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[Melly]

I have no will to live

In a good number of games with boss fights, final bosses tend to be challenging encounters, but surprisingly often you see final bosses which just disappoint. Maybe they're simply not as hard as the enemies and bosses before them, maybe they rely on repetitive patterns that are easy to counter, and sometimes they're just plain pathetic.

I understand that in some games, like Gradius, they want to give us an idea that the 'final boss' really is a boss in the sense that he's doing all the ordering and scheming, and none of the fighting. So when you finally reach him, he's a wimp, sometimes dying by himself or through some event not controlled by the player.

Often, however, it jsut seems lazy. In Twilight Princess, the final form of Ganondorf is simply not nearly as tough as anything else before it, as he lazily swing his sword at you. The game builds him up as this all-powerful being and you're treated to a disappointing climax.

I just never undertood how or why this happens. Often it seems the designers know how to make interesting, challenging bosses, which exist throughout the game, but right on the final one, they seem to get completely lazy, and the 'he just order people around' theory can't apply to most of them.

So, anybody got a good idea why this would happen? Because it's been baffling me a bit for a while now.

[Danrul]

Another Disappointing boss fight: Bioshock's final boss. 

[torahhorse]

that's a good point. maybe it has to do with how a 'final boss' usually intersects a climax challenge with the story climax, and it's really hard to do?

[Melly]

I've seen it done before, and done awesomely.

Other games to have disappointing final bosses are Final Fantasy X (I've heard of people killing it by ACCIDENT) and Oblivion (where you don't actually GET to fight him yourself, just watches someone else do the work).

[Poor Lazlo]

I tend to prefer the final boss fight to impress on a story level, rather than be particularly challenging. That way, I get a splurge of story in an interactive setting, rather than a cutscene. It's rewarding to be given a break after that super-hard penultimate boss battle.

Half life 2 is probably a good example of this, in that the game loses any challenge after you get past all the striders, and you are left to play out power fantasies and really hate Breen for the last 20-30 minutes. However, the actual final fight at the top of the tower has a lot in common with the last fight in Bioshock. I didn't think either was particularly bad, just extremely generic finishes that removed any sense of immersion the previous hours of play had instilled.

[Melly]

Great boss fights aren't just about being really hard, but about offering an interesting challenge and feeling more epic and important than what came before it. When you say that when you get to the end of a game you just want to be done with it, it kind of sounds like you weren't really enjoying the game up to that point, and simply wants to finish it out of a need to complete it so it doesn't seem like you wasted your time.

It's what I think anyway.

On the other hand I feel that when you're really enjoying a game you don't get tired as you're getting to the end, but more pumped up for what's coming next. And when what comes next is pathetic, it feels a bit empty.

[brog]

Cave Story.

Also, most RPGs where I tend to save up powerful items to use 'when I need them', and then realise oh, I just beat the end boss and still haven't used that, didn't need it.  VtM: Bloodlines was one example; I didn't realise it was the end and never used all my flamethrower ammo.

[Aquin]

Bad Final Boss: System Shock 2.  Yeah, that ending was pretty stupid too.

GREAT Final Boss:  I know this is gonna seem weird...but the final boss to Mass Effect was *amazing* if you were full Paragon.  You could actually talk the final boss out of destroying everything, rack him up with incredible guilt, and he will KILL HIMSELF WITH HIS OWN GUN.

You can talk the final boss into suicide.  *That* was a complete surprise.  (of course you still have a fight on your hands later, so maybe not quite the final boss.)

[Seth]

Alec Trevelyan in Goldeneye

Also, in River City Ransom you had to fight the Dragon Twins at the end, which were tough as hell, and then immediately afterward you fought this glasses wearing pansy Simon (Slick).

I always thought it was weird at the end of Resident Evil (I think it was the first one) that you run around for a while and then someone throws you a rocket launcher.

[Derek]

I always thought Shub Niggurath was pretty stupid.

[akumagaki]

No wait, the MOST disappointing final boss, is the one in Gears Of War 2!

You just have some big tentacles thing, and you get a gigantic laser satelite. Dead in 7 seconds in coop, you can't even lose, you just gonna aim the thing, taking 90% of your screen(not joking).

[Chris Z]

Fucken Monitor (ball) in Halo 3.  As I played through I thought for sure it would've been that massive Gravemind from after the Prophet of Truth scene. 

Yes I know people hate Halo, but all these bosses you guys are mentioning are incredibly badass next to a metal ball so I had to bring it up.

[Melly]

Planescape: Torment's end part was also pretty awesome. You could deal with the main antagonist in several ways, the least interesting of which is actually fighting him, even though it meant a tough battle with a lot of powerful spells and awesome effects.

[SPOILERS]

You could convince him to rejoin you, making you mortal again. You could kill yourself with the special weapon forged by the giant golem. And my personal favorite, if you had nearly full Wisdom, you could literally will yourself out of existence, erasing both you and him at the same time. I'm fairly sure there are a few more possibilities.

[/SPOILERS]

[i wanna be the guy]

the final bosses in every jak and daxter game



the games themselves were so fun, but god damn

jak and daxter: FIGHT A GIANT ROBOT ON TOP OF A TOWER. ONLY YOU CAN'T HURT IT AT ALL UNTIL YOU'VE BEEN THERE LONG ENOUGH TO HAVE WHITE ECO

jak 2: GIANT NON-MOVING BUG IN THE MIDDLE OF A ROOM. SNIPE HIM DEAD.

jak 3: DRIVE AROUND AND BRING DOWN A GIANT SHIP. THEN KILL A GIANT ROBOT WHO REFUSES TO MOVE.

[falsion]

I was always under the impression that Gradius did it as a long running inside joke. But that's probably the only game I can forgive for doing it since it's almost a tradition in Gradius games now.  Also you usually have to deal with an escape sequence, which depending on the game, can be difficult on its own. That and Gradius does a lot to kick your ass before you get to the final boss, so it's excusable for them to give you a bit of a break.

There is actually a whole TVTropes page dedicated to this subject though:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AnticlimaxBoss

Basically every game that uses this "trope" can be found there.

[Alevice]

Parodious bosses. They did it for the lulz I know, but still...


Fallout games and Arcanum are in the same vein of Mass Effect and PS:T in taht you can convice the boss to give up, which is damned cool. However, in arcanum, if you decided to go for the fight, i admit that the fight was downright shittastic (the already bad combat engine didnt help).

Doom 3's cyberdemon. Big come the fuck on. Unless you cheat for a real badas fight, then it is very fuck yeah.

[DantronLesotho]

Oh man, some of the worst final bosses I was going to mention already were. Nice.

I thought the FINAL boss of Devil May Cry 4 was really disappointing. Before it, you had to fight a ginormous statue of an angel, and there was really no way to top that. They should have stopped at that boss. The same goes for Final Fantasy X, which had Yu Yevon after the big thing; again, why not just stop at the big thing?

I think the problem comes down to the designers wanting to make something so epic, it is actually more epic than the game engine allows for. So because of that, you see things like bosses with quicktime events and others where you can beat the shit out of them without trying, because they are supposed to give the impression that the real business is happening all around you, instead of directly between your conflict.

One of the best bosses that I regard though, is Okami. I don't know if there has ever been such a balanced boss fight in recent years. It took every power you had to beat it, and it made sense because of the boss being the culmination of all the previous challenges and boss fights, rolled into one. If you haven't beaten Okami, I recommend doing so to see what I mean.

[moi]

Fuck yeah Arcanum! most disappointing shit ever!
Also, after walking on the last boss without noticing, the endings are just one static image each lol

[Strong]

Psychosomnium, though I guess that's kind of the point.

[MaloEspada]

Cave Story.

Can't agree with it. The secret boss was one of the most epic boss battles I've played in my whole life. The tension and everything else built by the extra stage was flawless.

Unless you were talking about the normal ending final boss.