>>1388500 (checked) Some that I can think of at the moment. >AC Verdict Day Where you fight a makeshift version of the overpowered NEXT AC from the previous game in your shit by comparison AC. It is a very memorable David and Goliath kind of fight that had me hyped up. >Dark Souls You mentioned this one, but I liked Gwyn. Thematically, I like it a lot. Mechanically I like it as well as it rewards you for mastering the games mechanics by giving you a more traditional fight. My friends say this makes the fight too easy but I think it fits. >MHW:IB I honestly didn't like the game and thought the clutch claw was annoying, but I enjoyed the Fatalis fight. Nothing bullshit or annoying like Alatreon or whatever it was called, just punishing in all the right ways instead. Also towards the end of the fight when they start playing the older MH theme, it got me really into it. >Chrono Trigger Lavos. The music and art/animations really got me hyped up back when I played it the first time as a kid. Beating it was incredibly satisfying to me. >Ace Combat Zero The music is fantastic, memorable lines, and having the final boss dueling with his buddy is great. Ending it with jousting is so damn cool too. >FTL I genuinely hate this boss. I enjoyed the game, but I never liked the boss and at times it made me not even want to play it. I eventually beat it, but at that point it already soured me on the game so I only replayed it a few times afterwards before dropping it completely.

>>1388500 >Pizza Tower The final boss wasn't really tough from a game play perspective, but the point was the catharsis of beating the shit out of him. Making him too challenging would have undermined that point. The escape mixing in mechanics from every floor was nice way to cap the game off. >Hyper Metroid Mother Brain isn't much different to Super Metroid, but again, the escape sequence as a final navigation challenge capped off the experience. Having to take odd detours as the planet crumbled really added to the panic. >Ninja Gaiden Black Great game, found Dark Murai a bit underwhelming, but after having to climb out the pit him being hard would be a ballache. Though he did get buffed compared to NG04 where you could Flying Swallow him to death. Though I didn't quite enjoy it as much overall, NG2 had a far more epic boss with Vazdah. >Chrono Trigger As anon said above. Being able to confront Lavos at any time to get squashed makes finally taking him on with proper strength even better. >7th Saga You climb the tower of slog with no special music and repetitive floors (though to be fair, it's made that way to confuse the Tetujin raiding the tower). Gorsia has no special theme. You use the runes on him in a specific order and fight him normally and get a shit ending. Fuck you, 7th Saga. >Super Mario World Great music, makes use of the directional punting of objects, and strips away all the UI that doesn't matter when you're about to finish the game.

>>1389413 >Pizza Tower You could argue that WAR was the true "final boss" in terms of difficulty

SMT4A was a very weak game that barely made me continue playing it, but the final fight against YHVH was very enjoyable and redeemed the whole thing for me. You deny everything that makes him divine and untouchable, until you reduce him to a mere demon and kill him like every other enemy you face. Doi's art is usually hit or miss for me (I love Mephisto, Anahita and Amon but hate his more popular designs like Odin, Zeus and Mermaid) but he definitely knocked it out of the park with YHVH's second phase. He is fallen, truly unholy looking, and all the plagues of humanity poking out of his body like he's barely containing them to uphold his perfect image is a nice touch. As with music, i never had any gripes with IV, IVA or V's music. In fact, i'll go as far as to say that Ryota Kozuka is a much better composer than Shoji Meguro. As always YHVH's themes match the fight perfectly. On an unrelated note, Massacre/Anarchy route is the only acceptable ending. Fuck that Persona-ass "power of our bonds" bullshit. I only need my hands to kill god. Maybe Flynn too, he's cool for me.

>>1389659 >he definitely knocked it out of the park with YHVH's second phase Its just a blob of purple monsters

Ganondorf/Ganon in OOT still stands out in my mind as an absolutely epic fight. The whole thing, from climbing the tower to the battle with the shadowy black demon you never seem to get a good look at was just excellent beyond measure.

Is Armstrong the only time a last-minute villain worked? I can't think of any other example. What a boss fight, one of the best in the genre and he shows up a few minutes prior.

Not sure if non-traditional "boss fights" are allowed, but >Deus Ex I always found it interesting for the final confrontation to be a choice of objective rather than a 1v1 fight. Whatever your JC's build is, you keep doing what you've been doing with the weapons and upgrades you've accumulated throughout your playthrough. No change of pace, and no sudden new game mechanics thrown in your face (not that there's anything wrong with that), just an extension of the rest of the game up to that point. It's still the culmination of everything you've done/learned, and still feels like a satisfying conclusion to the gameplay. >Thief: Deadly Shadows Like Dood Sex, it keeps the same mechanics you've been using to make the boss fight blend with the gameplay. It also has a fitting final boss: basically some manner of skinwalker that you really don't want to find you (been a couple of decades since I played, so the details escape me, but I think if it even touches you, you're pretty much fucked). You avoid all contact by doing what you've been doing all this time while placing runestones into their properr sockets (if I remember correctly, the boss is also completely indestructabel). The fight itself is kind of bland, but I just remember thinking it was great to have a "fight" where the point is actually avoiding the "fight". As for a more traditional boss fight: >Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker However you might feel about the rest of the game, the fact that Peace Walker is as powerful as you make it means that you may very well be the architect of your own demise when it comes to the final boss.

>>1388500 The boss that made me make this thread was Eigong from Nine Sols Story wise she's kinda weak (master who goes crazy for the search for immortality is kinda lame, especially in comparison to a lot of the other major bosses), but presentation and gameplay wise she is genuinely a 10/10 imo. Really difficult while you're learning her, but once you know what you're doing she becomes an amazing dance of a fight. The music in the final phase is great too. One of the best final bosses I've fought in a long time - possibly since Isshin. After beating her the first time, I've been replaying her once every couple of days - still haven't quite gotten to a hitless run on her but have gotten close.

Fatalis, the greatest boss in vidya history.

playing through god of war chain of olympus on normal, hard and very hard was fun. normal made me learn the boss patterns and how to use my weapons to their strengths. hard made me learn how to use magic effectively and how to ration my resources. very hard made me learn how to beat the game without getting hit cause getting hit stuns you long enough to get you killed. persephone was also such a bitch to kill in very hard. has lots of area of effect attacks she spams while also doing bullet hell ones. felt accomplishment from beating a game for the first time when I beat her on my 20th try on very hard. honorary mention for the kino abandon-your-daughter qte.

Bananza spoilers, for those who care. In a game full of outright shit bosses, I was very pleasantly surprised by the final boss of Bananza. Ticked pretty much all of my boxes for a solid final fight >Gameplay Unlike every other boss in the game, K Rool actually had a decent health pool so you could fight him for more than 30 seconds before moving on, and the fact that he jumped around a lot meant that you had to engage with and learn all of his attacks instead of spamming punch two times to knock him out. The fight does have a few of poorly explained parts to it though, like how some attacks can be countered with the elephant and kong bananzas but doesn't actually tell you that, leading to some annoying trial and error, but nothing major. I'd be interested to see someone finish this boss with no bananza powers at all - if that's even possible. >Music/Presentation K. Rool's entrance instantly stole the show from Void Kong (who was pretty boring), and the fakeout credits followed by Gangplank Galleon remix was great. Rushing through a destroyed city and fighting him in a giant boxing ring was a nice piece of icing on the cake as well - though I think his final phase looks a bit goofy. >Story It's a Donkey Kong game so I wasn't expecting much, but he did a good job of being a memorable final setpiece, which is much more than I would be able to say of Void Kong.

Here's an example of a boss done so terribly that it is funny <Deus Ex [2000] >Missile Silo >Bob Page builds up a guy who will "take care" of JC easily >Never shuts up about him the entire mission >Guy ends up just being a normal NPC with the same health as everyone else >Is in a sniper's nest position but can't actually shoot down at you very well >Very easy target >Most players don't even notice that he was the guy Page was mentioning and forget about him quickly after the next level comes or when Bob remarks about his death It took me 3 playthroughs to notice who this guy even was and that I had killed him.

>>1388500 >when the final boss is mechanically great and has a great presentation <but the narrative is a fucking BS rug pull I'm still mad. I don't care if the implications already existed, they waited too long to pull the "Actually I was a villain all along" card. They don't even let you join him in a game that allows you to join cosmic horror space satan and kill everyone's body and soul.

How did the Fallout franchise go from Frank Horrigan and The Master to... some faggot in a trench coat? The previous games set the bar so high and then you get a guy with zero armor armed with one of the worst weapons in the game. After you one-shot him, probably by mistake even without the Bloody Mess perk, it somehow gets worse. The original ending to Fallout 3 is quite infamous so I believe it needs no explanation.

Exusia, aka the Chief from Armored Core 5 was the shining beacon in an otherwise so/so game. The game really felt rough around the edges, and the struggling framerate and muddy graphics didn't help, as did the generic story about toppling muh generic evil dictator. But then this glorious motherfukker comes out of nowhere, derails the whole plot, and just kills people left and right. He's so obsessed with fighting the player that he literally betrays his employer, aka the dictator who you fight through most of the game, then kills him in a suicide bombing attack that kills one of your closest allies (Leon), he turns one of your other allies against you (RD) and then he shows up in the game's finale in an alien mech that defies everything you've seen in the game so far, and the last battle is just you versus him in an apocalyptic hellscape. Story-wise, he literally saves the whole game on the merits of just being a fun asshole to hate and fight. Gameplay-wise, his fight is a fitting conclusion to your mech skills, and is a decent challenge. Music/presentation wise, this is why Fromsoftware is at the top of their game. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnvqcSKho5w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKJtEGLSkFc

>>1637708 You think thats bad? Then name the final boss of F4. Spoiler: there is none.

Never really had a final boss "redeem" a game for me. If I'm liking the game the final boss either raises that good factor even further or tanks it a bit but doesn't ruin the game. I've had some final bosses ruin games for me though. Final Fantasy 3's final boss is some right bullshit that forces you back three hours because you didn't know she had a gimmick and used the wrong damage type on the wrong add, combined with the difficulty curve in that game being a sharp spike right at the end and it's just not fun. DS3 was a game I was very mixed on when I first played it and only soured on over time, but the final boss music being REMEMBER GWYN REMEMBER PLIN PLIN PLON and being sad garbage to end an experience combined with the last phase being less of a challenge save for the one five hit move cemented my dislike for the game and it's nostalgiabait horseshit. Thought I'd get a cool amaglam boss of all sorts of character builds but no, had to have some damned DS1 nostalgiabait in there as if we didn't have enough of that during the rest of the game. There are some final bosses that I thought were really awesome but don't get enough credit for their quality, though. Like Remnant II's final boss, Annihilation, having the really cool reality-switching thing and relying mostly on audio cues while remembering what's coming next, all while the phases keep switching in time to the music during the second half. >>1637708 Autumn pisses me off in a ton of ways. Much more than just being "some dude in a trenchcoat". He flip-flops on his ideals and motives constantly not as a character point, but due to retarded writing and wanting to force him into being a villain but still giving a passive way out of his final fight because past fallout games did that. If you actually wanted his Enclave to be a force trying to take the wasteland and rule it, give an evil or neutral karma option to join him when he kidnaps you started by giving him the correct code instead of having him dome you for it, and don't make him shoot a random passive scientist if his goal is to have a good rep with the wasteland and act as the benevolent dictator of such. If you want him to be an irredeemable piece of trash then go all the way with hit and don't have his motivations flip at the last minute. And make his final fight an actual hard one like Frank Horrigan and the Master were, not some jobber with a 10mm pistol. FO3's got a ton of problems but how they don't let you side with Autumn's Enclave is a big one for me, because for all intents and purposes he should be considering it with how much of a one man army your character has been, and since his goal is domination and not some purity shit like whatever Eden was smoking. >>1638944 A reactor that you interact with is the final boss. If you want to be more generous it's the black-armored Synths in the non institute routes, and General Maxson in the Institute one. Black armored synths with barely any more health than normal combat ones and a dude in some power armor who's no stronger than any other power armored BoS fuck, I might add.