I've already done rankings of some of my favorite levels and bosses in all of gaming, but what about my least favorite bosses? At their best, boss fights can be an exhilirating highlight, but at their worst, they can feel like a roadblock that drags down the entire experience. From my experience, here are some of the worst culprits:
10. Gnasty Gnorc (Spyro The Dragon)
The first Spyro The Dragon is pretty infamous for its lame boss fights, which usually require you to flame a boss, chase them to the next arena, and repeat the process two more times. The final fight with Gnasty Gnorc does change the formula a bit... albeit for the worse. Before you can even fight Gnasty, you need to chase down a few thieves to get some keys to lower a gate. Once you do, he immediately darts off and you have to chase him across a narrow track and flame him. After landing a hit, he runs off again and you need to do tight platforming over lava to land one last hit that finishes the fight. So when taken as a whole, Gnasty does down in two hits and spends the entire fight running away from the player. And yet, despite how utterly underwhelming that sounds, this fight is actually kinda frustrating, especially on the Reignited trilogy where you having stiffer turning when charging. It's really easy to fall off the narrow track or mess up in that final platforming section, and since there are zero checkpoints, dying will force you to re-do the entire fight, egg thieves included. As a result, Gnasty Gnorc is simultaneously a really irritating boss fight and a really underwhelming finale, the worst combination that a final boss could be.
9. Eely Mouth (Super Mario Sunshine)
I love Super Mario Sunshine, but it has some of the worst swimming controls I've ever had the displeasure of using. You use the FLUDD to propel yourself around, but since Mario is always positioned upright, you can only ever boost yourself directly upwards. Swimming in any other direction is usually going to be pretty slow. So I'm sure you can imagine how fun an underwater boss fight in this game would be, right? To give him credit, the fight against Eely Mouth does have a funny concept that in theory should work around Mario Sunshine's weird swimming controls. You need to float down to Eely Mouth's mouth, dodging the bubbles that he shoots out, and use the FLUDD to clean his teeth, boosting out of the way before he can eat you. However, what really kills the fight is the oxygen meter. Even with the fact that his teeth can give you a small oxygen boost, it's very hard to beat Eely Mouth without running out of air so you'll need to slowly float all the way to the sidelines of the arena to get more coins for air, which ruins the pacing of the fight. And even beyond that, so many of Eely Mouth's attacks seem specifically designed to waste your time and your air, causing the fight to drag on even longer. Neat concept, but an absolute slog in execution.
8. Fatty Whale (Kirby Super Star)
Kirby tends to have a really great track record when it comes to his boss fights, even in the earlier games, so a boss like Fatty Whale seems like such a weird anomoly. Fatty Whale feels like an attempt to push the SNES by being a boss that solely fights you from the background. He splashes around, shoots geysers out of his blowhole, and can even cause waves. However, in execution, it makes for a fight that's really hard to properly gauge. Fatty Whale and his attacks take up so much of the screen, but the weird background shenanigans means it's super hard to tell what's actually going to hurt you, which makes for a shockingly difficult fight for so early on in the Great Cave Offensive campaign. The best strategy is to either guard or use Stone to cheese through Fatty Whale's attacks entirely, and your helpers are most likely going to get wiped out because they're not programmed to properly handle him. That's not a sign of a well-designed boss, and the fact that this is in a Kirby game of all things feels especially insulting.
7. Yawn (Resident Evil)
Keep in mind that I've only played the first four Resident Evil games as of right now, so there may be worse fights out there, but Yawn is the only one so far that I've truly despised. You encounter Yawn two times in Resident Evil 1, and the second encounter honestly isn't too bad since you have a lot of space. The first encounter, on the other hand, is a massive difficulty spike regardless of the version you play. You're stuck in a small, cramped room with a giant snake with an absolutely ridiculous bite hitbox. You have to run around and repeatedly turn around to shoot Yawn, but it's so hard to find the proper timing when it's so easy to get bitten and poisoned, and that's not even considering the fact that he can also constrict you if you're not careful. While you can not fight Yawn and leave the room in the remake, actually getting to the door and out of the room without being bitten is so hard that it almost feels like a lost cause. And in the original version? Yeah, you're screwed, sorry. Resident Evil was my first RE game and I loved it, but that also meant Yawn was my first RE boss fight and he left a truly awful taste in my mouth.
6. Bubble Man (Mega Man Battle Network 3)
I love Mega Man Battle Network 3, it's my favorite game in the series! But I hate Bubble Man, and I mean hate. He's the reason I made this list to begin with! Even as a character, he sucks. Bubble Man's entire scenario consists of him running off as you chase him around the Internet, he doesn't even get his own dungeon! And when you finally do catch him, what are you rewarded with? The worst-designed boss fight in the entire series, that's what. Bubble Man stays in the back row and a hole in the middle of his arena shoots out a relentless series of projectile blocking bubbles. There's also a rock infuriatingly placed right above that hole just to make Bubble Man even harder to hit without piercing weapons. But even if you do have piercing weapons, the screen gets so filled with bubbles, projectiles, and other crap that actually letting out an attack without getting hit by something becomes borderline impossible. Oh yeah, and then in the final phase, Bubble Man gives himself a bubble shield, giving you yet another wall to break before you can hurt the damn NetNavi. And then his harder versions make the bubbles spawn even faster, and he won't even fight you unless your health is in the red! Everything about Bubble Man just screams cowardly, and that just makes him all the more hateable.
5. Hades' Hand (Rayman Legends)
Rayman Legends has an incredible boss lineup, pitting you against these titanic figures like a dragon, a luchador, and a mechanical monstrosity in these large-scale multi-phase boss fights. At this rate, there's no way the final boss can be underwhelming... right? Wrong. Rayman Legends's final boss has you face off against a dark cloud called Hades' Hand. Sounds intimidating, but Hades' Hand never actually attacks you. It just floats around the arena as you need to painfully and tediously pick off all of the little clouds that comprise it to move onto the next phase. Each phase makes Hades' Hand increasingly larger, and by the final phase, you'll have to slowly disassemble a giant black cloud that takes up half the screen while hopping across tiny platforms over a bottomless pit. So of course, on top of everything else, one mistake means you're starting the phase again. Like with Gnasty Gnorc, Hades' Hand is that special kind of bad final boss that manages to be both disappointing and frustrating at the same time. And coming off of what has otherwise been a fantastic set of boss fights, Hades' Hand feels all the more underwhelming.
4. King Arthur (Sonic & The Black Knight)
In theory, the King Arthur fight should be one of the highlights of the game. It's one of that chase Sonic fights, where you're running after the boss, dodging their attacks, and closing in to get a hit in. And the parts where you're just chasing after King Arthur are actually quite fun. However, when you finally catch up to King Arthur, the fight immediately falls off a cliff since the game forces you to do a series of incredibly precise quick time events... with motion controls. Look, I like motion controls, but there's some things that they're not equipped for, and twitch reactions are a perfect example. You have such a short window to input those slashes that you often need to start shaking the remote before the input pops up. And even then, some of the slashes are offset from one another, so you can't just rely on a familiar rhythm either. I wasted so much time on the second QTE in the King Arthur fight, I genuinely didn't think I was going to able to do it! The worst bosses feel like roadblocks that stop you from seeing the rest of the cool stuff the game has to offer, and King Arthur is probably the best example of that, an unfair difficulty spike that isn't designed with its own controls in mind.
3. Yoshika (Touhou 13: Ten Desires)
I've complained about Yoshika before, I often cite her fight as my biggest with Ten Desires, but in reality, she's a symptom of a larger issue with the game itself. Ten Desires has this mechanic where you shooting an enemy or boss generates spirits that you can pick up to fill your trance gauge, but the spirits don't fall down like most pickups in a shmup would. You have to go to the upper half of the screen and put yourself at risk to pick up the spirits. I think this is a pretty poorly-designed system but the game is so easy that I usually just ignore the spirits. But then there's Yoshika, who uses the spirits to heal herself, which means that to clear her spellcards, you need to go up close to her to pick up her spirits, usually while bullet patterns are being formed. It's so easy to accidentally die to a bullet you can't see coming when picking up the spirits, so for a lot of novice players like myself, the easiest strategy is to just wait out the spell card. Which, as you can see, epitomizes Ten Desire's spirit system as a whole. Yoshika is a boss that is so poor in its conception that the optimal strategy is to just not engage with her, and if you do actually try to beat her the proper way, prepare for a lot of BS.
2. Smog (Legend Of Zelda: Oracle Of Ages)
I love Oracle Of Ages, but I was genuinely at a loss for how horribly designed and unpolished this boss is. Smog tries to be a puzzle boss that utilizes the game's cane item, which can be used to place boxes wherever you want. In each phase, Smog splits himself into a bunch of small clouds that move along a wall. You need to place boxes to unite the clouds so you can land a hit. You can only have one box out at a time and if a Smog cloud is left without a wall to attach itself to, it will poof and respawn on the wall it started at. Eventually, you'll have to start making bridges by slowly placing blocks, and it is incredibly easy for a Smog cloud to just not sense the block and disappear, resetting all your progress. As a whole, this fight just feels really finicky and unreliable, and it can be quite easy to accidentally offset the clouds from each other making it even more difficult to get them to collide. It's really the kind of fight you need to place yourself to realize how bad it is, it's so uncharacteristically clunky for a Nintendo game, and especially a Zelda game, that I'm almost in disbelief that it actually exists.
1. Boobeam Trap (Mega Man 2)
Boobeam Trap is probably the worst-designed thing in any game I've played. It's so fundamentally flawed on pretty much every level conceivable. It's conceptually flawed because a boss that forces you to use a limited resource that you can't fill before the fight is a bad idea to begin with. The Boobeam Trap can only be destroyed with the Crash Bomb. If you don't have enough Crash Bomb, you have no choice but to die. What makes it worse is that there are also walls in the way that can also only be blown up by Crash Bombs, and the amount of walls and Boobeam Traps combined are greater than the maximum capacity of Crash Bombs you can hold. So you also need to know that some walls should not be blown up, which is pretty much beginner's trap incarnate. And if all that still isn't enough, every Boobeam Trap sensor shoots a super fast projectile at you. You can jump over these projectiles, but the fight is such a flickery mess that it feels almost impossible, so in practice, most players will also have their health slowly whittle down as the fight goes on. There are a lot of reasons why Mega Man 2 is one of my least favorite classic games, but the Boobeam Trap is probably the biggest reason. I don't use this term lightly, but this is objectively one of the worst-designed bosses in all of gaming. From the games I've played, nothing else compares.
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