Long-winded monotonous boss fights

So I just started watching Metal Gear Scanlon, and watching Part 2 is just making me frustrated; not because of Drews play or anything, but because of the length of the Boss fight against Revolver Ocelot. The guy has a huge health bar that Drew whittled away very slowly. Sure they figured out the trick with the c4, but it got me thinking..

EDIT: I understand, now, that revolver ocelot shouldn't be a long fight, but watching Drew battle him was what spurred this thought.

What are the most long-winded boss fights you can remember that had you repeating basically the same action (or a very repetitive set of actions) for the whole fight?

Man a lot of the Souls games come to mind. The absolute worst bosses are the ones that don't even flinch when you attack them, or ones where you need to jump up and attack when in mid-air.

Souls games? Obviously you haven't finished FF12 Yiazmat boss:

edit: just FYI this guy is crazy well prepared, the fight took me over 3 hours.

This jerk...

Destiny. Playing the beta and having the bigger enemies take 20 minutes of chip damage made me avoid buying the full game.

Borderlands 1? The final boss was immobile, and it seemed like it didn't have HP like other enemies, rather a specific amounts of hits - so high damage sniper rifles, shotguns or rocket launchers were useless - I ended up killing it with a low level Double Anarchy SMG, since it shot 4 bullets at once and had a large magazine (and my character regenerated SMG ammo), so all I had to do was to pretty much stay in place for a minute shooting endlessly at that thing.

@gamefreak9: Fuuu... I'm going back to that soon so I'm not watching it, but I'm dreading long repetitive fights like that.

I quit playing Heavenly Sword because the boss battle was extremely long and I never got his patterns down. Others may say he was short or not that bad but I raged quit that boss after an hour and a half of trying.

None of the fights in DS 1 or 2 ever felt like this to me. Can't speak about Demon's Souls because I never played it myself.

I fought a level 20 dragon for two hours on Dragon Age: Inquisition. Granted, it was three levels higher than me and I was the only one alive for 95% of the fight, but still.

Damn that Yiazmat fight is insane, I'm planning to replay Final Fantasy XII in the summer and don't think I'll be doing that fight. Geez.

I don't actually think it was a boss fight really but in Dragon's Dogma it took me ages (over an hour) to fight a golem. That's the longest fight I can think of & it was connected to a quest iirc so I couldn't leave it. I can't really remember why it took so long other than me being a sorcerer really wasn't a good match up and my pawns weren't being particularly helpful either even though one of them apparently knew what to do. The battle did look cool though and I guess going through a day/night cycle in it added a nice bit of drama. I think that was the first golem I fought, I came across others later in the game that weren't as much of an issue.

@discomposure said:

Fight isn't really that bad the guy in this video being prepared is completely wrong. The fight is doable in sub 30 using actual strats. (Low hp + decoy can force your samurai to do 8 hits every single hit and essentially never stop attacking.) The guy in the video could do 4-5x the damage he was doing with the same characters by just changing his strategy.

Personally when I played Valkyrie Profile 2 I was super under leveled (and I did not use all of my power up items on one character) and most of the bosses in the optional dungeon took me 1-2 hours each doing essentially chip damage with 1 character to prevent the party from being aoe'd to death. In retrospect I probably could have done the bosses way faster by playing the game more min/maxy from the start but I did not use a guide (except to see how to even access the dungeon) and basically made the optional dungeon much harder than it could have been.

Drew just said the word I was looking for in part 3 of MGS: monotonous.

Almost every boss in Legend of Dragoon.

Still love that game however.

My response to the title was "most Metal Gear boss fights" before I read the OP.

Final boss of Persona 3 was frustrating for me the first time I played it. It was about a 45 minute fight and once the boss gets down to like 5% health it starts inflicting random status effects on your team. One of my dudes that had the "heal all HP" spell got charmed and fully healed the boss. I didn't prepare as much as I could have, but that was just obnoxious.

Yup...

@xpolymorphic: When I was a kid, my best friend and I played that and we got to the cave worm and were just stumped because we couldn't comprehend how to beat it. To this day we still remember giving up on that game...

@jimipeppr: came here to post that, holy shit. It happened to me three times or something.

I think a lot of JRPGs suffer from this.

Never had a monotonous boss fight in a souls game since, even when they're long, the player can die in almost every false move.

Some Persona bosses are way too damn long. Nyx and shadow Teddie come to mind... Rpgs based off of gunplay like Borderlands and Fallout should probably not even have bosses as far as I'm concerned, the last boss in Borderlands is sooooooooo shiiiiiiit. Actually Bioshock bosses comes to mind in that too. But at least they were thematically memorable.

Completely agree, and I'll attest for Demon's Souls, too. There are some fights that are real fuckers, don't get me wrong, but I never found them to be monotonous. Bed of Chaos, maybe? That's not particularly long-winded, though, just the monotony of running back there a million times cause of bad design.

Interesting idea, that some shooters shouldn't have bosses with large health. I partly agree with this. I think a boss fights for shooters are more fun when they involve setting up large bursts of damage rather than the boss absorbing a ton of damage. For example: attacking weak spots to temporarily cripple a boss, leading to a devastating blow. Have every devastating blow be unique and set up in its own way, and you have an engaging and thought provoking battle. (attack knees with weapon A to make boss fall which reveals weak spot A. Then you fire at these parts on the surrounding which knock him down and expose weak spot B). Stuff like that!

Thought provoking variety is what we need! Perfect example being the Mr. Freeze fight in Arkham City. So many approaches to take a chunk of his health, but you can only use a specific approach once. That was one of my favorite modern boss battles I've encountered. Obviously your post and mine is in relation to shooters, but every genre could take notes on this boss battle.

As soon as I read the thread title, Metal Gear Peace Walker came to mind. Lo and behold, I enter the thread to see Metal Gear mentioned in the OP. (a different one but still)

That Revolver Ocelot fight can be beaten in about 30 seconds, if he had used the run and shoot method. Its only long because he made it that way.

I'm as big a fan of the Souls game as the next guy (well maybe not so much Dark Souls) but there are plenty of times where you would run into an enemy that you weren't doing a whole lot of damage to and it would become a battle of attrition. The enemy or even boss would have his few attacks, you'd hang back, roll, slash slash slash, ok back off, wait for him to do his windup, do his overhead, ok slash slash slash, back off. I mean don't get me wrong they are great games, all both of them, but there were plenty of times where that boss life bar would go down very slowly - and that was sort of part of the meta-game in a way, to not lose your nerve and just continue with the pattern without making a mistake.

It was mostly my own fault, but the final boss battle in Super Robot Wars Original Generations on the GBA was a long drawn-out mess of me blasting the boss with almost every character to burn out the energy shields, using the most powerful characters to deal damage that was almost totally healed by the bosses' innate regeneration... it was an absolute mess of a battle and took upwards of 50 turns to complete, if I remember correctly.

I went back last year and beat that game and, with a better understanding of how to play and a newfound appreciation for energy draining weapons, that boss was a piece of cake.

For the record, Golems are almost totally immune to magic. The best thing to do as a sorcerer, if you run into one, is actually unequip your weapon and climb the thing to punch the weak points.

Oh riiiiight, Yiazmat. I went in completely unprepared so his crazy Aeroga attack or whatever would always kill all 3 of my dudes. Sub the next 3 in, revive the first 3, resume fight. Over and over. Hours and hours.

Long boss fights are great!

Persona 3?

Valkyrie Profile 2 had some boss fights that took me an hour. Mainly because I was always under-leveled and cheesed each one with positioning instead of just grinding for 20 minutes.

It's already been said, but I'll repeat it anyway. Yiazmat.

Actually, the only reason that was a long and boring fight is exactly because of how Drew played it. He always ran in the same direction as the boss, instead of going the opposite way and trying to cut him. He also didn't attempt to run and gun while behind him. Poor play and lack of thought is what made Drew's Ocelot fight so tedious.

The Persona games tend to have their boss fights go on for too long by giving the enemies bloated health pools. MGS:Peace Walker has terrible boss fights that require you to dump an insane amount of ammo in to.

I really dislike the cliche of having 3 fights with the same boss. Especially when there is no saving option in the middle of the fight.

Developers could give better rewards or/and an achievement for the people who opt-out of the save option but it would be nice to have a choice to save for the people who just want to see the story. Older Final Fantasy games are famous for having really long boss fights with no check points. Also GTA games used to have no middle point saves.

Well in this category MMOs will be the winner no doubt, we are talking 100h+ to down a single boss and even after you nail the tactict perfectly we can talk about 30-60min fights

Saying the Ocelotboss is long and monotonous is just plain wrong however. Not only is it one of the shorter bosses in the series and in the game even but the amount of approaches you can take makes it anything but monotonous, what are you even talking about?

Edit: I see you are talking about MGS and not MGS 3 wich Drew is playing right now. That changes things slightly but if you concider the age of that game it still aint to bad. And yeh Drew is really bad at MGS and it doesnt exactly show the bosses from their good side.

I super ragequit the real final boss of No More Heroes. I thought there was probably just a trick I was missing, but no, it turns out it has ~infinity health in addition to its super fast combo patterns. I was down to learn how to fight it, but my roommate looked it up online and it just takes a billion years. I tried a few times anyway, for what felt like an hour, but ultimately I slammed the controller down, said "fuck that noise," powered down the system and went to bed.

I'm still annoyed by it to this day, especially because the previous fight left me feeling high on lunacy.

Mass Effect 2, Reaper Embryo, easily.

I guess there are worse bosses to name, but that was so long ago and I have forgotten about them. ME2's end boss was by far the worst I've ever fought that I can still remember. The ending mission as a whole was awesome, but that boss was extremely disappointing. I guess it's partly my own vault for playing it on Insanity immediately. It just took over 25 minutes to kill him with what I had, with the constant reinforcements and all. It wasn't fun in the slightest.

I typically really like bosses with a large health pool, because my favorite games are games where that makes sense. Devil May Cry, Revengeance, Ninja Gaiden and so on. Yeah, the final boss in Revengeance for instance, took so many hits to kill, but it was so well designed and so freakishly awesome that I almost wish he had even more health so I could fight him longer.

Boss fights are definitely an art. I can't remember the last time a boss completely stole hours away from me and I'm probably more concerned about a final boss that doesn't live up to the billing. The last two in DmC are just non-events.

@cubidog1: fighting rune sentinels in ds2 with a mage is both long and dreadful.

Potato Marshall.

Last month I played through the Dark Forces / Jedi Knight -saga games. The boss in Dark Forces II, Jerec, turned out to be such a slog and pile of sithy garbage that I, for once, lost my patience with the, for its time decent, light saber dueling that seemed to take forever and looked up a speed run tactic on how to beat him quickly using numerous satchel charges planted on top of each other that upon activation causes the boss to fly towards a wall with such a high velocity that he is killed instantly.

Persona 3 Final Boss: Nyx Avatar

To those who don't know this boss has a total of 14 different forms (with different sets of attacks and resistances per transformation) with 1500 hp each with the final form having 6000 hp and halfs all damage (just because fuck you). It can attack twice per turn (even more if it exploits a party members weakness) and is able to charm you party members to heal him.

In it's final form Nyx gains an ability to refect all attacks for 3 turns (while it buffs itself) and an attack that does massive amounts of damage with the chance of random status affects. Did I also mention that in Persona 3 that your game ends if the Main Character dies in battle? Also if you do die at any point of this fight you have to start the whole thing over again. IT'S FUCKED.

Edit: oh other thing to those who don't know. In the PS2 releases of Persona 3 you only control the main character's actions in battle while the AI control the rest of the group (with only slight guidance from the player like "full assult" or "heal/support) which can make any fight (but ESPECIALLY Nyx) maddening

That was an annoying boss fight that could go awry right at the end yes. Good call. I died near the end and had to redo it. Worst part was I wasn't struggling at any point before the end.

pretty much every boss fight in dark souls

The fight against Elizabeth in new game plus of Persona 3 makes you long for the fight with the Nyx avatar.

It's often easy to claim a boos fight is actually really easy or can be beaten in half the time using a certain strategy. The problem is the first time you play it the strategy isn't immediately obvious. Clearly if you've beaten a game multiple times you can point out strategies and ways to beat bosses in no time but the design needs to make bosses fun to fight first time around.

I'm sure it's tough for developers to get right because it's obvious to them if there is an ideal way to beat it, that doesn't necessarily apply to players who just walk up to it though.

Watching a video of Nyx didn't seem too bad, since it looked like you can pretty much two-shot each form until the final one. The fact that he can charm party members and make them cast Diarahan on him is pretty fucked, though. I'm glad I'll be fighting him in P3P for my first time around.

Anyways, compared to any of the MGS games, Souls games, or Persona games, Destiny seemed to be the biggest offender I can think of, with having blatantly artificially large health bars and zero creativity to them.

MGS1 Ocelot, not MGS3 Ocelot.

Will they really heal again a second time? Margaret cast Diarahan in Persona 4, and I went through that same line of thought, thinking I'd have to tear through 10000 HP before another heal went off, but it only happens once.

I believe after the first heal the heal threshold drops down to 9000 so that you get more of an attack window before subsequent heals. The other problem is that you only have 10 cycles of the boss' personas (90 turns) to win so depending on your damage output the first heal can kill a run.

Dead Rising 2 had this as a problem. I am sure there are Western examples but this seems like a very Japanese design characteristic