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Dude, You Look Terrible

A common trope in video games is that of the recurring boss: a persistent menace that won't leave you and yours well enough alone. Some are played off as comic relief, inexplicably hopping back from the many grievous drubbings you keep handing down to them. Others treat their defeats a little more gravely, eventually returning as something less than human in their increasingly desperate attempts to seek vengeance.

The following are a list of enemies you'll fight after they've been through some shit. I've tentatively ranked them by how rough they're looking the last time you face them. Oh yeah, and there's probably spoilers.

List items

  • Seifer Almasy's a sullen teen (like most of Final Fantasy VIII's cast) lost in his own self-insertion fanfic, throwing himself into the role of the chivalrous Sorceress' Knight. Like Squall, he's an exceptional gunblade warrior and is able to survive even a Zantetsuken to the chops, yet it's clear from the bedraggled trenchcoat and frazzled demeanour he's sporting by the fourth boss fight that his heart's no longer in it.

  • Zagi's a barely restrained psychotic who thirsts for battle, to the exclusion of everything else. Being able to finally face a peer like Tales of Vesperia's Yuri Lowell awakens something inside Zagi, and he embarks on a one-man crusade to stalk the renegade and fight him whenever and wherever possible. The party treats his constant challenges with confusion, frustration and eventually acceptance, like so many stages of grief. An utterly lost, corrupted and already dying Zagi challenges Yuri a final time in the final dungeon, and is finally put out of his (Yuri's, that is) misery.

  • Vandal Hearts II has an absurd labyrinthine plot I won't go into here, but suffice it to say the party builds up quite the cadre of recurring villains and henchmen by the end of the game. Eventually, all these villains end up either brainwashed or zombified by the main antagonist's fey powers and challenge the party one final time with unholy thousand-yard stares.

  • Seymour's not one to take "No" for an answer, especially from comely summoners who aren't too fond of parricidal power-hungry maniacs with creepy soft voices. Seymour's mid-game death does nothing to diminish his wroth against the party, returning a few more times as Final Fantasy X's most persistent paramour.

  • Janus is one of the many thief/adventurer/bounty hunter "Drifters" of Wild ARMs 3's Filgaia, and a pretty damn good one. He's often competing with the player's group for some trinket or another, presenting quite a challenge every time the two groups throw down. Unfortunately, he ends up working for the bad guys and is turned into a demon for his troubles. He totally thinks it's rad though, and explodes with a grin on his disturbing skeletal face.

  • A lot of unfortunate things happen to a lot of people in Silicon Knights' Eternal Darkness, such as having to later work on Too Human. Anthony the Page is a particularly unlucky individual, being hit with a deadly curse meant for his liege lord Charlemagne, who still winds up dead despite Anthony's best efforts. When you meet the still-ambulatory attendant six hundred years later through the eyes of a different character, he ain't looking too hot.

  • Saren was an asshole even before a giant crayfish robot used its brain magic to turn him into an indoctrinated lickspittle aiding in the destruction of every sentient organic race in the galaxy of Mass Effect. Regardless of whether or not Shepard is able to guilt him into eating his own bullet, Sovereign decides he can still get some use out of the ex-Spectre's body and reanimates him as an especially hyperactive skeletal husk.

  • Bosch is Ryu's friend, partner and rival in the Rangers corps, a group that keeps the peace in the grim subterranean world of Breath of Fire V: Dragon Quarter. After Ryu falls in with the wrong crowd (two criminals and an incredibly powerful biological weapon posing as a dragon, natch) Bosch locates his pal and, for old time's sake, kindly stabs him through the throat. The body horror doesn't stop there for either of them, though. That tends to be a thing with biological super-weapons in Capcom games.

  • The vast majority of the cast of any Siren game eventually become Shibito - shuffling corpses with just enough semblance of their former selves to give anyone the creeps - but not Ichiko Yagura. The young schoolgirl is saved from that fate because she's already been body-hijacked by an ageless eldritch horror from the bottom of the ocean. Phew, that's got to be a relief, right? Except perhaps to those around her who are gunned down and chopped apart when the entity turns her into a genocidal (and indestructible) killing machine.

  • I don't think it's ever ended well for scientists that decide to inject themselves with the glowy green junk they created as part of their shady company's biological weapons division. We could ask Resident Evil 2's Dr Birkin if he really thought it the best course of action, except I'm not sure a giant gooey pile of viscera and eyeballs can be reached for comment.
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