That One Boss/Action Game/Kirby

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Examples of That One Boss in Kirby include:


  • Meta Knight is usually difficult to defeat in a majority of the games he's in, due to the fact that in a majority of his fights you can only use the Sword against him. For those at home not familiar with the mechanics of Kirby games, Sword is a power focused around melee attacks with little in the way of range, meaning that you're forced to get right in the face of one of the most aggressive and nimble bosses in the series in order to hurt him, with his short size making it even harder to get a hit in. He also carries an arsenal of devastating attacks such as the Mach Tornado, where he envelops himself in a cyclone of pain and homes in on you, or his standard Tornado attack which whips up a twister that travels a huge portion of the arena - at low health, it will hit you if you don't get behind him before he unleashes it. Little else in the series measures up to the difficulty of these duels, and even fights where you do have access to your Copy Abilities still tend to be difficult.
  • Kracko in many games, starting with the Extra Mode of the original Kirby's Dream Land. Lightning fast, with a completely different attack pattern that gives you next to no time to react. His weaker Kracko Jr. form is just as hard, and some think he's even harder to beat - again, Extra Mode transforms a once easy boss into a spastic nightmare who is constantly bombarding you with bombs and cannonballs, and that's when he isn't trying to charge into you outright.
    • Of course, in this game getting to him means first getting through Kabula, who was a pushover in the regular game - but in Extra Mode she becomes the most insane, random, frantic battle in the game. Beating Kabula on Hard is as much luck as anything else. While they tried to replicate the difficulty in her later appearances (Kirby Super Star Ultra and Kirby: Planet Robobot) nothing can compare to the original. Between her Bullet Hell patterns and ridiculously quick ramming attacks, that thing is a MONSTER.
    • Whispy Woods of all bosses is a monster in Extra Mode. Iconic for being one of the most prolific easy bosses in any Nintendo game, Whispy's suddenly a lot scarier when most of the apples he drops onto you are replaced with the indestructible spiny Gordos. They lop off a whopping 3 health if they hit you. You have six health. They bounce a bit when they land, can block your shots, and can corral you right into the path of Whispy's wind attacks. You see the problem, yet?
  • Kracko could be regarded as kind of a junior version of Death and Ridley, in that he's in most of the games with the same patterns and strategy, but is somehow usually one of the harder bosses (which, admittedly, isn't always a strongly contested title in Kirby games). Cloud levels tend to be a bad sign...
    • There is one exception: Kracko doesn't appear in Kirby Squeak Squad. Oh no, instead, you fight Mecha Kracko, piloted by one of the titular Squeeks. While he's annoying enough on his own, once he Turns Red he starts using an attack where he moves towards the bottom of the screen, destroys the stage, and reforms it later. If you don't take to the air in time, you will die from this attack. Regular Kracko may be annoying, but at least he doesn't use an attack that can cause a one-hit KO at regular intervals. And this is the only boss in the game that has TWO health bars to drain. Not even the final boss has two health bars.
  • Paint Roller is considered this by some in Kirby's Adventure and its remake, Kirby: Nightmare in Dream Land. Being a fairly unpredictable quick target that many abilities don't work on will do that, but not to everyone. The fight Kirby: Canvas Curse is probably the most irritating boss in the entire franchise, though. The matches required to get through the main game are not very hard, but the ones required to get all the collectables are frustrating, much less with a grade A score.
    • Heavy Mole is even harder. For starters, he's fought in an auto-scrolling stage full of instant deathtraps such as bottomless pits and walls you can get crushed against. And if you don't bring a copy ability into the fight, the only ones you'll have access to are Hammer, which risks breaking the ground and dropping you to your death, and Sleep, which is useless and leaves you a sitting duck while the autoscrolling screws you over. Thanks to these being your only options, you're honestly better off just spitting his missiles back at him.
    • Rolling Turtle/Phan Phan (depending on the version) is surprisingly vicious for a Mid Boss. He's incredibly aggressive and constantly jumping around unpredictably, and his painful grab attack has a deceptive amount of range to it. The devs got the hint come Superstar Ultra, and toned his aggression down there.
  • The "Helper to Hero" mode in Super Star Ultra delivers a few of these, but especially Meta Knight as Bugzzy. The only way the Knight can be hit, discounting the aerial kick he usually will jump out of the way of, is to grab the stars he leaves behind after certain attacks. Problem is, these stars can be impossible to get unless you're in specific spots (as one of these attacks takes nearly the entire screen and can't be dashed through). The one upside there is is that the stars do a good amount of damage so you won't need that much to beat him. Again, good luck getting them.
    • Galacta Knight is pathetically easy when fighting him with Meta Knight during Meta Knightmare Ultra in Kirby Super Star Ultra , due to Meta Knight's healing move, Mach Tornado, and overpowered moveset. Then comes the fight with Galacta Knight as the penultimate boss of The True Area with Kirby, and suddenly he doesn't seem like such a wimp anymore. The player probably has low health by the fight, has to conserve health for the next boss, and cannot heal or abuse a super move like the Tornado. Worst of all are Galacta's Flail Knights, who, unlike the other Mooks he summons, are constantly attacking with a long-ranged weapon that hurts. He was so strong, he reappeared in Kirby's Return to Dreamland as one of the two Bonus Bosses.
  • Adeleine/Ado from Kirby's Dream Land 3 may look like an adorable and harmless little girl, but don't let her cute appearance deceive you. Her fight is a grueling Boss Rush where you fend off all the non-Dedede/Dark Matter bosses from Kirby's Dream Land 2. The Ice Dragon isn't so bad, but things start to get intense when she doodles Sweet Stuff, who can fire electric blasts that home in on you. Her Mr. Shine and Mr. Bright sketches are next, and you're forced to contend with two opponents at once; when you kill one, the second will aggressively charge after you until he falls. And once they're taken care of, she sics Kracko on you, who is every bit as dangerous as he usually is. Thankfully, once you beat him you're in the clear: there's one last phase, but it's Ado uselessly flailing around at you, and even your dash attack/exhale can knock her out in one hit.
    • The True Final Boss Zero is a hell of a note to end the game on. Like with Ado, he has multiple phases that you have to do in one go, with no healing in between. The boss fight is also an Unexpected Shmup Level where Kirby is slow, but he isn't. And his attacks involve trying to ram into you with his massive body, disappearing from the screen only to quickly home in on you from the background while shooting torrents of blood, and pelting you with tiny Dark Matters that love to get in the way. Once you think you've won, he rips his eyeball from his body and forces you to fight that. True, he is weak in this state and can't take many hits before dying, but he'll aggressively hound you and his small size can make hitting him a tricky prospect. The first phase, while far easier than the ones that follow, can still be annoying if you don't realize that Dark Matter's seemingly random lightning bolt attacks never strike directly in front of him.
  • Miracle Matter in Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards has seven forms representing the different abilities in the game, each of which can only be harmed by using an ability that matches it or by sucking up his projectiles and spitting them back at him when he uses the same ability as the projectiles you inhaled, and it must be done quickly before he changes back to his main form - anything that doesn't match the ability Miracle Matter is using will have no effect. Speaking of no effect, his main multi-eyed dice form is completely invulnerable. All seven of his ability forms have to take at least three hits from their projectiles in order to be destroyed, and worse yet, you have to face all seven, which easily makes this boss battle one of the longest and toughest in the game. While some of his forms are harder to deal with than others, Ice and Bomb are the worst: when he's using his Ice form, he's surrounded by a ring of ice blocks that are deceptively hard to dodge thanks to the way they rotate and undulate around the 3D axis in a 2D game. Bomb, meanwhile, has him attack you with four large randomly-moving bubbles that split into eight smaller bubbles, with their random movement making it easy to accidentally faceplant into one while you're trying to dodge.
  • Who remembers Mega Titan from Kirby and the Amazing Mirror? It’s a flying robotic suit of armor at least four times bigger than Kirby, with four detached (and also flying) metal hands that were the size of Kirby himself. It attacks by using its hands to hound Kirby and his friends around the room which is already tight for space with Mega Titan’s size. You cannot stop the hands, and they will relentlessly pound you from every direction, sometimes all four at the same time. The only way you can get the Mega Titan take damage is by knocking its main body into the electrified walls on the sides of the room or using the Beam or Spark Copy abilities – and that’s easier said than done. Normal attacks barely move it back, and the Mega Titan’s body tends to hang around the centre of the room, meaning it takes 2-3 normal hits to smack it into the wall - and during that time, you’ve probably been ganged-up on by the Titan’s hands and taken some damage. And to add to the grief, this is the only boss aside from the Final Boss that has more than one phase: destroying the main body leaves behind the Titan Head, which can thankfully be damaged normally, and two hits make it history. However, Titan Head is smaller and moves in an erratic zigzag pattern around Kirby - who is probably low on health by now – firing missiles and trying to ram into the poor little spud.
  • Goriath from Return to Dream Land. He wall clings just above the range of a lot of vertical attacks, forcing you to jump to get to him - and sometimes he'll decide he's going to drop down on top of you, so if you're jumping under him and/or the floor is icy, he will hit you. If you're in the air when he jumps from one side to the other, he WILL jump right into you. When the floor breaks and gets icy in his second phase, it becomes easier to avoid his Ki Attacks and giant punches, but harder to get away from body slam, that flying tackle, and the exploding spiky ice balls. And he's so damn fast and jumps around so much that he's hard to hit. For Galacta Knight, and most other hard Rt DL bosses, dash attacks with invincibility frames are very effective - but Goriath's floor changing and wall clinging make them useless at best, so you'd better get used to fighting a different way.
    • So you're playing Extra Mode, and are doing pretty okay. Whispy Woods EX was as easy as ever, Mr. Dooter EX puts up a decent fight but nothing spectacular... and then Fatty Puffer EX bitch-slaps you into next Sunday. Building off of the original Fatty Puffer's formidable fighting style, EX is an overwhelming nightmare who inflates himself to the point that his rolling attacks are nearly impossible to avoid, and can roll up walls and across ceilings while inflated at such a high speed that Kirby has barely any time to dodge it. His water beam is even more powerful than the original Fatty Puffer's, comes out with little warning, and can be aimed at upward and downward angles. And sometimes when he's on the ceiling, he'll shoot a spread of water blobs that are positioned and angled at a way that makes them really tricky to dodge.
    • Grand Doomer was a decently tough Disc One Final Boss and fairly manageable, but Grand Doomer EX will make you want to cry. He fights a lot like Kracko, complete with aggressive swooping/divebomb attacks, but throws his own attacks into the mix, such as a fast-moving grab attack that deals impressive damage to your dinky little health bar, and projectile spam to the point that his fiery blasts can cover most of the screen. The True Final Boss, Magalor? A cakewalk compared to this guy.
    • Dubior EX takes an already annoying miniboss, and makes it completely unbearable. Along with its annoying Teleport Spam tactics, aggressive lightning bolt attacks, and constant flight, its new tricks include a really wonky electrified tackle that is hard to wrap your brain around the first few times it uses it, and another lightning tackle that moves blindingly fast.
    • Metal General EX is this for many, due to an unexpected event during the fight. He starts out as a buffed version of the regular fight, like all the other bosses, and everything seems fine and dandy when you beat him... Until he suddenly gets a gigantic robot: HR-D3. While it is easy to dodge once you get the hang of it, hurting it and dodging at the same time is hard to do thanks to its weakspot (its arms) only being vulnerable while it's attacking, and with fast-moving slaps to boot. Also, guess what? Once you do beat it, yet another phase begins. Its attacks are extremely difficult to dodge, one of them notably being a belly flop that covers half the screen, and you're likely weakened from the previous phases. If it weren't for the fact that you don't have to do all of the fights consecutively, people would have ragequit the game before even reaching the final level. One last thing, he has more phases than the final boss. Have fun.
  • Kirby Triple Deluxe:
    • If you thought Kracko was hard in previous games, this game is easily his most brutal outing yet. Not only is he as aggressive and unpredictable as ever, but he's got a massive arsenal of attacks he can throw at you in his second phase. He can pelt you with a storm of garbage, hit you with an undodgeable screen-covering barrage of lightning if you don't escape to the background/foreground (depending on which plane of the battlefield he's currently on), run you over with a ridiculously fast drill-powered body slam, or launch a massive ball of lightning at you that splits into four smaller projectiles. He's even worse as Kracko DX, where his speed, aggression, and unpredictability are cranked Up to 11. When the pause screen warns you about Taranza's magic making him stronger, it's not kidding.
    • Very few Kirby bosses are as hated as Pyribbit, and that's because he's the unholy union of this trope and Goddamned Boss. Like all of this game's bosses, he can hop into the background and pelt you with attacks while you can't punish him. But he's by far the boss that abuses this mechanic the most and will often leap into the background every few seconds. This alone would merely be annoying, but when he bothers to fight you face-to-face, you quickly realize that he's way more aggressive and mobile than his blubbery body would suggest. When he isn't trying to squash you under his weight with his body slams or cutting off your approach by setting parts of the ground on fire, he's chewing you up and spitting you out for a ton of damage with a blindingly-fast tongue attack that he can aim. When he Turns Red, he'll spend even more time in the background by sending multiple waves of lava monsters you way, and you're given very little wiggle room to safely dodge them. And like with Kracko, Pyribbit DX is even worse than the original thanks to a boost in speed and aggression.
    • Normally, Blocky is a manageable miniboss. Aggressive and surprisingly fast given his large and cubical frame, but nothing too crazy. But thanks to the lava ceiling restricting your movement during a fight early into Endless Explosions, Blocky's fast-moving dash attacks and body slams make him a force to be reckoned with. Not helping matters is the fact that he can still hurt you when you dodge his attacks, on account of the damaging rocks they kick up.
    • During the Boss Rush at the end of the game, it's not the Final Boss that's the biggest threat, but the fight that precedes her: Masked Dedede. His first phase is your standard easy Dedede fare, but when the second phase starts, he becomes a terrifying Lightning Bruiser that fights like an axe-murderer on crack. His brutal spin attacks turn him into a bladed whirlwind that hurtles across the entire screen in half a second, and one of them will even home in on you. He also has some nasty projectile attacks that home in on you as well, while others have him trip you up by firing them directly into parts of the screen that most players retreat to during his other attacks. The nastiest of the bunch though is a gigantic blob of dark magic that bounces awkwardly across the screen like Pyribbit and Fatty Puffer's equally annoying body slam attacks, and is just as tricky to dodge. And again, his souped up form Shadow Dedede takes an already relentless boss and makes it even moreso.
  • Kirby Planet Robobot:
    • King Dedede usually isn't a particularly hard boss during his boss fights... so instead, Haltmann Works' Dedede Clone is more than happy to pick up the real McCoy's slack. The fight isn't too bad at first, since the clone fights like a somewhat more aggressive Dedede. But once you lower his health down to half, he dies... and splits into three. All of a sudden, you're being mobbed by a trio of hyper-aggressive clones that will pummel you into submission with wide-reaching group attacks, before de-synching and taking turns beating you black and blue before you even have a chance to recover.
    • Dubior EX (or as it's called here, 2.0) is back and just as spastic and unpredictable as ever. But along with its constant teleporting and hard-hitting electric attacks, it throws in some Goddamned Boss flavor by warping to the 3D plane where your attacks can't reach it a la Pyribbit from Triple Deluxe. Even worse is that it shows up way earlier than intended if you're going for 100% completion, and its early fight takes place on a giant pool table where huge billiard balls are constantly rolling in from the background and trying to crush you.
    • Much like in Super Star Ultra, Galacta Knight is easy as hell when you have Meta Knight's arsenal of Game Breakers on your side, but utter hell in the True Arena where you have to play as Kirby. Once again, he's an aggressive and intelligent foe who will happily nullify whatever attacks you pull out with his shield before brutally punishing you with a hard-hitting attack. He also learned a few new tricks since his last appearance, such as creating a massive storm of sword beams that are ridiculously hard to dodge unless you luck out and find the two safe spots that they can't reach, and a disgustingly fast dive bomb attack that will hit you unless you dodge the second he flies to a certain spot in the background. And while it's not so bad once you learn how it works, the attack where he cuts open a portal to Another Dimension and unleashes a massive laser beam will blindside you the first few times you fight him. Beat him, and chances are you'll be horribly worn down just in time for one of the biggest examples of That One Boss in the game, if not the entire series...
    • Said boss, of course, is Star Dream Soul OS, the obligatory Soul version of a final boss fought at the end of several games' True Arena. This fight is a grueling, arduous duel that goes on forever and stretches across four (technically five) phases. If you don't come in with full health, chances are you simply won't survive all the bullshit it throws at you. And even if you do, you're in for a brutal and stressful fight.
      • Its first two phases are manageable, but it throws way more lasers at you as well as some scary new attacks that include Star Dream wreathing itself in fire and chasing after you, a faster and longer-lasting version of its hard-hitting limb swipes, and another attack where its severed limbs close in on you and try to crush you while you have very little room to safely dodge. Oh, and its powerful inhaling attack has been moved from the third phase to the second, meaning that if you're positioned wrong at the start of the second phase, you will be sucked up and crunched up for massive damage. How's that for a rude wakeup call?
      • Phase 3 is a frantic race against the clock where you're hoping and praying that you'll kill Star Dream before it finishes its countdown. Because if it does, it unleashes a Fatal Error attack that will instantly kill you unless you pull off some insane perfectly-timed dodge rolls through the barrage of death screens. To avoid having this happen, you need to destroy as many of its summoned Nova parts as possible so you can use their debris to power your Robobot Armor's obscenely strong combo cannon. But of course, Star Dream doesn't want to make this easy on you - not only do these summoned items hit hard and fight with weird attack patterns, but every time Star Dream counts down it assaults you with a massive electronic number. 5, 4, and 3 aren't so bad, but 2 and 1 move in weird, inconsistent ways that will lead to a lot of lost health unless your instincts are on point.
      • And if you somehow survive all of this, you have Phase 4 to worry about! Refusing to be drilled through and blown to pieces like in your first fight against it, Star Dream inhales Kirby, forcing you to destroy its Heart much like you did with Nova's in Super Star. And the first phase is a lot like Nova in the sense that you're having to dodge through and destroy pillars powering up the boss... while they move at random speeds and try to crush you between each other for some nasty collision damage, which can really screw you over depending on Kirby's current ability. Then when you reduce its health to half, phase 5 begins, and the Heart of Star Dream will aggressively teleport like crazy before smacking you with its wide-reaching, fast moving attacks. The erratic and chaotic nature of this phase will lead to plenty of unfair deaths before you finally beat it...
      • ...except that depleting its health completely isn't the end of it. And that's because it unleashes a series of instant kill moves as it's dying. The first two are easy to dodge, but the final one forces you to hover very carefully between two closely-spaced death rings. And if you so much as graze one of them? Too bad, you lose! Hope you have fun fighting your way allll the way back here again! What makes this especially infuriating is that Copy Abilities that protect you from damage completely like Stone's default move, Poison's dash attack, and Arrow's shield won't work on this attack in particular. If you want to cheese it, your only hope is ESP's teleporting attack... and ESP isn't an easy ability to take to the end thanks to its slow and methodical fighting style being at odds with highly aggressive bosseses like the Dedede Clones, Sectonia's Clone, Dark Matter's Clone, and Galacta Knight.
  • Kirby and the Forgotten Land:
    • You may not expect much when you first encounter Sillydillo, which makes it a huge shock when that goofy-looking armadillo flattens you into paste. While his first phase is nothing to write home about, phase 2 has him spam a rolling attack that hits hard and can easily trap you if you dodge the wrong way in his surprisingly small battlefield. But even that doesn't hold a candle to phase 3, where he ballroom dances all over the place with a scrap dummy. His movements here are chaotic and unpredictable, and when he's done? He starts spinning several dummies your way, and they home in on you! And the cherry on top is the fact that he immediately follows up with more rolling attacks, and the dummies are annoyingly good at corralling you right into his path. If you haven't mastered the dodge mechanic, you're not getting past this guy.
      • And if you think merely fighting him is bad? His extra challenges are even worse. One tasks you with killing him, a boss whose strategy revolves around running away from you and making it unsafe to approach him, in under two minutes. Another? Beat him without getting hit. At all. While a lot of his attacks require near-frame perfect dodges to avoid. You can't even cheese the fight with the Drill ability, since some of his attacks can hit you underground!
      • Phantom Sillydillo, who's fought in the postgame is more-or-less the same, but with two new tricks to make him even more of a pain: he whips up a sandstorm in phase 3 in order to screw with your visibility, and he no longer gets dizzy after his rolling attacks. At least you don't have to worry about not getting hit/killing him quickly.
    • The transition into 3D has given us some of the franchise's toughest Dedede fights yet, with the pinnacle being the nightmare that is Phantom Forgo Dedede. He's an aggressive spaz who rarely ever stops moving and almost every attack of his generates either a fuckton of fire tornados or dangerous trails of lava. The lava is especially annoying because if you're using a copy ability with limited range like Sword or Needle, attacking him is very unsafe thanks to him often going idle smack-dab in the middle of it. Certain attacks of his will also mess with the arena, knocking it on its side and submerging it in a pool of lava. Not only does this cut off access to half the arena, but gravity will constantly push you down towards the pool.
    • Leongar was already a fairly formidable Climax Boss during the story, so he gets quite the upgrade during the postgame. In an interesting twist of fate, Forgo Leon’s fight is a reverse of his original boss fight: he starts off in his berserk state, where he assaults you with powerful attacks that have insanely good tracking, such as a long-lasting series of ferocious bites and an energy beam. But once phase 2 begins, the fight turns into a much more complex version of the original Leongar fight’s first phase. Here, Leon’s attacks start generating massive shockwaves, as well as damaging trails of lightning and fire while his claw beams come out in far more complex patterns than before. Fecto also becomes an active participant in the fight, and will back up Leon’s unrelenting attacks with massive arena-spanning blasts and annoyingly accurate projectiles of its own. The combined might of the King of the Beasts and his Eldritch Abomination tormentor is bound to give even the most hardened of Kirby veterans a hard time.


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