That One Boss/First-Person Shooter

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This page is for venting on bosses that gave large numbers of people grief. They do not need advice on how to beat them. They already know how to find GameFAQs.

The page isn't for you to talk about how great you are at the game either. Save that for your blog.

NOTE: Final Boss and "Wake-Up Call" Boss cannot be That One Boss without being overly hard by their standards. Please do not nonchalantly add them as examples. Bonus Boss is completely banned. They are supposed to be overpowerful and have no real standards.

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• In stand-alone gzdoom mod of Doom called scoredoom, only in Ultra-Violence mode when playing with the Add-on pack will the player see different bosses, including variants of the Cyberdemon and Spider Mastermind, all of which are very much this trope. (Save for the dark avatar)
• Cthon in Quake is a normally invincible Puzzle Boss that is defeated by three switches, when all previous enemies had been killed by brute force. You must run across narrow catwalks over lava to reach these switches, and Cthon tosses instant-kill lava balls at you that on higher difficulties are fired at where Cthon thinks you will be when they hit, and Cthon's guesses are uncannily accurate.
• In Perfect Dark Zero, Killian's personnel transport is an example of a first boss being the hardest boss, especially so on Perfect Agent and Dark Agent difficulties. Almost constant rain of machine gun fire, missiles that can damage you even when under cover, and when you've damaged him enough, he starts burning you with his flaming engines. Also a Puzzle Boss and a Guide Dang It somewhat, this troper couldn't figure out for a long time that only one of the engines needed to be shot at.
• Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness: Boaz, mainly due to the buggy target lock-on controls. What makes Spider Boaz really difficult is that up to this point, every boss could be killed by just pumping enough ammo into them while avoiding their specials. With Boaz, you have to target her sides when she does a specific move, preferably without getting hit by said move. The game didn't exactly teach you this, and doesn't tell you before or during the boss fight.
• In Halo 2, the Heretic Leader, particularly on the Harder Than Hard Legendary diffuiculty. Equipped with a jetpack, near-instant-death dual Plasma Rifles, and holographic doppelgangers. Definitely worse than the Prophet of Regret.
• The Death Knight in Spear of Destiny is by far the most difficult boss in the game, packing more than twice the firepower of any other boss. To make matters worse, he's in a room with at least twenty mutants, guards, and SS in it, and no health or ammo. To replenish health and ammo, you have to run through this room and out a doorway, and into a ring-shaped corridor running around the level...which is full of officers. There is a better than even chance that you will die within seconds of entering the boss arena, before you can even get out into the outer ring and lure the boss into following you.
• In Time Splitters 3: Future Perfect, the Creature (Crow's monster) in the episode "Something to Crow About" definitely counts as one. You know what I'm talking about. "Destroy his weapons and he'll be defenseless!"
  • The worst part is the collision detection for his body is wonky. So you step out from behind one of the ballroom pillars and open fire, hoping to take out one of his weapons. Even though it was a direct hit, the weapon didn't notice and is now unleashing hell in your direction, knocking you back into the proximity mines he laid, which blow you away from your cover so that you're now taking fire from multiple weapons. Rinse, repeat.
• NME (or Nasty Metallic Enforcer) from Rise of the Triad is undoubtedly the hardest boss in the game (Yes, even harder than the final boss). Not only does the damn thing move very fast, but it also hurls mines and heat-seeking missiles at you.
  • To give you an idea of just how hard the NME is, the developers outright state in the full-colour printed manual: "We even have trouble beating this guy." No joke.
  • If that wasn't enough, Extreme Rise of the Triad also had levels where you fight the above boss in a small space. Good luck beating it in those levels.
• Killzone 2, the first ATAC gunship fight (the second time it doesn't even really count as a boss fight). Dear god, this is a painful fight. The ATAC is faster than the Flash on methamphetamines, has a fairly painful machine gun turret, and has rockets of face raping +5. And your only source of cover in this fight is a single stone column in the middle of the area. Which offers you no protection at all from the splash damage of the ATAC's rockets, and is so thin that taking cover from the machine gun entails getting so close to the column that you can't see where the boss is. Basically, success in this battle comes down to getting in enough hits before the fucking thing decides to spam its rockets and instakill you.
• The Big Daddies of BioShock (series) can frequently provide quite a difficult fight.
  • Bouncers may seem to be lumbering idiots, but once they turn against you, things go very nasty very quickly. Don't get excited just because they have no long range attacks. They like to root you into place with a paralyzing shockwave and then ram into you at near superhuman speeds, which is pretty much a projectile attack. And unless you're playing on Easy, each attack is probably going to require you to use one of your precious First-Aid Kits.
  • Rosies like to keep their distance, but have huge rivet guns that take large chunks out of your health. Plus, they like to fire proximity mines while you're hiding, just to turn the tide in their favor and making it more difficult to move around freely. The mines have a large radius, and even stay after the fight. What fun!
  • BioShock 2's Big Sisters are worse than all of those. They are faster, stronger, swifter, and can throw fire and debris at you. The first time you meet one you have 3 options: Die, Fight (and die), or run like a bitch. You later have to kill 2 of them at the same time. As proof that they are tougher than ANY Big Daddy (except Delta) you actually get to watch one kill one of each type of Big Daddy (including the Alpha Series, which was made to be superior to Delta in every way).
• In Clive Barker's Undying, there's the penultimate boss, Bethany. She's widely considered to be much, much harder than the actual final boss, and has marked the point where many players have quit the game in frustration. Why? Well, for the one thing, she flies, meaning that in order to get up close to her and perform the one melee attack that can kill her, you have to manage the awkward flying controls and fighting controls at the same time. But that's not the worst thing. Oh no. She also summons enemies to fight for her while she flies around overhead. Enemies that can kill you in more or less one hit each. Enemies that respawn endlessly until you kill Bethany herself. And the plural term "enemies" doesn't just refer to the fact she'll summon them repeatedly: it's that she summons multiple one-hit kill enemies at a time, who'll pile onto you while you're trying to get to her to put a mercifully quick end to the battle. And since she's positioned right before the final boss, if you lose to it and quit the game, you will have to deal with her again.
• The Preacher fight from STALKER: Call of Pripyat. After launching an elaborately planned ambush on a Monolith patrol, with sniper support and a squad of specially trained, heavily armored Spetsnaz, he announces his presence by instantly killing said sniper, and the real Monolith patrol shows up. Suddenly, you and your six man team are pinned down in the middle of an open courtyard, outnumbered nearly 3:1, with sniper fire raining down on you. Even worse, if you take too long the Preacher will start using the Cool but Inefficient Gauss Rifle. Even worse, even the best armor in the game will be instantly ruined by a single shot, and if you aren't wearing that armor, you die instantly. If he can't find you, he'll simply fire on your allies, and is capable of wiping out the entire squad singlehandedly in under fifteen seconds.
  • Somehow, to make things even worse, in order to get a good ending, not a single Spetsnaz can die. Even if you take out the Preacher immediately, you have to hope the ridiculously heavily armed mooks don't take down a single one of your buddies. And if you take too long, one of the mooks will pick up his gun and use it on you. Even with decent AI, it took this Troper nearly three hours to get out of a two minute gunfight without losing anyone.
  • And during the whole ordeal, the Preacher is ranting over the radio in a monotone that places him amongst the most annoying voice actors in a series already full of Most Annoying Sound candidates.
  • The game has another situation later in the game, during the final mission, where you must escort a team of story-critical characters to the evacuation point. The catch? If you lost any men in the mission above, the survivors are weaker as a result. Half of them are outfitted with pitiful starting game gear. This Escort Mission from hell gets even worse when another Preacher (using a powerful semiautomatic shotgun) appears at the very end (along with 40 more Monolith mooks!). Even better? Every single one of those men has to make it out alive, or you will get a negative scene in the ending.
• Packrat Palooka from Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath, who is essentially an upgraded version of a rocket-firing outlaw. Most of your sucess depends on you managing to knock him off of his platform with Boombats or ThudSlugs, and then giving him a good arse-kicking before he scrambles back up. All whilst he continually fires homing rockets at you, which can kill you in just a few shots. And that's not even getting into trying to capture him alive.
• Maledict, the commanding demonic dragon made of the evil spirit of Dr. Malcolm Betruger, in Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil. You start the battle by landing on a flowing platform in the bottomless space of Hell. You have the the Artifact but it's only in limited use. Maledict demands you to hand over it, but the marine simply points the gun at it. The battle start with Maledict randomly throwing fires and summonding the local cannon fodders at you, which you just simply kill and then use the Artifact to slow time and just fire whatever kind of guns right at Maledict's slow-flying ass. After a while, Maledict decides that its gonna stop bull-shiting around and then just throws meteors at you, and all you can do is to avoid them and not trying to fall over the platform, as well shoot the beast up. And you can't get any healthpack during the battle. That and everything else makes it to one of the most adrenaline pumping boss fights ever. Its really makes up Doom 3's Cyberdemon's status as the Anticlimax Boss.