Current Events > What's the hardest boss in videogame history?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Battletoads on NES. The whole game.

Or Seath the first time you meet him.

Sartharion with 3 drakes up upon release, if I recall was considered the hardest boss in WoW history - a title once held by the Four Horsemen in the original Naxxramas. Then Algalon came along.

However both became easier with later content updates (better gear) so as with any MMO boss they only had that status for a window of time.

For me it was Sword Saint Isshin in Sekiro. Crazy difficulty spike at the very end, glock phase was a brick wall for me for several nights. I remember I ended up taking a couple days break after the first few nights of failed attempts.

Came back to the game one night, got close a few times but ended up calling it a night and going to sleep. The next day at work I was confident I was gonna beat him when I got home that night and ended up taking him down on the first attempt.

wanderingshade posted...

X4 Sigma was a fucking rat bastard son of a bitch.

His second or third form?

I never could beat Tabuu in Boss Battles on the intense difficult v__v

St0rmFury posted...

His second or third form?

Speaking of Sigma, in X3 can be a pain in the ass if you run with no upgrades. Which was me as a kid since I didnt know where anything was

C'Thun

MFers had to mathematically prove the boss was unkillable before they nerfed his ass.

Crimson_Corsair posted...

C'Thun

MFers had to mathematically prove the boss was unkillable before they nerfed his ass.

I recall it was also bugged to hell.

Drakengard 3 ending D.

Yoko Taro trolls the player in a way I didn't think was possible.

Sigma is tough, but nowhere near anything brutal.

Dark_Arbron posted...

I recall it was also bugged to hell.

Oh for sure, I remember tentacles spawning in the fucking walls making them unkillable.

The feared Camera Boss

wanderingshade posted...

X4 Sigma was a fucking rat bastard son of a bitch.

What? Im very puzzled by this, as thats one of his easier iterations.

wifi darkwraith

PraetorXyn posted...

What? Im very puzzled by this, as thats one of his easier iterations.

The one with 3 forms? Definitely harder than X2 and X3.

It would have to be whatever boss has the lowest percent clears per attempt count.

Probably some insane MMO bullshit somewhere that no one anywhere has ever beaten.

SilvosForever posted...

It would have to be whatever boss has the lowest percent clears per attempt count.

Probably some insane MMO bullshit somewhere that no one anywhere has ever beaten.

Mike Tyson. Just lasting the first half of the first round against Tyson is impressive. His lightning punches will send you to the mat in one hit.

SilvosForever posted...

It would have to be whatever boss has the lowest percent clears per attempt count.

Probably some insane MMO bullshit somewhere that no one anywhere has ever beaten.

Nah if attempts is the thing that matters the boss is going to just be whatever the first boss is in Minecraft.

Tyranthraxus posted...

Nah if attempts is the thing that matters the boss is going to just be whatever the first boss is in Minecraft.

First Goomba.

ellis123 posted...

First Goomba.

Not technically wrong but I don't think most people would consider this a boss.

DuuuDe14 posted...

Drakengard 3 ending D.

Yoko Taro trolls the player in a way I didn't think was possible.

That the rthym game where the screen goes black at the end, but you still have to keep up the beat? Yeah. Fuck that one. Watched my wife attempt it a godawful amount of times before giving up and I came to the conclusion that that game was not for me.

Only time I got pissed at Yoko Taro was that abomination of a final boss. Otherwise his works are artistic masterpieces.

ellis123 posted...

First Goomba.

Tyranthraxus posted...

Nah if attempts is the thing that matters the boss is going to just be whatever the first boss is in Minecraft.

I'm saying X = # successful kills / # attempts to kill percentage. Whatever boss has the lowest of that.

SilvosForever posted...

It would have to be whatever boss has the lowest percent clears per attempt count.

Probably some insane MMO bullshit somewhere that no one anywhere has ever beaten.

there are plenty of games that youre supposed to die to the first boss. Do these count?

ehh drakengard 3 isn't that bad now drakengard 1 on the otherhand was a pain to playthru when i played it few years ago and getting the endings was a pain in the ass coupled with the shitty game design earing it one of the top kusoge in my book

Tyranthraxus posted...

Not technically wrong but I don't think most people would consider this a boss.

Just give him a cane and top hat and we're all good.~

SilvosForever posted...

I'm saying X = # successful kills / # attempts to kill percentage. Whatever boss has the lowest of that.

Yes. This metric is heavily weighted towards games with the most players, not difficult games.

Tyranthraxus posted...

Yes. This metric is heavily weighted towards games with the most players, not difficult games.

....No? What are you talking about?

it depends entirely on how easy the thing is.

Do you really think a higher percentage of players have died to the first goomba than some of these MMO raid bosses?

Think of all the successful times the goomba has been killed.

This is a success percentage.

Goomba 1, even in the face of million of terrible players, gets regularly killed by MOST everyone else.

This has got to be at least a 30% success rate. Who knows exactly. But no less than 1% success rate AT WORST.

Meanwhile there are MMO bosses with like hundreds of thousands of attempts and no successes. Like 0.02% success rate.

RespectWomen posted...

there are plenty of games that youre supposed to die to the first boss. Do these count?

I think more people clear those bosses than some of the REALLY hard stuff that exists. A casual could beat the first boss of some of these games within a hundred attempts. There are bosses out there that people (very good players mind you) required thousands of attempts to beat.

So although they're hard, I don't think the success rates would be that bad actually. Probably like 2% success rate or something. I just think there are other things an order of magnitude more worse.

Obviously it's hard to say for sure without real data.

Maybe don't even use # successful kills / # attempts to kill percentage.

Maybe even better is # players who have EVER beaten the boss / # players who even play said game percentage.

SilvosForever posted...

....No? What are you talking about?

it depends entirely on how easy the thing is.

Do you really think a higher percentage of players have died to the first goomba than some of these MMO raid bosses?

Think of all the successful times the goomba has been killed.

This is a success percentage.

Goomba 1, even in the face of million of terrible players, gets regularly killed by MOST everyone else.

This has got to be at least a 30% success rate. Who knows exactly. But no less than 1% success rate AT WORST.

Meanwhile there are MMO bosses with like hundreds of thousands of attempts and no successes. Like 0.02% success rate.

Minecraft has over 200 million copies sold.

Many of them in households where multiple children all play the same copy so like probably close to like half a billion people play / have played Minecraft.

Many of these players are extremely low skill, typically children. They will die hundreds of millions of times collectively against the first boss. Then people will either stop playing or advance to a level where the first boss is no longer relevant content. All future bosses will have fewer attempts with more skilled players, leading to higher ratios.

Meanwhile, I do not think anyone on this board can even attempt inbachi because I doubt anyone here has the skill level to even make it to inbachi in the first place. At least not legitimately. You can do anything with pause spam / TAS.

Mike Tyson from Punch-Out.
I'd wager nobody ever defeated this final boss without seeing the game over screen many, many times.

Or, yeah, definitely an SNK boss

wanderingshade posted...

The one with 3 forms? Definitely harder than X2 and X3.

X4 Sigma is definitely the hardest.
Especially with Zero, as everything else in that game.

Xenogears15 posted...

Meganada from DDS2 wasn't just hard, it seemed like he fucking cheated. Needed big RNG luck to beat him. The fact that he was harder than the final boss and progression required you to beat him still sticks in my craw today.

Holycrap just reminded me of that fight. Yeah, even if you did everything perfectly there was some luck to it. Dont think fights like this should qualify.

Id say hardest for me have been the last boss of shinobi PS2 and the last boss of Ninja Gaiden 2.

LordFarquad1312 posted...

X4 Sigma is definitely the hardest.
Especially with Zero, as everything else in that game.

Zero had that dash cancel attack that let him rapid fire for the left Sigma though. The right Sigma was barely a threat.

I don't know what I think is the toughest Sigma. Maybe X3 if you don't have the z-saber that takes half his health in one hit.

Here's another inbachi video with some more information since if you're not familiar with the game/genre it's not necessarily obvious just how hard this boss is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1MBZA7w9YQ

Silly pattern.

Final pattern of Inbachi, the alternate true last boss of the game that took nearly 10 years since its first release in 2012 to be beaten.

The main obstacle was the final by far, but recently we have access to save states, so we can train in the hyperbolic time chamber to try and figure it out just a tiny bit more.
The pattern is complete and utter nonsense, but with enough pattern analysis, practice, determination and some good luck, it's possible to make a dent in it.

Technical stuff:
Blue bullets are shot by the 8 crystals around Inbachi. The crystals move according to one of 6 possible patterns, chosen at random; these are the direction and angular velocity of the crystal's orbit (Clockwise/Counter-clockwise, slow/medium/fast). Their initial shooting direction is also randomized. Crystals spawn every 78 frames.
Because of the three different angular velocities of the crystals we get three different types of blue lanes. The faster the velocity, the more space there is between the blue bullets. The types of lanes we thus get are wide (easy), dense (hard) or walls (impossible).

New crystal rings spawn before the previous one despawns, which causes all sorts of insane clown fiesta overlaps.
Basically you want to pray you get lots of wide gap lanes and not too many awful overlaps.

Red bullets are shot by Inbachi in circles of 32. No randomness here, one of them is aimed at the player. One circle is shot every 234 frames.
After 18 frames in game, each red bullet will start shooting one fugu bullet every 4 frames, up to 15 times. The direction rotates every time but it is static. Each circle of red bullets alternates between shooting inwards and outwards.

The hardest part of the final is a combination of a couple of factors:
- The extreme amount of health.
- The boss is invulnerable for a long time after dying, bombing and hypering.
- Bullets are so fast they will be on you long before the boss iframes run out.
You're basically forced to dodge it to do any kind of damage to it, you can't really do any sort of cheezing.

Everything causing long boss iframes is a big problem. There is however one exception to this rule: autobombs.
Autobombs cause very few iframes to the boss, meaning you can do damage the soonest after it. Which means the period of time after an autobomb is the most crucial in this fight.

Another trick was found out recently that made this a tiny bit more doable.
In Daioujou there was this bug where activating a hyper right after bombing would cause the hyper to lose their initial invulnerability period. Meaning you basically died instantly if you hypered right after bombing, a big problem on the Hibachi fight.
This same problematic bug exists in this game too, but you can actually use it to your advantage here!
If you trigger the bug right after autobombing, the boss will skip the hyper iframes and have the autobomb iframes instead. You can get hyper damage in earlier this way. Level 1 hypers do +10% damage, so it can be quite worth it.

Another thing to consider in this fight is how you build up hypers.
You charge a hyper by pointblanking and dying. A death will give you +50% hyper meter but ONLY when you die outside of hyper. Meaning you ideally want to always die outside of hyper.
A trick here is that autobombs cancel the hyper. So if you want to maximize the amount of hypers you want to do loops of hyper - autobomb - die - repeat, with the exception of your last life.
You can get around four hypers in the final this way. Besides the extra damage increase, hypers are also very useful for their initial screen cancels.

Besides pointblanking for hyper after a death, it's also possible to cancel a pink wave by cancelling the initial red bullets during iframes.

On Expert to trigger Inbachi at the end of the game you need to:
- No-Miss.
- No-Bomb.
- Get all the bee perfects.
- Max HIT Count 10,000.
- Rank 15 or more.
During a normal run it's possible to get to Inbachi at about rank 16 with a level 8 hyper. You then build that hyper up to a level 10 on the second pattern, use it and end the first phase right at the start of the third pattern.
REALLY IMPORTANT: the final phase takes damage for about a second before the phase transition iframes kick in. You really want to get Level 10 pointblank damage in during this.

The pattern does get easier over time since you keep dropping rank by dying a bunch.

Done with A-EX. The speed really helps with dodging the fast bullets and the smaller Expert hitbox is ESSENTIAL for this. This fight is 100% impossible with the larger Shot/Laser hitbox.

Tyranthraxus posted...

Blue bullets are shot by the 8 crystals around Inbachi. The crystals move according to one of 6 possible patterns, chosen at random; these are the direction and angular velocity of the crystal's orbit (Clockwise/Counter-clockwise, slow/medium/fast). Their initial shooting direction is also randomized. Crystals spawn every 78 frames.
Because of the three different angular velocities of the crystals we get three different types of blue lanes. The faster the velocity, the more space there is between the blue bullets. The types of lanes we thus get are wide (easy), dense (hard) or walls (impossible).

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/5/9/7/AARkkPAAEnEV.jpg