10 Phenomenal Video Games With Shockingly Bad Boss Fights
When all that's required to beat the main villain is the press of a button.
A lot of celebrated moments in the history of video games involve the satisfying death of an adversary after a challenging boss fight.
Be it Psycho Mantis, Bowser or any of the Colossi, well-made boss fights are exclusive touchstones that define entire generations of games and the people who grew up playing them.
Or at least... they used to.
In its undeniable progression with the development of graphics and storytelling, the medium has sacrificed a lot of what made it so special in the first place.
Now - much like the yin and yang - for every boss fight that was strategically challenging and once revolutionary, there are several disappointing and insulting ones that tarnish otherwise phenomenal video games.
Sure, there are still excellent bosses to be found in the likes of Dark Souls, Nier: Automata and Persona 5, but in AAA video games, terrible boss fights are pretty much expected.
Sometimes this is forgivable with certain titles providing one incredible boss fight in compensation for all the bad, but more often than not, the amazing video games of today offer nothing memorable, and embody why boss battles in general are a dying art.
10. The Evil Within 2
Yes, The Evil Within 2 fixed its predecessor’s robotic characters, overly convoluted story and intrusive black bars, but it failed to deliver boss battles that were anywhere near as terrifying.
In the original, Laura and The Keeper were recurring nightmares who forced you to quickly improvise, exploit the environment and manage your gear as you avoided being insta-killed in tight quarters with traps everywhere.
This claustrophobic horror and panic was something the sequel sorely lacked, with Tango Gameworks having removed traps and one-hit kills almost completely thanks to an overcompensating desire to please all the critics who raged about its forerunner's difficulty.
The tight halls were also replaced with breathable open spaces that made it easy to avoid up close conflict, and the bosses' designs were largely underwhelming with one being a lazy rip-off of the Scarecrow nightmares from Arkham Asylum, the other a pretentious artist with poor aim and the final a generic monster of Sebastian's wife.
It's telling that the only good boss fights in the entire game were a lullaby singing Siren and Father Theodore, only because they took you back to Beacon and literally recycled the last game's scarier monsters.