8 Terrible Games With INCREDIBLE Bosses
When amazing bosses happen to bad, bad games.
It's incredibly common for even the very best video games to offer up a dud boss fight or two, because maintaining brilliance for dozens of hours is a near-impossible task and everyone's human, right?
It's much rarer, though, for genuinely bad, poor, awful, even terrible games to strike momentary gold and deliver a boss fight far beyond the quality of the rest of the game.
And yet, that's precisely what these 10 video games just went and did.
Each of them was either panned by critics or proved wildly controversial with the fanbase, and yet, removed from their contentious release period and observed with a more objective eye, there's at least one brilliant boss fight worth praising.
Are these bosses perfect? Absolutely not - by sheer virtue of the game they're in, that's just not true - but to the same token, these memorably thrilling and thoroughly entertaining encounters do serve up fleeting of flashes of excellence in games that were otherwise rubbished by most.
While we can't in good conscience recommend that you play these games solely to experience these bangers bosses, they do nevertheless offer welcome respite amid the slop...
8. Solaris - Sonic the Hedgehog (2006)
2006's Sonic the Hedgehog reboot remains infamous among the fandom almost 20 years (!) following its release.
Even beyond the traumatic sequence where an unconscious Sonic is kissed by a human woman, almost everything here is a monstrous fail - the camera, controls, egregious loading times, and even the voice acting.
But if you can slog your way to the end of the game, its true final boss, Solaris, is arguably one of the best end-bosses in the entire Sonic franchise, and surely the most underrated due to the game it's attached to.
This dual-phase spectacle of a boss battle requires players to switch between Super Sonic, Super Shadow, and Super Silver in order to deal damage to the multi-dimensional entity.
The fight's second phase marks a major ramp-up in difficulty, but also introduces the certified banger of a battle theme, aptly titled "Solaris Phase 2," which is a gloriously extra orchestral rendition of the game's main theme, "His World."
A boss fight this fun, frantic, and epic clearly deserved to be tethered to a better game than Sonic '06, ensuring it's never quite gotten the flowers it so thoroughly deserves.