10 Infuriating Video Game Bosses That Made You Lower The Difficulty

by Austin Wood

1. Shin Megami Tensei - Devil Survivor Overclocked: Lucifer

How strange for Atlus, a studio best known for such wholly upbeat if maturely flavored IP as Persona, to also have put out some of gaming's most overwhelming bosses, the majority of which come from the mammoth Shin Megami Tensei franchise. SMT: Nocturne, for example, is widely regarded as the most difficult JRPG of the PlayStation 2 era.

Nocturne just so happens to share many design principles with the 3DS remake of Devil Survivors, now bearing the suffix Overclocked, but can't compare to the latter in the contest of bossing for a single, six-winged reason (pictured above). The lord of demons and prince of darkness himself, Lucifer graces Overclocked with an appearance as an optional boss fight accessible only after completing the game, allowing your party to reach a level of strength at which opposing Lucifer is strictly stupid rather than just plain laughable.

Forget actually fighting him, Lucifer isn't even fun on paper. Multiple and increasingly powerful forms? You got it. Unstoppable insta-kills? By the truckload. Defenses that waltz along the line between hardy and invincible? Stepping on the toes of the latter. This fortunately optional fight is a truly hopeless experience. It is not a matter of avoiding the worst-case scenario, but a matter of reluctantly counting down to it like the victims of a nuclear strike preparing their continent-splitting counterattack... only in this case, you're well out of nukes.

You have no choice but to account for the impending culling of Lucifer's next turn. Strategy? The only strategy here is to die at moments of least inconvenience.

 
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A freelance games writer, you say? Typically battling his current RPG addiction and ceaseless perfectionism? A fan of horror but too big a sissy to play for more than a couple of hours? Spends far too much time on JRPGs and gets way too angry with card games? Well that doesn't sound anything like me.