10 Longest Boss Battles In Gaming History

8. Abyssion - Tales Of Symphonia

I have a special place in my heart for players who spent hours retrieving all of the special items needed to get to this optional boss, turned them in, and then realised the battle triggers immediately after and is set to suck up at least an hour of your life.

Namco’s RPG Tales of Symphonia was first released in 2003 on the Nintendo Gamecube and boy were the unsuspecting among you in for a bad time with this one. Abyssion rears his head adorned with brilliant red locks once you hand over all of the Devil’s Arms to him and immediately realise that wasn’t such a great idea. That’s because said Arms are apparently able to turn their wearers mad which is not what you want but Abyssion reckons if you just don’t listen to the voices then “she’ll be right”.

Well, as it turned out, she did not turn out to be right and Abyssion used the arms to revive the power of the Dark Lord Nebilim into his body. I don’t think it matters if you know what that means or not, it’s obviously not a chill thing to happen.

Abyssion is an absolute beast to fight in this state, and he scales to your level so being tougher than him isn’t possible. He has mastery of close and long range combat and abilities as well as spells. Including a whole bunch of yours. There are only a handful of skills he can’t access and on PS2 port he is even immune to the “All-Divide” item you would have wanted to use, and defaults to even more brutal high-damage skills. Clearly somebody thought that was too easy because in the PS3 port they also make him immune to all Unison Attacks after you cut down half his HP.

I’m pretty sure all that speaks for itself but in case you need me to say it again, you are most likely going to be at this one for a while.