10 Surprise Final Video Game Bosses That Came Out Of Nowhere
5. Yaldabaoth - Persona 5
Being one of the founders of modern JRPGs, it was inevitable that one of the true bosses from the Persona games would end up here. But Yaldabaoth lacks something that the previous two secret bosses - Nyx and Izanami - had that keeps them off this list: build up.
Both Nyx and Izanami were at least somewhat established before they officially appeared, with Nyx in Persona 3 having her own cult dedicated to her that you have to deal with throughout the story, and the player sitting through a lecture on the myth of Izanami in the middle of Persona 4.
Yaldabaoth, on the other hand, has none of this. You're told by Morgana that there's SOMETHING at the bottom of the seemingly endless maze of Mementos, the collective unconscious made manifest, but you're given no clues as to what that is.
Yaldabaoth, like the various Personas throughout the game, IS based on real world mythology and religion, referenced as an angel in the apocryphal Gospel of Judas, destined to come down to Earth to rule over chaos and the underworld. Nowhere else in the game is Christian text - let alone specifically gnostic Christian text like the Gospel of Judas - referenced.
That tends to be a cultural blindspot when you set your game in a country with an at most 2% Christian population.