10 Video Game Boss Fights That Broke The Rules
6. Saren - Mass Effect
The first Mass Effect offers up a neat negation of the typical late-game boss fight by giving players the option to effectively forego the battle - well, one stage of it, anyway - by just talking their way out of it.
Near the end of the game, players with sufficiently high levels of Charm can actually skip the initial throwdown with Saren, instead convincing him he's in the wrong, after which he pulls his gun and shoots himself in the face.
It's a supremely shocking moment for anyone expecting a conventional fight, and though Saren is indeed brought back as a Sovereign-reanimated husk-thing afterwards, the initial fight against Saren's ordinary form can be circumvented entirely. How's that for different?
More than anything else, it's a testament to just how much weight BioWare placed on your character development and the power of words in the first game. Shame it didn't carry through to the third game, though...