Summary
Soulslike is one of the most popular game genres out there, providing a significantly challenging experience for players to conquer, which is almost always driven by boss fights. Some games lay off the gas and ease players into the worldswith simpler fights, while others throw them straight in the deep end with a brutally difficult fight that guarantees more than a few deaths.
But sometimes, that difficulty and frustration can actually be a breaking point, forcing players to close and even uninstall the game with no desire to progress further. Whether it’s an impossible boss located near the end of the game, or one right at the start, there are plenty of bosses that have turned players away, some never to return again.
Father Gascoigne is the first main boss inBloodborneand also happens to be one of the hardest overall. Many players will have started their journey into Yharnam and struggled through the early stages, maybe even taking on the Cleric Beast along the way, but nothing prepares players more than the insane challenge that awaits across the bridge.
He’s fast, aggressive, and barely gives the player any windows to recover, with the second phase only making all those problems worse. On top of this, the blood vials are limited and don’t replenish automatically, so for new players who don’t have a healthy supply, they will be forced to go farming to have a chance against him. He is a major barrier in a game that is otherwisefull of flawless bosses, many of which will never be seen by some.
Steelrisingis a decent soulslike that does a lot of things right and experiments in other directions as well. One of the most decisive aspects of the game is how enemies move and attack in a more jolty and unpredictable manner that is very different from any other game in the genre. This is shown off right from the start with the Unstable Lancer, the first main boss, and arguably one of the most difficult.
Because players have just started out and they don’t have that many heals or levels, their overall power is pretty low. A high-health boss with very hard-to-learn patterns - it makes sense why so many players gave up so early. Once the movements are understood, the rest of the game is a complete breeze, but that initial hurdle is often too high to clear.
The Tree Sentinel is a very interesting boss, but not becauseit’s super hardor unique, but because of how players approach it in different ways. After finishing the tutorial area, it is the first enemy that players lay their eyes on, and despite having a huge open-world to explore right in front of them, many chose to charge head-on with no preparation over and over again.
Elden Ringdoesn’t give players any real direction, as the game expects that players will want to explore just with their own will to see the world, and at no point does the game force them to fight the Tree Sentinel. Yet, like a moth to a flame, so many players chose the painful route of fighting it early rather than returning later, resulting in more than a few broken controllers and choice words in their reviews.
Oggdo Bogdo is by no means a complicated or very in-depth boss fight. If anything, it is one of the simpler encounters that players can find inFallen Order, but its location in the game is what made so many players quit due to their frustration.
Players can find the fleshy beast in a cave very early into the playthrough, but regardless of the difficulty, the damage is always high, and the attacks always seem to land. He has very large hitboxes on all of his attacks, and with no extra ways of helping other than returning later, many players switched the game off and left it at that.
The Capra Demon is the perfect example of a gank fight gone wrong. In a game with iconic battles like Ornstein and Smough, it is a shame that many players will have never gotten that far, thanks to this annoying and claustrophobic encounter that serves more as a camera puzzle than an actual boss.
The boss arena is so small and laid out in a peculiar way that it gives players little breathing room to recover or even dodge. This, combined with the extra dogs staggering the player over and over, makes it easy to see why this boss was the deciding factor for whether players should continue or not.
Sekirois not exactly a walk in the park, and it is easily one of the hardest games in the genre. A lot of that difficulty comes down to the tight parry windows and aggressive attacks, but the Chained Ogre isfrustrating for many different reasonsand is positioned right at the start of the game.
For one, players were taught to parry and deflect the majority of the incoming attacks, but the Ogre has many that either cannot be parried or have tiny windows with no margin for error. On top of this, the area for the fight is right next to a cliff, which the boss has a habit of tossing players off of multiple times in a fight, ensuring maximum frustration and an end to many people’s playthroughs.
Dark Souls 2is one of the few games in the FromSoftware catalog that has a large amount of mixed perceptions surrounding it. Some love it, some despise it, but there is not a single human on the planet who can say that Lud and Zallen are a good boss fight, and many players will never have seen it despite having played through the entire game.
The fight itself is frustrating enough on its own, being a gank fight against two pretty tough foes, but the main reason that so many people will have erased the game from their memory, is the ludicrous run-back that sees players sprinting across an icy landscape for several minutes, with no way of seeing half the time, that is also covered in enemies that spawn out of nowhere and never give up.
There are plenty of bosses inElden Ringthat could be considered annoying or challenging, but there is alsoa long list of fightsthat are exceptionally enjoyable and high-quality. However, among all of them, there is no boss that has caused anywhere near as much bloodshed, pain, tears, and anger as Malenia.
All the way at the edge of the map, after nearly 100 hours of playing, players are greeted with a disgustingly brutal fight that almost always takes dozens, if not hundreds, of attempts to take down. Her presence in the game spawned several players whose sole goal was to help others defeat her, because with no guides and no one to explain her moveset, it is virtually impossible to figure out how to avoid certain moves and how to make it through the whole fight alive.
