FAVORITE ENEMIES OR BOSSES?

Why do I love video games? Enemies. The enemies you fight are the meat of the game. I love to appreciate the intricacies of certain encounters, the ingenuous patterns enemies have and how they can so easily trip you up if you aren't on the ball. How you can take an otherwise uninteresting boss and make it a fight for your life with the right combination of attacking and defending. What are your favorites? But most importantly why? What makes them so much fun, that if you had to fight them again and again you wouldn't get tired of it?

This topic isn't specific to RPGs: Any genre of game is fair territory.


EARTHBOUND- Final Starman: Specifically I like a certain enemy combination that you fight at the end of the game: The eponymous Final Starman, a Nuclear Reactor Robot, and a Ghost of Starman. Combined they fall into the roles of a Mage, Healer, and Glass Cannon. If you've played the game you already know where I'm going, but for those who haven't it's one of them most devious enemy combinations that exist.

The Ghost of Starman always opens with a devastating magic attack that hits all allies and is almost guaranteed to kill three of your four, but the move has a 3-4 turn cooldown before it can fire again. The Final Starman can use this same move, but can use it whenever it wants, in addition to a fearsome array of other skills. Including reviving allies, casting a shield that reflects physical damage, and confusing your entire party. If that weren't enough, it has an additional shield that reflects magic already applied at the beginning of every encounter with one. The Reactor Robot further complicates matters by constantly healing it's allies to full health almost every round, and exploding when it is killed, heavily damaging your party.

Alone, these enemies wouldn't be too much of a threat. It's when they combine their forces that they become nothing short of overwhelming. But it's the Final Starman that provides the lynchpin to a surprisingly intricate fight. Even if you play your cards right and dispatch them as efficiently as possible, the battle can still take a toll on your party.

DRAGON WARRIOR III - Baramos: I think this guy is really underrated. The big thing is that when you fight him, you aren't ideally equipped to deal with him. A lot of the spells that would really be useful in the fight against him you don't learn until much later levels. Therefore when you first encounter him like I did, with as minimal grinding as you can get away with, it's really a shock to fight a boss who's that difficult.

I believe he has a fixed attack pattern, and a chance to attack twice per round. It's not significant in this fight because nothing is done with it save as a way to mix the moves up a bit. But I still find it kind of intriguing. It's possible to follow the pattern of moves he uses and predict what's coming next. But because he has a chance of attacking twice per round it can mix up that pattern and throw out another move you weren't expecting. He also regenerates HP every round instead of just having a lot of it. That's something I really wish people would do more often: it means you can't just sit on your thumbs for the whole battle and waste time healing people up.

This means that the fight is VERY close to the wire if you get to him as soon as you can. It's basically just a battle of attrition, kinda boring on a technical aspect. But the situation the fight presents is as tense as can be. I had a harder time with this guy than Zeromus in Final Fantasy IV: The first time I beat Baramos it felt like victory.

FINAL FANTASY IV - Behemoth: This is when I really started to appreciate counter-attacking in RPGs. When I first fought one of these guys, I thought that I simply wasn't fast enough, and assumed that it's speed was ridiculously high to allow it so many turns! It turned out he's programmed to counter physical attacks with a strong one of his own. I was under-leveled when I first got to this part of the game, so they were tough but memorable for me. It's a very simple enemy trait, but simplicity is not a bad thing.

MOTHER 3 - Mr. Passion/Sir Passion: Mother 3 brought a new mechanic to their battles. Comboing. You could perform combo attacks by pressing the button in unison with the beat of the battle music. So what must be an inevitable product of that? A ghostly boss that plays classical music! The battle music is made up of several famous compositions, and with varying tempos to boot. This means that you can actually screw up a combo attack because of shifts in the music.

It's not in place to make the battle more difficult. I think that it's there so that when you learn you can combo through these shifts in tempo, you'll feel on top of the world when you finally manage to do so. I also like this guy because of the varying attack descriptions prevalent throughout the Mother series. It really brings a new level of character to all the enemies in the game, and this guy is no exception. One of his attacks is to throw "everything but the kitchen sink!" and another is to "throw the kitchen sink!" Best of all, all the objects he can throw are visible in the room before you fight him.

SUPER MARIO BROS. - Hammer Bros: I just love these things. First, who came up with anthropomorphic turtles that throw hammers? "Someone awesome" is the answer. People remember these guys as one of the more difficult enemies in the game. They constantly throw their hammers in an arc. The constant throwing forms a barrier that breaks up the pacing of the level, in order to get past them you have to take your time and find an opening. Either waiting for them to hop to positions to safer positions on the block structures, or when there are no other routes to find that elusive pause when they stop throwing their hammers. But the arc pattern, in addition to their constant bobbing back and forth and hopping means that the hammers are also really tough to predict. Due to Mario's need to get momentum going before he starts running at a full tilt, it always feels like a gamble whenever you try and make a run for it. There's just enough predictability combined with an element of randomness. And then there's the one on the stairs. Screw that one.

SUPER GHOULS N' GHOSTS - Red Arremer: Dear lord. If you've not played this game you just can't understand. The Red Arremer is the most evil and sadistic enemy to ever appear in a video game. Not necessarily because of it's difficulty but because it taunts you by it's demeanor and methods of attacking. It will sit and wait for you to either approach it or attack, where it takes to the air and the fight for your life begins.

The Red Arremer has 5 actions it can perform.
-A swooping attack where it marks the player's position, and moves in a parabola arc.
-The above move twice in a row.
-Shoot a fireball that heads straight for your position.
-Summon imp minions and send them straight for you.
-Lands on the ground and begins dancing back and forth in an extremely asinine way. I see it as mocking the player's running animation. It will sometimes get a burst of speed and run right into you.

Combine all of that with an uncanny ability to dodge: It is almost regardless of how far away you are from it, it will deftly move out of the way of nearly all your shots. The only time you can hit it is if you anticipate the direction it will dodge and compensate by attacking slightly toward that spot, or hit it when it's swooping at you.

This would not necessarily be that hard in any other game. But in Ghouls n' Ghosts you are only able to take a single hit: The second one kills you. And you can only jump in a predetermined arc. The controls aren't the problem, its that the Red Arremer is the perfect counter to your control scheme. The parabola arc will nearly always hit you if you don't learn it's timing and jump at the right moment, in the right direction, at the right distance. Nevermind attacking the thing. The double-swoop...I still don't know how to avoid that one. At that point, the parabola basically turns into an angle: He can attack you almost anywhere, even in the air or on the ground. I am not exaggerating when I say that this one enemy is harder than any of the bosses in the game. Yet I love this guy. More than any enemy in the game, this one really makes you sweat. And when you beat it you know that whatever the game throws at you afterward is now a moot point. If you beat a Red Arremer you deserve a medal. I can respect an enemy who puts up a fierce opposition.

I'm sure there's another thread like this somewhere but whatever.

I really miss bosses that you just whack with your sword until they fall down. This seems like a really silly thing to miss, but Moldorm is one of the big reasons why. When I take a look at the bosses in Skyward Sword for instance, they don't ever feel like fights for me, rather they're just glorified puzzles or boring rinse-and-repeat routines: You never get to actually score a hit until you put the boss into some kind of stun lock. And the game makes sure you know it too. The freedom to not have to do that and just hit the bosses COMPLETELY VULNERABLE carcass really added a certain something for me.

Something that 2D Zeldas were able to do (and to an extent, Majora's Mask) very well was to emphasize movement and positioning rather than figuring out a boss' weaknesses. Moldorm in particular had a weird circular movement pattern that when first encountered it was very difficult to dodge. This made the fight feel like a fight, and added a bit of tension and uncertainty of victory. Sure, the bosses all have patterns in the newer games as well as the old ones, but in the old ones the movement wasn't straight toward your position as it often feels these days. At least with minibosses: I noticed the Stalfos never circled you like they did in the past. Z-Targeting is a bit overused too. I tried playing OOT without Z-Targeting, and managed to beat it without doing so once. Probably because it was intended to be a feature of combat rather than to base the entire system around the concept. But something tells me that if you tried to do the same with Wind Waker or any Zelda after that, it would probably render the game unplayable somehow.


@LockeZ: I read about that Lich King fight. It sounds like balls, but that's probably because it involves so many players, so I'm just not used to that sort of fast paced stuff. It does seem epic though: I like Phase 2 with the players getting picked up and dropped off the cliff.
Azulmagia is probably one of the neatest bosses ever. I would've mentioned him but I've never played the game.