In FFX, you fight this flying thing on the top of your ship, and you don’t have Yuna for the fight.

In replays, this wasn’t so tough, bit the first time I played this game, me and my friends were stuck for weeks.

For me it was Psycho mantis from Metal Gear Solid. The reason being that I didn’t understood English at the time, so it was literally an impossible boss. I got frustrated with it and abandoned the game, until I found a translated version of it and replayed it and he’s actually very easy if you know what you need to do.

Dunno if I ever beat Mike Tyson

Probably Monster Hunter World’s Fatalis. That’s the only fight I’ve ever had to genuinely grind for multiple days to beat. It was 100% worth it though, the feeling of bringing him down for the first time was unmatched.

Probably Malenia, but she’s beatable. Definitely had a tougher time learning her than Freide, Gael, Artorias, Manus, Fume Knight, or Ivory King etc.

Eggman on this sonic game I had on my Nintendo ds. Shit was fucked. I never won and am forever a loser because of it. One day imma emulate it and reclaim my honour.

God Of War 2 Theseus gave me way more trouble than Ares on Titan difficulty.

There might have been a mechanic I was missing but you had barely enough mana to cast all of the required spells to beat it, at least with the pickups I had found, like literally if I missed more than one lightning bolt I had to restart, and some of his spells would instantly kill you. I don’t recall the specifics of why it was giving me trouble beyond that but I do remember bashing my head against that wall for hours.

Never really had aa much trouble as that fight. Not in Souls, Bloodbourne, that fucking Theseus and his jerk friend minotaurs.

Messmer the impaler from Elden Ring SOTE.

I love this boss, it’s not bs, just pure skill… Shame I lack any of it. Still beat him eventually.

Ornstein and Smough from Dark Souls. The series have plenty of difficult boss fights but this one is earlier than most and the biggest difficulty spike in the entire game IMHO.

Outside of the Souls games, there’s Lil’ Hunter from Nuclear Throne. I tried to beat this little trashcan SO many times and succeeded only once. It’s insane.

Also shout-out to Hush from the Binding of Isaac for almost giving me a heart attack when I was fighting it as the tainted lost. Never again.

As a kid I beat the vampires in Illusion of Gaia as Will. Didn’t realize you could change.

Lies of P - nameless puppet. I choose the other ending on my first run, so my first time facing him was in ng+. Not sure if that made it harder, but yeah, that one was rough

In Chrono Cross, when entering Time Fortress Chronopolis, you immediately encounter the PolisPolice. This isn’t framed by the game as a boss encounter, but it is.

There is a design problem with this boss that you probably wouldn’t see in a more modern RPG. To survive its big attack, you need the White Plate to absorb white-based magic attacks. You get the White Plate by stealing it from the Sky Dragon. If you already fought the Sky Dragon and forgot to steal at the time, you are hosed. The game doesn’t let you go back and redo that, and the PolisPolice encounter is about 2/3rds of the way through the game–very late to be starting over again.

I replayed that encounter 20 times before I finally lucked out on the attack cycle to keep the party alive. Then I encountered the actual hardest boss: a disc scratch that prevented the game from continuing towards the very end.

Not the hardest over all, but the one that instilled the most fear:

The butcher

Still haven’t beaten Owl in Sekiro. Only Fromsoft game in the genre I haven’t finished because I can’t kill my fuckin’ dad. 😭