The Nameless King is a worthy addition to this list but I think Midir from the Ringed City dlc was much harder. Nothing like Barney the purple dragon trying to ruin you're day after being kicked down a hole
NK was harder for me, but then again I fought Midir for the first time after already having 300 hours of playtime. I have no clue what Midir would have done to me if I tried to fight him as a total noob.
@@felixpadilla3215 Lol same. I go into a playthrough knowing I'm beating Nk sooner or later. Midir? I usually don't even bother trying. Beating that dragon once was kind of enough.
Interesting thing is that no hit runners think Midir is like mid tier boss by difficulty, because he is predictable. NK, Pointif, Cinder, even Grave tender are way harder because bigger variety of moves or having adds in the fight.
I also hope fighting Freya is going to be near impossible. She’s the Queen of the Valkyrie in mythology. If Sigrun was this strong, I hope she’s stronger.
The Demifiend fight from Digital Devil Saga could've totally made this list as well. Nothing quite like fighting the protagonist of another game who immediately murders you the moment you do something he's not too keen on :'D
And let's not forget that you need to pray that at least one character DOES fall asleep when they try to inflict the sleep status effect so they can dodge the incoming party wipe attack.
how the actual frick is swapping an item a 4th wall break. if you have a mechanic like stashing a sandwich in your pocket and a boss pickpocketing you a 4th wallbreak. it doesn't talk to you it doesn't break the immersion it inst saying oh hey gamer relying on healing items suck this. its a damn move towards the characters inventory not a comment about you the player mocking you for using healing items. i am sincerely concerned about what you think a 4th wallbreak is
@@zurzulzurzul3119 are you okay? Why does this "seriously concern" you? You need to go the fuck outside and get off the internet for a few days. That's closer to "seriously concerning"
A hard optional boss is the Demon of Hatred from Sekiro, his attacks deal a good amount of damage in addition he starts introducing new attacks for each deathblow marker lost during the fight.
I agree, but the only thing is that the Demon of Hatred isn't above all the other bosses by a big margin. Several other bosses are as tough or more so. But it was a three-stage slog.
I found him easier than the final boss, mainly because DoH has a much more relaxed pace to the overall fight. Much less about timing tricky deflections and instead more about just avoiding attacks with spacing and positioning, with occasional dodges. The Inner bosses are harder.
@@nicholasbrookes176 Yeah, that was tough too, even though I still found Demon of Hatred harder. But none, for me, are harder than the main final boss.
Here's one! In Monster Hunter World, there are technically two monsters that are completely optional. One is much harder than the other - that's Fatalis. Everything about him is scary. The first time you fight him, you get 5 lives. You need each one of them - since he moves really fast, attacks really fast, and each attack nails half your health bar. Some attacks are extremely fatal - a charged fireball instantly kills you. The alternative fire waterfall negates one of the strongest special tools - the Temporal Mantle (where you automatically evade from strong attacks, nullifying damage) - and kills you. To top it all off, Fatalis can also blow a fire cone at you that also bypasses the Temporal Mantle and can easily kill you. And when you drop his health to 50%, his fire gets stronger. Remember that cone attack from earlier? You could still dodge it by running away and constantly jumping, exploiting the Superman dive invulneeability to live with a sliver of health. Now, it instantly kills you. You can dodge once, then you get up and you instantly die. No counters, nothing.
Another really hard optional boss is Demi Fiend from Shin Megami Tensei: Digitial Devil Saga. He has so many ways and triggers to insta-wipe your party, including not liking how you set up your character abilities!
I always loved the idea that normal battle music (from Nocturne) plays during that fight because to him your party is no different from a random encounter.
Yeah if you were "clever" and you built your demons to be immune to basically all forms of damage, he just flips you the bird and insta kills you for having the audacity to try that cheap, cheesy stuff with him. In P5, you could solo the Twin Wardens with a setup like that on Joker easily. Against Demi Fiend, doing that is just a death speed run. You have to fight on his super unfair terms. Screw that douche.
I was going to suggest Lucifer from Nocturne but if you know what you're doing I assume it isn't too terrible... I unfortunately didn't know what i was doing and it took me almost 3 hours to beat. Next time i go for true demon I'm making sure i get Pierce
Another optional overpowered boss in a video game is, Night Terror from Soul Calibur 3, the requirements to fight him are hard enough (not loosing a single battle in Tales of Souls, then making correct choices to end up in the labyrinth and fight Olcadan) but the fight against him is even worse, because he can fly, has lasers, has the strongest moves from Nightmare and Abyss and cannot be defeated by a ring out because he has wings, so he'll fly back into the ring
He's not even fair man. If I recall correctly, losing to him means you have to go back to fighting Abyss for that run. He has an absolutely badass design though.
Calling sigrun brutal would have been an understatement of the decade! I had to drop it to easy fighting her & it still took me 3 tries! Seeing someone beat her in 14 seconds on hard made my jaw hit the floor!
Dark Eater Midir is literally named by the developers as the hardest boss is the souls born series, as much as nameless king is tough once you’ve beaten him once you don’t struggle replaying
@A. A. I haven't played dark souls on consoles so i don't know about the achievement. Midir is the black dragon that at first is seen flying around and firing as you pass, then you fight him at a bridge. After you defeat him there, he falls down a chasm. After that if you truly wish to fight him,you have to find him in a secret area. PS: it's in the Ringed city DLC.
How about Final Fantasy 9's Ozma. This optional boss is unique: he cheats. Ozma immediately takes an action after you select one for your party members. To bypass this, you have to select your party's actions while Ozma is performing his attacks, he can't take a new action while he is already performing one--- and hope you don't die because he hits hard.
Totally agree, there are plenty of ways to essentially cheese Ruby weapon but I'd have to say Ozma is the absolute hardest of the Final Fantasy optional superbosses as he's basically a cheating bas**rd who cheats like a motherfu**er. Not only does he do everything you said but when HE casts Meteor IT ALWAYS HITS, unlike when you try and cast it. Oh and let's not forget the one thing that REALLY cheesed off everyone who tried to kill him, he can heal himself back to full any time he damn well likes. If all of that isn't cheating his big round ass off I don't know what the heck is. Ruby was an absolute cakewalk in comparison.
@@scottguffie7759 The crazy part about Ozma is that out of all the super bosses in Final Fantasy like Ruby Weapon with 800k HP or Yiazmat's 50mil HP, Ozma only has 55k HP. In theory, you could defeat Ozma in 6 max damage hits- but that ain't happening.
An interesting strat I used back in the day was Vivi and Amarant with Return Magic equipped, and everyone either immune or absorbs shadow damage, so if Ozma casts Doomsday, I recast it twice back at him for free. It does nothing for meteor though, which is just a case of survive or not.
YES! I HATE this S.O.B. so much. I've NEVER beaten him. I leveled my party so much that the ending bosses were a complete joke and yet still got destroyed by Ozma. You honestly have to hope he doesn't use Curse or Meteor too often and that's the only hope you have of winning
Depending on how exactly we define "optional boss", I would also add Absolute Radiance from Hollow Knight onto the list (since you really don't need to beat it to finish the game)
How much of that difficulty is just getting to that fight? Fight three boss rushes with each of three different handicaps that also have a new boss at the end of each one, then you unlock the super duper extra long boss rush with a new boss at the end of that, before you're allowed to fight Absolute Radiance
@@octochan That's a good point, and yet the Absolute Radiance still manages to be an obscenely hard boss in its own right. I would say one of the hardest of recent games. Easily took me as much time to beat the first time as Isshin from Sekiro. The platforming section always gets me.
Absolute Radiance is very likely the hardest boss I have ever faced in a video-game. Add to it that you need to face a massive boss rush every time you fail, and I honestly don't think it's worth it. I always get this high when I finish a hard challenge in a game, but by the time I beat Abs Rad I just uninstalled Hollow Knight and haven't touched it since.
I swear to god, fighting the nameless king made me wanna gouge out my god damn soul. The amount of anxiety removed after killing him was insurmountable. Literal pain.
Can't forget Sephiroth from Kingdom Hearts 1. He has so much health that his health bar runs out of colors to show what stage your at, so just repeats purple several times.
Agreed. While we're at it. Let's add mysterious figure from kh bbs, to it. Holy smokes that fight... Couldn't beat him unless you use a specific I-frame build or cheese him another way. Even then it's not guaranteed.
@@loganrenfrow2544 absolutely lol. I don't envy any newcomer into the series that 'stumbles' upon that optional fight. Thank goodness it is optional lmaoooo
I just recently beat Sigrun on "Give Me God of War" difficulty (the hardest). It was a real pain in the butt and took about 200 tries to memorize all of her abilities, but I finally did it. I'm not sure if you would call it skill or repetition, and it wasn't very pretty, but I'll take the win. Bragging rights or not, I feel accomplished.
@@lunaproductions13 i dunno man. If skill built from repitition i'd be confident of beating the likes of sigrun and kos and nameless more than loosing but even though i've beaten all the soulsborne games bar demon souls because i haven't gotten to play it and DS2 because i got bored halfway through i'm still sure i'd lose 9 times out of 10 to these bosses.
I’m not boasting but it took me 3 tries to beat it on GMGOW mode… it was only difficult to time the axe throw to stun her when she is about to flash aoe attack. The rest is so easy to remember because of the animation. It is also depending on the runes * you equip on your armor. The best one is the rune that slows down time during attacks… there’s videos of no damages runs people do with using just the axe and NO runic attacks. I copied the load out and strat from them
I also like to add that I’m no expert in gaming. Only 2 games I ever platinum, gow4 and ghost of Tsushima Non expansion…. I am not skilled at video games whatsoever, and I was surprised how I managed to beat sigrun on a few tries…. I actually had a tougher time defeating the VR mission to get the gatterdamrung necklace in final fantasy 7 remake, behemoth would always kick my ass
I would honestly add Black Dragon Fatalis here from Monster Hunter World Iceborne. Fighting the prerequisite Alatreon was hard enough, but Fatalis is another level... Even if you went with fully defensive armor you're still getting wrecked, and the fight has a 30 minute timer. Being in coop could make it easier, but since faint counts are shared it could also mean game over much more quickly.
Both KH1 and KH2 had optional superbosses that made Sephiroth look easy. KH1 had Unknown(I think that’s what it called him) and KH2 had Lingering Will.
@@joeschmo3844 Those are only in the remixes/Japanese titles. The original North American versions only had Sephi and in KH1 he was ridiculous. I thought he was easy af in kh2 though, before the remix that is.
@@subjectdelta7210 That's true, but by that same token: "He's literally called Invincible but he literally isn't." It's a Borderlands game - it wouldn't be at all surprising for him to be called "Invincible" and then die to a single shot.
Voracidous is the boss I had the most struggles with, even as a Gunzerker. I just can't seem to get that fight down perfectly. But he's worth fighting to get the Interfacer, if it even drops for you..
My first thought was the Demi-fiend in Shin Megami Tensei Digital Devil Saga who might be the hardest boss in any JRPG ever. To illustrate that the game even plays the regular fight music of SMT3: Nocturne, the game the Demi-Fiend is the protagonist of, just to show you that to him you are nothing more than a regular random battle.
@@secretnamemcsecreton eh, defiled amygdala was really only hard because you had half health. and therefore couldn't get hit like, at all, then actually being hard in the regular sense.
@@bobrandomness1055 and Capra demon is only hard because you face him early in the game as opposed to later where he’s a normal enemy Either way; in their respective OPTIONAL areas, they are harder given the relative context. Also; defiled chalice amygdala has higher stats than any other amygdala iteration in the game.
A bit sad that the side boss of Sword Dancer and Abyssion from Tales of Symphonia werent on here. First intro to the Sword dancer is pretty early in the game and to truely defeat it you have to beat it two more times and each time its stronger. Abyssion is a locked behind a sidequest to locate all of the Devils Arms, cursed weapons that grow more powerful as they end lives.
This reminds me of the time on the PSP where the tutorial asks you "Hey you already know how to play?" and if you say yeah, you get to fight the final boss with your base-level character. The boss itself isn't optional, but that initial fight sure is. Never forget Duodecim.
I fondly remember Feral Chaos, and getting frustrated at his level 130 form when I first fought him. The music was great too, they really nailed his character and theme
Thanks for posting this!! I thought Duodecim was too much of a niche game but yeah that shit was very brutal. I once saw a video of someone beating him at that level and was very disappointed to see that nothing happens even though you just beat the final boss.
The King of the Storm is also supposed to be Ornstein from the first game too. And the Nameless King is the son that betrayed Gwen and got wiped from the history books.
@@plazinga that doesn't make much sense though. Ornstein was a dragonslayer, you find his normal body st the base of the arena even before triggering the fight, and he was killed again in DS2
@@DrBrangar You find his armor in an area where people are praying to become dragons. Ornstein succeeds which is why you find his armor. It’s theorized that the boss from DS2 is a different person, or Ornstein got resurrected somehow. The Old Dragonslayer uses a different type magic than Ornstein and when the Nameless King absorbs the King of the Storm he gets lightning powers, which is what Ornstein had in DS1, and also importantly not what dragons use, supporting the idea that King of the Storm was originally something other than a dragon. Ofc DS lore being the nightmare to untangle that it is, you can believe whatever you want, no one is forcing you to think anything.
To add and clarify, I don’t believe you find a body with the Ornstein set, just the armor. Also, purely based on speculation, if we assume the Nameless King is the son of Gwen, as is accepted lore, it makes some sense if a defeated a Ornstein who found out Anor Londo was an illusion, would seek out the remaining child of Gwen, with whom he fought with in the war against the dragons, to find purpose.
I don't think anyone who faced Culex from Super Mario RPG ever forgets that battle. Rarely (if ever) is anyone ready for it the first time they go through the door in Monstro Town, and even if you ARE leveled, it's one hell of a battle.
Or you can just cheese him by equipping the Lazy Shell armor on Peach, wait for both Culex and his crystals to run out of mana, resurrect your party members and hand him his poor, defenseless ass.
I remember fighting some Dullahan Superboss in GoldenSun the lost Age. That fight took some serious time, since the Boss can use your own Djinns and Summons against you.
Dullahan in Golden Sun: The Lost Age was absolutely tough as nails and needed you to have collected all the Djinn in both the first and second game! Great optional boss with the best summon of the game as a reward.
Oh now that takes me back. I spent the time to do that and i needed a guide for the damn thing. It us the only boss where hard mode doesn’t get the full multiplier due to his stats maxing out.
Shin Megami Tensei 3:Nocturne has many difficult bonus bosses, but the ones I find most frustrating is the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, that if you unlock around the level it's supposed to be in story the save point in a town you are most likely in becomes blocked by the first one (Pale Rider) in a game where the save points are fast travel locations. He will also travel to whichever save point you're at. Bonus bosses are harder in that game but few are as abjectly annoying.
Midir varies depending on your build, I think. He didn't feel exceptionally tough the first time I fought him. He was impossible on my second playthrough.
@@crows2808 Given the number of times I've been summoned for Midir and watched the host get smushed in the first third of his health bar despite my best efforts, I'm gonna say that your first build was exceptionally well suited to that fight. Even my better builds have been a serious challenge until I fully grasped his (very long) combos. So on average, I'd still argue that Midir is the hardest optional boss in DS3.
@@Paledem Most ultra weapons do extremely well against midir as long as you keep yourself infront of him due to the huge downtime between attacks, granted they aren't the easiest to avoid but it's very manageable. Trying to kill him other than by going for the head is not possible while having fun
Funnily enough, I remember the first time I beat Sigrun on give me a challenge, I told myself I couldn't do it on the hardest difficulty. While I was falling into the flow of playing again on give me god of war. I ended up doing the fight with no sound because I was at work, I never felt so accomplished beating Sigrun on the hardest difficulty while simultaneously fixing someone's internet. Context: I worked for Comcast as a support tech at home, which is why I couldn't have the volume up.
YOU HAD TIME TO PLAY GAMES? Man what the fuck. I worked support for one of the major video game/console developers and they pretty much designed the process to make sure there's never a second where you could be doing anything except dealing with the call. Was even worse on live chat, because you weren't just working one, you were expected to be doing 2-3 at a time.
@@ledumpsterfire6474Not necessarily, I kind of pulled a pseudo multi-task move, where I had two extra monitors, one for my system, one for the laptop, and the laptop itself. Idk what system you guys used, but we had ITGs, which was sometimes a fix-all. Other times I had to pause and actually get more indepth if the issue was more taxing. That day I was dealing with a talker, so I just let them ramble.
@@k2tme451 We used a custom build of some Oracle database software. Every single issue had a separate entry called a KA (Knowledge Article), many of those issues having lots of overlapping symptoms and fixes, and you had to manually attach each one you used to the contact file. Each one also had checklists for symptoms and checklists for troubleshooting, and you had to follow them all in order. If you failed to do any of that, you'd get marks off on the contact. The micromanagement was absurd.
Not gonna lie, that fight didn't seem hard for me. Only took about 3-4 tries. Granted I had upgraded most of the valkyrie armour I had, plus some mist armour ( the name eludes me ). But still wasn't that hard, had a more difficult time with the fire valkyrie.
Any Velvet Room attendant from Persona 3 onwards. They take two actions a turn, which means debuffs last half as long, and typically their attacks are the strongest forms of each kind of magic, which can then incapacitate an ally weak to them, which then give them EVEN MORE attacks. What's more, they can resist any element and change resistances mid battle. And of course there is their one-hit kill if you take too long or don't deal enough damage consistently. What's more, in Persona 3 they basically have to be finished with Armageddon, a fusion spell. And they can self-heal back to full hp, which is just great. Most of note, however, are Elizabeth and Theodore from Persona 3 Portable who you have to fight one on one. If you have healing spells and they charm you- Well, that's more painful than any attack they can dish out. However, it is worth saying that Margaret, Caroline and Justine or Lavenza are no slouches either. Bring your A-Game for any of them
Any "hardest optional boss fight" list that doesn't include Elizabeth from P3 is just flat-out wrong. That fight (At least in the original and FES I haven't played P3P) is just one step short of impossible.
I honestly don't find Midir much harder either. I think I'd place him above Nameless since he can punish the player if they misjudge positioning, but that's kinda it. Otherwise he's boils down to a fight against Amygdala who misses most of the attacks because the player can just walk backwards. Gael and Friede are much tougher, since their attacks cannot be dismissed as easily, and they do require positioning along with careful dodge timing. Nameless' attacks are just too easy to read, making him feel similar to Artorias from DS1.
@@Arexion5293 I couldn´t defeat Midir so i gave up. Had no problems with NK though. The King of Storm phase sucks because of camera issues which From still haven´t solved - BB is the worst at that imho. NK is pretty good tells what attack he does same as Gael who is harder than NK imo. Sister Friede is also more of a nightmare than NK, (Well currently in my second DS 3 playthrough which is going much smoother so maybe this time Midir is going to die).
Gna and Hrolf aint got shii on Sigrun. Seriously only took me 10+ tries in 1/2 hour to beat them both while Sigrun cost me minutes, hours, days, arms, legs and 3 controllers
In Legend of Dragoon, there's an insanely hard boss wizard named Faust on Disc 4 that you can only get by gathering all the Stardust throughout the entire game. It's a bear to get to him, and an even worse time to fight him.
Kingdom Hearts 2 is filled with optional super bosses, but Lingering Will is probably the hardest because you need to figure out what attacks are better to dodge or deflect, and he's a very fast character so you've got to be as fast as he is. Although Sephiroth from KH1 is probably the hardest boss in the series
I don't know how many attempts it took me to finally beat KH1 Sephiroth, but my PS2 came perilously close to death by blunt force trauma with a wall ( I did kill the square and cross buttons on the DS2 controller, though ). When I finally did it, the successful attempt lasted at least 20 minutes.
In my opinion, Sephiroth was only hard because he had that move that could OHKO you. Barring the possibility of just losing in one, I never found that fight too hard. It's just a matter of being good at the combat. I think the clock tower phantom is MUCH harder, because you have the constantly ticking time bomb of Doom taking out you and your party one by one, plus you have to manage your magic super carefully because the fight relies on it so heavily, PLUS you need to keep track of his current element to know what you can even hit him with. There's much more to master there than just "don't get hit with Seph's OHKO".
I know it's been said but Sigrun truly is a challenge, even on regular difficulty. You can memorise her attacks but one of them is really fast so you better have quick reactions.
You basically have to perfect that fight, because one little slip up is game over. Still, I wish the other boss fights in the game were near that difficult.
I’m not that good at video games and I honestly didn’t think she was that hard. She just uses all the other Valkyrie’s moves combined and by that time, because you’ve defeated them you know how to counter her moves.
@@chrisoliver3642 really? I didn't have much trouble with him once I started taking it his secret service members first while maintaining a bled affect on the boss himself
Dullahan from Golden Sun: The Lost Age. Absolute Nails on his own and also has quite the challenge required to even access the boss dungeon. Needing to collect all the Djinn companions across both games is no easy feat in and of itself.
I enjoyed both Emil fights in Nier automata. I always love it when you get character development and storyline in a fight, and the Emil clone fight gave me just that. Also, you're gonna have to lose to that fight at least once, if you want all the endings...
The 9th and final Death Rite bird from elden ring is an honorable mention for me, took me longer than any other boss in the game it’s finishers are absolutely devastating and very hard to predict
The satisfaction of beating the KoS & Nameless King was immense: the countless attempts, followed by the montage of me researching help guides and youtube vids, dying, tweaking gear, dying, researching, dying. Until the moment were halfway down his health-bar I realised I was actually going to win - and did. Though in DS, you can never fully escape the true boss: the camera...
I really love that optional boss. But I must admit the young Jo Amon that Majima faces is not even the hardest of the Yakuza series, let alone games in general.
Kind of surprised Final Fantasy XII's Yiazmat wasn't mentioned at some point. He's s probably more grindy, but still,, a boss that takes no less that six hours to fight because he has that much health is just difficult on general principle.
@@bryangibbs7191 Maybe in the Revenant Wings version. I do remember my fight with Behemoth in the original took me around thirty or so minutes, and he had, IIRC, over a million HP. Yiazmat was stated to have like 16Mil HP and a really bad habit of regeneratig health whenever you stepped out of battle with him. Plus he'd double all of his stats once he lost half of his health.
How about a mention of the Ebony Warrior, a secret Skyrim boss so tough he doesn’t even show up in game until you are level 81, which was the games original max level if you got all of your skills to 100.
I'd rather face Karstaag again. The Ebony Warrior took on myself using dragon aspect, my dragon, two summoned Daedra, Karstaag, my ancient dragonborn, my spectral dragon priest, and Serana, and still beat the stuffing out of all of us!
I do believe you forgot about Culex from Super Mario RPG. Not only is he significantly harder than the actual final boss of the game, but the game makes you go out of your way to get the item required to even access the boss fight just to add insult to injury.
The final summon in Golden sun 2. You don't actually need it to finish the game, but if you do try and get it you'll find him WAY harder than the final boss.
Yes! That fight gave me fits as a kid. I finally hit upon a strategy on GameFAQs that required (1) a very specific djinn setup to (2) execute a series of very specific actions (most being high-powered summons as I recall) that sacrificed most of your party to unleash massive damage. I was so fucking happy when the bastard went down. Good times...
Lingering Will from Kingdom Hearts 2. The only way I know of to actually win that fight is by reducing your combos to only do finishers, then use repeated jump attacks to stun lock him until he dies, even at endgame max level with literally all of the best items, spells, etc unlocked.
I feel honoured they mentioned the Storm Fortress. When I first played AC: Rogue I kept retraining at least a dozen times to destroy that beast. I still find the twin Man 'o War from Black Flag harder, though
Storm Fortress is a kinda easy, as long as you can guess the only weapon that is the most likely to be used on the Storm Fortress and you have everything upgraded.
Sephiroth wasn't as bad as Lingering Will, but at least Lingering Will had an easy way to beat him if you were willing to swallow your pride. The Mysterious Figure from Birth By Sleep for me has always been the hardest boss, not counting the Data Bosses that are designed to screw you over.
Fyi for everyone saying dark eater he didn’t get add to dark souls 3 till way after release so he’s not In base game and you would have to buy ringed city to even fight him, so nameless would be the hardest BASE game boss
The reaper from the persona games, especially 3, was already hard enough with AI party members. Then they made the velvet attendant boss fights with a 9999 damage move to your entire party that is unblockable. Need I say more?
@@iangamez496 nah, Lavenza was easier. She didnt have the stupid restrictions that Elizabeth did. Sure lavenza was mostly luck based but she wasnt hard
The most emotional moment of Final Fantasy VII was when my first disk was scratched so I couldnt get to the second disk and my friend said to me, "So you haven't gotten to the part where Sephiroth kills Aerith?"
Oof. Your friend truly missed the "think before you speak" lesson we're usually taught growing up, lol! I'm sorry it was spoiled for you. I waited so long before playing that time had spoiled it for me (though in my defense, the game came out when I was 8. In 1997, my siblings and I were still jamming it up on the SNES, of which would be our main game console up into the early 2000's. And when we finally did get a PS1, Crash Bandicoot and Gran Turismo stole our attention. Back then, I thought the Final Fantasy games were all connected and so I wasn't keen on playing six other games just to get to this 7th one I'd been hearing whispers about 😂. I know now that's incorrect and thank goodness for that!)
@@BewareTheLilyOfTheValley Yeah there are common elements (big ridable birds called chocobos, there's generally someone named Cid, the spells are usually the same), but the stories and settings are different.
I spent my first playthrough waiting for a scene where Aerith walks in with a (admittedly quite large) bandage and everyone says “Aerith….we thought you were dead!” And then she says “I was!” and then we hear a convoluted and improbable reason why she survived. I still remember staring at a blank screen for too long until it dawned on me the game was really over and she was really dead…..bit of a bummer.
In Golden Sun, only by selecting specific rowers and putting them in specific seats can you reach the hidden Crossbone Isle with a boss so strong it's better to just keep playing, grind some later enemies, then come back.
While I'm not surprised he isn't on this list, I would still like to take this time to mention Nightmare King Grimm from Hollow Knight. A literal god of nightmares whose every speedy attack does double damage to you. It took days for me to beat him. And don't even get me started on Radiant Nightmare King Grimm. Edit: After reading some of the replies made by fellow watchers, I would like to edit my thoughts while keeping the original up. I would say Absolute Radiance is a better example of a boss that should only be attempted by experienced Hollow Knight player since reaching her entails defeating every single boss in the game, optional and required, one after the other back to back with the three before her being The Failed Champion, The Nightmare King, and The Pure Vessel who are all double damage bosses. Only after defeating all of the bosses in the game do you get a shot at the Absolute Radiance, and if you die to her you need to start the whole thing all over again just to get to her. Oh, and she's a double damage boss as well. Because why not, right?
To absolute hell with NKG, AbzRad and GPZ. Slamming my head against the wall would be less painfull. If you are reading this and dont understand, consider yourself lucky
I think the only one worse is the Absolute Radience. Since, you know, you have to get through the entire pantheon of Hallownest first to even fight her.
Mysterious Figure from Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep. Haven't fought him myself, just heard the nightmarish stories. Apparently, none of the devs even beat him before the game was released, great boss design there guys
oh my fucking god you made me remember the nightmares i had trying to defeat that thing.....the thing is you have to defeat the mysterious figure three times....ONE FOR EACH CHARACTER...ventus and aqua were fine but terras attacks were so slow that you had to pull your teeth to hope to damage the guy...but goddamn...the dopamin rush was insane afterwards....so thanks for the short ptsd episode
Fun fact: Mysterious Figure is the only boss in the series that had to be nerfed for re-releases. His collision magnet attack was originally inescapable and was basically a death sentence.
Got to give some love to ‘Inner Isshin’, the supercharged version of Sekiro’s already hard-as-nails final boss, who is unlocked by completing one of the boss rush modes. See also: Inner Genichiro and Inner Father
Faust from Legend of Dragoon. Come across him before you have collected every spec of stardust in the game and he is literally invincible. Even after getting the item for collecting all the stardust he is still capable of one shotting your entire team unless you are a very high level or bought the super expensive armor that halves all magic damage.
Okay, just thought of a REALLY good addition to this list... Nightmare King Grimm, from Hollow Knight. You can avoid the fight and still complete the quest line by siding with Brumm, and beating him seems almost impossible. The final boss of the game, comparatively, is bloody easy.
Why not Pure Vessel, Absolute Radiance, Radiant Absolute Radiance, Radiant Markoth? Those are why harder in my opinion (i think NKG and PV kinda easy, but very fun to fight against)
@@WarlordofWarren Haven't even gotten to Absolute Radiance yet but I 100% agree. I decided to just not fight NKG to save myself the pain, I spent way too long struggling on TMG
Finally some of these ridiculously hard optional things that I actually did! The Valkyrie was soooo hard in God of War. I also fully completed all optional everythings in FF7 (my favourite game of all time). Go me! I almost never do super hard optional things in games but I adored these games and really wanted to fully complete them.
@@oviswatts1982 Are you talking about FF7? I remember being almost fully wiped multiple times during those boss fights. Depends what level you are when you do them, though. The first time I finished FF7 I was only level 77 (how I still remember that, I don't know...) and it took me hours for the final boss fight. Had to be 3 hours at least, almost used up all my health potions... so I'm sure the first time I tried the optional bosses I was probably not at the level I should have been haha.
@@aliceallgrown for the original ff7 game, when taking on ruby it easier to kill of2 of the team and just go in with the member you like the most. Man brins back memories of playing ff7 over the summer holiday, sure hope the remake does the rest of the game justice
How about the countless optional bosses in Kingdom Hearts? Specifically *Sephiroth* himself in Olympus Coliseum in the original game!? That guy is brutal, yall
Ozma from Final Fantasy 9 deserves a spot on this list. It's arguably the hardest optional boss in the entire franchise. Ozma is also insanely hard to find/get to requiring the golden chocobo, special peppers and actually finding the unmarked flying island it lives on.
I actually solod Ozma with Freya the first time I fought it back when 9 was new, had no idea what I was doing and didn't finish the side quest. I just had shadow absorb and status protection on freya and she just rolled over him while everyone else took a dirt nap. Yiazmat is a jerk though.
Also don’t forget about that boss fight in the post game of Astral Chain. I haven’t fought her but judging from the videos on youtube it seems like a nightmare
How about the Dullahan from Golden Sun: The Lost Age. His stat total is the highest in the series and his moves are crazy. He can put all your Djinn on standby with Djinn Storm, he can use one of the strongest Djinn summons against you, and has an essentially one shot kill move in Formina Sage. Oh and he goes 3 times per turn.
Yiazmat from ff12 will always be my fav optional boss also sephiroth in Kingdom hearts 2 is insane he has a skill that always takes your hp to 1 no matter how much you have
my 9 year old is an absolute god at shooters like fortnite and COD, his reaction speeds and vision are literally god-like. He's never been a fan of campaign based games, he says there's no real challenge in A.I based enemies, when you're stuck in lobbies where people try to ping kill you (that's actually a thing). So I gave him god of war to play and told him he can't play cod until he completes 100% of the game. It was really thrilling to see 1st person shooter reflexes being used in god of war. His parries and dodges were near perfection and he zipped through the game in about half a day......with never ever having played the game before....we should all be ashamed of ourselves.
@@41stside51 i love these bosses, nameless is like "fight me bro, do you even thunder" and mydir finally look like a boss fight with an extremely angry dragon.
Ruby and Emerald Weapon have bonafide strategies that anybody can follow these days to kill them, and are therefore no longer super-hard, but simply hard bosses. Emerald Weapon, you approach with low materia and Mimic for very powerful Limit Breaks with some curative items until it's dead. Ruby Weapon, meanwhile, was discovered to be vulnerable to being frozen or stopped, not to mention the trick of appearing with two dead companions that you revive once it can no longer use Quicksand. In short, the use of Hades, Contain materia, and Time materia to deliver the status of Stop while you otherwise end its existence is utterly viable.
Or you do what I did and morph the enemies in the sunken submarine into permanent stat up items and fight them with Cloud with 255 in all stats. I was even able to simply soak the counter attacks from the ruby weapon for using knights of the round on it.
I'd like to present... the literal entity of Death, from Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen. Although just about everything you face in the Bitterblack Isle is basically an optional bossfight, Death is definitely the hardest of the lot. It can oneshot you and your pawn companions, and on top of that, has an aoe sleep ability that, paired with its teleportation, lets it catch your party more easily. Although it only has one scripted appearance, after that, it has a chance to randomly show up at any point, even in the middle of a fight, in areas it's able to spawn in if there's dead enemies lying around, which attract it and other Necrophagous beasts.
@@tyrusdalet In my hundreds upon hundreds of hours in the game I think I've only ever really played Assassin just up until I finish ranking them up to max. Just never really liked the playstyle, especially knowing how cheesey it can get lol. Seen too many Daimon fights where the guy just pops 4x Conquerors or Taligus and spams gouge
oh God that guy was THE most frustrating optional boss,always appearing when you least wanted him to and in the worst areas except where you can light multiple brazier and damage him with conquers periapts and a few skilled moves plus evading
There's Yiazmat in Final Fantasy XII, which is the last of the elite marks, if you decide to do the hunts. He has ~50 million HP, and takes an hour to beat, provided you know what you're doing.
I know not a single fight to go out and do, but the judge magistrates on trial floor 100 I have heard is also just horrible to beat. I have yet to try that or Yiazmat but the day I do sounds like pain
@@kyledavidson6635 I love that the judge magistrates know that you're using Reverse and throw elixirs at you to OHKO you. That's some next level cheek on top of already being super tough to take out.
Isn't there a boss in Final Fantasy that's supposed to be literally unbeatable, and the devs kept altering him every time someone works out a strategy to do it?
No mention of FF8's weapons? Ultima weapon is the very definition of OP, able to one hit any hero in the party or just reduce the HP of the entire party to 1...
If you want hard optional bosses, I have not struggled on any boss more than Nightmare King Grimm from Hollow Knight. Actually unlocking the fight is a pain, and the reward for beating him, sucks!
Have you tried Absolute Radiance yet? Ya know, the harder version of the ‘final boss’ who can only be unlocked after pantheon five, a 46 boss gauntlet? It’s much harder than NKG
@@Sedwards3795 Really! That's cool because i found NKG way harder than Absolute Radiance, that just goes to show that different people have different experiences. Also I'm m not saying I didn't find Absolute Radiance hard, just NKG harder.
I remember when my friend fought Ruby Weapon. He had some insane stock of Mime materia so any thing he cast had a chance of being recast over and over. When he summoned Knights of the Round we went into the other room and made sandwiches, and when we got back, it was STILL going, and Ruby Weapon didn't drop!
Ruby weapon has resistance to that summon in particular. You need to eat a stack of magic plus sources and equip a pile of magic plus materia. And then you get the reward: a gold chocobo you already got in order to get knight of the round.
Rodin was such cool boss battle that he gives you the weapon named Angel weapon Rodin (rodaan) his own name!! and those weapons has a discription someting like " Rodan ones used this wepon to gain a dominion over certain portion of heaven and that is why he was banished from heaven. Thise weapon are basically angelic halo and can transform into any kind of angelic weapon that bayonetta has defeated in the game or yet to defeat. They were the coolest weapon i have ever seen. (Bayonetta 1) was the game ahead of its time. Loves that game.
The dragons in Pillars of Eternity. I took a look at them and decided I'm better off staying on good terms with them, no matter how many achievements they're worth.
The Nameless King is a worthy addition to this list but I think Midir from the Ringed City dlc was much harder. Nothing like Barney the purple dragon trying to ruin you're day after being kicked down a hole
NK was harder for me, but then again I fought Midir for the first time after already having 300 hours of playtime. I have no clue what Midir would have done to me if I tried to fight him as a total noob.
I agree, I kill Nameless King every playthrough. He’s hard but not impossible. I’ve only beat Midir TWICE and I’ve replayed DS3 over 10 times
@@felixpadilla3215 Lol same. I go into a playthrough knowing I'm beating Nk sooner or later. Midir? I usually don't even bother trying. Beating that dragon once was kind of enough.
@@LoganHallard well you’re all doing it wrong…. How can you beat the king of the dragons without beating all the dragons first?
Interesting thing is that no hit runners think Midir is like mid tier boss by difficulty, because he is predictable.
NK, Pointif, Cinder, even Grave tender are way harder because bigger variety of moves or having adds in the fight.
I also hope fighting Freya is going to be near impossible. She’s the Queen of the Valkyrie in mythology. If Sigrun was this strong, I hope she’s stronger.
She is…. I had to ask a friend to help me out… can you believe this!
Nvm I thought you were talking about Dark Souls XD
I get the feeling she will be like Baldur but not as good
Freya will be a Story boss, so it’ll probably be designed for casual players.
Or maybe there Will be a HUGE gap between the difficulty levels.
She is unbeatable if you aren't geared properly and still nearly unbeatable with gear
The Demifiend fight from Digital Devil Saga could've totally made this list as well. Nothing quite like fighting the protagonist of another game who immediately murders you the moment you do something he's not too keen on :'D
Any SMT secret final boss 🤣😭😭😭
And let's not forget that you need to pray that at least one character DOES fall asleep when they try to inflict the sleep status effect so they can dodge the incoming party wipe attack.
17:22 replacing your healing items with huge debuffs is a really creative 4th wall breaking attack
Now you say it that way it is kinda cool!
how the actual frick is swapping an item a 4th wall break. if you have a mechanic like stashing a sandwich in your pocket and a boss pickpocketing you a 4th wallbreak. it doesn't talk to you it doesn't break the immersion it inst saying oh hey gamer relying on healing items suck this. its a damn move towards the characters inventory not a comment about you the player mocking you for using healing items. i am sincerely concerned about what you think a 4th wallbreak is
@@zurzulzurzul3119 are you okay? Why does this "seriously concern" you? You need to go the fuck outside and get off the internet for a few days. That's closer to "seriously concerning"
And in judgement Shin steals your phone
A hard optional boss is the Demon of Hatred from Sekiro, his attacks deal a good amount of damage in addition he starts introducing new attacks for each deathblow marker lost during the fight.
@@Wh1ffGod you should really try learning the fight, it’s a good one
I agree, but the only thing is that the Demon of Hatred isn't above all the other bosses by a big margin. Several other bosses are as tough or more so.
But it was a three-stage slog.
I found him easier than the final boss, mainly because DoH has a much more relaxed pace to the overall fight. Much less about timing tricky deflections and instead more about just avoiding attacks with spacing and positioning, with occasional dodges. The Inner bosses are harder.
Also the Hidden Owl fight. My gosh that killed me.
@@nicholasbrookes176 Yeah, that was tough too, even though I still found Demon of Hatred harder. But none, for me, are harder than the main final boss.
Here's one!
In Monster Hunter World, there are technically two monsters that are completely optional. One is much harder than the other - that's Fatalis.
Everything about him is scary. The first time you fight him, you get 5 lives. You need each one of them - since he moves really fast, attacks really fast, and each attack nails half your health bar. Some attacks are extremely fatal - a charged fireball instantly kills you. The alternative fire waterfall negates one of the strongest special tools - the Temporal Mantle (where you automatically evade from strong attacks, nullifying damage) - and kills you. To top it all off, Fatalis can also blow a fire cone at you that also bypasses the Temporal Mantle and can easily kill you.
And when you drop his health to 50%, his fire gets stronger. Remember that cone attack from earlier? You could still dodge it by running away and constantly jumping, exploiting the Superman dive invulneeability to live with a sliver of health. Now, it instantly kills you. You can dodge once, then you get up and you instantly die. No counters, nothing.
I know im mega late but cant you use the gate at the back of the arena?
@@ferrisdayoff2368 once. It completely disintegrates after use.
Not World, but I was thinking Shah Dalamadur from 4U or any White Fatalis appearance
Another really hard optional boss is Demi Fiend from Shin Megami Tensei: Digitial Devil Saga. He has so many ways and triggers to insta-wipe your party, including not liking how you set up your character abilities!
theres a game i havent finished from a long time ago
I always loved the idea that normal battle music (from Nocturne) plays during that fight because to him your party is no different from a random encounter.
That's a nightmare fight!
Yeah if you were "clever" and you built your demons to be immune to basically all forms of damage, he just flips you the bird and insta kills you for having the audacity to try that cheap, cheesy stuff with him. In P5, you could solo the Twin Wardens with a setup like that on Joker easily. Against Demi Fiend, doing that is just a death speed run. You have to fight on his super unfair terms. Screw that douche.
I was going to suggest Lucifer from Nocturne but if you know what you're doing I assume it isn't too terrible... I unfortunately didn't know what i was doing and it took me almost 3 hours to beat. Next time i go for true demon I'm making sure i get Pierce
Another optional overpowered boss in a video game is, Night Terror from Soul Calibur 3, the requirements to fight him are hard enough (not loosing a single battle in Tales of Souls, then making correct choices to end up in the labyrinth and fight Olcadan) but the fight against him is even worse, because he can fly, has lasers, has the strongest moves from Nightmare and Abyss and cannot be defeated by a ring out because he has wings, so he'll fly back into the ring
Man fuck Night Terror. That boss was so goddam broken and stupid.
He's not even fair man. If I recall correctly, losing to him means you have to go back to fighting Abyss for that run. He has an absolutely badass design though.
We do NOT talk about Night Terror *shudders*
Calling sigrun brutal would have been an understatement of the decade! I had to drop it to easy fighting her & it still took me 3 tries! Seeing someone beat her in 14 seconds on hard made my jaw hit the floor!
bruh, I have beaten her on gmgow +. Made it after like 4 hours of trying. I have video on my channel
I did that too
Truthfully, I find it weird people have trouble killining sigrun, I did it after my 2nd attempt on ng+ hard barehanded, not too difficult
@@brandonparsons3910 ok dont stroke yourself too much on the internet here!
@@brandonparsons3910 are you on pc?
Dark Eater Midir is literally named by the developers as the hardest boss is the souls born series, as much as nameless king is tough once you’ve beaten him once you don’t struggle replaying
I’d say orphan is the hardest boss, they’re the one I struggled with the mosf.
@@hahahahahaha1946 Orphan is not optional, Laurence is the optional boss from bloodbourne and for me it was harder then Orphan.
@A. A. I haven't played dark souls on consoles so i don't know about the achievement. Midir is the black dragon that at first is seen flying around and firing as you pass, then you fight him at a bridge. After you defeat him there, he falls down a chasm. After that if you truly wish to fight him,you have to find him in a secret area.
PS: it's in the Ringed city DLC.
@A. A. its in the ringed city dlc so i guess not. You should get the dlc its excellent
@@ShillienKnight90 If you dont play the dlc it is technically optional.
I would have never considered the rings were giving Sonic the ability to perform the Dark Arts, thanks Jane
It’s Chaos Magic not Dark Magic
It's all egbert's fault
And robotnis
@@Kpimpmaster sounds spicier
Meaning Sonic and the Seven Rings and his darkspine form?
Maz Koshia testing you to hell prepare you for Ganon is kinda hilarious when he could solo Ganon in the time Link needs to cook him a thank you steak
How about Final Fantasy 9's Ozma. This optional boss is unique: he cheats. Ozma immediately takes an action after you select one for your party members. To bypass this, you have to select your party's actions while Ozma is performing his attacks, he can't take a new action while he is already performing one--- and hope you don't die because he hits hard.
Totally agree, there are plenty of ways to essentially cheese Ruby weapon but I'd have to say Ozma is the absolute hardest of the Final Fantasy optional superbosses as he's basically a cheating bas**rd who cheats like a motherfu**er. Not only does he do everything you said but when HE casts Meteor IT ALWAYS HITS, unlike when you try and cast it. Oh and let's not forget the one thing that REALLY cheesed off everyone who tried to kill him, he can heal himself back to full any time he damn well likes. If all of that isn't cheating his big round ass off I don't know what the heck is. Ruby was an absolute cakewalk in comparison.
@@scottguffie7759 The crazy part about Ozma is that out of all the super bosses in Final Fantasy like Ruby Weapon with 800k HP or Yiazmat's 50mil HP, Ozma only has 55k HP. In theory, you could defeat Ozma in 6 max damage hits- but that ain't happening.
An interesting strat I used back in the day was Vivi and Amarant with Return Magic equipped, and everyone either immune or absorbs shadow damage, so if Ozma casts Doomsday, I recast it twice back at him for free. It does nothing for meteor though, which is just a case of survive or not.
Hahaha you had me at cheat 🤣🤣🤣🤣😁😁. But yes, that boss can go and make some others bosss life a living Hell hehe.
YES! I HATE this S.O.B. so much. I've NEVER beaten him. I leveled my party so much that the ending bosses were a complete joke and yet still got destroyed by Ozma. You honestly have to hope he doesn't use Curse or Meteor too often and that's the only hope you have of winning
Defeating the Valkyrie queen on the absolute hardest difficulty is one of my biggest gaming achievements
I beat her on easy and it only took me over 100 tries 😂😂😂😂
A Masochist, are ya?
I think it took me 3 days of tries to defeat the Queen, and defeating that first one took me like 2-3 hours but Jesus was I proud lol.
Ngl I had to turn down the difficulty. I just couldn’t face losing again 😂
I’ve done Sigrun twice on the 2nd hardest difficulty, would love to take her down in Give Me God of War
I think Malenia now takes Nameless King's spot for hardest optional Souls saga boss.
Miyazaki saw this video and took it personally.
Just a quick note, “King of the Storm” is actually the wyvern/dragon’s name, hence why when that health bar is depleted the dragon dies.
YES, thank you! Someone actually told them XD
Also, the Nameless King's hand is shaking, when he puts him down.
@@daviddaugherty2816 that's because the storm king was a dear friend to him
@@soulsguy5954 Yep, exactly. I just thought that was a cool little detail for the animator to include.
Also it ain’t a dragon, it’s literally an oversized drake
Depending on how exactly we define "optional boss", I would also add Absolute Radiance from Hollow Knight onto the list (since you really don't need to beat it to finish the game)
How much of that difficulty is just getting to that fight? Fight three boss rushes with each of three different handicaps that also have a new boss at the end of each one, then you unlock the super duper extra long boss rush with a new boss at the end of that, before you're allowed to fight Absolute Radiance
I would like to add Nightmare King Grimm as well. He's got regular Grimm's moves, but cranked up to 11.
I agree with this pick if only to make myself feel better about my choices
@@octochan That's a good point, and yet the Absolute Radiance still manages to be an obscenely hard boss in its own right. I would say one of the hardest of recent games. Easily took me as much time to beat the first time as Isshin from Sekiro. The platforming section always gets me.
Absolute Radiance is very likely the hardest boss I have ever faced in a video-game.
Add to it that you need to face a massive boss rush every time you fail, and I honestly don't think it's worth it.
I always get this high when I finish a hard challenge in a game, but by the time I beat Abs Rad I just uninstalled Hollow Knight and haven't touched it since.
I swear to god, fighting the nameless king made me wanna gouge out my god damn soul. The amount of anxiety removed after killing him was insurmountable. Literal pain.
Dark eatier midir: *laughs in fire and purple laser*
Bro I luckily first attempted the nameless king but midir definitely got that get back😭
After beating Dark Souls 3 upwards of 50 times Nameless King still occasionally poses a challenge to me.
Can't forget Sephiroth from Kingdom Hearts 1. He has so much health that his health bar runs out of colors to show what stage your at, so just repeats purple several times.
Sadly was not any less difficult in KH2 either, again with the absurdly lethal move set and absurdly high health pool.
@@thomasallen9974 Yeah, KH2 is even more difficult imo, but damn if it isn't one of the best
Agreed. While we're at it. Let's add mysterious figure from kh bbs, to it. Holy smokes that fight...
Couldn't beat him unless you use a specific I-frame build or cheese him another way. Even then it's not guaranteed.
@@eddysegafan6655 Man BBS was too much for me. I beat Lingering Will on critical but the mysterious figure can go to hell.
@@loganrenfrow2544 absolutely lol. I don't envy any newcomer into the series that 'stumbles' upon that optional fight. Thank goodness it is optional lmaoooo
I just recently beat Sigrun on "Give Me God of War" difficulty (the hardest). It was a real pain in the butt and took about 200 tries to memorize all of her abilities, but I finally did it. I'm not sure if you would call it skill or repetition, and it wasn't very pretty, but I'll take the win. Bragging rights or not, I feel accomplished.
Skill builds from repetition so I'd say you became skilled.
@@lunaproductions13 i dunno man. If skill built from repitition i'd be confident of beating the likes of sigrun and kos and nameless more than loosing but even though i've beaten all the soulsborne games bar demon souls because i haven't gotten to play it and DS2 because i got bored halfway through i'm still sure i'd lose 9 times out of 10 to these bosses.
@@aizazizzat6060 well nothing is a guarantee but generally speaking the more often you do something the more likely you are to improve at it.
I’m not boasting but it took me 3 tries to beat it on GMGOW mode… it was only difficult to time the axe throw to stun her when she is about to flash aoe attack. The rest is so easy to remember because of the animation. It is also depending on the runes * you equip on your armor. The best one is the rune that slows down time during attacks… there’s videos of no damages runs people do with using just the axe and NO runic attacks. I copied the load out and strat from them
I also like to add that I’m no expert in gaming. Only 2 games I ever platinum, gow4 and ghost of Tsushima Non expansion….
I am not skilled at video games whatsoever, and I was surprised how I managed to beat sigrun on a few tries…. I actually had a tougher time defeating the VR mission to get the gatterdamrung necklace in final fantasy 7 remake, behemoth would always kick my ass
I would honestly add Black Dragon Fatalis here from Monster Hunter World Iceborne. Fighting the prerequisite Alatreon was hard enough, but Fatalis is another level... Even if you went with fully defensive armor you're still getting wrecked, and the fight has a 30 minute timer. Being in coop could make it easier, but since faint counts are shared it could also mean game over much more quickly.
Sephiroth on Kingdom Hearts 1 and 2. Beating him in 7th grade defined me as a human for a solid week afterwards.
The secret bosses in KH1 are brutal as well
Just a week? That kind of victory justifies an entire year (considering that I never managed).
Both KH1 and KH2 had optional superbosses that made Sephiroth look easy. KH1 had Unknown(I think that’s what it called him) and KH2 had Lingering Will.
The one in Kingdom Hearts Birth By Sleep(Mysterious Figure) was also pretty damn hard.
extra points if you beat him with Terra
@@joeschmo3844 Those are only in the remixes/Japanese titles. The original North American versions only had Sephi and in KH1 he was ridiculous. I thought he was easy af in kh2 though, before the remix that is.
The title gave me an immediate flashback to beating Borderlands solo only to have my insides turned into outsides by Crawmerax the Invincible.
Same but Terramorphus the invincible
He’s literally called “the invincible” unless your op your not winning
@@subjectdelta7210 That's true, but by that same token:
"He's literally called Invincible but he literally isn't."
It's a Borderlands game - it wouldn't be at all surprising for him to be called "Invincible" and then die to a single shot.
@@subjectdelta7210 he is invincible until you play a monk build Gunzerker and solo him easily^^
Voracidous is the boss I had the most struggles with, even as a Gunzerker. I just can't seem to get that fight down perfectly. But he's worth fighting to get the Interfacer, if it even drops for you..
The Daylight Empress in Terraria. Even with endgame gear, she’s a pain to beat.
My first thought was the Demi-fiend in Shin Megami Tensei Digital Devil Saga who might be the hardest boss in any JRPG ever. To illustrate that the game even plays the regular fight music of SMT3: Nocturne, the game the Demi-Fiend is the protagonist of, just to show you that to him you are nothing more than a regular random battle.
Most of the super bosses in SMT are ridiculously hard, but Demi-fiend easily takes the cake among them.
Mike:...The Nameless King, the hardest boss fight in all of Dark Souls
Midir: Hold my beer...
Orphan of Kos: YAAAAGH!
@@jimijenkins2548 defiled amygdala / watchdog *sounds*
@@secretnamemcsecreton eh, defiled amygdala was really only hard because you had half health. and therefore couldn't get hit like, at all, then actually being hard in the regular sense.
@@bobrandomness1055 and Capra demon is only hard because you face him early in the game as opposed to later where he’s a normal enemy
Either way; in their respective OPTIONAL areas, they are harder given the relative context.
Also; defiled chalice amygdala has higher stats than any other amygdala iteration in the game.
Me, who needed 18+ tries to beat Iudex Gundyr: hold my tears
A bit sad that the side boss of Sword Dancer and Abyssion from Tales of Symphonia werent on here. First intro to the Sword dancer is pretty early in the game and to truely defeat it you have to beat it two more times and each time its stronger. Abyssion is a locked behind a sidequest to locate all of the Devils Arms, cursed weapons that grow more powerful as they end lives.
This reminds me of the time on the PSP where the tutorial asks you "Hey you already know how to play?" and if you say yeah, you get to fight the final boss with your base-level character. The boss itself isn't optional, but that initial fight sure is. Never forget Duodecim.
I fondly remember Feral Chaos, and getting frustrated at his level 130 form when I first fought him. The music was great too, they really nailed his character and theme
Thanks for posting this!! I thought Duodecim was too much of a niche game but yeah that shit was very brutal. I once saw a video of someone beating him at that level and was very disappointed to see that nothing happens even though you just beat the final boss.
The wyvern is the "king of the storm", not the nameless king. Hence the name
The King of the Storm is also supposed to be Ornstein from the first game too. And the Nameless King is the son that betrayed Gwen and got wiped from the history books.
@@plazinga that doesn't make much sense though. Ornstein was a dragonslayer, you find his normal body st the base of the arena even before triggering the fight, and he was killed again in DS2
@@DrBrangar You find his armor in an area where people are praying to become dragons. Ornstein succeeds which is why you find his armor. It’s theorized that the boss from DS2 is a different person, or Ornstein got resurrected somehow. The Old Dragonslayer uses a different type magic than Ornstein and when the Nameless King absorbs the King of the Storm he gets lightning powers, which is what Ornstein had in DS1, and also importantly not what dragons use, supporting the idea that King of the Storm was originally something other than a dragon. Ofc DS lore being the nightmare to untangle that it is, you can believe whatever you want, no one is forcing you to think anything.
To add and clarify, I don’t believe you find a body with the Ornstein set, just the armor. Also, purely based on speculation, if we assume the Nameless King is the son of Gwen, as is accepted lore, it makes some sense if a defeated a Ornstein who found out Anor Londo was an illusion, would seek out the remaining child of Gwen, with whom he fought with in the war against the dragons, to find purpose.
@@plazinga are you calling him Gwen on purpose? Haha
I don't think anyone who faced Culex from Super Mario RPG ever forgets that battle. Rarely (if ever) is anyone ready for it the first time they go through the door in Monstro Town, and even if you ARE leveled, it's one hell of a battle.
Honestly surprised Culex wasn’t on this list. I never fought him myself, but he seemed really challenging from watching Chuggaaconroy’s playthrough
Culex was hard af
Or you can just cheese him by equipping the Lazy Shell armor on Peach, wait for both Culex and his crystals to run out of mana, resurrect your party members and hand him his poor, defenseless ass.
I remember fighting some Dullahan Superboss in GoldenSun the lost Age. That fight took some serious time, since the Boss can use your own Djinns and Summons against you.
Hey! Someone else who remembers Golden Sun! Nice!
@@SilverByakuya
I 'member.
Actually dulluhan in lost age didn’t use your summons against you, it could only use the summon Charon
Anyone who members GS is an ally to me also I hated this boss fight took me forever to beat it
I just remember the most efficient way was to just keep summoning eclipse. You could summon it over and over again multiple times.
Dullahan in Golden Sun: The Lost Age was absolutely tough as nails and needed you to have collected all the Djinn in both the first and second game!
Great optional boss with the best summon of the game as a reward.
Oh now that takes me back. I spent the time to do that and i needed a guide for the damn thing. It us the only boss where hard mode doesn’t get the full multiplier due to his stats maxing out.
man.. the memories. gotta copy all the code from the first so you could get all the djinn to defeat him.
Shin Megami Tensei 3:Nocturne has many difficult bonus bosses, but the ones I find most frustrating is the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, that if you unlock around the level it's supposed to be in story the save point in a town you are most likely in becomes blocked by the first one (Pale Rider) in a game where the save points are fast travel locations. He will also travel to whichever save point you're at. Bonus bosses are harder in that game but few are as abjectly annoying.
I'd argue that Midir was more of a challenge, though I guess he counts as DLC.
Midir varies depending on your build, I think. He didn't feel exceptionally tough the first time I fought him. He was impossible on my second playthrough.
He just has too much hp, it's more annoying than challenging. I like Kos in Bloodborne. He's tough, but it's a fun challenge.
@@crows2808 I definitely agree with that. I still haven't beat him without a greatshield.
@@crows2808 Given the number of times I've been summoned for Midir and watched the host get smushed in the first third of his health bar despite my best efforts, I'm gonna say that your first build was exceptionally well suited to that fight. Even my better builds have been a serious challenge until I fully grasped his (very long) combos.
So on average, I'd still argue that Midir is the hardest optional boss in DS3.
@@Paledem Most ultra weapons do extremely well against midir as long as you keep yourself infront of him due to the huge downtime between attacks, granted they aren't the easiest to avoid but it's very manageable. Trying to kill him other than by going for the head is not possible while having fun
I may not be the king of fashion, but Jane's jacket was ON POINT!
I'll say this for it: it's better than her dad's cricket jumper in last week's video.
If we're complementing the fashion here how has Andy's shirt not come up?
With that outfit, she is only an indie soundtrack away from becoming a Life is Strange protagonist
Funnily enough, I remember the first time I beat Sigrun on give me a challenge, I told myself I couldn't do it on the hardest difficulty. While I was falling into the flow of playing again on give me god of war. I ended up doing the fight with no sound because I was at work, I never felt so accomplished beating Sigrun on the hardest difficulty while simultaneously fixing someone's internet.
Context: I worked for Comcast as a support tech at home, which is why I couldn't have the volume up.
YOU HAD TIME TO PLAY GAMES?
Man what the fuck. I worked support for one of the major video game/console developers and they pretty much designed the process to make sure there's never a second where you could be doing anything except dealing with the call. Was even worse on live chat, because you weren't just working one, you were expected to be doing 2-3 at a time.
@@ledumpsterfire6474Not necessarily, I kind of pulled a pseudo multi-task move, where I had two extra monitors, one for my system, one for the laptop, and the laptop itself. Idk what system you guys used, but we had ITGs, which was sometimes a fix-all. Other times I had to pause and actually get more indepth if the issue was more taxing.
That day I was dealing with a talker, so I just let them ramble.
@@k2tme451 We used a custom build of some Oracle database software. Every single issue had a separate entry called a KA (Knowledge Article), many of those issues having lots of overlapping symptoms and fixes, and you had to manually attach each one you used to the contact file. Each one also had checklists for symptoms and checklists for troubleshooting, and you had to follow them all in order. If you failed to do any of that, you'd get marks off on the contact. The micromanagement was absurd.
The (many, many, many) Sigrun attempts were brutal. The eventual victory was unimaginably glorious.
God, I never had such a great victory-high in any other game I can think of.
Well worth the hours of smashing my face against the wall.
EXACTLY!!!!!!
beat her in a hour of grinding on hard, was a good fight
Not gonna lie, that fight didn't seem hard for me. Only took about 3-4 tries. Granted I had upgraded most of the valkyrie armour I had, plus some mist armour ( the name eludes me ). But still wasn't that hard, had a more difficult time with the fire valkyrie.
@@pipe_smokin_pete7713 i think its just called mist armor ngl 🤣 but valk queen on give me god of war + absolutely destroyed my will to live
Any Velvet Room attendant from Persona 3 onwards. They take two actions a turn, which means debuffs last half as long, and typically their attacks are the strongest forms of each kind of magic, which can then incapacitate an ally weak to them, which then give them EVEN MORE attacks.
What's more, they can resist any element and change resistances mid battle.
And of course there is their one-hit kill if you take too long or don't deal enough damage consistently. What's more, in Persona 3 they basically have to be finished with Armageddon, a fusion spell. And they can self-heal back to full hp, which is just great.
Most of note, however, are Elizabeth and Theodore from Persona 3 Portable who you have to fight one on one. If you have healing spells and they charm you- Well, that's more painful than any attack they can dish out.
However, it is worth saying that Margaret, Caroline and Justine or Lavenza are no slouches either. Bring your A-Game for any of them
Any "hardest optional boss fight" list that doesn't include Elizabeth from P3 is just flat-out wrong. That fight (At least in the original and FES I haven't played P3P) is just one step short of impossible.
You can't even be immune to anything. She'll just insta-kill you
They're literally just weaker versions of Demifiend from his optional hidden boss fight in Digital Devil Saga 2. They're way easier.
For those who want a laugh at p5 search the video "I hate this game - persona 5"
@@at6774 but they're still hard bosses from persona.
the nameless king was insane i remember the first time i found him i was like this is gonna hurt a lot 😭😭
I can't even remember how many times I died fighting Sigrun before I finally got her. Made the actual boss fight seem dead easy in comparison.
I never got past 1 damn valkyrie
Yeah made Baldur feel disappointingly easy
@@kevinruiz1041 just do the talisman of betrayal glitch. You can slow down time but if you get hit once it will stop working.
“…The Nameless King, easily the hardest optional boss fight in the entire Souls series.”
Midir: Am I a joke to you?
I honestly don't find Midir much harder either. I think I'd place him above Nameless since he can punish the player if they misjudge positioning, but that's kinda it. Otherwise he's boils down to a fight against Amygdala who misses most of the attacks because the player can just walk backwards. Gael and Friede are much tougher, since their attacks cannot be dismissed as easily, and they do require positioning along with careful dodge timing. Nameless' attacks are just too easy to read, making him feel similar to Artorias from DS1.
*panic rolls away*
Totally that was my thought as well
I don't think the guy played the DLCs at all and saw Nameless and was like "it's hard!"
@@Arexion5293 I couldn´t defeat Midir so i gave up. Had no problems with NK though. The King of Storm phase sucks because of camera issues which From still haven´t solved - BB is the worst at that imho. NK is pretty good tells what attack he does same as Gael who is harder than NK imo. Sister Friede is also more of a nightmare than NK, (Well currently in my second DS 3 playthrough which is going much smoother so maybe this time Midir is going to die).
Sigrun is the hardest boss I have fought.
Now soon I am gonna suffer with king hrolf and Gna
Gna and Hrolf aint got shii on Sigrun. Seriously only took me 10+ tries in 1/2 hour to beat them both while Sigrun cost me minutes, hours, days, arms, legs and 3 controllers
Man fuck those 2 I beat them though those 2 killed me 5 times each before I got my get back
True, beating Sigrun always felt good.
@@Vayne_Solidor can definitely agree with that
@@hoh5956 Sigrun cost me 3 tries .
In Legend of Dragoon, there's an insanely hard boss wizard named Faust on Disc 4 that you can only get by gathering all the Stardust throughout the entire game. It's a bear to get to him, and an even worse time to fight him.
I remember going through all that and a few hours later thinking, "why?" PS1 optional bosses were the worst.
Kingdom Hearts 2 is filled with optional super bosses, but Lingering Will is probably the hardest because you need to figure out what attacks are better to dodge or deflect, and he's a very fast character so you've got to be as fast as he is. Although Sephiroth from KH1 is probably the hardest boss in the series
You haven’t play KH3 Re:Mind, have you?
@@Isharne Not yet, although I've heard stories of the boss in that game
I don't know how many attempts it took me to finally beat KH1 Sephiroth, but my PS2 came perilously close to death by blunt force trauma with a wall ( I did kill the square and cross buttons on the DS2 controller, though ). When I finally did it, the successful attempt lasted at least 20 minutes.
In my opinion, Sephiroth was only hard because he had that move that could OHKO you. Barring the possibility of just losing in one, I never found that fight too hard. It's just a matter of being good at the combat. I think the clock tower phantom is MUCH harder, because you have the constantly ticking time bomb of Doom taking out you and your party one by one, plus you have to manage your magic super carefully because the fight relies on it so heavily, PLUS you need to keep track of his current element to know what you can even hit him with. There's much more to master there than just "don't get hit with Seph's OHKO".
Lingering will may be one of the toughest bosses but his ability to be infinitely staggered makes him one of the most exploitable fights in the series
I know it's been said but Sigrun truly is a challenge, even on regular difficulty.
You can memorise her attacks but one of them is really fast so you better have quick reactions.
Even on very easy she’s still a handful I tried it a while back and she was still difficult, give me god of war forget about it she was insane!
The Sigrun fight begins with her dragging your face on the dirty to indicate how the rest of the fight will be
Ah yes, the possessed norse warrior angel queen. Don't know what I thought I was doing.
You basically have to perfect that fight, because one little slip up is game over. Still, I wish the other boss fights in the game were near that difficult.
I swear she's not even on xbox
I’m not that good at video games and I honestly didn’t think she was that hard. She just uses all the other Valkyrie’s moves combined and by that time, because you’ve defeated them you know how to counter her moves.
So a fair preview of the fight to come
I recall Morgan Freeman being a pain in the ass in south park the fractured but whole
As was Al Gore in _Stick of Truth._
@@chrisoliver3642 really? I didn't have much trouble with him once I started taking it his secret service members first while maintaining a bled affect on the boss himself
@@SebasTian58323 All I can say is... _EXCELSIOR!!_
I am Malenia, Blade of Miquella
Dullahan from Golden Sun: The Lost Age. Absolute Nails on his own and also has quite the challenge required to even access the boss dungeon. Needing to collect all the Djinn companions across both games is no easy feat in and of itself.
I enjoyed both Emil fights in Nier automata. I always love it when you get character development and storyline in a fight, and the Emil clone fight gave me just that. Also, you're gonna have to lose to that fight at least once, if you want all the endings...
Amazing fight!!! and what about the optional/secret fight in the coliseum with square enix's ceo, so weird and hard...
The 9th and final Death Rite bird from elden ring is an honorable mention for me, took me longer than any other boss in the game it’s finishers are absolutely devastating and very hard to predict
The satisfaction of beating the KoS & Nameless King was immense: the countless attempts, followed by the montage of me researching help guides and youtube vids, dying, tweaking gear, dying, researching, dying. Until the moment were halfway down his health-bar I realised I was actually going to win - and did. Though in DS, you can never fully escape the true boss: the camera...
He really is a pain in the ass, but he's so satisfying to beat, Darkeater midir is the only boss I haven't been able to beat yet
Never tried using a bow?
@@guyman9655 Weakness: Tail.
@The Profaned Black Knight I'll give it a try next time I make it to that point in the ringed city
Magic user: Pestilent mist is great!
"Huh, where's that Jo guy? What a bizzare adventure..."
- Goro Majima, 1988
I'm so glad that the Yakuza games are getting more attention.
I really love that optional boss. But I must admit the young Jo Amon that Majima faces is not even the hardest of the Yakuza series, let alone games in general.
Is that a...
"YES, THIS IS A JOJO REFERENCE!!!" - Alucard in lady form from Hellsing Ultimate Abridged.
@@michaelandreipalon359 Recently rewatched that series, happy to see its other fans out in the wild :)
The radiance from hollow knight would be a fine addition to this list
Or better yet, Nightmare King Grimm, who is more optional and more dangerous than Radiance.
@@Link-ho8yq or better yet, absolute radiance, an abomination of hit boxes that overlap
Nightmare King Grimm, Pure Vessel, Absolute Radiance would all make the list here
Kratos is also pretty competent at fighting things after they're dead
True but somehow they’re stronger after they’re dead then when they were alive
Let's face it, the Amon bosses from the Yakuza/Judgement series would have probably taken up the whole list lol
I am playing Judgment atm and I am dreading Amon haha
Haven’t even watched yet and i mediately thought of those. At least you can cheese it in some.
Kind of surprised Final Fantasy XII's Yiazmat wasn't mentioned at some point. He's s probably more grindy, but still,, a boss that takes no less that six hours to fight because he has that much health is just difficult on general principle.
Huh, I don't remember him taking more than 30 minutes
@@bryangibbs7191 Maybe in the Revenant Wings version. I do remember my fight with Behemoth in the original took me around thirty or so minutes, and he had, IIRC, over a million HP. Yiazmat was stated to have like 16Mil HP and a really bad habit of regeneratig health whenever you stepped out of battle with him. Plus he'd double all of his stats once he lost half of his health.
How about a mention of the Ebony Warrior, a secret Skyrim boss so tough he doesn’t even show up in game until you are level 81, which was the games original max level if you got all of your skills to 100.
I'd rather face Karstaag again. The Ebony Warrior took on myself using dragon aspect, my dragon, two summoned Daedra, Karstaag, my ancient dragonborn, my spectral dragon priest, and Serana, and still beat the stuffing out of all of us!
@@thearishok2802 Really? Karstaag was so much harder for me.
Unless you use marked for death, then he tips like a cow.
I didn't find the Ebony Warrior that difficult, but Karstaag beat me down every single time. I think I only killed him once, and I don't know how.
See, it was difficult.. but, once I just doubled down on my swords, each given 40hp a hit, i could out heal his dps and an easy fight..
I do believe you forgot about Culex from Super Mario RPG. Not only is he significantly harder than the actual final boss of the game, but the game makes you go out of your way to get the item required to even access the boss fight just to add insult to injury.
Maz Koshia absolutely blew my mind. So cool.
The final summon in Golden sun 2. You don't actually need it to finish the game, but if you do try and get it you'll find him WAY harder than the final boss.
Ahhhhhh, Dullahan, yes. That is such a bs fight lol
Yes! That fight gave me fits as a kid. I finally hit upon a strategy on GameFAQs that required (1) a very specific djinn setup to (2) execute a series of very specific actions (most being high-powered summons as I recall) that sacrificed most of your party to unleash massive damage. I was so fucking happy when the bastard went down. Good times...
Lingering Will from Kingdom Hearts 2. The only way I know of to actually win that fight is by reducing your combos to only do finishers, then use repeated jump attacks to stun lock him until he dies, even at endgame max level with literally all of the best items, spells, etc unlocked.
I almost forgot about Lingering Will. I must've repressed that nightmare.
That's what I was thinking. Btw I used the exact same cheese strategy lol still stressful as fuck
I feel honoured they mentioned the Storm Fortress. When I first played AC: Rogue I kept retraining at least a dozen times to destroy that beast. I still find the twin Man 'o War from Black Flag harder, though
Storm Fortress is a kinda easy, as long as you can guess the only weapon that is the most likely to be used on the Storm Fortress and you have everything upgraded.
Wait a second…HOW is Sephiroth from Kingdom Hearts 2 not on this list? He killed me faster than I could say “I don‘t wanna end like Aerith”
Me, 24 years later from '97: "TOO SOON!"
Exactly!! I only ever made it as far as "Show me your strength..... that's enough."
Sephiroth? Sephiroth was a fucking cakewalk compared to Lingering Will in the same game
Kh1 sephiroth was harder + lingering will
Sephiroth wasn't as bad as Lingering Will, but at least Lingering Will had an easy way to beat him if you were willing to swallow your pride. The Mysterious Figure from Birth By Sleep for me has always been the hardest boss, not counting the Data Bosses that are designed to screw you over.
"the nameless king is the hardest optional boss fight in all of dark souls"...Sister Friede, Gael and Midir will have something to say about that.
Fyi for everyone saying dark eater he didn’t get add to dark souls 3 till way after release so he’s not In base game and you would have to buy ringed city to even fight him, so nameless would be the hardest BASE game boss
The reaper from the persona games, especially 3, was already hard enough with AI party members. Then they made the velvet attendant boss fights with a 9999 damage move to your entire party that is unblockable. Need I say more?
I msan, Elizabeth tells you to come alone so if you tried to fight her with a full party then thats kinda on you
Lavenza from 5 royal was eay harder
@@iangamez496 nah, Lavenza was easier. She didnt have the stupid restrictions that Elizabeth did. Sure lavenza was mostly luck based but she wasnt hard
@@phantomnite really i wouldnt know because ive only played some of 4 and all of royal but i was comparing her aginst the reaper
@@iangamez496 oh, yeah, she's harder than the reaper
The most emotional moment of Final Fantasy VII was when my first disk was scratched so I couldnt get to the second disk and my friend said to me, "So you haven't gotten to the part where Sephiroth kills Aerith?"
Oh god. I had to spoil it for my then boyfriend because he'd named her after me. "MIKE, SHE DIES!" and he went silent for a good minute
@@BJGvideos 😂😂😂😂 Well, damn.
Oof. Your friend truly missed the "think before you speak" lesson we're usually taught growing up, lol! I'm sorry it was spoiled for you. I waited so long before playing that time had spoiled it for me (though in my defense, the game came out when I was 8. In 1997, my siblings and I were still jamming it up on the SNES, of which would be our main game console up into the early 2000's. And when we finally did get a PS1, Crash Bandicoot and Gran Turismo stole our attention. Back then, I thought the Final Fantasy games were all connected and so I wasn't keen on playing six other games just to get to this 7th one I'd been hearing whispers about 😂. I know now that's incorrect and thank goodness for that!)
@@BewareTheLilyOfTheValley Yeah there are common elements (big ridable birds called chocobos, there's generally someone named Cid, the spells are usually the same), but the stories and settings are different.
I spent my first playthrough waiting for a scene where Aerith walks in with a (admittedly quite large) bandage and everyone says “Aerith….we thought you were dead!” And then she says “I was!” and then we hear a convoluted and improbable reason why she survived. I still remember staring at a blank screen for too long until it dawned on me the game was really over and she was really dead…..bit of a bummer.
In Golden Sun, only by selecting specific rowers and putting them in specific seats can you reach the hidden Crossbone Isle with a boss so strong it's better to just keep playing, grind some later enemies, then come back.
While I'm not surprised he isn't on this list, I would still like to take this time to mention Nightmare King Grimm from Hollow Knight. A literal god of nightmares whose every speedy attack does double damage to you. It took days for me to beat him. And don't even get me started on Radiant Nightmare King Grimm.
Edit: After reading some of the replies made by fellow watchers, I would like to edit my thoughts while keeping the original up. I would say Absolute Radiance is a better example of a boss that should only be attempted by experienced Hollow Knight player since reaching her entails defeating every single boss in the game, optional and required, one after the other back to back with the three before her being The Failed Champion, The Nightmare King, and The Pure Vessel who are all double damage bosses. Only after defeating all of the bosses in the game do you get a shot at the Absolute Radiance, and if you die to her you need to start the whole thing all over again just to get to her. Oh, and she's a double damage boss as well. Because why not, right?
To absolute hell with NKG, AbzRad and GPZ. Slamming my head against the wall would be less painfull. If you are reading this and dont understand, consider yourself lucky
@@ABadassDragon Amen. Pure Vessel's alright though.
Completely agree - took me a week to finally beat him. The satisfaction though…^^‘
Worth it just for that BANGER of a battle theme though.
I think the only one worse is the Absolute Radience. Since, you know, you have to get through the entire pantheon of Hallownest first to even fight her.
Mysterious Figure from Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep. Haven't fought him myself, just heard the nightmarish stories. Apparently, none of the devs even beat him before the game was released, great boss design there guys
I'm still stuck on Terra from kh2
oh my fucking god you made me remember the nightmares i had trying to defeat that thing.....the thing is you have to defeat the mysterious figure three times....ONE FOR EACH CHARACTER...ventus and aqua were fine but terras attacks were so slow that you had to pull your teeth to hope to damage the guy...but goddamn...the dopamin rush was insane afterwards....so thanks for the short ptsd episode
Fun fact: Mysterious Figure is the only boss in the series that had to be nerfed for re-releases. His collision magnet attack was originally inescapable and was basically a death sentence.
@@bsgfan1 THEY NERFED HIM?wtf?wait so i beat the guy at his hardest and most broken?wow...all those hours well spent?
@@sandyk9300 I never played KH game but i’ve heard about this boss fight, is there an in game reward for beating it, and was it worth it?
Yiazmat from Final Fantasy XII definitely deserves a spot on this list.
Yes! He's only got over 50 million hitpoints!
Got to give some love to ‘Inner Isshin’, the supercharged version of Sekiro’s already hard-as-nails final boss, who is unlocked by completing one of the boss rush modes. See also: Inner Genichiro and Inner Father
I'd say Darkeater Midir for the DS3 DLC is harder than the nameless king.
@memon0711 geht euch nichts an true, but she's not an optional boss.
@@ToastyTstdToast yes she is. shes dlc.
I am surprised that inner agent 3 from splatoon 2’s dlc, octo expansion, isn’t on this video. He/she is one of Nintendo’s hardest bosses out there
EXACTLY
Faust from Legend of Dragoon. Come across him before you have collected every spec of stardust in the game and he is literally invincible. Even after getting the item for collecting all the stardust he is still capable of one shotting your entire team unless you are a very high level or bought the super expensive armor that halves all magic damage.
Glad to see TLoD getting some love.
Okay, just thought of a REALLY good addition to this list... Nightmare King Grimm, from Hollow Knight. You can avoid the fight and still complete the quest line by siding with Brumm, and beating him seems almost impossible. The final boss of the game, comparatively, is bloody easy.
Why not Pure Vessel, Absolute Radiance, Radiant Absolute Radiance, Radiant Markoth? Those are why harder in my opinion (i think NKG and PV kinda easy, but very fun to fight against)
@@WarlordofWarren Haven't even gotten to Absolute Radiance yet but I 100% agree. I decided to just not fight NKG to save myself the pain, I spent way too long struggling on TMG
Honestly, it took me hours to beat him
to quote an HK youtuber:
"everyone has a different breaking point, except for NKG everyone ragequits on NKG"
@@WarlordofWarren Radiant Absrad sucked to complete, Markoth was probably next worst
Finally some of these ridiculously hard optional things that I actually did! The Valkyrie was soooo hard in God of War. I also fully completed all optional everythings in FF7 (my favourite game of all time). Go me! I almost never do super hard optional things in games but I adored these games and really wanted to fully complete them.
I remember both secret boss fights were honestly easy. The secret boss in Super Mario RPG was harder!
@@oviswatts1982 Are you talking about FF7? I remember being almost fully wiped multiple times during those boss fights. Depends what level you are when you do them, though. The first time I finished FF7 I was only level 77 (how I still remember that, I don't know...) and it took me hours for the final boss fight. Had to be 3 hours at least, almost used up all my health potions... so I'm sure the first time I tried the optional bosses I was probably not at the level I should have been haha.
@@aliceallgrown the original FF7 I remember a giant red monster and then I think one was a giant sea creature
@@aliceallgrown for the original ff7 game, when taking on ruby it easier to kill of2 of the team and just go in with the member you like the most. Man brins back memories of playing ff7 over the summer holiday, sure hope the remake does the rest of the game justice
The way I look at it every single boss in Dark Souls 3 that lays beyond Dancer of the Boreal Valley was completely optional.
The Lords of Cinder weren't.
How about the countless optional bosses in Kingdom Hearts? Specifically *Sephiroth* himself in Olympus Coliseum in the original game!? That guy is brutal, yall
SIN HARVEST ANGEL!
(Or was it Descend Heartless Angel?)
He's tough, but I think Lingering Will in KH2 is the absolute apex of difficulty in those games
"Sorry, I don't lose."
“I Am Melania, Blade Of Miquella.”
Ozma from Final Fantasy 9 deserves a spot on this list. It's arguably the hardest optional boss in the entire franchise. Ozma is also insanely hard to find/get to requiring the golden chocobo, special peppers and actually finding the unmarked flying island it lives on.
Honestly Ozma and Yiazmat are both better choices than Ruby Weapon.
I actually solod Ozma with Freya the first time I fought it back when 9 was new, had no idea what I was doing and didn't finish the side quest. I just had shadow absorb and status protection on freya and she just rolled over him while everyone else took a dirt nap.
Yiazmat is a jerk though.
A couple of those legendary ships in AC Black Flag were a nightmare. I gave up on the 4th one after somehow beating 3 of them
The "two at a time" ships are the only thing I need to 100% it.
Also don’t forget about that boss fight in the post game of Astral Chain. I haven’t fought her but judging from the videos on youtube it seems like a nightmare
How about the Dullahan from Golden Sun: The Lost Age. His stat total is the highest in the series and his moves are crazy. He can put all your Djinn on standby with Djinn Storm, he can use one of the strongest Djinn summons against you, and has an essentially one shot kill move in Formina Sage. Oh and he goes 3 times per turn.
Yiazmat from ff12 will always be my fav optional boss also sephiroth in Kingdom hearts 2 is insane he has a skill that always takes your hp to 1 no matter how much you have
my 9 year old is an absolute god at shooters like fortnite and COD, his reaction speeds and vision are literally god-like. He's never been a fan of campaign based games, he says there's no real challenge in A.I based enemies, when you're stuck in lobbies where people try to ping kill you (that's actually a thing). So I gave him god of war to play and told him he can't play cod until he completes 100% of the game. It was really thrilling to see 1st person shooter reflexes being used in god of war. His parries and dodges were near perfection and he zipped through the game in about half a day......with never ever having played the game before....we should all be ashamed of ourselves.
“Tactics so cheap, he may have bought them in bulk at Costco..” 🤣😂💀💀💀💀💀 I’m dying
"Nameless king is the hardest optional boss in dark souls 3"
Midir: ".......And I took that personally."
is possible to cheese mydir on meelee being near his face to bait the byte attacks and nameless king can be nuked with glass canon arcane build
@@pedrohenrique-et3fs yeah especially with the pessilent mist and farron greatsword.. but still a hard ass
@@41stside51 i love these bosses, nameless is like "fight me bro, do you even thunder" and mydir finally look like a boss fight with an extremely angry dragon.
Ruby and Emerald Weapon have bonafide strategies that anybody can follow these days to kill them, and are therefore no longer super-hard, but simply hard bosses. Emerald Weapon, you approach with low materia and Mimic for very powerful Limit Breaks with some curative items until it's dead. Ruby Weapon, meanwhile, was discovered to be vulnerable to being frozen or stopped, not to mention the trick of appearing with two dead companions that you revive once it can no longer use Quicksand. In short, the use of Hades, Contain materia, and Time materia to deliver the status of Stop while you otherwise end its existence is utterly viable.
Or you do what I did and morph the enemies in the sunken submarine into permanent stat up items and fight them with Cloud with 255 in all stats. I was even able to simply soak the counter attacks from the ruby weapon for using knights of the round on it.
I'd like to present... the literal entity of Death, from Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen. Although just about everything you face in the Bitterblack Isle is basically an optional bossfight, Death is definitely the hardest of the lot. It can oneshot you and your pawn companions, and on top of that, has an aoe sleep ability that, paired with its teleportation, lets it catch your party more easily. Although it only has one scripted appearance, after that, it has a chance to randomly show up at any point, even in the middle of a fight, in areas it's able to spawn in if there's dead enemies lying around, which attract it and other Necrophagous beasts.
I never even made it to that guy
Sounds like someone hasn’t abused 4x Conquerors Periapt + Tenfold Flurry with an Assassin focused character
@@tyrusdalet In my hundreds upon hundreds of hours in the game I think I've only ever really played Assassin just up until I finish ranking them up to max. Just never really liked the playstyle, especially knowing how cheesey it can get lol. Seen too many Daimon fights where the guy just pops 4x Conquerors or Taligus and spams gouge
I find death pretty easy, he's very slow, just a chore to hit away at
oh God that guy was THE most frustrating optional boss,always appearing when you least wanted him to and in the worst areas except where you can light multiple brazier and damage him with conquers periapts and a few skilled moves plus evading
There's Yiazmat in Final Fantasy XII, which is the last of the elite marks, if you decide to do the hunts. He has ~50 million HP, and takes an hour to beat, provided you know what you're doing.
I'm so glad someone brought Yiazmat up! I have beaten them exactly once. I wept the entire time.
I know not a single fight to go out and do, but the judge magistrates on trial floor 100 I have heard is also just horrible to beat. I have yet to try that or Yiazmat but the day I do sounds like pain
@@kyledavidson6635 I love that the judge magistrates know that you're using Reverse and throw elixirs at you to OHKO you. That's some next level cheek on top of already being super tough to take out.
Isn't there a boss in Final Fantasy that's supposed to be literally unbeatable, and the devs kept altering him every time someone works out a strategy to do it?
@@kyuubinaruto17 if there is, I don't know about it.
No mention of FF8's weapons? Ultima weapon is the very definition of OP, able to one hit any hero in the party or just reduce the HP of the entire party to 1...
If you want hard optional bosses, I have not struggled on any boss more than Nightmare King Grimm from Hollow Knight. Actually unlocking the fight is a pain, and the reward for beating him, sucks!
That fight made me quit that game for a long time.
@@PlaneWalker18 it’s tho easy lol
Have you tried Absolute Radiance yet? Ya know, the harder version of the ‘final boss’ who can only be unlocked after pantheon five, a 46 boss gauntlet? It’s much harder than NKG
@@Sedwards3795 Really! That's cool because i found NKG way harder than Absolute Radiance, that just goes to show that different people have different experiences. Also I'm m not saying I didn't find Absolute Radiance hard, just NKG harder.
I still say "Ceaseless Discharge" isn't a name, it's a symptom that a greasy dude asks a doctor about at a party
The doctor is also at the party? 😂
I remember when my friend fought Ruby Weapon. He had some insane stock of Mime materia so any thing he cast had a chance of being recast over and over. When he summoned Knights of the Round we went into the other room and made sandwiches, and when we got back, it was STILL going, and Ruby Weapon didn't drop!
Ruby weapon has resistance to that summon in particular. You need to eat a stack of magic plus sources and equip a pile of magic plus materia.
And then you get the reward: a gold chocobo you already got in order to get knight of the round.
"hardest boss in the entire series"
*Darkeater Midir has entered the chat*
I love how they always use Dark Souls "expert" Mike to talk about it. The amount of times he has cleared the game is legendary! :P
Rodin was such cool boss battle that he gives you the weapon named Angel weapon Rodin (rodaan) his own name!! and those weapons has a discription someting like " Rodan ones used this wepon to gain a dominion over certain portion of heaven and that is why he was banished from heaven.
Thise weapon are basically angelic halo and can transform into any kind of angelic weapon that bayonetta has defeated in the game or yet to defeat.
They were the coolest weapon i have ever seen. (Bayonetta 1) was the game ahead of its time.
Loves that game.
The dragons in Pillars of Eternity. I took a look at them and decided I'm better off staying on good terms with them, no matter how many achievements they're worth.