Your top 3 favorite video game bosses - Because Viper needs advice

Figured this would be a cool topic, and since I am hard stopped at the cruel Viper, I need good bosses to think about. Mine are, in order:

1. Godfrey, first Elden Lord - Elden Ring - From Software

2. Tempered Gore Magala - Monster Hunter Wilds - Capcom

3. Alecto - Elden Ring - From Software

These are, in my opinion, the best 3 mechanical bosses I have ever encountered. Gore Magala is there because it's hard to do a boss like that properly, and even From Soft has fumbled the ball there (The Dancer in DS3 was pretty good though).

Anyway, looking forward to your top 3.

To me best bosses are:

1. Curse form Witcher 3 in Toussaint. In that old manor where you can try to lift the curse from ghast if i recall it right. Best thing ever.

2. Moving ship to Enclave in Fallout 2. Thats just great designed quest.

3. Rose from the painting Witcher 3 Hearts of Stone. That house on LSD trip was just something i will remember forever.

As for bosses like in PoE or something like that they all are stressfull to me. I doesnt matter how easy boss is its always stressful. More or less but its there. Dunno why but thing is as it is.

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NotPivot#9831 wrote:

Figured this would be a cool topic, and since I am hard stopped at the cruel Viper, I need good bosses to think about. Mine are, in order:

1. Godfrey, first Elden Lord - Elden Ring - From Software

2. Tempered Gore Magala - Monster Hunter Wilds - Capcom

3. Alecto - Elden Ring - From Software

These are, in my opinion, the best 3 mechanical bosses I have ever encountered. Gore Magala is there because it's hard to do a boss like that properly, and even From Soft has fumbled the ball there (The Dancer in DS3 was pretty good though).

Anyway, looking forward to your top 3.

For me, the best bosses are those who force you to learn mechanics and give you a real sense of victory.

I'm not sure I have any that would take the cake for "best" boss.

What I DO have, are the games that instilled into me the whole idea of enjoying boss-like fights - learning and mastering mechanics and gameplay.

I'm basically a middle-aged man at this point so it would be mostly the games I played on Sega Genesis as a kid.

A few memorable games for me:

Eternal Champions - playing through the campaign where you fight every character on the way to the boss is basically just a series of boss fights where each one has their own set of moves to counter and learn, and there was huge variety - the character attacks were totally unique and you could learn how to do it with each character. I liked how this game provided you a "practice dojo" where you could experiment and learn all the moves/combos.

Gunstar Heroes - this was a Japanese platformer where you had to jump around and dodge boss attacks while doing damage yourself, and you'd progress through it stage by stage. It had a lot of variety and bosses. The screen would flash BOSS APPROACHING and play this alarm noise every time that just amped you up and the levels and boss fights were amazing. Sometimes you'd be in a mining tunnel moving super fast on a minecart, or you'd just be on your own two-feet, or in space in a space ship, or literally navigating a puzzle that you had to solve in real-time as a boss was shooting lasers around you, where sometimes you had to discover how to use the environment itself to damage or protect yourself from the boss.

https://youtu.be/Bl0W_q8_KQE?si=NIuqNuNjeklvUE4L&t=171

I played a lot of the classics, and lots of other fighting games that were also good, but if I have to pick a top 2 those ones really set the bar for me at a young age.

I will say that I didn't really feel like I ever encountered that same "boss fight" feeling in many PC games until Diablo 1/2 and in some other games like FreeSpace where you were basically dogfighting spaceships and giant boss-like capital ships.

I've never played a souls game but from what I hear, all of the From Software games sound like they'd be right up my alley.

Favorite bosses? Some I liked facing because of the fight, some for the atmosphere, one for the sheer terror of seeing the boss appear and usually destroy you.

#1 Deathspit from Diablo - an acid spitter boss, who with his spack of machine gun spitting buddies would start to take you out from offscreen.



#2 Dagoth Tanis from Morrowind - creepiest vibes for me going in to fight this boss, and he's like some bloated mind flayer





# Sinistar - from Arcade game of the same name. Terrifying when he appeared and his roaring and taunts (like "Beware I live") in a a great monster voice.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1s46g7IIN8&t=529s

The crazy boss noises on those old arcade games definitely added a little je-ne-sais-quois.

Maybe as kids it was just the comparative abrasiveness against all of the previous noises that just propagated the DANGER signal through our mind, and made it memorable lol.