5 Most Unfair Boss Moves In Games

5 The Nukadillo from Ninja Gaiden 2

Some claim that Ninja Gaiden invented difficulty in video games – we don't mean Ninja Gaiden for the original Xbox, but the ancient Ninja Gaiden for the even more ancient-er NES. The claim is false for both games, as old-school difficulty in games comes from way before that, but this is indeed a really tough series. The classic offered relentless sidescrolling action, and the new ones are even worse because they do that but with enemies coming from all directions. Both Ninja Gaiden for the Xbox and Ninja Gaiden 2 for the 360 are normally harder than anything prior to the Dark Souls era, but there's one boss that pushes NG 2's difficulty past even regular Souls difficulty levels.

After a hard-won victory, the Armadillo boss from Ninja Gaiden II doesn't shower us with good loot, but instead with fire because it immediately explodes in a way that'll trigger a game over unless the player already knows what to do. Chances are players will die the first time they beat the Armadillo because no one ever expects an armadillo to go nuclear.

They'll probably also die on the second and third attempts because the game never really explains how to survive the blast.

4 Drakengard 3's Final Boss Chances The Entire Fabric Of The Game

Yoko Taro, director of both the Drakengard and the Nier series is a guy who considered canceling the development of Nier Automata, one of the best games of all time because he didn't want to keep on waking up early to make it. The only kind of messing with that this man will put up with is the kind that involves messing with players. When entering the stage of the final boss from Drakengard 3, players will naturally get ready for just a harder version of everything they'd fought up until then, but that's a mistake, as the final boss makes Drakengard 3 forget it is supposed to be an action game and turns it into a full-on rhythm game. Reflexes will help players, but there are no attack animations or any other visual cues to guide the player. How to do it, then? Well, simple: by focusing on goddamn audio cues.

That alone is terrible because it requires players to learn an entirely new set of skills just for one fight, but it gets even worse. As soon as the battle seems over, the boss will unleash an extra secret move that's straight out of the Ninja Gaiden 2's Armadillo's cookbook and will unleash a deadly attack that we cannot foresee by either visual or audio cues – we just have to feel it coming as if we're a character from Dragon Ball. This is such a messy fight that one awesomely kind YouTuber has created a guide that helps players beat it as if it is a Guitar Hero-style game.

3 Melania's Waterfowl dance from Elden Ring

Anyone who's heard about Elden Ring is likely to have already learned about Malenia. She's a literally rotten optional boss that even speedrunners have no problem declaring as the hardest foe in Elden Ring and in the history of Dark Souls games. She's a menace for various reasons, like the fact that she has two life bars, the fact that she refills hp whenever she hits the player (regardless of whether she deals damage or not), the fact that she's pretty fast, and especially because of the "Waterfowl Dance". That's the name given not to an actual dance, but to four consecutive flurries of attacks that have a very easy time hitting and killing the player.

To get a better idea of how terrible she is, players can watch the video below to see the entire animation.

As shown in the video, making one wrong move even before the attack animation has begun is more than enough to get players killed twice. In order to come unscathed from this dance of death, players have to do not one, but four perfect dodges – or just wait a few hours until a heroic nudist is free to step in and kill her for us.

2 Just the basic attack from Havel in Dark Souls

Gamers know the Dark Souls series for achieving difficulty through some unfair mechanisms sometimes, but some other times, it achieves its difficulty in a humiliatingly straightforward way. The thing about Havel The Rock isn't that he's a huge menace for even the most experienced of players because he has a wide array of deadly attacks, it's that he's the most hardcore filter for newer players. He doesn't do anything special, he just hits us once in a completely normal manner – and then we die. He's very heavily armored and tough to kill, so video game logic would have us believe something that looks like a human tank wouldn't have the strength to also hit pretty hard, but this is a one-hit kill machine.

Another thing making this supposedly simple fight even more of a nightmare is Havel's location. He resides right beside the door of a small room and his job is just waiting for unsuspecting newbies to come in and get their brains splattered all across the room.

Even if his attacks are relatively simple, they get harder to dodge because taking this one down in the early game requires some serious endurance.

There's nothing more righteous in the world of Dark Souls than just beefing our characters up to no end and then coming back with the strongest weapon in the game to give Havel a taste of his single-use medicine.

1 The reverse psychology of the Ruby Weapon from Final Fantasy VII

Final Fantasy fans know sh*t is real when they're fighting a monster with the word “weapon” in its name, and FFVII's Ruby weapon is just the worst of all weapon-and-jewelry-themed enemies. The worst part about this enemy isn't the fact that he's by far the strongest enemy in the game (which he is), but a weird move that requires players to beat him in the most counter-intuitive way imaginable. So, how does one usually go about getting ready for a tough boss fight? They watch a youtube tutorial grind in order to make their party as strong as possible, and then just kick the boss' ass. Neat idea, but that'll actually result in a game over screen.

The Ruby weapon has a special move that will immediately result in the permanent removal of two of the party members, so the best way to fight it is to enter the battle with two-thirds of the party already dead. That way it somehow won't bother removing them after they get revived. Final Fantasy VII came out in ‘97, and since then Square Enix hasn’t dared to put anything nearly as messed-up in any of their single-player FF titles. Oh, yeah, we mentioned single-player titles because they totally put a boss in FF XI online that was so impossibly strong that it remained undefeated for 3 straight years.

Top Image: From Software, Xam3lpt