Top 5 "Holy Difficulty Shift, Batman!" Bosses

At some point in every game, there's a moment where the difficulty'll randomly shift. Sometimes its an unbelievably hard beginning but you hit your stride and the rest of the game is a breeze. Most of the time, its that one point where you thought you were perfectly leveled, but then "So and so" comes along and wipes the floor with you. At this point, the player has a number of options ahead of them, they can play and play and pray to god they get a lucky critical or the boss misses nonstop, or you just get that lucky jump. Another is hopelessly level grinding until you crush the boss in question. The final option (my personal favorite) is to throw down the controller in a huff and proceed to write a blog entry about how stupid difficulty can be. Without any further ado, here's the top 5 "Holy Difficult Shift, Batman" bosses!

5. PINSTRIPE POTOROO: Crash Bandicoot

Pinstripe Potoroo is the fourth boss in the first game of the Crash Bandicoot series, and a stereotypical mobster. As the battle starts he pulls out a drum magazine Tommy gun and opens fire on Crash. The first nine times I fought this boss I barely managed to get out of the way of the gunfire, to say nothing of actually damaging him. Between his bursts of gunfire you're meant to spin attack him to deplete his five HP. In comparison to his predecessor Koala Kong who just throws rocks and explosives at you, you now have about 85 other things to worry about, marking the ramp up in difficulty that awaits the player in the back half of Crash Bandicoot.

4. TWIN DRAGON ZOMBIES: Castlevania: Circle of the Moon

Castlevania: Circle of the Moon is considered by many to be one of the best games on the Game Boy Advance, and has one of the best plots, castle designs, and it sports that classic Castlevania difficulty and music. Towards the beginning of the game you're fighting some simple bosses such as Cerberus and a transforming Necromancer with simple attacks. Then you fight the Iron Golem, which is a slow moving joke. After beating the crap out of a goat demon called Adramelech you have the displeasure of going through the Underground Warehouse. One of the hardest areas in the game, you have to fight through swarms of killer plants and other difficult enemies capping off with a 2 on 1 fight with the Dragon Zombies. Each with more HP than Adramelech, they begin with a co-operative barrage of fire breathing and head sweeping. If you manage to slay one of them, the other begins to feast on its corpse and regain up to 300 HP. Simply put, after defeating this guy, Death will seem like a cakewalk.

3. ATMA/ULTIMA WEAPON: Final Fantasy VI

Atma Weapon is encountered towards the end of the first half of Final Fantasy VI, introducing itself as a being of pure power and doing the whole "I'll kill you without breaking a sweat" malarkey. All good fun up until he starts blasting your party with top level magic. The previous boss, the Imperial Air Force had 8,000 HP, with 2 other parts and a rather significant dislike of Bolt spells, making him a simple boss when you dealt with the magic absorbing Speck. Overall a pretty simple boss. Then you hit the Floating Continent and at the end of a grueling gauntlet you have to fight this beast. Sporting 24,000 HP

and 5,000 MP you have two options, three if you're playing the SNES or PS1 version. Option one, wipe out his HP and pray that he doesn't cast Flare too much (Oh yeah, he casts Flare, and Meteo as well). Option two, teach Osmose and Rasp to everyone in your party and just slowly but surely drain his MP, when it hits zero, he'll die (Only option I've never done myself). This one may take even longer than the first option since each shot of Osmose only drains upwards of 80-100 MP. Between all three stages he's got a nasty arrangement of attacks including Meteor, Full Power, and the dreaded Flare Star. Overall, not a fight you'd want to slack on.

2. GANDOHAR: Two Worlds

Ah Two Worlds, where to even begin. Well, pretty much it was touted as the next Elder Scrolls game with a massive open world, a wealth of quests and two things Oblivion didn't have, mounted combat and an online component. When it came out the end result was a muddled buggy mess of a game. I hate this game with a passion, but I wanted to get that 370 point achievement for finishing the game, seemed like a laugh. I didn't pay that much attention to the plot, all I got was that I was assembling some kind of relic for these generic evil guys in armor and hoods. After screwing them over somehow I just go and hack and slash through their defenses and fight the two leaders of the order of Generic Evil Armor and Cloak People, Reist and Gandohar. They look exactly the same, apart from Reist having a green cloak instead (So pretty much I'm killing the Dark Knight versions of the Mario Bros.). Reist also has a move up his sleeve where he transforms into a large fire spitting demon that can kill a level 45 character in high end armor in two to three shots. So after luring him over to the respawn point so he can't recover his health between him kicking me around, I finally kill Reist and take my pimped to hell and back sword and see Gandohar just about to complete his generic satanic ritual so he can "become more powerful than the gods of old" or some bull like that. He draws in some sort of evil power and the fight begins. And by begins I mean he comes at me, I hit him twice and he dies. Credits roll, Generic Protagonist rides off into the sunset with his sister and I get 370 Gamerscore for putting up with this crappy little thing.

1. BALLOR: Final Fantasy Legend III

BALLOR!!!!!! If I happen to go prematurely gray, it's probably because of THIS lousy son of a good supportive mother. The previous boss is a creature named Agron which bombards you with Holy er I mean White, Acid, and other status based attacks. He's not too difficult, but Ballor takes things to another level. At least 75% of the time he'll ambush the party, kicking things off with Magma (200-400 damage to the party), and already you're hurting. His other attacks include Tail (around 600 damage to one character), Beam (400-700 to a single character), and Fla-no not Flare, Nuke (500-700 to the party), which makes surviving long enough to deplete his 34,000 HP quite a challenge. But I left off one major attack that this freaky little #$%^er has called DK Virus. Nearly anyone who's played a Final Fantasy game can remember fighting those bloody Malboros and their dreaded "Bad Breath" attacks. DK-Virus is about the same except he's known to slam the party with it and follow it with Nuke so any chance your healer has to recover the party is shot out a tube, because chances are they'll be dead after a shot of Nuke. The party's best chance at survival is keeping a heavy offensive up with the four legendary swords, Xcalibr, Masmune, Emperor, and Durand, all of which deal above 1500 damage a pop, Xcalibur in the hands of a good fighter can deal almost 3000 at times. Overall this boss is pure friggin' evil and I wish the most painful of punishments upon whoever thought THIS would be a good idea for a boss. Probably the same person that thought that Xagor would be an engaging final boss...

Well there you have it, five bosses that will either make you tear your hair out from surprise difficulty or laugh for hours on end on how pathetically easy they are. I got my rage at Ballor out so unless I do an LP of Final Fantasy Legend III it'll probably be the last time I mention him for a while. Next up I plan to review some Magic sets, some World of Warcraft TCG Raid Decks and the somewhat highly anticipated ArchEnemy game style of Magic: the Gathering. Have a granfantastical day!