Hard Levels, Easy Bosses: Difference between revisions

* In ''[[Castlevania]] Rebirth'', The amount of damage you sustain by the normal stage enemies is determined by the stage number, in the vein of Castlevania I and III. However, every boss in the game always inflicts the minimum amount of damage for the particular difficulty mode you are playing through.

* In ''[[Super Castlevania IV]]'', Stage 8 is frustratingly difficult, but the boss (Frankenstein) is one of the easiest in the game.

== [[Action Game]] ==

* ''Spider-Man: The Movie'' game has harder bosses in the beginning of the game, when you're fighting faceless mooks, and harder levels towards the end, when you fight omnipowerful robots.

* ''[[Ninja Gaiden]]'' games tend to have hard levels early on. For example: Even the second level in Ninja Gaiden 2 for the NES has gusts that blow Ryu into pits and takes a bit of mastery, but Baron Spider (the boss) is trivial, especially if you have the Fire Wheel and the Clones. A lot of the difficulty of bosses comes from having half one's life bar from the previous stage and trying not to die.

* Captain Cabot Toth of ''[[Star Wars]]: Jedi Starfighter'' is mindnumbingly easy. Especially compared to the level you just faced. Made all the worse by the fact that he's vulnerable to your [[Values Dissonance|Force lightning]].

== [[Platform Game]] ==

* ''[[Crash Bandicoot]]''... in the first two games, the bosses were oftentimes the only thing that ''didn't'' kill you.

** Sometime appears, though it varies; earlier games in the series tended to have bosses as difficult or harder than their levels (though they were [[Nintendo Hard]] overall.)

*** Subverted by ''[[Kaizo Mario World]]''. The first game featured two boss fights, against {{spoiler|the Big Boo and Invisible Bowser.}} The second had two, {{spoiler|Underwater Bowser and Reznor, but in a room full of spiked logs and rising lava.}}

* ''[[Sonic the Hedgehog]]'': In general, the bosses are significantly easier than the levels themselves, with the exception of [[That One Boss|one or two bosses per game]]. See [[Easy Levels Hard Bosses]] for the exceptions.

* The first ''[[Spyro the Dragon]]'' game had tricky platforming aplenty, but the bosses were laughably pathetic. Each was a case of [[Get Back Here Boss]], took no more than three hits to defeat, and were usually no more powerful than the [[Mooks]] populating the rest of their respective levels.

* The first ''[[Donkey Kong Country]]'' game. The levels get increasingly harder, but all the bosses (except for K. Rool) are a cakewalk.

** ''Donkey Kong Country 2'' qualifies as well. The bosses are more challenging than those in the first game, but none of them will make you tear your hair out in frustration. Many of the levels, however, are absolutely brutal.

* ''[[I Wanna Be the Guy]]'' is like this to an extent. Both parts are [[Platform Hell|incredibly hard]], but the bosses are easier... "easi'''''er'''''" being the key word here.

* The original ''[[Prince of Persia]]'' has levels filled with precipitous falls and [[Spikes of Doom]] of the deadliest sort. The almost only boss in the game is Jaffar, who fights like all the other [[Mooks]] and can be killed just by pushing him off the platform if you get behind him. (This doesn't apply to the SNES version, which has completely different bosses and many more of them.)

* While ''[[Banjo Tooie]]'' wasn't really hard, the bosses actually got easier as the stages progressed, with the final boss being difficult more due to length than challenge. The sequel didn't have bosses per se, but the challenges offered by Grunty were all pathetically easy with the proper application of creative thinking. This is because the characters grow disproportionately powerful compared to the bosses, provided you find the items. There's no excusing [[Anticlimax Boss|Minji-Jongo]]. Try the bosses on Boss Replay, and the final boss suddenly becomes hair-pulling.

* ''[[New Super Marisa Land]]'''s bosses are, with the exception of the World 7 boss, much easier than the stages preceding them.

* ''[[Mega Man X|Megaman X6]]'' tends to have extremely brutal stages ([[That One Level|Blaze Heatnix and Metal Sharkplayer come to mind]]) followed by insultingly easy bosses in comparison. The only exception is Gate's second stage, which has both a difficult level, and two difficult boss fights (High Max and Gate himself). Played straight once again with Sigma, who's an absolute joke.

== [[Role Playing Game]] ==

* In the RPG ''[[The 7th Saga]]'', random encounters are invariably more dangerous than a typical boss; just walking from one town to the next requires a ton of [[Forced Level Grinding]]. There are a few [[That One Boss|obscenely overpowered bosses]], but they're [[Rubber Band AI|special]].

* The ''[[Final Fantasy]]'' series varies widely, but the most pronounced example of [[Boss Dissonance]] would likely be ''[[Final Fantasy II (Video Game)|Final Fantasy II]]''. Bosses are, with few exceptions, strategically simple to kill and not possessed of extraordinary strengths. The rest of the game is an [[Fake Difficulty|infamous]] veritable [[Nintendo Hard|nightmare]].

* [[Demons Souls]]:

* [[Touhou Mother]] is often stated to have fairly easy bosses, but many dangerous random encounters that make the dungeons themselves much more difficult to go through than any boss fight.

* ''[[The Spirit Engine 2]]'' is usually this type, since normal enemies can be quite difficult (generally they accomplish almost as much in one turn as a boss, except there'll be three of them and they mostly have enough health that you can't just hope they run out first) and are very numerous. Certain regular enemies also have armor values far outstripping the bosses, since the author learned his lesson after giving a few bosses in the first game too much armor; this means that dealing significant damage to them is only possible with a few specific moves. And that's ignoring the two sections where you have to fight several defensively-oriented groups of enemies on a time limit.

== [[Shoot'Em Up]] ==

** And in ''Thunder Force VI'', if you're using the Rynex-R, and have at least one Over Weapon gauge ready, most bosses will go down in at most ''five'' seconds. I'm not exaggerating. On [[Harder Than Hard|Maniac]] difficulty, this is a big relief from a normal shooter-turned-[[Bullet Hell]].

* ''Sly Spy'', an obscure [[Data East]] game, has extremely simple boss fights. All the actual bosses have only a single, easily dodgeable attack with the motorcycle and underwater levels being the worst offenders. However, some boss fights are just rushes of [[Elite Mooks]] which are very good at eating away at your health.

== [[Sports Game]] ==

** In general, while the levels are very difficult, the bosses ([[That One Boss|save for the Mothership]]) are relatively simple, especially if the player has used multiple deaths to level up weapons.

* In the various ''[[Final Fantasy Tactics]]'' games, bosses are almost always easier than regular battles. This is because you have five people and they have only one, so you can move five times as fast as them, and more often than not their attacks can't hit everyone at once, or take a long time to charge. Story battles also don't scale with you and you're always facing the same general type of [[Mooks]] (plus an occasional [[Elite Mook]]) from beginning to end while you unlock more and more ways to break the game over your knee.

* ''[[X-COM]]'''s end boss is technically a four tiles terrain with 40 armor, who dies if one of its tiles is destroyed, and is guarded by [[Demonic Spiders|Etherals, Sectopods, and Chryssalids]]. So you are basically trying to shoot a terrain tile (explosives deal a fixed 50% damage to terrain, other weapons deal between 25 and 75% damage), while trying to have at least one soldier survive [[Mind Control]] and [[One-Hit Kill]] for the final showdown.

== [[Wide Open Sandbox]] ==

* In ''[[Arkham City]]'' you will be killed by random groups of street thugs more often then Mr. Freeze, {{spoiler|Solomon Grundy}}, {{spoiler|Clayface}}, {{spoiler|Ras Al Ghul}} and {{spoiler|Deadshot}} combined especially if you're playing on Hard.

* No gunslinger in ''[[Red Dead Redemption]]'' is as deadly as a pack of wolves or a solitary cougar, or worse, a pack of bears.