That One Boss/Action Game/Castlevania

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Examples of That One Boss in Castlevania include:

  • Castlevania features Death. The fight is significantly harder than the previous bosses as well as the final boss, you can only take four hits before you die (assuming you got through the ridiculously hard corridor without taking damage), and even after you kill him, his sickles remained active. Many a player has beaten Death only to die while trying to exit the stage because of those things. He is That One Boss so often in the series that fans tend to complain when he's not.
    • In Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse, Death returns with essentially the same attack pattern as he had in the first game. But players quickly discovered that the boss fight wasn't over even after you emptied his energy meter. Oh, no - he just comes back with a second energy meter as a giant ghoulish head that moved in a looping pattern that was very hard to dodge.
    • In Aria of Sorrow, he could summon vertical energy beams that chase you. If you're close to a corner you can't evade it. Once you knock him out of this phase, he'll pull out a Double Scythe and throw/dash around with it.
      • Death in Aria was tough mainly because of the double scythe. His three attacks with it all hit hard and are fast, and the fastest is also the hardest one to dodge.
    • In Dawn of Sorrow, it's not too bad until phase two. Now he can teleport right in front of you and spam sickles. The best attack is when he spams GIANT SKULLS FROM OFF SCREEN that take 80% of your life. If you're hit by one, you are likely to recoil into another one. Fun!
    • Even in Harmony of Dissonance which was pathetically easy, Death's second form could sometimes juggle you into a corner and shred you without a chance to heal.
    • In Portrait of Ruin, he summons these weird floating hands that grab onto you and hold you in place while he hacks you to bits. You're supposed to have the character who isn't trapped free the one who is, but the timing is really hard to pull off. Even better is that he switches his weaknesses at random between Light and Darkness.
    • In Order of Ecclesia... well, he lives up to the game. That damn black spiral (which can only be dodged, counter-intuitively, by getting close to him) is probably the worst part.
    • His Harmony of Despair incarnation might top all of the above. First off, the bastard turns invisible and moves outside of his quarters and actively attacks the other players with his flying scythes, which become nigh impossible to avoid in certain areas. The only way to stop him from doing this, which is not explained at all in-game, is to align the two spotlights on each side of the map to reveal him and move him back to his room, or to deal enough damage to him, which can be difficult due to all the other enemies you need to avoid at the same time.
    • Death from Rondo of Blood deserves mention too. To start with, the battle is annoyingly long, having three phases. In the first phase, Death uses his usual routine of spamming sickles all over the place that are hard to dodge, and he also likes to float up in the air out of your reach. In the second phase, he goes to the background, and shoots a wave of huge skulls into the foreground at you. What's worse, though, is that if you get hit by even one skull, Death will launch another wave. You have to dodge an entire wave in order to progress to the third phase. In the third phase, Death comes back to the foreground and stands on the ground to fight you. His attacks now are easier to dodge, but you're probably low on health by this point. Also, you can't throw crosses at him anymore, as he'll just block them and counter with a magic attack.
      • It's even worse in the SNES Dracula X. It's the same fight, but it takes place on the top of the clock tower rather than a ship. This gives you much less room to move around and dodge the sickles in his first form. What makes it worse is that Death himself couldn't hurt Richter in Ro B by touching him, but in Dracula X, he not only does damage, but curses Richter, making him move much slower. To add to that, his spinning attack in his second form must be dodged by leaping towards the edge of the clock tower as Death spirals toward you. Which means that 50% of the time, you'll overshoot your jump and fall off.
    • In Super Castlevania IV, Death doesn't really have any special tricks or anything aside from trying to suck you in which is arguably the easiest part to avoid and damage him with. It's just a nightmare literally because of the scythes and how quickly they come with bizarre orientations.
  • Castlevania also has Frankenstein's Monster. By himself, he was an irritatingly large target to avoid. The real issue here was Igor, an invincible Fleaman that shot fireballs. Dodging the huge monster, the unpredictably moving Igor, and the fireballs at once is notoriously difficult.
    • Castlevania 64 ramped up Frankenstein to ridiculous steroid addict levels by making him basically invincible and giving him a CHAINSAW. And, for good measure, Frankenstein is accompanied by two demonic dogs who 1) stun you so Frank can catch up and 2) run considerably faster than you. They're invincible too.
  • The two Zombie Dragons in Circle Of The Moon have caused many a restart. You're constantly trying to hit their heads (their weak-points) which move around constantly, all while trying to avoid getting smacked, running straight into their massive bodies, getting decimated by their breath attacks, and avoiding the rocks that constantly fall from the ceiling. It's a war of attrition that's hard to win, especially since killing one dragon will cause the other to devour its corpse, restoring a big chunk of health for your troubles.
    • Adramelech too, made all the more jarring by the fact that the previous three bosses were all complete wusses. You might think the same will apply to him, only to see Hugh get violently flung out of his boss room as a tease of what exactly you're in for. While his weak point (also his head) isn't hard to hit, he has a ton of health and is constantly assaulting you with storms upon storms of projectiles, many of which hit incredibly hard and are tough to dodge.
    • Speaking of Hugh? He puts up one hell of a fight himself, though that's to be expected since he's your rival in vampire hunting. He's fast, powerful, and relentlessly chases you down with powerful sword strikes while throwing out subweapons that are just like yours. And once you've got him down to around half his health, he starts pulling out new moves such as his own version of the Pluto + Serpent card combo to throw double subweapons, as well as summon multiple spectral swords that restore his HP if they skewer you.
    • The Battle Arena's Minotaur Room. When encountered as enemies, Minotaurs are already Demonic Spiders thanks to their HP and their hard-hitting attack that covers damn-near the entire screen. But when fought in the arena, you're forced to fight 7 of them at once, all without magic or any breathing room since three are immediately within swinging distance with those massive clubs of theirs. Even if you win, you'll spend at least half the fight flying ass-over-teakettle as they constantly smack you across the room.
    • Capping off this game is what many consider to be one of Dracula's toughest fights yet. His human form is a total joke, but that changes once transforms into a demon. You have to hit his tiny weak spot while he's pummeling you with meteors and poisoning you with swarms of toxic globs, and once he loses half his health? That's when he breaks out the stupidly fast charge attacks that wipe out most of your health bar with one hit, and summons swarms of bats that will whittle you down and keep you from hitting his disembodied weak point. Since you're not a Belmont (or his own son) and don't have access to the Vampire Killer, it's only naturally that he'd be harder to fight than usual. But come on!
  • Symphony of the Night has The Doppelgangers, which can be quite tough if you don't know about the Red Rust trick.
    • Beelzebub can also put up a tough fight, especially when he's almost dead. He's just a head and part of a shoulder, near the ceiling, surrounded by giant flies. The axe makes it somewhat easier, but it still takes a while.
  • Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin has the vampire sisters Stella and Loretta. The vampires' attacks deal enormous damage, especially their ice sword technique, and you have to keep them off of Charlotte for about fifteen seconds so she can cast a particular spell. You only need to hit one of them with it, but there's very little you can do to ensure that they're in place when Charlotte completes it.
  • Aria has, aside from the already mentioned Death, "J". If you don't know about his resistance to holy damage, and you try to use your Infinity+1 Sword against him (or don't have a choice), he can easily be That One Boss.
    • And after the fight, Soma actually notes that he was holding back, to the point where your average vampire hunter is tougher than that. Makes you wonder how ungodly hard he'd be if he WASN'T holding back. He's also far faster than every other boss in the game and moves so erratically that you basically have to have to constantly use Black Panther to get away from him.
  • Gergoth from Dawn of Sorrow is a pain in the ass; he's huge (in a one-screen room), shoots a frickin laser beam that sweeps across most of the room, and the only "safe place" you can attack from is directly under his head, even though he walks back and forth and has a tendency to release poisonous and petrifying gases from that spot. And then he gets faster. To top it off, he does way more damage than previous bosses; if you haven't been power-leveling, he'll only need a few hits to kill you.
  • Eligor, from Order of Ecclesia. One of the bosses in Dracula's Castle, Eligor is a giant metal centaur. He seems easy enough at first. At first.
    • Explanation: it's a Colossus Climb boss. Aside from using glyphs such as Redire to skip parts of the battle (which in itself is tough to get right), there are multiple phases to Eligor. Firstly, you must destroy these red knee blocks on the front and back of his legs while he's attacking you every so often. You have to climb underneath him to get to the back ones, and it's not that easy to do due to Collision Damage. He also has bows and arrows at the front and back, which, while destroyable, are tough to avoid (especially in Hard mode), and if you don't destroy them, they'll cause problems. Once you've finally destroyed his knee things, he'll buck down and you can climb up to his back, where you can hit his head, which is how you kill him. If you haven't destroyed the bows, you will get arrow spammed. Even if you have, he obviously tries to knock you off. The patterns of his attacks are VERY hard to predict and memorise, and he does a lot of damage to you at the best of times even before this. If you get knocked off (likely to start with, he attacks in awkward ways which often involve ducking and hoping you don't slide too far into him for Collision Damage), you'll have to take down the knee things at the back again, albeit with less health.
  • Speaking of Ecclesia, what about Blackmore? Admittedly, he's not as hard as Eligor but he's a real pain in the ass if you want the medal. Especially when he does that fire breathing combo of his, and it really doesn't help that you're more or less stuck in the corner for the entire fight. And he'll kill you in about 4 hits, tops.
    • Brachyura. Whereas Arthroverta was a pushover, and the Giant Skeleton was a pain, but still doable, with Brachyura, if you don't figure out how to dodge all of its attacks, you're dead. Doesn't help that he spends half the fight invincible.
    • Gravedorcus, the land shark boss in Oblivion Ridge. Not only does he spend half the fight underground, but that attack where he jumps out of the ground is a nightmare to dodge.
    • Then there's Albus. He has a crapload of attacks, all of which are hard to dodge. His standard gunshot, which gives you no warning whatsoever, his flaming kick, which makes it very hard to jump over him, and his Vertical Shot, which is a pain to dodge, are probably the worst offenders. There's one saving grace though: he's the one of the two bosses you don't take damage from by touching him. So you can just run or slide by behind him to dodge all of his attacks.
  • In Castlevania: Curse of Darkness, every boss starting with the first encounter with Trevor "Asshole" Belmont is That One Boss. Trevor is the the third boss, by the way.
    • Especially Dullahan, what with his shockwave attack. And the boss before him? Trevor, again. And of course, he's even worse the second time.
  • Harmony of Despair has the boss of the downloadable Chapter 7. It's a replica of Astarte from Portrait of Ruin, and she has every attack it had back then, including the ability to Charm male characters, which is nigh impossible to avoid. And you can still be hurt by the boss while you're charmed. There's even an achievement for killing a charmed teammate! The only real way to avoid being charmed outside of precision-timed double jumps is to simply stay out of the battle if you aren't playing as Charlotte or Shanoa (they're immune to charm.), or beat the level solo with Charlotte. Or Shanoa.
    • Puppet Master, the 2nd stage boss. He sends out a series of exploding dolls, moves around the entire map, and creates puppets which he can place inside the iron maidens scattered around the map which he then proceeds to magically swap with yourself. And the iron maidens can kill you instantly. You CAN destroy the puppets, but chances are you need very good synchronization with your teammates in order to do so, they each take a set number of hits to destroy, and the more players there are, the more hits they take, maxing out somewhere around 30 with the maximum of 6 players. Good luck hitting the damn things enough times in the few seconds it takes him to place one inside an iron maiden without a team of Blender Somas.
      • The Iron Maidens only kill you instantly on Hard Mode. On normal they still do a crap load of damage. If you plan on playing online, chances are all the games you play will be on hard mode, woe be to you if you haven't grinded yourself in singleplayer.
    • Stage 10 has 8-bit Dracula, who fills the screen with ridiculously fast fireballs that can only be dodged with precision-timed jumps, and trying to avoid them by jumping over him just causes him to do an extremely fast backdash into a corner followed by the usual fireball spread. If you manage to beat him, he then naturally changes to his second form, which has an extremely quick dash attack that does colossal amounts of damage and a fireball spiral that takes yet some more precision jumping to avoid. If players try to hide outside the boss room, he counters by attacking with an even harder-to-dodge fireball spiral that goes through walls to boot.
    • Stage 11 has Ryukotsuki, the final boss of Getsu Fuuma Den who has 3 forms: the first one isn't particularly hard to kill, but you can easily get hit by his wild leaps if you don't stay grounded. The second one is slow, but he can block attacks high and low and throws poison daggers to wear you down for the third form, which can summon the 3 minibosses from the stage that you need to kill to be able to fight him, possesses a hard-to-reach weak point that's only vulnerable for a few seconds at a time and loves spamming fireballs that bounce all over the screen, split into smaller fireballs and petrify you upon hit.
  • Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge has Soleil Belmont. He has a ton of health, his whip has the same range as yours and does a hell of a lot of damage, and he can throw homing swords which are difficult to dodge. Exploiting his AI is practically required to defeat him.
  • From the Lords of Shadow DLC Resurrection, we have The Forgotten One. Easily harder than any other boss in the game, and for mostly all the wrong reasons: see Lo S' YMMV entry for more details.
  • The Doppleganger from Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse. He's armed with your characters' most powerful special attacks and can take a quarter of your health whenever you get hit. Not helped by the fact that the level to get to the boss is just as annoying, so unless you've memorized the level quite well, you're more than likely to be battered and bruised by the time the fight starts.
  • The Werewolf from Castlevania Chronicles is easily one of the toughest bosses in the game, rivaling Death in terms of frustration. Reaching her with full life is a problem in and of itself, since her stage requires lots of memorization. She herself moves extremly quickly, and likes to hang onto places where the slow axe is the only weapon that can reach her. While she's bounding around like a maniac, she's also tearing off pieces of rock and the clock tower's numerals to throw at you. Though they can be destroyed by whipping them, most of the time the angle they're at makes it nigh impossible to react and whip them. Finally, at that point in the game, a mere 4 (5 on Arrange mode) hits will send Simon to the grave, meaning you have to fight your way to her again.


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