That One Boss/Driving Game

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Examples of That One Boss in Driving Games include:

  • Initial D Arcade Stage brings us Takumi Fujiwara, the protagonist of the Initial D manga and anime. On Myougi (ver. 1-3) or Lake Akina (4), he's a Warmup Boss who's test-driving Itsuki's AE85, but when you race him again--this time for real--on Akina, expect to use up several credits trying to defeat him.
  • Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune 2 has Sonoda, who you race twice in Story Mode, on stages 10 and 55. Good God, this guy loves to block you, often causing you to run into a barrier or traffic car in the process. Even in Maximum Tune 3 onwards, which makes Story Mode much easier, he's still an asshole compared to other opponents. And if you lose, he mocks you by telling you that "your style is boring."
    • And 30 (which is usually the toughest one). Still even that's a walk in the raceway park compared to 59, where 1. you face Akio and Tatsuya 2. on the shortest course they race 3. which ends at one of the most technical sections in the entire game. It will take you a while to win this stage. A long, long while. (This may also qualify as a Wake Up Boss stage, as it takes places amidst one of the easiest blocks of stages in the game.)
  • In Diddy Kong Racing you have Wizpig. Every boss in the game is exceptionally tough, but you're given boost balloons, zipper panels, and missile balloons to get ahead. Then comes Wizpig, who springs one hell of a nasty surprise on you: the power-ups you relied on for the other bosses? They're nowhere to be found aside from a few zip panels placed haphazardly around his tricky racetrack. Every person who has played this game agrees that while you've got enough wiggle room to mess up a few times against the other bosses, doing a single thing wrong at any point during the race against Wizpig will cost you the race. This means that you must play perfectly, and it also requires you to take advantage of some serious out-of-the-box strategies such as exploiting the boss's ability to kick you forward, using a special speed-boosting trick that the game might never tell you about, and having outside knowledge of each character's hidden stats since Wizpig's nearly impossible to beat with most of them. When this guy says "You can't beat ME!", he isn't kidding! The remake fixed this however, as Wizpig has magically fallen out of shape and runs slower than you drive.
    • After beating Wizpig, you race him again in outer space, where he's now riding on a rocket. While the rocket is actually slower than Wizpig on foot, there's the slight problem of you being in the middle of a Macross Missile Massacre and/or flying through extremely narrow passageways. Getting hit by anything has a pretty strong tendency to throw you off course, and landing in front of a pillar pretty much means that you've already lost the race. See how bad it is, and note especially the room at roughly 1:15.
      • And after that it's safe to assume that the nightmare is over, right? Wrong. There is a second mode which plays all the courses backwards, so good luck learning how to race him again.
    • Tricky, the triceratops boss of the first world is already a tough customer during his first race. But when you challenge him to a rematch, he's added a bunch of hazards that will screw you out of a win. The gigantic stone pillars will fall over and cut off access to most of the track, sometimes crushing you outright if you're unlucky enough. The boulders, likewise, will also crush you, and have weird, unpredictable movement patterns. He's no Wizpig, sure, but it doesn't stop him from being an obnoxious opponent.
    • Bubbler the Octopus, both races. You have to race him in the hovercraft, a slippery vehicle that's annoying to drive on the best of days, and he's constantly laying down mines and bubbles to slow you down. The bubbles are especially bad, because they trap you for several seconds while he can swim ahead unopposed. Get caught in one even once, and he'll likely get so far ahead that you can't hope to close the distance before the race is over.
  • If you don't take him out early, he can accumulate an insurmountable 10-second lead, driving the course perfectly. Some races, you never even see him, except off in the distance at the front of the starting line. Even if you manage to catch him with a power play or route changer, he can still slip past you with a fraction of a second to the finish line. If you guessed Raptor, from Split Second, you're correct!
  • Blur has That One Objective: in order to unlock the final boss challenge, you need to maintain a speed of 125mph for an entire lap. Even the A-Class cars are hard-pressed to stay above 125 in hard turns.
  • F-Zero GX, one of the hardest racing games ever (try the story mode on normal, let alone hard or very hard), had That One Boss as level 7 in the story mode, the Grand Prix. You are on one of the most unforgiving tracks in the game, with lava pits and very few rails, and extremely sparse health. The difficulty comes from the computer giving the Black Bull (your main enemy) extra speed and also imbuing the rest of the NPC's a desire to murder you. Until this point, you've never faced very aggressive AI at all, in fact, you've been the one being aggressive with attempting to damage opposing vehicles. You are also used to only needing 1 hit to take out an enemy or at least put them very far behind you, but Black Bull will shrug off the first attack and FOR SOME REASON get a small boost which means you have to use precious energy to boost again to kill him. There are two ways to win: Either try to take out Black Bull at the beginning with two immediate hits (very difficult with everyone else trying to hit you and the random speed boosts given to him), or to survive the first lap, and then use boost more effectively than your opponents and race perfectly to stay just behind Black Bull and ahead of everyone else, with the hope that at the VERY END, you can purposely hit explosive mines to get enough of a speed boosts to pass him just before the finish line, of course without hitting too many or you die.
  • Normally, all the Ridge Racer secret cars are earned through very tough one-on-one races, but R4: Ridge Racer Type 4 is a little bit different. Earning cars works like this: you're given two choices for each playthrough of the main story: your racing team, which determines your sliding scale of speed vs handling, and your car manufacturer, which influences whether you use a Drift (classic Ridge Racer) or Grip (no drifting but a simplified turning mechanic). Each has a nationality: American, Japanese, French or Italian. If you're taking on the secret cars with a version with a mismatched nationality (e.g. the Italian manufacturer by way of the French team) then the secret cars aren't that tough to earn. However, their true versions when you match team nationality and manufacturer are something on the order of anywhere between 10-30 MPH faster than the mismatched versions, and faster still than you, and this is all if you have the best cars up to that point. They can be hell to complete, to say nothing of what it takes to earn a car that even comes close to chasing them down. To qualify this, R4 is a very unforgiving Ridge Racer title. Touching anything in the normal game will substantially slow you down while your flawless opponents whiz by you. Both handling styles demand great precision from you, or else you will crash into either sidewall or the completely-oblivious traffic around you. You have to nail almost every single turn in order to win races, especially the last four ones out of eight, where you're required to in order to advance. A perfect run on one track will only give you a good chance of winning a race. Imagine what precision it takes to outrun one of the "true" extra cars.

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