now i’m curious what your favorite encounters are in your fave games? could be pokemon or other stuff. are they thematically impactful, do they have banger music, all of the above?
other ones for me:
gold vs red
zidane vs kuja
that fight in mother 3 made me bawl my eyes out during a combat encounter which is the first and last time that’s ever happened
yakuza 7 spoilers ichiban vs kiryu
sora vs lingering will is cooler than any actual fight in KH3. the music, the sheer “wtf is going ON” of it, the way it becomes the ultimate skillcheck of your understanding of KH2’s battle system…absolute top 3 for me. i think i tend to gravitate towards secret boss fights because of this one specifically.
there are TONS of good AC ones (i am talking about both ACs here but particularly Ace Combat) the final fight in AC4 is a baby mint canon-event. so is the MG3 fight.
Phantom Train because it never will not be funny to suplex a train
Ventus’ final battle in Birth By Sleep
Deeply stupid answers: Louse from Bonkers. Chill Penguin from Mega Man X, ONLY because of speedrun reasons. The first is dumb and I hate it the second because it’s the first real boss so you see him after almost every real reset, and he’s dumb. Edit whoops I thought this was “fights you won’t forget” not “favorite” lmao. These two are deeply stupid and I hate them.
I’m going through my list of games and my memories and realizing I have incredible edgy tendencies in my favorites lmao
Some of these are relevant to my childhood, and others are just plain rad, and I also generally avoid recent picks when making these lists, so no Gabriel Ultrakill or CHAOS even though they’d probably make it
This dude was my Edgy Awakening. I was the dweeb who did Tenseiken Slash when play fighting against my cousins, but this shithead completely rewrote my brain sinapses for a good decade. “I’m you but better and cooler” destroyed my mind, as well as that kickass finishing move that follows the same logic. Its also one of the two jRPGs that I remember losing the fight because I thought it was one of those unwinnable bosses, only to have a sad realization (the other one was Id from Xenogears but I don’t think that’s a good fight lmao)
There’s two games I’ve finished and immediately started a new save file, Metal Gear Solid 3 was already mentioned, the other one was God Hand. Azel is another mirror match, “I’m you but better and cooler” edgy rival, and Clover/Platinum’s original “button mash while you oraoraoraoraora” boss. Bonus points for intentionally riding on the edgy wave, down to calling himself Devil Hand for no reason other to sound evil and the completely unnecessary sunglasses.
Hel from Boktai
This isn’t actually a fantastic boss fight by itself but if there’s one thing that makes me go more apeshit than fighting against the edgelord rival, its the edgelord rival joining your side for one encounter. Same reason why I’d attempt to put DMC3 penultimate boss here, if it weren’t for that fact that you lose your cool abilities in that fight.
Everhood’s Frog Wrath
I’m a power metal bitch, as well as a long, tiring bossfight with multiple stages bitch. The major issue with those is that you’re often going to feel exhausted from restarting them every time you die. Everhood is clever enough to give you checkpoints in its longer fights, while still making it challenging. A secret boss in a rhythm game pulling out every instrument it got to smite you is simply chef’s kiss.
I don’t think Sekiro is FROM’s more well rounded game, but it was the one where the combat really peaked for me. I’m not really fond of Bloodborne’s zero defense, all dodge ways, and Dark Souls/Elden Ring are too slow. Focusing on defending, having a large window to parry and still giving the option to dodge was the most engaged I felt with these entries. I wish this game hadn’t been tarnished by the whole pathetic difficulty debacle from Gamers™, and also that you could summon players/NPCs like every other soulskiroborne, but FROM gotta FROM. Genichiro is the final lesson and high point of the game, even counting the sudden tutorial in the second half of the fight. Of course, like every other bloodsekirouls, the second half of the game goes downhill immediately.
Meme entry: Assassin’s Creed II’s Rodrigo Borgia
The last boss of this game is a fist fight against the Pope. They never reached these heights again.
this is one of the best tropes in games and it feels so specific to games as a medium because they require you to engage with the medium directly. it never stops being fire. Mega Man v Zero , Dante v Vergil, Miles Edgeworth vs Phoenix Wright[1], Bayonetta v Jeanne, it never stops hitting
proceeds to forget every single video game i’ve ever played
no but uhh one of the ones that comes to the top of my head immediately is the Rawk Hawk boss fight in Paper Mario and The Thousand year door.
Part of it is bc of the music be like, I still love htis so much lol
but another part of it is bc i think this was like… when my siblings, cousins, and me were still really into WWE so having like, a pro-wrestling-like arc in paper mario got us hype LOL
Another one of my favs is in pokemon mystery dungeon explorers of the sky while doing the extra mission “In the future of darkness” (I think that’s what it was called) getting to play as one of the villains from the main story + grovyle and celebi while fighting against primal dialga again (honestly both the main primal dialga fight and the one in this side scenario hit me hard aaaa)
The Asriel Dreemur encounter is also one that’s going to be in my memories forever too. I still cry whenever i watch someone do that fight for the first time.
The “you go up against someone who has the same capabilities as you” thing crops up all over the place but I did say “oh shit” out loud when it happened in Transistor
Thing’s got an absolutely menacing theme, terrorizes you on random quests for an entire batch of quests; and there’s a bird that always calls it to your position if you run across it.
And then, at the end of said batch of quests, they tell you to hunt it. I’ve never felt this intimidated by a quest description before or since.
Devourer of Gods (Terraria Calamity Mod)
It’s just a Terraria worm boss! And yet, somehow, it’s the sickest fight in the entire engine. Everything is just right. The difficulty is just right, the music and phase transition hit just as hard on your 20th attempt as on the first, absolute masterpiece.
Humongous-ass spoiler for The Outer Wilds DO NOT OPEN unless you know what this probably is or are 100% convinced you will never play it (The Outer Wilds)
Following the Quantum Moon series of puzzles (which make you feel like an absolute BRAIN GENIUS almost every step along the way), you arrive on the quantum moon… and meet a living member of the extinct progenitor race you’ve been finding traces of all across the solar system.
You get to TALK to them (in a limited way that makes sense in-story, using your translator tool)!!! You get answers to a bunch of questions, and a whole bunch of new questions on top. It’s such a humongous payoff that’s not even the end of the game.
The final final boss (Hollow Knight)
The Radiance fight itself is fine, but what I absolutely adore is the visual of the knight pulling his nail on the fucking sun, as it morphs into the creature that is about to end your entire existence. I’m a sucker for strong key visuals like that and it took a lot of restraint to just do this one rather than this entire list being just those.
The biographer (Caves of Qud)
Ok I’ve literally been treating this game as a second full-time job for the past week and a half, and I’ve finished it (as far as you can, anyway).
At the top of the Tomb of the Eaters you meet the biographer. You’re not looking for him; you’re just trying to turn off some machine. But getting to it requires you becoming a sultan and entombing yourself. As part of the ritual, the biographer makes murals of your life.
They physically walk around the room carving out murals that describe events and achievements from your adventure (discoveries, defeated legendaries, inventions…). It’s just a kind of thing I’ve never seen done before on this scale and granularity.
the mecha one. (Zero Ranger)
I’m not particularly into mecha, but this game is the first time I went HELL YEAH MINE IS THE DRILL THAT WILL PIERCE THE HEAVENS. You know the part. It rules.
"the final final boss (Octopath Traveler 2)
Ok I don’t think it’s a particularly controversial statement to say that the final “united” storyline in OT1 fucking suuuuuuuuuucked, and Galdera is the kind of boss you go watch a youtube clear of because fuck that.
I am delighted to say that the final final story boss of OT2 rules and is good and really makes full use of your eight travelers. And the music is octopath music, so, like. yeah.
