Demon’s Souls had already embraced the opaque design and challenges of classic games, adding names like Ornstein and Smough to the wince-inducing canon of legendary video-game big bads. Then a wave of nostalgia brought the boss back.

Open-world and online games flourished, player choice became paramount, and boss fights in games that felt otherwise wide open - like the notoriously underwhelming boss confrontations in otherwise acclaimed games such as Bioshock or Deus Ex: Human Revolution - ended up feeling like dead weight. Bosses were effectively bottlenecks at a time where games were expanding. ”įor much of the 2000s, it seemed as if the concept of the video-game boss was on its last legs. After much deliberation, we have determined that Guitar Hero 3 ’s “Through the Fire and Flames” and Top Gun ’s “Aircraft Carrier” are more Levels than they are Bosses, and we have recategorized them accordingly. We had to, since FromSoftware games somehow keep getting harder. We originally published this list in 2017, and have updated it to reflect the most recent, cutting edge advancements in boss difficulty.

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