Bad: I am going with Mehrunes Dagon as well. Really there was no fight for you to join in just sit back and watch Martin destroy him.

Good: Well its not one boss but the final boss run on Ninja Gaiden: Black. You get to fight four of the most fun bosses from throughout the game and an old one to end it but this time with some new tricks.

I'm semi-surprised Jack of Blades from the Fable games (original and TLC) hasn't been mentioned as Bad Boss yet. All the backstory building up around him, with the all-powerful sword, and then in the end you just end up pincushioning him.

Good end boss: Baal from Diablo 2: LoD. I thoroughly enjoyed fighting him because of the atmosphere of the fight, what was in stake, and how hard he is to fight against as anything other than a Barbarian or a Tank Druid. The fact that you fight in the Worldstone chamber gave me quite a few wow points that it kept me trying to beat him after I was killed 4 times as a Paladin.

Bad end boss: 343 Guilty Spark from Halo 3. I thought I'd end up fighting the Gravemind towards the end of the game, but fighting him felt like a big middle finger to me. The boss was a friggen joke to me, like how Yahtzee said, it's like fighting a wheelchair bound cross-eyed hobbit while you're armed with the BFG9000.

vasudean:
Good end boss: Baal from Diablo 2: LoD. I thoroughly enjoyed fighting him because of the atmosphere of the fight, what was in stake, and how hard he is to fight against as anything other than a Barbarian or a Tank Druid. The fact that you fight in the Worldstone chamber gave me quite a few wow points that it kept me trying to beat him after I was killed 4 times as a Paladin.

I killed him without needing to use one potion with a well built skeleton summonancer. All i lost was one skeletal mage. He is not to hard but he is pretty fun for a basic boss

Good end Boss: I always liked Andross from Lylat Wars. The harder version that is, the one that had killer eyes and brains!
Bad end boss: Guilty Spark from Halo 3. Not the most climactic way to end such a big trilogy. At all.
IT'S A FUCKING TINY ROBOT TESTICLE WITH LAZORZ!

Sin and Punishment's final boss. You have to fight a planet. A planet. That throws meteors and laserbeams at you. God, that was amazing.

Bad boss... Metroid Prime. Turns from some kind of spider-crab- rock into a floating squid. The hardest thing about that battle was trying to stop laughing for long enough to shoot the bloody thing.

Great boss - Dullahan from Golden Sun the Lost Age. Not the final boss but by far the most difficult. He can attack 3 times per fight round. Golden sun is a turn based RPG for those of you that don't know.

Bad boss (short list) - Red Steel had a boss? really? Halo 3. Geddon from WoW. You didn't know you were the living bomb?

Good Boss - The strider you face in Half Life 2 Episode 1, where it destroys scenery around you like an angry god. Makes you feel so badass to finally take it down.

Bad Boss - Armoured Core 2: Another Age. Because you had to play through the game to get to it.

Good End Boss:

Malak from KotOR I. I found myself really sympathising with Revan and how Malak had backstabbed him. It felt good to cut that guy up. And when I did the trick to turn him into a dancing Twi'lek it was even better.

Bad End Boss:

Mr Mohawk from Halo 2... One thing I enjoyed about Halo was that the few 'Bosses' it had didn't feel like bosses. The first time you met Hunters was just the Covenant sending in the cavalry. I didn't see the Prophet you killed in H2 as a boss either; you just walked up, boarded and punched his skull in. Tartarus was just boring. The only way to spruce it up was to fight him while in a Banshee and the novelty of that wore off quick.

Good End Boss:
Ansem in KH1, just the way it seems to go on forever, and you fight in the different places in different ways. Although it wasn't overly difficult, it was one of the few times the build up was worth it.
Gnasty Gnorc in Spyro 1, its kinda funny how after all the build up, most of the fight is spent with him running away from you dropping gems.

Bad End Boss:
Yu Yevon in FFX, I loved the whole game and most of the bosses in it were pretty good, especially all the Seymours.
The penultimate boss, Braska's final aeon was good and providing something of a challenge, although I found earlier bosses harder. But Yu Yevon was just a joke. Fighting all the past aeons was cool but I beat them all in pretty much one hit (Yuna's Holy with damage limit broke + 1MP). But having auto-life so it was impossible to die, and Yu Yevon himself was beat in a couple of hits from Holy too. I was just expecting so much more, when I found enemies inside sin harder. On top of that, I was expecting a person not some weird flying blob to be Yu Yevon. I just think the whole thing could have been handled a lot better with it being a person and it being a cut-scene after defeating Braska's Final Aeon. But I'll let it pass as it was such a good game.

Good: The Boss, Liquid Snake, Liquid Oceleot, Vamp, Dagoth Ur Tes3, Dagonn, Tes4, Elder God Legacy of Kain: Defiance. FF7: Crisis Core both 'end bosses' were awesome fights, specially the 'last fight' which wasn't really a 'boss'. Zack could kick Clouds ass! Kefka FF6.

Bad: FF7; Sepiroth, Seriously, you had nothing but limit breaks, it was just pathetically easy! Bioshock end boss, Enchanted Arms last boss kinda sucked imo, but it did have a Twist I DIDN'T expect... man that gay guy was annoying... Final Boss in Rogue Galaxy kinda sucked, only because I never actually beat it... Man that sucker is hard... when your 20 levels to low. :P

Meh: Assassins Creed end boss, XenoSagas end boss, but you don't really play xenosaga for the gameplay, you play it for the story. ;), and the Neverwinter Nights end bosses...
I mean, EVERY expansion, every GAME has the SAME BOSS, and the SAME ENDING!
Every ending is the same, you defeat the big bad guy who wants to destroy the world, then a cave crashes over your head and you die. :P

Good End Boss - Serious Sam
Dude was freakin' huge. I loved that. Firing off gigantic cannon balls, seeing how far up they could go and still only just about hitting him in the neck.

Bad End Boss - Serious Sam 2
I was expecting a lot, what I got was some shitty wizard in a robe. However, the pre-fight fight was epic. It starts off easy, wide open area... you can see the monsters coming for miles, quite easy to pick them off... but then they just keep coming, before you know it you're running for your life backwards and firing off every piece of ammunition you've got.

Good Boss: Saren from Mass Effect, I know that a lot of petulance and hate has been thrown at this guy but seriously, he's a boss with emotion. You can see how wracked with Guilt he is and want to put him out of his misery, and I also like the fact you can talk him into doing it himself, ending his life against the Reaper's will. The only part I hated was the end part, an emotional scene where you have finally slain the bastard, then he gets Borged. Disappointment. Then again Seth Green piloted a space ship so I'm not complaining about this game.

Bad Boss: Jack of Blades, both mortal and Dragon form. The first, meh, if you get enough spells and Bow points you can take the bugger down fairly quickly, but the second incarnatuion was just salt in the wound. It would've been better if you fought him as a living god, not a god damn dragon. Wow, he stops and does bugger all while you slash at his nostril cavity, the possibilities are limitless.

Good Boss: Malak from KotOR 1 (the ONLY KotOR game). Everything leading up to it made the final fight full of emotion, and fighting in a big room with a huge space battle just outside the windows is cool

Bad Boss: 500 lb nun chuck guy at the end of the tutorial part of Ninja Gaiden. For being the first freaking boss in the game he was ridiculously hard and the power of his constant blocking and attacks felt cheap. the only way to do anything to him was to constantly do that "flying cicada" or something attack where you jump off a wall and slash down.

Good: Dr. Wallace Breen in HL2. He didn't do anything himself but being allowed to pummel his machine with the corpses of his underlings was amusing.

Bad:
The demon samurai in Condemned.

Anything in Jericho, the 1-click-gimmick ones in particular(lighthammer, corpse behemoths, the first set of sumerians, the firstborn himself) as well as the "keep shooting untill it stops shooting back" crowd(maltheus, the gladiators, blind behemoths, vicus, final group of sumerians) and the swarms of flying cultists whenever the developers had no idea of what to use as boss instead(end of act 1...)

Roberta, Robert and Al'Mualim in Assasin's creed; block block block counter block block block counter. Srry i spoiled the gameplay for the entire last hour or so.

Any rts map where the final boss is a single rediculously powerful unit. At that point strategy goes out of the window and you just zerg it with whatever you got.

Sovereign Incarnate from mass effect, all he does is jump arround and shoot rockets.

Everthing from gears of war exept the brumak, bezerkers are plain stupid with the clucky movement, the corpser is just... meh and the same applies to the seeders. RAAM himself is plain impossible without co-op because the ally ai is so retarded(hint: no melee on a guy who wields a 25mm gatling gun as sidearm please)

Bad bosses - MK and a vast range of other fighting games, where the end boss is someone who can kill you in two hits, and has all sorts of near unblockable undodgable attacks...

Good bosses - The goldfish in Earthworm Jim, after getting thru a nightmare level where he's been throwing armies at you , you get to his room, where he's in his bowl on a table...and...
You touch him once and knock the bowl off the table and its level over :D
Just such a nice spin on usual boss battles.

I don't really have any good end bosses - I suppose killing Sephiroth in FF7 was okay.

Worst End Boss: This is a toss up between Final Fantasy IX and X. With Final Fantasy IX - who the hell was Necron and why should I care? With Final Fantasy 7, you know Sephiroth is the big bad guy, and you fight him and kill him. With Final Fantasy IX - you kill the guy you THINK is the main villian... and then out of nowhere comes a different guy. You never hear of him except at the VERY end, and he looks stupid. And with Final Fantasy X, you fight against a squiggly white ball with tentacles, and you can't even die. It was terrible. Having said that, both games are great, with the exception of the lousy end bosses.

Korolev:
I don't really have any good end bosses - I suppose killing Sephiroth in FF7 was okay.

Worst End Boss: This is a toss up between Final Fantasy IX and X. With Final Fantasy IX - who the hell was Necron and why should I care? With Final Fantasy 7, you know Sephiroth is the big bad guy, and you fight him and kill him. With Final Fantasy IX - you kill the guy you THINK is the main villian... and then out of nowhere comes a different guy. You never hear of him except at the VERY end, and he looks stupid.

I think the whole thing with Necron is it was a 'Deus Ex Machina' moment. FF9 plays a lot on theatrical concepts, and the idea of a god appearing out of nowhere at the show's climax is one that's been around since Greek Tragedy. Necron was meant to be a WTF moment, or so I read into it at least. And he doesn't look that stupid.

Worst boss for me? Tartarus. The original Halo game was cool in that it had no bosses. All the enemies you fought were soldiers, whom you could fight using a number of different tactics. Then Tartarus comes along in Halo 2 and it's a case of following the pattern: let the Elites bring his shield down, then take a few potshots at him. Rinse and repeat.

ElArabDeMagnifico:

Ultrajoe:

I played for 2 hours before looking up how to drop this sucker. I know he's not the end boos but this deserves mention, he's not even hard to kill repeatedly, but after so much of the shooty i had to do some weird crap with the syringe?

i knew i had to use the syringe but i had no idea how to do it, i had never done it or even bothered to grab someone until that point, great fight but poor design. i would not have minded if i had done it in the past or had been told about it in passing to preserve the feeling of 'Well what do i do!?' but to me it reeked of the developers having more fun than me.

Pfft, you must not remember people getting pissed off about Psycho Mantis, and then got even more pissed off when they realized that all they had to do was call the colonel to figure out what to do (and he simply tells you "Plug the controller into Port 2". I killed that bastard twice in MGS4 and then just spammed with Otacon calls until he figured it out. At least with vamp, chances are people used the syringe/remembered it's purpose seeing as that it was used so much during the games cutscenes - and that the whole story revolves around nanomachine control and that the Syringe's description says you can use it on other people for a non-lethal "throat jab" - and I tried to CQC vamp once and it didn't do anything special, so I just slit his throat and it killed him, and then he revived - that's when I called Otacon over and over. I'd say this one is a LOT more fair than Psycho Mantis was seeing as if that came to you without having to call the colonel then you are a frikin' puzzle game genius.

oh i remember, but i still think vamp was worse

Why? i lied

I was killing that fucking whore for 5 hours.

Korolev:
I don't really have any good end bosses - I suppose killing Sephiroth in FF7 was okay.

Worst End Boss: This is a toss up between Final Fantasy IX and X. With Final Fantasy IX - who the hell was Necron and why should I care? With Final Fantasy 7, you know Sephiroth is the big bad guy, and you fight him and kill him. With Final Fantasy IX - you kill the guy you THINK is the main villian... and then out of nowhere comes a different guy. You never hear of him except at the VERY end, and he looks stupid. And with Final Fantasy X, you fight against a squiggly white ball with tentacles, and you can't even die. It was terrible. Having said that, both games are great, with the exception of the lousy end bosses.

Necron at least had a purpose and an origin. That wasn't nearly as bad as shoving Zeromus in at the end of FFIV after every other "Here's the real villain" twist throughout the game.

Good Boss Fight: Almalexia from Morrowind's Tribunal expansion. It really felt good killing her, especially after you hear her paln to kill you and turn you into a martyr. Especially after you get Hopesfire, a really cool balde, and Barilzar's Mazed Band.

Bad Boss Fight: Nihilanth from Half Life 1. Boring, monotonous, and ugly. Enough said.

Even Worse Boss fight: The Stupid Teleporter Thing from Half Life 2. I mean, come on!

Good: Mithos from Tales of Symphonia. Seriously, with all the emotion put into the character as well as the premise for the fight is just awesome. And the setting and music just makes it all the more epic. Especially the second round.

Bad: Enclablosa from Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom. Well, not bad, just meh. He's not even that hard really. If you have a good ranged weapon, its no problem really. Hell, the boss right before Enclablosa was harder.

Good: The Boss, MGS3: Hard, emotional; everything.

Bad: The end one from Shadow of the Colossus. C'mon, folks! Time your jumps well and a couple of stabs later he's bloody dead! Disappointing, considering his predecessors were way harder.

The only ending-boss battle I really liked was going up against Breen in HL2, because a) it didn't feel so much like a "boss fight" as the real cumulation of all your efforts, and b) I just wanted to shut his smarmy ass UP.

If we're counting mid-bosses, though, quite a few of the ones in Call of Cthulhu: Deep Corners of the Earth were straight-out insane.

Disappointing end bosses:

- Mehrunes Dagon, Oblivion. I mean, seriously. Deus ex machina much, Bethesda?
- Frank Fontaine, Bioshock. So arcade-y that I expected to see an "insert coin to continue" message to flash up at some point.
- Lucifer, Painkiller. I was expecting some balls-to-the-wall ammunition dispensing action, and what do I get? "Kill these putzes, transform, do a bit of tricky shooting. You just beat the boss of all Bad Guys!" The final level was pretty cool-looking, though.

I think the worst end boss fight ever was Jinpachi Mishima in Tekken 5.
Its actually one of the best tekkens, surprising for a series thats ran so long.
But the end boss is just way too hard, he has a move in which he teleports back and then shoots fire from a mouth in his stomach, taking roughly 70% of your health away. The only way to block this is to hit him in the millisecond in between him teleporting and the fire appearing.
I'm in no way a master at tekken (I play on moderate difficulty) but I'm in no way bad at it, and often I can get to the final boss in record time, only to have to spend 20 minutes trying to beat him.

Bad boss: Vamp MGS4
I know it's been said but I think the developers actually made that fight so that you would buy the guide to figure out how to beat him.

Bad: I have to agree with Dagon from Oblivion although Akasha from UT 3, (ill probably take a lot of heat for this one) the Archfiend from Ninja Gaiden 2 and Gabe from Rainbow Six Vegas 2 are all close seconds.

Good: Halos 1 and 2 were both good, Turoks was good albeit was totally quick time events. General RAAM from Gears 1 and Dagra Dai from NG 2.

Good Final Bosses
1. Omega from megaman zero 3. Hard and not just ridiculously oversized like all other megaman bosses.
2. Not really a boss, but the final level of Broodwar. Everyone vs you... fun...
3. Necrosarro from Dragon warrior 4. You start off cutting off all his a limbs and his head only to have him grow one or two more of each.
4. Malroth from Dragon warrior 2. The only DW boss to be smart enough (and a big enough jerk) to use healall on himself.
5. Hitler from bionic commando. I mean who doesn't want to watch Hitlers head explode in all of its 8-bit glory?

[quote=Ultrajoe]

Bad: Vamp from MGS4...

quote]

whoa spoiler

If i may

Good
Ganondorf: Always a pleasure to slay you. I especially enjoyed the recent one from Twilight Princess. You couldn't just smack the Wiimote randomly, you had to try, and it was a lot of fun
Aries(God Of War): A truly powerful villain who also has the ability to attack you emotionally. At the end your health is inversely proportional to his. Fun times!
GlaDOS: Now you're thinking with Portals. It was fun figuring out where to place the portals.
The Boss(MGS3): Deep and challenging. I wish I could say Volgin but he's not an end boss.
Gruntilda(Banjo games): What else can I say. It's fun, challenging with several distinct stages.
Taboo(SSBB): On Intense mode, he's hard as hell! He still has very good attacks and fun to fight time and time again.
Wizpig(Diddy Kong racing): Either one was still fun.

Bad
Bowser: The end Browsers now a days are two similar to the other bowser fights. I will have to say I enjoyed. Think Mario Galaxy and Mario64.
Hybrid-thing from (Psychonauts): Seriously, WTF?!?
Yu-Yevon (FFX): So you always have autolife... riiight.
Alien(Conker's Bad Fur Day): You throw him out the air lock, that's it.
Head-thing:Gradius 3: The difficulty curve goes bungee jumping and he's tedious.

juandonde:
Good boss fight: Towards the end of condemned. When you are running after the serial killer x then he is running after you basically playing a cat and mouse game with the guy inside a creepy dark house. That was immensely satisfying and fun.

Why does everyone say that? I just sat by the window near the staircase the whole time and beat him effortlessly, which in my opinion is a broken boss battle. I did like the Hate. Fun to parry, hit then rip off embedded armor.

No real point in posting this late in the entire thread, but what-the-shit, I'm bored.

Good = Yggdrasiel (spellcheck? whatever) from Tales of Symphonia for getting the most creative vote (A JRPG without turn-based combat? Hark, I think I hear hell freezing over and Valve going bankrupt. Seriously, though, look into it, its fun), but Fontaine/Atlas/The Hulk from Bioshock was challenging enough to be enjoyable, even on the easy setting, but not overly-so to be infuriating.

Bad = Bowser in Paper Mario (The first one, on N64. Yes, I had one, what of it?). I mean, you had to fight that little wanker about three times or so, with an un-loseable (man, my spelling blows tonight) Peach vs. The Witch fight in the middle. Double yoo-tee-eff, mate?

Ugly = Majora's mask, from...Majora's Mask. Mostly, though, the middle form. I mean, the first one is cute (like a jellyfish, or something) and the third is intimidating. The middle form just looks like a load of organs scooped out of a few recently-deceased car-crash victims and surgerically attached (by that I mean crudely sewn-and-burned)to a creepy, possibly dangerous-to-hold-too-tightly-onto mask.

Well, IMO, I kinda liked Warhawk from Twisted Metal Black. It may not be very different from other boss battles, but it was the first airborne combatant in Twisted Metal and made me think, "Oh crap..." when I first saw him.

Pardon the what must sound like an attack, but wasn't the real end-bosses to Shadow of the Colossus that small legion of soldiers that try to kill the now uber-you? Please don't take this the wrong way, that was just the impression I was under. If I'm mistaken, please let me know, I don't want to sound like a prick. Sorry in advance.

For the good end boss, I'm going to go for Fou-Lu in Breath of Fire 4. Came at you three times, each of which is more brutally punishing than the last. With the buildup given, fighting him is absolutely satisfying, despite his horrific murder power in his final form. And what's more, you don't even have to fight him at all; he can be bypassed entirely - or rather, joined with...

Okami had some epic bosses as well, given that each one ended their own little chapter. Ninetails had a buildup that was practically mythical, with the cloud-shrouded environment, the big red moon, the unfamiliar constellation mimicking divinity in the sky. Lechku and Nechku had the absolute best music in the game, and no one can ever convince me that a pair of dapper clockwork demon owls are not badass.

Dark Cloud comes to mind first for suck end bosses, though. Most of the bosses through the game are manageable, if not downright easy, but the end boss is damn near impossible, with three forms, each of which more infuriatingly difficult than the last. There is a point at which something becomes so challenging it ends up un-fun. So un-fun it halts enjoyment completely. And when I can't even goddamn well finish the game...