Video game bosses I’m sick of fighting

Bosses can be more important to a game than the protagonist. Without a threatening and charismatic foe to motivate you to push through all the levels and sub-bosses to reach them, what’s the point? Like a cherry on top of your ice cream sundae, the final boss should be the most rewarding and satisfying moment of a game’s story. It is the culmination of all your efforts, where your life—and perhaps even the fate of the world—hangs in the balance. Nothing takes the wind out of that moment quite like running into the same boss you’ve already fought (and beat) in two, three, four, or even 10 games already.

There are situations where a game’s plot does call for a boss to return, and it can even be a great twist. But that only works once or twice. Some series have become so attached to its bosses that we have been fighting them for literal decades at this point. No matter how badly we beat them, somehow these bosses just keep coming back. These are the bosses I’m totally sick of fighting and am ready to be killed off for good.

1 Ganon/Ganondorf

Break the cycle

I get the idea that Link, Zelda, and Ganon are all in an endless cycle of reincarnation to battle over the fate of Hyrule, but I think we can all agree we’re sick of this tired feud. Nintendo did try to spice things up a bit by introducing Ganandorf as a human form, but even then it just serves as a first phase to the boss fight before some version of the pig-like Ganon shows up. Some of the most interesting Zelda games are the ones where Ganon isn’t involved at all, like Link’s Awakening, The Minish Cap, and Majora’s Mask. The latter in particular is praised as one of the best in the series, and I’d argue Skull Kid is a huge part of that. Sorry, Ganon, but you’re just not that interesting or frightening anymore.

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2 Shao Kahn

One Fatality should have been enough

Mortal Kombat suffers from the same curse that all fighting games do, which is the struggle to kill any of its characters. That’s mostly because each character pulls double-duty as not only a character in the story, but also a unique fighting style that makes them different from the rest of the cast. Killing off any character will piss off fans of them as a person, but also turn away people who stuck with them as their main. But Shao Kahn has always been a boss character and rarely playable. And as a boss, he’s never been fun to fight. Forgetting the fact that he reads your inputs most of the time to be unreasonably hard to beat, he’s just a dude with a skull helmet on. Let’s get a more creative and actually threatening villain.

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3 Andros

It’s always Andros

There haven’t been a ton of Star Fox games, which is a shame unto itself, but why is it that Andros is the villain in every single one? I’m not even exaggerating here. He was the villain in the first, of course, then 64, and Zero. Even Star Fox Adventures, which was retroactively made into a Star Fox game, had Andros show up at the last second to replace the original villain who we never got to fight at all. What makes Andros so bad is that, unlike most other bosses on this list, you always fight him in the exact same way. He’s just a big, dumb, floating ape head in space with two disembodied hands that you blast with your ship lasers. If you’ve done it once, you’ve done it a thousand times. If we ever get a new Star Fox, please leave Andros out of it.

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4 Sigma

Somehow, Sigma has returned

You might feel Dr. Wily deserves the spot more on this list, but I think Sigma is a way worse offender of a boss that had absolutely no reason to come back so often. Unlike the original series, X took itself a bit more seriously in its storytelling. The themes were darker, and there felt like real stakes and progression from one game to the next. Sigma was a great way to show that X was not going to have that somewhat cartoony tone of the original. But then it just got ridiculous. The second game has him be rebuilt, which is okay, but then he lives on as a virus and eventually the games stop trying to explain how he comes back for X4-8. It very quickly feels lazy and unsatisfying to, for no good reason, always end up fighting Sigma when you constantly are getting new robot masters.

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5 Ridley

Just give it up

What is it about Nintendo franchises and not being able to get away from its villains? I would’ve thought at least Metroid could avoid this fate, and yet the space pirate dragon keeps coming back no matter how definitive his death seems. This is another Sigma-like situation where Ridley’s return is almost always hand-waved away. The excuses aren’t even creative, boiling down to “someone revived and enhanced Ridley with a new body” over and over. Oh, and one time he was cloned in Other M, just to hit another trope. Metroid is all about fighting big monsters, but Ridley is so uninteresting at this point. He’s just a dragon. There’s supposed to be all this weight about his and Samus’ history, but I can’t take any of that seriously when he looks like a weird robotic dinosaur.

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