Lord of the Rings: The Third Age had an Evil Mode where you played a bunch of fights from the campaign, but as the bad guys fighting the main party. In theory it was a Challenge Mode where you would have difficult fights to unlock special bonus equipment and whatnot. Mostly what it taught me was that if the AI wasn't an idiot, the regular game would be unwinnable. The party you fight is usually *stronger* with fancier abilities than what you had access to at the time, but by focus firing and actually using your stronger abilities, the good guys were screwed. Every time.
Especially whenever it lets you be the bosses. Those fights were over *fast* when you didn't waste turns doing basic attacks against a single target.
Every once in a while I get this urge to emulate it again, as my GC has long since bit the dust. It... holds up decently well if you don't mind a linear game, but RPG's have come a ways since then. I usually use the emulator-level controls to speed things up though; those attack animations get repetitive.
Ill never forget the elvish women water bombing an enemy, they disappear into thin air and then she slashes the air 3 times with her sword. Great times
I was never really a LOTR fan but my grandparents bought me this game and I loved it. Rare to see someone mention it in the wild. My friend and I used to play it co op a lot!
That makes exactly 2 people I have heard using it for co-op XD
Like, they *had* a co-op mode, but it didn't exactly do anything that couldn't be accomplished by passing the controller around during fights...
[Probably the best example of this were the Mumakil fights.](https://youtu.be/gbTXZriwmlI?feature=shared) AI only had to use the stun move once off the bat and it ended this dude’s speedrun.
was about to comment about fear. it came out when i was a freshman in college and we had a kid on our hall that was heavy into torrenting and got a leaked copy online. he had an incredible pc build for 2005 standards along with a massive speaker setup attached to it. The night he downloaded it, he started playing it and after maybe 20 minutes of hearing everything there were 14 sweaty freshman dudes crammed in there watching him just get destroyed over and over again by the AI. The radio chatter was so mind blowing to all of us. great core gaming memory of mine for sure
The Oliphaunt and Sauron fights were so easy to win if you spammed the right move over and over. Yeah the developers definitely nerfed the AI to give the player a chance
First thing I did once I unlocked that was go bomb Oscorp, I hated that mission and the idea of Goblin carpet bombing his employees was hilarious to me
But it was the game to tie in with the movie. I generally refer to it as Spider-Man: The Movie: The Game. Spider-Man 2: Enter Electro was only a few years before. The list of Spider-Man games is pretty wild, there have been about a dozen games called Spider-Man 2.
True, you start questioning if you're the hero or just a one-(wo)man army with a grudge against henchmen! But hey, someone's gotta clean up the city, right?
Dude's got like superarmor on his knife stance and can shadow step between strikes in addition to the blade-arm finisher, it's wild how much fun he is.
Mewtwo from Gen 1 Pokemon. Not technically "stronger" once the player gets him, but much more effective since the AI for wild Pokemon was kinda ass. Same holds true for most end-game legendaries, really.
Yup. My Mewtwo on Yellow hasn't seen a single battle because I got him, admired him, and then just never played again because what the hell else am I supposed to do. Very short lived feeling of excitement lol.
Oh, you didn't save before fighting Mewtwo? You can catch with an ultra ball if you try hard enough. Back when I had the time 25 years ago.....
You can catch all the legendaries with ultra balls.
Are you serious? I feel way more justified in duping all those master balls now.
Edit: Apparently, not true at all. [This](https://www.dragonflycave.com/mechanics/gen-i-capturing#english) goes in depth. Great Balls are better in *some* situations. Mostly easy to catch pokemon you don't want to bother lowering below 50% HP.
I prided myself on my save file that had all the birds and mewtwo caught in standard pokeballs. Took so many retries cause they would almost always struggle to death before being caught.
Can’t find any official source to verify but there’s a bunch of anecdotal forum posts saying you can. Personally never knew this was possible if it is.
Yeah I just looked into it and found much the same. If true, that’s wild. I grew up on those games and played them many, many times. Now, I sometimes watch “Pokemon facts you never knew!” videos on youtube. Still, never heard of this.
Me either and I'm one of the people that played it 3-4 times through at different points in life and caught Mewtwo every time.
I was just so scared that I saved before the encounter, or used the Master Ball, since really, what are you going to get that's better than Mewtwo?
Time to replay them, save before the Meetwo battle, kill him, go do E4 again and see I guess… be back in 20-30 hours (not really, I don’t know if I have the patience to grind out that game currently…).
I was thinking Stadium would be my chance to use my Mewtwo, but I read the rules at the beginning and he's not allowed to enter. Had me wondering why I even bothered catching him.
I remember this sort of thing in some battle tower. Some of the best pokemon were banned. Ruined the experience for me. For me it's like banning New Zealand from playing rugby.
It also was the most OP because he didnt actually have a weakness, and the special stat was insane.
Psychic types were immune to ghost attacks, outside of nightshade. His high special stat with 2 amnesias maxed him out. The final pokemon in the game was able to solo everything else because of how the game was coded with nothing to stop it.
Mewtwo is actually stronger after you catch him because you fill out his EVs and you can teach him a better moveset. (Not that Amnesia/Psychic/Recover is lacking, but he doesn't have Ice Beam to cheese other Mewtwos.)
I JUST finished playing Pokemon Red moments ago. Went all the way to the Unknown Dungeon then decided, meh I don't want to go in. The lvl 136 Mewtwo I got from the MissingNo exploit is good enough :D
I remember a Kirby game on the GBA that let you play as Meta Knight after you met certain conditions and the game was not balanced with his powers in mind. That also made it pretty fun to blaze through.
Most Sith in the LEGO Star Wars games. They have cool powers and shit, but just spamming attacks and blocks will rinse them fine. Then you play as them, and use the same moves you use to beat them, as them.
There is currently an event in SF6 where you can fight a special CPU Akuma and wow he does not fuck around.
-
Edit: I just beat him yall! I even got a perfect round!
You can play as shin akuma in SF6. He gets his double air fireballs and 2 extra level 2 supers that he uses in the battlehub. In a match you need to do a back-taunt. Then while he is sitting down, spam down-taunt until he pulls out a rice ball. Once Akuma eats the rice ball, a purple aura envelopes him and becomes Shin Akuma. You probably won't legitimately pull it off in an online match unless both players agree to let it happen. Still pretty cool we can play as him.
Not 100% in accordance, but Richter is the "Disc 1" boss of Castlevania Symphony of the night and is an absolute pushover -- the character would literally be curb-stomped by most bosses in the Upside Down Castle (part 2 of the game). When you play as him (Richter mode) he is incredibly powerful and speedy (MUCH faster than the main character Alucard), albeit a bit squishy. Super-fun to play as, albeit not truly "broken."
This is how I felt with Julius in Aria of Sorrow lol. He could just dodge through every enemy and whip the daylights out of them, infinite jumps, that was a real treat
Julius fucking slaps anyway. Dude is mega nerfed from off-screen stuff and still nearly breaks apart the evil incarnate magic castle from collateral damage. Before the events of the game, he straight up murderkills Dracula in his fully powered state, not only being the only person to do it single handedly, but he was relatively untrained as the previous couple generations of Belmonts had given up monster hunting. But he also actually properly *kills* kills him, sending him into the sun, making the usual methods of resurrection impossible and forcing a reincarnation.
In Portrait of Ruin you unlock the vampire sisters and they make the game hilariously easy to play. One spams ice magic, the other allows you to draw sword strikes on the screen so you can crush any enemy super fast.
The wild DLC of Dragon Age Origins where you play as a Hurlock Alpha leading the counter offensive at Denerim. Those dudes normally go down pretty quick, but you essentially turn back the entire attack singlehandedly, killing your main atory party members as you go.
The entertaining part, to me, was always that it's the whole party but you fight Alistair last. He's basically made all the pragmatic bad choices and, obviously, loses horribly. So it's hard not to see it as an answer to "what if the Hero of Ferelden hadn't made it?"
(Some take it further and suggest that it's "What if the Hero had been turned into a Darkspawn?" but that's not exactly what the Blight does.)
The final boss in Baldur's Gate can join your party at the beginning of the BG2 expansion Throne of Bhaal. He levels up to match your party's (now epic) level, so it's technically significantly more badass when you get him.
Sarevok is a really powerful character, with great stats and I think he still has some abilities. The only problem with him is that he's got too many levels in fighter by the time he joins, which I think is silly because he should only have the same fighter levels he has at the end of bg1, not more. What it does is stop you from doing many of the best fighter dual class options. My mate dav streams virtually nothing but modded BG with insane difficulty no save no death runs, and I think he rarely takes sarevok unless he has specific niches available.
Like I think he starts off as a level 17 fighter. If they made him a lvl 9 or lvl 13 fighter, he'd easily be one of the best characters and taken on most runs. Like Jan, and Edwin.
And the only reason those two are so high on the list is because of their unique items. Take those items away and sarevok would be amazing. But as it is, lvl 17 is just ridiculously too high to dual class easily and nobody needs a pure fighter of any kind at ANY point in bg2, let alone at the point where you're fighting demigods.
I mean obviously the attack speed and targetting is better with a player behind the wheel, but you're still not nearly as strong as Hu Lao Gate Lubu when you first encounter him
I feel like everyone who enjoyed the old Dynasty Warriors games made a point to slog it out and beat him at least once, if nothing else then just to see the chracters' reactions. I distinctly remember one time when I was like 10yo struggling through that fight, running around the entire map to find health to finish beating him, and then coming back and beating him with mere minutes left to finish the mission
I remember when you beat him it unlocks something. I don't remember what, but all my friends knew I could beat him, so they would ask me to beat him while I visited thier houses. It was pretty easy with Guan Yu, I would just juggle him.
There is a local Chinese resturant with an all Chinese family that owns and operates. They have a beautiful tapestry with Guan Yu as the center piece.
I walked in one day and I said something about Guan Yu, and how much of a badass he was. The father lit up, and started talking about Chinese generals and I was keeping up with him. We spoke about Zhang Fei, Liu Bei, etc....
He asked if I was a Chinese history buff.... Nope, I played Dynasty warriors and read all the character bios.
Sephiroth from FF7.
There is a point in a flashback where you play with Cloud and Sephiroth in a party. Sephiroth is ridiculous beyond what you were able to pull off at that point in the game. He one-shots nearly everything.
It really drove the point home on the power he had, especially where that was a flashback!
That was such a beautifully done section. They talked so much about how powerful he was up to that point but seeing it through the battle system really hammered it home.
Not to the same level, but FFX did similar with Seymour. He joins the party briefly and is much stronger than your whole party at that point (unless you’ve overlevelled) and also has an overdrive. When you fight him later, he’s quite easily beatable and doesn’t have an overdrive to use. He also summons Anima, who you can get later in the game, and is much more powerful under your control than his.
It's not just that he one-shots everything, it's how nothing can even touch him. The enemies will kick past Cloud's ass in every direction. Sephiroth can resurrect your dead ass like he's Shiny Emo Jesus, then smack around a dragon like it's a fly, and to him the whole encounter is no more effort than a human clearing cobwebs.
Cortex from crash bandicoot. Struggling to fly that little hovercraft thing as final boss in the first game, you get your hands on him in CTR, man's powersliding around like a pro!
It’s still hard as an adult. Playing the remastered trilogy, Crash Bandicoot had no right to be as hard as it was for a kids game.
Weird because I remember having to complete levels for my cousins because they couldn’t do it, so I must have been pretty good, but I’m absolutely useless as an adult.
Every legendary Pokémon because you can catch them, level them up, and give them better moves
Honorary mention to Colosseum and XD, which gave final bosses which were actually capturable
Yeah, that's what I had in mind. You can level them up, give them new moves and just being able to cleverly select movements really makes them more powerful.
Wow, you guys just unlocked a core memory for me. I haven't thought about this game in over 20 years! I was so innocent. I remember walking into the nearest GameCrazy and asking the employee if they have it for Playstation 2. That was the day I learned about console exclusivity. Where can one play this game in 2024?
On the Nintendo Switch. It's called Advance Wars 1 + 2 Reboot Camp and is a remake of the first two games on the GBA. It is really good imo and I would pick it up if you can.
Magus from Chrono Trigger becomes an absolute beast. Not right away, but he’s a monster when you level him up. Then again so is everyone by the late game.
Mind you, it's because he didn't have any combo-tech's the way the other characters did. Dude's a bit of a loner. 1 on 1 though, his solo abilities were some of the most powerful in said game.
Turns out in a JRPG, the Power of Friendship trumps raw magical might, who knew.
Perhaps you'd geared them better? I recall Magus being able to just nuke the whole battlefield more effectively and more often during the bits I played with him. Losing out on Tri-combos meant I switched him out eventually, but he hit like a freight train and had gas for days when I played.
> Losing out on Tri-combos
He has triple techs with lucca+robo and lucca+marle. He doesn't have any double techs. And he's rather powerful with naturally 100-200 more stat points by ** level compared to the rest of the cast. If you're doing new game+ and tab collecting to stat max, it doesn't really matter who you play with. But in the natural game, he's quite strong and pretty versatile with his access to all level 2 elemental magic, plus magic defense and death spell; and his ult is quite strong too. I don't think he's useful enough to make a best team comp list because of synergies, but he's quite good nonetheless.
He was a boss I originally thought was one of those "you're gonna lose no matter what" battles.
As a near literal God when you first face him, you see his power wane as you understand the game mechanics more.
Still, going in blind, one of the more epic battles in turn based RPGs outside of FF VI.
Not a final Boss but Shiva in Streets of Rage. Like he's stupid broken as a boss but once the player controls him and you can use his broken moves he's unstoppable.
I love SoR4 Shiva who can literally just dash all over the screen non stop
Final fantasy tactics. Thundergod Cid I think is his name. Game gets much easier once he joins your party
Edit. Just realized I read it wrong. Not the final boss.
When I first got Anima and used her overdrive on a group of normal enemies and broke the 9999 damage barrier? I felt like an unstoppable force of nature.
Not sure if this counts, because technically you don't play as the villain, but in Zone of the Enders 2 you keep fighting Anubis who just teleports all over the place, then sometime near the end you actually get the same ability on Jehuty and everything becomes so easy.
Bowser from Mario and Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story.
You defeat him by jumping on his head, but you get to play as him throughout the game. In a few segments he *grows to roughly 100x his average size and punches out not one*, *but* **two** *life-sized castles.* ^(and a train.)
It's pretty neat.
There was an SMT game on the Gameboy that, in the post-game, let you recruit the bosses.
It kept their stats exactly the same. So you'd have your main characters with like 200 health and then have Lucifer with 3k throwing out room clears every turn.
Soul reaver 2, technically. Raziel must fight his past human self, ultimately putting himself in the grave for Kain to resurrect later. But at that point in the game Raziel wilds the soul reaver sword, a sword that contains the soul of his future self. Due to the paradox, neither Raziel or the sword can be destroyed until the human Raziel is killed.
You essentially fight a bunch of vampire hunters and the last boss in God mode.
The Three Mage Sisters from Kirby Star Allies. They have their full boss movesets, but with invincibility frames. They also have way less endlag on their attacks in their playable forms.
They also have a screen nuke attack with the only restriction being a cooldown period before being able to use that attack again (as opposed to Kirby's Crash ability, which is a single-use ability).
Zan Partizanne in particular is ridiculously fast, has long range, and a practically infinite teleport dodge move.
Not so much a final boss, but getting the apple of Eden for assassins creed brotherhood makes you feel like a final boss. I replayed the episode so much as a kid. Also getting 100% for that mission is so boring, I don’t remember entirely but I swear for 100% synchronisation you can’t kill anyone.
Keepa the goalie from the Besaid Aurochs in FFX. Terrible goalie, even worse in every role..... until you get him to level 99 his SHOT gets turbocharged to the max number.
Sephiroth ff7 not sure if you’d fought him before then though. The flashback happens before the final though so don’t know if it counts
Some of the duragons in the bouncer
Ness from original ssb
Mewtwo and most of the legends
A lot of the characters in the tenkaichi series
I’d say Kratos in Tales of Symphonia. While not a final boss, after having him in your party for the whole first act he betrays you and WHOOPS your ass (assuming no NG+), but you can make certain choices to get him back. His strength reunited in your party and if you level him up and get him his ultimate weapon could kick his own ass, so to speak. You also do fight him once more towards the very end of the game and he is still very tough for a first timer.
Well it doesn’t hurt that in the original game, psychic had nothing it was Not Very Effective against. So you either did reg or super effective damage 100% of the time, which is super strong. Add to that the lack of bug and ghost type moves in that version, which were the only things Super Effective against Psychic, and it was a super OP type.
Psychic was the only type that resisted Psychic.
Plus, Mewtwo was also basically the fastest thing in the roster, on top of monstrous special attack/defense and pretty high physical attack. And a great moveset.
It's kind of sad to see how mediocre he is in Ubers by now.
In Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects the metal chick, I forgot her name, you unlock after beating the campaign is pretty overpowered to the point that me and my siblings banned her in fights lol
The Trails games since Cold Steel 2 sometimes makes the bosses playable when you get to the last save point or so. Trails into Reverie allows you to unlock McBurn, the most powerful enemy agent you've encountered up to that point and it is possible to build him to solo bosses.
EDIT: Here's the [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=km4C4lSGtN0) of someone doing it to the hardest boss in the game.
Double Dragon Gaiden. You can unlock all the bosses and mini-bosses as playable characters, and they're every bit as OP as when you fought against them.
Not a final boss, but there are characters in Suikoden 2 that when beaten, will join your party at level 99. Nobody knows why they're at max level since they're only level 40 something when first fighting them.
Lord of the Rings: The Third Age had an Evil Mode where you played a bunch of fights from the campaign, but as the bad guys fighting the main party. In theory it was a Challenge Mode where you would have difficult fights to unlock special bonus equipment and whatnot. Mostly what it taught me was that if the AI wasn't an idiot, the regular game would be unwinnable. The party you fight is usually *stronger* with fancier abilities than what you had access to at the time, but by focus firing and actually using your stronger abilities, the good guys were screwed. Every time. Especially whenever it lets you be the bosses. Those fights were over *fast* when you didn't waste turns doing basic attacks against a single target.
That was an incredible game. Played that back in college.
Every once in a while I get this urge to emulate it again, as my GC has long since bit the dust. It... holds up decently well if you don't mind a linear game, but RPG's have come a ways since then. I usually use the emulator-level controls to speed things up though; those attack animations get repetitive.
Ill never forget the elvish women water bombing an enemy, they disappear into thin air and then she slashes the air 3 times with her sword. Great times
And then she stares at sky for a while to summon water horses. For like 20 seconds. I got sick of that one in a hurry.
I was never really a LOTR fan but my grandparents bought me this game and I loved it. Rare to see someone mention it in the wild. My friend and I used to play it co op a lot!
That makes exactly 2 people I have heard using it for co-op XD Like, they *had* a co-op mode, but it didn't exactly do anything that couldn't be accomplished by passing the controller around during fights...
It streamlines the process! XD Granted it didn't add much but I doubt we would have played it together without that option so I'm glad it was there
One of the last gasps of couch co-op, yeah. I mean, sure, the Wii and such, but that usually involved getting *off* said couch...
[Probably the best example of this were the Mumakil fights.](https://youtu.be/gbTXZriwmlI?feature=shared) AI only had to use the stun move once off the bat and it ended this dude’s speedrun.
Making a good AI that's actually fun to play against is still an unsolved problem.
f.e.a.r. Had a pretty solid grasp i feel
was about to comment about fear. it came out when i was a freshman in college and we had a kid on our hall that was heavy into torrenting and got a leaked copy online. he had an incredible pc build for 2005 standards along with a massive speaker setup attached to it. The night he downloaded it, he started playing it and after maybe 20 minutes of hearing everything there were 14 sweaty freshman dudes crammed in there watching him just get destroyed over and over again by the AI. The radio chatter was so mind blowing to all of us. great core gaming memory of mine for sure
The Oliphaunt and Sauron fights were so easy to win if you spammed the right move over and over. Yeah the developers definitely nerfed the AI to give the player a chance
Green Goblin in the Spider-Man: The Movie game on the PS2. You almost feel bad machine gunning down so many goons by the end of the story
Still maybe the coolest unlockable in a video game
Definitely one of the best. Now you would have to pay real money to unlock him.
Green Goblin in a vault suit for 34.99
With a big green ghyat
First thing I did once I unlocked that was go bomb Oscorp, I hated that mission and the idea of Goblin carpet bombing his employees was hilarious to me
I feel bad for the people who had to put "The movie" on the casing when it was, in fact, a game.
But it was the game to tie in with the movie. I generally refer to it as Spider-Man: The Movie: The Game. Spider-Man 2: Enter Electro was only a few years before. The list of Spider-Man games is pretty wild, there have been about a dozen games called Spider-Man 2.
Street Fighter II The Movie The Game
Sadly overshadowed by Spider-Man 2, but an incredible game in every respect.
True, you start questioning if you're the hero or just a one-(wo)man army with a grudge against henchmen! But hey, someone's gotta clean up the city, right?
Krauser in Resident Evil 4 Remake. Dude shreds in mercenaries mode.
Wesker too. Hes absolutely busted and it’s such a blast
Wesker is so much fun. The ability to parry literally everything, including chainsaws, is amazing.
Dude's got like superarmor on his knife stance and can shadow step between strikes in addition to the blade-arm finisher, it's wild how much fun he is.
Is that in the PC remake? I played through the campaign twice but didn't do much else.
Mewtwo from Gen 1 Pokemon. Not technically "stronger" once the player gets him, but much more effective since the AI for wild Pokemon was kinda ass. Same holds true for most end-game legendaries, really.
Yup. My Mewtwo on Yellow hasn't seen a single battle because I got him, admired him, and then just never played again because what the hell else am I supposed to do. Very short lived feeling of excitement lol.
Beat Elite Four. Get Mewtwo. Beat Elite Four again. Never play again.
Beat Elite Four Accidentally knock out Mewtwo Beat Elite Four again to reset the encounter Finally get Mewtwo
Wait, the encounter can be reset in Gen 1? I didn't think so?
Oh, you didn't save before fighting Mewtwo? You can catch with an ultra ball if you try hard enough. Back when I had the time 25 years ago..... You can catch all the legendaries with ultra balls.
Gen 1 is bugged and Ultra Balls are no better than Pokeballs. Great Balls are much better.
Are you serious? I feel way more justified in duping all those master balls now. Edit: Apparently, not true at all. [This](https://www.dragonflycave.com/mechanics/gen-i-capturing#english) goes in depth. Great Balls are better in *some* situations. Mostly easy to catch pokemon you don't want to bother lowering below 50% HP.
Maybe I’m misremembering, but I’m pretty sure I caught him with a greatball back in the day, because I wasted the masterball on something else.
I used one of my 99 master balls after doing the missingno glitch on every playthrough lol
I like got into a fight with a younger kid about whether missingno was a real pokemon. It was not, but I certainly believed it to be.
When I was a (not very smart) kid, I didn't realize the Master Ball was a one-off thing and used it on a Pidgey.
Classic I'm pretty sure half of us easily have wasted it on a dollar store hamster or barnyard chicken at least once.
I prided myself on my save file that had all the birds and mewtwo caught in standard pokeballs. Took so many retries cause they would almost always struggle to death before being caught.
I once caught Moltres with a regular PokeBall. After like 100 Great and Ultra balls...
Wait, what? You can reset Mewtwo?
Can’t find any official source to verify but there’s a bunch of anecdotal forum posts saying you can. Personally never knew this was possible if it is.
Yeah I just looked into it and found much the same. If true, that’s wild. I grew up on those games and played them many, many times. Now, I sometimes watch “Pokemon facts you never knew!” videos on youtube. Still, never heard of this.
Me either and I'm one of the people that played it 3-4 times through at different points in life and caught Mewtwo every time. I was just so scared that I saved before the encounter, or used the Master Ball, since really, what are you going to get that's better than Mewtwo?
Time to replay them, save before the Meetwo battle, kill him, go do E4 again and see I guess… be back in 20-30 hours (not really, I don’t know if I have the patience to grind out that game currently…).
Emulator with a speed up function, can easily run through the whole game in one session
You didn't save the Masterball for this?
There was a high level ratatta...
Mewtwo was all about flexing on your friends in link battles but eventually everybody had them
I was thinking Stadium would be my chance to use my Mewtwo, but I read the rules at the beginning and he's not allowed to enter. Had me wondering why I even bothered catching him.
I remember this sort of thing in some battle tower. Some of the best pokemon were banned. Ruined the experience for me. For me it's like banning New Zealand from playing rugby.
You can use him in the Gym Leader tower I’m pretty sure. I recently played and he was a key member of my team.
It also was the most OP because he didnt actually have a weakness, and the special stat was insane. Psychic types were immune to ghost attacks, outside of nightshade. His high special stat with 2 amnesias maxed him out. The final pokemon in the game was able to solo everything else because of how the game was coded with nothing to stop it.
As we call them, bragging rights rewards. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BraggingRightsReward
Mewtwo is actually stronger after you catch him because you fill out his EVs and you can teach him a better moveset. (Not that Amnesia/Psychic/Recover is lacking, but he doesn't have Ice Beam to cheese other Mewtwos.)
I JUST finished playing Pokemon Red moments ago. Went all the way to the Unknown Dungeon then decided, meh I don't want to go in. The lvl 136 Mewtwo I got from the MissingNo exploit is good enough :D
I remember a Kirby game on the GBA that let you play as Meta Knight after you met certain conditions and the game was not balanced with his powers in mind. That also made it pretty fun to blaze through.
Not long afterwards, they released Super Smash Bros Brawl, which was also not balanced with his powers in mind.
Nightmare in Dreamland? I had that one as a kid and lost my shit when I discovered MK Mode.
Super Star Ultra had Meta Knightmare Ultra, which was a blast.
Return to Dreamland
Most Sith in the LEGO Star Wars games. They have cool powers and shit, but just spamming attacks and blocks will rinse them fine. Then you play as them, and use the same moves you use to beat them, as them.
Evil Rey slaps in Lego Star Wars.
Street Fighter 2 Akuma, while he is technically not the final boss as he is a secret boss he is banned in tournaments due to how good he is.
There is currently an event in SF6 where you can fight a special CPU Akuma and wow he does not fuck around. - Edit: I just beat him yall! I even got a perfect round!
You can play as shin akuma in SF6. He gets his double air fireballs and 2 extra level 2 supers that he uses in the battlehub. In a match you need to do a back-taunt. Then while he is sitting down, spam down-taunt until he pulls out a rice ball. Once Akuma eats the rice ball, a purple aura envelopes him and becomes Shin Akuma. You probably won't legitimately pull it off in an online match unless both players agree to let it happen. Still pretty cool we can play as him.
For a second I thought "why does he use supers in the bathtub?".... I need sleep
Lui Kang Zombie unlock from Mortal Kombat Armageddon was the most OP any Mortal Kombat character ever was.
Motaro in the PS version of Trilogy was the worst
The unlockable version of Gill in the console versions of Street Fighter 3: Third Strike is also unbelievably busted.
All I can hear is RESURRECTION!
I think you missed the title, CPU Akuma is even more busted
Akuma is so good he's a problem in Tekken now, and even more with pro.
Bowser in Paper Mario TYD and Bowser in Mario Odyssey. You feel so badass going on a rampage.
This goes for pretty much every enemy in mario odyssey, coming to think about it haha
Not 100% in accordance, but Richter is the "Disc 1" boss of Castlevania Symphony of the night and is an absolute pushover -- the character would literally be curb-stomped by most bosses in the Upside Down Castle (part 2 of the game). When you play as him (Richter mode) he is incredibly powerful and speedy (MUCH faster than the main character Alucard), albeit a bit squishy. Super-fun to play as, albeit not truly "broken."
This is how I felt with Julius in Aria of Sorrow lol. He could just dodge through every enemy and whip the daylights out of them, infinite jumps, that was a real treat
Julius fucking slaps anyway. Dude is mega nerfed from off-screen stuff and still nearly breaks apart the evil incarnate magic castle from collateral damage. Before the events of the game, he straight up murderkills Dracula in his fully powered state, not only being the only person to do it single handedly, but he was relatively untrained as the previous couple generations of Belmonts had given up monster hunting. But he also actually properly *kills* kills him, sending him into the sun, making the usual methods of resurrection impossible and forcing a reincarnation.
Aria was so fun.
In Portrait of Ruin you unlock the vampire sisters and they make the game hilariously easy to play. One spams ice magic, the other allows you to draw sword strikes on the screen so you can crush any enemy super fast.
Yeah but you die so fast, and restoring your health is hard. That kinda ruined richter mode for me.
The wild DLC of Dragon Age Origins where you play as a Hurlock Alpha leading the counter offensive at Denerim. Those dudes normally go down pretty quick, but you essentially turn back the entire attack singlehandedly, killing your main atory party members as you go.
The entertaining part, to me, was always that it's the whole party but you fight Alistair last. He's basically made all the pragmatic bad choices and, obviously, loses horribly. So it's hard not to see it as an answer to "what if the Hero of Ferelden hadn't made it?" (Some take it further and suggest that it's "What if the Hero had been turned into a Darkspawn?" but that's not exactly what the Blight does.)
That one lord of the rings game (conquest I think?) where you could play as the Balrog
I remember that. The Balrog was a really early game boss and when you play as him you only fight normal weak enemies.
That game was so much fun
I'd play the shit out of a conquest reboot. I still remember my best match, I got the Troll and went on a 60 kill spree just swinging in a circle lol
You talking about The Third Age? Turned based with evil morlde as you played through the story.
Conquest. Game was akin to Star Wars Battlefront (the originals) with a LOTR skin from my memory. Fun game
The final boss in Baldur's Gate can join your party at the beginning of the BG2 expansion Throne of Bhaal. He levels up to match your party's (now epic) level, so it's technically significantly more badass when you get him.
And yet still not as strong as a miniature space hamster.
Sarevok is a really powerful character, with great stats and I think he still has some abilities. The only problem with him is that he's got too many levels in fighter by the time he joins, which I think is silly because he should only have the same fighter levels he has at the end of bg1, not more. What it does is stop you from doing many of the best fighter dual class options. My mate dav streams virtually nothing but modded BG with insane difficulty no save no death runs, and I think he rarely takes sarevok unless he has specific niches available. Like I think he starts off as a level 17 fighter. If they made him a lvl 9 or lvl 13 fighter, he'd easily be one of the best characters and taken on most runs. Like Jan, and Edwin. And the only reason those two are so high on the list is because of their unique items. Take those items away and sarevok would be amazing. But as it is, lvl 17 is just ridiculously too high to dual class easily and nobody needs a pure fighter of any kind at ANY point in bg2, let alone at the point where you're fighting demigods.
LuBu in the older dynasty warrior games I never played 1&2 so this statement was based off my experience with 3-5
I mean obviously the attack speed and targetting is better with a player behind the wheel, but you're still not nearly as strong as Hu Lao Gate Lubu when you first encounter him
Do not pursue Lu Bu!
Fuck you, I want his horse!
I managed to kick his ass!
I feel like everyone who enjoyed the old Dynasty Warriors games made a point to slog it out and beat him at least once, if nothing else then just to see the chracters' reactions. I distinctly remember one time when I was like 10yo struggling through that fight, running around the entire map to find health to finish beating him, and then coming back and beating him with mere minutes left to finish the mission
I remember when you beat him it unlocks something. I don't remember what, but all my friends knew I could beat him, so they would ask me to beat him while I visited thier houses. It was pretty easy with Guan Yu, I would just juggle him.
Guan Yu was #2 or #3 in terms of power in most of the games I believe, he was great
There is a local Chinese resturant with an all Chinese family that owns and operates. They have a beautiful tapestry with Guan Yu as the center piece. I walked in one day and I said something about Guan Yu, and how much of a badass he was. The father lit up, and started talking about Chinese generals and I was keeping up with him. We spoke about Zhang Fei, Liu Bei, etc.... He asked if I was a Chinese history buff.... Nope, I played Dynasty warriors and read all the character bios.
I remember when dynasty warriors didn't even have a map and was an old school Tekken type fighter lol, fuck im getting old.
Before 2?
Is 2 when they changed the formula? I know for sure I had the original and that it changed somewhere after but that's as far as memory serves.
2 and 4 were both similar.
Yeah 2 is when the formula changed.
Its not the same thing you're talking about, but I fucking LOVED Dynasty Warriors Tactics
I have that same memory! Sooo many smashed pots.
To be fair, it’s Lu Bu. He held off all Three Brothers singlehanded until he decided three-on-one might be disadvantageous.
LuBu is a beast in Total War 3 Kingdoms. He averaged 500 kills a battle for me after I got him. Then he died of old age.
It’s Lu Bu!!!
Lu Bu has come to destroy us!
"Can anybody provide me with a decent challenge!?"
IT'S #LUUU BUUUUUUU
Yall just gave me flash backs lol. Btw a new DW game was announced during the PlayStation state of play stream yesterday.
DO NOT PURSUE LU BU
Man, they really fucked up those games for a while there huh… 3 was a lot of fun, but I think 6 was my favorite. 7 and 8, not so much
Vergil in all of the Devil May Cry games
Also Dante in DMC5.
Sephiroth from FF7. There is a point in a flashback where you play with Cloud and Sephiroth in a party. Sephiroth is ridiculous beyond what you were able to pull off at that point in the game. He one-shots nearly everything. It really drove the point home on the power he had, especially where that was a flashback!
That was such a beautifully done section. They talked so much about how powerful he was up to that point but seeing it through the battle system really hammered it home.
The same can be said for Seymour in FFX too. He is extremely powerful in the one bossfight you get to use him in.
Not to the same level, but FFX did similar with Seymour. He joins the party briefly and is much stronger than your whole party at that point (unless you’ve overlevelled) and also has an overdrive. When you fight him later, he’s quite easily beatable and doesn’t have an overdrive to use. He also summons Anima, who you can get later in the game, and is much more powerful under your control than his.
It's not just that he one-shots everything, it's how nothing can even touch him. The enemies will kick past Cloud's ass in every direction. Sephiroth can resurrect your dead ass like he's Shiny Emo Jesus, then smack around a dragon like it's a fly, and to him the whole encounter is no more effort than a human clearing cobwebs.
Cortex from crash bandicoot. Struggling to fly that little hovercraft thing as final boss in the first game, you get your hands on him in CTR, man's powersliding around like a pro!
I was never able to beat him in the story as a kid, I hated him
It’s still hard as an adult. Playing the remastered trilogy, Crash Bandicoot had no right to be as hard as it was for a kids game. Weird because I remember having to complete levels for my cousins because they couldn’t do it, so I must have been pretty good, but I’m absolutely useless as an adult.
Brumaks, Gears of War 2.
Or that DLC in Gears 3 where you play as Raam, just straight up massacring the COG
Goddamn what a game. It's my personal GOAT when it comes to split screen co-op experiences.
Every legendary Pokémon because you can catch them, level them up, and give them better moves Honorary mention to Colosseum and XD, which gave final bosses which were actually capturable
Yeah, that's what I had in mind. You can level them up, give them new moves and just being able to cleverly select movements really makes them more powerful.
Except eternatus
Dynamax eternatus is probably the most busted pokemon ever
[удалено]
Sturm is much more powerful, its a shame you cannot use him in campaign, that would have been awesome!
Wow, you guys just unlocked a core memory for me. I haven't thought about this game in over 20 years! I was so innocent. I remember walking into the nearest GameCrazy and asking the employee if they have it for Playstation 2. That was the day I learned about console exclusivity. Where can one play this game in 2024?
On the Nintendo Switch. It's called Advance Wars 1 + 2 Reboot Camp and is a remake of the first two games on the GBA. It is really good imo and I would pick it up if you can.
Master Hand in SSBU.
Magus from Chrono Trigger becomes an absolute beast. Not right away, but he’s a monster when you level him up. Then again so is everyone by the late game.
At least in the original, by the time you were at max level, he fell behind the other characters. He was still cool, but not amazing.
Mind you, it's because he didn't have any combo-tech's the way the other characters did. Dude's a bit of a loner. 1 on 1 though, his solo abilities were some of the most powerful in said game. Turns out in a JRPG, the Power of Friendship trumps raw magical might, who knew.
Even minus combos, I seem to remember Marl and Luca being stronger by a considerable amount.
Perhaps you'd geared them better? I recall Magus being able to just nuke the whole battlefield more effectively and more often during the bits I played with him. Losing out on Tri-combos meant I switched him out eventually, but he hit like a freight train and had gas for days when I played.
> Losing out on Tri-combos He has triple techs with lucca+robo and lucca+marle. He doesn't have any double techs. And he's rather powerful with naturally 100-200 more stat points by ** level compared to the rest of the cast. If you're doing new game+ and tab collecting to stat max, it doesn't really matter who you play with. But in the natural game, he's quite strong and pretty versatile with his access to all level 2 elemental magic, plus magic defense and death spell; and his ult is quite strong too. I don't think he's useful enough to make a best team comp list because of synergies, but he's quite good nonetheless.
He was a boss I originally thought was one of those "you're gonna lose no matter what" battles. As a near literal God when you first face him, you see his power wane as you understand the game mechanics more. Still, going in blind, one of the more epic battles in turn based RPGs outside of FF VI.
his solo techs are some of the strongest in the game for the least mp
He wins just because he looks awesome.
Not a final Boss but Shiva in Streets of Rage. Like he's stupid broken as a boss but once the player controls him and you can use his broken moves he's unstoppable. I love SoR4 Shiva who can literally just dash all over the screen non stop
Yeah Shiva was a beast. I still preferred Roo though because who doesn't want to kick ass with a kangaroo? :)
Fucking loved Streets of Rage.
Does Minion in Twisted Metal 2 count?
Absolutely. Minion was so stupid good. I believe one of the games let you play as Calypso, too, with a nuclear missile truck.
Final fantasy tactics. Thundergod Cid I think is his name. Game gets much easier once he joins your party Edit. Just realized I read it wrong. Not the final boss.
TGC, Cidolfus Orlandeau, baby!
He breaks the game.
Anima in FFX. Not the final boss but is fought again near the ending
Shoutout to the international version where their limit hits 16 times
When I first got Anima and used her overdrive on a group of normal enemies and broke the 9999 damage barrier? I felt like an unstoppable force of nature.
Guardian Heroes has a whole mode where you can play as any enemy you've encountered which leads to some wild gameplay
Not sure if this counts, because technically you don't play as the villain, but in Zone of the Enders 2 you keep fighting Anubis who just teleports all over the place, then sometime near the end you actually get the same ability on Jehuty and everything becomes so easy.
From what I understand, Anubis's stats don't change at all over the game. You just become so badass you can finally keep up with him.
Yes, and you also get the *Zero Shift*.
Bowser from Mario and Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story. You defeat him by jumping on his head, but you get to play as him throughout the game. In a few segments he *grows to roughly 100x his average size and punches out not one*, *but* **two** *life-sized castles.* ^(and a train.) It's pretty neat.
Using a cheat code to play as Minion in Twisted Metal made you basically unstoppable.
Minion was class. It never really got tiring either just laying waste to everything.
Ganon in Hyrule Warriors.
His big pig form for sure.
That's a nice keep you have there. Be a shame if I OHKO'd the entire thing...
There was an SMT game on the Gameboy that, in the post-game, let you recruit the bosses. It kept their stats exactly the same. So you'd have your main characters with like 200 health and then have Lucifer with 3k throwing out room clears every turn.
SMT?
Shin megami tensei
Soul reaver 2, technically. Raziel must fight his past human self, ultimately putting himself in the grave for Kain to resurrect later. But at that point in the game Raziel wilds the soul reaver sword, a sword that contains the soul of his future self. Due to the paradox, neither Raziel or the sword can be destroyed until the human Raziel is killed. You essentially fight a bunch of vampire hunters and the last boss in God mode.
Castlevania Curse of Darkness lets you play as Trevor Belmont after finishing it
True Ogre in Tekken 3 and Reapermon in Digimon Rumble Arena. Bosses with moves that take 40-60% of the opponents life, and you can just spam them.
The Three Mage Sisters from Kirby Star Allies. They have their full boss movesets, but with invincibility frames. They also have way less endlag on their attacks in their playable forms. They also have a screen nuke attack with the only restriction being a cooldown period before being able to use that attack again (as opposed to Kirby's Crash ability, which is a single-use ability). Zan Partizanne in particular is ridiculously fast, has long range, and a practically infinite teleport dodge move.
Valgas from Powerstone. Comically OP in multiplayer
Not so much a final boss, but getting the apple of Eden for assassins creed brotherhood makes you feel like a final boss. I replayed the episode so much as a kid. Also getting 100% for that mission is so boring, I don’t remember entirely but I swear for 100% synchronisation you can’t kill anyone.
Keepa the goalie from the Besaid Aurochs in FFX. Terrible goalie, even worse in every role..... until you get him to level 99 his SHOT gets turbocharged to the max number.
Ganon from Hyrule Warriors. Can become big stompy and stomp all over the hylians.
Sephiroth ff7 not sure if you’d fought him before then though. The flashback happens before the final though so don’t know if it counts Some of the duragons in the bouncer Ness from original ssb Mewtwo and most of the legends A lot of the characters in the tenkaichi series
M. Bison Street Fighter II: Champion Edition
Playing as Venom in Spiderman 2 was OP as hell🤣🤣
I’d say Kratos in Tales of Symphonia. While not a final boss, after having him in your party for the whole first act he betrays you and WHOOPS your ass (assuming no NG+), but you can make certain choices to get him back. His strength reunited in your party and if you level him up and get him his ultimate weapon could kick his own ass, so to speak. You also do fight him once more towards the very end of the game and he is still very tough for a first timer.
Mewtwo in R/B? I basically cleaned up with him, despite not knowing type advantages at that early stage. Or at least that’s what I remember.
Well it doesn’t hurt that in the original game, psychic had nothing it was Not Very Effective against. So you either did reg or super effective damage 100% of the time, which is super strong. Add to that the lack of bug and ghost type moves in that version, which were the only things Super Effective against Psychic, and it was a super OP type.
Psychic was the only type that resisted Psychic. Plus, Mewtwo was also basically the fastest thing in the roster, on top of monstrous special attack/defense and pretty high physical attack. And a great moveset. It's kind of sad to see how mediocre he is in Ubers by now.
In Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects the metal chick, I forgot her name, you unlock after beating the campaign is pretty overpowered to the point that me and my siblings banned her in fights lol
Brock Lesnar
The Trails games since Cold Steel 2 sometimes makes the bosses playable when you get to the last save point or so. Trails into Reverie allows you to unlock McBurn, the most powerful enemy agent you've encountered up to that point and it is possible to build him to solo bosses. EDIT: Here's the [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=km4C4lSGtN0) of someone doing it to the hardest boss in the game.
Double Dragon Gaiden. You can unlock all the bosses and mini-bosses as playable characters, and they're every bit as OP as when you fought against them.
Not a final boss, but there are characters in Suikoden 2 that when beaten, will join your party at level 99. Nobody knows why they're at max level since they're only level 40 something when first fighting them.
Ivan Ooze in Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers: The Fighting Edition. He absolutely wrecked!
Friends don't let friends pick rugal.