Post examples of enemies or bosses that are initially presented as insurmountable obstacles you're not meant to win against in your first encounter, usually leading to a story-driven defeat or having to avoid or run away from them. Bonus points if you actually can beat them during the first fight if you're good enough.

Count Dooku in Ninja Gaiden 1 is like that

>>11840972 (OP)

>>11840972 (OP)

feel like theres at least one of these in every 90s jrpg. golbez in ff4 instantly comes to mind

>>11840972 (OP)

>>11840972 (OP)
You *can* beat the goers in the initial blitzball tournament if you're familiar with the game mechanics and are willing to use cheesy keepaway tactics and maybe hide behind your own goal for a half but it's clearly a match you're supposed to lose.

I found the alternate postgame cutscene you get for actually winning kind of underwhelming considering what a pain in the ass is but you do get a strength sphere so that's something, I guess.

>>11840972 (OP)
Dozer (or Desaix if you insist on Nintendo's official localization) from Fire Emblem Gaiden. Technically an impostor; you fight and kill the real one later on.

>>11841223
You're basically required to use Tidus's Jecht Shot to clear out the Goers blocking the goal if you want to win.

Do not pursue Lu Bu!
IIRC you can beat him early anyway.

>>11841223
Yeah watched my friend do this. You have to play good D the first half then use Jecht Shot to score. You might win by 1 or 2-0 like a real soccer match.

>>11841224
You can get a great item for actually beating him but I don't want to think about how much grinding it would take.

>>11840972 (OP)

I hated this fuck so much.

Lavos is basically this. I also think there was an early boss in Breath of Fire 2 who was this but I can't remember if you end up fighting him again later

Balio and Sunder from BoF3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4-0KoXEQ-k
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXecE5XXnTo

I actually tried for like half an hour to whittle down Bahamut at Dragon's Peak in the original FF3. It's not like I wasn't familiar with him - I had already played FF4 by that point, and I knew he was supposed to be a big tough monster, but he didn't hit all that hard and I did some damage, so I assumed I was supposed to win eventually. Then I ran out of healing items and such, and that's when I remembered Desch telling me to run, and I couldn't have felt dumber.
Supposedly it is possible to beat him here, though.

>>11841223
I never even knew you were supposed to lose. Somehow when I first played it as a kid I managed to get up 2-3 points in the first half and absolutely dominated once Jecht Shot was available. I don't remember doing anything cheesy either, just playing the fundamentals.

I just started a nostalgiafag replay with the Steam version. I'll see if I can replicate 8 year old Anon's blitz skills.

>>11841074
>fight a boss that’s so hard that he completely roasts your asshole in 3-4 turns
>assume you’re supposed to lose the fight and wait for the cutscene to play
>game over

The Rainbloods in Shining Force 3. They're a godlike deus ex machina on their first appearance in disc 2, and then in Disc 3 they're rather pathetic. A huge letdown.

>>11841678
I hate when this happens. This was more or less the case with Lavos in Chrono Trigger. When you fight him in the Ocean Palace, his stats are so jacked up that he's unquestionably the hardest boss, as he should be, and of course you'd be expected to lose at such relatively low levels. But then you fight him for real later on, when you're much stronger (or ought to be, anyway, unless you decide to skip all the sidequests), and he's a lot weaker than he was before.

>>11841783
Lavos really needed to either have the same stats in every encounter, or some story reason for being weakened when you fight him at the "right" time (like some quest you go on to trigger some event that hinders his development, or some item that exposes a weakness). You're right that how much he gets downgraded is disappointing, especially when there's no reason for it.

>>11841642
>Try to give it absolutely your all
>Forced to use the rare special items you were saving
>Still lose after forever
>No game over this time
>Turns out you can't win, but you also aren't supposed to lose too soon

It's bad enough I am stuck in an unwinnable boss battle, do you have to set rules that I have to lose properly too?

>>11840986
>Count Dooku in Ninja Gaiden 1 is like that
Does Ninja Gaiden really have boss named after the Star Wars guy?

>>11841193
>class of 1397
>home of the rebels
Were the founders of Columbine confederates?

The first Zone of the Enders did this with the freaking LAST BOSS!

After you beat what you think is the last boss that you have been after for most of the game another person suddenly appears out of nowhere, reveals he's the boss of the boss you just killed, and fights you. His life bar is basically just for show, you literally can't even touch him.

You can't just let him beat you either, you have to survive long enough for backup to arrive and help you escape. In ZOE2 within the first half hour of the game you fight that same boss again, and he's untouchable again, this time though all you can do is get your ass kicked. You do finally kill him as the last boss of ZOE2 though, but you are playing as a different character in ZOE2, the main character from ZOE1 never gets to beat him or even participate in the final battle even though he is in ZOE2.

The first Zone of the Enders did this with the freaking LAST BOSS!

After you beat what you think is the last boss that you have been after for most of the game another person suddenly appears out of nowhere, reveals he's the boss of the boss you just killed, and fights you. His life bar is basically just for show, you literally can't even touch him.

You can't just let him beat you either, you have to survive long enough for backup to arrive and help you escape. In ZOE2 within the first half hour of the game you fight that same boss again, and he's untouchable again, this time though all you can do is get your ass kicked (to add further insult to injury, right before this you fight an AI clone of the previous game's beatable last boss again, and she can be a total pushover if you use the new mechanics right). You do finally kill him as the last boss of ZOE2 though, but you are playing as a different character in ZOE2, the main character from ZOE1 never gets to beat him or even participate in the final battle even though he is in ZOE2.

>>11841428
There's two such bosses in Breath of Fire 2.

The first is a childhood nightmare boss Barubary, which is one of the biggest-bads of Deathevan's forces.
It's a forced defeat in the game's opening, but he spares you because the bad guys have a specific interest in keeping you alive to set things in motion.
You challenge him again at the end of the game as the penultimate boss, pretty close to the final boss. He gives you the option of taking him on solo (as Ryu alone), and if you accept you get the hardest boss fight in the game, but if you win he acknowledges your strength and gives you a hint about a treasure hidden in the pitch-black room you fight him in.

The other scripted loss in BoF 2 is against Tiga, a cat man warrior who leads the resistance against the St. Eva church, and falls in love with Katt, the cat girl warrior on your team.
He won't take no for an answer when he makes advances on her, and in the resulting challenge, no matter what you try you can't take him down. Unlike the earlier scripted loss, this one's not so obvious and the player is allowed to exhaust their resources trying to beat him.

>>11842460
As I recall you can also skip that second fight. While Katt is trying to avoid Tiga's advances she will run behind you, making Tiga think she did this because you are already her boyfriend. Kat tells him you are just friends and Tiga asks if this is true. If you say yes he will then ask if you are ok with him marrying Katt, saying yes again makes him see no reason to fight you. Any other choices makes him fight you.

>>11841326
I'm not sure if you even can grind enough to do any more than chip damage at such an early point of the game, plus he regains HP each turn. Beating him in Act 1 is pretty much a campaign in itself.

>>11842470
Yes, but what's at stake is both hers and Ryu's dignity, because Tiga's behaviour isn't really acceptable there.
The choice that avoids conflict is the pussy's way out and not really in line with the character.

>>11842628
https://www.fireemblemwod.com/fe2/ENG_vencer-a-tozeh-y-judah.htm

>>11841345
Why didn't they roll those guys out back when the Espers or Returners attacked Vector? Or when your party was fucking up their esper factory?

>>11842646
Ryu 2 is a silent protagonist, he has no character or personality outside of what you decide for him. He could be a naïve idiot who doesn't even realize Katt has feelings for him for all we know. And Ryu 4 was shown to be a bit of a pervert from the deleted scenes, the Ryus aren't necessarily all stoic white knights in shining armor.

>>11842382
Not to mention the real fight's actually kind of a drag. Before you even get to the real fight, you first have to go through a long boss rush gauntlet where Lavos for whatever reason decides to imitate bosses you've fought in the past, which I guess they implemented for narrative purposes, but in reality I'm just thinking "ugh, I gotta fight these fuckers again?" Thankfully you can dispatch most of them very quickly, but still.

>>11842683
Yeah, I've always felt that part of the narrative a bit weird, to be honest. Supposedly the Guardian cannot move, which is why you can run from it when you encounter it, so once deployed its use is to protect specific spots as, quite literally, an immovable object, but is a sitting duck otherwise. But then Kefka takes THREE of the fuckers to Thamasa, where they're depicted as Magitek soldiers but turn out to be Guardians when you fight them, though I'm guessing they just needed an unbeatable enemy at that point so they just recycled the Guardian rather than come up with a new Magitek Armor-type enemy.
And while we're on the subject of the Espers, where was Kefka and his insane power capable of soloing an entire army of Espers when they were released? If he didn't have that power before until Thamasa, how did he achieve it? It's never sat well with me. They kinda just handwave it away.

>>11841559
Speaking of FF3...

>>11841103
Imagine the blood splatter

>>11841338
>weakest of the group
Damn, he really had a small pp

>>11841338
Why can't modern indie devs make pixel art like this?

>>11843502
Which ones exactly?

>>11840972 (OP)
I generally dislike enemies that are arbitrarily invincible. The more the game events feel "scripted" and arbitrary, the less respect I have fore them
>you actually can beat them during the first fight if you're good enough.
Kino
Darksoulsian even

>>11840972 (OP)
Heishin in Yu-Gi-Oh! Forbidden Memories. It's satisfying to duel him again later on and beat him though.

>>11842424
>do you have to set rules that I have to lose properly too?
its funny because vile in mega man x in the op can actually kill you before he hits you with the beam thing to start the cutscene

The only time this trope was used well.

>Game start
>You're presented 4 party members including your adoptive mother
>Shit is going down, mom says that I shouldn't hesitate to run from battle if necessary
>First two fights in the game, without the player so it's all automatic
>First fight the team wins easily
>Ted Broiler appears
>Burns all party members to death except the mom like it's nothing
>Now it's the player's turn
>Barely hit 1 dmg against Ted Broiler
>Attempt to run like mom suggested
>it works....
>but Ted Broiler catches up
>kills your mom
>leaves you for dead
>wake up after several weeks of recovery
>all 4 party members are dead, they're not coming back
>entire game is about getting revenge on this MOFO that literally fucked your mother up
>end game boss fight against him
>Hardest fight in the entire series
>even if you grind like a madman your characters deal 30 dmg per turn at best
>except Ted Broiler secretly has auto-regen and heals 100 HP per turn
You could think "I'm gonna get him little by little" and not even know you're not making any progress. They really didn't shy away on how strong he is supposed to be even when you are supposed to kill him.

>>11844805
Sounds kino. Way too many RPGs have the final boss be either some ancient evil you have no personal vendetta against, or a pushover, or both. Having the final boss be both brutal as fuck even with preparation and a son of a bitch who ruined your life is as good as it gets.

>>11845012
Actually he's the penultimate boss but I didn't want to spoil more. Ted Broiler definitely is harder and leaves more of an impact though

>>11844805
Only part of that I don't like is the secret regen, that's just a dick move honestly.

>>11844805
>>11845027

>>11840972 (OP)
High Max is a cunt and I don't ever want to see a set of boss appearances like that again, yet somehow there is something very satisfying about killing him on the rematch after meeting the conditions to even have a chance and going through his stupid ballet for the last time

>>11845217
You'll figure out something's up after a 20 mins fight that leads nowhere

Forgot to mention but he's also wearing body armor at the start of the fight. Body armor makes you almost invicible until it gets destroyed by a crit, so the first few turns are just holding on until you get a crit the trick is to not use the weapon with the best damage output but a weaker one which is more likely to crit. There are a few tricks like this that can make the game easier but it takes full knowledge of the game mechanics, like how with your weaker character you should use a battle item except it's a very rare item that can also get used up after a few uses or that you can raise the stats of your companion dog by feeding him so that he's actually helpful in this fight instead of just being another target

>>11845852
... can't you just unplug him?

>>11846026
The crit thing sounds stupid too honestly. So these enemies that have armor until the RNG blesses you with a critical hit you can't even do damage to them until the RNG gives you a crit to break their armor?

>>11846229
You can do dmg but very little, or by using that consumable item I mentionned. Not many enemies have body armour, it's actually the player that can use and abuse that (switch to another one once the first one breaks) so it's a known mechanic, and crits aren't too hard to trigger especially with certain weapons

>>11842706
Ryu is the average japanese anime character, of course he has to act as a white knight in the canon way in every BoF game.

>>11844805
GIDEON