First Boss Battles That Made Us Rage Quit

Classically, the first boss in a video game barely qualifies as a boss at all. It's usually more of a glorified regular enemy, designed to test your knowledge of the game's basic mechanics. There is no way you should lose to the first Bowser in Super Mario Bros. unless your little sibling smashes your controller just as the Turtle King breathes fire your way.

Certain games, however, don't subscribe to that notion. As far as they're concerned, just because a video game boss comes first doesn't mean they have to be a pushover. Will they be as difficult as the final boss? Probably not, but that doesn't mean they can't destroy you. These are the games where a good chunk of their players may never see stage two, because they're too busy swearing, followed by swearing off the game entirely.

Here are video games with opening bosses that made us, and countless other frustrated gamers, rage quit and settle for something easier, like chess.

Bloodborne is chock-full of giant monsters and horrific demons, so it makes sense to assume the first boss, an evil priest named Father Gascoigne, would be a pushover. He's just a human, and humans are exceptionally killable.

Sadly, you'd be dead wrong (and probably just plain dead), as Father Gascoigne is a stone-cold nightmare to beat. Because he's human-sized, Gascoigne is incredibly fast, making him and his attacks super-difficult to avoid. Speaking of those attacks, he wields an axe and will swing at you multiple times in a row with it, in a way that you're not likely to easily dodge. If that's not obnoxious enough, he also sports a blunderbuss, a shot from which can stagger you and somehow make it even more impossible to evade his axe attacks.

You need to be extremely patient to bring down the good father. A good strategy is to continually dodge and hit him with weapons that will make him stagger, leaving him prone to further attacks. He turns into a werewolf after you've damaged him enough; the trick is to know the seemingly-pointless Music Box you found earlier can lull him into a peaceful hypnosis, leaving him vulnerable. If this strategy proves too difficult — and likely it will — an alternate strategy would be to remove the disc from your system, sell it for store credit, and buy the latest Sesame Street game instead.

If you've ever played a Zelda game, you're familiar with the creepy spider boss, Gohma. Usually one of the first bosses, this crawly critter isn't normally a tough battle. When Gohma opens its eye, you shoot it with arrows until the spider is squished.

This isn't the case with Wind Waker's Gohma, who doesn't fall victim to a simple arrow-to-the-eye strategy. With this Gohma, you initially pretend the 50-foot-tall nightmare spider isn't there, and focus instead on a creature called Valoo dangling above it. Valoo has a tail that you need to grab, using your clawshot. Once you do that, he'll get angry and throw a foot-stomping tantrum, causing part of the ceiling he's chilling on to crash down on Gohma's head, damaging its armor. Gohma then helpfully repairs the ceiling and returns to its position; you rinse-repeat until the armor is completely destroyed. Only then do you do the eye-attack thing until there's one less monstrous spider in the world.

The problem is, tugging on a much smaller enemy than the one you're scheduled to face is a weird strategy, one many players might not get at all. Even the developers of the game seem to realize they made Gohma too counter-intuitive for the typical gamer. In an interview, developer Satoru Takizawa admitted, "I was really worried about whether players would figure it out." For frustrated gamers, that quote might offer some comfort.

Even a cutesy game like Pokemon can throw a difficulty curveball your way, as Pokemon: Yellow Edition did extremely early on. As with other Pokemon games, the first boss is a boy named Brock. This time, however, you're at an extreme disadvantage from the get-go, and there's little you can do about it except smile, wave, and pray for the best.

Brock's monsters are all rock-based, and in games where you could choose your first Pokemon, that wasn't much of an issue. But Yellow Edition is yellow for a reason: you have no choice of initial monster, and are saddled with a Pikachu whether you like it or not. Once you face Brock, whose monsters are all incredibly resistant against Pikachu's lightning-based attacks, you won't like it. At that point, Pikachu's iconic cuteness will not stop you from hating its guts

You can capture other Pokemon along the way, but none available to you by that point are really that good against Brock's rocks either. Your best hope is to get really good at grinding, and have the patience to do it. If you get your Pokemon strong enough, they should be able to wear Brock down. But if you're one of the many modern gamers who considers grinding more a chore than an enjoyable part of your favorite hobby, there's a better-than-good chance your copy of Yellow Edition never showed you anything past that first gym.

Typically, Dr. Robotnik (Eggman if you're nasty) challenges you at the end of every Sonic stage. He's like the subject of a Barry White song: your first, your last, and your everything. Of course, his difficulty level changes as the game progresses, and at the start he's a downright pushover.

With Sonic 2 for the Game Gear, however, he comes out swinging in one of the most frustrating moments in Game Gear history. You don't actually fight Robotnik so much as you attempt to avoid his bouncing balls of death, while simultaneously avoiding falling into a pit featuring a gigantic crab that will happily claw you to bits if you get too close. Avoid the balls and they'll hit the crab; do that enough times and the crab dies. Somehow, Robotnik's ship self-destructs along with it. It's Sonic, don't bother with logic.

The rage-inducing challenge comes from how you're on a fairly steep incline, so just about every time you ducking the bouncing balls, you simply roll down into the crab pit. You're forced to jump over the balls, but that's easier said than done. Many times, they bounce as high as you can jump, making them extremely difficult to avoid completely. The problem is, this boss stage contains no rings. No rings equals a one-hit death for poor Sonic, so you either have to conquer this near-impossible situation perfectly, or you're as cooked as Sonic's beloved chili dogs.

Dark Souls is so dedicated to murdering you over and over again, even its tutorial boss could qualify as the final Big Bad in a lesser game. The Asylum Demon, the first boss you face after waking up undead, is a tremendous pain in the butt, especially since you just started and almost certainly have no clue what you're doing.

The Demon is humongous and his lair isn't, making evasion from his many wide-reaching attacks (including his ground-pound that sends harmful waves your way) annoyingly difficult. If you make the rookie mistake of attacking the demon too hard and too fast, that'll deplete your stamina in record time, making evasion near-impossible.

Like everything else in Dark Souls, the immense challenge is designed to force you to deduce an actual strategy for victory. In this case, your best bet is to start the fight from atop a high ledge, jump down, and attacking the Demon with enough force to sap tons of his life. From there, focus on attacking him from behind and you should eventually fell the Demon. The trick is being patient enough to deal with dozens of aggravating deaths before the strategy truly clicks. Even then, the fact that your attacks do very little damage means that even when expertly fought, this battle will take forever. That, more than anything else, could cause more than a few players to throw up their hands and move on.

Devil May Cry's giant crab boss, Phantom, isn't terribly difficult if you know what to do. The problem is, many players don't initially, because beating him involves playing the game in a completely different way than you'd just gotten used to.

For the most part, you can get through the bad guys in Devil May Cry by going in guns a-blazing. Hacking and slashing like the utter badass Dante is will get you through the game to a point, and that point is boss number one. That's because if you attack Phantom with the same reckless abandon as you would any other baddy, he will simply counterattack with his giant pincers, killing poor Dante over and over again until the player either gets good or gets to quitting.

Phantom exists to teach the player that each boss battle in Devil May Cry requires their own, separate, thought-out strategy, as opposed to the straight-ahead methods you could use to plow through lesser ne'er-do-wells. So what do you have to do to make it past Phantom? Basically, you should focus on attacking from above. Using aerial moves like the Helm Breaker, Dante should be able to damage Phantom without worrying about his crabby new friend's deathclaws. If you can't figure that out, however, you're not likely to advance any further in this game and you're gonna have a bad time.

Shadow of the Colossus is a game with no enemies except for the bosses. As such, you'd think the first monster would be stupendously easy, so you can learn how the game works and how you're supposed to conquer these beasts. You would be wrong, as the first Colossus pretty much assumes that you know what you're doing, and punishes you severely if you do not.

Named Valus, the first Colossus can be a nightmare to deal with. You pretty much have to figure out on your own, in real time, how to climb this humongous beast, reach its head, and then stab it to death without repeatedly falling or getting thrown around everywhere. While you do get a jumping and climbing tutorial beforehand, there's a big difference between climbing a lifeless rock and climbing an angry, hundred-foot-tall murder-giant.

It's not like the game gave you an easy giant to start off with, either. Valus is as brutal and unforgiving as any other Colossus in the game. If simply attempting (and failing) to scale this guy doesn't frustrate you to the point of quitting, his brutal attacks might just do the trick. If you can climb and beat Valus, you got a pretty good chance of making it through the rest of the game. All you have to do is not stumble into the metaphorical Sarlacc Pit the game placed right at the starting gate.

You'd think that of all types of games, a side-scrolling Disney romp would be among the most likely to take it easy on you come first boss time. Tarzan for the PS1, however, cares not for your puny human assumptions.

Unlike many games, Tarzan doesn't throw a boss at you until you're well into the game. Sabor, the vicious leopard, waits until stage six to attack poor Tarzan. By then, the game must assume you know exactly how to play it, because Sabor sure doesn't come at you with kid gloves. While his running attack is rather avoidable, his jumping attack is beyond frustrating. For the most part, he doesn't jump until you're too close to avoid him. You can't exactly attack him from afar, because your only attack is to slowly amble up to him and stab him straight-ahead with your spear.

What you need to do is time your jump just right to leap over Sabor as he jumps toward you. Once that happens, turn around immediately and stab him. Do that enough times and he ... runs away? Yes, you have to fight him again. And again. Ultimately, you need to hunt down Sabor three separate times before he finally joins Scar, Maleficent, and so many others in Disney Hell. But, unless you're an expert jumper, it's more likely Tarzan will join Mufasa and Bambi's Mom up in Disney Heaven.

The term "Nintendo Hard" exists for a reason, and the original battle with Kraid from Metroid is one of the best reasons why. Nevermind Mother Brain, good luck getting past Kraid on your way to the Metroids. He's cheap, relentless, and you will hate him forever for making it so you never see the rest of the game.

Despite him not being any bigger than you, Kraid is incredibly formidable. He only has two weapons, but both are doozies. He will shoot claws at you in three rapid-fire groups of two or three at a time, while simultaneously chucking spikes from his back toward you like basketball layups. These attacks aren't easy to dodge at the same time, especially as you're trying to jump just high enough to shoot a missile at Kraid's head, his only vulnerable point.

On that note: remember how we said he's not very big? That means his head is almost impossible to hit. Nine times out of ten, you're probably going to hit any other part of his body, meaning your missile will bounce off of him helplessly. At that point in the game, you don't have very many missiles, plus you have to hit him over 20 times to beat him, so it's totally plausible you'll simply run out of ammunition before Kraid crumbles.

Years later, Kraid returns in Super Metroid, and this time he's absolutely gargantuan. He's also ludicrously easy this time around, because bigger isn't necessarily better.