The Hardest Boss In Video Games History

Ethereal queen way harder than any of these bosses. Git gud filthy casual.

The most frustrating part is the developer response. As long as the strats are within the parameters in the game's code, it should not be considered cheating, and should instead be praised as players learning the game well enough to discover how to defeat it in their own way.
I can understand banning and other such punishments due to mods that cheat, such as the TOP debacle in 14, but if it's within the limits of the game as the devs designed it, then they should accept the solution the players discovered rather than throw a fit that they're not beating it "the right way."

"Super bosses" have ever been the excuse devs have had to let out their sociopathic frustration on the people they have always hated.

They're not hard insomuch giant damage sponges with absurd mechs made with frayed threads of string that will snap under the stupidest of parameters. I'm convinced Japanese developers cannot tell the difference between 'challenging' and 'punishing.'

It's worth noting that the FFXI dev team were actively and overtly hostile to the playerbase, and AV is a great example of how that hostility was manifest in the game design. The disdain they had for the players was obvious in their dev videos, and they deliberately refused to make badly needed QoL improvements until years after someone did it first, such as adding a minimap and support for windowed mode only after a patcher (Windower) was created by players to add those features. Player suggestions were pretty much ignored, and any time a player figured out how to cheese some system the dev team focused its energy and effort into defeating that approach rather than investigating whether and why it was required in the first place. It was almost like FFXI was a personal pet project for a handful of people and they resented the millions of interlopers that dared intrude upon it.

The same team worked on FFXIV 1.0, and the tremendous number of technical issues aside, it was an unmitigated disaster that dealt a lot of damage to Square Enix as a company, and was only undone when a new team was assembled that actually cared about both the game and the players of that game, and FFXIV: A Realm Reborn (version 2.0) and the soon-to-be-five major expansions that followed were the result of their efforts.

imagine you're fighting Ghost Train in FF6. You throw a Phoenix Down at it to instakill it and Yoshinori Kitase walks into your room and slaps the controller out of your hand, resets your super nintendo, and tells you to do it right this time.

I'm a huge FF fan. This is a big reason I never even bothered playing 11.

It's just too bad that literally nobody played FFXI when compared to WoW. I say this as someone with 20,000 hours in FFXI.
In all that time, I've never even seen AV once in game. Ever.

I imagine when you mention to a ffxi veteran the name alone they would probably get vietnam flashbacks and the horrors they felt

The consistent wrath of the developers against players for not beating AV exactly the way they wanted it to be done makes me laugh today, but holy was it ever ridiculous back when it happened.

THIS BOSS FUCKIN SUCKS!

Ran a link shell that did these runs had no problem with any of the content except AV I think we got him down to 92 percent at best. Which I viewed as pretty good for a group that consistently did not have a full alliance.

I have heard some stories about this. But I have 2 questions.
1)Why they made it so hard that nobody could beat it legit for years.
2)Why when people figured strategies to beat him SE said they don't count? What? They used what the game had. They didn't used cheats or hacks. So yeah
I don't understand this thing that SE did with this boss.

playing ffxi is like working on a car

with the announce of the 7.0 alliance raid series being centered around ff11, I am absolutely certain that, aside from appearing in BA, Absolute Virtue will reappear

THE worst designed boss ever.

The NMs and HNMs are optional bosses. You didn't need to fight them to finish the story.

i hope this is in the 14's 7.0 alliance raid i know there's version in Eureka but BA is a pain to get a party for

This is what would happen if Steve Jobs was a Square Enix game moderator

I was thinking The Sleeper from EQ would've been on here...

I remember some of these players from Odin man. Good times.

I've been playing FF XI for like 11 year and never have beat AV

This boss wasn't the hardest boss, it was just physically impossible for anyone who didn't have a data centre next door to where their entire group was playing... and when people found a way around SE's BS they got banned, and the cheese strategy was patched out... Really, can't figure out what SE would be without Yoshida and his team...

I had the magic acc. chakram... it free'd you up to nuke harder... what a fucking nightmare of a fight though. My job was just to nuke with the correct element, to keep one of it's defenses down... also worked as an add nuker. We lost more than we won, but we did eventually win.

I still remember the scholar strategy used that ended up causing the Devs to make a Scholar ability completely and totally useless. The strategy was basically to hit him with a Helix (Nuke/DOT hybrid), then having the alliance use Modus Veritas (Which doubled the helix damage but halved the damage time). Having the whole alliance of Scholars MV it would cause the Helix to do astronomical damage. SE ended up destroying MV's accuracy to the point where it's pretty much useless nowadays.

I didn't watch the whole video, but I thought for sure it was going to be The Sleeper ( Kerafyrm ) the unkillable dragon in EverQuest.

on par with Kerafyrm "The sleeper" but at least sony didn't keep patching it to keep it undefeatable. lol

Was in a LS that was the first to fight it on Ifrit. We had no clue what we were doing, spent hours fighting, and lost a ton of resources. What a waste.

The hardest boss I've beaten in recent years was definitely Orphan of Kos from the Bloodborne DLC

Absolute Virtue = Moving the Goalposts Fallacy, The Boss.

It really was the hardest boss. The hardest boss was grumpy, self-important game developers

"Oh yeah, just kill this other boss's minions really quickly and then use magic based on the day of the week, how did you NOT figure that out this trick to make it easier?"
This feels overly convoluted at best and purposely ridiculous to find to figure out, then they basically revealed they didn't want the boss beaten with basically... everything around it gettin nerfed?

Calling this boss “the most difficult boss battle of all time” is like calling a live porcupine “the spiciest and most difficult-to-eat cupcake of all time”.

What is “wall of justice “? I never heard that before

Oh my Altana! The developers NERFED Dark Knight K-Club strat? I never knew. BOO! Cheap! Hiss!

This is why I stopped playing final fantasy period!

So let me get this straight. The intended method of winning basically involved having a group of people all having TAS levels of timing and RNG in an environment with variable command input lag. The odds that everything would line up that way in such an environment, and even with everyone playing perfectly, you are more likely to win the jackpot on a lottery. Yes it is technically beatable, but the odds are almost non existent of being beaten in such a way.

I am halfway convinced that they created this knowing people would find work arounds and cheese. In other words that they basically used it for bug testing, and that is probably why the first method was allowed at first, so that they can collect data to patch an unintended game mechanic.

Absolute Virtue ? More like Absolute Failure. Both on the boss design and the developer responses to people beating it.

This seems just cruel

I was in Pandemonium at that time, but nowhere near strong enough to get into Sea. IIRC, I believe I had just gotten into Sky. I did hear about the news of this Boss not in-game but in the news like most people. Those were the best days of FFXI.

Nerfing an entire job to blance the difficulty of an optional lost boss from a expansion... nothing else to say.

when "unbeatable" gets enforced

S/E is at Fault for this, and them nullifying methods of winning is childish.

This doesn't even sound fun.

The order of the blue garter was on pandemonium? I remember them being on bahamut

kerafyrm

I was in one of the first linkshells that beat it using the wall strat I believe. We had several long attempts on it prior, trying tons of strats and holding it for hours on end. The funny thing is I remember pretty early on we did have people trying the 2hr strat, but never could figure the whole thing out, or the regen. Was on bismark server, LS called 'Lunarians'.

"Legitimate Means." Whatever that meant in this context. Ugh modern Square then and now is it's own worst enemy.

And then there is pandemonium warden where people fight this single boss constantly for 18 hours straight, and they give up because people are getting sick. SE is one crazy bitch.