The awesome boss fights are one of the major selling points of the Metal Gear series, so unsurprisingly there are a lot of these.
Metal Gear Solid[]
- Hmm... I see you like Metal Gear. Do not worry, Psycho Mantis is only here to Break the Fourth Wall. There is no need to switch controller ports.
- Later you fight Sniper Wolf in a Sniper Duel. At night. In the middle of a blizard.
- The battle with Vulcan Raven in the freezer room.
- Snake vs. REX. You've just witnessed the seemingly immortal Grey Fox get killed, you've watched the absolute Tear Jerker of a sequence where Snake can't bear to fire his Stinger missiles at Fox, and after it all, you just want to Kick. Some. Ass.
- There's also the battle against Liquid Snake. It starts out as a timed fist-fight, and then later on you have to shoot Liquid while on a Jeep with Meryl (or Otacon, if Meryl died), as he follows on another Jeep while escaping Shadow Moses.
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty[]
- In Metal Gear Solid 2, you fight a Harrier — in other words, a fighter jet — piloted by Vamp and Solidus. Accompanying you in this battle are Snake and Otacon in a helicopter, making for an awesome 3 vs. 2 battle.
- There's something about RAY, 'cause the fight against the RAY army is sufficiently great. You play as Raiden on foot with a Stinger launcher, fighting anywhere from three to twenty Metal Gear RAYs. All the while dodging bullets, homing missiles, and water-jets. It's one of the more difficult fights, but so satisfying.
- The sword fight with Solidus at the end of the game is also pretty good.
Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater[]
- Metal Gear Solid 3 gives us The Sorrow. He's an unusual boss, because he's already dead. He's another in a long tradition of HopelessBossFights- you can only win by trudging past the ghosts of everyon you've killed. He also has some of the best dialogue in the game before the fight.
The Sorrow: The living... may not hear them. Their voices... may fall upon deaf ears. But Make. No. Mistake. The dead... are NOT silent. Now you will know the sorrow of those whose lives you have ended. |
- Made more awesome by the ghosts. If you kill a guy with a nutshot, he'll grasp his crotch and yell "I'm useless!" The prize for the most creative ghost goes to the one where you kill a sentry on a mountain, let a bird eat him, kill the bird, and eat it, the ghost appears with the bird on his shoulder crying "You ate me!"
- The End stands out. The End is a sniper around 100 years old, and is more or less capable of manipulating the natural environment. This, combined with the fact that he is the only boss to never kill Snake, makes him a tough but somewhat forgiving challenge. You can literally spend hours crawling on your stomach scanning the combat area, that spreads over three large open maps, with your gadgets to pinpoint his position before getting shot and he runs away to a new hiding spot.
- The End has some extremely crafty AI, too. You can use the Directional Microphone to learn that he's hiding in the next map, by listening for his breathing. Then, when you enter the next area, you find that he was waiting for you right in the transitional area, and he smacks you down with a flashbang. Or you find his sniping point, but can't reach it from the same map. So you go to the next area, re-enter from a point where you can reach his perch, and find that he isn't there anymore. Instead, he's at a completely different perch, and has his scope trained on his old spot, so even if you have 100% camo, he can still completely sucker you.
- The battle with The Fury inside the tunnel in the mountain. The atmosphere during this fight really adds to it, as does the music.
- Fighting against The Boss was the highlight of the game. You are both standing in an open field of white flowers, with the boss not only being blond and pale skinned, but also wearing her iconic white combat suit. Being able to CQC her like she did Snake was amazing. She tells you you have 10 minutes to kill her before bombers will blast the whole place to ash and about 5 minutes into the fight, an instrumental version of the theme song, which you have heared several times during the game, starts playing. And it is clear that when the last note plays, it's all over. It all goes downhill when Snake has to shoot her in the head with her own weapon.
Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots[]
- The Metal Gear RAY battle. Bonus points for quite possibly being the only time in the entire series where you get to pilot one of the titular Metal Gears.
- Even more awesome when you know you are fighting the Metal Gear DESIGNED to obliterate Metal Gear REX, AKA the very one you almost destroyed in the first game and you are piloting now.
- Another candidate for the greatest boss battle in the entire series must be the final battle between Snake and Liquid Ocelot. It's not very unusual or spectacular, but uses the health bars and theme music from all four games, to take your one more time through the entire series before it finally comes to an end.
- Laughing Octopus has perfect camouflage abilities and you fight her inside a small hut, where she can hide in any place and disguise herself as anything, becomming part of the walls or the furniture, but always leaving some tiny traces by which you can spot her if you look carefully enough.
- Although MGS4 is a single player game, when Raiden comes to Snake's rescue when he has to fight both Vamp and the Gekkos, the game gets into split screen mode to show both fights next to each other. While you don't have any time to watch what's happening on Raiden's side, it's still an amazing effect and really feels like Back-to-Back Badasses.
- Made even better by the music.
Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker[]
- The second battle against Peace Walker/Basilisk in Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker is extremely intense and very much awesome, even though it can be a long-haul on single player. The exhilaration and intensity peaks when it readies its nuke for launch, which will end in a game over if you don't stop it, accompanied by Kaz sounding genuinely panicked as he urges you to prevent the launch via your radio. Few moments are as pulse poundingly exhilarating to a gamer as that moment where the timer reached the single digits, and on their last shot they manage to stop the launch sequence for another few precious moments.. The subsequent internal destruction of The Boss AI pod as you constantly hear her voice talking to you counts as well.
- Also from Peace Walker, we have the final battle against Paz and Metal Gear ZEKE. The fact that Nana Mizuki's Koi no Youkushi-ryoku is playing in the background turns the fight against a Metal Gear, something that is already awesome in its own right, in a heated, epic showdown you know you Simply. Cannot. Lose.
- Peace Walker also has The Cocoon AI weapon which is enormous. It is basically a building made out of guns. Eventually you have to climb all the way to the top of it.