My personal experiences with Sonic final bosses.

[superluigi018]

So my first experience with Sonic was through Sonic Classic Collection, and I was pretty mixed on some of the games, but Sonic 3 & Knuckles really clicked with me. I first beat the game normally as Tails, and then went and got all the emeralds to unlock Super Tails and the Doomsday Zone. And as much as I loved Sonic 3K, I could never bring myself to love this final boss, Death Egg Robot. I found it to be arduous and not fun at all, so I put the collection down after I got the true ending and moved on to another Sonic game, Sonic Colors on DS. A very similar thing happened there. Loved the game, but the final boss (Nega Mother Wisp) made me want to pull my hair out, and it didn't even feel like it needed to be there, and I was so disappointed I didn't get to use Super Sonic afterwards. My Sonic game after that was Sonic Generations on 3DS and the final boss (Time Eater) was even worse than the other two. It was one of the most painful experiences of my gaming career, and I remember sitting hunched over on the bus trying to figure it out. So after Sonic Generations 3DS I moved on to 3D sonic games, starting with Sonic Colors on the Wii. And I felt almost the opposite about the final boss. It was too easy. I loved the atmosphere (I loved all of them for that), but the boss was short, easy, and predictable, but at least I eventually got Super Sonic. Then came Sonic Generations on PC, and the experience was unexpected. Based on what I remembered from the 3DS version, I expected to tear my hair out, but the boss was even shorter and easier than in Colors, and I came out of it slightly underwhelmed, and by that point the joy of unlocking Super Sonic wasn't even there. So what I realized was that 2D sonic final bosses are stupid hard, and 3D bosses are pathetically easy. Once I get my Series X I will be playing Sonic Unleashed and Sonic Forces. What are those bosses like? Are they way too hard or laughably easy?

[Eurisko]

There have been some very easy final bosses in the series but I also credit the Sonic franchise for having In what is in my opinion the hardest/greatest final level/boss fight/fights ever...……….

Eggman Land and Dark Gia from Sonic Unleashed. An absolutely unrelenting gauntlet.

The very first time I played it  took me HOURS to get through. I'd say it has been the last great boss fight to this day.

 

[JezMM]

Sonic has rarely had very strong final bosses.  Probably the best one, conceptually speaking, is Sonic Adventure.  I love that it's the only final boss in the franchise where your speed is important to dealing damage to the boss.  It is not just enough to approach the boss and attack it, you have to approach it, dodging attacks, without losing your speed in order to actually deal damage.  It's bizarre that no other Sonic final boss has ever tried this idea again, and a shame too because Sonic Adventure's is still let down by some of that game's innate glitchiness and unclear geometry clipping etc.  (It's not terrible, but it doesn't feel particularly cool either).

Sonic Unleashed is a mixed bag.  The common consensus is that it's a bad final boss, I personally enjoy it, but it's not one I put much stock in defending, like, I totally get why people hate it, I just am more tolerant because I enjoy how the action unfolds.  Like most Sonic final bosses, it changes up the gameplay entirely from the game that came before, three times over no less (with, thankfully, some sections mixed in where you just play as regular Sonic and tasked with completing some platforming segments within a time limit, serving as a sort of "final exam" for the game which so few Sonic final bosses actually are).

Most people prefer the Wii/PS2 version which does play out with slightly more understandable rules at the cost of being a less cinematic experience than the HD version's boss.  I won't lie, the flair of the HD boss wins out for me since I feel the true final boss is the platforming sections that come before Super Sonic, and everything after is just us getting to play through the dramatic narrative climax where the tables turn against the villian.

Sonic Forces' final boss is okay but underwhelming.  One section is more or less a repeat of an earlier boss from the game but with a more challenging arena, the second section is fine as a final exam for that character's gameplay but not particularly interesting, and the third section is pretty much just a tweaked version of Sonic Colours' final boss - AGAIN, after Lost World already pulled the same trick.

 

But yeah, Sonic final bosses in general are rarely that good.  Super Sonic almost always causes them to come up with an underdeveloped minigame that loosely resembles the regular gameplay but rarely actually tests you on it.  And likewise they always seem to have trouble making the boss feel threatening due to Super Sonic's invincibility meaning the boss can only hurt you by wasting time.  Even the beloved Sonic Mania's regular final boss is an ordinary Eggman arena battle (with some confusing teleporty bits) with the secret final boss being a weird Super Sonic gameplay change-up boss.

I'd really love to see a 2D final boss that really tests you on your understanding of speed and physics, and a 3D final boss that isn't a gimmicky Super Sonic thing but also isn't just Sonic Colours' final boss AGAIN.  To be honest, I think they should do arena and chase style bosses for the majority of the game, and then make the final boss be something like Perfect Chaos in Generations, a proper little high-speed, exciting platforming exam disguised as a boss fight.  Of course if they ever manage to do a 3D game that captures the physics and speed style of the classic 2D games, they can follow my brief for a 2D final boss and make it about that, lol.

[Fish964]

Oh god, so many experiences here.

The final bosses of both Sonic Rush and Sonic Unleashed both took me literally hours to beat when I was a kid.

The former took me so long to understand what the hell I had to do to deliver damage and even after I figured that out, it was a seemingly endless struggle.

The latter, I remember knowing how to play it but just finding it so hard and dying so much. If memory serves me right, its also a really long boss anyway, so dying over and over and having to repeat the whole process was less than pleasant.

On a more positive note, I think the final boss of SA1 was super hard but never unfairly so. It tested your skills of the game in such an effective way I feel.

And here a few final bosses I find a bit too easy/quick to defeat:

Sonic CD

Egg Emperor from SH

Final boss from Sonic (1991)

Sonic Advance 3 (if certain teams)