7 Deleted Bosses You’ll Never Get to Fight

These cut boss battles got axed from the game and now exist only in our dreams! Or sometimes in glitchy bits of unearthed code.

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Outside Xtra is a companion channel to Outside Xbox, covering the wider world of gaming with weekly list videos, Let's Plays and shows with your hosts Ellen and Luke. Look for regular appearances by OG Outside Xboxers Andy, Jane and Mike, and generally more of the videos you love, about more of the platforms you enjoy, from a team now two people larger overall.

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#bossfight #deleted #outsidextra

[_underscore_]

Honestly, I'm so glad The illusive man fight got cut, there's just something so fitting about his character dying in a conversation, and never actually being encountered in "real" gameplay, I think it really fits the illusory theme

[Neva]

Even worse than being cut in dev: They launch with it and then delete it. Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands and the fight with the Predator. Me and my friend tried to beat him like dozen times just to find him bit too much. We decided to give it a break and come back stronger and with better strategy. Just a week later we can't find the mission on the map and little research tells us that the mission was deleted from the game. We were left without fulfillment.

[LukeAImp]

Would Professor Oak count? Using glitches, we can see that he was originally meant to be Champion, having the same Pokémon on his team as his grandson does in the final product with the exception of his starter being the one left over from the beginning of the game.
The game even alludes to his Champion status when he's able to follow you into the Hall of Fame, which only Champions can enter.

[simonbriggs]

A number of colossi were deleted from Shadow of the Colossus. Some were not even given proper names, but instead placeholder names. There was a daddy longlegs colossus, a monkey colossus, a worm colossus, a devil colossus, and a griffin colossus to name a few.

[CrowXIII]

The literal final boss fight in Metal Gear Solid V. Not only they took away the fight, they took away the whole ending of the game!

[totz_the_plaid]

Believe it or not, "Shadow of the Colossus" was originally going to be TWICE AS LONG. I haven't read all the translated interviews, but I believe it got cut from 32 to 24 before proper development (moving from planning to building stage), but another eight were cut during the actual build, including ones based on a phoenix, a spider, and a monkey, as well as a whole map segment that looked like a dam of some sort, cut deep enough into development that it's just been left beyond the world borders, but is still on the original PS2 disc. This was found because of a of director Fumito Ueda mentioning a "last big secret" that fans seemingly hadn't discovered in the game (speculation ranged from an alternate ending to a secret bonus colossus fight), there was TONS of research and searching done to discover what it could be. ...then it turned out that he wasn't aware that people knew you could get to the 'secret garden' floor of the Shrine of Worship.

Anyway, yeah, the discovery of "the dam" was pretty huge in the fandom when it happened since the map had been tightened up to the point where it's hard to even be sure where such a large structure would've gone, but even more to this list's point: eight planned bosses cut during the planning stage and another eight cut during development (with some even getting CGI models and even early playtesting).

[Gakusangi]

Wow, the fact that one guy was working on all the enemy and boss AI in Madness Returns explains a LOT of why that game felt like it was just missing key elements... like a proper boss battle in some cases.

[cleverruse]

I'm personally kinda glad that we never went barrel to barrel with the Illusive Man. It seems very... odd? To have him as a boss that you'd beat in a fight with hit points. Beating him psychologically felt fulfilling, even if it was just in a cutscene with like... a few things you could say. Throughout all of our interactions, he always had the upper hand, always had control until suddenly he didn't, and then you didn't really *need* brute force to take him down. Because hiding behind the company and the power, the Illusive Man was just that. A man.

Anyway! Professor Oak was cut from Red/Green I think.

[medusathedecepticon]

The fact that one guy managed to make all of the bosses from Alice Madness Returns is epic! Also it's nice that we got to see the boss in the actual game anyways which is well worth it due to how awesome it looks and all the effort the guy went into making it!

[Sniperguy]

I'd say Songbird in BioShock Infinite fit this category. It was initially planned as a more traditional enemy to fight, and though you do encounter it multiple times in the final game, its mostly in cutscenes and never a straight up boss battle.

[ZevVeli]

In the 2000 PS1 JRPG "The Legend of Dragoon" there was a cut boss fight against one of the titular Dragoons, heroes of an ancient war who weilded the power of dragons. In the late game there were four optional bosses against the ghosts of the original Dragoons of Wind, Earth, Water, and Thunder but there was a cut fight against the Dragoon of Light. The reason for this was because, unlike all the other boss fights, these optional bosses used the same spells as the characters in your party that had the same element and of the light Dragoon's four spells, only one did not restore the target to full health. This meant that the boss was unbeatable because she would heal herself faster than the party could deal damage to her, and this optional boss fight was cut from the game.

[furonguy]

In the original 2002 Ratchet and Clank, there was a character only known as “robot lieutenant”, who was supposed to be the first boss fight in the game, to be faced in the fifth level. We don’t know much about how the boss fight was supposed to unfold, but it was cut due to budgetary constraints, so there likely isn’t any unused code to find. The absence of the boss fight is noticeable though, as the final game gives the character a moderate amount of buildup before he ultimately just gets scared off in a cutscene.

[Lopezchile]

I wonder if there was an outtake of Ellen laughing at the "you mecha me so mad" joke, cuz that was brilliant Luke.

[josephattwell]

An interesting semi-deleted boss fight: Slate from Bioshock Infinite.

In the game himself, Slate appears, but as a soldier who has felt sidelined by Comstock, and pressures Booker to give him a soldier's death. However, in the game files there is an almost completed boss fight against Slate, where he uses electric Vigors to leave traps for you. It is possible to trigger this boss either by glitching or console commanding your way out of bounds. So it is deleted but it is a boss battle you can fight.

[MidwestArtMan]

I like to imagine the Space Pirates giving Kraid CPR during the events of Metroid Prime. Watch out for the spikes, guys.

[druinofodd]

I'd love to see a "7 hardest pieces of videogame capture" list - looking at some of the technical or gameplay obstacles to getting footage for these lists.

[acattygamer]

What we're missing is Luke fighting Ellen as a boss and losing repeatedly. That's the only way to explain all the puns in this video.

[PercentImagination]

Its unfortunate that deleted content doesn't get modded back in more often, especially so when the only reason it wasn't already ingame is because of time constraints.

[SabrinaRina]

Something just worse to me about a boss that just stomps up with no urgency to smack you around. They don't care, they know they can take you. You're like another fly. They get one so frequently they've gotten the swat routine down and expect it with only mild annoyance... You won't take long. 😣

[killertruth]

You had forgotten about the true deleted boss fight.

The developers.