So yeah... just read through this whole thread... all 37 pages of it. Ow.
A few things to say:
Only one person mentioned Lagoon, and didn't mention the final boss. He had quite a few forms (even if you didn't count the bosses you had to fight before him) and the hardest one was the giant blue bird form. For those who haven't played it, imagine a huge blue bird flying around shooting lazers at you and all you have to attack it with is a sword that's 1/10th as big as one of the bird's feathers.
I empathise with TeknoBunny about the contra 3 last boss on hard mode. A friend of mine named Dan and I decided we'd beat that game together on hard mode, because we were both the best video game players in the theatre the SNES was in. We FINALLY beat him (Dan was really good at 'sniping' the blue 'walking' orb), and Dan was celebrating, cheering, and pointing it out to other people in the room, while I watched us rise out of the canyon. Of course we had only beaten it on normal thus far, so when the boss' NEW final form attacked us on the missle... "DAN GET YOUR ASS BACK OVER HERE, HE'S ATTACKING US AGAIN!!!"
Konami is evil, yes. I never managed to beat Super Ghouls and Ghosts without cheating. The second to last boss was just frikkin impossible to beat in the time limit with the stupid bracelet. Why the weapon of ultimate power has to be so hard to use compared to the other weapons is beyond me. It wasn't so much I couldn't beat him, I just couldn't beat him in the stupid time limit.
As for the person surprised by someone going through FF1 with four black mages, I have a friend who has beaten it with four RED mages. That's like playing D&D with a group full of bards, except even less useful.
Omega Weapon in FF8 was easy for me, but perhaps that's because I spent the entire way down to his lair drawing incredibly powerful spells for my wussy characters, and then 'equipping' them or whatever it was called. I had enormously powerful characters who were all low level, so he wasn't that hard.
The 'amusing' diffcult endboss for me was bowser of Super Mario World. This boss is insanely easy now, but I had so much trouble beating him the first time because somehow I had missed the info block that told you, "You can throw things straight up by holding 'up' before kicking them." I went through the whole game without knowing that, and had to beat bowser by FLYING a shell up to him, without getting hit once.
But one game I haven't seen mentioned by anyone is Lawnmower Man for the SNES. The last boss in that game is not only incredibly annoying and difficult to beat, but just getting to him is insanely hard. It's like playing a crappy version of gradius without any of the good weapons. And the ending is pathetic too. All in all it's a crappy game, which is why I don't recommend anyone else playing the game to see what I mean.
