Happy Monday, folks, and welcome to the Weekly Video Games Thread!

Back in February, I replayed the Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door remake. I always make sure to beat Bonetail before conquering the final chapter. I took this picture to use in a header, and since then it’s been either in my Switch 2 storage or in a folder on my computer for screenshots that could be used as header images. It stayed there, relaxed, with me knowing that I was always gonna get to it eventually.

And that day is today, because of a different Nintendo game (or remake of a Nintendo game) from the 2000s. See, I saw that Lily-Bones was playing Pikmin and decided to do a quick playthrough myself. I’m on Day… 11, I think, and I’ve got just one or two days more in the Distant Spring before getting to the final boss. Super short game, so this isn’t interfering much with my other projects. However, it was on this playthrough that I decided to challenge myself. I fought the Smoky Progg, an incomprehensible monster and one of the Pikmin series’ greatest terrors. It only appears in the first few days as a challenge to resourceful players, but if you do summon it, it’ll make a beeline to your home base and kill as many Pikmin as it can. Its body is toxic and will instantly kill your allies. I did beat the Smoky Progg, but it took most of the day and literally hundreds of Blue Pikmin. The prize for beating it, a cute pearl that gives you 100 Pikmin, restored only a fraction of what I lost.

Smoky Progg and Bonetail, the monster from The Thousand-Year Door, are great examples of “superbosses,” hyper-dangerous but entirely optional bosses. Many of your classic JRPGs have one: the Reaper in Persona, Lost Number in Final Fantasy VII, Mewtwo in Pokémon Red & Blue, Malenia in Elden Ring. The Xenoblade franchise openly delineates them by having them surpass their game’s level cap. But you can find these across genre. It’s all the same idea: having an ultimate enemy who’s only there for the hardcore and committed. It would be beyond cruel for Nintendo to force you to fight the Smoky Progg, a monster so powerful it derailed many of my plans in the Distant Spring. Instead, it’s an Easter egg, and when it returned in Pikmin 4, it was similarly optional and hard to find. It would be beyond absurd for Kingdom Hearts to gate critical plot points behind obscenely tough and hard to find bosses—which is why it does gate critical plot points behind obscenely tough and hard to find bosses.

Anyway, what’s your favorite superboss in a game? You don’t need to have beaten or even seen your answer, to be clear. This is a trope that actively keeps itself from most players, not just in the difficulty of these bosses but the challenge it can be to find them at all. Like, I will never be able to fight Slave Knight Gael at the end of Dark Souls III: The Ringed City, but I know him well enough to know he’s cool.

And, as always, what did you play this weekend?