That One Boss / Driving

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NOTE: Final Boss and Wake-Up Call Boss cannot be That One Boss without being overly hard by their standards. Please do not add them as examples.

Superboss is banned from being That One Boss, as it has to be overpowered and it's optional to fight them. They have no standards to measure their power.

• Blur has That One Objective: in order to unlock the final boss challenge, you need to maintain a speed of 125mph for an entire lap. Even the A-Class cars are hard-pressed to stay above 125 in hard turns.
• In Diddy Kong Racing you have Wizpig. Every boss in the game is exceptionally tough, but you're given boost balloons, zipper panels, and missile balloons to get ahead of the boss. Then comes Wizpig. His course lacks any upgrades and every person who has played the stage agrees that while you can mess up maybe a few times you can beat the other bosses, but doing a single thing wrong at any point during the race against Wizpig is the same as a forfeit. This means that you must play perfectly. This also requires using any tricks in the game, exploiting the boss's ability to kick you forward, and hidden stats in all the characters making it impossible to beat with most of the cast (something that doesn't necessarily guarantee a loss against any other boss). Even by the already extremely harsh standards of Diddy Kong Racing, this boss is difficult beyond so. The remake fixed this however, as Wizpig has magically fallen out of shape it seems and now runs slower than you drive.
  • After beating Wizpig, then you have to race a rocket version of him. While the rocket is actually slower than Wizpig on foot, there's the slight problem of you being in the middle of a Macross Missile Massacre and/or flying through extremely narrow passageways. Getting hit by anything has a pretty strong tendency to throw you off course, and landing in front of a pillar means the race is essentially forfeit. See how bad it is, and note especially the room at roughly 1:15.
  • And after that you see the credits and think it is over, right? Wrong. There is a second mode which plays all the courses backwards, so good luck learning how to race him again.
  • Before all of that is the boss of the third world Bubbler the Octopus who is formidable in his first race where he drops mines around the course, but becomes outright infuriating in the rematch with him where he now drops bubbles made to temporarily hold you in place while he gains a hefty lead over you if you get caught in the bubbles. Even the strategy guides say that he is the hardest boss by far, and they really aren't kidding.
• F-Zero GX, widely considered to be one of the hardest racing games ever developed, features Black Shadow on Level 7 of Grand Prix Mode. The race takes place on one of the most unforgiving tracks of the game, with next to no rails, extremely sparse health pick-ups and Instant Kill lava pits below, whilst the Black Bull (Black Shadow's machine) is given extra speed and durability compared to its base stats and every other opponent on track will attempt to dogpile the Blue Falcon with aggression unseen before.
• Gran Turismo:
  • Gran Turismo 4 has the final wet race around Tsukuba Circuit, in which you must race against one of the fastest cars in the game (typically a Toyota 89CV◊ or a Mercedes Benz CLK GTR), in ultra low grip conditions with the AI at it's highest difficulty. To top all of this off you get a five second time penalty whenever you collide with anything, be it the other car, a barrier, or any other obstacle you might face.
  • The "License Tests" in the series in general arguably qualify. No option to soup up your car means the tests are typically harder than the races the license qualifies you for. And you need to pass the first set of license tests to even start racing in Gran Turismo mode, and later tests for higher level races.
• The Firepede fight in LittleBigPlanet Karting at the end of Eve's Asylum. It has multiple weak spots which, when destroyed, leaves behind a trail of instant-kill slime. Destroying these weak spots at the wrong time will usually leave the player no choice but to die.
• Need for Speed: Most Wanted (2005) brought Eugene "Earl" James to the world. Number 9 on the Blacklist, Earl is considered to be one of the most egregious cases of Rubber-Band A.I. in a racing game, capable of closing the gap and staying glued to the player until the finish line. Nowhere is this more evident in the two Sprint races against him, which take place on courses with sharp turn after sharp turn: all it takes is a quick get-away at the start and a single mistake afterwards, and Earl will rocket ahead with no chance of recovery.
• Racing Lagoon has Ikki Fujisawa's RS2000tb (Nissan Skyline Turbo RS DR30), who goes all out against you right after his relatively easy-to-beat Group C car he used in the previous chapter. You race 3 laps and a half, in the home turf course at the dusk (most of the races are at night), but he's now driving extremely fast 500+ horsepower car and nailing all the corners decently. A duel can be hellish if you haven't mastered the track and have gained accessed to rare parts. Worse, losing a race forces you into an extra area where it's even trickier to grind for upgrades in order to make a comeback.
• Ridge Racer series:
  • Normally, all secret cars are earned through very tough one-on-one races, but R4: Ridge Racer Type 4 is a little bit different. Earning cars works like this: you're given two choices for each playthrough of the main story: your racing team, which determines your sliding scale of speed vs handling, and your car manufacturer, which influences whether you use a Drift (classic Ridge Racer) or Grip (no drifting but a simplified turning mechanic). Each has a nationality: American, Japanese, French or Italian. If you're taking on the secret cars with a version with a mismatched nationality (e.g. the Italian manufacturer by way of the French team) then the secret cars aren't that tough to earn. However, their true versions when you match team nationality and manufacturer are something on the order of anywhere between 10-30 MPH faster than the mismatched versions, and faster still than you, and this is all if you have the best cars up to that point. They can be hell to complete, to say nothing of what it takes to earn a car that even comes close to chasing them down. To qualify this, R4 is a very unforgiving Ridge Racer title. Touching anything in the normal game will substantially slow you down while your flawless opponents whiz by you. Both handling styles demand great precision from you, or else you will crash into either sidewall or the completely-oblivious traffic around you. You have to nail almost every single turn in order to win races, especially the last four ones out of eight, where you're required to in order to advance. A perfect run on one track will only give you a good chance of winning a race. Imagine what precision it takes to outrun one of the "true" extra cars.
  • In the original Ridge Racer we have the end-game duel against the 13th Racing, later known as the Soldat Crinale, affectionately nicknamed by the fans as the Devil's race car. And that's a quite fitting nickname: you race on the Advanced circuit on the reverse direction, at night^note And trust us, it's very difficult to predict the road ahead with such pitch-black darkness.. The Crinale will not start until you surpass him, and after a few seconds he takes you over again at an outrageously high speed. The car will then stop dead in its tracks to give you another chance of taking him, but after doing so, he will slowly rack up speed as you progress through the race. But do not, do NOT let him take you over or he won't give you another chance of recovering. And just to add insult to injury, the Crinale is painted completely matte-black (thus meaning it's very hard to see him as you race at night) and its position on the circuit is not shown on the map, thus means it's brutally difficult to predict his tactics. But win this race and the Crinale, the best car in the game hands down, is yours to keep.
  • Ridge Racer 7 ratchets up the difficulty as much as possible with the last track of the last regular Grand Prix in the game, possibly as a Shout-Out to how the last regular race in Ridge Racer Type 4 worked: it puts you on a very short track which isn't very technical on the face of it...for just three laps, in the fastest regular cars in the game. In both, the curves now come up as sudden changes in direction with very hard AI bearing down on you, so the first mistake you make will often mean you never see the top spots again. They're both incredibly difficult for different reasons: in Ridge Racer 4 you're not supposed to drift at all if you want to keep your speed up, which you're never asked to do for any other track in the entire game and so is guaranteed to throw you for a loop, and in Ridge Racer 7, no matter what, you're using the fastest normal cars they have to offer and while drifting is now bar none the fastest way to navigate the track, since the race is so short, you can't slowly build up nitrous for the boost mechanic: you have to nail every curve at a zillion miles per hour if you want to win. The AI racers are actually quite slow, though.
• Raptor from Split/Second (2010). If you don't take him out early, he can accumulate an insurmountable 10-second lead, driving the course perfectly. Some races, you never even see him, except off in the distance at the front of the starting line. Even if you manage to catch him with a power play or route changer, he can still slip past you with a fraction of a second to the finish line.
• In SpyHunter (2001), the fourth mission has you chasing down a stolen Interceptor, which has all of the weapons and abilities of your vehicle, plus the Weapons Van is disabled, so you can't repair your car or replenish your missiles, and there are droves of innocent civilians in the way.
• Tokyo Xtreme Racer series:
  • Nagoya's D3, as featured in Tokyo Xtreme Racer 3. The Final Bosses of the city of Toyota, they're a trio of thousand-horsepower A80 Supra drivers fought on an highway system that is almost exclusively straightways and ninety-degree corners. If Nagoya is the first city players decide to tackle in Stage 2, it's unlikely a car with the sufficient performance to atleast keep up will be available... but on the off-chance that the Player Character and D3 will be on somewhat even footing, the former will still need to fight all three of them in a row, with no break to cool down the car's engine and on tires that wear down the longer the gauntlet drags on. D3, obviously, do not have such a problem, as their cars have their condition reset every time they respawn. The only mercy the players get is the possibility of fighting them on the Inner Loop, where atleast their top speed is more limited and the constant turning give more of a possibility to manage the battles.
  • Osaka's DARTS — not their first unit made up of "Mountain" Kaneko, "Fire" Shinshiro, "Woods" Oishi, and "Wind" Kubota, which is considered a fair fight at that point in the game, but the other two. The second unit of "Humanity" Kawasaki, "Earth" Tadokoro, and "Heaven" Nagai is fought sequentially, just like D3, without any possibility of taking a break or losing: falling to defeat any one of them will see the gauntlet restart from Kawasaki. Unlike the D3, however, they can't be cheesed because they'll only spawn in the high-speed sections of the Hanshin Expressway. Worse than the D3, they all drive Skyline GT-Rs, which lack the weaknesses of D3's A80s. Upon defeating them, players will then immediately have to face "Kami" Kawajiri and his Ford GT, already one of the strongest bosses in the game by himself, alongside his second-in-command, "Nothingness" Manabe and his Corvette C4, who will appear once Kawajiri's SP bar is halfway drained, fully restoring it in the process and leaving players alone to beat both at the same time.
  • Melancholic Angel quickly shot to this fame during the Early Access of 2025. despite being one of Stage 2's bosses, her RX-8 has more power than Midnight Cinderella, Early Access's Final Boss, and far more power than the player can hope to reach with what cars and parts were available at that point. Furthermore, her car has absurdly short gearing, granting her blistering acceleration that, even with the correct Perks, will end up destroying players' SP Bar before they get a chance to start closing the gap by surpassing her lower top speed. A lot of series newcomers were wildly taken aback, to the point that Angel single-handedly sparked a community-led debate over the franchise's boss design. Genki eventually nerfed her in Patch 0.1.2.0, but only for the first mandatory battle against her. She has to be defeated a second time, with her pre-nerf stats in what is a series first, if one wants to complete the game.
  • Shuwa Shuwa Strong, one of the bosses of the "Rise of the New Generation Arc", earned during Early Access a reputation unseen since the debut of the Thirteen Devils. His Mazda 3 BP Mark IV is all-around well-tuned with emphasis placed on top speed: as his turf is the Wangan, he has plenty of road to go as fast as he can, something most players cannot hope to reach at that point of the game. Furthermore, there are no spots where his car's weaknesses can be taken advantage of, unless one drags the battle all the way to Yokohama: an extremely remote possibility, as he's well capable of accelerating out of sight and demolishing the player's SP Bar in a dozen seconds or so if one is poorly prepared. In a best case scenario, one still needs to hold tight and keep the battle going for a good minute or two, which is not easy with the amount of traffic the game seemingly enjoys to spawn.
  • The three Kurosaki brothers give the Player Character one of the toughest battles in all of Tokyo Xtreme Racer 2025. Specifically, the rematch against them where they switch from their Levorgs back to their original cars from Import Tuner Challenge and need to be faced one after the other with no breaks and the same SP Bar through-out it all. The three have thoroughly tuned cars, strong Perks, and take the battle to the Shinkanjo, often attempting to have the battle start around Ariake as the road merges back into the C1 Loop: a combination that will leave most players quickly overwhelmed when one tags the other in at the end of their segment of the battle. Should the player have Additional Rules enabled, it's very likely that their engine will overheat just as they've reached Iron Old Man, meaning one mistake in defending against him will lead to them losing and having to restart from scratch. Whilst they need to be defeated a second time in the post-story in order to face their aunt, Cyber Dame, the difference in power by that point should let the player handle them far more easily.
• Wangan Midnight series: Akio and the Devil Z in Wangan Midnight R, true to the source material, have the acceleration and top speed of a Formula 1 single-wheeler. As such, if the race ever approaches the Wangan, players are suggested to just stop there and let their SP bar drop to zero to restart, because it's impossible to keep up with them. To put it into perspective, if the player dives onto the Devil Z's line and gets hit on the rear bumper, their car will rocket to a speed of 400 kilometers per hour, faster than what any car can normally reach. Blocking may not even be an option, as the sheer speed and acceleration of the Devil Z let Akio push the player's car over like it was a paperweight. There's a good reason why several players have bestowed him the title of "one of the most unfair final bosses in racing games".