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Tuesday’s Trope: Giant Space Flea From Nowhere

[Tuesday's Trope is a weekly department highlighting an amusing video game trope from TVTropes. Aggrogate is not affiliated with TVTropes.org in any way. All trope examples come from TVTropes and are shared via the Creative Commons license.]

Boss fights don't have to make sense. Sure, sometimes you'll fight a crime lord, an alien overlord, or an evil wizard that fits in with the narrative of the game you're playing, but just as often you're probably going to run across a mutant cake, a robot dinosaur, or a Giant Space Flea from Nowhere.

What is the Giant Space Flea from Nowhere? It's supposed to be the embodiment of all evil in the world. Some say its father was the main character's long-lost friend. Nobody believed it was real. Nobody ever saw it or knew anybody that ever worked directly for it, but to hear the cutscene tell it, anybody could have worked for it. You never knew. That was its power. The greatest trick the GSFN ever pulled was convincing the world it didn't exist. And like that, poof. It's gone.

The GSFN is any boss that just doesn't make sense. It appears out of nowhere, forces you to fight it, and then vanishes without a word. In some games, it turns out to be the final boss, just because the guy you were chasing the entire game didn't seem big or interesting enough. It just shows up, looking for a fight.

Examples of Giant Space Fleas from Nowhere include:

• Dark Force, the final boss of Phantasy Star, was initially one of these, but was retconned into having an expanded role in the Phantasy Star mythos in later games. You can say that he "graduated" from Space Flea status.
• Dragon Quest in general is terrible about doing this to the final boss of the game. Even the very first one, the original text had the Dragonlord's pet superdragon come out of nowhere after you beat him (although the first translation changed this to his "true form" to help make the fight climactic and continuous.)
• Skies Of Arcadia has quite a few of these. An overweight, acid-spewing rabbit, a giant robotic penguin with a death-ray, a floating tortoise that could make itself invincible, and a cockatrice-esque giant bird all appeared suddenly, were dispatched by the heroes, and died without comment from anyone.
• Chernabog from Kingdom Hearts. He literally appears out of nowhere, after you've jumped through the hole in "The End of the World". You don't know who he is, Sora makes no comment about him whatsoever, it's never explained if he's a Heartless, what connection he's got to Xehanort or why he's even there, he's the only boss who doesn't get an entry in Jiminy Cricket's journal and he's never mentioned again. It's as though the developers just thought it would be a disservice not to include one of the most impressive Disney creations, even if they had to just drop it in without so much as a single word of context. It's just plain Rule Of Cool (and copious Rule Of Scary).
• Chrono Cross and the Time Devourer. Sure, Lavos is mentioned a couple times in passing if you go out of your way to read side documents near the end. Schala isn't. But the game already gave two 'final' bosses before this, one at the end of a long dungeon and the prior requiring a long attunement and the entire game having built up to it. But then you fight this giant space eating glowing thing that merged with Schala somehow and defeat it with The Power Of Rock? What the hell? Dropping Magus in would have made about as much sense. Hell, Chrono, Marle and a zombie Lucca would have made about as much sense. And what was with Miguel? Why was he a superpowered philosophical fisherman?
• The ending of No More Heroes has got to be a parody of this, with a long stream of nonsensical boss fights and totally non-foreshadowed plot twists which push Travis to break the Fourth Wall and complain that the developers are just making this up as they go along.
• After defeating the Big Bad Plutonium Boss of Blaster Master, a strange cyborg knight with a plasma whip appears out of nowhere to challenge you.
• The video game The Matrix: Path of Neo more or less proceeded with the plot of the three Matrix movies. Until the very end, when instead all of the Smiths morphed into one giant "Mega-Smith" to fight Neo. Atari-esque avatars of the Wachowski Brothers stopped the plot at that point to explain how the metaphorical ending of the movies didn't translate well into a video game. This may be true, but it did feel like they were making fun of the player. ("Have fun... and enjoy enlightenment!" [Both laugh])
• Metal Slug 3's first four and a half levels are a fight against a human army (and the odd Giant Enemy Crab)... until you defeat the commander. At that point, an alien springs from his body, and the last half of the last level is a war against the invading aliens known as the Mars People. The series takes Refuge In Audacity, though, so most players's reactions are "Oh, cool!"
• Castle Crashers also does this in the final level. Even though the Cyclops and Black Knight are both encountered in earlier levels, on the final level you fight a guy with a toolbox for a head that draws bad flash animation.
• The final boss from Mega Man 2 would certainly count as this. Right as you reach the end of the caves underneath Wily Fortress, you meet up with Dr. Wily, expecting a battle against one of his mechas... But, for some reason, he literally levitates out of the Wily Saucer and transforms into what looks like some sort of space alien... Not only that, but the room becomes filled with stars and darkness, again without any prior lead-up. After you destroy this "true form" of Wily, it turns out to just be his Holograph Projector, and, as the room returns to normal, you see that Wily was just behind a console, operating the green-shooty-alien-holograph-thingie.