Octopath Traveler

Octopath Traveller is a game that could have been absolutely great, but the developers decided that that's for wusses. I got to every one of the eight characters' chapter 4 (the last one), then dropped the game during Ophilia's final boss. Alfyn's second and third bosses also didn't help matters, but I got through them in spite of everything. Ophilia's chapter 4 boss, however, took everything too far.

This game's combat is based around "breaking" the enemies' defenses. You use attacks the enemy is weak to, and whittle down their defense number until it hits zero. Once that happens, the enemy is unable to move for two rounds (including the round it was broken on), and also takes more damage. If you fail to kill the enemy while it is broken, it will ALWAYS take its turn(s) first next round. Bosses get multiple turns per round, with some, like Alfyn's third boss, getting up to six turns in one round. Thus, it becomes imperative to break the enemies' guard as quickly as possible, and use abilities to make sure they take most of their turns last in a round. This is a unique, fun idea for a combat system that could have worked really well. Shame they decided to make it horrible.
In some later boss fights, the boss can summon minions that "protect" it. While the boss's minions are present, the boss's defenses cannot be broken. This is annoying, but something you come to accept.

However, Ophilia's chapter 4 boss takes it up a notch. Let's start from the beginning. (I tried to do this at level 48, and the "recommended" level was 45)
The boss is a mage, and can attack all of your guys at once for well over half their health. The boss gets two turns per round.
The boss is weak to swords, axes, ice magic, and light magic. Of these, ice magic is the only one that can be reliably used more than once in a single character's turn without expending the most precious resource, BP. If the boss gets two attacks off before you can heal, your characters will die. Luckily, the first of his turns on the round after being broken is spent increasing his defenses. This means that, if you use leghold trap, it's simple to get him broken before he can destroy you.
I thought this was the main puzzle of the fight, and was satisfied with my solution. Up to this point, it felt like I had used every trick I'd learned throughout the game to succeed. If this had continued, I would have thought this was a very good boss fight. I wouldn't be typing this right now, in other words. I'd be playing the game still.
Once the boss hits red health, the entire game changes. He still gets two turns per round, and can still destroy your entire party with two attacks. However, now he summons two minions to protect his weaknesses. Alone, this wouldn't be that big of a deal. However, he also does something completely new that no one could have been prepared for. Remember that this is ten minutes into the fight.
The boss locks away your magic. You can't cast spells. I can't recover from this. Two of my characters are full-on mages geared up to do nothing but cast spells, and one is a support character geared up to do nothing but use leghold trap, exploit arrow weaknesses, and buff the other party members. So now my party only has one character who can do damage, and the goons sure as shit aren't weak to what he uses.
Complete party wipe, with no way I could have possibly prepared. I should also mention that the two spellcasters I brought were required characters (Ophilia is required because it's her chapter, and Cyrus is required because I chose him as my starting character), so I can't switch them out.
Fuck this game. I have no doubt in my mind that every other character's final boss will play out the same exact fucking way.

Octopath Traveler is 1992's idea of a perfect game: beautiful and coherent HD-2D graphics, a turn-based battle system with just enough depth to keep interesting, and a diverse cast of main characters with individual stories that add up to dozens of hours of gameplay. The game's blunt selling points are accurate: you should play this if you enjoy turn-based RPGs and avoid if you don't. RPG fans should view Octopath as the idealized version of all the SNES RPGs that inspired it, just not the ones that truly surpassed the genre.

Octopath's flaws are fairly obvious, making it stranger why they weren't fixed ahead of time: the eight stories rely on cliches and rarely intertwine with meaningful party interactions. Battles are often too long and the difficulty curve requires XP grinding despite efforts to scale encounters based on your story progression. Octopath is worth your time but I'm expecting Octopath 2 to capitalize on feedback more than the typical sequel.

Music's fantastic too.

When the main criticism of a game is that the 8 fully fledged stories all have equally good, satisfying resolutions and final bosses, so those 8 final bosses and conclusions should be sub-bosses and sub-conclusions to a extra final boss and conclusion that actually is there, but lurking subtly in post-game content so they don't really know it's there, you've got a pretty good game on your hands.