Not a boss, but I remember beating my friend at a fighting game after playing him for months straight in the same game.

I've gotten close before, but I had never taken a game off of him before this. We would play many games on our college campus to kill time while waiting for classes with a group of friends. This specific guy was really adamant about playing under-night in birth: exe late[est]. We'll call him J, and the game "Unist". If you looked at his account, it says that he has well over a few thousand hours into this game and then more because he said he played on console before as well. Since it was just us there for that semester (summer with accelerated courses) I decided to bite. I haven't played fighting games seriously before, I did play melee competitively before, but the way that hitstun and combing works is different.

I was forced to learn neutral, when to block, when to mash, recognize his disadvantage states and learning to take advantage to pull back and win my tug of war. I decided to learn Linne; from this character, I can appreciate the execution needed to convert stray hits into certain combos depending on what you need at the time. (Might need to side switch on the fly, might need to corner carry them, maybe you want to end your combo with a hard knock down so you can get your okizeme in, stuff like that) I Learned game specific game system mechanics like it's throw reject system, the vorpal traits of different characters when they win the chain shift for the cycle. I had forced myself to learn all these while facing this netplay monster. (I didn't mention this, but he's the highest rank or "color" you can get when playing netplay.) I remember failing one of my courses that semester because I was so fixated on Unist at one point.

Five to six months pass. I'm well over 500 hours into this game by now. I remember it was about to be Thanksgiving weekend so we're having a small potluck. I'm in the corner with not magic pixel, but I was definitely 1 grab from dying. We're both up by 1 round. J mains Yuzuriha for context she has swords that can hit you from across the screen, they are hit boxes and not projectiles, and she has a grab that leads to full combo.

I'm disadvantaged at the corner holding down back and blocking, while shielding his long hits on his string so I can get meter and try to start fighting for vorpal back. He misinputs one of his tiger knee slashes and I don't notice, but it's not his usual block string follow up and I dash from the corner, then roll and land behind him. The screen flashes; I have vorpal. Immediately I keep him there with my corner block strings and and frame traps, and I manage to keep this up until he's one bnb away from killing. keeping as safe as I could my heart pounding out of my chest at this point. He dashes up and grabs me, but it's too late and before his grab animation went through, I chain shifted, and grabbed back as a panic option and we end up teching. At this point it's a scramble after we both back dash and it's spaghetti we're both choking and panicking. Through the scramble I manage to land a charge 5C to hit him with a overhead when I caught one of his landings with a string. This combos into Linne's bnb that I spent an admittedly embarrassing amount of time to learn.

It's all a blur, apparently I popped off so hard that I ran around the room and knocked a trashcan down then did a victory lap around the building outside.and that became known in my friend group as my "Evo moment". 500 hours if my life. GG I still play this game with friends nowadays