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Notes -
I guess it depends on what you call a boss. I've been playing Halo CE recently (a coincidence, I started a bit before the conversation here about Halo came up), and the first time they bring up hunters (in the Truth and Reconcilliation mission) sure feels like a boss fight: you fight a bunch of Covenant on the way to the ship, you take high ground (with Covenenant turrets to use) around the lift to the ship. You keep mowing down the troops that keep coming down until instead of bringing down a normal squad (one elite with a bunch of grunts and jackals) they bring down two bigger aliens that the turrets are not able to take down, so you have to get down from the advantageous position and engage them from close range. It wasn't hard for me because by now, from having played a bunch of Halo before, exactly how to dance with the Hunters, but to a new Halo player, they might have felt like a boss fight.
From my recollection, they keep using Hunters more or less like that through the game and the series, as sort of a capstone to escalating fights.
Hunters are a tougher enemy, certainly, but the hunters you fight in Halo are all the standard model. There's no Halo equivalent of, say, the Makron in Quake II, or Mohc in Dark Forces, or the titular character in Kingpin.
Later Halo games have named bosses - Tartarus in Halo 2, Guilty Spark in Halo 3, and so on - but the first one always avoided that. Wiki does not list any bosses for the first game, if that counts for anything.
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