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Fighting Gruntilda make have made me wonder if I should have regretted not getting out the cartridge to play with a real N64 controller. But I'd guess most of the control problems I'm having would be the same either way.

The hardest part (control-wise) is when she shoots fireballs at you and you need to counter by spitting eggs at her. This is a sort of ambitious thing to do with the N64 controller. Even with as many buttons as it has, it still requires combination button pressing. You need to dodge the fireballs, and then have a split second to jump onto a platform and shoot the eggs. To shoot the eggs, you need to hold the R button and press top C. However, if you press R a little too early, you'll do a pound-the-ground move instead. If you press C a little too early, you'll be really fucked, as the camera will go to first person mode, and you'll surely take a hit before you can leave the mode.

(I first thought this might have been a problem due to me using the right stick as the C buttons, but either of those things could happen anyway. Something that I might be able to blame the controller on would be if I accidentally started to talon trot.)

Even if you manage to spit the eggs, for some reason the camera swings around wildly (hmm, maybe that could be a controller issue). So you have no idea where Grutilda is. It's almost impossible to aim the eggs even under ideal circumstances -- ie., just about any time in the game when you have to shoot a stationary, passive target. Part of the problem is that Banjo, for some reason, despite having analogue control, only turns in 90 degree increments at a time while preparing to shoot.

Oddly, that isn't as big a problem as I might have thought. Even though I can't see or aim at Gruntilda, I manage to hit her maybe 75% of the time when the move works. Maybe they made her so big so that you would almost be guaranteed to hit her.

Sometimes boss rehashes might be more acceptable. Like in Mega Man games, the boss fight might effectively be different because you have weapons you didn't have the first time. Sinistron rehashes the first two bosses at the end of the game, but they were much harder. In some ways, it can seem like a "waste" to put a good idea early in a game because you have to make it easy for the learning curve. For Sinistron, the rehash let them have it both ways (another game that has it both ways, without rehashes, is Goldeneye, thanks to the difficulty levels and cheats)

I was a little disappointed in the boss rehash level of Gaiares, but on the positive side, it did feel to me like it verified your skill with the bosses; otherwise, maybe you could fluke past them.

I guess technically A Link to the Past has rehashes in Ganon's tower. That never really felt like much to me. It was such a minor part of that stage. What it makes me think of is how just about any videogame reuses minor enemies all the time; it's not a big deal or something you particularly think about. By the end of ALttP, those former bosses were almost like normal enemies, compared to your advanced character.

Someone might point out that one of my favorite games of all time, Castlevania 3, could have you fight the Cyclops boss several times in one game. However, while you fight that boss several times, everything else is different, and other bosses are added, too. So it's not a pure rehash.

Punch-Out!! reuses characters, sometimes with obvious rematches, other times by reusing bodies (ie., Soda Popinski and Super Macho Man have the same bodies with different colors and heads). But no two fights are exactly the same, not even rematches. I think this, and the Castlevania 3 example, and even something like reused levels in Super Mario Bros. are examples of a game hitting up against the technological limits of the time, and in a way that limitation is maybe obvious, but they're still able to do well despite the limitation.

So, those are some of the more positive, or at least least negative, boss rehashes I can think of. I don't know if I ever made it to a boss rehash and thought, "All right! A boss rehash!", though.