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I can think of a few RPG bosses that were legitimately hard and not just because they had lots of hit points.

The Breath of Fire series has always been pretty tough, mainly because you gain shit EXP and the tedium of trying to power level with that shit EXP usually defeats normal players with lives before they can exploit any perks offered by character growth. Also, equipping your characters/restocking exhaustible resources is typically really fucking expensive in BoF. This is particularly annoying when it comes to Life Pixies/Ammonias/other items that revive characters. I recall that in BoFIII, Ammonia's cost anywhere from 300-500 Zenny a pop and revived your character with 1 FUCKING HP. And if you didn't revive your character before the end of battle? They'd come back to life automatically, but their Max HP dropped 10% semi-permanently (until you rested at an Inn). "What about magic?", you say? True, most JRPGs include spells that will revive fallen characters. Not until BoFIII did you get such a spell. The spell was "Raise Dead", which costs 10 precious AP (you're lucky if you have 100 AP by endgame, and that's going to be needed to cause more than miniscule damage to bosses), and it only has a CHANCE of working. Speaking of AP, there are no buyable items in most BoF games that can restore AP. BoF2 is the only exception. You can buy Wisdom Fruits, and they're really not all that expensive and restore a whopping 20 AP. Sounds great, right? Except they're POISONOUS. When you eat them, you're not really gaining 20 AP, you're exchanging 20 HP for 20 AP. Considering that BoF doesn't use an ATB-style combat system (all of your combat selections for all characters are made at the beginning of each round and are carried out depending on Agility), you could theoretically kill yourself with a Wisdom Fruit if you get hit with an attack that drops you to 20 HP or below.

Of course, none of this says anything about the actual bosses; they're pretty fucking brutal, especially in 2 and 3. Going back to BoF3, you trudge through this EPIC fucking final dungeon where nearly every grunt enemy you face is like as tough as a boss in any other dungeon, and then you get to a boss that nearly kills a character with every physical attack and your entire party with every magic. Particularly noteworthy is the Dragon Lord, who likes to periodically use Howling, a skill that makes all of your characters confused unless you're wearing proper status effect protection. While your characters are beating the shit out of eachother and/or fumbling to whip out curative items to remedy the confusion, Dragon Lord is doing shit like casting high-level magic against your entire party or physically attacking 3-5 times in a single fucking round for 150-250 damage a hit (note that endgame stats without serious grinding or apprenticeship to a master that boosts HP growth usually leave your beefiest characters at 300-500 HP).