Gaming General Questions (New ones every few days)

General Discussion
1

You know, we all play a lot of games. So naturally, I thought about some of the aspects of games that we either love or hate, and how we might want to talk about them.

I’ll ask a different question every few days, so keep an eye on the new posts. Mine will usually have a new question, or me snarking. Maybe both.

Today’s question: What is the most poorly designed boss you’ve faced in a game?

For me, while I’ve heard of the horrifying tales of Silver in Sonic '06, I have never played that game, so I can’t use him. Instead, for me it’s drum-roll

Junko for Touhou 15: Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom.

…Zun, what the FUCK?! In a series famous for it’s amazing characters (Yuyuko, Byakuren and Sukuna coming to mind) Junko’s battle is…pixel perfect dodging.

I’m not joking, the non-spells are singular bullet rings that require perfect positioning thus leading to a lot of clip-deaths, the most rage-inducing death for a bullet hell player. It doesn’t help her case that Junko also interrupts Hecatia in the extra stage twice with her BS pixel perfect patterns. Just…GAAAAAAAAAAAH!

What really gets me is that Junko’s design and theme (purity) are BRILLIANT. A character that has purified and refined herself until all that’s left is her grudge, and even then, she doesn’t remember what started it. The problem is that Zun went with Purity = Simplicity way too far and it ended up creating a generally bad boss battle. Worse yet a bad FINAL boss.

So yeah, who’s boss design do you hate and why?

PS. Since I expect him to answer, no firesoul10 you can’t claim sans. His battle was designed to make you want to quit due to frustration and it works well.

2

marauder shields from ME3 because of what he represents

3

Not really a boss as much as it is an end-game mission but in Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn there’s this one mission where before the mission there’s a scene where you receive a blessing on every equipped item from each of your current units (you can only pick like 10 units I believe). Only blessed items can do significant damage to the enemies in the next mission and the boss of the mission heals so you have to have solid dps from multiple units in order to take him down. So if you were using throwaway gear up until that point on any of your units to save dura, your shitty gear would be blessed going into the next mission and your unit is essentially useless since he can’t use his good weapons. Long story short that ended up happening to me and I accidentally saved during the battle and lost that entire playthrough cuz it was impossible to kill the boss using the shitty weapons I had equipped.

4

I’m gonna say the Bed of Chaos from Dark Souls. It’s not TERRIBLE in a vacuum, but it’s so completely different from every other boss in the game it threw me for a loop and I was stuck for a while. It’s a puzzle boss, having to destroy two ‘weak points’ on either side of it as the floor crumbles under you and you dodge attacks. This isn’t terrible by itself, but EVERY OTHER BOSS IN THE GAME works based on “You hit it, it looses health, do this until it’s dead.” And there’s no real warning or indication of this. Also, after destroying a weak point, it’s extremely difficult to not die immediate after as you have to navigate around bottomless pits while it hits you to get back to the main part of the room. To combat this, the fight doesn’t reset when you die… again unlike anything else in the game. I won by destroying a weak point, dying, and then running back from the bonfire to do it again. And once you get two you have to… make a difficult jump down into the center in one of the pits to hit it’s main weak spot ONE TIME and then the fight ends. Love the souls game, but that boss made no sense.

Also, this is a cool thing Silver and I think you should keep it up.

5

The final fight in Dead Island, Infected White. Sure, on paper it might seem nice to have a boss that is susceptible to special attacks, but when you can ONE HIT him, that kind of kills the climax a lot. No joke, back when a friend and I played through Dead Island co-op, all the hassle of the island, all the pain of the final run to the boss, I get first hit, it’s a crit, and his body just flies away as if I hit a baseball with a bat.

6

I figured if I got people to talk even just a little, then they’ll be a bit more open to talk on other threads. Plus this has the potential to be HILARIOUS, especially with my next question. I’ll probably put that one out on Sunday.

7

Due to the outage, I’m extending this question for another day. Once I post the new question, any answers to the old one will be disregarded, so pay attention.

8

Alright, day’s over. New question time!

This one is more story based. What event in a video game was the most emotional for you?

For me it was… (Persona Q spoilers)

[spoiler]The Reveal that Rei is dead in Persona Q. For most of the game (Excluding the Evil Spirits Club) Rei is generally happy-go-lucky and a ridiculously big eater. At least until you reach the deeper levels of the labyrinths where she’d get more melancholy and scared. But even so, Rei always seemed so full of life.

Imagine the shock when it’s revealed that Rei is DEVOID of life.

Helping this was Ashly Burch’s delivery of Rei’s lines post memory regain. The whole mix of anger, despair and confusion is downright HEARTBREAKING, and let’s you know just who Rei really is: A broken girl who feel’s like her whole life is meaningless.

And then we have Zen, AKA Chronos revealing just how everything in the game is his fault, and how much despair he felt at causing Rei so much pain. Taken together, the reveal of Zen and Rei is definitely the most emotional scene in a video game.[/spoiler]

How about you guys. Just remember, if it’s important to the game’s plot, use the spoiler tag like I did above

9

Oh man, this was actually hard for me to decide, so I am going to go with the most recent.

The decision part for the descent, and the finale, in SOMA. Full disclosure, I didn’t actually play the game, I watched a full playthrough of it because I don’t do jumpscares and suspense. There was something about how the story was written, that although was a bit cheesy at times, still had a few good points, and the those two I mentioned are what got me the most, especially the ending.

10

The first one that comes to mind is the beginning of Homeworld, returning to a burned-out Kharak. The shock of your homeworld’s devastation, the score (Adagio for Strings), the numb, desperate battle to save the last few scraps of your entire species… It was an exquisitely sad mission.

11

The Dario fight in Chrono Cross ;__; Or the Miguel fight. I guess any fight that used the People Imprisoned By Destiny song during it.

12

Tough one, but I’m gonna go with both of the yes/no choices I had to make in The Last Story for Wii, first feeling torn over the available choices and then feeling very angry at the game for not letting me choose. The gist of it is that the main character is a mercenary, and his dream has been to be a knight. I’m a big fan of knight chars in general (longest running d&d game I was a paladin/hellreaver) so I was on board with this. And after completing an important job, a noble gives you that chance, and also basically says he’ll let you marry his daughter who you’ve fallen in love with. The catch is knights (of course) have to swear loyalty, and the guy is an obvious warmonger, and is basically recruiting you for your kickass magic powers. He’s not totally evil per se, just near-genocidal against the token evil fantasy race (who are petty warlike to be fair).

I deliberated over this for a LONG time, just left the game on that dialogue choice. It was pretty clear that if I accepted this, the guy was going to eventually ask you to do something terrible. Eventually I turned him down, after agonizingly deciding he could achieve his dream the hard way, without having to probably compromise his moral code. Or at least, I thought I would except the GAME WON’T LET YOU SAY KNOW CAUSE IT NEEDS IT LINEAR STORY DAMMIT. So it does the thing where it says “are you sure?” and offers the choice over and over until you accept. Normally not a huge deal, but after agonizing over the choice and feeling really bad about saying no, it was a pain. Sure enough, later on the guy asks you to use you’re kickass magic powers to annihilate the enemy. I didn’t think about this one for as long, but I still felt bad when I hit the yes button. But dammit I’d given my word, and sometimes it’s harder to follow and all that. Guess what the game had to say about that? “Wait, are you sure?” DAMMIT GAME IF YOU WANT ME TO CHOOSE ONE OF THESE DON’T MAKE THE DECISIONS SO AGONIZING.

13

I still hold Cave story dear; it really threw me on the feels train for all of the endings, really. the first one, obviously, caught me off guard.

Getting on the dragon with Kazuma…I was not expecting that to be the end of the game so soon.
seeing Curly left in the core room messed me up a bit on the “good” ending too, and the fact that you just kinda left everyone else on the best ending was still kinda rough, especially after learning the backstory and the hell Ballos and Jenka went through.

long story short, good game.

14

Welp, another few days and things have died down. Time to get people into a good mood.

What was the funniest moment you’ve experienced in a video game.

Really for me, it comes back to Persona Q, with two moments standing out. One is on the P3 side with the other on the P4 side. Both involve Mystery Food X.

However the crown has to go to P4.

“I call it Mystery Food X: The Final Edition! It is a weapon that has surpassed all of my expectations!”

Let’s get a bit of exposition out of the way first, FOE’s in PQ are absurdly strong Shadows that you will SEE roaming the Labyrinths, usually being ridiculously strong upon first encounter.

So Naturally, the group comes upon one that’s a macho man in a loin cloth. Let that sink in.

So as this…thing is chasing them, the group decides to split up, with one group distracting the FOE with the other preparing an ambush. Makoto (P3 Hero) and the boys - minus Zen - leading away the FOE with Naoto and the girls preparing the ambush.

Heading with Makoto shows how Kanji ended up as bait. Heading with Naoto reveals the weapon that was used.

What was this weapon? It was…

[b][u][i]Mystery Food X: The Final Edition.

By combining the awful cooking of Yukiko Amagi, Chie Satonaka, Rise Kujikawa and Fuuka Yamagishi, Naoto created a weapon so terrible, so brutally lethal, that even a full health FOE could not withstand it.[/i][/u][/b]

But Kanji could. It almost killed him, but he survived.

The whole scene is absurd and insane. Naoto hams it up for a brief moment and it is GLORIOUS. Not to mention the Four Awful Cooks of the Apocalypse all being told that their food was good for nothing other than weaponry. And come on. Mystery Food X: The Final Edition. How is that not awesome?!

So let me know and leave me in stitches for laughing.

15

I’m a little sad that no one responded, but I’ll move things along.

What is the hardest game you’ve ever played?

I’ve never had the privilege of playing Dark Souls, so I can’t use that. What I can use is just as insane.

Sin and Punishment: Star Successor.

HOLY. FUCK. THIS GAME.

In most senses of the word, bullet hells…are not actually all that hard. They’re mostly pattern memorization, so they’re pretty doable if you put time into them.

Star Successor, however, is a game that never lets up at any point. EVER. Some of that might have to do with the Wii’s pointer controls, but even on easy this game kicks my ass. Hard.

In a way, it’s a testament to what makes bullet hell games hard to transition into 3-D. Touhou is complicated enough in 2-D, imagine giving it a third dimension to play with.

So why do I keep coming back to it?

In any case, let’s hear your thoughts.

16

I suppose it’s XCOM Enemy Within on Impossible Ironman settings. Perma death with no save/reload and really OP aliens you have to fight against. At one point I fucked up and my elite heavy unit got mind-controlled and shot an RPG straight into the cover that 2 of my other squad members were hiding. So I had to complete the mission with 2 snipers cuz that’s all I had left. It wasn’t a good time lmao

17

Welp, new question time. Let’s keep things positive for everyone.

What’s your favorite boss battle?

…I may like shooters too much. My favorite boss comes from one.

A bit of context. My favorite kind of boss is a mirror boss. One that mirrors your level of skill, making it more of a battle of equals. See: Asch from Tales of the Abyss and or Flynn from Tales of Vesperia.

Unfortunately, most shooters don’t have this. So, we delve a bit deeper.

Suguri is a dojin shooter by Orange Juice. It’s something like that, I can’t remember fully the name of the Circle. The game is quite…well, it’s actually pretty challenging. And fun, but god help you if you don’t have a gamepad. The game involves you playing the title character (Suguri for those of you who missed it) fighting against invaders trying to wipe out all life on your home planet.

But this game doesn’t have my favorite boss battle. For THAT we need the squeal…prequel? Um…

Sora follows up by telling of a war that nearly destroyed the world that Suguri takes place on, with the titular character (Sora) fighting to end it, culminating in a battle with resident omnicidal psycho, Star Breaker. At the end Sora ends up asleep for quite some time. Going into Sora’s extra stage nets you a fight against Hime, Suguri’s final boss.

This is not the fight. My favorite boss fight is AFTER Hime…against Suguri herself. You are fighting yourself in a set, circular arena.

HOLY. FUCK. THIS. BATTLE.

The game has a mechanic known as the hyper dash, which lets you dash through energy bullets, but not ballistic attacks (Missiles and the like). Using the dash is key to completing the game, as the hypers are useful.

Please note that Suguri has a hyper dash as well. The whole battle is you and Suguri dashing around each other, unleashing periodic hypers as Suguri tries to get Sora to calm down. Set to the theme Icarus (- YouTube) which is Suguri’s intro theme, the whole battle just becomes AMAZING.

Let me know which battle had you grinning like a lunatic.

18

I think one of my favorites has to be Quadraxis from Metroid Prime 2. I mean, look at the guy:

3333×3333 1.94 MB

The battle itself is decently challenging and fun, but the combination of his visuals and his theme just make him extremely memorable to me.

Also, thanks Silver, for doing this. Its very helpful for the forum.

19

Big picture is big, sorry about that. :stuck_out_tongue:

20

I’m no programmer, but I like it when people talk. Even if I can get just one person talking about things the like, I feel like I’ve succeeded. Thank you, Kilif. It means a lot to hear that from you.