For a really funny point, I had my play speed on YT set to 1.75 speed when I started the video and clicked to bring it down to a normal speed but I misclicked and set it to 0.5 and it took the rest of the intro and a full sentence of you talking before I realized what I'd done and that you weren't doing a bit.
In a nutshell: what matters isn't the speed of the boss, but the speed of the player. It's okay for bosses to be a lethargic damage sponge, so long as players can't beat them as a lethargic damage dealer. Players should remain active and engaged, whether it's getting in close to melee them before retreating from a devastating AoE, running from one degrading cover point to the next in a cover shooter, dodging large attacks as you close the gap, or simply staying out of its attack range as you deal chip damage.
Older Monster Hunter games were a good example of this; the monsters are big and sometimes slow, but depending on your weapon type YOU may be just as slow (on attack or movement) yourself. Plus the relatively long knockdown animation every time you take a hit.
This is why some Dark Souls enemies \ bosses are just horse shit. I don't mean just DS 1 - I mean the entire Soulslike family. DS 1 and 2 were slow attacks, grand tells, each attack is kind of a commitment. 3 Sped up gameplay, and that was fine. But your protagonist sure as shit didn't speed up with that same gameplay LOL. Sekiro got away with it because of its flawless parry system. Tailor-made! Elden Ring has a lot of those enemies that are just flailing with bad tells, massive long combo chains (Gross centipede enemy comes to mind) or other weird, often outright BAD Design decisions. So what happened there was the tells got shorter, tell delays were added, attacks became faster, with more hits and combos, over a wider area... ...but your player character compared to DS 1 is barely more responsive and agile. The difficulty was upped tremendously with such a simple change. Less time, less margin of error.
I remember when I was fighting sephiropth in FF7, I had a bowl of pasta with me and whenever Supernova went off I just put the controller down and ate my food.
Sounds like what I do when I'm at a stoplight and I have fast food in my car. I grab a french fry, tempting fate into making that traffic light green as I eat my food. If fate is successfully tempted, I get a green light finally. If fate ignores me, I successfully eat a french fry. It's a win-win and the fates absolutely hate me for figuring it out.
Imagine if Sephiroth's Super Nova had a parry window. One specific half-second within those two minutes where you could press a button and completely avoid all damage. I'm not even sure if that would make it better or worse.
Entirely blocking it would just feel way too cheap, something similar to sea of stars way of doing it where if you time a block well you take reduced damage COULD work...but also if we're talking supernova I don't think reducing it would do a whole lot so maybe not worth bothering.
It would be funny if it happened at a random time during the animation each time, signaled by a slight visual cue like the meteor flashing or something.
Shadow of the Colossus feels different because of the time between as well. Navigating an essentially empty world the bosses feel high paced comparatively
@@BBHood217 That's only in the worldwide release. In the original Japanese version of the game, the attack didn't do percentage-based damage and could kill the party, inflicting around 2000 damage to the entire party. The attack's animation was also way shorter, only being about 30 seconds long versus the international version which is about 2 minutes in length.
In regards to the Hinox: I actually feel like that enemy fits it's specific role perfectly. It's there as a beginner's learning tool. You get to learn how you can sneak up on it (learning stealth), even to the point of stealing weapons from it before it wakes. Plus getting the chance to attack ahead of it waking up. The "it can be blitzed" definitely becomes a more veteran player experience, where once you've learned how to beat them down it becomes easy... Which is a-okay. It did it's job. If it were to be changed at all I would argue instead of changing the moveset, movement speed, or wakeup time... Simply have more Hinox that are awake to begin with in later zones of the game (guarding something without just sleeping on the job or such). Plus there is the evolution of the hinox in the stal-hinox which solves some of it's issues as well by being less vulnerable early. But above all, there end up being harder bosses that appear later in the world as well that ramp up the difficulty anyways and work out best for scaling up than making the Hinox stronger
There's also the potential option of given them damage resistance while they wake up if them taking too much damage early is a problem. Maybe a damage cap during that animation could work too, to still allow players to get an advantage without trivializing the fight.
Would like to shout out SMO (mario odyssey) for having bosses with invulnerable phases that are still skippable with some skillful maneuvers (namely the Broodals), creating an engaging fight that retains the rhythm of alternating between offensive and defensive gameplay.
@@pedroscoponi4905 Love how KH2 will reward skillful use of reaction commands against bosses. Though it was way too easy to one shot enemies, at least in my opinion.
Finding the more rarer reaction commands is also pretty fun :D (like the one two combo of wall climb and pile drive into Sark's head in the second phase of the MCP fight)
Why do you use an abbreviation followed by including the full name anyway if you then never use the established abbreviation again? The abbreviation lengthened your comment instead of shortening it. What is the point of an abbreviation if it only lengthens your message? BTW (by the way) you do not have to shout! You can just talk normally.
Funniest thing about Supernova is that it can't even kill you (in the International version, at least). It deals damage equal to about 75% of each character's current HP.
@@RushStudios101 And if you have cast Regen or Big Guard before it happens, the long animation guarantees you'll have full health and there's no attack Sepiroth can do to you at that point that would kill a character afterwards.
10:35 "A big rectangle blockade where rows of bees will attack." Young man, we in the 'definitely been playing games for too many years' business call that "Space Invaders."
Yeah the amount of work FFXIV players put into Ultimates is insane. I could never be that dedicated, but it impresses me every time seeing them basically have coordination on par with military squads. 😭
@@inplane9970I've done a couple, it's not that bad! By the time you get to that point you probably think the rest of the game is pretty easy, so it might only take a week or two, or even a couple of days.
@@inplane9970 Same. I play XIV but Extreme Trials are the highest I do. Still 8-Man Bossfights harder than anything in the Main Story or casual Raids... but watching a guide and joining a party of randoms is enough most of the time if you know how to play your class/job.
Hinox intimidate me so much that I spend an hour beating the one from the island that takes away your items and armors upon arrival by throwing him bombs from up the mountain and retreating when he woke up.
Yeah this is what the video maker does not realize. Videogames are not just for pro players but casuals as well. Even if mechanically weak, huge bosses intimidate so much an average player you cant do them too hard. There is a reason the games he talks about are legendary and their creators millionares while he just makes videos on youtube.
@@usuariofuturista chill, some good games have bad designed bosses, there is no reason to pretende these games are perfect no matter how good they are. A 2 minute animation for an attack or a boss so slow you can always hel up between attacks is not well designed no matter how good the game where they reside is.
@@gustavoaraujopenha8463 To be fair, hinox aren't bosses, if anything they're minibosses. I'm pretty sure going from being an intimidating menace that new players don't even dare to take on to being just another enemy to get rid off quickly by veterans is intentional.
I've been playing Hyrule Warriors (Wii U) for a while now, and despite the game being about quickly dispatching of enemies and taking keeps before the enemy forces can take yours, the giant bosses bring the whole pace of the fights down to zero because you need to wait for them to execute one specific move that makes them vulnerable to one specific item before you can actually damage them. The Imprisoned is the worst, because while you don't need to wait for it to execute one specific move, you have to wait for it to stop doing that stupid shockwave attack before you can get close enough to damage its toes, and even if you do have the attack power to diminish its Weak Point Gauge in one round, it is hard coded to get up once half of it has been depleted and start wailing around the arena for an unnecessarily long period of time, making the fight more of a drag than a challenge. The fights would have been so much better if the bosses were already vulnerable to damage to begin with, and using the items when the opportunity arrives was just a way to speed up the fight if it happens, but not be the sole determining factor for if you can damage it or not. And the Imprisoned shouldn't be coded to recover at half gauge either, let me one round the darn stupid thing!
You have no idea how much I hate the Giant Bosses in HW. It brings out the worst parts in that whole game. Swapping items is cumbersome, the opportunity windows can be weirdly short which leads to more and more waiting due to mistakes. They happen often enough that it makes me have to put the game down for a while. Probably the biggest reason why I won't completely clear any of the adventure maps on top of the ranking system being rather annoying.
@@DesignDoc And it's such a shame, because the entire game is a love letter to the whole franchise and an otherwise great experience. You can mitigate the tedium by equipping your strong weapons and giving them skills that deal bonus damage to giant bosses, but that's a bandaid solution to a fittingly larger problem.
How about a video about "Boss Weaknesses"? Something that the boss is weak to, or a way to actually harm him. Maybe it's a weak spot, an elemental weakness, a secret way to speed up the fight or something more related to the plot.
Hello, we are Legend of Zelda, Majora's Mask 3DS, and we would like to say, "SHOOT IT IN THE GIANT ASS EYE WE GAVE EVERY BOSS!" Thank you for listening.
Ah ofc, though you do have to avoid the "Spark Mandril Syndrome", and if you are not aware, spark mandril from Megaman X is weak to an ice weapon... AND, that one ice weapon can stunlock him.
Interesting take on Margit. I get that it's supposed to teach you to be very intentional with your dodge timings, but some of those windups look SILLY to me. For some bosses it gets to the point where I stop looking at the fight as an intelligent, intentional creature and start seeing the developer's hand behind it daring me to roll early.
I think that with the slowest attacks Margit teaches you that sometimes you can attack bosses during the wind up. A lesson that I feel is more helpful for the late game fights
Being fair, Margit is basically slumming it in his first fight and doesn't think much of you- taking that long to swing could be his way of fucking with you, daring you to try and dodge it so he can smack you.
What impressed me the most with Shadow of the Colossus was how they used the music to convey the feel of those Colossus movements.Everything in a colossus fight felt slow and deliberate, yet frantic and intense, animation and mechanic played a aprt sure, but without that OST? I'm not sure the game would ahve been peak.
In Pokemon battles slow Pokemon can become very powerful in trick room, a field effect where the slowest moves first This could inspire a boss that is slow but occasionally casts a field effect that slows the player but sleeps up the boss, having to rely on defending yourself until the effect ends
That has a lot of potential to be unfair to the player if it's just "debuff player, buff boss". Trick Room doesn't feel cheap because everyone in Pokémon has access to the same tools. It also works in reverse, so technically your Pokémon *could* use the same move to turn the twisted dimensions back to normal. Player interactivity is key.
@@rainpooper7088 That is very true, for “buff boss, debuff player” it would have to be balanced in a way that it is telegraphed to the player to prepare for short period of time where the boss is fast and the player is slowed Like how some bosses in persona you the boss is telegraphed a big attack and you have to guard in order not to get wiped out
It's not quite the same thing, but there are a lot of bosses that are generally slow but speed up rapidly at a certain point. Like Malekith from Elden Ring
This can even work with real-time combat. The third boss of Persona 5 Strikers has something akin to this where they can unleash a lasting blizzard that cuts the Phantom Thieves' speed drastically. With no guard mechanic and a boss largely resistant to hit-stun, having your dodges crippled is a huge deal, but there is a giant heater nearby that can disable the entire effect, so players who see the boss winding up after the first instance can rush to this counter in advance.
To quote my Ghostrunner 1 Project Hel DLC steam-review: "The second critique is how dlc's second boss battle starts out with very boring sequence where you just move between platforms while avoiding lethal lasers/ bullets and avoid electrical platforms, if I were to make an video essay one day of bad boss-encounter designs this battle would be definitely mentioned in it." This video is exactly what I had in my mind while writing that review one month ago.
Ghostrunner's bosses so perfectly fit this, yeah. The first game's aren't terrible but I was thinking about the second's pretty much the whole video. There's just so many of them and they're all such miserable slogs, so detached from the actual Ghostrunner formula
Black Doom does have a way to speed him up; Chaos Control. Just time Chaos Control to freeze him when he becomes vulnerable, increasing your opportunity to hurt him and pump him full of ammo. Depending on the guns available and the right timing, he can be beaten the fastest of the 3 final bosses in Shadow the Hedgehog.
One aspect that makes bosses feel slower for me is when you have to wait to get them vulnerable and then there's no way for you to deal extra damage even if you're already good at the game. The first boss from Sonic Rush feels a lot slower to me than the first boss of Rush Adventure (even though they work very similarly and the latter fight takes longer) because you can actually bounce on the Ghost Rex multiple times during both of his attacks if you're good while the Egg Hammer always takes one hit max during just one attack before you're back to watching him slowly picking up his rolly thing again every damn time he does that attack with no chance to deal damage. Kinda shows how design matters too: Why do I have to wait to let Eggman pick his hammer back up? Any other game would *let you attack the boss for easy damage while his weapon is down!* Even Bashmaster got this part right! On the other hand, a giant robotic T-rex eyeing you is kind of intense, so the wait times between attacks actually create suspense and therefore feel less slow.
Man the FF14 section is so interesting because I have lived that life. In ultimate raids, the community frequently uses Sims, which are community-created apps that let you practice a difficult mechanic with your team in a simulation, outside the game. This is basically like adding a checkpoint to a fight, where you can skip the first half you know perfectly, and just do the part you're actually trying to learn. This begs the question of if this is good for the game. After all, part of the point is that you're supposed to be consistent enough to make it to the hard part every single time. If your team only gets to that point like 1 out of 5 attempts, you probably shouldn't worry about it. Sims massively speed up progress in teams, but they somewhat take away from that sanctity of struggling over and over until it cracks. And the developers didn't really design for the community to create their own checkpoints. The pride of doing the hard fight is usually why you're doing it in the first place. If you want statistically powerful loot, just wait a few months when a new easy dungeon has better loot than the hardest raid in the game. If you want the mount, just wait a year when your stats are so high you can pretty easily crush the old Savage fights. But on the other hand, Sims are a goddamn lifesaver. I have been there, stuck on a fight for months, until using a Sim resolved all of our issues. Is that cheating, or quality of life?
I see it as basically skipping ahead on an exam paper. Sometimes people will get stuck on a specific set of questions, simply move onto the next, understand those, and in turn helps their brain understand the questions they previously couldn't because their brain begins to process the topic better. Is it against the rules? No. If anything, it's working smarter because banging your head against the same door isn't going to solve anything. Sure the door may break eventually and your head definitely wont like you, but why not simply look for another door, find the key, or look for help elsewhere?
@@inplane9970 I don't necessarily disagree with any of that, but I think it also steps on that slope of plugins/mods that FF14 has continuously waged war on. One of FF14's design goals was so that players could clear the hardest raids without having to install lots of mods that make things easier for the player. As a result, raids are meant to be beaten without having to resort to using Sims. You'll even occasionally see people do blind raids, where they try to solve mechanics on their own without any outside help. But of course, FF14 is designed in the internet age. People create content and discuss the game. We create video and text guides, chat online about strategies, share diagrams, watch other people clear, use discord to make callouts. Is a sim breaking the game by placing a checkpoint where the developer explicitly didn't put one for a reason? Or is a sim just an interactive guide? I'm not sure, but when I see how much easier it can make certain fights, it makes me wonder if it is healthy for the game and its fight design.
@@sauceinmyface9302I've used sims for ultimates, and used them extensively for TOP, and I'm unsure myself. I play in NA but live in EU, so a static is out of the question, and I only get to find so many parties a day. For me, being able to sim a fight like TOP means that I can begin to think about doing the fight in the first place. But at the same time, I think there's an argument to be made that not everyone should be able to do these fights, and I do agree that it takes away from the joy of the fights themselves. The problem is that ultimate is so long and so hard that it ends up running into this wall where it's not about the difficulty - like savage - it's about the time commitment. So in a sense I don't think they're inherently good or bad. It's up to whoever uses it to decide whether it'll be more fun for them or not. I just worry it'll get to a point where you're EXPECTED to sim, just like how people expect AM for Titan Gaols, even though the mechanic is really not that hard with the normal prio system.
@ That's exactly the same concerns I share too. It's ok if it's an option, but the community and Party Finder always strives for standardization. If everyone uses one strategy, you better learn it. If everyone uses the same plugin, you better get it.
Another ‘slow boss’ mechanic is damage sponges. Bosses with a TON of HP. It’s a fine line between a super resilient boss feeling sturdy and tough and it feeling just tedious to chip down.
the key difference there is that you need to feel like you're accomplishing something while whittling the health down. the best way to show this is with either some kind of battle damage mechanic (e.g. Monster Hunter's part breaks or the occational tail cut in Dark Souls) or with phase changes. the regular little markers of progress help to feel like you're actually doing something to it and essentially change the feel of the fight from being 1 big health bar to instead be several smaller ones.
I like how I was reflecting on how FF14 raid transitions on certain fights could feel especially slow when you're several attempts in on raid night just before the actual section started. The learning curve of a raid is definitely rough to perfect, especially in cases like the one given in Pandemonium where the difficult section in question has elements that weren't developed prior in the fight (there isn't a ramp up to the higher difficulty), and the actual elements in that section didn't exist at any point earlier in the fight. Better than any kind of practice mode is the raid itself training you for its later sections, and that fight did neither.
Yep. That problem is even worse for the Ultimates, like, I'm pretty sure it was TOP rhat had a mechanic in a later phase that had world first racers stuck for a week or so, which is insane. Same with DSR having some very backloaded moments in the double dragons phase.
I love King Bob-Omb in Super Mario 64, it's the perfect slow boss as it serves as a tutorial boss. It's easy to learn, slight slap on the wrist if you fail and still rewards with progression
Pyribbit from Kirby was actually pretty fun in the original Triple deluxe despite the moments of invulnerability. The problem immediately presents itself when you put a time limit on the fight like in Super Kirby Clash. Especially when you want a perfect rank.
Dark Beast Ganon from BotW's final fight will always be my least favorite slow boss I've ever dealt with. An amazing game, an amazing final fight, with an absolute momentum killer as you suddenly play target practice against a giant, virtually non-moving pig. Worst version of Beast Ganon ever in Zelda, and it was for me the only thing I didn't like about BotW. (well that and the temporary health system broke food)
I've gotten to a point where if a final boss in an RPG takes over an hour to beat, and then hits you with a party wipe attack that sends you back to the start, eventhough you're at the right level (*cough* Persona 5, Xenoblade 3 *cough*), I'm just like nah.
@@DesignDoc Exactly. The first 13 phases are anywhere from trivially easy to moderately difficult, and it really starts getting hard in the final phase.
To be fair to Hinox'es - If you have the gear/skill to blitz one down, you can probably blitz a bokoblin camp of the same tier. Late in the game all red tier enemies feel underwhelming - even Red Lynels don't have any real threat once you get some of the top tier gear. Blue enemies are mostly the same, although Blue Lynels should still be treated with some caution. Black and silver enemies (and Gold enemies in master mode) are the ones scaled properly to late game. The real pity is that there aren't any Silver Hinox in either BoTW or ToTK - and the fact that Master mode upscales most enemies, but not Hinox really makes them seem so much weaker than similar fights. Even so - a Black Hinox can absolutely chunk your health if you are not careful, and they have too much health to blitz down in one go (unless you do some mad tech), so they keep being an enemy you have to take seriously.
How about a boss with too much Health and takes forever? Yiazmat from FF 12 according to most sources takes an hour to beat under PERFECT conditions (Fifty Million HP in a Game were the damage cap is 9999.) and up to SIX HOURS under non-perfect conditions, add on insteant death moves that kill you if you are not paying attention and you got one of the worst fights in FF History.
And this is why The Zodiac Age allows you to break the damage cap and Yiazmat is like a 12 minute fight now. Still long, but not arduous. Yiazmat is far from the worst fight in FF history though. The whole list could be composed of fights from FFXI like Absolute Virtue or Pandemonium Warden. Yiazmat is an endurance test for sure and was too long, but the fight itself isn't that bad. Compare that to say FFX's Penance or Aeronite in FFXIII Lightning Returns which give the finger to the player, or FFXV's Adamantoise which is worse than Yiazmat in every way unless you use the cheese strat.
They fixed all that in Zodiac Age and by how you phrase your reply it seems you're not actually familiar with how Yiazmat works. The game lets you take breaks, you're not supposed to defeat Yiazmat in one sitting. The next time you come back it has the same amount of health.
@@LZ02-OVERTURE I'm aware that it let's you take breaks but that just makes it take longer I DID NOT SAY ITS THE HARDEST BOSS OR THEY DIDN"T FIX HIM AT SOME POINT Just that he is a very slow boss to fight.
Expanding on the point with the FF14 boss, anything that makes it slow to get back into a boss fight can be a point of friction. Like all the long run backs in From Soft games. Some fans see these as a breather, but they are certainly not all made equal, like the world's slowest elevator up to the Dragonslayer Armor. I always found it bizarre that Elden Ring had a solution for this - the stakes of Marika which act as respawn points- but only uses it on some of the boss fights.
You have no idea how happy it made me to see FFXII's Yiasmat as one of first few clips in the videos. FFXII was my first Final Fantasy game and is - to this day - one of my favorite games of all time. Though, to be honest, I never even attempted to fight Yiasmat xD Edit: The MMO drawback of having to rely on other people to understand and execute mechanics is exactly the reason why I've stopped doing most savage content in FFXIV. I grow SO bored of it so quickly because of how often it needs to be done over and over and over until even the last person finally gets it. I don't have that kind of time. I'd love a single player version of all the savage fights without having to wait for the next expansion to be released and raise the max. level at which point, of course, you can solo most fights.
If you own The Zodiac Age version of the game (since you seem to love the game like I do) you should try Yiazmat in that one since they allow you to break damage barrier and the fight then becomes like 15 minutes at most. If you give Ashe a full set of Genji gear and the Masamune she will do downright obscene DPS. Add in a tank and a buffer, you got yourself a stew!
Rabbits & Steel might be what you're looking for! The Touhou games feel very similar to savage fights too, in the sense that specific spell cards/mechanics have a specific idea solution and generally must be progged.
Y'know, for Black Doom, you can use Chaos Control to slow down time to get more shooting in on him. Playing it like that speeds up the Black Doom fights.
Everybody hates Hades' Heart from Kid Icarus Uprising, and I can't blame them. Seemingly innocuous, HH just moves slowly around the arena, occasionally sending out fake hearts that have Bomberman-style explosions and possibly jumping or potentially responding to you being close with mines that have 10 Shot Cancel Level/15~36 (based on Intensity) Shot Stamina, movement with homing, AND Slip Shot property (basically, averts wall collision) off of an attack that has NO signifier. Of course, the obvious solution would be to just snipe HH. Yeeeaaah, here's the nasty part about that: every time HH takes 16% of his HP in damage, he goes into an invulnerable Berserk Mode phase, where he is not only moving VERY fast and will hurt you if he collides with you, but he also will STILL send out those fake hearts, which did I forget to mention that those things have contact damage too? Oh, but don't worry, because your attacks CAN do something, namely damaging the fake hearts, which if they are hit for enough damage, they will unconditionally stop on the next "turn" and do their Bomberman-style explosion there. What I do to minimize the chance of getting hit by this is try to guarantee that the Berserk Mode gets set off when I'm where I can make HH trace around a convenient L-shaped block in the arena and generally manipulate his movement by being on given sides of the "tiles" involved. This much isn't even foolproof when HH can potentially spawn a fake on top of you and create so many problems with the dodging that way. I can point out that there is a mercy, that the Bomberman explosions' damage can in fact be Parry Dodged even without Evasion+, but without Evasion+ it's absolutely confounding timing with active reliance on sound, and I point out that Evasion+ is straight up broken in general, so yay for more design demanding the player to deal with the game's RNG provision of passive boosts. I can point out that I am known to main Skyscraper Club, which I argue to be having THE best Hades' Heart MU simply because of SSC's Shots' incredible damage bases providing MASSIVE potential to make use of the fact that the damage counter for when the Berserk Mode goes off fully resets, and on top of that, my style is built to involve patience and boxing. Even with that standpoint, I STILL denounce Hades' Heart as a badly designed boss for having bad communication and needless punishment for attacking. We have the following issues: -There is no indication to how close HH is to going into his Berserk Mode, OR when he's about to deploy one of those blasted fakes -The mines are a random "screw you" to using melee and should have been acceptably signified with that in mind -Attacking during the Berserk Mode is COMPLETELY pointless other than dash attacks purely for momentum to do positioning -You're punished for attacking the bombs with high enough damage, what the Underworld? Thankfully, there would be hope with a remake. We have seen Anubis Rex and Krome Keeper in Pac-Man World get vastly improved in Re-Pac, and a KIU remake could do something similar to Hades' Heart. What we have right now is trash. HH would be improved with the following: -HH indicating when he's about to attack (would nerf the fake bombs' fake difficulty, as well as bogus out of nowhere mines) -HH beating faster when closer to the Berserk Mode threshold (Mother Brain in the original Metroid involved something similar for Palutena's sake) -Mines having their SCL nerfed to be the same as Bowl Arm's (this would buff Guardian Orbitars in the MU, for one) -HH under Berserk Mode taking 12.5% damage not contributing to the next Berserk Mode trigger, and having the death immunity flag (yes, that's a thing, it's used by Twinbellows when she is doing her obnoxious lunging to keep her from dying until whenever she's hit after she eventually crashes) -Fake bombs being possible to disarm entirely with the current amount of damage for the Bomberman explosion early trigger, which would newly require half of that As it is, we have a slow boss that IS threatening, for all the wrong reasons.
The final boss fight of Donkey Kong Country Returns is, overall, pretty good. It's pretty long, but the gimmicks are clever and it feels good to play, learn, and eventually conquer. I legitimately enjoyed it as an experience when I replayed the game over the summer. There's a vertical rocket section before it, which would be super tedious to redo every time you die, but lucky for us there's a checkpoint afterwards, right before the cutscene that starts the fight. One issue though: If you die and respawn there, you don't get Diddy back. This forces you to play the fight on half health with no hover, which is not what the designers seemed to have in mind when making the mechanics of the earlier phases. If you want him back, you need to skip the cutscene, exit to the world map, re-enter the level, break the DK barrel, and replay the rocket section every single time you die. Let's just say I could probably still do that rocket ride with my eyes closed, even several months later.
Obnoxious, repetitive dialogue also can make a boss feel like a slog. Nyx from Persona 3 did not need to say "The arcana is the means all is revealed" 13 times my god
I'm surprised that you showed Byakko during the FF14 section but didn't mention his freefalling phase as an example. That one phase feels super long, probably because you can't do much during it other than move to not get his.
That's a fair point. I didn't explicitly mention it cause that fight is pretty easy by extreme/unreal standards so it didn't stand out to me to mention it compared to P7S. I also only just ran the Unreal for the first time the other week with friends partially for general xiv footage for this so it wasn't hot on my mind.
I remember, in the manual for the Western release of Alundra (PSX), the porting team specifically noted that they rebalanced a few bosses for less boss HP but higher damage output, because they felt a few battles were too "slow" and not threatening enough.
Talking about how Hinox can feel easy while using gameplay from someone with end-of-game weapons and full stamina and hearts lol. They have to be a bit slow because they deal massive damage, if you don't yourself play slow and anticipate their hits you'll likely get very low on hearts, even well into the game. Plus part of the challenge is hitting them in the eye, so again, their slowness in necessary.
Meanwhile, he shows off footage from King Bob-Omb (SM64's "tutorial boss") while . . . not even attempting to discuss it as an example. And for good reason.
Won't say we'll never do a dedicated video but we sort of cover that in our "Impossible bosses" episode talking about RE2 Remake's Mr. X and the EMMI in Metroid Dread.
I think one of the more interesting cases of a slow boss is Fafnir Roy III from Dragalia Lost. He's a stationary target with a very slow attack speed, but he's also a boss designed to be beaten hundreds of times across five different presets, and all in under a minute, so the strict time limit makes up for him being a bit too passive.
My go-to example of a boss with terrible waiting/invulnerable phases is the Meat Golem from Super Meat Boy. You don't attack this boss at all, you just wait out his attacks until he does the headbutt attack enough times to knock himself unconscious. But his attacks are all in a predetermined order, so you will literally just memorize what part of the screen every single one is going to hit. None of them require complex movement either, just jumping or standing in the right spot.
One slow boss I want to shout out is Goliath from DMC 5. He appears as the boss of mission 2, the third mission player goes through as Nero. Up until the point of fighting Goliath, players were most likely fighting little punching bags, with the only exceptions being Urizen and Qliphoth roots. For the Urizen fight, players are already expected to lose and have very low expectations to face him again that early. As for the Qliphoth roots, it barely fights back, even if it does players can simply back up and wait for another opportunity to strike back. However, in Goliath's case, the fight starts in a very tight space, making the back-up strategy very unreliable. Players are forced to face this big guy one-on-one, and he is no punching bag, he can tough out the wild attack button mashes and deliver strong counter attacks. Forcing players to dodge in-between their flurry of attacks. Once the fight gets into its 3rd phase, Goliath goes all out and the fight takes place in a much more open arena, in which players have to deal with bigger attacks from Goliath but also get more space to work with. Additionally, Goliath's head is his weak spot, but most of Goliath's punches can catch players in mid-air easily, aiming for the head becomes a risk & reward decision, which pushes the skill ceiling even more and directly supports the combat design philosophy of the game. If you're skillful enough, Goliath can still become a big punching bag. Very underrated first boss fight IMO, he's slow but certainly fun to fight against!
Long bosses that have tight damage windows are the worst ever. You have to get through these gauntlets of attacks to FINALLY get a chance to attack, and you end up missing it and have to wait all over again. I think that's the worst part about bosses like Pyribbit. I don't even really have an issue with Pyribbit, but the fact you can wait so long just to miss an attack is what can make it so frustrating. I actually love how some Kirby bosses have very short windows or vulnerability, but usually they're spaced out really nicely. Massive props to the devs for basically making the star bullets appear just enough to feel fair and engaging.
I genuinely will use this video while refining my boss battles. A streamer called one of my bosses a "bullet sponge" and I had no real way of making it feel better. This has absolutely helped give me ideas!
I just want to make a slight correction to the Shadow the Hedgehog portion. For the Black Doom and Black Bull fights specifically, you gain Hero meter rather than Dark meter for damaging the boss. Full Dark meter lets you Chaos Blast, just a big explosion. Hero meter in boss fights works differently than in levels, where in levels, it zips you forward, but in boss fights, it slows fights to a crawl. If you time it right in boss fights where you have it, you can deal MASSIVE amounts of damage to the boss, to the point where you can effectively take them down from 3/4 health to dead
@@rsj2877 Exactly! The rock could even be seen dropping off in chunks and the Titan gets smaller as it goes. Hell it could grab them again to heal itself, which means you have to hit all the harder. Then when it gets small enough (50% health) it could instead start throwing them at you as quick ranged attacks. ...Damn I wish I was a gamedev, lol.
This actually reminds me of a story I recently heard. People were complaining about how slow the elevators at the office were going. They wanted super fast elevators installed right away so that they could zip right to the floor they needed. But the on-site engineer simply installed shinier doors on the elevator. And immediately all of the complaints about slow elevators stopped because everyone immediately began to focus on something else: their reflections. They intuitively began focusing on something else, and that made the slow elevators feel fast. I don’t mind slow boss fights. But don’t let boss fights feel slow.
I felt the FF14 segment. The amount of curses i had to hear from friends because someone wiped minutes of progress and its their fault that an entire fight has to be restarted...yeah thats no good gamedesign. Been there myself, it also wrecks with you mentally if you dont learn fast enough and are the one tearing down the team. Really wish like you said, to have a training mode for the raids, without the external tool needed.
I just want to point out that Margit is meant to show that you can find advantages in openings you can't always see immediately. Take, for example, the tail swipe. You can jump that and it leaves you plenty of time to use a jumping heavy attack for no real effort. You can stagger him quite easily if you see the correct positioning to allow for as much poise damage. Try and stay behind his back as much as you can and you will probably get it done easily
I feel llike the way you described the hinoxes are emblematic of what Link represents as the wielder of the triforce of Courage. Idk if it was intentional per se but i like the idea that your own player courage is rewarded in a way like that.
15:06 You don't mention it, but you can see it in the fact that ALL of the footage you use is from different platformer games - because platformer bosses are NOTORIOUS for this trope. This has some reasons in game design - most platform games tie your ability to attack to your movement (after all platformers are all about movement), so it's hard to make a fair boss that asks player to attack and dodge at the same time, so most designers overcompensate and make the boss have a strict "attack phase" when they're invincible and you can only dodge, and "damage phase" when they're vulnerable to player attacks. If they're feeling bold, player may need to do a sequence of actions to make boss vulnerable.
Rock Titan's lack of difficulty is more understandable when you remember that the Coliseum has a Time Trial mode that requires you to do 49 combats in a row. If you put the actual most difficult boss last (probably Hades), you're subjugating players to 15 minutes of play until they likely die, then need to start over again. Moving Hades to 10th seed and replacing him with a glorified damage check is probably a mercy. Not to mention there are two other secret bosses after rock titan, so him being a pushover just serves as a warm up for Ice Titan and Sephiroth.
while I can't think of one off the top of my head, my least favorite type of 'slow boss' is one with any of the things mentioned in the video, on top of having such high HP and defense that it just takes FOREVER to kill the damn thing. Like this boss isn't that hard, it hits like a truck but it moves soo slow you mostly end up dying because you just messed up do to spending too long in your combo or you just kinda started to zone out so your reflexes slowed.
I disagree with the hinox because they are side bosses that aren't a roadblock to move forward, they are sleeping/walking materials. Getting to a point to just kill them quick and get the mats is at least what I prefer.
In Devil May Cry 4, The Savior is infamous for how slow it is, how it's leaping between platforms and exploring the area to stun the boss and then get vantage points to hit gems while occasionally stopping to fight minor enemies. In terms of actual "stuff" you're doing you are constantly making meaningful decisions but it's way different from the rest of the game. Plus the first time playing the mission it isn't immediately obvious that's what you're supposed to be doing, and even once you figure it out there's the added problem of the gems being located across The Savior's entire body and you need to figure out how to reach them - not only because of the stage being a maze, but the maze being in the air so it isn't really clear which platforms will lead you to a given location. Once you actually figure out the fight, the problem is that avoiding the attacks and getting to the gems and hitting them is not very difficult because of how slow The Savior moves. Plus the Savior has a standard slow boss staple of "extremely telegraphed attack you realistically will never get hit by but that you have to just stop what you're doing for like 30 seconds to avoid it." The second phase restructures the fight to be more straightforward but then it introduces the other problem of the Savior standing way in the background so you have to passively dodge attacks while using peashooters before you can actually get damage in. In a different game, like a Zelda game, The Savior would probably be a fan-favorite boss, but in a stylish action game it's just boring. Soulstice has a lot of DMC blood in it, you can really see it looked at some of the missteps of specifically the PS3-era games and tried to improve on them. Its final boss Harbinger is also like "The Savior but better." The boss is extremely aggressive right out of the gate, and shifting to different platforms in the arena is simply used as a method of avoiding attacks, no mazelike structure. It has more "passively attacking" moves like a rain of meteors or summoning adds that run concurrently with the basic melee attacks. Plus, Soulstice's mechanics of color-coded auras mean that having less downtime in the boss fight inherently raises the difficulty. Plus the "break a gem on its body" part is a mechanic Soulstice does through the entire game, not a new mechanic for one boss specifically. Both the Savior and Harbinger are, theoretically, a very similar fight concept and even their relative attack telegraphing is fairly similar but Harbinger just remembers that it's an action game.
Correction on FFVII: Supernova wasn't in the original Japanese version at all, instead being one of the many additions to the NA release that were then added to the FFVII International re-release in Japan, and they didn't change anything about the animation.
omg, I would love to have raid training modes in MMOs. GW2 needs this especially (because of the very gatekeepy community lol). Getting mechanics training before grouping up would save so much time.
5:21 Mimics in dark souls have a pretty long stand-up animation after you wake them up, so you can get some good hits in, but they have higher defense during it so you have to do a lot of damage to kill them before they can move
Brave Fencer Musashi suffers a lot from these bad slow boss fights. Almost all of the bosses there are "wait phase > boss exposes weakpoint to be attacked > repeat". I think only a few of them lets you do the actions to show their weak spot to essentially "skip" the wait phase.
one thing I will say about Sephiroth's minute long attack is that it gives you time to breathe. With how fast Sephiroth is and how fast your party is when Hasted, the fight is very stressful with a lot of fast movements. So the minute-long attack forces you to take a breath and gives you time to think about your next moves. Not sure if it's intentional, but it definitely helped me pull through and eke out a win
Anecdote from a friend about Sephiroth's Supernova. One of the first times he fought Sephi, he used Knights of the Round and two Mimics, and then Sephi used it, resulting in such a long stretch of cutscene that my friend went to the kitchen, made a sandwich, came back and finished eating it before he had to pick the controller back up.
Have a feeling this is basically the same topic as salt time, which was covered by GMTK before. Basically the more time a player can recover from their failure the less fun the game is. Usually a slow boss isn't slow, it's only slow because the player is forced to see things they already saw for a lot of times, and it's hard to even reach new stuffs. And usually the solution would be to reach new things quicker, for example providing checkpoints and practice modes, and generally just cut down the repitition and let the player decide how many times they want to repeat.
09:03 A good example are the killing blows in Sekiro. There each boss has multiple health bars, and to transition from one health bar to the next you need to deliver a special killing blow, with the final blow to end a boss always being a special kill animation. It looks great and when you see that red dot indicating the boss is ready to be finished, it always felt great. ... well except for the Guardian Ape. If you know you know.
In my personal opinion, the Hinox issue is the closest to not being an issue, sufficiently out-skilling or out-classing a boss should lead to a trivial encounter if that is how your game is built. My biggest issue with slow bosses usually come about from when you out-class a boss, but the game artificially extends the boss fight through methods like invulnerability phases. (Admittedly this come from the view of games like looter shooters and RPGs, where character progression involves getting incrementally stronger and bosses are shouldn't have a static difficulty irrespective of the character's progression.)
"(Margit) might seem slow, but the moments between attacks are filled with so much decision making and tensions" Me, standing well outside his range, waiting for him to finish his fourth consecutive combo-string: Yeah, ahuh, definitely.
Thank you for making a point about invincibility phases in bosses. I have never been a fan of these they just feel like a waste of my time. Especially when it's unclear why they're invincible (bonus points if they could theoretically just continue doing the invincible thing and you're sitting there wondering why they don't just do that infinitely until you die). Unless it's a mechanic that rewards you for breaking their invincibility (like stunning them and giving you a chance to deal a bunch of damage), I usually just find invincibility phases frustrating and boring.
@@Ghorda9 My issue comes more with ones that are just invincible for whatever reason. Like it's just x amount of time you can't hurt them and they're dealing damage. No mechanic behind it it's just invincible for the sake of it
For a good “slow boss,” I would suggest Pikmin 2’s water wraith as an interesting way to handle the “vulnerable/invulnerable state” issue: if the invincible state isn’t framed as a fight but instead as a hazard, it can make the boss itself a lot more interesting, even if in reality all it does is wander around. Even Pikmin 3 did this with the final boss sequence.
FF15's Adamantoise "super boss" was probably one of the longest, and slowest fights ever. It took WAY too long to complete and I had to take pause breaks to not cause damage to my hands from mashing attack.
I did that boss specifically to see the cool Titan summon and I didn't even get it or any other summon. I looked it up afterwards and its only a trigger if your party is down. Fishing for rare encounters and being upset when you don't get them is probably a bad way to approach a game but man, Adamantoise was really 20-40 mins (I forget exactly how long it took me) of just nothing
@@faceless1434 100%. I didn't even get to see Titan. So that was the trigger? I had Ramuh trigger a LOT during that fight. I remember it taking 40-50 minutes for very little interaction. Definitely could have been planned WAY better of a boss.
the very first boss you showed reminds me of furnace golems of elden ring and oh boi! their range, damage, stomping speed and even defence is crazy. They may look slow but capable of wiping you out in an instant.
This is why everyone praises Metroid Dread's bosses. There's a constant, steady flow of decisions to make, with the game's good controls making sure whether you succeed is never random, and the long attack animations are rewards for good parries where you get to wail on them. Even in bosses with invulnerable states, you're almost always in control of how quickly they become vulnerable again, keeping it engaging
The worst part about scornet maestro is that his attack only follow the capitan you're controlling while he prepares to attack. so you can throw a capitan and control it, wait until he starts attacking and use the others capitans to attack the boss from the back while he stands there doing nothing
The interesting thing I learned about Sephiroth's signature Super Nova attack that I learned while trying to complete FF7 at the lowest level I possibly could was that it is a gravity based attack, so it can't even kill you. I guess it is designed to make players feel like they barely survived, but in reality it is just a glorified set up move.
one of my biggest pet peeves is when something is gigantic in fiction and to portray it's strength the thing moves at a glacial pace. One of my only complaints with Bayonetta 3 personally is the Gamorrah kaiju fight is the world's slowest game of rock paper scissors. It's supposed to portray the weight properly, but it makes the thing feel floaty and like there's no strength at all behind the attacks. The biggest issue here is that we have no real-world equivalent. We have nothing the size of a building that is capable of moving, so people generally have to guess using stuff like air resistance. The only problem is that people do resistance training all the time, and it makes them stronger and faster and able to largely ignore the resistance. Facing heavy air resistance all the time means constantly doing that. Not to mention the largest animals we have on Earth are Elephants and Giraffes, and elephants can charge while giraffes can swing their necks crazy quickly. My point is if something is gigantic you can make it move at a normal pace. You can even make it fast cause it's gonna have bigger muscles capable of doing more. Just make it hit like a plane crash and it'll still feel strong.
heres the thing about margit though; unlike mohg, whose attacks are slow all the way through, margit has long wind-ups for attacks typically come out way too quick for most people to react. it results in a fight where you're pretty much forced to learn by trial and error rather than intuition in a series where you're usually able to dodge attacks the first time you see them
I think one think that could help mitigate the blitzing through the Hinox's health bar during its slow get up animation would be to have an animation where the hinox slaps both hands on the ground as it gets up. Like when a person pushes down on the bed to push themselves up into a sitting position? But as an attack that causes a shockwave around it. Newbies won't be as likely get hit by the attack, as they'll likely keep their distance to assess the situation, and veterans can still capitalize on blitzing through the health bar, but it isn't as free as before, as they'll have to shield parry the shockwave and be punished if they fail.
the war flashbacks to progging p7s... that fight was so disgustingly backloaded even reclears were miserable 😭 and I do raiding in party finder with randoms (and usually 2-3 other friends with me, at least) not a static group. playing with randoms in raids in ffxiv can make the backloaded fights feel so so much worse because you don't even have the consistency of static members learning alongside you, you're just rolling the dice every time you put the party up hoping you dont get someone lying about their prog or someone who doesn't know how to actually play their class...
One pet peeve of mine (and it may be just me) is when bosses force long periods of avoidance. Technically they aren't invulnerable, but if there's no viable way to apply damage during this attack cycle, they may as well be. And it feels cheap as hell when the boss can layer other attacks on top. If I'm forced to spend my time dealing with this one action, why isn't he spending the same time focusing on it? Point of reference (because I've been replaying Elden Ring): Elden Stars. The beast fires one projectile that chases you for 20 seconds, spawning further homing projectiles. Meanwhile, beast can run off and do other arena-wide sword swipes that aren't tuned to interact with it. You have no choice but to sprint until the stars time out, but dodge-rolling any other attack slows you down enough to get hit by the stars.
Mom's Heart/It Lives from flash isaac.The fight was basically "kill these enemies/bosses and then you can get a few hits on me before I spawn more enemies/bosses and disappear again." the boss.Which was changed to something better in rebirth
A thing on FFXIV is that part of the issue of learning fight is in how FFXIV hard content will do a mechanic once, maybe twice, and discard it. So there's no practising mechanics that come later on earlier variants. You do the mechanic once and don't think about it again until the party wipes. Which makes an especially easy start especially annoying.
There's something else to be said about HP tanks of a boss. Even if they have some cool attacks, if it takes 20 minutes to beat the guy, it's not going to be pleasant. Especially if you end up losing and have to start over. A decent amount of JRPG bosses fall under this category where it takes a while to beat
PIKMIN! PEAKMIN MENTIONED! But yes, Scornet Maestro was a lot more engaging in the original Pikmin 3. P3 Deluxe undercut it's orchestra by fumbling the pacing.
I don’t know if this channel takes UA-cam suggestions, but since Valentine’s Day is coming up, I’m curious to see a video on how games use love/attraction/romance mechanics differently
A boss can be thought of as a large and powerful enemy that is also the level itself. Designing a boss encounter works a lot like designing a level. I've seen a lot of bosses that constantly change between too slow and too fast. The player spends a lot of time waiting for the boss to do its next move, and when it does attack, it moves unpredictably and there is no indication of when it will suddenly change direction, and the waiting can add up to a significant portion of the time spent on every attempt.
Blood of Bahamut is filled with slow bosses. They have weak spots that are the only way to deal deal damage (just like shadow of the collosus) and to get materials. If you need a certain material you will have to wait for the boss to perform the right attack on the right platform all the while not attacking it too much lest you kill it early.
For a really funny point, I had my play speed on YT set to 1.75 speed when I started the video and clicked to bring it down to a normal speed but I misclicked and set it to 0.5 and it took the rest of the intro and a full sentence of you talking before I realized what I'd done and that you weren't doing a bit.
That would have been a really funny bit.
Tip: You can change the speed manually with [shift] + [>] or [
In a nutshell: what matters isn't the speed of the boss, but the speed of the player. It's okay for bosses to be a lethargic damage sponge, so long as players can't beat them as a lethargic damage dealer. Players should remain active and engaged, whether it's getting in close to melee them before retreating from a devastating AoE, running from one degrading cover point to the next in a cover shooter, dodging large attacks as you close the gap, or simply staying out of its attack range as you deal chip damage.
Older Monster Hunter games were a good example of this; the monsters are big and sometimes slow, but depending on your weapon type YOU may be just as slow (on attack or movement) yourself. Plus the relatively long knockdown animation every time you take a hit.
This is why some Dark Souls enemies \ bosses are just horse shit.
I don't mean just DS 1 - I mean the entire Soulslike family.
DS 1 and 2 were slow attacks, grand tells, each attack is kind of a commitment.
3 Sped up gameplay, and that was fine.
But your protagonist sure as shit didn't speed up with that same gameplay LOL.
Sekiro got away with it because of its flawless parry system. Tailor-made!
Elden Ring has a lot of those enemies that are just flailing with bad tells, massive long combo chains (Gross centipede enemy comes to mind) or other weird, often outright BAD Design decisions.
So what happened there was the tells got shorter, tell delays were added, attacks became faster, with more hits and combos, over a wider area...
...but your player character compared to DS 1 is barely more responsive and agile.
The difficulty was upped tremendously with such a simple change. Less time, less margin of error.
Speed is still useful for the midfight cutscenes, to reduce the amount of inactive downtimes.
@@chillnagasden6190you seem slightly salty? 😅
I remember when I was fighting sephiropth in FF7, I had a bowl of pasta with me and whenever Supernova went off I just put the controller down and ate my food.
Sounds like what I do when I'm at a stoplight and I have fast food in my car. I grab a french fry, tempting fate into making that traffic light green as I eat my food. If fate is successfully tempted, I get a green light finally. If fate ignores me, I successfully eat a french fry. It's a win-win and the fates absolutely hate me for figuring it out.
@@Boomblox5896 in fighting games we call this an option select
Imagine if Sephiroth's Super Nova had a parry window. One specific half-second within those two minutes where you could press a button and completely avoid all damage. I'm not even sure if that would make it better or worse.
Entirely blocking it would just feel way too cheap, something similar to sea of stars way of doing it where if you time a block well you take reduced damage COULD work...but also if we're talking supernova I don't think reducing it would do a whole lot so maybe not worth bothering.
It would be funny if it happened at a random time during the animation each time, signaled by a slight visual cue like the meteor flashing or something.
A window to spread damage between the party and stepbrother would comically dope.
parry this you filthy casual
that's what happens when mario and luigi knock it back with their hammers.
Shadow of the Colossus feels different because of the time between as well. Navigating an essentially empty world the bosses feel high paced comparatively
Context is king goal is queen.
Dismiss your king and forget your queen is the shortcut to ruin.
...
idk I'm drunk on H2O.
I can't wait for the third part of the FF7 Remake where Supernova is gonna be turned into an hour+ long animation
And it would still only do percentage damage that can't kill.
@@BBHood217Really hope they fix that.
Supernova gets its own game
@@BBHood217 That's only in the worldwide release. In the original Japanese version of the game, the attack didn't do percentage-based damage and could kill the party, inflicting around 2000 damage to the entire party. The attack's animation was also way shorter, only being about 30 seconds long versus the international version which is about 2 minutes in length.
Wait, it's not already just hours of cutscenes?
In regards to the Hinox: I actually feel like that enemy fits it's specific role perfectly. It's there as a beginner's learning tool. You get to learn how you can sneak up on it (learning stealth), even to the point of stealing weapons from it before it wakes. Plus getting the chance to attack ahead of it waking up. The "it can be blitzed" definitely becomes a more veteran player experience, where once you've learned how to beat them down it becomes easy... Which is a-okay. It did it's job.
If it were to be changed at all I would argue instead of changing the moveset, movement speed, or wakeup time... Simply have more Hinox that are awake to begin with in later zones of the game (guarding something without just sleeping on the job or such). Plus there is the evolution of the hinox in the stal-hinox which solves some of it's issues as well by being less vulnerable early.
But above all, there end up being harder bosses that appear later in the world as well that ramp up the difficulty anyways and work out best for scaling up than making the Hinox stronger
There's also the potential option of given them damage resistance while they wake up if them taking too much damage early is a problem. Maybe a damage cap during that animation could work too, to still allow players to get an advantage without trivializing the fight.
Would like to shout out SMO (mario odyssey) for having bosses with invulnerable phases that are still skippable with some skillful maneuvers (namely the Broodals), creating an engaging fight that retains the rhythm of alternating between offensive and defensive gameplay.
Scripted "quick-kill" strats are cool in any game, honestly. Monster Hunter, KH2, I think Shovel Knight has those too?
@@pedroscoponi4905 Love how KH2 will reward skillful use of reaction commands against bosses. Though it was way too easy to one shot enemies, at least in my opinion.
Finding the more rarer reaction commands is also pretty fun :D (like the one two combo of wall climb and pile drive into Sark's head in the second phase of the MCP fight)
@@Fenyx_Birb Or that one RC for Neoshadow
Why do you use an abbreviation followed by including the full name anyway if you then never use the established abbreviation again? The abbreviation lengthened your comment instead of shortening it. What is the point of an abbreviation if it only lengthens your message?
BTW (by the way) you do not have to shout! You can just talk normally.
Funniest thing about Supernova is that it can't even kill you (in the International version, at least). It deals damage equal to about 75% of each character's current HP.
@@RushStudios101 And if you have cast Regen or Big Guard before it happens, the long animation guarantees you'll have full health and there's no attack Sepiroth can do to you at that point that would kill a character afterwards.
Yeah, 2 and a half minutes for a Demi-elemented attack lol
Poor Sephiroth. Blew up the goddamn sun and your plot armored ass doesn't even flinch.
10:35 "A big rectangle blockade where rows of bees will attack." Young man, we in the 'definitely been playing games for too many years' business call that "Space Invaders."
I've seen fulltime jobs that do less work than MMO's
Yeah…
Yeah the amount of work FFXIV players put into Ultimates is insane. I could never be that dedicated, but it impresses me every time seeing them basically have coordination on par with military squads. 😭
@@inplane9970I've done a couple, it's not that bad! By the time you get to that point you probably think the rest of the game is pretty easy, so it might only take a week or two, or even a couple of days.
@@inplane9970 Same. I play XIV but Extreme Trials are the highest I do. Still 8-Man Bossfights harder than anything in the Main Story or casual Raids... but watching a guide and joining a party of randoms is enough most of the time if you know how to play your class/job.
Hinox intimidate me so much that I spend an hour beating the one from the island that takes away your items and armors upon arrival by throwing him bombs from up the mountain and retreating when he woke up.
Exactly how my first ever attempt on that same island went lmao, still probably my favourite shrine puzzle of the whole game low-key.
Yeah this is what the video maker does not realize. Videogames are not just for pro players but casuals as well. Even if mechanically weak, huge bosses intimidate so much an average player you cant do them too hard. There is a reason the games he talks about are legendary and their creators millionares while he just makes videos on youtube.
i did the exact same thing haha
@@usuariofuturista chill, some good games have bad designed bosses, there is no reason to pretende these games are perfect no matter how good they are. A 2 minute animation for an attack or a boss so slow you can always hel up between attacks is not well designed no matter how good the game where they reside is.
@@gustavoaraujopenha8463 To be fair, hinox aren't bosses, if anything they're minibosses. I'm pretty sure going from being an intimidating menace that new players don't even dare to take on to being just another enemy to get rid off quickly by veterans is intentional.
I've been playing Hyrule Warriors (Wii U) for a while now, and despite the game being about quickly dispatching of enemies and taking keeps before the enemy forces can take yours, the giant bosses bring the whole pace of the fights down to zero because you need to wait for them to execute one specific move that makes them vulnerable to one specific item before you can actually damage them. The Imprisoned is the worst, because while you don't need to wait for it to execute one specific move, you have to wait for it to stop doing that stupid shockwave attack before you can get close enough to damage its toes, and even if you do have the attack power to diminish its Weak Point Gauge in one round, it is hard coded to get up once half of it has been depleted and start wailing around the arena for an unnecessarily long period of time, making the fight more of a drag than a challenge.
The fights would have been so much better if the bosses were already vulnerable to damage to begin with, and using the items when the opportunity arrives was just a way to speed up the fight if it happens, but not be the sole determining factor for if you can damage it or not. And the Imprisoned shouldn't be coded to recover at half gauge either, let me one round the darn stupid thing!
I don't recommend you playing skyward sword because there is a lot of patience needed to fight the imprisoned. 😮
@@cupofoats Oh, I did beat Skyward Sword several times when it came out. And yeah, the Imprisoned fights are the worst...
You have no idea how much I hate the Giant Bosses in HW. It brings out the worst parts in that whole game. Swapping items is cumbersome, the opportunity windows can be weirdly short which leads to more and more waiting due to mistakes. They happen often enough that it makes me have to put the game down for a while. Probably the biggest reason why I won't completely clear any of the adventure maps on top of the ranking system being rather annoying.
Only played age of calamity and now I'm glad I did, seems the devs realised how awful that was and changed it thankfully.
@@DesignDoc And it's such a shame, because the entire game is a love letter to the whole franchise and an otherwise great experience.
You can mitigate the tedium by equipping your strong weapons and giving them skills that deal bonus damage to giant bosses, but that's a bandaid solution to a fittingly larger problem.
How about a video about "Boss Weaknesses"? Something that the boss is weak to, or a way to actually harm him.
Maybe it's a weak spot, an elemental weakness, a secret way to speed up the fight or something more related to the plot.
Hello, we are Legend of Zelda, Majora's Mask 3DS, and we would like to say, "SHOOT IT IN THE GIANT ASS EYE WE GAVE EVERY BOSS!"
Thank you for listening.
@@MagusDouken And that's why almost no one likes the 3DS version.
Ah ofc, though you do have to avoid the "Spark Mandril Syndrome", and if you are not aware, spark mandril from Megaman X is weak to an ice weapon... AND, that one ice weapon can stunlock him.
Interesting take on Margit. I get that it's supposed to teach you to be very intentional with your dodge timings, but some of those windups look SILLY to me. For some bosses it gets to the point where I stop looking at the fight as an intelligent, intentional creature and start seeing the developer's hand behind it daring me to roll early.
You can definitely feel that fromsoft didn’t want to be too predictable and overdid these telegraphs to throw people off for better and worse.
I think that with the slowest attacks Margit teaches you that sometimes you can attack bosses during the wind up. A lesson that I feel is more helpful for the late game fights
People do have a habit of dodge spamming tho, speaking as one of people lol. I did finally learn to stop and watch and got by it.
@@DesignDoc i don't think they overdid it in almost all cases, it's really just Margit's raised cane that's a stand out.
Being fair, Margit is basically slumming it in his first fight and doesn't think much of you- taking that long to swing could be his way of fucking with you, daring you to try and dodge it so he can smack you.
What impressed me the most with Shadow of the Colossus was how they used the music to convey the feel of those Colossus movements.Everything in a colossus fight felt slow and deliberate, yet frantic and intense, animation and mechanic played a aprt sure, but without that OST? I'm not sure the game would ahve been peak.
In Pokemon battles slow Pokemon can become very powerful in trick room, a field effect where the slowest moves first
This could inspire a boss that is slow but occasionally casts a field effect that slows the player but sleeps up the boss, having to rely on defending yourself until the effect ends
That has a lot of potential to be unfair to the player if it's just "debuff player, buff boss". Trick Room doesn't feel cheap because everyone in Pokémon has access to the same tools. It also works in reverse, so technically your Pokémon *could* use the same move to turn the twisted dimensions back to normal. Player interactivity is key.
@@rainpooper7088
That is very true, for “buff boss, debuff player” it would have to be balanced in a way that it is telegraphed to the player to prepare for short period of time where the boss is fast and the player is slowed
Like how some bosses in persona you the boss is telegraphed a big attack and you have to guard in order not to get wiped out
It's not quite the same thing, but there are a lot of bosses that are generally slow but speed up rapidly at a certain point. Like Malekith from Elden Ring
This can even work with real-time combat. The third boss of Persona 5 Strikers has something akin to this where they can unleash a lasting blizzard that cuts the Phantom Thieves' speed drastically.
With no guard mechanic and a boss largely resistant to hit-stun, having your dodges crippled is a huge deal, but there is a giant heater nearby that can disable the entire effect, so players who see the boss winding up after the first instance can rush to this counter in advance.
Pokemon speed is just a turn order thing, it's not game speed
To quote my Ghostrunner 1 Project Hel DLC steam-review:
"The second critique is how dlc's second boss battle starts out with very boring sequence where you just move between platforms while avoiding lethal lasers/ bullets and avoid electrical platforms, if I were to make an video essay one day of bad boss-encounter designs this battle would be definitely mentioned in it."
This video is exactly what I had in my mind while writing that review one month ago.
Ghostrunner's bosses so perfectly fit this, yeah. The first game's aren't terrible but I was thinking about the second's pretty much the whole video. There's just so many of them and they're all such miserable slogs, so detached from the actual Ghostrunner formula
Black Doom does have a way to speed him up; Chaos Control. Just time Chaos Control to freeze him when he becomes vulnerable, increasing your opportunity to hurt him and pump him full of ammo. Depending on the guns available and the right timing, he can be beaten the fastest of the 3 final bosses in Shadow the Hedgehog.
i was saying this at my screen watching that part lol
*Oh lawd He comin*
One aspect that makes bosses feel slower for me is when you have to wait to get them vulnerable and then there's no way for you to deal extra damage even if you're already good at the game. The first boss from Sonic Rush feels a lot slower to me than the first boss of Rush Adventure (even though they work very similarly and the latter fight takes longer) because you can actually bounce on the Ghost Rex multiple times during both of his attacks if you're good while the Egg Hammer always takes one hit max during just one attack before you're back to watching him slowly picking up his rolly thing again every damn time he does that attack with no chance to deal damage.
Kinda shows how design matters too: Why do I have to wait to let Eggman pick his hammer back up? Any other game would *let you attack the boss for easy damage while his weapon is down!* Even Bashmaster got this part right! On the other hand, a giant robotic T-rex eyeing you is kind of intense, so the wait times between attacks actually create suspense and therefore feel less slow.
Man the FF14 section is so interesting because I have lived that life. In ultimate raids, the community frequently uses Sims, which are community-created apps that let you practice a difficult mechanic with your team in a simulation, outside the game. This is basically like adding a checkpoint to a fight, where you can skip the first half you know perfectly, and just do the part you're actually trying to learn.
This begs the question of if this is good for the game. After all, part of the point is that you're supposed to be consistent enough to make it to the hard part every single time. If your team only gets to that point like 1 out of 5 attempts, you probably shouldn't worry about it. Sims massively speed up progress in teams, but they somewhat take away from that sanctity of struggling over and over until it cracks. And the developers didn't really design for the community to create their own checkpoints.
The pride of doing the hard fight is usually why you're doing it in the first place. If you want statistically powerful loot, just wait a few months when a new easy dungeon has better loot than the hardest raid in the game. If you want the mount, just wait a year when your stats are so high you can pretty easily crush the old Savage fights.
But on the other hand, Sims are a goddamn lifesaver. I have been there, stuck on a fight for months, until using a Sim resolved all of our issues. Is that cheating, or quality of life?
Yes.
I see it as basically skipping ahead on an exam paper. Sometimes people will get stuck on a specific set of questions, simply move onto the next, understand those, and in turn helps their brain understand the questions they previously couldn't because their brain begins to process the topic better.
Is it against the rules? No. If anything, it's working smarter because banging your head against the same door isn't going to solve anything. Sure the door may break eventually and your head definitely wont like you, but why not simply look for another door, find the key, or look for help elsewhere?
@@inplane9970 I don't necessarily disagree with any of that, but I think it also steps on that slope of plugins/mods that FF14 has continuously waged war on.
One of FF14's design goals was so that players could clear the hardest raids without having to install lots of mods that make things easier for the player. As a result, raids are meant to be beaten without having to resort to using Sims. You'll even occasionally see people do blind raids, where they try to solve mechanics on their own without any outside help.
But of course, FF14 is designed in the internet age. People create content and discuss the game. We create video and text guides, chat online about strategies, share diagrams, watch other people clear, use discord to make callouts.
Is a sim breaking the game by placing a checkpoint where the developer explicitly didn't put one for a reason? Or is a sim just an interactive guide? I'm not sure, but when I see how much easier it can make certain fights, it makes me wonder if it is healthy for the game and its fight design.
@@sauceinmyface9302I've used sims for ultimates, and used them extensively for TOP, and I'm unsure myself. I play in NA but live in EU, so a static is out of the question, and I only get to find so many parties a day. For me, being able to sim a fight like TOP means that I can begin to think about doing the fight in the first place.
But at the same time, I think there's an argument to be made that not everyone should be able to do these fights, and I do agree that it takes away from the joy of the fights themselves. The problem is that ultimate is so long and so hard that it ends up running into this wall where it's not about the difficulty - like savage - it's about the time commitment.
So in a sense I don't think they're inherently good or bad. It's up to whoever uses it to decide whether it'll be more fun for them or not. I just worry it'll get to a point where you're EXPECTED to sim, just like how people expect AM for Titan Gaols, even though the mechanic is really not that hard with the normal prio system.
@ That's exactly the same concerns I share too. It's ok if it's an option, but the community and Party Finder always strives for standardization. If everyone uses one strategy, you better learn it. If everyone uses the same plugin, you better get it.
Another ‘slow boss’ mechanic is damage sponges. Bosses with a TON of HP. It’s a fine line between a super resilient boss feeling sturdy and tough and it feeling just tedious to chip down.
the key difference there is that you need to feel like you're accomplishing something while whittling the health down. the best way to show this is with either some kind of battle damage mechanic (e.g. Monster Hunter's part breaks or the occational tail cut in Dark Souls) or with phase changes. the regular little markers of progress help to feel like you're actually doing something to it and essentially change the feel of the fight from being 1 big health bar to instead be several smaller ones.
@@Eclipsed_Embers Well said! Exactly this!
I like how I was reflecting on how FF14 raid transitions on certain fights could feel especially slow when you're several attempts in on raid night just before the actual section started.
The learning curve of a raid is definitely rough to perfect, especially in cases like the one given in Pandemonium where the difficult section in question has elements that weren't developed prior in the fight (there isn't a ramp up to the higher difficulty), and the actual elements in that section didn't exist at any point earlier in the fight. Better than any kind of practice mode is the raid itself training you for its later sections, and that fight did neither.
Yep. That problem is even worse for the Ultimates, like, I'm pretty sure it was TOP rhat had a mechanic in a later phase that had world first racers stuck for a week or so, which is insane. Same with DSR having some very backloaded moments in the double dragons phase.
I love King Bob-Omb in Super Mario 64, it's the perfect slow boss as it serves as a tutorial boss. It's easy to learn, slight slap on the wrist if you fail and still rewards with progression
Pyribbit from Kirby was actually pretty fun in the original Triple deluxe despite the moments of invulnerability. The problem immediately presents itself when you put a time limit on the fight like in Super Kirby Clash. Especially when you want a perfect rank.
Dark Beast Ganon from BotW's final fight will always be my least favorite slow boss I've ever dealt with. An amazing game, an amazing final fight, with an absolute momentum killer as you suddenly play target practice against a giant, virtually non-moving pig. Worst version of Beast Ganon ever in Zelda, and it was for me the only thing I didn't like about BotW. (well that and the temporary health system broke food)
Yeah, I didnt even view calamity ganon as a boss. In my mind, it was basically a playable cutscene
I've gotten to a point where if a final boss in an RPG takes over an hour to beat, and then hits you with a party wipe attack that sends you back to the start, eventhough you're at the right level (*cough* Persona 5, Xenoblade 3 *cough*), I'm just like nah.
Persona 5 not so much...PERSONA 3 ON THE OTHER HAND...
@@DesignDoc The arcana is the means by which all is revealed.
It sounds like you're kinda ass at the game lmao
@@DesignDoc Exactly. The first 13 phases are anywhere from trivially easy to moderately difficult, and it really starts getting hard in the final phase.
To be fair to Hinox'es - If you have the gear/skill to blitz one down, you can probably blitz a bokoblin camp of the same tier. Late in the game all red tier enemies feel underwhelming - even Red Lynels don't have any real threat once you get some of the top tier gear. Blue enemies are mostly the same, although Blue Lynels should still be treated with some caution. Black and silver enemies (and Gold enemies in master mode) are the ones scaled properly to late game.
The real pity is that there aren't any Silver Hinox in either BoTW or ToTK - and the fact that Master mode upscales most enemies, but not Hinox really makes them seem so much weaker than similar fights. Even so - a Black Hinox can absolutely chunk your health if you are not careful, and they have too much health to blitz down in one go (unless you do some mad tech), so they keep being an enemy you have to take seriously.
Shadow of the Colossus is pretty perfect, the more I think about it
100%
How about a boss with too much Health and takes forever? Yiazmat from FF 12 according to most sources takes an hour to beat under PERFECT conditions (Fifty Million HP in a Game were the damage cap is 9999.) and up to SIX HOURS under non-perfect conditions, add on insteant death moves that kill you if you are not paying attention and you got one of the worst fights in FF History.
And this is why The Zodiac Age allows you to break the damage cap and Yiazmat is like a 12 minute fight now. Still long, but not arduous. Yiazmat is far from the worst fight in FF history though. The whole list could be composed of fights from FFXI like Absolute Virtue or Pandemonium Warden. Yiazmat is an endurance test for sure and was too long, but the fight itself isn't that bad. Compare that to say FFX's Penance or Aeronite in FFXIII Lightning Returns which give the finger to the player, or FFXV's Adamantoise which is worse than Yiazmat in every way unless you use the cheese strat.
Yeah the hd rerelease nerfed him greatly. Plus they added x3 time to make it more pallitable. Now I can dust it in maybe 10 minutes
@@Ashtarte3D Its not about difficulty its ab out slowness which Yiazmet takes the cake for being WAY to slow.
They fixed all that in Zodiac Age and by how you phrase your reply it seems you're not actually familiar with how Yiazmat works. The game lets you take breaks, you're not supposed to defeat Yiazmat in one sitting. The next time you come back it has the same amount of health.
@@LZ02-OVERTURE I'm aware that it let's you take breaks but that just makes it take longer I DID NOT SAY ITS THE HARDEST BOSS OR THEY DIDN"T FIX HIM AT SOME POINT Just that he is a very slow boss to fight.
Expanding on the point with the FF14 boss, anything that makes it slow to get back into a boss fight can be a point of friction. Like all the long run backs in From Soft games. Some fans see these as a breather, but they are certainly not all made equal, like the world's slowest elevator up to the Dragonslayer Armor. I always found it bizarre that Elden Ring had a solution for this - the stakes of Marika which act as respawn points- but only uses it on some of the boss fights.
You have no idea how happy it made me to see FFXII's Yiasmat as one of first few clips in the videos. FFXII was my first Final Fantasy game and is - to this day - one of my favorite games of all time. Though, to be honest, I never even attempted to fight Yiasmat xD
Edit: The MMO drawback of having to rely on other people to understand and execute mechanics is exactly the reason why I've stopped doing most savage content in FFXIV. I grow SO bored of it so quickly because of how often it needs to be done over and over and over until even the last person finally gets it. I don't have that kind of time. I'd love a single player version of all the savage fights without having to wait for the next expansion to be released and raise the max. level at which point, of course, you can solo most fights.
If you own The Zodiac Age version of the game (since you seem to love the game like I do) you should try Yiazmat in that one since they allow you to break damage barrier and the fight then becomes like 15 minutes at most. If you give Ashe a full set of Genji gear and the Masamune she will do downright obscene DPS. Add in a tank and a buffer, you got yourself a stew!
Rabbits & Steel might be what you're looking for! The Touhou games feel very similar to savage fights too, in the sense that specific spell cards/mechanics have a specific idea solution and generally must be progged.
Y'know, for Black Doom, you can use Chaos Control to slow down time to get more shooting in on him. Playing it like that speeds up the Black Doom fights.
Everybody hates Hades' Heart from Kid Icarus Uprising, and I can't blame them. Seemingly innocuous, HH just moves slowly around the arena, occasionally sending out fake hearts that have Bomberman-style explosions and possibly jumping or potentially responding to you being close with mines that have 10 Shot Cancel Level/15~36 (based on Intensity) Shot Stamina, movement with homing, AND Slip Shot property (basically, averts wall collision) off of an attack that has NO signifier. Of course, the obvious solution would be to just snipe HH.
Yeeeaaah, here's the nasty part about that: every time HH takes 16% of his HP in damage, he goes into an invulnerable Berserk Mode phase, where he is not only moving VERY fast and will hurt you if he collides with you, but he also will STILL send out those fake hearts, which did I forget to mention that those things have contact damage too? Oh, but don't worry, because your attacks CAN do something, namely damaging the fake hearts, which if they are hit for enough damage, they will unconditionally stop on the next "turn" and do their Bomberman-style explosion there. What I do to minimize the chance of getting hit by this is try to guarantee that the Berserk Mode gets set off when I'm where I can make HH trace around a convenient L-shaped block in the arena and generally manipulate his movement by being on given sides of the "tiles" involved. This much isn't even foolproof when HH can potentially spawn a fake on top of you and create so many problems with the dodging that way. I can point out that there is a mercy, that the Bomberman explosions' damage can in fact be Parry Dodged even without Evasion+, but without Evasion+ it's absolutely confounding timing with active reliance on sound, and I point out that Evasion+ is straight up broken in general, so yay for more design demanding the player to deal with the game's RNG provision of passive boosts.
I can point out that I am known to main Skyscraper Club, which I argue to be having THE best Hades' Heart MU simply because of SSC's Shots' incredible damage bases providing MASSIVE potential to make use of the fact that the damage counter for when the Berserk Mode goes off fully resets, and on top of that, my style is built to involve patience and boxing. Even with that standpoint, I STILL denounce Hades' Heart as a badly designed boss for having bad communication and needless punishment for attacking. We have the following issues:
-There is no indication to how close HH is to going into his Berserk Mode, OR when he's about to deploy one of those blasted fakes
-The mines are a random "screw you" to using melee and should have been acceptably signified with that in mind
-Attacking during the Berserk Mode is COMPLETELY pointless other than dash attacks purely for momentum to do positioning
-You're punished for attacking the bombs with high enough damage, what the Underworld?
Thankfully, there would be hope with a remake. We have seen Anubis Rex and Krome Keeper in Pac-Man World get vastly improved in Re-Pac, and a KIU remake could do something similar to Hades' Heart. What we have right now is trash. HH would be improved with the following:
-HH indicating when he's about to attack (would nerf the fake bombs' fake difficulty, as well as bogus out of nowhere mines)
-HH beating faster when closer to the Berserk Mode threshold (Mother Brain in the original Metroid involved something similar for Palutena's sake)
-Mines having their SCL nerfed to be the same as Bowl Arm's (this would buff Guardian Orbitars in the MU, for one)
-HH under Berserk Mode taking 12.5% damage not contributing to the next Berserk Mode trigger, and having the death immunity flag (yes, that's a thing, it's used by Twinbellows when she is doing her obnoxious lunging to keep her from dying until whenever she's hit after she eventually crashes)
-Fake bombs being possible to disarm entirely with the current amount of damage for the Bomberman explosion early trigger, which would newly require half of that
As it is, we have a slow boss that IS threatening, for all the wrong reasons.
17:09 not to defend a lame fight, but I’m sure you’re supposed to use chaos control to freeze the boss so you can hit them more when vulnerable
The final boss fight of Donkey Kong Country Returns is, overall, pretty good. It's pretty long, but the gimmicks are clever and it feels good to play, learn, and eventually conquer. I legitimately enjoyed it as an experience when I replayed the game over the summer. There's a vertical rocket section before it, which would be super tedious to redo every time you die, but lucky for us there's a checkpoint afterwards, right before the cutscene that starts the fight. One issue though: If you die and respawn there, you don't get Diddy back. This forces you to play the fight on half health with no hover, which is not what the designers seemed to have in mind when making the mechanics of the earlier phases. If you want him back, you need to skip the cutscene, exit to the world map, re-enter the level, break the DK barrel, and replay the rocket section every single time you die. Let's just say I could probably still do that rocket ride with my eyes closed, even several months later.
Obnoxious, repetitive dialogue also can make a boss feel like a slog.
Nyx from Persona 3 did not need to say "The arcana is the means all is revealed" 13 times my god
IT MATTERS NOT WHO YOU ARE
REPEATING ALL 13 PHASES BECAUSE AKIHIKO DIARAHAN'D THE BOSS AFTER NIGHT QUEEN AWAITS US ALL
"It's no use!"
@@ferrohazard”You know what they say, the more the merrier!”
yes she did
NGL you're my favorite game design series. Always a good day when your videos come out.
No idea! Lets find out
Why would you comment this
lol
I'm surprised that you showed Byakko during the FF14 section but didn't mention his freefalling phase as an example. That one phase feels super long, probably because you can't do much during it other than move to not get his.
That's a fair point. I didn't explicitly mention it cause that fight is pretty easy by extreme/unreal standards so it didn't stand out to me to mention it compared to P7S. I also only just ran the Unreal for the first time the other week with friends partially for general xiv footage for this so it wasn't hot on my mind.
I remember, in the manual for the Western release of Alundra (PSX), the porting team specifically noted that they rebalanced a few bosses for less boss HP but higher damage output, because they felt a few battles were too "slow" and not threatening enough.
Talking about how Hinox can feel easy while using gameplay from someone with end-of-game weapons and full stamina and hearts lol. They have to be a bit slow because they deal massive damage, if you don't yourself play slow and anticipate their hits you'll likely get very low on hearts, even well into the game.
Plus part of the challenge is hitting them in the eye, so again, their slowness in necessary.
Meanwhile, he shows off footage from King Bob-Omb (SM64's "tutorial boss") while . . . not even attempting to discuss it as an example. And for good reason.
Now, I had an idea. Can you make a video about enemies/Bosses that chases the player in games? (Chasing Sequences)
Won't say we'll never do a dedicated video but we sort of cover that in our "Impossible bosses" episode talking about RE2 Remake's Mr. X and the EMMI in Metroid Dread.
I think one of the more interesting cases of a slow boss is Fafnir Roy III from Dragalia Lost. He's a stationary target with a very slow attack speed, but he's also a boss designed to be beaten hundreds of times across five different presets, and all in under a minute, so the strict time limit makes up for him being a bit too passive.
My go-to example of a boss with terrible waiting/invulnerable phases is the Meat Golem from Super Meat Boy. You don't attack this boss at all, you just wait out his attacks until he does the headbutt attack enough times to knock himself unconscious. But his attacks are all in a predetermined order, so you will literally just memorize what part of the screen every single one is going to hit. None of them require complex movement either, just jumping or standing in the right spot.
One slow boss I want to shout out is Goliath from DMC 5.
He appears as the boss of mission 2, the third mission player goes through as Nero. Up until the point of fighting Goliath, players were most likely fighting little punching bags, with the only exceptions being Urizen and Qliphoth roots. For the Urizen fight, players are already expected to lose and have very low expectations to face him again that early. As for the Qliphoth roots, it barely fights back, even if it does players can simply back up and wait for another opportunity to strike back.
However, in Goliath's case, the fight starts in a very tight space, making the back-up strategy very unreliable. Players are forced to face this big guy one-on-one, and he is no punching bag, he can tough out the wild attack button mashes and deliver strong counter attacks. Forcing players to dodge in-between their flurry of attacks. Once the fight gets into its 3rd phase, Goliath goes all out and the fight takes place in a much more open arena, in which players have to deal with bigger attacks from Goliath but also get more space to work with. Additionally, Goliath's head is his weak spot, but most of Goliath's punches can catch players in mid-air easily, aiming for the head becomes a risk & reward decision, which pushes the skill ceiling even more and directly supports the combat design philosophy of the game. If you're skillful enough, Goliath can still become a big punching bag.
Very underrated first boss fight IMO, he's slow but certainly fun to fight against!
Long bosses that have tight damage windows are the worst ever.
You have to get through these gauntlets of attacks to FINALLY get a chance to attack, and you end up missing it and have to wait all over again.
I think that's the worst part about bosses like Pyribbit.
I don't even really have an issue with Pyribbit, but the fact you can wait so long just to miss an attack is what can make it so frustrating.
I actually love how some Kirby bosses have very short windows or vulnerability, but usually they're spaced out really nicely. Massive props to the devs for basically making the star bullets appear just enough to feel fair and engaging.
I genuinely will use this video while refining my boss battles.
A streamer called one of my bosses a "bullet sponge" and I had no real way of making it feel better. This has absolutely helped give me ideas!
I just want to make a slight correction to the Shadow the Hedgehog portion. For the Black Doom and Black Bull fights specifically, you gain Hero meter rather than Dark meter for damaging the boss. Full Dark meter lets you Chaos Blast, just a big explosion. Hero meter in boss fights works differently than in levels, where in levels, it zips you forward, but in boss fights, it slows fights to a crawl. If you time it right in boss fights where you have it, you can deal MASSIVE amounts of damage to the boss, to the point where you can effectively take them down from 3/4 health to dead
Monster Hunter is exceptionally good at what would normally be pretty slow fights in other action games.
Rock Titan would have been amazing if it sped up as its health reduced. Get some of that good ol dynamic from Space Invaders.
Like as you chip it down, it weighted much less amd moves faster.
@@rsj2877 Exactly! The rock could even be seen dropping off in chunks and the Titan gets smaller as it goes. Hell it could grab them again to heal itself, which means you have to hit all the harder. Then when it gets small enough (50% health) it could instead start throwing them at you as quick ranged attacks.
...Damn I wish I was a gamedev, lol.
This actually reminds me of a story I recently heard. People were complaining about how slow the elevators at the office were going. They wanted super fast elevators installed right away so that they could zip right to the floor they needed. But the on-site engineer simply installed shinier doors on the elevator. And immediately all of the complaints about slow elevators stopped because everyone immediately began to focus on something else: their reflections. They intuitively began focusing on something else, and that made the slow elevators feel fast.
I don’t mind slow boss fights. But don’t let boss fights feel slow.
I felt the FF14 segment. The amount of curses i had to hear from friends because someone wiped minutes of progress and its their fault that an entire fight has to be restarted...yeah thats no good gamedesign. Been there myself, it also wrecks with you mentally if you dont learn fast enough and are the one tearing down the team.
Really wish like you said, to have a training mode for the raids, without the external tool needed.
I just want to point out that Margit is meant to show that you can find advantages in openings you can't always see immediately. Take, for example, the tail swipe. You can jump that and it leaves you plenty of time to use a jumping heavy attack for no real effort. You can stagger him quite easily if you see the correct positioning to allow for as much poise damage. Try and stay behind his back as much as you can and you will probably get it done easily
I feel llike the way you described the hinoxes are emblematic of what Link represents as the wielder of the triforce of Courage. Idk if it was intentional per se but i like the idea that your own player courage is rewarded in a way like that.
15:06 You don't mention it, but you can see it in the fact that ALL of the footage you use is from different platformer games - because platformer bosses are NOTORIOUS for this trope. This has some reasons in game design - most platform games tie your ability to attack to your movement (after all platformers are all about movement), so it's hard to make a fair boss that asks player to attack and dodge at the same time, so most designers overcompensate and make the boss have a strict "attack phase" when they're invincible and you can only dodge, and "damage phase" when they're vulnerable to player attacks. If they're feeling bold, player may need to do a sequence of actions to make boss vulnerable.
Rock Titan's lack of difficulty is more understandable when you remember that the Coliseum has a Time Trial mode that requires you to do 49 combats in a row. If you put the actual most difficult boss last (probably Hades), you're subjugating players to 15 minutes of play until they likely die, then need to start over again. Moving Hades to 10th seed and replacing him with a glorified damage check is probably a mercy. Not to mention there are two other secret bosses after rock titan, so him being a pushover just serves as a warm up for Ice Titan and Sephiroth.
while I can't think of one off the top of my head, my least favorite type of 'slow boss' is one with any of the things mentioned in the video, on top of having such high HP and defense that it just takes FOREVER to kill the damn thing. Like this boss isn't that hard, it hits like a truck but it moves soo slow you mostly end up dying because you just messed up do to spending too long in your combo or you just kinda started to zone out so your reflexes slowed.
I disagree with the hinox because they are side bosses that aren't a roadblock to move forward, they are sleeping/walking materials. Getting to a point to just kill them quick and get the mats is at least what I prefer.
In Devil May Cry 4, The Savior is infamous for how slow it is, how it's leaping between platforms and exploring the area to stun the boss and then get vantage points to hit gems while occasionally stopping to fight minor enemies. In terms of actual "stuff" you're doing you are constantly making meaningful decisions but it's way different from the rest of the game. Plus the first time playing the mission it isn't immediately obvious that's what you're supposed to be doing, and even once you figure it out there's the added problem of the gems being located across The Savior's entire body and you need to figure out how to reach them - not only because of the stage being a maze, but the maze being in the air so it isn't really clear which platforms will lead you to a given location.
Once you actually figure out the fight, the problem is that avoiding the attacks and getting to the gems and hitting them is not very difficult because of how slow The Savior moves.
Plus the Savior has a standard slow boss staple of "extremely telegraphed attack you realistically will never get hit by but that you have to just stop what you're doing for like 30 seconds to avoid it."
The second phase restructures the fight to be more straightforward but then it introduces the other problem of the Savior standing way in the background so you have to passively dodge attacks while using peashooters before you can actually get damage in.
In a different game, like a Zelda game, The Savior would probably be a fan-favorite boss, but in a stylish action game it's just boring.
Soulstice has a lot of DMC blood in it, you can really see it looked at some of the missteps of specifically the PS3-era games and tried to improve on them. Its final boss Harbinger is also like "The Savior but better." The boss is extremely aggressive right out of the gate, and shifting to different platforms in the arena is simply used as a method of avoiding attacks, no mazelike structure. It has more "passively attacking" moves like a rain of meteors or summoning adds that run concurrently with the basic melee attacks. Plus, Soulstice's mechanics of color-coded auras mean that having less downtime in the boss fight inherently raises the difficulty. Plus the "break a gem on its body" part is a mechanic Soulstice does through the entire game, not a new mechanic for one boss specifically.
Both the Savior and Harbinger are, theoretically, a very similar fight concept and even their relative attack telegraphing is fairly similar but Harbinger just remembers that it's an action game.
Correction on FFVII:
Supernova wasn't in the original Japanese version at all, instead being one of the many additions to the NA release that were then added to the FFVII International re-release in Japan, and they didn't change anything about the animation.
omg, I would love to have raid training modes in MMOs. GW2 needs this especially (because of the very gatekeepy community lol). Getting mechanics training before grouping up would save so much time.
5:21 Mimics in dark souls have a pretty long stand-up animation after you wake them up, so you can get some good hits in, but they have higher defense during it so you have to do a lot of damage to kill them before they can move
Brave Fencer Musashi suffers a lot from these bad slow boss fights. Almost all of the bosses there are "wait phase > boss exposes weakpoint to be attacked > repeat". I think only a few of them lets you do the actions to show their weak spot to essentially "skip" the wait phase.
19:32
*Sees Dawntrail's EX3... sees flashbacks*
By the Twelve, I swear I've died to every possible mechanic at least once in this fight lmao
/slump
I've been fortunate to not have to ever PF that fight so progging was pretty smooth for me.
no mention of the dmc2 helicopter? it's the crown jewel of bad slow boss fights
15:43 HEEEEEY WHAAAAAT'S UUUUUUUP - IT'S MEEEEEEEEE -
one thing I will say about Sephiroth's minute long attack is that it gives you time to breathe. With how fast Sephiroth is and how fast your party is when Hasted, the fight is very stressful with a lot of fast movements. So the minute-long attack forces you to take a breath and gives you time to think about your next moves. Not sure if it's intentional, but it definitely helped me pull through and eke out a win
Anecdote from a friend about Sephiroth's Supernova. One of the first times he fought Sephi, he used Knights of the Round and two Mimics, and then Sephi used it, resulting in such a long stretch of cutscene that my friend went to the kitchen, made a sandwich, came back and finished eating it before he had to pick the controller back up.
Have a feeling this is basically the same topic as salt time, which was covered by GMTK before. Basically the more time a player can recover from their failure the less fun the game is. Usually a slow boss isn't slow, it's only slow because the player is forced to see things they already saw for a lot of times, and it's hard to even reach new stuffs. And usually the solution would be to reach new things quicker, for example providing checkpoints and practice modes, and generally just cut down the repitition and let the player decide how many times they want to repeat.
09:03 A good example are the killing blows in Sekiro. There each boss has multiple health bars, and to transition from one health bar to the next you need to deliver a special killing blow, with the final blow to end a boss always being a special kill animation. It looks great and when you see that red dot indicating the boss is ready to be finished, it always felt great. ... well except for the Guardian Ape. If you know you know.
amazing video idea, I always thought this was a problem but never saw someone talking about it
In my personal opinion, the Hinox issue is the closest to not being an issue, sufficiently out-skilling or out-classing a boss should lead to a trivial encounter if that is how your game is built. My biggest issue with slow bosses usually come about from when you out-class a boss, but the game artificially extends the boss fight through methods like invulnerability phases. (Admittedly this come from the view of games like looter shooters and RPGs, where character progression involves getting incrementally stronger and bosses are shouldn't have a static difficulty irrespective of the character's progression.)
"(Margit) might seem slow, but the moments between attacks are filled with so much decision making and tensions"
Me, standing well outside his range, waiting for him to finish his fourth consecutive combo-string: Yeah, ahuh, definitely.
Trombone Eggman in Sonic 2 is a horrible slow boss.
Thank you for making a point about invincibility phases in bosses. I have never been a fan of these they just feel like a waste of my time. Especially when it's unclear why they're invincible (bonus points if they could theoretically just continue doing the invincible thing and you're sitting there wondering why they don't just do that infinitely until you die).
Unless it's a mechanic that rewards you for breaking their invincibility (like stunning them and giving you a chance to deal a bunch of damage), I usually just find invincibility phases frustrating and boring.
i think they're fine so long as they're not too frequent or too long, they can still be engaging by forcing you to deal with it.
@@Ghorda9 My issue comes more with ones that are just invincible for whatever reason. Like it's just x amount of time you can't hurt them and they're dealing damage. No mechanic behind it it's just invincible for the sake of it
For a good “slow boss,” I would suggest Pikmin 2’s water wraith as an interesting way to handle the “vulnerable/invulnerable state” issue: if the invincible state isn’t framed as a fight but instead as a hazard, it can make the boss itself a lot more interesting, even if in reality all it does is wander around. Even Pikmin 3 did this with the final boss sequence.
FF15's Adamantoise "super boss" was probably one of the longest, and slowest fights ever. It took WAY too long to complete and I had to take pause breaks to not cause damage to my hands from mashing attack.
I did that boss specifically to see the cool Titan summon and I didn't even get it or any other summon. I looked it up afterwards and its only a trigger if your party is down. Fishing for rare encounters and being upset when you don't get them is probably a bad way to approach a game but man, Adamantoise was really 20-40 mins (I forget exactly how long it took me) of just nothing
@@faceless1434 100%. I didn't even get to see Titan. So that was the trigger? I had Ramuh trigger a LOT during that fight. I remember it taking 40-50 minutes for very little interaction. Definitely could have been planned WAY better of a boss.
the very first boss you showed reminds me of furnace golems of elden ring and oh boi! their range, damage, stomping speed and even defence is crazy. They may look slow but capable of wiping you out in an instant.
This is why everyone praises Metroid Dread's bosses. There's a constant, steady flow of decisions to make, with the game's good controls making sure whether you succeed is never random, and the long attack animations are rewards for good parries where you get to wail on them. Even in bosses with invulnerable states, you're almost always in control of how quickly they become vulnerable again, keeping it engaging
The worst part about scornet maestro is that his attack only follow the capitan you're controlling while he prepares to attack. so you can throw a capitan and control it, wait until he starts attacking and use the others capitans to attack the boss from the back while he stands there doing nothing
The interesting thing I learned about Sephiroth's signature Super Nova attack that I learned while trying to complete FF7 at the lowest level I possibly could was that it is a gravity based attack, so it can't even kill you. I guess it is designed to make players feel like they barely survived, but in reality it is just a glorified set up move.
one of my biggest pet peeves is when something is gigantic in fiction and to portray it's strength the thing moves at a glacial pace. One of my only complaints with Bayonetta 3 personally is the Gamorrah kaiju fight is the world's slowest game of rock paper scissors. It's supposed to portray the weight properly, but it makes the thing feel floaty and like there's no strength at all behind the attacks.
The biggest issue here is that we have no real-world equivalent. We have nothing the size of a building that is capable of moving, so people generally have to guess using stuff like air resistance. The only problem is that people do resistance training all the time, and it makes them stronger and faster and able to largely ignore the resistance. Facing heavy air resistance all the time means constantly doing that. Not to mention the largest animals we have on Earth are Elephants and Giraffes, and elephants can charge while giraffes can swing their necks crazy quickly.
My point is if something is gigantic you can make it move at a normal pace. You can even make it fast cause it's gonna have bigger muscles capable of doing more. Just make it hit like a plane crash and it'll still feel strong.
Phase 1 of Meta Ridley is such a pain
heres the thing about margit though; unlike mohg, whose attacks are slow all the way through, margit has long wind-ups for attacks typically come out way too quick for most people to react. it results in a fight where you're pretty much forced to learn by trial and error rather than intuition in a series where you're usually able to dodge attacks the first time you see them
I remember my days, when I fought Tonberry King, on FF8. It was an easy, but funny fight.
I think one think that could help mitigate the blitzing through the Hinox's health bar during its slow get up animation would be to have an animation where the hinox slaps both hands on the ground as it gets up. Like when a person pushes down on the bed to push themselves up into a sitting position? But as an attack that causes a shockwave around it. Newbies won't be as likely get hit by the attack, as they'll likely keep their distance to assess the situation, and veterans can still capitalize on blitzing through the health bar, but it isn't as free as before, as they'll have to shield parry the shockwave and be punished if they fail.
the war flashbacks to progging p7s... that fight was so disgustingly backloaded even reclears were miserable 😭 and I do raiding in party finder with randoms (and usually 2-3 other friends with me, at least) not a static group. playing with randoms in raids in ffxiv can make the backloaded fights feel so so much worse because you don't even have the consistency of static members learning alongside you, you're just rolling the dice every time you put the party up hoping you dont get someone lying about their prog or someone who doesn't know how to actually play their class...
One pet peeve of mine (and it may be just me) is when bosses force long periods of avoidance. Technically they aren't invulnerable, but if there's no viable way to apply damage during this attack cycle, they may as well be. And it feels cheap as hell when the boss can layer other attacks on top. If I'm forced to spend my time dealing with this one action, why isn't he spending the same time focusing on it?
Point of reference (because I've been replaying Elden Ring): Elden Stars. The beast fires one projectile that chases you for 20 seconds, spawning further homing projectiles. Meanwhile, beast can run off and do other arena-wide sword swipes that aren't tuned to interact with it. You have no choice but to sprint until the stars time out, but dodge-rolling any other attack slows you down enough to get hit by the stars.
this is fixed with Torrent that was allowed after the dlc release
Mom's Heart/It Lives from flash isaac.The fight was basically "kill these enemies/bosses and then you can get a few hits on me before I spawn more enemies/bosses and disappear again." the boss.Which was changed to something better in rebirth
A thing on FFXIV is that part of the issue of learning fight is in how FFXIV hard content will do a mechanic once, maybe twice, and discard it. So there's no practising mechanics that come later on earlier variants. You do the mechanic once and don't think about it again until the party wipes. Which makes an especially easy start especially annoying.
There's something else to be said about HP tanks of a boss. Even if they have some cool attacks, if it takes 20 minutes to beat the guy, it's not going to be pleasant. Especially if you end up losing and have to start over. A decent amount of JRPG bosses fall under this category where it takes a while to beat
PIKMIN! PEAKMIN MENTIONED!
But yes, Scornet Maestro was a lot more engaging in the original Pikmin 3. P3 Deluxe undercut it's orchestra by fumbling the pacing.
I don’t know if this channel takes UA-cam suggestions, but since Valentine’s Day is coming up, I’m curious to see a video on how games use love/attraction/romance mechanics differently
Loving that Papers Please intro music!
Mentioning Agdistis gave me flashbacks. At least Snake Prog in P8S was pretty early in the fight.
A boss can be thought of as a large and powerful enemy that is also the level itself. Designing a boss encounter works a lot like designing a level.
I've seen a lot of bosses that constantly change between too slow and too fast. The player spends a lot of time waiting for the boss to do its next move, and when it does attack, it moves unpredictably and there is no indication of when it will suddenly change direction, and the waiting can add up to a significant portion of the time spent on every attempt.
0:55 Sonic generations did stuff to me... "How about a change of pace?"- Eggman, Sonic Generations
Blood of Bahamut is filled with slow bosses. They have weak spots that are the only way to deal deal damage (just like shadow of the collosus) and to get materials.
If you need a certain material you will have to wait for the boss to perform the right attack on the right platform all the while not attacking it too much lest you kill it early.