Games by order of appearance 0:09 Persona 5 0:13 Lost Odyssey 0:18 Xenoblade Chronicles 0:22 Star Wars: Knights of The Old Republic 0:28 Zelda: Breath of The Wild 0:32 XCOM 2 0:34 MGSV 0:36 Puyo Puyo Tertris 0:41 Final Fantasy XII 0:44 Persona 4 0:48 I am Setsuna 0:50 Super Mario RPG 2:14 Legend of Heroes: Trails in The Sky 2:17 SMT3: Nocturne 2:22 Dragon Quest (Switch) 2:30 Final Fantasy 3:30 Dragon Quest XI 3:34 Pokemon Sword & Shield 3:46 Final Fantasy X 3:50 Monster Hunter World 3:56 Final Fantasy IX 4:05 Octopath traveler 4:14 Dark Souls II 4:29 Pokemon Gold & Silver 4:32 Team Fortress 2 4:41 Tales of Vesperia 5:29 Street Fighter 2 HD 5:32 Dragon Quest VIII 5:39 Minecraft 6:02 Earthbound 6:07 Overwatch 6:27 Persona 3 6:33 Skies of Arcadia 6:48 Super Smash Brothers Ultimate 6:50 Sonic Mania 6:53 Final Fantasy XIII 7:00 Final Fantasy VII Remake 7:26 Final Fantasy VII 9:28 Chrono Trigger 10:11 Dragon Quest III (Switch) 10:20 Final Fantasy VI 13:07 Bug Fables 14:55 Final Fantasy VIII 16:10 Kingdom Hearts 16:45 SMT: Digital Devil Saga 2 17:09 Steven Universe: Save The Light 17:14 Chrono Cross 17:28 Slay the Spire 17:35 Ring Fit Adventure 17:47 Darkest Dungeon 17:54 Left 4 Dead 2 18:11 Skullgirls 18:25 Lisa The Painful
There's this boss on Bravely Second called "Turtle Dove" with attacks that can cause Love, making one of your units fall in love for another unit of your party While in Love, your unit will always copy the move that the loved unit used (even if they don't have acess to it), so if you strategize around it, you can use this in your favor But, if another character falls in love for the same unit, these two units will stop repeting the loved's moves and actually start attacking each other out of jelousy
I'm glad you point out that making bosses immune to status effects makes status effects useless in the rest of the game. That's something that has bothered me for years.
Yeah, this being so common in RPGs back in the day has for a large part, programmed me to not even bother with status effects or debuffs. I had to deprogram myself from this way of thinking playing Persona 5 recently because I went through a lot of the game just ignoring skills that didn’t do direct damage
I kinda like the Etrian Odyssey series because of this. All enemies are affected by statuses and in fact the game expects you to use it on bosses to stop certain attacks and survive some phases (e.g. bind the head of the boss, to stop eye beams). Late game I might have to even have to incapacitate random encounters to not return to town often.
@@malcovich_games i played Persona Q2 and really liked how useful status effects were in that game. And i like the idea of certian enemies being affected by certian statuses in special ways
@@darienb1127 i really recommend you the Etrian Odyssey saga if you liked persona Q1 or 2, as most of the mechanis were taken from there and just mixed some persona elements, games are really fun and challenging where status effects matter a lot
Bad design: Bosses/High Level Enemies that are just completely immune to status effects. What's the point in having characters that can inflict negative status effects if they can't inflict them when it matters most?
Yup. One of the biggest problems with negative status effects in a lot of games (especially JRPGs) the mob fights are too weak to need them, and all bosses are immune to them. Rendering them totally pointless.
There's definitely a balance to be struck, though. I've played an RPG that decided no bosses ever should be immune to statuses... The final boss literally could not fight back because I was able to pile too much onto them. Though, I've also had fun with a game not making bosses immune to DoT status effects... I was so underleveled that the only way I was able to kill a particular boss in a Tales of game was hitting it with a DoT and kiting it. Took me forever, but I did it! (And then promptly realized the highest NG+ difficulty really wasn't intended to be played from level 1).
That's why I love the SMT games (and Xenoblade to a lesser extent), is because it prompts you to use your entire toolbox to take down a boss including status effects.
I never understood that, like, the minor enemies are just that, minor enemies, even if they have special weaknesses against certain attacks is a logical waste using MP against them when we now a boss is coming, then at the boss fight the only use we have for our MP is healing, which is helpful but isn't fun, and is understandable that the designer wants the boss to feel way to powerful but the only thing it does is oversimplify the combat and making the whole battle way more tedious.
An idea I personally enjoy is that usually bosses are immune to some status effects, but some of those immunities can be bypassed if you bring a character that is specialized in them. Like an alchemist. In general tho I agree, it's just frustrating that all statuses have no effects
In case anyone wants to quickly refer back to a specific type of status effect: 4:16 Damage Over Time 4:40 Stat Buffs and Debuffs 5:07 Turn and Action Economy 5:48 Debilitators 6:12 Loss of Control 6:35 Shields 6:52 Setups 7:14 Transformations 7:40 KOs and Insta-Kills
Status effects for me... "Not gonna bother using them on trash enemies, since I can kill them so quickly." "Oh, this boss is IMMUNE to status effects? Why do these things exist again?"
well, think of it in this way. If you debuff some mooks that can give you a problem, with a sleep or something, you'll have less enemies to have to deal with. But the game should have a way to make status more useful or have attacks that have status effects.
@@TheMemoryOfWrenAndMe "may work on boss somehow." Sometimes that is the case, true. I hate it how SO many games however don't make it clear if they just resisted it, or if they are just straight up immune.
@@starduststriker8792 true. But if they do have a bunch of HP and you don't have much power to deal with them. Giving them status aliments can deal with them while you take care of the rest.
And if that character can also avoid any attack at the cost of being unable of attack makes it way better and more fun to use, revolving the battle around that character, helping him to have enough MP in case of loosing the taunt, or being unable of avoid more attacks, I love that strategy and more when my main attackers are defeated making it more tense.
I would call that redirection because Taunt is different in many games. In Pokemon it prevents non-attack moves, in Persona it enrages, in SMT Nocturne it reduces defense a lot but boosts enemy attack...
I just love how Matador’s immense speed in Nocturne is just a genius tool to force the player to learn how if you don’t use buffs or debuffs you aren’t going to beat the game
have you seen the new youtube series a youtuber is doing? he is doing a challenge run of SMT 3 where he doesnt use buffs or debuffs and it looks like HELL. its so funny
It's kind of a shame that Nocturne is so unbalanced in that regard. If you ignore buffs and debuffs the game is stupidly hard, but if you know how to abuse them a lot of the game becomes kind of a joke. As nice as it is to see a game that encourages and rewards you for make use of buffs and debuffs, I'm glad they nerfed them in future games.
I really loved that game because of how useful status effect are, it made boss battle a lot more interesting and it made random battle somewhat hard cause you didn't want to waste time to use status there (especially since mana is a bit scarce in the early to mid game) but that meant the random encounters were actually somewhat challenging because of that so I ended up always thinking about elemental resistance and all even for trash mobs. Honestly this game ended up making me dislike the combat in final fantasy games because of how shallow it is since status are usually not worth using unless you know exactly when they are worth using, but you have no real way of knowing usually so you don't bother.
I like when there’s a way to get rid of effects. Monster Hunter World does this, where to get rid of fire/blast, you roll, theres energy drinks to get rid of sleep, antidotes and various antidote-related items for poison, doing something with the joystick for stun, nullberries for dragon/effluvium/water/ice/thunder, and... nothing for Paralysis. I like how it’s something different for most effects, so that you can get rid of them easily but you’ve gotta remember what does it. Wish some of the things you need a nullberry for were diversified a bit, but ahh well...
I understand you. Though, I personally like the other side. I like when status effects primarily aren't cured with items, but my DOING something. As you mention Roll for Fire. I like in games where, Sleep can be broken by being hit, Burn if touched will spread to anyone else, Paralyses can be button mashed out of, or whatever. Things where it's not "Use this item and be prepared" but where it's "Briefly change your strategy to remedy this quickly, before things get worse"
@@KingTaltia In MHW Sleep and Paralysis can be broken by being hit by your allies or even your NPC cat. Only the blights can't be removed via action, and yet you can counter them by planning for them and building a small amount of resist. Or throwing on a mantle. Except fireblight as previously mentioned you can roll. But hell, Thunderblight doesn't do anything on it's own, it just makes you more susceptible to stun and paralysis. So don't get hit!
I also like that the design of MHW makes you plan around status effects. The game really makes you plan each Hunt so you can choose the best buffs & resistances to give yourself and the best debuffs and ailments to apply to the enemy. And once you've fought the monster its info gets updated so you can check in-game which ones are best to use and which you should avoid.
My recommendation for immobility effects like stun or paralyzed, is to make them ramp up instead of being instantly activated. Such as needing to hit a foe three times to build up three stacks of stun, the first two stacks function as a "speed down" effect, and only turns into temporary immobility at three stacks. Another benefit of this if a foe is immune to stun, three stacks can turn into a strong speed down effect instead. Stacking poison also lets you adjust how many turns you put into your poison damage, and makes poison focused characters able to specialize in doing something across multiple turns.
Stacking is a really good way to do certain starus effects. Especially when getting enough stacks transforms the status into something deadly. Another idea I like to have diminishing returns. Basically, the more you use status effects on an enemy or boss, the weaker it becomes.
You can also make status effects too powerful, South Park the Stick of Truth comes to my mind, where all effects, specially bleeding are way too effective. I played as a thief and I could just use a bouncing ball (that hits multiple enemies) with a perk that inflicted bleeding, and the ball would inflict anywhere from 2 to 5 stacks of bleeding on every enemy, now they lost a ton of health each turn and becausa I was a thief some of my abilities got bonus damage because the enemies were bleeding. It made the game too easy, although it was satisfying pulling out that strategy.
It was definitely overpoweringly fun to use. :) When you play as a jew and unlock Plagues of Egypt, you can easily inflict burn + 3x bleed on all enemies from a single cast. It's ridiculous, lol
Same thing happened to me! I was surprised to how OP it was and found it by accident, I really liked it as I found it myself and even though it made the game too easy, i will always remember it. (I dont play that many turn RPGs so having found a "OP" Build was rewarding for me XD)
@@2011supergamer, I'd say the first point is true in specific cases. The second point runs into problems where there is no logical reason to use a status effect if it doesn't work on bosses and mob fights are easier than existing
I always like the Earthbound status effects because they were very real takes on what status effects would be in a modern setting. Nausea is one of my favorites, especially its effect in Mother 3, because you either take damage each turn from vomiting, or you feel too queasy to stomach any health restoring food, so you can't heal. It's a very tangible effect of an innocuous thing we experience in real life applied to the mechanics of a game.
I like that Burn and Paralysis in Pokemon have a secondary effect of cutting attack and speed in half respectively. Also, the badly poisoned status is really nice for especially tanky Pokemon
My first thought when it comes to status effects has to be the Etrian Odyssey series, the games that taught me to appreciate them when so many other JRPGs make them useless. While its list of status effects is pretty standard, it makes them extremely useful. The games are difficult - random encounters are a constant danger, rather than a mild annoyance - so anything that lets you mitigate this helps a lot. Particularly notable is poison, which deals a good amount of damage - often proving far more effective than other attacks against normal enemies, and still dealing a healthy amount of damage to bosses. And, yes, statuses work on bosses. While bosses do tend to have more resistances and immunities than normal enemies, they're still valid targets for statuses. If anything, the game does lean towards status effects being a bit too powerful, but it works in the context of the games' difficulty. Getting your party wiped out due to being hit with status effects sucks (and in fact enemies with poison attacks are many a player's first game over), but it's not out of character for these games, so it feels less jarring. And when they're used to make things a bit too easy for the player, it's satisfying, because you know how difficult things can be - so anything that trivializes a fight makes you feel awesome rather than bored.
Yup, when I think status effects I think of Etrian Odyssey first and foremost for that reason. The game is explicitly designed around the concept that the odds are stacked against you and status effects are how you equalize it to an extent.
Poison in EO can destroy with the right builds, at least Hexer's poison in EOU and EOU2 I struggled so much with one of the bosses in EOU2 then I swapped one of my party members with a Hexer and capped poison since the boss was weak to it and it destroyed them even past that boss and against enemies not weak to poison I stuck with the Hexer for the rest of the game
When it comes to games I've played with status effects, Etrian Odyssey is one of my favorites. Most bosses have at least one weakness to a status, and killing enemies while they have a certain status can net you a rare drop at times.
Status effects are also just incredibly useful all throughout the game. Given that random enemies can be almost as dangerous as bosses at times, being able to disable them to limit their ability to kill you makes a huge difference. I also like that many classes have unique synergies with the various status effects, so even when you're just looking to maximize DPS it's worth trying to apply them. I don't expect every RPG to make random encounters as difficult as EO to justify status effects, but I do wish more of them would be more creative with how they implement their status effects.
The importance and genius of the Bind system cannot be overstated. It's basically a three-fold way to seal skills (head for magic and most support skills, arms for physical skills) and your agility/evasion (legs and some skills in later installments), and being that both the party and the enemies alike are bound to these rules, you can live and die by bind setups. Long live Dark Hunters, Hexers and Arcanists.
On top of that, the bind system is less binary than most "lose control" status effects. Because they only shut down certain types of attacks, you have to guess or intuit which bind is most worth your time. You may have certain options that could inflict all three binds at once but you'll also have to plan for a contingency when the bind you want doesn't land. Having some binds be effectively powerless on certain enemies means that, while the enemy doesn't become a complete sitting duck, you can still have an avenue to exploit a bound-target bonus.
I think it’s worth pointing out that, as with so many things in the rpg genre, these general tropes of status effects, what they do, and often their aesthetics can be paralleled directly back to Dungeons and Dragons.
Yeah it's there to add more context to what is happening. A poisoned tipped arrow's purpose is to slowly kill a target, hence in tabletop RPGs it slowly reduces your health. This then translated to video games.
@@doombybbr I feel that works really well for D&D. It's a game where you don't have to kill everything to progress most of the time. If the party dosen't want to get in a major fight for some reason (Like taking someone alive for information), It might be better to cast something like Hypnotic Pattern. Plus, you can have NPCs all act differently when they see their ally get turned into a sheep or something.
Earthbound had a couple of unique takes on status effects: -Ness could get homesick, which would randomly waste turns until you called your mom. -In addition to messing with your controls, the Mushroom would sometimes cause your targeting to change, but never in a way that made it predictable. It was also quite possibly the only status effect in any game that you'd be paid for getting treated. -Characters could become Possessed: this entailed having an invisible enemy that would sometimes stun the possessed character and take pot-shots at their teammates for minimal damage. WoW had the more-or-less-mandatory-to-bring-up Corrupted Blood, which as a result of a coding oversight created a virtual version of the current global crisis. Pokemon has several interesting status effects that, while useless in the main campaign due to how easy it is, can all simultaneously counter certain strategies and provide opportunities for the player that can use them effectively. Of particular note are Encore (force a player to re-use the last move that they used for several turns), Rest (put your own pokemon to sleep to heal all damage - it also removes any other status they might have), Toxic (poison that effectively forces players to eventually switch or die from the accumulating damage), Substitute (take 25% damage to ensure that the next attack does nothing), and all kinds of arena-wide effects that are both specific and general in how they change the flow of combat. In general, any game with a unique set of mechanics is going to present a similarly unique opportunity to mess with the effects via status effects.
Earthbound Beginnings also had some interesting ones. Ninten has asthma, so if car-type enemies use exhaust attacks you have to use an inhaler or he's stunned due to coughing. (However because those enemies are rarely encountered most players skip bringing the inhaler so they can use the valuable bag space for other stuff). You could also catch a cold which works exactly like poison in pokemon, except you get it from talking with NPCs instead of enemies.
On my file, the Mushroom effect once made Jeff use the Hungry HP-Sucker on himself. He absorbed all of his own HP. Also, if you confuse the Diamond Dog, it can bite and diamondize itself, ending the battle. It makes no sense, but it’s fucking hilarious.
Speaking of Pokemon status effects, the Mystery Dungeon games have a different take on things. The main games have major status effects where you can only have one afflicted at a time, but PMD has many "minor" effects that still trigger abilities like Guts (boosted attack if statused). Also due to the grid-based system in PMD, many moves have new AOE uses and could disable a crowd of say, 12 opponents at once in the same room.
One thing you forgot to mention on Pokémon status effects. Some of them don’t go away after the battle ends. In the Pokémon games before Black & White, if a Pokémon was poisoned outside of battle it would take poison damage for every few steps you take until you heal it or the afflicted runs out of HP.
i love toxic against the AI in pokemon main campaigns since they dont get rid of the multiplier because they dont switch out its satisfying as fuuuck against any difficult battles, (which there are some that i had issues with like cynthia in D/P, blue in hgss on my first run, a few others)
My favorite story about status effects is the Chac enemy from FFX2. These super-tanky, basilisk-like monsters can't be run from and they have a 255% chance to inflict Petrify on two of three party members every turn in combat. So what happens when you walk into into a fight with 100% immunity to Petrify? 255% - 100% = 155% chance to petrify a target immune to petrify. That's just how math works.
It's really rare for me to care about Stat effects. If the game doesn't go out of its way to show how they're useful and well integrated to the systems. SMT and DQ are basically the two ones that I see myself constantly thinking about it.
@@jabariwiththebois5765 I think OP means it in a good way. Because personally, in those games. Buffs and Debuffs can make or break a boss fight. *ESPECIALLY* In SMT games.
There's one status effect that really got me in Metroid Prime 2. An enemy in the last main area can hack Samus' suit, causing frame drops and static until you reboot her suit with an arbitrary button combination. You Ctrl-Alt-Del a freaking power suit.
Oh my god I know this "Boss is immune to nearly all status effects" trope all too well. It makes the bossfight so much less fun, I always love to experiment with status effect but am seldom rewarded for it.
@@Dinoman972 What I hate is when bosses are immune to some magic spell but not to the like.. secondary effect but you can't get secondary effect since the main spell gets absorbed or whatever For example.. a boss immune to lightning yet can be paralyzed via other methods.. but those other methods would be you grinding to a certain level, to a point of you being overleveled anyways and can just brute force the boss anyways
For as many flaws FFXIII has, it was the game that made me realize status effects exist and aren't useless. The effect is so noticeable that it might as well be bad design (like you're actually forced to use deprotect to kill armored turtles or whatever, so it isn't much of a decision) but up until playing that game, I just brute forced/grinded through every turn based game ever.
To be fair, a lot of Final Fantasy games (among others) suffer from status effects being largely useless due to widespread resistances/immunities meaning the fights where they would be worth the opportunity cost, they don't work in, and the fights they do work in, they take longer (and cost more resources) than just applying brute force...
play epic battle fantasy 4/5 if you want to see a game that heavily encourages you to use status ailments and buffs it makes things far more interesting and they are extremely useful you will find up using status ailments on regular enemies instead of just the bosses because fights are lenghty (up to 4 waves of enemies in a encounter)
@@juanrodriguez9971 if you're a mechanics gamer, by all means do. The systems in place are really good. If you care about exploration, lore, story, characters, etc just run away as far as you can and don't look back
@@killermelga what are some of the good mechanics in ff13 trilogy, i played all 3 and they didn't seem quite concrete. Though it has been a while so maybe my memory is fuzzy.
One of my favorite boss fights ever is in Digital Devil Saga. In Digital Devil Saga, you can have your characters learn moves that reflect specific elements. Because DDS uses the press-turn system, reflecting attacks not only sends the damage back at the opponent, but it also immediately ends their turn and switches to the opposing sides turn. Now this one boss used a bunch of elemental magic. However I noticed that they weren't immune to any elements, and they only used the last element I attacked them with. So I could attack them then set up the elemental reflect. They would get hit with their own attack, and it would be my turn again. Sure it wasn't the hardest fight once you figure out that exploit, but it felt amazing once you realized it.
Bonus points go to the fact that the Isis trio also use the elemental combos (like Vayaviya), which not only make the fight more dynamic, but it also makes it easier to strip turns if one doesn't have the Repel skill.
I love how miitopia's status effects are pretty mundane things that have not so mundane effects. And the way they appear is different depending on ur personality. when the "avenge" attack happens, a party member faints and the ones with high enough relationship levels attack the enemy who caused it, stubborn, cool, and energetic miis become angry, allowing them to attack twice but have no control. Whereas Kind, Airheaded, and Cautious Miis start crying, giving them a chance to miss. The last personality type, laid-back, has no status condition from this. I love how they so creativity mix RPG and Life Sim elements
FFX's post-game is a master class on how to take status effects, gear crafting and the often forsaken item usage and build puzzle games around their use. Figuring out how to beat all the super bosses in the monster arena, and then the mega bosses after that, is very satisfying if you don't use a guide. Or only using a guide if you can't figure out how to beat the bosses at first. Unfortunately, the sphere grid holds players back. It isn't nearly as bad as it sounds to have to max out your grids, but only if you figure out one of the ways to cheese levels. (or look them up) But it still adds a ton of pointless grinding hours to the game.
It's a bummer that just about every single one of them is 100% immune to every negative status (except Doom, instead having an obscenely, impractically high Doom Counter for that to take effect). I guess it's because a lot of FFX's status ailments are actually really powerful if they are allowed to go through, but it does invalidate a lot of abilities. Likewise, "Ribbon" makes the existence of a lot of status ailments on boss attacks pointless as well, so a lot of fights just turn into spamming Quick Hit, mixed with a fairly rigid buff/heal rotation. At least you do get a lot of mileage out of buffs. Haste, Protect, Shell, Reflect, etc are all crucial in a lot of cases or highly valuable otherwise, so at least that is praiseworthy.
A fun thing about FFX's design is that EVERY CHARACTER is situational. So it's not just that status effects are situational, but that every spell and attack has their place. For example, don't try to swing at bats with Auron. Also one of my favorite things to do was giving Rikku a weapon with a lot of on-hit effects. Just giving her blindness and mute on hit, with the steal+attack ability, makes her amazingly useful. Her high speed gives her a lot of turns so she's also an amazing support character for using items.
Well there are some cases like the Malboro Menance where even it's ailments bypasses Proof and Ribbon mods. But that is why you enter with Auron armed with Masamune so you can swap into Yuna for a summon.
@@laggalot1012Getting hit with Armor Break can really wreck your day if you forget about it, since it has no visual indicator. And there's no way to block it.
Monster hunter does it best. Because you know what monster you’re hunting you are encouraged to make the right gear with the right status effects. For example, if you’re going against something hats blubbery, bleed is usually effective. Hunt down the monsters that do bleed first and you can use that effect on the next ones weak to it. Same with stun, sleep, poison, etc. all kinds of status balancing and adaptation.
i love the improvements to technical damage in p5r. It's very useful on mid-bosses without weaknesses. But then there's my entire party getting hit by brainjack and i get to watch them massacre each other. Fun times.
I enjoy SMT'S status effect system, because the point of the system is to abuse it and cheese through weaker enemies, it works because the enemies and player have full access to all abilities putting them on equal footing.
@@CitBox I hate the beginning of SMTIV when you're fighting the hedgehogs and they use a gun attack crit, and get a smirk and wipe your whole party. That happened like 5 times before I could get enough demons to progress
My favorite standard status effect system is used in the Etrian Odyssey franchise. Random encounters are dangerous and rarely will a damage class be able to one-shot the strongest enemy in a fight. But with a debilitating condition these enemies are as good as dead (or at least way less dangerous) so classes focussing on status effects are valuable during exploration. While buffs and debuffs always work - although they have several mechanics surrounding them - other conditions are harder to inflict especially on bosses and the walking mid-bosses you spend much of your time avoiding. There is also a hidden system that makes it much harder for the same condition to be inflicted again after it was inflicted once - but this slowly reverts over the course of several turns (although it doesn't quite reach the initial value). So while they can be powerful status classes aren't (usually) super broken and they still need to be diverse instead of just focussing on a single condition. So status classes can be valuable in boss fights as well. 2 for 2 for an archetype that is sadly more often than not useless in many RPGs. The games also have the flavorful bind system where you can inflict (or by inflicted by) head bind, arm bind or leg bind which prevent the usage of skills that use the bound body part as well as lower one of your stats (and leg bind also disables evasion). A boss giving you trouble with its tail swipes that hit the entire party? Break its legs and you'll be safe from those attacks for a few turns.
status effects in Etrian are broken with the classes that goes with it. once they land its game over for them and buffs can make you survive attacks that would wipe your party.
FFX's Reflect spell was one of my favorites. It reflects *all* spells onto the opponent party, but reflected spells can only reflect once. You can take advantage of this by: • Casting Reflect on yourself to protect yourself from enemy spells, at the cost of being unable to cast beneficial spells on yourself. • Cast Reflect on your enemy to turn their self-buffs into party buffs, at the cost of being unable to target them with hostile magic. • Cast Reflect on yourself so you can target yourself with hostile magic, reflecting it onto the enemy and piercing their own Reflect spells. It creates a whole host of interesting tactics, and post-game enemies like the Arena bosses all revolve around it in some way or another. In the sequel game, FFX-2, there's an extra layer of strategy added onto the spell. Black Magic can be cast on a single target at full damage, or the full enemy party at reduced damage. *But* if your entire party has Reflect up, you can cast Black Magic on your entire party, reflecting 3 different spells onto the enemy for total damage that exceeds a single full-strength spell. Reflect is one of my favorite effects for this very reason!
"Zombie" was great for a similar reason, since you can use it to your benefit (immunity to death spells). You can get around the "reversed healing magic" issue by giving a zombified character on element absorption. Hitting them with black magic heals in spite of zombie.
These uses of Reflect predate FF10 by several years, including bouncing each hit of an AOE targeting the party at a single enemy. Notably the beginner house in FF6 included a character that would describe the single bounce limitation as a strategy for fighting an enemy with Reflect status.
it isnt an idea unique to 10 but 10 uses it really well. a particular note is that the magus sisters in 4 use targeting themself with magic to reflect it onto your party as part of their signature move delta attack, with the eldest casting reflect on the other two leading into a reflected bio or elemental spell to hit your entire party. which, come to think of it, theyre in 10 too so it works out.
I remember loving the burn effect in Pokémon gen 2 and 3. I just loved it for some reason. It was years later that I learned the burn reduced attack. I wish I knew that earlier, but that would explain a lot.
Random notes from a hobbyist RPG developer here: Status effects that only boost a stat, or debuff an enemy stat, and take a full turn to use, can be really boring if not handled with extreme caution. If there are several of these in your party's skillset, then you might start to see a very significant amount of turns being spent just on those buffs/debuffs at the start of every single big enemy/boss battle, and setting them all up and maintaining them starts to feel like a chore. As an alternative, you could mix those effects/attacks in with other skills (as described in this video), or give them unique activation conditions that don't require excessive turn usage. A passive that increases crit rate when dodging, a skill that causes a character to take hits for others and increases defense for each hit tanked, an attack skill that boosts the user's attack power and does more damage at low HP... you get the idea. Etrian Odyssey has a really good handle on status skills and status effects. Every character class has a moveset of skills which almost all have multiple purposes from status effects to possible additional hits, and some activation conditions rely on other characters' skills for some incredible synergy. Furthermore, every enemy has their weaknesses and resistances to specific status effects clearly listed, so you can plan ahead to take out tough foes and even bosses by being prepared and exploiting those weaknesses.
I was watching someone play through Paper Mario 64, and I realized that while the Charge skills are situationally useful, overall they're actually pretty bad.
Etrian Odyssey has limited slots for buffs and debuffs, so they're allowed to be REALLY powerful, and you get to make difficult decisions-like whether it's worth it to chase a dreamy combo or go for immediate survivability. Also, the way enemies gradually gain more resistance to status as they're cast makes them feel very balanced... even when you're totally disabling a boss, you have to invest into the risk/reward of it.
+1 for Repping Etrian Odyssey. Cumulative Resistance is probably the best way to handle Bosses being able to be hit by some of the super powerful conditions . It doesn't invalidate the entire fight, it just buys you some time to DPS more and stuff
Great advice! What I've found both playing and designing abilities is that these kinds of things are only very fun when the encounters really push players to have to try different things. Some of the most fun I've had in tabletop is playing tank or support archetypes where I was constantly figuring out what I had to do. Action economy can be really useful for this. If you use something like the D&D move-minor-standard system, then having buffs/debuffs be part of the minor or replace a move can promote a lot of tactical thinking. It's all about making sure there are interesting choices (what are you giving up by spending that turn using Haste?)
exponential damage scaling helps a lot with that. as in buffing strength to 110% increases your attack damage to 121% (or something like that). that makes buffs decent when you have one, very good when you have 2 and then go insane after 4 or more. and it works for debuffs too. also dialing the sheer power of status effects down makes them better imo because then you can actually let the player use them without breaking the game.
Skyrim: Poison is weak, complicated, tedious, and half of everything is immune to it Also Skyrim: Wearing this armor inflicts a ton of constant unavoidable AoE damage to everything nearby
@@Nukestarmaster The poison is just a flat amount. Turn the difficulty down and poison insta kills everything. I remember my first time playing legendary where the frostbite brood spider in the first dungeon one shots you with it's poison.
Insta-death is always a mixed bag in SMT. from rather cool uses making you carefuly conisder which demon to bring on the MC for a boss fight or certain area.... to the utter flipside where I got sick of cheesing it in PQ. Party Wide + death boost skills = every fight over in 1-2 actions... (And then flip your opinion again when your in the final dungeon with the protag who doesn't have insta-death immunity,.
Etrian Odyssey incorporates some of the best uses for status effects I've ever experienced. Nearly every boss and normal enemy has certain status resistances and weakness. Being weak to a status increases the odds of it successfully being inflicted, and the effects are so potent the player really feels the benefits when they land. Whether that's binding a monster's arms just before they unleash a devastating, party-wide attack, or silencing a foe before they can heal their allies. Where in past games, inflicting status effects is brushed off as unreliable, in Etrian Odyssey, it is a possibility to consider every turn. Certain classes specialize in inflicting statues, and most others have at least one or two they can use as a backup/bonus effect if a more straightforward approach isn't viable.
I'm surprised that there was no mention of Bravely Default. Their whole premise is based around changing turn orders and using your special attacks to change up stats on the battlefield. They event have enemies that take away brave charges from characters, thus changing how you use your status effects.
Bravely Default's BP system is defenitely a fantastic example! Though it's also a good case study of how NOT to handle some of the more typical status effects (Bosses being immune to most statuses, Poison being useless outside BP Batteries, etc)
neversparky I remember you could pull it off with the status weakening from the rod debuff special, but yeah, you can only make a boss vulnerable to one status.
besides the BP system, it also created a whole bunch of "new" status effects that were definitely fun and useful at best, and borderline broke the game at worst. My personal favorite: the Ninja job had an ability which always goes first and forces all single-target actions to affect the designated party member for the turn. And it even works against counterattacks for some reason. Just have a party member with dual shields and immunity to all ailments use that as their only ability every turn and it literally blanks over half the boss/jobmaster fights also, there was more than one "status" you could hit bosses with. All the debuffs you could inflict with the salve-maker's concoctions for one. Also, I had a Ringabel build (well Ringable and Agnes) which took advantage of the Time Mage passive ability to just take away a BP from every combatant every other turn, so that some enemies just didn't even get to act at all the whole battle. And literally nothing, not even the final boss, was immune to that
I once make a boss suffer from a status aliment with special attacks. It was the salve master, and that was the only way i found to beat him... And then later i knew about the dispell spell.
Another things I would like to add are: 1. The differences between similar effects, for example, in Pokemon both poison and burn makes the same effect of damage over time, but burn from what I know also debuffs the opponent's attack, and that against a more elaborated AI can be an important decision. 2. The presentation, this is more oriented to the UI so is understandable that you didn't talk about it, but if the status effect isn't clear with what it does or when is happening the player would be annoyed with that weird symbol which doesn't have an explanation in-game and would force the player to research outside of the game and would also make the player forget about it and don't do anything about it, frustrating the player's experience with the game. PD: Thanks for add something about Lisa the Painful at the end, I love it
That's a good thing to point out! Having status effects that have similar effects but differ in some meaningful way adds good strategic depth. The example I'd go to is Darkest Dungeon, where Bleed and Blight (poison) are both Damage over Time effects, but apply that damage differently. Furthermore, enemies can be resistant to one but not the other, allowing you to formulate an alternative strategy instead of just being locked out of using DoT skills.
Well some games have had Burn also have weaker defense. I think Chrono Cross had this. Wished they brought Venom and bio back from F.F. 4. Can to lamb,piggy to. Wild Arms series had similar,but different and deadly ones. As Disease and Meltdown. Although I think F.F. 8 had some kind of Meltdown to.
Yeah, burn halves the ennemy's attack. Status are insanely good in competitive mons. Scald is a 80 bp (high enough to do damage) water move that has a 30% chance to burn. It's so good that a lot of water mons like to slot it in just for the incremental damage, like choice specs keldeo.
One of my favorite instances of status effect usage is in "Labyrinth of Touhou 2". The game is a turn-based JRPG with an ATB (similar to Final Fantasy 5 - 9). Stat buffs and debuffs work in the way that they decay, meaning each turn, some of their effectiveness wears off, but in turn, casting the same buff or debuff will stack up to a maximum. One of the characters, a tank specifically, has an ability to increase her own physical and magical defenses by a lot, while also paralyzing herself, making her lose a lot of her turns. The first instinct is to give her paralysis negating gear, but it's actually better to embrace the paralysis. Since you lose some of your stat buffs each turn. being paralyzed will prevent you from losing stat buffs, meaning you will have to spend less of your valuable MP to reapply your stat buffs. And since the character is pretty much useless outside of taking hits for your team, you're not really losing out by having one character less to combat your opponents. Long story short, Labyrinth of Touhou 2 managed to turn a negative status condition into a boon to your character.
that’s actually cool as hell I read this a long time ago (so the details could be completely wrong), but there was a game that managed to turn a positive status effect into a setback. A certain boss would buff you with haste, but they would also inflict poison. Thus, though you were faster, the damage over time would be accelerated to severe levels similar interactions would be forcing Reflect onto a party that desperately needs healing, or attack buffs to charmed/confused characters. Lots of neat gimmicks to be made with status effects
I actually wanted to bring up Pokemon as an example of how a status effect can be a boon in the right hands. But LoT did it really well as well now that I think of it. Definately an underappreciated game.
The entire Epic Battle Fantasy series, particularly 5, is based around the concept of utilizing abilities and states that would be completely useless in other, more traditional, RPGs. Would you believe me if I told you that Wet is one of the most useful states in the entirety of 4 and 5?
Temper + whatever the Nolegs katana thing is called + Light + enemy weak to wind + Wispy Strike(or upgraded version thereof) can do over a million damage. Hell, just the katana and Temper with Wispy Strike alone does 600K even without a wind weakness being hit.
Status effects in the Etrian Odyssey series are extremely important, and they come in three distinct types. Binds are hybrid debilitators: Leg Bind reduces Agility and disables evasion and the Escape command, Arm Bind reduces physical damage and many skills, and Head Bind reduces TEC (or INT) and disables a number of more magic-like skills. Any or all of these can coexist on one target. Ailments consist of more of the traditional effects: poisioning, paralysis, petrification, etc. etc. Generally these come in a hierarchy, and higher-priority ailments override lower-priority ones - and can't be overridden in return. Blind tends to be low, petrify tends to be pretty high. Probably the most creative one is EO3's Plague, which spreads to your other characters if left untreated. Buffs and Debuffs are more direct modifications to stats and such. Troubadour songs, Sovereign Orders, and the like go here, and each party member and enemy can have three of each. Depending on the game, it's possible to use a buff or debuff that affects the same thing to cancel these out.
In a video about status effects I'm really surprised not to see Etrian Odyssey anywhere in your examples. They have what has to be one of my favorite status systems in video games; Binds. Every enemy is broken into "parts" like in Monster Hunter, but and each "part" (head, arms, and legs) has certain skills associated with it. You use "Binds" to inflict a Silence Like condition for a few turns, and like in monster hunter, enemies build up resistance over time to any status you might inflict. Most bosses can actually be affected by other status conditions, too, but the most useful one by far is "bind". Say a boss has a powerful attack that uses its head, you can try to bind its head and that will lock it out of using that attack until the bind wears off. Pair this with Atlus's typical brutal difficulty and you have a set up for really fun and a surprisingly unique spin on JRPG gameplay.
Earthbound's homesickness is an interesting status ailment since no enemy can give you this effect (you have a 1/256 chance of getting it after the end of a battle starting from level 15-75)and you can't use an item or PSI to cure it; instead needing you to talk to your Mother to cure it
ATLUS in general has some really interesting ideas when it comes to using buffs and debuffs. Not all of them are good (Persona 3 is a really good example). My personal callout is the Bind system from Etrian Odyssey. Almost every attack in the game, player or enemy, uses either the head, arms, or legs. And there are moves and items that can temporarily bind them, preventing the character from using moves with that part. It also uses a variant of SMT's buff/debuff system: An ATK Up will negate an ATK Down rather than them applying separately. Casting multiples of the same buff only increases the time, though, not the effect. You also can't keep stacking up buffs endlessly, since you can only have 3 unique buffs and debuffs at once on each character.
One interesting example of using status effects from Xenoblade Chronicles is Riki's art, Say Sorry. Say Sorry is a physical attack that removes all the debuffs from the enemy, but increases the damage of the attack for each debuff the enemy has. On top of that, Riki has 5 other arts that inflict debuffs (paralysis, poison, blaze, chill, and bleed), so you can stack up a shit ton of debuffs on the enemy, and use Say Sorry for massive damage.
I'm glad you acknowledged the Trails games (both with that brief video clip of Trails in the Sky FC and with Sophisticated Fight as background music), because I find the status effects in those games to be super interesting when combined with its fluid turn ordering. Having temporary status effects (HP/EP/CP heal, zero-cost spells, CP drain to 0, critical damage, etc) bound to specific turns adds a new level of strategy to managing player speed and turn order -- just buffing your team's speed and delaying your opponents as much as possible isn't necessarily the best strategy, because that could end up giving an opponent a critical turn or giving one of your party members a CP-0 turn. That also ties into managing CP -- if an enemy is going to get a critical turn soon, do I interrupt the turn order with an S-Break and steal the critical effect for myself, or do I preserve my party member's CP and try to tank the critical hit? Alternatively, do I try to inflict an ailment like Seal/Mute/Sleep on the enemy before their turn so they can't take advantage of the critical bonus? Add in the combat link system from Trails of Cold Steel, and critical turns become much more important because it also means a guaranteed follow-up from your link partner. There's a lot of interesting strategy that can be done, which is one of the reasons why I've been so hooked on the series recently
Seeing the Trails footage reminded me of how powerful the spell Chaos Brand was in the first game. It was cheap, easy to acquire, and almost always worked if the enemy wasn't immune to confusion.
The geo effects from Disgaea are genius. It adds so much dimension to the game for people wanting more out of it and makes use of the lifting mechanic while also being incredibly flexible and diverse. They can also take the form of a more traditional status effect system for players who are there for the main campaign alone!
Also, status effects in Disgaea are not useless, which is nice. I had a shaman character that could move around and put enemies to sleep, or a group of mages that cast buffed attack on my axe guy.
One thing I'd like to add to all this is the timing/pacing of statuses and their potencies can change a playstyle a ton. I'll be using SMT 3/Nocturne and 4 as my primary examples here with their main stuff: stat buffs. For a quick breakdown, Taru = attack, Raku = defense, Maka = magic (Nocturne only) ,and Suku = accuracy/evasion/speed and suffixes are -kaja = increase, -nda = decrease. The second thing I would like to quickly bring up are the 'end game' stat changing buffs; Luster Candy and Debilitate. Luster (rough translation from RaSuTa) Candy, in the games it appears, is a party-wide buff that increases all stats one stage. Plain, simple, super effective. Debilitate does the opposite by debuffing all of the enemy party's stats a stage. Compared to possibly focusing on a couple stats early on or taking quite a bit of time to use it all. Third thing. Dekaja and Dekunda. What do these do? They remove all stat changes then and there. There's a boss exclusive skill that comes into play much later where it's a full stat change wipe for both parties in a single action and, more often than not, will be used if the boss is fully debuffed or your party is fully buffed. Onto the meat now You can get an early skill in 4 called Fang Breaker. What does it do? Small amount of damage and *attack* *down*. It's very early and you probably wouldn't have Tarunda for a while longer. So it's fantastic to have, especially for bosses. But it's single target. Have to make it count. On the other hand, you will eventually find demons with non-element Breath attacks, specifically Fog Breath and Acid Breath with effects differing between 3 and 4. In 3, Fog Breath reduces agility by *two* stages. In 4, it instead affects agility and attack, each only one stage. Regardless, both blow Sukukaja out of the water and both are surprisingly early depending on the demon you use or magatama in 3. Being able to drop multiple stats or multiple stages early is very huge, even at end game where you might have Debilitate and/or Luster Candy ready.
I'd like to give Etrian Odyssey and Persona Q props for not only making status ailments useful, but also giving you incentive to actively use them. Hell, some classes in EO specialize in inflicting ailments and do more damage if enemies are under specific ailments.
Just a small bit I noticed from my decades of JRPGS: If the first time a player uses a status effect spell, and that spell misses, then the player will NEVER use that spell again. First time use should have a huge buff to hit% to encourage the player to use the mechanic.
@Diamond Frieza I think he was more referring to how poor first impressions could turn players away from a spell even if it is well balanced in the long term
@Diamond Frieza New players wouldn’t know what those strategies are. The point is to cater to them so that they don’t get scared off using utility spells because they just happen to fail the first time they use them. A min/maxer wouldn’t be put off by the ideal strategy having a 99% success rate.
@Diamond Frieza Hardcore elitism is not the way to go. Especially when you’re on a game design channel where the entire point is to make your game better for more people.
This is excellent! I think a big part of what might need more expanding upon is the consequence of dissipating a status effect, as that can dramatically impact continuing forward in a game. Items, inventory management, spell/MP availability, using turns to heal, the consequences of things like REFLECT, theres a lot of content to work with. In Legend of Dragoon for example, poison does massive damage but you also have a limited inventory, so your percieved value of items that cure that condition is raised, but you also value those item slots more. Plenty to ponder :)
A common way they are handled well is by "tiering" them basically, the more simple and less impactful the effect is, the easier to apply and the easier to remove The more powerful it's, then it's the other way around In terms of applying difficulty, the effect could cost more mana to apply or have a longer cooldown, while the effect that removes it could have the same issues
You know, as I watched this video, I started to consider other things that are related. First is status resistance/immunity. Bosses being affliction-proof has been around a long time as a cheap way to make a fight tougher, but sometimes mobs can have immunity to certain afflictions as well. It's a tricky balancing act and should be done in a way that makes sense. One way I thought of doing it is that while bosses should be immune to the most debilitating effects (instakilling a boss should be a puzzle and not just "press X to deathspell"), they're not immune to everything. In the game engine I've been theorizing, most every affliction has levels which determine how badly the affliction affects the target; bosses can be immune to all but the lowest levels of those afflictions, which still gives those afflictions meaning. For example, let's say Poison does more damage, and impairs accuracy and evasion, at higher levels; with this setup, while the boss' probability factors won't be affected, they still take gradual damage from being poisoned. Another is status treatment. Yeah, there are antidotes and other remedies that appear throughout the games, but if some multi-status remedy comes along, there needs to be some factor besides cost to balance them out, because - let's face it - once the late game or endgame roll around, you're going to run out of "better equipment" to buy, and if that multi-remedy is more efficient than specialized remedies, the specialized remedies are going to be an afterthought. In the system I had in mind, things would be different: while multi-remedies exist, they are only capable of treating every status at once. The dedicated status remedies instead replace the status they "cure" with a special status that not only overwrites the intended status, but prevents its reapplication for some time.
So basically avoid simplicity and add complexity to everything a player can do or use. I like the idea of your second paragraph where things like antidotes prevent getting poison for some time. It is all a game of balancing the value of each move or item. But isnt it likely that by the endgame enemies and bosses tend to use multiple effects at the same time, still making single effect recovery items obsolete by that time?
For the sake of this argument let's say status afflictions could go 5 deep. I would think a multi remedy would only cure 1 to 2 levels of all statuses while a targeted remedy could eliminate 4 to 5 depending on the price.
Thank you for this video. I'm designing a game with a lot of status effects myself and it's been reaffirming to hear that I've been designing them in a decent fashion.
How about the Hollowed status from the Dark Souls game. It added a whole heap of risk/reward, you had to spend resources to enable cooperative help whilst also opening yourself up to the risk of invasions. If you died then the Humanity you spent was gone, so do you spend another Humanity for another chance at an easier boss fight with coop help?
Thing is, all those things only apply to online play. If you play offline, the only uses for being human are kindling bonfires (for whatever reason), sunmoning NPCs before bossfights and a bunch of side stuff like Lautrec's questline.
@@AlexanderMartinez-kd7cz Can't you just play offline for that? or just disconnect your console from the internet mid-play if you started playing online
@@Dinoman972old comment but there are a few other benefits, though they are relatively minor. each point of humanity up to 10 raises item discovery, and any amount of liquid humanity will increase your damage resistance with each point being an equivalent to 1 level in vitality and attunement, stacking all the way up to 99 humanity, as well as boosting curse resistance up to 120 at 30 humanity.
My most memorable status effect is the "Gravity" status effect by the "Wall of Flesh" boss in Terraria in a specially difficult modded game-mode. It flipped you screen upside down when you got hit for some ~5 seconds, which had a huge effect on disorienting the player, even though it had no actual in-game effect. Very fun and chaotic boss fight.
One of the coolest parts of status effects is discovering unintended exploits. Like in Oblivion where you can make custom spells with the same OP status effect with a different name and stack them until the starting fireball spell is a one-hit kill. Fun for those who want to go through all that trouble and completely ignorable if you don't want to do it.
I was a fan of how smt sorta relied on its buffs and debuffs. And how the press turn system almost required you to take huge consideration about how your actions effect the pacing
Burnout from Monster Train is an amazing status effect. You can play reform cards that not only bring dead units back to life, but also buff their stats. However, reforming units applies burnout, a number that ticks down each turn. Once the burnout reaches 0, that unit dies. The best part is that some units have abilities that only trigger once another unit dies, so you can use the burnout timer to your advantage. Monster Train has many more awesome status effects that are at the core of the combat. I highly recommend checking it out.
I really appreciate that if you brainwash an enemy in Persona 5 Royal there's a chance you can just tell them to submit to you instead of negotiating with them. It's a neat mechanic that makes the effect extra worth while.
FFTA2 had a similar ability for the paladin called Parley, you can tell any human enemy to surrender, with the chance increasing the lower they are in health, even then the move sucks because by the point it has any significant chance to work the enemy is already a few hits away from death
I'm just posting to say that seeing Skies of Arcadia made me feel happy. I hope that game gets a PC release (perhaps even a remaster) one day. Also, my favorite status effect is getting mercenaries drunk in Jagged Alliance 2; some will go from hating a team mate to loving them after a bottle of liquor.
16:58 to be fair this can happen in any smt/persona game. i remember getting charmed in the lucifer fight and that demon fully healed him and he has a significantly higher hp bar and very high defense compared to nyx avatar.
I think the other problem with Mitsuru was the fact you can't control your party action on P3. She's supposed to be the substitute for Yukari. The healer, but with more offenses. But when You used Her, She doesn't use heal that much(due to her offensive nature). Even when you set her as the support. "Support? So does that mean I have to use Marin Karin 90% of the time?" So the impact of seeing Her healing the opponents on her first turn being charmed REALLY pisses you off. Thank God for the PSP version, for giving the control to the player.
I like the idea of the every boss being able to be effected by status effect except the final boss. The final boss being immune to most common status effects like poison, blind etc but being extremely weak to some obscure status effect that you know the players will under look and in turn discover how powerful/what those effects really do and in turn incentivize a new playthrough
NOOO!!! Not the money down status effect! It affects only UA-camrs, and the worst part is that it is always cast randomly and takes a random amount of time to cure. By then, most of the battle is over. They need to patch that out.
The real question is, how did he know that the status effect was going to show up before he uploaded the video. I refuse to believe that the sponsor got added to the video after the money down status got applied.
10:28 The trope I hate the most in boss fights. This brings the battle down to the same level as a random mob encounter, resulting in bruteforcing your way through. What's the point of grinding for all those spells that inflict status effect if the majority of late game bosses are immune to everything!?
@@pn2294 The original was also kinda "nice" in that regard. You can posion Rufus, beat the GI shaman witha phoenix down and so on. But its fckn hard to find out because half the effects dont have a visual you can see or a text that lets you know that your effect did something or didnt do anything.
When all the mooks go down in a few hits so status effects are pointless, but bosses are immune to status effects when they would be helpful is just awful design. And that's why I love the Tales series. For the most part, bosses in Tales games aren't immune to statuses. In Tales of Destiny Remake, even the super boss can be affected by any status effect so poisoning him helps a lot to chip away at all his HP, and even full stun effects like sleep and petrifaction work on him. Helps that ToDR also has weapons for all the main characters that carry statuses on all their attacks, both physical and magical. Petri-locking bosses with Leon is so broken but feels so good. Rutee's sleep-locking Tidal Wave/Maelstrom combo is also fun.
Give Falcom's Trails/Kiseki series a look, with the right planning and setup it is possible beat bosses on the hardest difficulty without taking damage through the use of status effects, while on the easier difficulties even the mooks pose a challenge if you employ the classic JRPG strategy of "spam attack to win". They don't feel grindy either because of how the exp system works.
I really liked status effects and technical attacks in P5. And not just on themselves but the way it worked with the talking system, want that persona? You better not leave it speechless.
I really appreciate you having captions on your videos!! I'm not hard of hearing, but I sometimes have trouble focusing on what people say, so I always have captions on whenb possiuble.
I love Frigid Coffin in Bug Fables. It's a freeze spell that freezes enemies and bosses often. Leif gets from a level up early on. Why I love it so much is that it has a 3tp cost (semi low amount) and does 4 damage (base attack does 2 for reference). This is great because you still can use it as a nice damage dealing move, no matter your luck. The other two character's skills also do 4 damage, though Kabbu's is defence peirceing and Vi's hits multiple times, making attack ups much stronger. Proves you can make attacks that deal the same damage be varried.
I'm saving this video to a playlist JUST because it has so many rpgs and a good few I've never even seen. I'm gonna love going through all the games here.
I like that it created a stronger synergies between some of the characters, like having Makoto and Haru together. Makoto causes confusion and then Haru destroys the confused enemy via technical. Or Ann and any of the heavy hitters with the sleep technical, or Makoto/Morgana with Ann and the burn technical.
Seriously I actively was using ailments, one of my favorite combos early game was to use shikioji on Kanishiro's body guard to rage than block any damage.
The persona series is not exactly difficult though, so applying status effects will just waste your time Ironically, despite the intricacies of the Press-Turn-Lite system that is One More, the best possible strategy is the rampant use of physical attacks with a massive Luck stat behind them Mid-game bosses to late-game tend to have no weaknesses, so critting them with huge physical damage is more optimal, ESPECIALLY if you have Pierce
@@devranyilmaz9806 Physical + Peirce is the OP start in about 50% of the SMT series. The other half it's often total garbage. Guessing which is always fun when you relaise you have stat points to spend in siad spinoffs
I really loved how you added Trails in the Sky to your video. It's one of my favorite games with probably the most interesting action economies out there. I hope you're gonna make a video about that soon ^^
Playing FF7 remake on Hard and Persona 5 royal on merciless difficulty was a great way to be forced to take advantage of status effects. putting Rufus to sleep then 1 shotting him with infinity edge is so satisfying
I was genuinely surprised and delighted that FF7R had so much room for strategy based around elemental and status effects. Like, poisoning the Hellhouse saved my bacon in that war of attrition. In hard mode, remembering that the first Reno fight abused lightning attacks let me use elemental to just absorb everything. Sleep actually worked often on several bosses. And, critically, having elemental fire in my armor for the Pride and Joy gauntlet stopped me from dying when Ifrit showed up and broke the delicate balance of the enemy's DPS by adding a bunch of fire to the mix.
I've been working on a tabletop rpg that runs things the opposite of your example of combat without status effects, and make things like "hurt," "reeling," and "tired" into status effects to be inflicted and completely doing away with hp meters. It's pretty good.
I finished my first Etrian Odyssey game earlier this week (Etrian Odyssey Untold) and that game had fun combat and bunch of tricks you can utilize in battles. For example, you have a character with a passive skill that lets them attack a random enemy whenever they take damage. The class has access to all kinds of other skills that hurt yourself but also attacks at the same time or gives buffs. So you can get extra attacks on enemies on both your turn and your opponent's turn. But then there's also the Grimoire Stone system which gives you access to skills from other classes or even enemies. You can use Vulcan Stance to make normal attacks deal damage on all enemies for few turns and that includes the attack you perform by taking damage. Or maybe add a passive Penetrator skill that makes normal attacks pierce through enemy lines, giving you a chance of attacking two enemies at once. Or you can up your defense and make enemies attack you more often by using Provoke. Unfortunately EO suffers somewhat from the same problem as most other RPGs. The normal battles are so short that you are better off just attacking instead of using status effects. Although it gets partially around the problem by having some loot that can be only obtained if the enemy has been inflicted with certain status effect or is killed with a specific type of attack. And there are some stronger enemies that feel like bosses if you decide to battle them early. Most bosses are single enemy encounters so all attacks that hit multiple enemies can be thrown out of the window but at least they can be hit with status effects. Binding the final boss's arms was a huge help since it made it unable to use an attack that reflects all of your attacks for one turn. I basically killed myself on my first try since I didn't know it had a skill like that.
I think part of that is because Untold is a bit on the easy side for an EO game. In many of the other games (especially the first three), you really need to take full advantage of your available status effects just to survive the normal battles, as regular enemies can quickly overwhelm you if you're careless. It does somewhat depend on the team you use, as some classes are far more dependent on statues on others, but most of the really good team comps make liberal use of status effects, because they make such a huge difference.
Depends, on your party comp, and whether or not you're playing on Expert mode. EO generally has some of the most useful status effects of any turn based rpg though. Bindings and buffs/debuffs/walls are all fantastic for standard battles in my experience.
This is why turn based rpgs are not really dead yet. With the right impelementation of status effects like in the Shin megam tensei games, you can make combat more interesting and also to avoid the game being a press "a" or "x" to win every damn time.
Happy to see Skies of Arcadia representation :) That game had some pretty overpowered status effects. The prevalence of instant-death magic in certain sections means you're pretty much forced to use one character's anti-magic ability every turn, effectively preventing them from taking any other action. Also applies for enemies that use whole-party debuff, sleep or confuse spells.
I love that you kept cutting back to Persona 3 and Nyx Avatar when talking about how Charm can screw you over. Hehe. To elaborate for those who don't know, Persona 3's final boss (Nyx Avatar) is a 14 phase boss fight that slowly rotates through the first 14 tarot arcana. Each of the first 13 phases has 1,500 HP, changing resistances and skills every phase. This is basically made to wear you down for... The final phase, the Death Arcana, has _6,000_ HP, strong skills, and two nasty unique skills. Moonless Gown lets Nyx block all damage for a few turns - including the normally unblockable Almighty damage type, cheating bastard. The second is Night Queen. It's heavy Almighty (unclockable) damage to the whole party, with a random chance of inflicting *any* status effect. By this point in the game, your healers will have Diarahan (single target) or Mediarahan (multi-target), which are _full heals._ So it's entirely possible to have to fight the 6,000 HP phase from the beginning. Nyx gets two actions a turn.
@@Johnof1000Suns Once, a representative of ATLUS USA(ATLUS Japan made P3) said "we get off on your tears". Making stupidly annoying bosses is one thing ATLUS are known for, and hard games in general are their forte.
Destiny 2's recent foray into Status Effects and how they interact with Major Enemies is I think an example of what not to do. For people who don't play, in high level activities Destiny's recently introduced the Champion system, featuring three types of Champions that are each vulnerable to a specific Status Effect you can apply to your weapons and some abilities. Barrier champions have the ability to make themselves temporarily immune to damage and heal themselves, but if you use an Anti-Barrier weapon you can break the immune effect and stun them. Overload champion regenerate health and use abilities more quickly, but a Disruption weapon stops the regen and stuns them. Unstoppable enemies have a huge damage resistance buff and rush players down, but Staggering weapons remove that damage buff and stun them. You may have already seen the problem. Each and every champion design is some flavor of "If you don't have X, this is going to be a nightmare. If you do have X, this is going to be a cakewalk." There's not really any thought put into it, you just have to have the right gun and enough damage to kill them while they're stunned. Not a very dynamic system. And it has two additional problems; Firstly, what weapons you have available to counter any specific Champion changes every Season, and are almost universally Primary weapons, which are the weakest of the three types of weapons with the most prolific ammo (A good idea on paper, but it means any Primary weapons that can't have Champion mods applied to them are trash). And Secondly, while this system works reasonably well in groups where each player might have one or two tools for countering specific champions, it breaks if you either don't have teammates covering the gaps in your own build, or don't have teammates in general. If you don't have an Anti-Overload weapon and you're facing an overload champion, then it looks like it's time for you to completely change your build mid-activity. On the plus side, the Status Effect system is at least moderately relevant against non-Champions. Anti-Barrier weapons are able to pierce the defense screens of a lot of common enemies, making things like Phalanxes and Hydras less tedious to fight. Anti-Overload weapons reduce incoming damage making them useful against moderate-sized enemies. Anti-Unstoppable weapons deal AoE damage by default, letting you stagger groups of enemies. So it's not all-bad, but it's heavy-handed and incredibly frustrating, even in activities where all of your based are covered, simply due to the fact that the teammate with the appropriate tool might simply be preoccupied with other threats.
Yeah, lock and key scenarios make the battle more of a gear check and a puzzle than an actual "fight". It links back to the "overpowered" downside mentioned in the video.
@@benedict6962 Lock and Key is kind of why i hate, and have barely performed any, raids. The fact that Raids are big fat puzzles in a game that is mostly just "shoot face, get -somewhat disappointing- loot" means that people who don't like forming groups like myself just can't ever do them (i've only ever done the first raid of both games, and the only reason i was there was because they needed a warm body and a friend recommended me) and the champion system is a big reason i just stopped playing, cause "play how you want" got thrown out the window in exchange for "hope you like bows this season" Edit: VoG was also a piss easy "puzzle" compared to the vast majority of Raids, since "shoot the noisy things" and "don't get spotted in the obvious stealth section" are pretty simple compared to whatever the fuck the Baths section in Leviathan was all about...
![7 Spells That Ended Up Being Almost Completely Useless [Commenter Edition]](/img/n.gif)
Games by order of appearance
0:09 Persona 5
0:13 Lost Odyssey
0:18 Xenoblade Chronicles
0:22 Star Wars: Knights of The Old Republic
0:28 Zelda: Breath of The Wild
0:32 XCOM 2
0:34 MGSV
0:36 Puyo Puyo Tertris
0:41 Final Fantasy XII
0:44 Persona 4
0:48 I am Setsuna
0:50 Super Mario RPG
2:14 Legend of Heroes: Trails in The Sky
2:17 SMT3: Nocturne
2:22 Dragon Quest (Switch)
2:30 Final Fantasy
3:30 Dragon Quest XI
3:34 Pokemon Sword & Shield
3:46 Final Fantasy X
3:50 Monster Hunter World
3:56 Final Fantasy IX
4:05 Octopath traveler
4:14 Dark Souls II
4:29 Pokemon Gold & Silver
4:32 Team Fortress 2
4:41 Tales of Vesperia
5:29 Street Fighter 2 HD
5:32 Dragon Quest VIII
5:39 Minecraft
6:02 Earthbound
6:07 Overwatch
6:27 Persona 3
6:33 Skies of Arcadia
6:48 Super Smash Brothers Ultimate
6:50 Sonic Mania
6:53 Final Fantasy XIII
7:00 Final Fantasy VII Remake
7:26 Final Fantasy VII
9:28 Chrono Trigger
10:11 Dragon Quest III (Switch)
10:20 Final Fantasy VI
13:07 Bug Fables
14:55 Final Fantasy VIII
16:10 Kingdom Hearts
16:45 SMT: Digital Devil Saga 2
17:09 Steven Universe: Save The Light
17:14 Chrono Cross
17:28 Slay the Spire
17:35 Ring Fit Adventure
17:47 Darkest Dungeon
17:54 Left 4 Dead 2
18:11 Skullgirls
18:25 Lisa The Painful
Holy shit thanks you so much. More videos should have this!
I see nocturne I like
you listed Chrono Cross instead of Chrono Trigger at 9:28
Alastair Jack Can’t click on the time stamps if they’re just in the video
*B R U C H*
There's this boss on Bravely Second called "Turtle Dove" with attacks that can cause Love, making one of your units fall in love for another unit of your party
While in Love, your unit will always copy the move that the loved unit used (even if they don't have acess to it), so if you strategize around it, you can use this in your favor
But, if another character falls in love for the same unit, these two units will stop repeting the loved's moves and actually start attacking each other out of jelousy
That's actually amazing.
pretty sure the boss exists in bravely default aswell.
@@gulgaffel As a secret boss, yes
But on Bravely Second it shows up on the main quest
That's actually pretty interesting status effect.
I've never heard of a status effect like that before, that's a creative one!
I'm glad you point out that making bosses immune to status effects makes status effects useless in the rest of the game. That's something that has bothered me for years.
Yeah, this being so common in RPGs back in the day has for a large part, programmed me to not even bother with status effects or debuffs. I had to deprogram myself from this way of thinking playing Persona 5 recently because I went through a lot of the game just ignoring skills that didn’t do direct damage
I kinda like the Etrian Odyssey series because of this. All enemies are affected by statuses and in fact the game expects you to use it on bosses to stop certain attacks and survive some phases (e.g. bind the head of the boss, to stop eye beams). Late game I might have to even have to incapacitate random encounters to not return to town often.
@@TheJadedJames when i played P5 (vanilla) on hard mode, i found myself actually using the status effects.
@@malcovich_games i played Persona Q2 and really liked how useful status effects were in that game. And i like the idea of certian enemies being affected by certian statuses in special ways
@@darienb1127 i really recommend you the Etrian Odyssey saga if you liked persona Q1 or 2, as most of the mechanis were taken from there and just mixed some persona elements, games are really fun and challenging where status effects matter a lot
Bad design: Bosses/High Level Enemies that are just completely immune to status effects.
What's the point in having characters that can inflict negative status effects if they can't inflict them when it matters most?
Yup. One of the biggest problems with negative status effects in a lot of games (especially JRPGs) the mob fights are too weak to need them, and all bosses are immune to them. Rendering them totally pointless.
There's definitely a balance to be struck, though. I've played an RPG that decided no bosses ever should be immune to statuses... The final boss literally could not fight back because I was able to pile too much onto them.
Though, I've also had fun with a game not making bosses immune to DoT status effects... I was so underleveled that the only way I was able to kill a particular boss in a Tales of game was hitting it with a DoT and kiting it. Took me forever, but I did it! (And then promptly realized the highest NG+ difficulty really wasn't intended to be played from level 1).
That's why I love the SMT games (and Xenoblade to a lesser extent), is because it prompts you to use your entire toolbox to take down a boss including status effects.
I never understood that, like, the minor enemies are just that, minor enemies, even if they have special weaknesses against certain attacks is a logical waste using MP against them when we now a boss is coming, then at the boss fight the only use we have for our MP is healing, which is helpful but isn't fun, and is understandable that the designer wants the boss to feel way to powerful but the only thing it does is oversimplify the combat and making the whole battle way more tedious.
An idea I personally enjoy is that usually bosses are immune to some status effects, but some of those immunities can be bypassed if you bring a character that is specialized in them. Like an alchemist.
In general tho I agree, it's just frustrating that all statuses have no effects
In case anyone wants to quickly refer back to a specific type of status effect:
4:16 Damage Over Time
4:40 Stat Buffs and Debuffs
5:07 Turn and Action Economy
5:48 Debilitators
6:12 Loss of Control
6:35 Shields
6:52 Setups
7:14 Transformations
7:40 KOs and Insta-Kills
Some people are just the best :)
Kinda wondering if he'd get timestamps into his videos like kliksphilip if he put this into the description.
The evolution/next step to these?
Traps and Setplay
AKA landmines and Interrupts
Status effects for me...
"Not gonna bother using them on trash enemies, since I can kill them so quickly."
"Oh, this boss is IMMUNE to status effects? Why do these things exist again?"
well, think of it in this way. If you debuff some mooks that can give you a problem, with a sleep or something, you'll have less enemies to have to deal with.
But the game should have a way to make status more useful or have attacks that have status effects.
Those rly old jrpg atk up is almost *1.5 ~2.
And your party wont learn debuff skills/ magics. Poison, paralyze or silent may work on boss somehow.
@@TheMemoryOfWrenAndMe "may work on boss somehow."
Sometimes that is the case, true. I hate it how SO many games however don't make it clear if they just resisted it, or if they are just straight up immune.
@@Arlesmon you know how you can also have less enemies to deal with? by killing them.
@@starduststriker8792 true. But if they do have a bunch of HP and you don't have much power to deal with them. Giving them status aliments can deal with them while you take care of the rest.
Taunt is also an important effect, to put in on someone who can stand the strong attack or do it to decide who dies instead of your main DPSer
And if that character can also avoid any attack at the cost of being unable of attack makes it way better and more fun to use, revolving the battle around that character, helping him to have enough MP in case of loosing the taunt, or being unable of avoid more attacks, I love that strategy and more when my main attackers are defeated making it more tense.
Best paired when the tank has a last stand passive. In the Dissidia mobile game, this is a legit strategy I've done a few times.
I would call that redirection because Taunt is different in many games.
In Pokemon it prevents non-attack moves, in Persona it enrages, in SMT Nocturne it reduces defense a lot but boosts enemy attack...
@@matchanavi In Pokemon the equivalent attack would be follow me, not taunt. We aren't discussing the name of the attack, but rather its effect.
@@matchanavi yeah there is also provoke in ff13 which makes all enemies aggro on the caster
I just love how Matador’s immense speed in Nocturne is just a genius tool to force the player to learn how if you don’t use buffs or debuffs you aren’t going to beat the game
have you seen the new youtube series a youtuber is doing? he is doing a challenge run of SMT 3 where he doesnt use buffs or debuffs and it looks like HELL. its so funny
The youtuber's name is Nyarly
As I was typing this comment I was thinking you aren’t gonna beat this game without buffs or debuffs..... unless your name is Nyarly
It's kind of a shame that Nocturne is so unbalanced in that regard. If you ignore buffs and debuffs the game is stupidly hard, but if you know how to abuse them a lot of the game becomes kind of a joke.
As nice as it is to see a game that encourages and rewards you for make use of buffs and debuffs, I'm glad they nerfed them in future games.
I really loved that game because of how useful status effect are, it made boss battle a lot more interesting and it made random battle somewhat hard cause you didn't want to waste time to use status there (especially since mana is a bit scarce in the early to mid game) but that meant the random encounters were actually somewhat challenging because of that so I ended up always thinking about elemental resistance and all even for trash mobs.
Honestly this game ended up making me dislike the combat in final fantasy games because of how shallow it is since status are usually not worth using unless you know exactly when they are worth using, but you have no real way of knowing usually so you don't bother.
I like when there’s a way to get rid of effects. Monster Hunter World does this, where to get rid of fire/blast, you roll, theres energy drinks to get rid of sleep, antidotes and various antidote-related items for poison, doing something with the joystick for stun, nullberries for dragon/effluvium/water/ice/thunder, and... nothing for Paralysis. I like how it’s something different for most effects, so that you can get rid of them easily but you’ve gotta remember what does it. Wish some of the things you need a nullberry for were diversified a bit, but ahh well...
What do you mean by "diversified?" More uses for nulberry, or making the player lug around a berry of each element?
I understand you. Though, I personally like the other side. I like when status effects primarily aren't cured with items, but my DOING something. As you mention Roll for Fire. I like in games where, Sleep can be broken by being hit, Burn if touched will spread to anyone else, Paralyses can be button mashed out of, or whatever. Things where it's not "Use this item and be prepared" but where it's "Briefly change your strategy to remedy this quickly, before things get worse"
Just say "nullberries for blight" next time. Way more concise and accurate.
@@KingTaltia In MHW Sleep and Paralysis can be broken by being hit by your allies or even your NPC cat. Only the blights can't be removed via action, and yet you can counter them by planning for them and building a small amount of resist. Or throwing on a mantle. Except fireblight as previously mentioned you can roll. But hell, Thunderblight doesn't do anything on it's own, it just makes you more susceptible to stun and paralysis. So don't get hit!
I also like that the design of MHW makes you plan around status effects. The game really makes you plan each Hunt so you can choose the best buffs & resistances to give yourself and the best debuffs and ailments to apply to the enemy. And once you've fought the monster its info gets updated so you can check in-game which ones are best to use and which you should avoid.
My recommendation for immobility effects like stun or paralyzed, is to make them ramp up instead of being instantly activated. Such as needing to hit a foe three times to build up three stacks of stun, the first two stacks function as a "speed down" effect, and only turns into temporary immobility at three stacks.
Another benefit of this if a foe is immune to stun, three stacks can turn into a strong speed down effect instead. Stacking poison also lets you adjust how many turns you put into your poison damage, and makes poison focused characters able to specialize in doing something across multiple turns.
Stacking is a really good way to do certain starus effects. Especially when getting enough stacks transforms the status into something deadly. Another idea I like to have diminishing returns. Basically, the more you use status effects on an enemy or boss, the weaker it becomes.
I’ve found that I like this the most in like slay the spire where you get multiple attacks per turn.
You can also make status effects too powerful, South Park the Stick of Truth comes to my mind, where all effects, specially bleeding are way too effective.
I played as a thief and I could just use a bouncing ball (that hits multiple enemies) with a perk that inflicted bleeding, and the ball would inflict anywhere from 2 to 5 stacks of bleeding on every enemy, now they lost a ton of health each turn and becausa I was a thief some of my abilities got bonus damage because the enemies were bleeding.
It made the game too easy, although it was satisfying pulling out that strategy.
It was definitely overpoweringly fun to use. :) When you play as a jew and unlock Plagues of Egypt, you can easily inflict burn + 3x bleed on all enemies from a single cast. It's ridiculous, lol
Same thing happened to me!
I was surprised to how OP it was and found it by accident, I really liked it as I found it myself and even though it made the game too easy, i will always remember it.
(I dont play that many turn RPGs so having found a "OP" Build was rewarding for me XD)
The Stick of Truth was just poorly balanced. I remember some abilities that have nothing to do with status effects being insta-win.
Stick of Truth is the perfect example of why status effects shouldn't stack, and shouldn't be inflictable on bosses.
@@2011supergamer, I'd say the first point is true in specific cases. The second point runs into problems where there is no logical reason to use a status effect if it doesn't work on bosses and mob fights are easier than existing
I always like the Earthbound status effects because they were very real takes on what status effects would be in a modern setting. Nausea is one of my favorites, especially its effect in Mother 3, because you either take damage each turn from vomiting, or you feel too queasy to stomach any health restoring food, so you can't heal. It's a very tangible effect of an innocuous thing we experience in real life applied to the mechanics of a game.
I didn't know that you can vomit from nausea.I even tried to heal while I got that effect with Duster without knowing what the status ailment did
Reminds me of Rabies IRL. You get aquaphobia (fear of water), and literally stop being able to drink fluids. Rabies is really an awful thing IRL.
@@ghostsquadmeand you pretty much are done for too
In Lisa the Painful, if you are crying you lose accuracy on your hits.
I like that Burn and Paralysis in Pokemon have a secondary effect of cutting attack and speed in half respectively. Also, the badly poisoned status is really nice for especially tanky Pokemon
My first thought when it comes to status effects has to be the Etrian Odyssey series, the games that taught me to appreciate them when so many other JRPGs make them useless. While its list of status effects is pretty standard, it makes them extremely useful. The games are difficult - random encounters are a constant danger, rather than a mild annoyance - so anything that lets you mitigate this helps a lot. Particularly notable is poison, which deals a good amount of damage - often proving far more effective than other attacks against normal enemies, and still dealing a healthy amount of damage to bosses. And, yes, statuses work on bosses. While bosses do tend to have more resistances and immunities than normal enemies, they're still valid targets for statuses.
If anything, the game does lean towards status effects being a bit too powerful, but it works in the context of the games' difficulty. Getting your party wiped out due to being hit with status effects sucks (and in fact enemies with poison attacks are many a player's first game over), but it's not out of character for these games, so it feels less jarring. And when they're used to make things a bit too easy for the player, it's satisfying, because you know how difficult things can be - so anything that trivializes a fight makes you feel awesome rather than bored.
Fucking BUTTERFLIES, am I right?
I got all DS and one of the 3DS games...
ONLY FINISHED TWO SO FAR... GUESS
Yup, when I think status effects I think of Etrian Odyssey first and foremost for that reason. The game is explicitly designed around the concept that the odds are stacked against you and status effects are how you equalize it to an extent.
Poison in EO can destroy with the right builds, at least Hexer's poison in EOU and EOU2
I struggled so much with one of the bosses in EOU2 then I swapped one of my party members with a Hexer and capped poison since the boss was weak to it and it destroyed them
even past that boss and against enemies not weak to poison I stuck with the Hexer for the rest of the game
Does EO have the boost system like Persona Q2? That’s a system I’d really like to expanded on in a game with similar gameplay.
17:36 I never thought Ring Fit Adventure would be nominated like THIS.
it's a weirdly good rpg
It's in the Favorite Games 2019 video too
You’d be surprised how good this game is.
When it comes to games I've played with status effects, Etrian Odyssey is one of my favorites. Most bosses have at least one weakness to a status, and killing enemies while they have a certain status can net you a rare drop at times.
It's bind or die xD
Status effects are also just incredibly useful all throughout the game. Given that random enemies can be almost as dangerous as bosses at times, being able to disable them to limit their ability to kill you makes a huge difference.
I also like that many classes have unique synergies with the various status effects, so even when you're just looking to maximize DPS it's worth trying to apply them.
I don't expect every RPG to make random encounters as difficult as EO to justify status effects, but I do wish more of them would be more creative with how they implement their status effects.
I love that bosses in EO aren't always immune to Instant Death or Stone. Just spamming those until it works is a legitimate strategy.
The importance and genius of the Bind system cannot be overstated. It's basically a three-fold way to seal skills (head for magic and most support skills, arms for physical skills) and your agility/evasion (legs and some skills in later installments), and being that both the party and the enemies alike are bound to these rules, you can live and die by bind setups. Long live Dark Hunters, Hexers and Arcanists.
On top of that, the bind system is less binary than most "lose control" status effects. Because they only shut down certain types of attacks, you have to guess or intuit which bind is most worth your time. You may have certain options that could inflict all three binds at once but you'll also have to plan for a contingency when the bind you want doesn't land. Having some binds be effectively powerless on certain enemies means that, while the enemy doesn't become a complete sitting duck, you can still have an avenue to exploit a bound-target bonus.
I think it’s worth pointing out that, as with so many things in the rpg genre, these general tropes of status effects, what they do, and often their aesthetics can be paralleled directly back to Dungeons and Dragons.
Yes I like how the poisoned status in my JRPGs reduces my stats for a while.
Wait what?
Yeah it's there to add more context to what is happening. A poisoned tipped arrow's purpose is to slowly kill a target, hence in tabletop RPGs it slowly reduces your health. This then translated to video games.
In DnD status effects are OP as all hell. Where you can just casually end encounters with 1st level spells.
The first videogame.
@@doombybbr I feel that works really well for D&D. It's a game where you don't have to kill everything to progress most of the time. If the party dosen't want to get in a major fight for some reason (Like taking someone alive for information), It might be better to cast something like Hypnotic Pattern. Plus, you can have NPCs all act differently when they see their ally get turned into a sheep or something.
Earthbound had a couple of unique takes on status effects:
-Ness could get homesick, which would randomly waste turns until you called your mom.
-In addition to messing with your controls, the Mushroom would sometimes cause your targeting to change, but never in a way that made it predictable. It was also quite possibly the only status effect in any game that you'd be paid for getting treated.
-Characters could become Possessed: this entailed having an invisible enemy that would sometimes stun the possessed character and take pot-shots at their teammates for minimal damage.
WoW had the more-or-less-mandatory-to-bring-up Corrupted Blood, which as a result of a coding oversight created a virtual version of the current global crisis.
Pokemon has several interesting status effects that, while useless in the main campaign due to how easy it is, can all simultaneously counter certain strategies and provide opportunities for the player that can use them effectively.
Of particular note are Encore (force a player to re-use the last move that they used for several turns), Rest (put your own pokemon to sleep to heal all damage - it also removes any other status they might have), Toxic (poison that effectively forces players to eventually switch or die from the accumulating damage), Substitute (take 25% damage to ensure that the next attack does nothing), and all kinds of arena-wide effects that are both specific and general in how they change the flow of combat.
In general, any game with a unique set of mechanics is going to present a similarly unique opportunity to mess with the effects via status effects.
Earthbound Beginnings also had some interesting ones.
Ninten has asthma, so if car-type enemies use exhaust attacks you have to use an inhaler or he's stunned due to coughing. (However because those enemies are rarely encountered most players skip bringing the inhaler so they can use the valuable bag space for other stuff).
You could also catch a cold which works exactly like poison in pokemon, except you get it from talking with NPCs instead of enemies.
On my file, the Mushroom effect once made Jeff use the Hungry HP-Sucker on himself. He absorbed all of his own HP. Also, if you confuse the Diamond Dog, it can bite and diamondize itself, ending the battle. It makes no sense, but it’s fucking hilarious.
Speaking of Pokemon status effects, the Mystery Dungeon games have a different take on things. The main games have major status effects where you can only have one afflicted at a time, but PMD has many "minor" effects that still trigger abilities like Guts (boosted attack if statused). Also due to the grid-based system in PMD, many moves have new AOE uses and could disable a crowd of say, 12 opponents at once in the same room.
One thing you forgot to mention on Pokémon status effects. Some of them don’t go away after the battle ends. In the Pokémon games before Black & White, if a Pokémon was poisoned outside of battle it would take poison damage for every few steps you take until you heal it or the afflicted runs out of HP.
i love toxic against the AI in pokemon main campaigns since they dont get rid of the multiplier because they dont switch out
its satisfying as fuuuck against any difficult battles, (which there are some that i had issues with like cynthia in D/P, blue in hgss on my first run, a few others)
My favorite story about status effects is the Chac enemy from FFX2.
These super-tanky, basilisk-like monsters can't be run from and they have a 255% chance to inflict Petrify on two of three party members every turn in combat.
So what happens when you walk into into a fight with 100% immunity to Petrify?
255% - 100% = 155% chance to petrify a target immune to petrify.
That's just how math works.
Wait, that's illegal.
PRAISE NUCLEAR GANDHI!!
that thing is the ultimate BS boss in x2.
you can beat almighty shinra without cheese strats but chac is just dumb.
Ah well not forget Chac in 10-2 side dungeon can bypass Ribbon.😥
I find it annoying when they do that because it effectively devalues/ ignores/ disrespects the sole purpose of immune to something
It's really rare for me to care about Stat effects. If the game doesn't go out of its way to show how they're useful and well integrated to the systems.
SMT and DQ are basically the two ones that I see myself constantly thinking about it.
As good or bad examples??
@@jabariwiththebois5765 I think OP means it in a good way. Because personally, in those games. Buffs and Debuffs can make or break a boss fight.
*ESPECIALLY* In SMT games.
What SMT games let you cast pulinpa or marin karin on a boss?
@@lacreatura4737 Isn't op talking about status ailments rather than buffs/debuffs?
@@crono276 Whoops. I must've misread that.
2:28
JOEY
JOJO
JR.
SHAB
That’s the worst named party I’ve every heard.
not worse than group of braves adventurers named A, B, C, D
It's a Simpsons reference
*best
@@raven75257 LMAO
Laks Alice, Bob, Claudia, Dennis
There's one status effect that really got me in Metroid Prime 2. An enemy in the last main area can hack Samus' suit, causing frame drops and static until you reboot her suit with an arbitrary button combination.
You Ctrl-Alt-Del a freaking power suit.
Ah, yes, the Rezbits. Great enemy for a late-game area.
did we play a different Prime 2? i don't remember ever doing that...
@@robonerd125 The Rezbit's attack animation was lengthy so it is possible to dodge the attack, or not see it entirely in a playthrough.
While annoying, I like that you had to reboot your suit. Nice detail
Oh my god I know this "Boss is immune to nearly all status effects" trope all too well. It makes the bossfight so much less fun, I always love to experiment with status effect but am seldom rewarded for it.
Have you ever played the Trails/Kiseki series?
unfortunately, if bosses are susceptible to status effects, it wouldn't be much of a boss fight, it'll be wayyyyyy too easy
@@pondypoo Making them immune to all status effects isn't a good solution either. Maybe make them resistant/immune to only some of them?
@@Dinoman972 What I hate is when bosses are immune to some magic spell but not to the like.. secondary effect but you can't get secondary effect since the main spell gets absorbed or whatever
For example.. a boss immune to lightning yet can be paralyzed via other methods.. but those other methods would be you grinding to a certain level, to a point of you being overleveled anyways and can just brute force the boss anyways
@@BaconNuke Are there any examples of this off the top of your head?
For as many flaws FFXIII has, it was the game that made me realize status effects exist and aren't useless. The effect is so noticeable that it might as well be bad design (like you're actually forced to use deprotect to kill armored turtles or whatever, so it isn't much of a decision) but up until playing that game, I just brute forced/grinded through every turn based game ever.
Man, I want to play that trilogy, I heard bad things about it but also good things and seems like it can be an interesting experience.
To be fair, a lot of Final Fantasy games (among others) suffer from status effects being largely useless due to widespread resistances/immunities meaning the fights where they would be worth the opportunity cost, they don't work in, and the fights they do work in, they take longer (and cost more resources) than just applying brute force...
play epic battle fantasy 4/5 if you want to see a game that heavily encourages you to use status ailments and buffs it makes things far more interesting and they are extremely useful
you will find up using status ailments on regular enemies instead of just the bosses because fights are lenghty (up to 4 waves of enemies in a encounter)
@@juanrodriguez9971 if you're a mechanics gamer, by all means do. The systems in place are really good. If you care about exploration, lore, story, characters, etc just run away as far as you can and don't look back
@@killermelga what are some of the good mechanics in ff13 trilogy, i played all 3 and they didn't seem quite concrete. Though it has been a while so maybe my memory is fuzzy.
One of my favorite boss fights ever is in Digital Devil Saga. In Digital Devil Saga, you can have your characters learn moves that reflect specific elements. Because DDS uses the press-turn system, reflecting attacks not only sends the damage back at the opponent, but it also immediately ends their turn and switches to the opposing sides turn. Now this one boss used a bunch of elemental magic. However I noticed that they weren't immune to any elements, and they only used the last element I attacked them with. So I could attack them then set up the elemental reflect. They would get hit with their own attack, and it would be my turn again. Sure it wasn't the hardest fight once you figure out that exploit, but it felt amazing once you realized it.
Bonus points go to the fact that the Isis trio also use the elemental combos (like Vayaviya), which not only make the fight more dynamic, but it also makes it easier to strip turns if one doesn't have the Repel skill.
This reads like an advert for Digital Devil Saga
@@Scarabola Good. Everyone should play Digital Devil Saga.
I love how miitopia's status effects are pretty mundane things that have not so mundane effects. And the way they appear is different depending on ur personality. when the "avenge" attack happens, a party member faints and the ones with high enough relationship levels attack the enemy who caused it, stubborn, cool, and energetic miis become angry, allowing them to attack twice but have no control. Whereas Kind, Airheaded, and Cautious Miis start crying, giving them a chance to miss. The last personality type, laid-back, has no status condition from this. I love how they so creativity mix RPG and Life Sim elements
FFX's post-game is a master class on how to take status effects, gear crafting and the often forsaken item usage and build puzzle games around their use. Figuring out how to beat all the super bosses in the monster arena, and then the mega bosses after that, is very satisfying if you don't use a guide. Or only using a guide if you can't figure out how to beat the bosses at first. Unfortunately, the sphere grid holds players back. It isn't nearly as bad as it sounds to have to max out your grids, but only if you figure out one of the ways to cheese levels. (or look them up) But it still adds a ton of pointless grinding hours to the game.
It's a bummer that just about every single one of them is 100% immune to every negative status (except Doom, instead having an obscenely, impractically high Doom Counter for that to take effect). I guess it's because a lot of FFX's status ailments are actually really powerful if they are allowed to go through, but it does invalidate a lot of abilities. Likewise, "Ribbon" makes the existence of a lot of status ailments on boss attacks pointless as well, so a lot of fights just turn into spamming Quick Hit, mixed with a fairly rigid buff/heal rotation.
At least you do get a lot of mileage out of buffs. Haste, Protect, Shell, Reflect, etc are all crucial in a lot of cases or highly valuable otherwise, so at least that is praiseworthy.
A fun thing about FFX's design is that EVERY CHARACTER is situational.
So it's not just that status effects are situational, but that every spell and attack has their place.
For example, don't try to swing at bats with Auron.
Also one of my favorite things to do was giving Rikku a weapon with a lot of on-hit effects. Just giving her blindness and mute on hit, with the steal+attack ability, makes her amazingly useful. Her high speed gives her a lot of turns so she's also an amazing support character for using items.
Well there are some cases like the Malboro Menance where even it's ailments bypasses Proof and Ribbon mods. But that is why you enter with Auron armed with Masamune so you can swap into Yuna for a summon.
Hmmm
That's why I was thinking of trying to beat Dark Yojimbo... AFTER A DOZEN GAME OVERS
@@laggalot1012Getting hit with Armor Break can really wreck your day if you forget about it, since it has no visual indicator. And there's no way to block it.
Monster hunter does it best. Because you know what monster you’re hunting you are encouraged to make the right gear with the right status effects. For example, if you’re going against something hats blubbery, bleed is usually effective. Hunt down the monsters that do bleed first and you can use that effect on the next ones weak to it. Same with stun, sleep, poison, etc. all kinds of status balancing and adaptation.
i love the improvements to technical damage in p5r. It's very useful on mid-bosses without weaknesses.
But then there's my entire party getting hit by brainjack and i get to watch them massacre each other.
Fun times.
In my vanilla P5 run knock down and enemy and Marin Karin the other without weaknesses during the 3rd palace saved me a lot of game overs
there is always an item you can buy which makes you immune to brainjack. or now in P5R you can fuse persona that makes you immune to those.
it's really weird that most of the technical stuff is behind a lot of books tho
Or when the entire party gets hit with confuse and throw away 200,000 yen
I enjoy SMT'S status effect system, because the point of the system is to abuse it and cheese through weaker enemies, it works because the enemies and player have full access to all abilities putting them on equal footing.
Shame that enemies are too stupid to utilise press-turn in an even slightly effective way.
@@JayAreAitch until they randomly gain their first press turn before destroying you in under a turn
@@CitBox I hate the beginning of SMTIV when you're fighting the hedgehogs and they use a gun attack crit, and get a smirk and wipe your whole party. That happened like 5 times before I could get enough demons to progress
If you are not using debilitate + luster candy and do not have null light/dark you are doing it wrong.
That was honestly one of the smoothest sponsor transitions I've seen so far
My favorite standard status effect system is used in the Etrian Odyssey franchise.
Random encounters are dangerous and rarely will a damage class be able to one-shot the strongest enemy in a fight. But with a debilitating condition these enemies are as good as dead (or at least way less dangerous) so classes focussing on status effects are valuable during exploration.
While buffs and debuffs always work - although they have several mechanics surrounding them - other conditions are harder to inflict especially on bosses and the walking mid-bosses you spend much of your time avoiding. There is also a hidden system that makes it much harder for the same condition to be inflicted again after it was inflicted once - but this slowly reverts over the course of several turns (although it doesn't quite reach the initial value). So while they can be powerful status classes aren't (usually) super broken and they still need to be diverse instead of just focussing on a single condition. So status classes can be valuable in boss fights as well.
2 for 2 for an archetype that is sadly more often than not useless in many RPGs.
The games also have the flavorful bind system where you can inflict (or by inflicted by) head bind, arm bind or leg bind which prevent the usage of skills that use the bound body part as well as lower one of your stats (and leg bind also disables evasion).
A boss giving you trouble with its tail swipes that hit the entire party? Break its legs and you'll be safe from those attacks for a few turns.
status effects in Etrian are broken with the classes that goes with it. once they land its game over for them and buffs can make you survive attacks that would wipe your party.
FFX's Reflect spell was one of my favorites. It reflects *all* spells onto the opponent party, but reflected spells can only reflect once. You can take advantage of this by:
• Casting Reflect on yourself to protect yourself from enemy spells, at the cost of being unable to cast beneficial spells on yourself.
• Cast Reflect on your enemy to turn their self-buffs into party buffs, at the cost of being unable to target them with hostile magic.
• Cast Reflect on yourself so you can target yourself with hostile magic, reflecting it onto the enemy and piercing their own Reflect spells.
It creates a whole host of interesting tactics, and post-game enemies like the Arena bosses all revolve around it in some way or another.
In the sequel game, FFX-2, there's an extra layer of strategy added onto the spell. Black Magic can be cast on a single target at full damage, or the full enemy party at reduced damage. *But* if your entire party has Reflect up, you can cast Black Magic on your entire party, reflecting 3 different spells onto the enemy for total damage that exceeds a single full-strength spell. Reflect is one of my favorite effects for this very reason!
"Zombie" was great for a similar reason, since you can use it to your benefit (immunity to death spells).
You can get around the "reversed healing magic" issue by giving a zombified character on element absorption. Hitting them with black magic heals in spite of zombie.
These uses of Reflect predate FF10 by several years, including bouncing each hit of an AOE targeting the party at a single enemy. Notably the beginner house in FF6 included a character that would describe the single bounce limitation as a strategy for fighting an enemy with Reflect status.
it isnt an idea unique to 10 but 10 uses it really well. a particular note is that the magus sisters in 4 use targeting themself with magic to reflect it onto your party as part of their signature move delta attack, with the eldest casting reflect on the other two leading into a reflected bio or elemental spell to hit your entire party. which, come to think of it, theyre in 10 too so it works out.
I remember loving the burn effect in Pokémon gen 2 and 3. I just loved it for some reason. It was years later that I learned the burn reduced attack. I wish I knew that earlier, but that would explain a lot.
Burn > Poison for me. This is also why I use Arcanine as a tank.
@@soratheorangejuicemascot5809 True but Toxic>Burn
Bulky water types love scald
@@fattytan1377 scald + aqua ring = lol, go home.
Random notes from a hobbyist RPG developer here:
Status effects that only boost a stat, or debuff an enemy stat, and take a full turn to use, can be really boring if not handled with extreme caution. If there are several of these in your party's skillset, then you might start to see a very significant amount of turns being spent just on those buffs/debuffs at the start of every single big enemy/boss battle, and setting them all up and maintaining them starts to feel like a chore.
As an alternative, you could mix those effects/attacks in with other skills (as described in this video), or give them unique activation conditions that don't require excessive turn usage. A passive that increases crit rate when dodging, a skill that causes a character to take hits for others and increases defense for each hit tanked, an attack skill that boosts the user's attack power and does more damage at low HP... you get the idea.
Etrian Odyssey has a really good handle on status skills and status effects. Every character class has a moveset of skills which almost all have multiple purposes from status effects to possible additional hits, and some activation conditions rely on other characters' skills for some incredible synergy. Furthermore, every enemy has their weaknesses and resistances to specific status effects clearly listed, so you can plan ahead to take out tough foes and even bosses by being prepared and exploiting those weaknesses.
I was watching someone play through Paper Mario 64, and I realized that while the Charge skills are situationally useful, overall they're actually pretty bad.
Etrian Odyssey has limited slots for buffs and debuffs, so they're allowed to be REALLY powerful, and you get to make difficult decisions-like whether it's worth it to chase a dreamy combo or go for immediate survivability.
Also, the way enemies gradually gain more resistance to status as they're cast makes them feel very balanced... even when you're totally disabling a boss, you have to invest into the risk/reward of it.
+1 for Repping Etrian Odyssey. Cumulative Resistance is probably the best way to handle Bosses being able to be hit by some of the super powerful conditions . It doesn't invalidate the entire fight, it just buys you some time to DPS more and stuff
Great advice! What I've found both playing and designing abilities is that these kinds of things are only very fun when the encounters really push players to have to try different things. Some of the most fun I've had in tabletop is playing tank or support archetypes where I was constantly figuring out what I had to do.
Action economy can be really useful for this. If you use something like the D&D move-minor-standard system, then having buffs/debuffs be part of the minor or replace a move can promote a lot of tactical thinking. It's all about making sure there are interesting choices (what are you giving up by spending that turn using Haste?)
exponential damage scaling helps a lot with that. as in buffing strength to 110% increases your attack damage to 121% (or something like that).
that makes buffs decent when you have one, very good when you have 2 and then go insane after 4 or more.
and it works for debuffs too.
also dialing the sheer power of status effects down makes them better imo because then you can actually let the player use them without breaking the game.
Skyrim: Poison is weak, complicated, tedious, and half of everything is immune to it
Also Skyrim: Wearing this armor inflicts a ton of constant unavoidable AoE damage to everything nearby
ah yes, make shit one or the other end of spectrum
Admittedly that armour is the artifact of a dark god, while the poison is made by smashing two herbs together.
@@Nukestarmaster The poison is just a flat amount. Turn the difficulty down and poison insta kills everything. I remember my first time playing legendary where the frostbite brood spider in the first dungeon one shots you with it's poison.
He's definitely a fan of smt series, seeing how many of smt and persona songs he uses, and all the exemple he takes from thoses games
to be fair, persona music is peak
@@StygianPidgeon
Megaten music is peak
Great video, but I was really hoping to see that one clip of a charmed Mitsuru casting Diarahan on a low-HP Nyx, followed by an instant ragequit.
he mentioned it, but its really unfortunate that the clip wasnt there
"Shes gonna heal him, im done IM DONE its over. Its over, goodbye" -DSP, 2016
MARIN KARIN!
Me, every time BBtag gives me Mitsuru
He probably didn't want to trigger anyone's PTSD.
Or sirlionhart earrape because demifiend use diarahan to samael. Damn that thing funny asf
14:52 *talks about overpowered status effects, while Daisoujou uses mahamaon* seems about right, insta death in SMT is very obnoxious
Insta-death is always a mixed bag in SMT. from rather cool uses making you carefuly conisder which demon to bring on the MC for a boss fight or certain area.... to the utter flipside where I got sick of cheesing it in PQ. Party Wide + death boost skills = every fight over in 1-2 actions... (And then flip your opinion again when your in the final dungeon with the protag who doesn't have insta-death immunity,.
Etrian Odyssey incorporates some of the best uses for status effects I've ever experienced. Nearly every boss and normal enemy has certain status resistances and weakness. Being weak to a status increases the odds of it successfully being inflicted, and the effects are so potent the player really feels the benefits when they land. Whether that's binding a monster's arms just before they unleash a devastating, party-wide attack, or silencing a foe before they can heal their allies. Where in past games, inflicting status effects is brushed off as unreliable, in Etrian Odyssey, it is a possibility to consider every turn.
Certain classes specialize in inflicting statues, and most others have at least one or two they can use as a backup/bonus effect if a more straightforward approach isn't viable.
That's so cool!
I'm surprised that there was no mention of Bravely Default. Their whole premise is based around changing turn orders and using your special attacks to change up stats on the battlefield. They event have enemies that take away brave charges from characters, thus changing how you use your status effects.
Bravely Default's BP system is defenitely a fantastic example! Though it's also a good case study of how NOT to handle some of the more typical status effects (Bosses being immune to most statuses, Poison being useless outside BP Batteries, etc)
neversparky I remember you could pull it off with the status weakening from the rod debuff special, but yeah, you can only make a boss vulnerable to one status.
Yeah. That Bunny lady.😅😔😐
besides the BP system, it also created a whole bunch of "new" status effects that were definitely fun and useful at best, and borderline broke the game at worst. My personal favorite: the Ninja job had an ability which always goes first and forces all single-target actions to affect the designated party member for the turn. And it even works against counterattacks for some reason. Just have a party member with dual shields and immunity to all ailments use that as their only ability every turn and it literally blanks over half the boss/jobmaster fights
also, there was more than one "status" you could hit bosses with. All the debuffs you could inflict with the salve-maker's concoctions for one. Also, I had a Ringabel build (well Ringable and Agnes) which took advantage of the Time Mage passive ability to just take away a BP from every combatant every other turn, so that some enemies just didn't even get to act at all the whole battle. And literally nothing, not even the final boss, was immune to that
I once make a boss suffer from a status aliment with special attacks. It was the salve master, and that was the only way i found to beat him...
And then later i knew about the dispell spell.
Another things I would like to add are:
1. The differences between similar effects, for example, in Pokemon both poison and burn makes the same effect of damage over time, but burn from what I know also debuffs the opponent's attack, and that against a more elaborated AI can be an important decision.
2. The presentation, this is more oriented to the UI so is understandable that you didn't talk about it, but if the status effect isn't clear with what it does or when is happening the player would be annoyed with that weird symbol which doesn't have an explanation in-game and would force the player to research outside of the game and would also make the player forget about it and don't do anything about it, frustrating the player's experience with the game.
PD: Thanks for add something about Lisa the Painful at the end, I love it
That's a good thing to point out! Having status effects that have similar effects but differ in some meaningful way adds good strategic depth. The example I'd go to is Darkest Dungeon, where Bleed and Blight (poison) are both Damage over Time effects, but apply that damage differently. Furthermore, enemies can be resistant to one but not the other, allowing you to formulate an alternative strategy instead of just being locked out of using DoT skills.
Well some games have had Burn also have weaker defense. I think Chrono Cross had this. Wished they brought Venom and bio back from F.F. 4. Can to lamb,piggy to. Wild Arms series had similar,but different and deadly ones. As Disease and Meltdown. Although I think F.F. 8 had some kind of Meltdown to.
Yeah, burn halves the ennemy's attack. Status are insanely good in competitive mons. Scald is a 80 bp (high enough to do damage) water move that has a 30% chance to burn. It's so good that a lot of water mons like to slot it in just for the incremental damage, like choice specs keldeo.
One of my favorite instances of status effect usage is in "Labyrinth of Touhou 2".
The game is a turn-based JRPG with an ATB (similar to Final Fantasy 5 - 9).
Stat buffs and debuffs work in the way that they decay, meaning each turn, some of their effectiveness wears off, but in turn, casting the same buff or debuff will stack up to a maximum.
One of the characters, a tank specifically, has an ability to increase her own physical and magical defenses by a lot, while also paralyzing herself, making her lose a lot of her turns.
The first instinct is to give her paralysis negating gear, but it's actually better to embrace the paralysis. Since you lose some of your stat buffs each turn. being paralyzed will prevent you from losing stat buffs, meaning you will have to spend less of your valuable MP to reapply your stat buffs. And since the character is pretty much useless outside of taking hits for your team, you're not really losing out by having one character less to combat your opponents.
Long story short, Labyrinth of Touhou 2 managed to turn a negative status condition into a boon to your character.
FF10
YUNALESCA
You WANT to be Zombie'd at a certain point in that Boss Battle!
that’s actually cool as hell
I read this a long time ago (so the details could be completely wrong), but there was a game that managed to turn a positive status effect into a setback. A certain boss would buff you with haste, but they would also inflict poison. Thus, though you were faster, the damage over time would be accelerated to severe levels
similar interactions would be forcing Reflect onto a party that desperately needs healing, or attack buffs to charmed/confused characters. Lots of neat gimmicks to be made with status effects
Ayyy LoT2! Tenshi also has her buff wipe skill, which is a god send. Not counting the offensive meme sets of course.
I actually wanted to bring up Pokemon as an example of how a status effect can be a boon in the right hands. But LoT did it really well as well now that I think of it. Definately an underappreciated game.
I like that one pokemon move that confuses you but sharply increases your damage, kinda quirky.
So we can enjoy the slow torture of watching someone walk through blighttown while toxic and scrambling to stay alive.
The entire Epic Battle Fantasy series, particularly 5, is based around the concept of utilizing abilities and states that would be completely useless in other, more traditional, RPGs. Would you believe me if I told you that Wet is one of the most useful states in the entirety of 4 and 5?
Temper + whatever the Nolegs katana thing is called + Light + enemy weak to wind + Wispy Strike(or upgraded version thereof) can do over a million damage. Hell, just the katana and Temper with Wispy Strike alone does 600K even without a wind weakness being hit.
@@lucasmatignon9666 but makes nolegs as frail as a lvl 1 slime..
Status effects in the Etrian Odyssey series are extremely important, and they come in three distinct types.
Binds are hybrid debilitators: Leg Bind reduces Agility and disables evasion and the Escape command, Arm Bind reduces physical damage and many skills, and Head Bind reduces TEC (or INT) and disables a number of more magic-like skills. Any or all of these can coexist on one target.
Ailments consist of more of the traditional effects: poisioning, paralysis, petrification, etc. etc. Generally these come in a hierarchy, and higher-priority ailments override lower-priority ones - and can't be overridden in return. Blind tends to be low, petrify tends to be pretty high. Probably the most creative one is EO3's Plague, which spreads to your other characters if left untreated.
Buffs and Debuffs are more direct modifications to stats and such. Troubadour songs, Sovereign Orders, and the like go here, and each party member and enemy can have three of each. Depending on the game, it's possible to use a buff or debuff that affects the same thing to cancel these out.
In a video about status effects I'm really surprised not to see Etrian Odyssey anywhere in your examples. They have what has to be one of my favorite status systems in video games; Binds. Every enemy is broken into "parts" like in Monster Hunter, but and each "part" (head, arms, and legs) has certain skills associated with it. You use "Binds" to inflict a Silence Like condition for a few turns, and like in monster hunter, enemies build up resistance over time to any status you might inflict. Most bosses can actually be affected by other status conditions, too, but the most useful one by far is "bind". Say a boss has a powerful attack that uses its head, you can try to bind its head and that will lock it out of using that attack until the bind wears off.
Pair this with Atlus's typical brutal difficulty and you have a set up for really fun and a surprisingly unique spin on JRPG gameplay.
I came to the comments section specifically to mention Etrian Odyssey’s system as well, I love it to bits
Earthbound's homesickness is an interesting status ailment since no enemy can give you this effect (you have a 1/256 chance of getting it after the end of a battle starting from level 15-75)and you can't use an item or PSI to cure it; instead needing you to talk to your Mother to cure it
ATLUS in general has some really interesting ideas when it comes to using buffs and debuffs. Not all of them are good (Persona 3 is a really good example).
My personal callout is the Bind system from Etrian Odyssey. Almost every attack in the game, player or enemy, uses either the head, arms, or legs. And there are moves and items that can temporarily bind them, preventing the character from using moves with that part.
It also uses a variant of SMT's buff/debuff system: An ATK Up will negate an ATK Down rather than them applying separately. Casting multiples of the same buff only increases the time, though, not the effect.
You also can't keep stacking up buffs endlessly, since you can only have 3 unique buffs and debuffs at once on each character.
13:06 Ah! I was hoping Bug Fables would show. And in a moment of good too.
Your videos are always great, keep up the good work.
One interesting example of using status effects from Xenoblade Chronicles is Riki's art, Say Sorry. Say Sorry is a physical attack that removes all the debuffs from the enemy, but increases the damage of the attack for each debuff the enemy has. On top of that, Riki has 5 other arts that inflict debuffs (paralysis, poison, blaze, chill, and bleed), so you can stack up a shit ton of debuffs on the enemy, and use Say Sorry for massive damage.
I'm glad you acknowledged the Trails games (both with that brief video clip of Trails in the Sky FC and with Sophisticated Fight as background music), because I find the status effects in those games to be super interesting when combined with its fluid turn ordering. Having temporary status effects (HP/EP/CP heal, zero-cost spells, CP drain to 0, critical damage, etc) bound to specific turns adds a new level of strategy to managing player speed and turn order -- just buffing your team's speed and delaying your opponents as much as possible isn't necessarily the best strategy, because that could end up giving an opponent a critical turn or giving one of your party members a CP-0 turn. That also ties into managing CP -- if an enemy is going to get a critical turn soon, do I interrupt the turn order with an S-Break and steal the critical effect for myself, or do I preserve my party member's CP and try to tank the critical hit? Alternatively, do I try to inflict an ailment like Seal/Mute/Sleep on the enemy before their turn so they can't take advantage of the critical bonus? Add in the combat link system from Trails of Cold Steel, and critical turns become much more important because it also means a guaranteed follow-up from your link partner. There's a lot of interesting strategy that can be done, which is one of the reasons why I've been so hooked on the series recently
Seeing the Trails footage reminded me of how powerful the spell Chaos Brand was in the first game. It was cheap, easy to acquire, and almost always worked if the enemy wasn't immune to confusion.
So.. What colour do we use use for the next video?
Dan and Mike: *YES*
The geo effects from Disgaea are genius.
It adds so much dimension to the game for people wanting more out of it and makes use of the lifting mechanic while also being incredibly flexible and diverse.
They can also take the form of a more traditional status effect system for players who are there for the main campaign alone!
Also, status effects in Disgaea are not useless, which is nice. I had a shaman character that could move around and put enemies to sleep, or a group of mages that cast buffed attack on my axe guy.
One thing I'd like to add to all this is the timing/pacing of statuses and their potencies can change a playstyle a ton. I'll be using SMT 3/Nocturne and 4 as my primary examples here with their main stuff: stat buffs. For a quick breakdown, Taru = attack, Raku = defense, Maka = magic (Nocturne only) ,and Suku = accuracy/evasion/speed and suffixes are -kaja = increase, -nda = decrease.
The second thing I would like to quickly bring up are the 'end game' stat changing buffs; Luster Candy and Debilitate. Luster (rough translation from RaSuTa) Candy, in the games it appears, is a party-wide buff that increases all stats one stage.
Plain, simple, super effective. Debilitate does the opposite by debuffing all of the enemy party's stats a stage. Compared to possibly focusing on a couple stats early on or taking quite a bit of time to use it all.
Third thing. Dekaja and Dekunda. What do these do? They remove all stat changes then and there. There's a boss exclusive skill that comes into play much later where it's a full stat change wipe for both parties in a single action and, more often than not, will be used if the boss is fully debuffed or your party is fully buffed. Onto the meat now
You can get an early skill in 4 called Fang Breaker. What does it do? Small amount of damage and *attack* *down*. It's very early and you probably wouldn't have Tarunda for a while longer. So it's fantastic to have, especially for bosses. But it's single target. Have to make it count.
On the other hand, you will eventually find demons with non-element Breath attacks, specifically Fog Breath and Acid Breath with effects differing between 3 and 4. In 3, Fog Breath reduces agility by *two* stages. In 4, it instead affects agility and attack, each only one stage. Regardless, both blow Sukukaja out of the water and both are surprisingly early depending on the demon you use or magatama in 3. Being able to drop multiple stats or multiple stages early is very huge, even at end game where you might have Debilitate and/or Luster Candy ready.
I gotta comment on the way Golden Sun's status system and comprehensive Djinn system blend together. It's simply amazing.
Phenomenal Footage.
You very clearly illustrate concepts for novices, avid players and developers. Your selection of games is excellent as well.
i respect the sponsor transition, but not enough to actually watch it.
And?
same
Whether we watch it or not doesn’t matter. They still made their money from even putting it in the video.
I'd like to give Etrian Odyssey and Persona Q props for not only making status ailments useful, but also giving you incentive to actively use them. Hell, some classes in EO specialize in inflicting ailments and do more damage if enemies are under specific ailments.
Just a small bit I noticed from my decades of JRPGS: If the first time a player uses a status effect spell, and that spell misses, then the player will NEVER use that spell again. First time use should have a huge buff to hit% to encourage the player to use the mechanic.
@Diamond Frieza I think he was more referring to how poor first impressions could turn players away from a spell even if it is well balanced in the long term
@Diamond Frieza New players wouldn’t know what those strategies are. The point is to cater to them so that they don’t get scared off using utility spells because they just happen to fail the first time they use them. A min/maxer wouldn’t be put off by the ideal strategy having a 99% success rate.
@Diamond Frieza But people don’t. Casual gamers just get games they think look cool and get put off if something doesn’t work.
@Diamond Frieza Enjoy ruining the games industry and never getting any AA or AAA game again, then
@Diamond Frieza Hardcore elitism is not the way to go. Especially when you’re on a game design channel where the entire point is to make your game better for more people.
This is excellent! I think a big part of what might need more expanding upon is the consequence of dissipating a status effect, as that can dramatically impact continuing forward in a game. Items, inventory management, spell/MP availability, using turns to heal, the consequences of things like REFLECT, theres a lot of content to work with. In Legend of Dragoon for example, poison does massive damage but you also have a limited inventory, so your percieved value of items that cure that condition is raised, but you also value those item slots more. Plenty to ponder :)
A common way they are handled well is by "tiering" them
basically, the more simple and less impactful the effect is, the easier to apply and the easier to remove
The more powerful it's, then it's the other way around
In terms of applying difficulty, the effect could cost more mana to apply or have a longer cooldown, while the effect that removes it could have the same issues
You know, as I watched this video, I started to consider other things that are related.
First is status resistance/immunity. Bosses being affliction-proof has been around a long time as a cheap way to make a fight tougher, but sometimes mobs can have immunity to certain afflictions as well. It's a tricky balancing act and should be done in a way that makes sense. One way I thought of doing it is that while bosses should be immune to the most debilitating effects (instakilling a boss should be a puzzle and not just "press X to deathspell"), they're not immune to everything. In the game engine I've been theorizing, most every affliction has levels which determine how badly the affliction affects the target; bosses can be immune to all but the lowest levels of those afflictions, which still gives those afflictions meaning. For example, let's say Poison does more damage, and impairs accuracy and evasion, at higher levels; with this setup, while the boss' probability factors won't be affected, they still take gradual damage from being poisoned.
Another is status treatment. Yeah, there are antidotes and other remedies that appear throughout the games, but if some multi-status remedy comes along, there needs to be some factor besides cost to balance them out, because - let's face it - once the late game or endgame roll around, you're going to run out of "better equipment" to buy, and if that multi-remedy is more efficient than specialized remedies, the specialized remedies are going to be an afterthought. In the system I had in mind, things would be different: while multi-remedies exist, they are only capable of treating every status at once. The dedicated status remedies instead replace the status they "cure" with a special status that not only overwrites the intended status, but prevents its reapplication for some time.
So basically avoid simplicity and add complexity to everything a player can do or use. I like the idea of your second paragraph where things like antidotes prevent getting poison for some time. It is all a game of balancing the value of each move or item. But isnt it likely that by the endgame enemies and bosses tend to use multiple effects at the same time, still making single effect recovery items obsolete by that time?
For the sake of this argument let's say status afflictions could go 5 deep. I would think a multi remedy would only cure 1 to 2 levels of all statuses while a targeted remedy could eliminate 4 to 5 depending on the price.
Thank you for this video. I'm designing a game with a lot of status effects myself and it's been reaffirming to hear that I've been designing them in a decent fashion.
How about the Hollowed status from the Dark Souls game. It added a whole heap of risk/reward, you had to spend resources to enable cooperative help whilst also opening yourself up to the risk of invasions. If you died then the Humanity you spent was gone, so do you spend another Humanity for another chance at an easier boss fight with coop help?
Thing is, all those things only apply to online play. If you play offline, the only uses for being human are kindling bonfires (for whatever reason), sunmoning NPCs before bossfights and a bunch of side stuff like Lautrec's questline.
@@robonerd125 in ds2 you can burn effigies at bonfires to disable invasions for a while. just saying.
@@AlexanderMartinez-kd7cz Can't you just play offline for that? or just disconnect your console from the internet mid-play if you started playing online
Only the lowest of the low play offline.
@@Dinoman972old comment but there are a few other benefits, though they are relatively minor. each point of humanity up to 10 raises item discovery, and any amount of liquid humanity will increase your damage resistance with each point being an equivalent to 1 level in vitality and attunement, stacking all the way up to 99 humanity, as well as boosting curse resistance up to 120 at 30 humanity.
My most memorable status effect is the "Gravity" status effect by the "Wall of Flesh" boss in Terraria in a specially difficult modded game-mode. It flipped you screen upside down when you got hit for some ~5 seconds, which had a huge effect on disorienting the player, even though it had no actual in-game effect. Very fun and chaotic boss fight.
One of the coolest parts of status effects is discovering unintended exploits. Like in Oblivion where you can make custom spells with the same OP status effect with a different name and stack them until the starting fireball spell is a one-hit kill. Fun for those who want to go through all that trouble and completely ignorable if you don't want to do it.
I was a fan of how smt sorta relied on its buffs and debuffs. And how the press turn system almost required you to take huge consideration about how your actions effect the pacing
Burnout from Monster Train is an amazing status effect. You can play reform cards that not only bring dead units back to life, but also buff their stats. However, reforming units applies burnout, a number that ticks down each turn. Once the burnout reaches 0, that unit dies. The best part is that some units have abilities that only trigger once another unit dies, so you can use the burnout timer to your advantage. Monster Train has many more awesome status effects that are at the core of the combat. I highly recommend checking it out.
wow, i've never realized how much of an impact status effects have on most games. very well-made video!! thanks and keep it up :D
I just got the notification for this, but i better see vanilla p5's final boss while watching this
but that boss sucked imo
too easy of a boss
But the boss is all about status effects. Yeah it could've been better, but it is one of the few final bosses I've seen do anything like it
Is there spoilers?
@@legendarytat8278 not really if you only watch the fight segements but watch out anyways
I really appreciate that if you brainwash an enemy in Persona 5 Royal there's a chance you can just tell them to submit to you instead of negotiating with them. It's a neat mechanic that makes the effect extra worth while.
FFTA2 had a similar ability for the paladin called Parley, you can tell any human enemy to surrender, with the chance increasing the lower they are in health, even then the move sucks because by the point it has any significant chance to work the enemy is already a few hits away from death
I never knew that!
I'm just posting to say that seeing Skies of Arcadia made me feel happy. I hope that game gets a PC release (perhaps even a remaster) one day.
Also, my favorite status effect is getting mercenaries drunk in Jagged Alliance 2; some will go from hating a team mate to loving them after a bottle of liquor.
16:58 to be fair this can happen in any smt/persona game. i remember getting charmed in the lucifer fight and that demon fully healed him and he has a significantly higher hp bar and very high defense compared to nyx avatar.
I think the other problem with Mitsuru was the fact you can't control your party action on P3.
She's supposed to be the substitute for Yukari. The healer, but with more offenses.
But when You used Her, She doesn't use heal that much(due to her offensive nature). Even when you set her as the support.
"Support? So does that mean I have to use Marin Karin 90% of the time?"
So the impact of seeing Her healing the opponents on her first turn being charmed REALLY pisses you off.
Thank God for the PSP version, for giving the control to the player.
Ridwan A she’s more a Black Mage
It’s Ken who’s the substitute for Yukari
In a way, even basic hit-stun featured in nearly any game with combat is a sort of status effect.
Persona 4 Arena
FGC with RPG ailments!
MARIN KARIN!
I like the idea of the every boss being able to be effected by status effect except the final boss.
The final boss being immune to most common status effects like poison, blind etc but being extremely weak to some obscure status effect that you know the players will under look and in turn discover how powerful/what those effects really do and in turn incentivize a new playthrough
NOOO!!! Not the money down status effect! It affects only UA-camrs, and the worst part is that it is always cast randomly and takes a random amount of time to cure. By then, most of the battle is over. They need to patch that out.
*affects
You obviously have not heard about the Hula of Misfortune from Persona 2. :D
@@Mewseeker Macca beam in SMT IV...
The real question is, how did he know that the status effect was going to show up before he uploaded the video. I refuse to believe that the sponsor got added to the video after the money down status got applied.
10:28 The trope I hate the most in boss fights. This brings the battle down to the same level as a random mob encounter, resulting in bruteforcing your way through.
What's the point of grinding for all those spells that inflict status effect if the majority of late game bosses are immune to everything!?
Immune to quick kills makes sense because BOSS BATTLE
But EVERYTHING.... Just... don't
They seem to have learned their lesson in FF7R
I was surprised that you could put the mechanical fish to sleep
@@pn2294 The original was also kinda "nice" in that regard. You can posion Rufus, beat the GI shaman witha phoenix down and so on. But its fckn hard to find out because half the effects dont have a visual you can see or a text that lets you know that your effect did something or didnt do anything.
16:08 I do love how well the story and gameplay mechanics of Xenoblade Chronicles tie together in regards to visions of instant-KO attacks.
Darkest Dungeon and Etrian Odyssey really make status effects shine.
They're fundamental to progress.
When all the mooks go down in a few hits so status effects are pointless, but bosses are immune to status effects when they would be helpful is just awful design. And that's why I love the Tales series. For the most part, bosses in Tales games aren't immune to statuses. In Tales of Destiny Remake, even the super boss can be affected by any status effect so poisoning him helps a lot to chip away at all his HP, and even full stun effects like sleep and petrifaction work on him. Helps that ToDR also has weapons for all the main characters that carry statuses on all their attacks, both physical and magical. Petri-locking bosses with Leon is so broken but feels so good. Rutee's sleep-locking Tidal Wave/Maelstrom combo is also fun.
Give Falcom's Trails/Kiseki series a look, with the right planning and setup it is possible beat bosses on the hardest difficulty without taking damage through the use of status effects, while on the easier difficulties even the mooks pose a challenge if you employ the classic JRPG strategy of "spam attack to win". They don't feel grindy either because of how the exp system works.
"Great is the weapon that cuts on its own"
2:14 Trails in the Sky, one of my favorite games.
I really liked status effects and technical attacks in P5. And not just on themselves but the way it worked with the talking system, want that persona? You better not leave it speechless.
Sleep bombing in Monster Hunter is still my favorite status effect strategy in any game.
I really appreciate you having captions on your videos!! I'm not hard of hearing, but I sometimes have trouble focusing on what people say, so I always have captions on whenb possiuble.
I love Frigid Coffin in Bug Fables.
It's a freeze spell that freezes enemies and bosses often. Leif gets from a level up early on. Why I love it so much is that it has a 3tp cost (semi low amount) and does 4 damage (base attack does 2 for reference).
This is great because you still can use it as a nice damage dealing move, no matter your luck. The other two character's skills also do 4 damage, though Kabbu's is defence peirceing and Vi's hits multiple times, making attack ups much stronger. Proves you can make attacks that deal the same damage be varried.
Leif is clearly the Status Boi and that's why I like him
I'm saving this video to a playlist JUST because it has so many rpgs and a good few I've never even seen. I'm gonna love going through all the games here.
This is why I love Persona 5 Royal, the status effects actively make the game more fun when you use them because of the genius Technical system.
I like that it created a stronger synergies between some of the characters, like having Makoto and Haru together. Makoto causes confusion and then Haru destroys the confused enemy via technical. Or Ann and any of the heavy hitters with the sleep technical, or Makoto/Morgana with Ann and the burn technical.
Seriously I actively was using ailments, one of my favorite combos early game was to use shikioji on Kanishiro's body guard to rage than block any damage.
The persona series is not exactly difficult though, so applying status effects will just waste your time
Ironically, despite the intricacies of the Press-Turn-Lite system that is One More, the best possible strategy is the rampant use of physical attacks with a massive Luck stat behind them
Mid-game bosses to late-game tend to have no weaknesses, so critting them with huge physical damage is more optimal, ESPECIALLY if you have Pierce
@@devranyilmaz9806 Physical + Peirce is the OP start in about 50% of the SMT series. The other half it's often total garbage. Guessing which is always fun when you relaise you have stat points to spend in siad spinoffs
In another way, it felt annoying that the shortened the duration of status effects
I really loved how you added Trails in the Sky to your video. It's one of my favorite games with probably the most interesting action economies out there. I hope you're gonna make a video about that soon ^^
Playing FF7 remake on Hard and Persona 5 royal on merciless difficulty was a great way to be forced to take advantage of status effects. putting Rufus to sleep then 1 shotting him with infinity edge is so satisfying
I was genuinely surprised and delighted that FF7R had so much room for strategy based around elemental and status effects.
Like, poisoning the Hellhouse saved my bacon in that war of attrition. In hard mode, remembering that the first Reno fight abused lightning attacks let me use elemental to just absorb everything. Sleep actually worked often on several bosses. And, critically, having elemental fire in my armor for the Pride and Joy gauntlet stopped me from dying when Ifrit showed up and broke the delicate balance of the enemy's DPS by adding a bunch of fire to the mix.
I've been working on a tabletop rpg that runs things the opposite of your example of combat without status effects, and make things like "hurt," "reeling," and "tired" into status effects to be inflicted and completely doing away with hp meters. It's pretty good.
I finished my first Etrian Odyssey game earlier this week (Etrian Odyssey Untold) and that game had fun combat and bunch of tricks you can utilize in battles.
For example, you have a character with a passive skill that lets them attack a random enemy whenever they take damage. The class has access to all kinds of other skills that hurt yourself but also attacks at the same time or gives buffs. So you can get extra attacks on enemies on both your turn and your opponent's turn.
But then there's also the Grimoire Stone system which gives you access to skills from other classes or even enemies. You can use Vulcan Stance to make normal attacks deal damage on all enemies for few turns and that includes the attack you perform by taking damage. Or maybe add a passive Penetrator skill that makes normal attacks pierce through enemy lines, giving you a chance of attacking two enemies at once. Or you can up your defense and make enemies attack you more often by using Provoke.
Unfortunately EO suffers somewhat from the same problem as most other RPGs. The normal battles are so short that you are better off just attacking instead of using status effects. Although it gets partially around the problem by having some loot that can be only obtained if the enemy has been inflicted with certain status effect or is killed with a specific type of attack. And there are some stronger enemies that feel like bosses if you decide to battle them early.
Most bosses are single enemy encounters so all attacks that hit multiple enemies can be thrown out of the window but at least they can be hit with status effects. Binding the final boss's arms was a huge help since it made it unable to use an attack that reflects all of your attacks for one turn. I basically killed myself on my first try since I didn't know it had a skill like that.
I think part of that is because Untold is a bit on the easy side for an EO game. In many of the other games (especially the first three), you really need to take full advantage of your available status effects just to survive the normal battles, as regular enemies can quickly overwhelm you if you're careless.
It does somewhat depend on the team you use, as some classes are far more dependent on statues on others, but most of the really good team comps make liberal use of status effects, because they make such a huge difference.
Depends, on your party comp, and whether or not you're playing on Expert mode. EO generally has some of the most useful status effects of any turn based rpg though. Bindings and buffs/debuffs/walls are all fantastic for standard battles in my experience.
Yes
The First Persona game in PS1
I GUNNED DOWN MY WHOLE PARTY
Just came in to say that your thumbnails are so good, but this is my favourite one
This is why turn based rpgs are not really dead yet. With the right impelementation of status effects like in the Shin megam tensei games, you can make combat more interesting and also to avoid the game being a press "a" or "x" to win every damn time.
Play reaaal Shin megooomi tensei like Jack bros
Happy to see Skies of Arcadia representation :)
That game had some pretty overpowered status effects. The prevalence of instant-death magic in certain sections means you're pretty much forced to use one character's anti-magic ability every turn, effectively preventing them from taking any other action. Also applies for enemies that use whole-party debuff, sleep or confuse spells.
I love that you kept cutting back to Persona 3 and Nyx Avatar when talking about how Charm can screw you over. Hehe.
To elaborate for those who don't know, Persona 3's final boss (Nyx Avatar) is a 14 phase boss fight that slowly rotates through the first 14 tarot arcana. Each of the first 13 phases has 1,500 HP, changing resistances and skills every phase. This is basically made to wear you down for...
The final phase, the Death Arcana, has _6,000_ HP, strong skills, and two nasty unique skills. Moonless Gown lets Nyx block all damage for a few turns - including the normally unblockable Almighty damage type, cheating bastard.
The second is Night Queen. It's heavy Almighty (unclockable) damage to the whole party, with a random chance of inflicting *any* status effect. By this point in the game, your healers will have Diarahan (single target) or Mediarahan (multi-target), which are _full heals._ So it's entirely possible to have to fight the 6,000 HP phase from the beginning.
Nyx gets two actions a turn.
Oof
This sounds like a super-boss rather than the final boss of the game. I know the last boss should be hard, but this is overkill.
@@Johnof1000Suns Once, a representative of ATLUS USA(ATLUS Japan made P3) said "we get off on your tears".
Making stupidly annoying bosses is one thing ATLUS are known for, and hard games in general are their forte.
Sounds like bad boss design
@@mads_in_zero They killed me with royals Okumura.
You’re sponsorship status effect was very clever! I love your channel!
Destiny 2's recent foray into Status Effects and how they interact with Major Enemies is I think an example of what not to do. For people who don't play, in high level activities Destiny's recently introduced the Champion system, featuring three types of Champions that are each vulnerable to a specific Status Effect you can apply to your weapons and some abilities. Barrier champions have the ability to make themselves temporarily immune to damage and heal themselves, but if you use an Anti-Barrier weapon you can break the immune effect and stun them. Overload champion regenerate health and use abilities more quickly, but a Disruption weapon stops the regen and stuns them. Unstoppable enemies have a huge damage resistance buff and rush players down, but Staggering weapons remove that damage buff and stun them.
You may have already seen the problem. Each and every champion design is some flavor of "If you don't have X, this is going to be a nightmare. If you do have X, this is going to be a cakewalk." There's not really any thought put into it, you just have to have the right gun and enough damage to kill them while they're stunned. Not a very dynamic system. And it has two additional problems; Firstly, what weapons you have available to counter any specific Champion changes every Season, and are almost universally Primary weapons, which are the weakest of the three types of weapons with the most prolific ammo (A good idea on paper, but it means any Primary weapons that can't have Champion mods applied to them are trash). And Secondly, while this system works reasonably well in groups where each player might have one or two tools for countering specific champions, it breaks if you either don't have teammates covering the gaps in your own build, or don't have teammates in general. If you don't have an Anti-Overload weapon and you're facing an overload champion, then it looks like it's time for you to completely change your build mid-activity.
On the plus side, the Status Effect system is at least moderately relevant against non-Champions. Anti-Barrier weapons are able to pierce the defense screens of a lot of common enemies, making things like Phalanxes and Hydras less tedious to fight. Anti-Overload weapons reduce incoming damage making them useful against moderate-sized enemies. Anti-Unstoppable weapons deal AoE damage by default, letting you stagger groups of enemies. So it's not all-bad, but it's heavy-handed and incredibly frustrating, even in activities where all of your based are covered, simply due to the fact that the teammate with the appropriate tool might simply be preoccupied with other threats.
Yeah, lock and key scenarios make the battle more of a gear check and a puzzle than an actual "fight". It links back to the "overpowered" downside mentioned in the video.
@@benedict6962 Lock and Key is kind of why i hate, and have barely performed any, raids. The fact that Raids are big fat puzzles in a game that is mostly just "shoot face, get -somewhat disappointing- loot" means that people who don't like forming groups like myself just can't ever do them (i've only ever done the first raid of both games, and the only reason i was there was because they needed a warm body and a friend recommended me) and the champion system is a big reason i just stopped playing, cause "play how you want" got thrown out the window in exchange for "hope you like bows this season"
Edit: VoG was also a piss easy "puzzle" compared to the vast majority of Raids, since "shoot the noisy things" and "don't get spotted in the obvious stealth section" are pretty simple compared to whatever the fuck the Baths section in Leviathan was all about...
Dark Souls 1, when you get "egged" blocking the helmet slot from being equipped until a special item is used.