Lord Shplane
Of course, what really annoys me about other bosses is how the idiots always have some HUGE AWESOME LOOKING ATTACK that BLOWS UP THE PLANET/SUN/GALAXY/UNIVERSE but somehow manages to NOT KILL THE HERO. *cough*Sephiroth*cough*.

What's worse is when that attack has an animation that takes about TEN FREAKIN' MINUTES. I have other things to do with my life, y'know? And every time they use that attack, the animation shows in full and is unskippable. I GET IT, YOU BLEW UP PLUTO. I'VE SEEN IT SIX TIMES NOW. *wanders off to do some baking* *comes back* You're not done yet?!? *twitch*

mlai

stabbyfairy
(Also, I love this website. It's like it knows what I'm thinking... XD [tvtropes.org])

NOOOOOOOO.....! You just made me waste another 2 hours of my life reading that site instead of drawing! :dizzy:

I'M SORRY, SOOO SORRY! o_O
Almost makes me glad I don't connect my laptop (my workin' 'puter) to the 'net. But Freecell has that same effect on me. Just one more game, then I'll draw another page. OK, I'll just WIN another game then draw som'thin. Oh, who am I kidding? *closes GIMP* XD

You know what's funny?... That we call them bosses

I like to imagine Bowser as some kind of CEO, and all those goombas and turtles worrying about their health plan and 401k. And the employee of the month is a piranha plant.

I don't know who first started calling bosses bosses.

Nintendo Power?

STABBYFAIRY
What's worse is when that attack has an animation that takes about TEN FREAKIN' MINUTES. I have other things to do with my life, y'know? And every time they use that attack, the animation shows in full and is unskippable. I GET IT, YOU BLEW UP PLUTO. I'VE SEEN IT SIX TIMES NOW. *wanders off to do some baking* *comes back* You're not done yet?!? *twitch*

TOTALLY. sol blade from golden sun.

'Isaac's Sol Blade lets out a howl!'
'Meggido!'
*I go for a shower*
10 minutes later...
me : 'hurry up and hit the guy.'

XD

'Isaac's Sol Blade lets out a howl!'
'Meggido!'
*I go for a shower*
10 minutes later...
me : 'hurry up and hit the guy.'

XD

lol! I remember that. Long animations are nice the first one or 2 times you do them or when you go back to DESTROY the begin game monsters but when you are doing something like leveling up there really should be a way to turn the animation off.

I hate it when bosses curse.... especially when they sing! Of course, this boss is a big pile of.... nevermind.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0w5neFPat1w

i am the great mighty poo
and i'm going to throw my shit at yooooouuuu

HILARIOUS!!!!

Man, that guy has class.

My beef is with bosses that do special stuff. For instance, in Super Mario RPG, there's a boss who steals all your items (Croco, 2nd time you fight him). Another boss (Bowyer) can disable your ability to use magic, use items, or attack.

The other thing that REALLY gets my goat is when a boss battle is rigged so that you will always (or, almost always) lose, but the game goes on anyway. If it goes on after you lose this time, why doesn't it go on (albeit, perhaps somewhat the worse for you) after you lose that time?

SoItBegins
My beef is with bosses that do special stuff. For instance, in Super Mario RPG, there's a boss who steals all your items (Croco, 2nd time you fight him). Another boss (Bowyer) can disable your ability to use magic, use items, or attack.

Those where fun and actually pretty easy.

Yes, but in a nastier RPG, that wouldn't have been fun, it would have been fatal.


Oh, and I still think the rigged battles (see my last post) are evil.

SoItBegins
Oh, and I still think the rigged battles (see my last post) are evil.

The rigged battles do tend to be more like playable cutscenes (in that they're plot points or something) than actual fights.
I gotta admit though that after 2 hopeless fights against Yggdrasill in Tales of Symphonia, I went into the third one and thought, "OK, this time I'll just let him kill me and not waste my precious items." Too bad that was the one I was supposed to win. XD

Every time I come up on a battle that you are supposed to lose I can't help but re load my game and go train for another 5 hours and try to beat them.

vgman
Every time I come up on a battle that you are supposed to lose I can't help but re load my game and go train for another 5 hours and try to beat them.

What, after they've beaten you?
You do know they usually have infinite HP or something similar, right? XD

Meh, I've done it too. Well, tried. I hate level grinding.

It's always fun to try even if it seams like they have infinite hp. I don't think there is any such thing ass infinite when it comes to RPG's 9 out of 10 times I usually beat the person any way, maybe iIm just not playing the right game. The only time I don't do it is when the fight is at the very beginning where you have like 30 hp and he hits you for like 9723 damage, or when you can't even hit the guy your fighting.

Any way the newer RPG bosses are pretty gay any way. There still as hard but they don't put out NEARLY as much xp as they used to. I remember when I beat a boss I would go up like 4 levels. Today its barly one if that.

One more thing. Why do you hate level grinding? Its one of the best parts about RPG's.
Can't beat a boss? Go back and train a little bit more! Before you know it that boss will be kissing your feat!

Any way thats my opinion.

heh, that's like in golden sun. (the game was awesome, it was just soooo cliche)
you have to fight the two main antagonists at the start, and cos i knew that if you lose in an rpg, turn it off and back on, i lost, and tried to beat them again, and again, and again. then i gave in, and realised i had to lose to proceed. i was so pissed off!! if the elite four in the pokemon games can be counted as bosses, i hate how you get them down to their last pokemon, at 1 health, then they use a full restore!! i f*cking hate it!!

I hate the games where you charge up your best attack and lay into them, then they TELEPORT OUT OF THE EFFING WAY!! Yeah, Phoenix Magnion and a bunch of other bosses do that. I swear Magnion is harder than the final boss!

Actually, in Lufia the Legend Returns for GBC, every "unbeatable" boss can be beaten with a lot of work (And plenty of hibombs). Usually, you get rewarded with a really awesome item for doing so. I like the ones where victory is optional.

I hate bosses who can, at the flick of a finger, use a restoration ability that you cannot hope to match. (Final Bowser from paper mario heals for 30 at the drop of a hat)

vgman
It's always fun to try even if it seams like they have infinite hp. I don't think there is any such thing ass infinite when it comes to RPG's 9 out of 10 times I usually beat the person any way, maybe iIm just not playing the right game. The only time I don't do it is when the fight is at the very beginning where you have like 30 hp and he hits you for like 9723 damage, or when you can't even hit the guy your fighting.

Any way the newer RPG bosses are pretty gay any way. There still as hard but they don't put out NEARLY as much xp as they used to. I remember when I beat a boss I would go up like 4 levels. Today its barly one if that.

One more thing. Why do you hate level grinding? Its one of the best parts about RPG's.
Can't beat a boss? Go back and train a little bit more! Before you know it that boss will be kissing your feat!

Any way thats my opinion.

Oh yeah, bosses that don't level you are annoying. And I have indeedy tried (and once managed) to beat someone I was s'posed to lose to and I cheered like a crazy thing. XD

I don't mind a little level grinding so long as a) it's worth it and b) I'm not just fighting the same monster over and over again. That gets boring. I'm far more likely to ability grind or money grind though. I'm not looking at the level the characters are, I'm looking at what they can do or buy. I guess that's one of the reasons I enjoyed FFIX - the ability system suited my playing style down to the ground.

No game should have "unbeatable" bosses. If you have to lose fo story purposes, they really shouldn't make you do the fight to begin with and just resolve the story issue in a cut scene.

One thing I get sick of is bosses with obvious patterns. Action games seem to follow a simple pattern of throwing waves of small fry enemies at you which have decent AI only to end a stage with a retarded giant-sized boss who uses a predictable pattern. I find more often than not, an action game boss can be taken down without losing getting hit if you know the trick to beating them. I'd rather they spent more time creating intelligent bosses which fought the player on equal terms than a large boss who used predictable and easily dodgeable patterns.

In RPGs, they could also use a little better AI in general, rather than rely on random number geenrators to determine who gets hit with what. It wouldn't even be that hard to program a simple routine for enemies to target the biggest threat/weakest link and use their particular attacks in a more intellignt way. If a magic attack doesn't deliver the expected damage, the enemy could follow up with a physical attack. If a character delivers a particularly harsh blow, the enemy could change targets to focus on the more powerful character. They wouldn't redundantly use moves which won't stack or would have little value. I've noticed pokemon do that all the time. It's bugs me when they continue to waste moves increasing defense or otherwise changing stats when they've maxed out or minimized that stat.

When you reach the supposed final boss and after defeating him you find out that in order to actually reach the final true boss you have to go back and collect everything in the game including all the crappy extra visual items and such.

I also hate when you manage to get the boss to a small percentage of life and he ends up doing some undodgeble move that takes almost all of your life away.

The monologue before and after the fight gets annoying as well...unless you play the game for the story.

isukun
In RPGs, they could also use a little better AI in general, rather than rely on random number geenrators to determine who gets hit with what. It wouldn't even be that hard to program a simple routine for enemies to target the biggest threat/weakest link and use their particular attacks in a more intellignt way. If a magic attack doesn't deliver the expected damage, the enemy could follow up with a physical attack. If a character delivers a particularly harsh blow, the enemy could change targets to focus on the more powerful character. They wouldn't redundantly use moves which won't stack or would have little value. I've noticed pokemon do that all the time. It's bugs me when they continue to waste moves increasing defense or otherwise changing stats when they've maxed out or minimized that stat.

Hm, I thought the AI in RPGs wasn't that bad. Could be better, but the bosses do seem to attack my healer and my damage character more than anybody else. Maybe it's just a fluke and I'm looking too much into it, but my making-up-the-numbers team members (I know, I know, relying too much on 1 or 2 characters is bad strategy but I manage to win somehow anyway) seem to stay relatively unscathed. Apart from in FFVIII where every enemy seemed to have a line of programming that told them to attack Zell, and no-one but Zell. ZELL MUST DIE. XD
Maybe I'm playing different ones to you. (I always feel a little bad posting in this forum 'cos I've probably played the least games of anyone here... XD)

Most of the RPGs I've played don't target particular threats unless the game is forced to use some level of AI (i.e. they don't rely on the everybody lines up and takes turns whacking on each other style of gameplay). Instead, they try to get around this by having a large number of enemies or bosses which attack multiple characters or the entire party.

Of course, I've seen the same redundancy problem even in the more recent Final Fantasy games. For instance, an enemy may cast a spell which casts silence on all party members. Even after the spell hits all party mebers, they will sometimes cast it again, to no effect.

Sometimes they play ratios on characters (all enemies favor a character that may have certain attributes or that they think players will try to max out), but rarely do they make an intelligent decision on which characters to attack based on the type of enemy and which characters that enemy would be most effective against. Nor have I ever seen a game where the enemies test the waters with player characters and develope a battle strategy as they fight. This wouldn't be a hard thing to implement and would add a little realism and strategy to a genre which has become overly easy.

Well, they do tend to have a "Attack the guy who's hurting you the most/helping the enemy the most" kind of thing in MMORPG's, the "Hate" system that usually shows up.

Really though, I don't see why they can't implement this in normal RPG's. It's kind of annoying to know that they could, but don't.

Hmm... I find ally boss fight annoying. You know, where you train up your party for an hour or so, get loads of good abilities and junk, and then BAM, someone suddenly turns out to be evil or is possessed by an evil spirit. And can you just try to cure the possessed? Oh no, you have to beat the crap out of your own character, who now so happens to be so damn strong he pretty much just has to look at you to kill you...

Kind of like the Den of Woe from FFX-2. The only joy I got out of that was killing Rikku... Oh, and in Final Fantasy X where you have to kill your own aeons... With Yuna dealing the finishing blow... Stupid magus sisters...

And while we're on Final Fantasy X, the final boss reeeaaally ticked me off... You go through the game kicking everything to kingdom come, and then it turns out the thing you have to kill of and 'win' the game is a tiny little bug that only casts 'Curaga'... Kind of like Sephiroth in FFVII which can be killed in one with Omni-Slash...

@ isukun: Yeah, I guess you're right. It just gives the facade of decent AI, and I'm pretty easily fooled by technical doohickeys. XD
I totally get the 'casting the same spell twice' thing, or when they constantly cast a spell you've protected your whole party against. They can't program a human level of intelligence yet but it couldn't be that hard to program 'if it doesn't work twice stop doing it'.

Liaoriao
Hmm... I find ally boss fight annoying. You know, where you train up your party for an hour or so, get loads of good abilities and junk, and then BAM, someone suddenly turns out to be evil or is possessed by an evil spirit. And can you just try to cure the possessed? Oh no, you have to beat the crap out of your own character, who now so happens to be so damn strong he pretty much just has to look at you to kill you...

That doesn't annoy me too much. The games I've played that do that seem to have a different set of stats and standard abilities for when you fight an ally as an enemy. Oddly, I reckon changed stats'd be harder, 'cos one of the PC party members tend to be pretty weak on their own.
What annoys me about that is if it means you've lost them forever (and all their equipment). You put in all that time levelling them up and it's all for NOTHING. T_T And give me back my +20 Sword Of Awesome, you treacherous dog! XD

Better AI for bosses is another idea. In most games, your mage or magic-user can cause the most trouble-- that's why one of my first rules when battling RPG enemies is: Take Out the Mage. However, most enemies just attack willy nilly.

There is always an exception. In the game 'Betrayal at Krondor', the enemies know the exact same thing. They act like me, and can be hard to beat. It gets quite annoying, but at least they're demonstrating good sense.

Back to the "have to lose" boss matches. While I do find them annoying, I think they're better than going to the cutscene and having the boss defeat you in a way that you think, "bullshit, my guy could handle that!"

Inkmonkey
Back to the "have to lose" boss matches. While I do find them annoying, I think they're better than going to the cutscene and having the boss defeat you in a way that you think, "bullshit, my guy could handle that!"

Yeah, especially if your guy was though so much worse things and came out of it alive. game developers and the game writers must love irony.... a whole lot.

isukun
No game should have "unbeatable" bosses. If you have to lose fo story purposes, they really shouldn't make you do the fight to begin with and just resolve the story issue in a cut scene.

I remember in Dragon Warrior 4 there was a point where you were supposed to lose to a bad guy. Unfortunately I was playing with a Game Genie code that meant my guys didn't lose any health. I played that fight forever, chipping away at the guy, until I realized I was supposed to die. I couldn't play the fight without the game genie on, as the must-die-fighting boss came immediately after a hard boss I was supposed to kill (and didn't have the HP for), but I couldn't figure out how to die.

Turns out one of the characters had some tarot cards though that would cause random battle effects, and one of them (thankfully) would kill off all your party.

SoItBegins
Better AI for bosses is another idea. In most games, your mage or magic-user can cause the most trouble-- that's why one of my first rules when battling RPG enemies is: Take Out the Mage.

Yep, that's my strategy too. Strangely enough there are at least two fights in Tales Of Symphonia that I kept losing until I switched my strategy around - instead of Magic user -> Ranged weapon user -> Melee fighter I had to kill 'em the other way around. Odd. Well, like ya said there's always an exception.
(I have to stop using that game as examples, it's gonna look like I've never played anything else. XD)

skoolmunkee
I remember in Dragon Warrior 4 there was a point where you were supposed to lose to a bad guy. Unfortunately I was playing with a Game Genie code that meant my guys didn't lose any health. I played that fight forever, chipping away at the guy, until I realized I was supposed to die. I couldn't play the fight without the game genie on, as the must-die-fighting boss came immediately after a hard boss I was supposed to kill (and didn't have the HP for), but I couldn't figure out how to die.

Turns out one of the characters had some tarot cards though that would cause random battle effects, and one of them (thankfully) would kill off all your party.

And the moral of the story is... XD