NSFW Best Thread Ever [No SJW-related posts allowed]

What is good boss design then? Allowing a party consisting entirely of damage dealers walk into the boss' lair and kill the thing in two turns without ever bothering to do anything other than attack? Because that's what low HP leads to.

It applies to both, really. If you're dumb enough not to create any support spellcasters, you'll need to use items to substitute.

 

The concept of "bosses" in and of itself is retarded anyway. Making a distinction between normal enemies and super powerful bad guys that tie into the plot leads to an unnecessary partitioning of the encounter spectrum. Every character in the game world should ideally be their own boss. Boss fights should probably be party versus party affairs. The only exceptions should be in games with a highly fantastical setting where you end up doing battle against powerful beings like dragons or even gods. But abusing these exceptions (like both JRPGs and WRPGs tend to do) is bad design. It tends to trivialise non-boss encounters and you end up with filler.

I liked the good old classic D&D approach to encounters and "bosses". If you play a low level campaign you may come across a vampire as the big boss. If you were to continue your character through to a higher level campaign you may even end up killing them for fun. A vampire, as it turns out, is just shorthand for a bunch of statistics. They may have some things in common with other enemies, yet they may also have a "unique selling point" too.

Let's take a look at a game you've probably played: Baldur's Gate. Sarevok's a boss, right? He's a named human with his own statistics and items (sort of). He's much more powerful than any single character of yours, but that's because he's higher level. He's quite a legitimate enemy. He's also with a band of less powerful characters in Angelo, Tazok and Semaj, all three of which have their own race, class, attributes, items and memorised spells/abilities. Your party versus their party. It's certainly not a puzzle boss fight.

But stepping back a bit, weren't those guys outside Sarevok's temple also named characters with their own sets of statistics, items and spells? Gorf, Haseo, Rahvin, Carston, Wudei and Shaldrissa apparently (I looked them up). Isn't that a boss fight? How about encounters featuring only a single named character but with some unusual yet copy-pasted enemies protecting them? I remember that mage called Narcillicus who had "tamed" two mustard jellies. Is that a boss fight? Who knows.

That's how it should be done.

Right. Which leads to more meaningful and permanent party set ups. And considering the vast majority of proper western cRPGs feature full party creation while JRPGs most likely don't, the whole #5 is retarded. So what are you arguing here exactly?

 

I don't know what the fuck this is but it has the terms 'Darth Erectus' and 'Uterus of the Force'.

 

That's how it can be done, and it can be a good approach when executed well. But what makes you say that high HP on a single character is automatically decline? I agree that that things can get pretty silly if a human you're fighting has 10 times more HP than all your party members put together, but JRPG bosses mostly tend to be powerful monsters, constructs or even gods. Why should these guys follow the exact same rules that the player's party does?

My point is that a good boss is a balanced boss. As long as the player's party is given the tools to efficiently counter the boss' attacks and deal damage to him, anything goes. Whether the boss' actions points and HP are all given to a single target or split between multiple enemies is mostly flavor.

I was arguing that JRPGs require party setup. As in, they encourage you to build characters with a specific combat function in mind.

 

What the fuck? How dreadfully braindead do you have to be to be confused by fucking grid-based inventory system? You cannot carry more then what you can tetris into your bag, it's not rocket science!

 

Aren't you just proving his point?

 

That you're a couple of bedeviled wapanese fanboys? Yes, I suppose I am.

 

Baka gaijin.

 

Skyway does this shtick better, sorry.

 

Then maybe you should think before repeating insipid trollbait as if it were a coherent argument.

 

Pots and kettles are everywhere!

 

If you think serving steak with a mandatory side of dogshit is ok, that's fine. Some of us are a little more discerning, and accept only the highest-quality Finnish videogame writing

 

No. That's how it should be done. The problem with fighting singular bosses with huge amounts of hit points is that they become battles of attrition. This is the case in almost all JRPGs I've ever played. You end up doing roughly the same tactics repeatedly. Sometimes a boss changes mode multiple times throughout a fight, perhaps switching immunities or breaking up into multiple targets, requiring you to switch your pattern of actions. But this is functionally identical to fighting multiple bosses one after the other.

Also, why are JRPGs allowed to excuse bad boss fights by making bosses powerful singular monsters/constructs/gods? All this says to me is that good game design is secondary to whatever fits the story or setting. This is also a reason why I tend to dislike the super fantastical JRPG settings and stories, even though I'm not an unreasonable "JRPG hater" that you see around these parts.

Which is exactly what WRPGs do, except usually more so because you are more often than not required to create your entire party from scratch at the very start of the game. So please tell me why "no strategic thought or party setup is required" is a fair criticism of WRPGs over JRPGs? It's not. It's a retarded and relatively incorrect statement, with the complete opposite being closer to the actual truth.

 

Quiet Wizardry - japanese are the only people who care about your precious series these days, so you'd better be nicer to them.

 

I love when weeaboos think the reason most JRPGs are hated is because of animey graphics rather than most of them managing to be even more on-rails than Bioware crap, emo romance shit that was later adopted by EAwhore and juvenile 14-year old "heroes" in an even more ridiculous plot combined with a dumbed down gameplay featuring a castrated form of blob combat that usually involves "PRESS A BUTTON TO WIN", excessive grinding, as many trash mobs as Dragon Age 1 and 2 together, forced cutscenes, dialogues that are literally like reading a book(at least they don't give you the illusion of choice) and dull minigames.

Final Faggotry had boring minigames way before the rise of popamole popularity made such shitty features into an industry standard for any AAA crap.

What is going on nowadays here when someone isn't blindly defending Skyrim it's JRPG defense squad. I want 2007 Codex back instead of so many consoletards and weeaboos posing as hardcore CRPG fans and trying too hard to balance their Kodex Kool Kredits by bashing less mainstream popular popamole x just to make up for sucking up commercially successful popamole y!

 

Well, we were in fact talking specifically about grafix/art direction/writing in this particular case.

 

Jaesun is just being Jaesun.

 

Well, I suppose this thread should be kept on-topic.

Um...

What IS the topic of Best Threads Ever?

 

Wouldn't this mean the "RPGCodex News & Content Comments" is the Best Forum Ever?