Damage sponge bosses

This nigga hit the nail square on the head.

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It's difficult to balance game mechanics, or to create combat systems that accurately show where you made a mistake, so you can recover and learn enough.

Games are the victim of mass casualization, so you don't tend to get setups/conflicts where skilled players win the early stuff instantly and then the difficulty will generally scale up later. Instead, we have a game design strategy where most of the "skill" is actually just familiarization with the quirks of the movement and battle design decisions.

What's the easy choice when you have absolutely no idea how your game mechanics are affecting gameplay in variations of enemy spawn rules and AI goals? Just increase the enemy health by a fuckload. (3 million hp each in Challenge difficulty in The Division)

In The Division's pvp zone you can see how not using bullet sponge works (because players are never allowed to have insane hp). It takes 1-2 seconds to kill other players if you are well geared, and instead of health or even player gear, the most important element is simply to gang up in groups, sometimes even glitching your way to 10 or more players in a group so you can instantly kill everyone else on the server.

The Souls series is about a lot of lessons like determination, but the limitation in controls fidelity and the camera in modern games makes it difficult to use anything other than oversized health bars. If you had the player on the same level as bosses, you just stunlock to kill any boss in a few hits. This is an enormous NARRATIVE problem because Dark Souls is all about presenting a dramatic narrative (not gameplay) struggle against much bigger, more experienced enemies which is a metaphor for anyone who stops you from getting your own way in life (threshold guardians). The gameplay in itself is supposed to convey a symbolic message at the meta level. And there are lots of mechanical limitations. If you add too much detail, the meta message could be ignored and trivialized even more. Sticking to the core of a message is the best strategy.

This.

And why are shmups the only genre that remembers how bosses are supposed to work? I miss fights where the boss changes forms and attacks and eventually throws everything but the kitchen sink at you in desperation. When was the last time a boss burned out the last 5% of his HP in a psychotic rage trying to kill you?

Senator Armstrong kinda does that.

Yeah, but there's still progress.
You can tell if you're damaging them and they get stronger/weaker.
Shmups like Ikaruga have the bosses gain/lose armor and abilities.
Bhells like Touhou have the boss progressively make harder and harder patterns with each health bar depleted.

This really does depend on the boss.
If it's a cuhrayzee, then yeah, you want the boss to have a decent amount of health.
Otherwise if the boss isn't hard but has an assload of health, it's a pain in the ass.
See: Orphan first phase from FF13.
It's just a balancing game of how long can you keep your party barely alive while still maintaining chain build to out-DPS his healing, and hope that you last long enough to stagger the cunt.

Hate it.
If it's a fun fight, the last boss or an extra boss, sure. But if it's just a regular boss then it's just a pain in the ass, sitting there and wondering if this next attack will end the boring fight or not.
If the boss has some sort of gimmick like the adamantoises from FF2 where they resist everything but earth magic, that's cool too, since once you find out the weakness they become fun.
To bring up FF13 again, the adamantoises in that are fun as well, because it's a race against time to maximise your DPS and not worry about anything else before it breaks its stagger and can kill you.

Have to disagree.
Though they are shit the majority of the time, some bosses you wish had more health/phases.
Parasite Queen from Metroid Prime for instance had lots of potential for being a fun fight, but if you scan it the moment you start the fight, you can drop it in like 15 seconds.
Fuckers like Thardus on the other hand are just a pain in the ass.

Also
My nigger.

Gherman throws everything he taught you and somethings he didn't at you.

i ended up with my character having almost no health in the last moments, i didn't want to heal i wanted to have that moment where it all comes down to a single strike after a dance with death.

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Gherman is a good example, but I felt his final stages could have been a little more desperate.
Having a boss lash out everything they have in fear as their HP drops into the very final bits would make fights so much more interesting.

that fight was kind of long and tedious

Papa G was nice, turning full beast mode on your ass.

Care to name what monsters you think are sponges? I never really felt any besides some tedious fights are sponges like the 3u final boss comes to mind.

not him but pic related :^)

10/10 post man, 10/10.

All the Elders and event giant versions of regular monsters.
Everything else is a-ok though.

then maybe the second encounter with him as the orphan of kos will meet your criteria.
where ever gherman goes after you sever both the ties to the hunter's dream and the hunter's nightmare i can only wonder, cause if the mechanics of mutation are constant then his killing of kos as a hunter does to him what the killing of the moon presence does to us, cause by then gherman had used three cords

Not really all I got from him was "OH NO I'M LOW TIME TO POWER UP" as opposed to actual desperation, like even fucking FFXIV does this better with the knights of the round fight.
When you get to the last 5% of the boss he just wanders in random directions flailing. Funnily enough I've seen people wipe to that in higher difficulties

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Know what worse? Bosses with instant death spells that you can't be immune to.

Some turn based rpgs can do boss fights well. I liked p3 bosses quite a bit. Especally emporer and empress. They would change weakness, so you have to take advantage of your new scan ability. Really all the full moon bosses in p3 were donw well, but the tartarus bosses were just damage sponges.

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I hate games that are built around party management but give instant game-overs for MC death. It's okay if everyone else dies a million times, someone can revive them, but the MC takes a dirt nap and everyone loses the will to live.

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sometimes it kindof makes sense like SMT3 because the demons literally don't care.
Other times it makes no fucking sense like Persona 3/4.

It made sense for Persona 3 because if MC dies even for a little then Death gets freed and Nyx kills everybody. But then that happened anyway…

I love that shit unlike some casuals here, suggest me some games with damage sponge battles. Just finished Peace Walker.

is this b8? there are still plenty of good games made after 2002. there's just more stupid bullshit afflicting the industry as a whole and more pandering to """casuals""" but there are still good games

G-rank monsters of any caliber right after you rank up and still have high-rank gear ;_;

Really? I never really had a problem with him, though he was kinda tough.

Probably because of the water mechanics made it harder since it was meh at best and everyone just lanced in the end.

What are they supposed to do after High Rank? The next step is G rank, so either they have more monster or do it over again but I see your point.

Didnt they get rid of G rank in MH cross?

yeah MHX isn't a G rank game.
It suffers from another problem though, High level variants are worse HP sponges than fucking G rank.
Seriously me and 2 other people still barely clear the level 10 ones. Shit has too much HP

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What's worse is when every mook takes at least three hits to kill, and there's only one attack move. The Simpsons Game was tedious as hell because of this.

Metroid Prime series did come to mind after I made that post. But it's one of those games where the bosses are way more interesting than your average FPS. Really enjoyed the Dark Samus fights for one. However I can't really think of any bosses in that game I felt dragged on for too long. Hell some of the better fights felt too short. Like Dark Samus.

Yeah his stuff is great. I wonder if he'll make another E.C.M. Or maybe he's upset so many pirated it. Though because of that, his stuff is usually well known here.

Elder Dragons for the most part. Especially when you don't have end game weaponry. They could take multiple fights too. I solo'd Dalamadar with an Alatreon Great Sword and won with 3 minutes left. With G-rank gear he would have most likely went down much faster.

Try the last boss from Dragon Quest 6.

Definitely bait.

Import Sengoku Basara 4 Sumaragi. You don't need to know a lick of moon to understand and play it. Crank up the difficulty to make it even more fun. When you get every character's movesets and git gud. You can do shit like in this vid.

OoE/AoS/DoS have some of the worst bosses ever. A big portion of them are 'crouch in the corner of the room where the attack can't hit you then wail on him for 30 seconds during his idle period rinse and repeat' and it's fucking awful. SotN has some really fun fights. I think a big part of what makes SotN easy is that you can actually get good at the bosses, and the better you get the faster/easier it is to kill them. But in most of the other castlevanias they're spongey meme enemies where it doesn't matter how good you get, the way to beat them is still 'crouch in the corner while they attack and then mash attack on them'.

I hated "true fonal boss" dlc for Lords of Shadow (modern rebooted Castlevania).
So it's a fuckhuge humanoid, who constantly does aoe attacks and the only way avoid them is to run away. And the best part is he had a lot of health. Whole fight was incredibly tiresome.

I loathe enemies that do high damage and take very little. Like witchman3 on hardest, you die fast, but you also have all the tools to avoid it, but everything takes so fucking long to kill.

Also invincibility phases. Or when boss has only one weak spot that requires a specific move (from the boss) be become available for attack. Hate that shit.

Ceadeus is one of the worst executed boss battles ever in my opinion and it's a shame since the music for both parts is so damn good and atmospheric.

I recognize this slutty loli.

Goldbeard is slightly better though, just slightly.

Opinion disregarded. I bet you're around 30 years old. Put on your diapers back before you shit yourself.
I bet you like GTA San Andreas too, niggerlover.

FF1 had a good balance, espeacially in the early game.
Items were expensive and your money limited, in order to get money you needed to grind or charge head on in the first dungeons with a high reward-high risk danger, but grinding was also fucking tense because the encounters were very dangerous and you had not enough Items in order to make up for making many mistakes.

Well, yeah you don't have to go through the trouble of breaking his beard when just keeping up is difficult or instantly failing the quest for no fucking reason only to find he still has like 3 moves he spams over and over again.

But at the same time you miss out on a breathtaking track like The Lunar Abyss.

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Elizabeth was not a fun fight.

THE ULTIMATE SPONGE

SPONGEY STATS

TL;DR: if fighting itself is fun, then sponges are good.

what the fuck is this garbage so i can not play it?

definately not FFXII

That definitely sums a good chunk of it up.

You don't have to fight him for 5 hours straight. You can leave the fight at any time and save. But it really adds to the game being a pseudo MMO in terms of combat.