“Did you finish Chapter 2 yet? Did you finish Chapter 2 yet?”, I kept being asked. My bud wanted to argue with me about the game but I was still stuck on the final boss. “Lower the difficulty!”, he told me. “No”, I replied.
I was playing on Normal Difficulty and having a good amount of fun doing it. Going up against various monsters and figuring out their attacks and the timing and saying to myself stuff like “parry, parry, PAUSE, parry, PAUSE PAUSE, wait for the arm… GRADIENT COUNTER” and feeling like I’d figured out a puzzle when I finally had a no-hit combat against monsters that had me reloading the game a half hour before.
It felt vaguely like “getting good” felt in Elden Ring.
Then I got to the end of Chapter 2. I fought the Chapter Boss and got rolled up until I figured out some of the timing and then I found out that, oh, this boss has two forms. Dang it. And then the second form of the boss did an amazing job of rolling me up. So I had to figure out the timing all over again. This attack involves two quick parries and then a jump. That attack involves a parry and then a pause and then a gradient counter. Figure out the timing, figure out the timing… dang it. I died again.
“Lower the difficulty!”
“No.”
I finally figured it out. “This is it,” I thought. “I get to see the cutscene.” I climbed up the hill and saw that we entered a cutscene and I thought “Finally… I’ll learn what’s going on.”
As it turns out, the chapter boss that I thought was the final boss was *NOT* the final boss but the penultimate boss. I had the final boss to fight and I had to figure it out.
And I couldn’t figure out *ANYTHING*. None of the attacks had timing that I could grasp. I got picked up, slapped around, body slammed, and I had to reload. Over and over and over.
Which brings me to my criticism:
The Final Boss should be like a final exam. The attacks used by the bosses at the end of the chapter ought to be variants of different monsters you can encounter in the area prior to the main boss area.
So, like, let’s say that the final boss has an attack called “THE BIG ONE!” where you have to parry 5 things with a particular timing and then do a gradient counter.
There should be a monster out there that has an attack called “medium” or something that forces you to learn to parry an identical timing (but without the gradient counter). A different attack should have a timing where there is an attack and then a gradient attack that has similar timing to the timing of the last bit.
You can mix it up, of course. Have a different monster attack with a percussive attack that forces you to learn a beat like it’s guitar hero. And then, once you get good at fighting that monster, you’ll do well against this one attack from the chapter boss.
All those monsters down there should be training you for the final exam.
As it is, I just switched from normal difficulty to “storytelling”.
Beat the boss the first time. I watched the cutscene. They finally told me what was going on. I am now in Chapter 3.
My gosh, this is an amazing game.
So… what are you playing?
Still making my way through Last Defense Academy, which is just incredibly overlong, if you can say “overlong” in a laudatory way.
I really love the final exam boss and feel like they are very underutilized, maybe because getting them just perfect is a challenge. Still, there’s something about a boss that you spend hours figuring out how to put down right before the credits roll that, for me, makes a video game perfectly satisfying. The PS4 God of War had one in the optional Valkyrie Queen, and the otherwise sort of decent Astral Chain had an amazing final boss fight that finally brought all of its individually neat mechanics into play all at once, instead of just being another set piece where you could choose one trick and kinda button mash your way through it
OH THE VALKYRIE QUEEN!!!!
That was another fight that made me switch from Normal to Storytelling. Saying “Well, I got her down to 80%…” when I fought the best fight of my life was the final straw.
And then, even on the easy mode, it still took me three or four times (but those times made me feel hopeful rather than hopeless).
Just beat it.
Wowsers.
*THAT* was a game.
The worst part is that there’s no real spoiler-free way to talk about it except in the broadest of strokes.
It’s French as heck.
There’s a monologue given by the antagonist that makes you say “The Antagonist has a point.”
The combat is amazing. The story is amazing. The world is amazing. The themes are the things that philosophy students would argue about whilst drinking wine and eating cheese and smoking camels.
It almost makes me mad at other games from the last 10 years or so. “You could have been making stuff like *THIS*!!! Instead you made stuff like *THAT*!!!”
Dang, what a good game.
Oldest Boy bought me “Elden Ring: Nightreign” for Father’s Day, so I fired that up this weekend to play with him and his brother. I…do not remember how to play this game, so I spent a chunk of my sunday replaying the tutorial over and over again to try to recapture my Elden Ring reflexes. I didn’t really want to play Elden Ring again but for the sake of doing things with my children I’ll figure it out.