Boss Battles

Skeith

Skeith

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This episode of the RadCast we talked about some of the best boss battles of all time.

-What are some of your favorites?
-What makes a great boss?
-How important are boss battles in a game anyway?

(P.S. : That episode of the RadCast should be posted by Wednesday)
 
My favorite bosses are The Boss from the end of MGS3, the fight with Gray Fox in MGS1, and prolly some others I'm forgetting. A great boss battle is never one of those "easy but tedious" bosses that you see alot in RPGs. Where they don't do too much damage, but they have lots of HP, so they take forever to kill.

Bosses aren't 100% necessary in every game. You get a game like Splinter Cell and it doesn't really need you to fight with some behemoth for it to be good. In that way, in games that are realistic, it would go against the game's general spirit to have somebody who wouldn't die from a bullet to the face.
 
Baal in Disgaea. The fact that once you beat him he came back as a prinny and was 10 times for powerful. Remember, this is after sinking 100-200 hours more into the game after you finally beat it.
 
I forgot to mention it, but I'm sure I've said it in an earlier podcast, but the fight with Luca Blight in Suikoden II was one of the most epic struggles in gaming. And it only happened half-way through the plot. Everything else was people trying to deal with the fallout of that fight. Heavy stuff.

Plus you needed an army, plus three parties of 6 characters and then it still came down to a duel that you could easily blow. I was shaking with nervousness when it ended.

This fight also had an odd side effect on my system. Not that this was programmed into the game, but when I lost to him, apparently he went and burned down the inside of my memory card. Because my game was deleted afterwards. That's badass damage.
 
Wow... Someone else who remembers Suikoden II.

I remember Luca, and remember before and after, but for some weird reason I never remember fighting him. Then again I haven't played that game in YEARS.
 
I remember Suikoden 2. It's just that Suikoden 3 was better in every possible way.

But indeed, Luca was a demon to fight.
 
I thought that Suikoden 2 was the better one, but then again Suikoden 1 was the reason I bought a PS1. Talk about awesome launch title, I played through that game more than most games I own today.

Also, as long as no one like Suikoden 4 and was amazingly disappointed with 5 that is fine by me.
 
Suikoden wasn't a launch title, the first psx jrpg to be released in the states was a little gem known as Beyond the Beyond. The first two Suikoden titles have the unfortunate luck to be released along the same time as a Final Fantasy game, thus they not selling and thus they being so damn rare, and I actually liked Suikoden V over III, something about that damn talking duck that got on my nerves.
 
Suikoden 2 was possibly one of the best games of all time. Suikoden done right. 3 wasn't terrible, and five was just a disappoint. I just thought that the entire thing was super slow and not never really got to where it was going. It never built up that fever pitch that 2 had, which is probably the major flaw in 3 and 5 as neither one of them really pushed you into believing you needed to be fighting this war.

IV was terrible. Besides being on that stupid slow boat that made it take forever to do anything the last half of the game was checking to see which area you couldn't warp to, then sailing there. There were several characters that you got by doing random conditional things, recruit a fisherman, then get his brother, having his brother drop a net and then sail. After awhile you will catch a mermaid. They have to be caught in order and they only appear in the nets at some spots so you continually need to be sailing the entire world just to get some stupid fish people. Every other game before that atleast gave you some kind of clue as to how to recruit everyone, but 4 you needed the guide to do.

So, yeah, I liked 4 the least. Anyone play Suikoden Tactics?
 
gillman said:
Suikoden 2 was possibly one of the best games of all time. Suikoden done right. 3 wasn't terrible, and five was just a disappoint. I just thought that the entire thing was super slow and not never really got to where it was going. It never built up that fever pitch that 2 had, which is probably the major flaw in 3 and 5 as neither one of them really pushed you into believing you needed to be fighting this war.
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Suikoden 2 had a mildly compelling story that was only good once you got past the silly implied homoeroticism. Gameplay-wise, though, it's alot more of a timepiece. The Rune system was nice and all, but the battle system was simplistic. There was nothing in Suikoden 2 that Suikoden 3 didn't do better. Suikoden 3 took everything good from 2 and added a Chrono Trigger-esque feel with the character customization from the Baijutsu/Magic Tutor school. Add to that how there were all the little bonuses, better characters and all sorts of other nicities and Suikoden 3 is just better. Oh...and it was longer. Sure, it didn't have Flik, Viktor or many of the recurring cast members, but it was still pretty jawesome.

IV was terrible.
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It wasn't that it was terrible. It was just a very average RPG. And since Suikoden is a very above-average RPG series, it automatically ends up at the bottom of the barrell.

V brought back lots of the Suikoden tradition. It was a lot like Suikoden 2 but focused on one central idea for the story, and emphasized having a "moral to the story" while Suikoden is normally a character-driven game that builds up as it goes along. Suikoden V is more up-and-down in terms of how compelling its story is.

So, yeah, I liked 4 the least. Anyone play Suikoden Tactics?
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I played Suikoden Tactics. It's pretty mediocre, but gets points for being one of the only non-NIS tactics games that doesn't blow from the last several years. It's just stupid how little point there is to using non-plot-essential characters.
 
Boss battles seemed like a good topic. Let us know if you want to hear us talk about something in particular in the next pod, or feel free to ask us questions and we will read them on the air. Give us your input.
 
I have heard that a bunch of people really really like 3. I think this kind of goes back to the fact that I dislike any game that doesn't give you a world map and routes you through small halls that are supposed to give the impression of "the world". I will admit that it did do some of the things correctly, and impressively but you will notice that a bunch of the stuff (the world map thing, picking which one of the heroes really is the main hero) has never been done in another Suikoden.

Don't get me wrong, I don't hate it and think it is better than the first one but it too was a touch stone of the time it came out. Most games then (FFX and Star Ocean come to mind) were doing the "no world map" thing, and it was sort of the standard in game design push. The same with 4 as a couple of games that came out around then also took place in a mostly empty ocean.

My problem with 5 is that even though you are on land it still felt like you were at sea because the world was open and empty. It was weird that the world map was so big without ever really filling in the spaces between with anything. Also the plot was possibly the weakest of any of the Suikoden games in awhile.

It did do a couple of things correctly. I thought that for the most part it was a return to form from 4 and that it wasn't terrible.
 
Suikoden 3 may have had some influences from other games that were big at the time, but Suikoden 2 is only considered great because it was a good RPG that came out when most RPGs were highly, disappointingly simplistic. Suikoden 2 was the average student in a Georgia public school that seems like a genius by comparison (not that Suikoden 2 was an average game, it's just that lotsa people in Georgia are stupid). Suikoden 3 was good by any standard when it comes to RPGs. Overworld or not, it was just plain great.
 
Come on! When Rpg's were simplistic? That was the golden era of Rpg's! The ps2, xbox and gamecube don't have the sweet ass rpg's that the psx or snes had! Suikoden II came out right at the time frame that Final Fantasy VIII, Thousand arms, Star Ocean: Second Story. All three of those completely different, and simplistic is not a term to be used when it comes to Final Fantasy VIII.
 
Final Fantasy 8 was stupidly complex, the damn guardian forces, having to mash the square button while summoning for added damage, weapon upgrade had to be done by finding magazines that were impossible to find unless you had a guide! I mean you literally couldn't tell they were there! The Magic Draw system, the retarded "oh we knew each other when we were kids!" story, not knowing where to go, literally after finishing a town there were hardly any hints of where to go next, Zell and Selphie! The good thing about Final Fantasy 8, gunblades, seifer and the diablo summon.
 
Might just be me but you lost me at "unless you had a guide". Any game that you need a guide to figure out how to beat it has problems.

Also the plot was terrible and gunblades proved unusable during the motion caputre.
 
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