[tcaudilllg]

No grinding, no endless gauntlets of 1-shot underlings every five steps... just hardcore bosses. Better, the ability to select the bosses I fight. An RPG where I just fight boss monster after boss monster, no exploration, no hunting for weapons... just stats, preset items, and the necessity for strategy. Would love for the items to be randomized to force adjustments in strategy. So tired of wasting time playing these things for 50+ hours... just give me the meat, man! You look in an anime, where do see fights with underlings? A few ambushes here and there, and that's it. I remember the one anime I have seen where the hero actually fights hordes of enemies was Samurai Jack. Bored me like no other cartoon I've ever seen. (of course, Gundam also has that problem to some extent).

But I was thinking that I'd like to relive some of the old great boss battles of the games I've played, yet the thought of spending 30 hours just to get there again just... not gonna do it. In general games take too long nowadays. Lots of time spent exploring mediocre dungeons and fighting mediocre enemies, just to feel relieved once you've finished the game that you can put the thing down and not pick it up again. Heavens no, who would want to?

[js71]

That wouldn't work at all for me. I'd probably find it absurdly boring; boss battles are great climaxes in the dynamics of a game, but without the rest it's just nothing. Even a game like Shadow of the Colossus had a lot more to it than the huge boss fights, though it may not be as obvious.

Or, to play a bit on your analogy, you need to eat a lot more than meat to have a healthy diet. ;) (although I don't personally consider boss battles to be the 'meat' of RPGs-- they are a useful tool for shaking things up, providing challenge and, often, bits of story)

Just my thoughts on the idea. All that said, I'm sure there's a way you could make it work quite well, but even then it'd probably be a little more than just traditional boss fight after boss fight.

~Josiah

[tcaudilllg]

I was thinking about the reasons I'm not replaying the games I own:

Shining Force Neo and EXA - shoot'em up gets boring.

Valkyrie Profile - battles and dungeons get repetitive.

Valkyrie Profile: Silmeria - scrounging for rare items get old.

Wild Arms 2 - Puzzles... gah!

Wild Arms 3 - Puzzles and repetitive battles.

Wild Arms 4 - (actually liked this one a lot, might replay it)

Nightmare of Druaga - farming for armor enhancing gems gets old

Drakengard - grindfest

Castlevanias since SotN - grindfest

Final Fantasy 7 - tired of chasing Seph, though this game came closest to decent balance.

Final Fantasy 9 - have to steal the best equipment, usually... makes boss battles something of a bore in the meantime.(difficult boss steals were NOT a good invention!)

Final Fantasy 8 - Never doing that again, absolutely not.

Chrono Trigger - apart from a few big battles, the story, and the end, game was a total bore. (worse, doing the boring bits is necessary to win!)

All the Grandias - too much grinding.

Lunar - grinding

Persona - grinding

One of the worst design decisions that can be made in an RPG is to increase the difficulty by raising the encounter rate. There were times in the earlier DQs that you would be handed a new battle every 2 or 3 steps, and the more you fought, the more they'd keep coming. And for all that, the experience requirements were high enough that a hundred battles were needed to gain one level.

Diablo - worst treatment of bosses ever. The last floor was a frickin' gimmick. Every boss was a monster like any other, only more deadly.

FF Tactics - fighting random battles necessary, but makes the enemy more dangerous because their level rises. Alternative is the cheap-ass tactic of trading blows between your own people for an hour.

It may be that I'm getting older: I'm 28 now and the thought of spending a week's worth of time playing something is getting increasingly unappealing.

[Rainer Deyke]

I play rpgs mostly for the exploration and the story. The average rpg combat system does nothing to me. It's boring in the random encounters, and it's still boring in the boss fights.

List of RPGs where I actually enjoyed the combat:

• Quest for Glory series (1-4; I hated 5)
  
• Summon Night: Swordcraft Story series (1-3)
  
• Magic Candle series (2-3; I haven't played 1)

[Jinroh]

Hmm...good question.

If you just wanna fight bosses why not just play Mega Man? ^o^

IMO one of the best RPGs I ever played was Shining Soul II it's basically a better Diablo on the GBA. You got a lot of rad classes, Diablo style gameplay, even 2P Co-Op. The bosses are different and challenging as well. You also get tons of different weapons, weapon and armor smithing, and lots of cool stuff it's really rad.

Plus the Brawler class is a Werewolf which drew me to the game immediately. ^_^

Don't play Shining Soul I though it's lame. Shining Soul II was developed by Goichi Suda's Grasshopper Manufacture so it's much better. ^_^


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Mao Mao Games
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