I think I figured out most of my boss fights pretty well now. Most of the rest of my work are just a work in progress though. The plot's a bit vague and I still can't decide on my character's names. But we're here about my boss fights. Keep in mind that these aren't ALL my bosses. Just most of them(exceptions include rival fights, the main villain, optional bosses and some cases where the following bosses team up) . So how do you think of them? Which do you think sounds best or worst? Here they are:

- Some Demon guy with normal attack and Ghost Fire. Which immediately summons 4 Fire Wisps that self destructs the next turn. Each doing slightly less damage than the Demon's normal attack.

- A Monk who can use an Energy Blast in addition to regular attacks. Though his Energy Blast deals about 3-4 times damage(killing you in about 4 hits at the expected level), it requires him to focus power first, to be used within one turn.

- A group of 4 Orc-ish things that pretty much attacks you relentlessly(a little slow though). But they can also counter attack the moment they're hit, with slightly more damage than a regular attack.

- The Grim Reaper??? Who spends most of the battle invisible and cannot be hit in anyway, attacking you with Shadow Surge(average magic damage) and Necrosphere(which blinds you). Then at times he will also take physical form to use Death Scythe in his next turn(dealing 3 times regular damage). This is the only time you can attack him like a regular foe.

- A Sorcerer, inspired by Magus from Chrono Trigger(entirely different personality though), but with a twist. This Sorcerer can only be damaged by the barrier's element or they will just be absorbed(yes that sounds familiar). Except these barriers have misleading colors to them(red more likely means poison than fire). On top of that, the barrier's element is only revealed at the end of his turn, when he casts it with damage that could kill you in 5 hits at the expected level). Not even mentioning his Comet attack which could kill you in 4 hits. At least he's slow. Oh and I forgot to mention he switches barriers right after he casts the barrier's element to make things more confusing.

- A Samurai girl with 5 moves. Attack, Power Strike(attack and lowers attack), Armor Strike(attack and lowers defense), Spirit Strike(attack and lowers magic) and Agility Strike(attack and lowers speed).

- A Knight who can attack, use an attack up ability and go into defense position where attacking him does a lot less damage, plus he counters with 3-4 times damage.

- A Witch who begins the battle by casting slow petrification which turns you into stone in 4 turns. You can relieve this with items or magic, but it'll just trigger her next action to cast the same spell again. Other than that she can use fire magic on you and heal herself.

- A Dragon who can attack you, stun you or fly up for one turn when he can't be hit at all. Then uses a thunderstorm doing massive(4 times?) damage on you....... and stunning you.

- A Giant Mecha Robot with five parts. The main body revives any other broken parts to perfect condition otherwise it'll charge up for one turn to unleash greater damage than any other mentioned boss here. The two shoulders can blind you or counter attack if you hit it first. And the two hands can only do regular attacks.

- The last and my personal favorite boss I'm going to mention here is my Summoner Boy. He starts by summoning a Flower Monster which he conceals himself in, completely protected unless you destroy the flower. But even so the Boy will use his next turn to absorb your health(likely more than you can damage him), then revive the Flower Monster in perfect condition and be protected again. Anyway, the Flower Monster can attack you, poison you and put you to sleep.

These are not bad ideas, although I feel some tread a bit too close to the line between being challenging and being plain frustrating.



This sounds okay, depending on what the normal attack is, and how the explosion works. If it's four below-average attacks to the whole party, it could be overpowered. I'm guessing the idea is to destroy the flame wisps before they explode on your turn, which raises two questions: will they be easy to destroy, and will the demon attack on this turn as well?



Sounds good. The advance warning of attack means you get a chance to buff / heal once you get the pattern down. I would consider that fair and tactical, because you know what is about to happen and can prepare an appropriate response.



Do they counter under all circumstances, or just when attacked with physical attacks? Countering all the time seems excessive, to my mind, there should be a tactical approach to counter or mitigate the punishing counter. Especially since they effectively get two or more attacks per round.



This seems very frustrating. You have advance warning of a big attack one round before it comes, which is also your only chance to attack. You're left with either trying to buff and heal ready for the massive attack, or dropping your defences completely and eating 3x damage.
What I might suggest in terms of balancing it would be to make it the second or third round after becoming physical. He stops attacking and you start seeing "storing energy" then "energy maximum" which is your cue to block and defend against the pain. It gives you a fairer chance at actually hurting him, without having to completely compromise on keeping yourself alive, but also remains a challenge.



This sounds like a recipe for maximum frustration. Quite frankly, you need to give the players some kind of clue what to do. It'll be up to them to work out what it is, but whether it is cycling through the barrier in a set pattern or compromising and making the barrier colours either obvious, or the direct opposite to what they would normally be, there needs to be some kind of a way to figure out what to do next. Otherwise your player is going to have to fumble along and randomly try spells in the hope of finding the right one, healing the enemy all the while because they do not know what the barrier is yet.



Sounds fine to me. Compared to the others, she is positively normal.



Does he counter all the time, or just from the defensive stance? And does he counter everything or just physical? If it is from the defensive stance, fine, that will be a good cue for the player to know not to press the attack when they see him do that. If it is all the time, again, there ought to be a way to work around it.



This is quite clever. The trick would be to dedicate one character to healing the status every round to lock her into recasting all the time, while the rest of the party wail on her and bring her down. Success is determined by your MP and inventory, and your ability to pick up this is how to do it.



The flying up would be a good cue for boosting defences and getting ready for the pain, so no bones there. The stunning could potentially be annoying, although I think again the trick is to make sure you have given the player means to counter that, say through an anti-stun accessory before the battle. Or at least fixed it so they can have one ready.



Figuring out the sequence sounds like a cool approach, my only concern is the amount of damage from the core section when you've already described attacks that cleave off up to 1/3 of your health at a time! Not to mention, the charge time is very low, what it sounds like to me is unless you have a party of four and every turn you can 1 hit KO the parts, you are going to be taking a whole lot of damage.



That one sounds pointless. You have this enemy that gets restored to 100% after you kill it, and the "core" of the enemy can heal for more than you can damage it for. I cannot see how you are meant to win this fight as the boss is effectively completely broken - it heals for almost all the damage you do, and you get only a small window to actually hurt it.


I'm sorry if I seem harsh in my assessment as you have got some good ideas for approaching the concept of boss battles in terms of tactics. I just think you may need to fine tune it and reduce the difficulty a little. Some of them just sound completely over the top overpowered.

the sorcerer and the summoner boy are bad ideas.

the sorcerer is bad mostly because it'll frustrate the players to no end. With the way you have it set up now, you might as well not bother with the color coded barrier change, and let the players guess incessantly. If you have enough elements, this will be REALLY frustrating. And trust me, that's not how you want them to feel. You need to find some way to let the players know how to deal with this guy or at least locking him into a barrier long enough for them to act upon the information. otherwise, you might as well just tell the players to roll a die, and let them win on a 6.

the summoner boy is a bad idea because as of right now, you're basically erecting an impossible boss fight. Unless it is possible for the players to kill the flower in a single hit, and have the rest of the team deal more damage than the boss can heal, there is no way this fight is winnable. the way you have it set up right now, in fact, it seems like the only way to beat this boss is to be so powered up that the player can bulldoze over the boss' awesome healing powers. Again, got to give the players a chance to get around the defense somehow. maybe something that can either disable his healing, reduce the amount, or reduce the amount of time the flower is up.

For the Sorcerer I'd let the player find clues throughout the level. Lame e.g. 'Poison burns like fire within.' => Hint: poison magic = the fire color. Make sure the player knows these clues refer to that, though.

Let's see. Well yeah, the Demon can attack all he wants when he's not summoning and the fire wisps get killed easily. So that's not so bad. Anything that counters, counters to both physical and magical attacks. The Grim Reaper....... yeah, even the creator yours truly finds him as the most frustrating. The Knight only counters on defensive mode and as implied, he doesn't attack freely on this form either. I think the Dragon's stun abilities might get frustrating too, I'll test out making the boss after I figure out Yanfly's confusing script.

Then well, the Summoner Boy? He'll be either the most frustratingly impossible or the most strategic fight of them all. Your aim is to defeat the Boy with as least rounds with the Flower Monster as possible. It would REALLY be a nightmare to fight it revived by the third time. Mindless fighting will result in more than 8 rounds with the Flower Monster when you'll SURELY be dead before 7 rounds. It is my goal for him to become angry gamer material. With most players cursing how much they hate him, struggling to find any possible ways to win. That One Boss if you will .

Well, maybe some of my fights may be a little too difficult. But it's not easy finding a balance for how difficult my bosses should be. My aim is to make it so that it's only possible for clever players to win. While mindless mashing players would still lose a few levels ahead. In short, encourage strategic gameplay.

I'm still not entirely sure though. Some of the bosses I doubt ANYONE will be able to beat them on their first try though. Like the Sorcerer or the Summoner Boy. But whoever manages it deserves an award like hell. But the problem with Sorcerer guy is he'll just be mostly fun and challenging the first few times though.

well, sorcerer guy, I said, seems like there's really no actual way of knowing how you'd defeat him. Now, if the barriers are just mismatched but are ultimately consistent, (i.e. fire is always poison, poison is always ice, etc) then it's alright, since it just means a bit of process of elimination will reveal how to defeat the guy. Of course, you need to preface this with something like a villager telling the player that the guy is deceptive and can subvert the elemental order of things, or else it will be a guide-dangit situations, and you don't want that.

Summoner, like I said, because he can heal the flower 100% every round, and you can't touch him unless the flower is gone, the challenge then is to get rid of the flower, and then deal as much damage as possible in that same round. That by itself is okay, but then when you add to the fact that the summoner will actively heal himself throughout, and can easily heal more than you can do damage, that just becomes unfair, as the only way of you actually dealing damage to him is just flat out shut out through pure numbers. that's just utterly unfair.

Now, having said that, it also depends greatly upon what other stuff the player can do in game, and what will work against the boss. i.e. if the players can buff themselves in a manner that allows them to overcome the boss numerically, or some other method, then maybe.

Well yeah, the Sorcerer's barriers are ultimately consistent really. Sorry I thought I implied that. Which is why I said his fight would be the most fun and challenging the first few times. Still fun after though, just not "as" fun. I expect the players to take at least a few of the Sorcerer's turn to figure out the mechanics of the boss fight then the next few turns to memorize the barrier's colors and elements. But you would almost definitely be dead before then.

Okay so maybe Sorcerer and Summoner are a little iffy at the moment. But how about the other bosses?

your other bosses seem fine. they have enough variance between them that the fights don't become too same-y, which is what you're shooting for. You made sure each one has it's own optimal solution that the player must figure out, which is pretty much the key to these things.

With the Summoner. Notice I said that he can absorb your health("likely" more than you can damage him). So if you focus all your most powerful attacks and MP at that point you can do a little more damage to him than he can heal. But you would hardly have any energy left for the next flower battle. Which is why this is really tricky. If you just use regular attacks on the Summoner when you can though, then yeah he'll definitely steal more health from you.

Oh and now that I'm actually creating my game and bosses it seems I had to change a few things to make them more challenging. The Monks energy blast can actually kill you in 3 hits.

well, the net effect is really just this though: the fight will go REALLY slowly.

Wait, I got another idea for my Sorcerer fight, so what do you think? How about the barriers he uses are really just conditions/states that CAN be dispelled. HOWEVER, at the end of his barrierless turn is when he will cast Comet, his most powerful spell, which of course does WAY more damage than any of his other elemental spells.

So the player must make the choice between figuring out his barriers. Which a lot of people here are saying it's confusing. Or go completely in the offense and face the Sorcerer's most powerful attack.

hmm... well, once you told me that the barriers are always fixed, just that they are not intuitive, I thought the sorcerer fight is actually fine. All you need is just some hints beforehand so that the players know it's not a bug. This additional thing is not really necessary, if you ask me. But it does make the fight a bit more interesting.