LogFAQs > #977650151

YoukaiSlayer posted...

Well therein lies the problem. It usually IS enough, they just won't let me win yet. Usually by these points in the game you are already strong enough to beat the final boss.

Mechanically, sure, but not narratively. Mechanically, you can beat most final bosses at level 1 with no gear (or whatever state is analogous to that for the game you're playing) if you really know what you're doing. To suggest that the narrative should support that, however, would be silly.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

The reward for playing well is winning the fights. Very observable because if I play poorly enough, I lose the fights. Separating the gameplay and story so heavily that success in one doesn't positively influence the other is bad IMO.

If you lose winnable fights, you fail to progress the story. If you lose unwinnable fights, you progress the story. Winning boss fights is not inherently its own reward, it's a prerequisite for accessing later content and ultimately completing the game. Losing an unwinnable boss fight robs you of that immediate satisfaction, but it's still a success in the sense that you're moving the game forward to your ultimate victory. Scripted losses are (virtually) never a matter of "you lost, game over." They're always just one step toward the ultimate success of beating the game. That's not a failure, it's just progress where your gratification gets delayed a bit.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

If you were to have a choose your own adventure book but no matter what you do at a certain junction, the story only takes negative turns, then why make it a choose your own adventure in the first place?

Because you want to write a CYOA, but don't feel the need to make absolutely every story beat be a positive one. "Negative turns" does not mean the story ends in failure. It just means something goes wrong for the protagonist. If nothing ever goes wrong for the protagonist, you've got yourself a Mary Sue.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

So me, except it's not for me because they just ruin the fantasy of that anyway.

One boss fight that you still one-shot but that then goes into a scripted loss "ruins the fantasy" of one-shotting everything else before and after that? Despite that failure not setting you back in any way?

If a scripted loss actually undoes your grinding or anything like that, yeah, that's a problem. But developing your character to a point where you overpower the core game content just means you remove any challenge left in progressing through the core game. Losing in a battle that's a scripted loss doesn't impact that at all, because the scripted loss never actually had any challenge in the first place (which is the biggest problem with them: people look forward to boss fights because they want to be challenged, scripted fights deny that and should therefore be used sparingly). You lose, the cutscene plays, and you keep roflstomping every other enemy between you and the next cutscene. The loss doesn't reintroduce challenge.