MONSTER DESIGN - MIRROR MANIAC

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In the Power Rangers Movie game for SNES, there's an enemy called Mirror Maniac who will appear as double, but one of them will have a mirror on their chest, and the other will have a plain chest. Only the one with the mirror on the chest is the real one and vulnerable to being hit.

So, the idea I'm suggesting to you all, is a monster who appears as double, but only one of them is the 'real' one / vulnerable to death. Either the real one has a visually distinguishing trait, or is distinguishable through their behavior patterns. But the main flaw in this idea is: if it were visually distinguishable, it would not take much ongoing skill after the first time that you figure out the secret. But it would, somewhat, if it were identifiable by the behavior patterns.
unity
You're magical to me.
12540
In Luxaren Allure, I had one area that was a forest of illusions. To beat the monster groups there, you had to find the "real" one in the group and kill it, all the others couldn't be killed conventionally.

The tell of which one was real was they all were weird objects, but when they were hit the objects became transparent, and the real one had a monster hiding inside. Which means when you know the trick, you can just use a hit-all spell, watch the reactions from the monsters, and find the real one, but I had fun with it all the same.

I really like the idea and want to do something similar in my next game. It's a lot easier if you have animated enemies, so you can give them some sort of "tell" that something's off about one of them. The Mirror Maniac idea is very cool :D
InfectionFiles
the world ends in whatever my makerscore currently is
4622
I like how unity did it a lot and I think beyond visual cues you could make their move sets different. Maybe they react to each other or have backwards abilities, something like that.
Unity and Flutter! Best for me. Graduated and got job for Q&A testing post. Great.
uni's approach is giving me oldschool anime D&D vibes like magic knight rayearth or something, y'kno? It's such a narratively engrossing way to do it!
i like the monster AI approach too, though -- it's a bit trickier and potentially more laborious for the player (having to waste turns on repeated encounters to see which enemy fumbles) but there's a lot of narrative and symbological potential on AI patterns too!
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
"Only one opponent is real and there's some kind of clue" is one of those gaming tropes that works vastly better in real-time combat than in turn-based combat. If you have a minute and a half to sit there and see the clue then it kinda loses all tension.

I've tried to make similar mirror/clone bosses in turn-based RPGs and never found a really satisfying way to do it. You can kinda get away with making only the real one (or only the fake ones) counterattack, if they don't shuffle their position too often. Making the fake ones reflect attacks feels like a nice nod to the "mirror" thing, and also makes AOE attacks feel like a trade-off - you are guaranteed to identify and hurt the real target, but at the cost of taking a bunch of damage yourself.

But it still doesn't really feel satisfying to me on its own. I'm sure it would be fine if it were just one small piece of a boss puzzle, and the boss also had other abilities that played into the mirror image aspect. Give the player various other reasons to worry about when to use AOE attacks and when to do something else instead of attacking.
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