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THAT FINAL STRETCH
Posts
clyde
50
clyde
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CloseI don't really have a favorite final dungeon. Nothing sticks out to me other than Castlevania 2.
Radnen
1806
post=clyde
I don't really have a favorite final dungeon. Nothing sticks out to me other than Castlevania 2.
I think we were talking about final dungeons in your game. ;)
Clest
0
I thought it was about last dungeons/endings in general :P
Anyway:
I usually think last dungeon is the worst part of most games I played, if I liked the game I knew it was going to end there and in some extreme cases (*Persona 2 Eternal Punishment) I just stopped playing before the last dungeon so I wouldn´t see the game I liked so much come to an end :P
If I dislike the game usually I am not interested in the ending and assuming that for some reason I keep playing until the last dungeon, I will feel lazy to grind or do anything else to see an ending I don´t care about...
Also not all settings/story/villains are suited to have a last dungeon or many forms, so I think ppl could try to close their games with something different.
While someone mentioned Black Omen as last dungeon in Chrono Trigger, and it was great at being a dungeon, I think Lavos itself is last dungeon since you can skip black omen. And that is a thing I wanted to see more often: No last dungeon, just a last boss.
My point is doing it either in a very interesting way or in a very short way, you can make it hard without making the player walk and fight for 3 hours just to spend another one fighting 12 forms of a last boss...
For my actual projectsince the whole game is set inside a huge dungeon/moon base complex, last area will be the command center tower of said place, and you use more than one party like in FF6 but more like the battle in Narshee and less Kefka´s tower. However last battles wil be fought by each party after that event including a duel.
Anyway:
I usually think last dungeon is the worst part of most games I played, if I liked the game I knew it was going to end there and in some extreme cases (*Persona 2 Eternal Punishment) I just stopped playing before the last dungeon so I wouldn´t see the game I liked so much come to an end :P
If I dislike the game usually I am not interested in the ending and assuming that for some reason I keep playing until the last dungeon, I will feel lazy to grind or do anything else to see an ending I don´t care about...
Also not all settings/story/villains are suited to have a last dungeon or many forms, so I think ppl could try to close their games with something different.
While someone mentioned Black Omen as last dungeon in Chrono Trigger, and it was great at being a dungeon, I think Lavos itself is last dungeon since you can skip black omen. And that is a thing I wanted to see more often: No last dungeon, just a last boss.
My point is doing it either in a very interesting way or in a very short way, you can make it hard without making the player walk and fight for 3 hours just to spend another one fighting 12 forms of a last boss...
For my actual projectsince the whole game is set inside a huge dungeon/moon base complex, last area will be the command center tower of said place, and you use more than one party like in FF6 but more like the battle in Narshee and less Kefka´s tower. However last battles wil be fought by each party after that event including a duel.
cho
0
My favorite last dungeon is FF10's because I got so annoyed of the battles that I ran away from every single one, then I fought the really dumb last boss and remembered why I always play the first half of FF10 and then stop.
That said, the last dungeon was built up pretty well and would have been mad climactic without all those goddamn random battles. Also the music during the last boss fight is so unbearably SLIPKNOT, which is a shame because the music during the last Seymour fight (listen) is pretty neat.
squaresoft whyyyy
(Xenosaga 3 comes in a close second where I avoided as many battles as I could and when I did get in one I ended it instantly with the game-breaking combination of Erde Kaiser Sigma and the accessory that makes everything cost 1 MP. I also beat the final boss in two turns, and one of those was just a buff to make sure it would die. gg monolith soft)
So yeah my game only has six dungeons and the first five are more like primers for the last one than anything else. The last dungeon really is supposed to be the focus of the game, because that's when you have access to all of your characters' skills and enough equipment to outfit all of your characters properly and all that jazz. Also like half of the game's bosses are in that dungeon. The idea is that it's supposed to be, more than anything else, unquestionably the last dungeon (i.e. climactic, brutally difficult, finally tying some things together).
It's worth noting that my game is more dungeon crawler-y than a traditional JRPG though, and that it's not very long. So if my last dungeon was in your average 40-hour Final Fantasy or whatever it would probably be pretty bad. But like the guy above said, the same setup won't work for every game/story/etc.
That said, the last dungeon was built up pretty well and would have been mad climactic without all those goddamn random battles. Also the music during the last boss fight is so unbearably SLIPKNOT, which is a shame because the music during the last Seymour fight (listen) is pretty neat.
squaresoft whyyyy
(Xenosaga 3 comes in a close second where I avoided as many battles as I could and when I did get in one I ended it instantly with the game-breaking combination of Erde Kaiser Sigma and the accessory that makes everything cost 1 MP. I also beat the final boss in two turns, and one of those was just a buff to make sure it would die. gg monolith soft)
So yeah my game only has six dungeons and the first five are more like primers for the last one than anything else. The last dungeon really is supposed to be the focus of the game, because that's when you have access to all of your characters' skills and enough equipment to outfit all of your characters properly and all that jazz. Also like half of the game's bosses are in that dungeon. The idea is that it's supposed to be, more than anything else, unquestionably the last dungeon (i.e. climactic, brutally difficult, finally tying some things together).
It's worth noting that my game is more dungeon crawler-y than a traditional JRPG though, and that it's not very long. So if my last dungeon was in your average 40-hour Final Fantasy or whatever it would probably be pretty bad. But like the guy above said, the same setup won't work for every game/story/etc.
The final "dungeon" is the climax of the game, like the climax in a story. It should be a culmination of all the emotions that led up to that point, and like most final dungeons, that lingering question of "when do I fight the ACTUAL last boss?" stays with you the entire time. The more immersive the game's story and characters(particularly the relation between the hero(es) and the villain(s), the more the creator can take advantage of the emotions the player experiences as he ventures through the fateful final dungeon. When it comes down to it, you have to make sure your players are interested to be in the final dungeon, and to thoroughly enjoy it and play through it. I realized that if a game reveals too much before the climax, I feel I am rushing through the final dungeon because I am too bored by everything around me and must beat the game to get it over with. There should always be secrets left over.
Clest
0
Ghostman got a point which I forgot: leaving stuff to be discovered.
This has a key factor: players have different motivations and if the mystery is completely unveiled before the last and largest effort part in the game, any player who disagrees with the characters actual motivation, ot simply finds it predictable or the ending to be predictable might feel bored.
Sure a boring ending is bad, but it can be forgiven if everything else is good to me. However if before beating the game I can see that, I probable won´t bother finishing it and may just move on to the next.
This has a key factor: players have different motivations and if the mystery is completely unveiled before the last and largest effort part in the game, any player who disagrees with the characters actual motivation, ot simply finds it predictable or the ending to be predictable might feel bored.
Sure a boring ending is bad, but it can be forgiven if everything else is good to me. However if before beating the game I can see that, I probable won´t bother finishing it and may just move on to the next.
