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A poorly designed boss rush

  • Rine
  • 02/28/2016 01:35 AM
  • 889 views
In essence, this game is a collection of 'boss fights' in a row, under the guise of different tournaments and challenge arenas. You will fight a half dozen or more enemies per tournament, killing them nets you a bit of money/exp and a summon item to let you use them in later fights, and winning the tournament with different ranks will reward you with different items. The idea is solid, but it requires careful balancing and design to make it fun and...this game falls flat there.

Every boss fight that I completed (completing the first two tournaments), basically had the boss use one attack the entire time. They were basically a race to kill the boss before they killed you, or you run out of MP (every skill costs MP, and I found no way to restore it conveinantly). Later bosses start to have self buffs, but they are poorly coded and thus will tend to cast haste on themselves 5 or more times in a row while you wail on them. There is really no strategy to the fights, even though they let you change gear between them, as you don't know what you are fighting next, so you can't even hazard a guess at weaknesses/resistances/etc. In the very beginning, you can purchase an armor that gives you regeneration, and will basically out heal any boss, and the hammer item pretty much out damaged on a per-MP level every summon item you get. The only challenge I ran into, and where I quit, was the boss that randomly silenced you. Because every attack spell I had equipped was suddenly useless for all but for a few random moments I was not silenced, I didn't really feel like trudging through the fight to actually finish it.

There are also some technical issues, the cursor defaulting to an attack you don't use when you go to the menu, enemies using their own summon item and thus the animation showing two of them on screen at once, etc.

In the end, for a boss rush, the bosses are not at all challenging, the combat is typical 'my numbers win' drudgery, and any strategy is lost by not knowing who you are fighting next so you can prepare.