DESERTOPA'S PROFILE

One thing that I would definitely suggest avoiding at all costs; it is pretty much never a good idea to write a story around an idea, decide it's too straightforward, and then add a plot twist. The plot twists should be consequences of the main ideas of the story, not add-ons.

author=RyaReisender
@nurvuss
Nope, pickpocket isn't needed, you just need to see a single private action for the boss to get strong. And a simple talking to a random NPC in the arena to get to the bonus dungeon.

Nurvuss is half right. You don't need to pickpocket Filia, but you do need to encounter her in her private action before Clik is destroyed. Most players probably see this scene, since it has no preconditions and is available in an easily visible spot, but since Clik is only accessible for a short period of time before being destroyed, if you neglect to explore the private actions at that time, you won't be able to get the private action later in the game (after returning from the game's final save point) which would power up the final boss.

Calling the conditions for getting the bonus dungeon "a simple talking to a random NPC" is misleading in the extreme though. If you go through the whole "talk to everybody" process at any point before touching the final save point in the game, talking to this random NPC will do nothing. There's nothing in the area to call attention to him, he's just a face in a large crowd. For the entire rest of the game, talking to NPCs without unique sprites, who appear in the same place in both regular exploration and private actions, does not lead to rewards other than dialogue. Even after major events, unless their sprites have actually changed locations, NPCs who are not major characters almost never get new dialogue, so the player has a long time to be trained out of the presumption that there's any value in going around and talking to the same NPCs multiple times after they've advanced further in gameplay. Further, there's no precedent in the game up to that point for touching a save point functioning as a trigger for any kind of events, so a player who hasn't been explicitly informed has no reason to suppose that touching the final save point will have changed anything. On top of all this, the very process of getting out of the final dungeon from the last save point and getting back to the rest of Nede takes somewhere in the neighborhood of half an hour of gameplay- and it'll take them just as long to get back. The process of getting to the bonus dungeon is easy, if you know what the requirements are, but the game has put you in a position such that you would have no way of guessing the process on your own, and all your ordinary gameplay motivations work against discovering it by accident.

Kind of a tangent to the subject, but the idea that "gold" is the default currency has bugged me for a long time. I favor made-up currencies, like Gil or Zenny, which might be more or less arbitrarily valuable, but even making the standard currency "silver" in the Lunar games was a big improvement over gold. Gold is valuable enough that it's hard to make it the standard of exchange for trivial purchases as well as major ones. You can shell out gold for a sword or suit of armor, but buying bread or fruit with gold just makes me feel silly.

I don't mind having bonus bosses that are harder than the final boss, occasionally, as long as it's very clear in the narrative why the optional boss doesn't constitute the major threat that the final boss does, or something that might address that threat on its own. I tend to like it when games have a lot of optional content, and sometimes it's just not practical to calibrate the final boss so that it's challenging after you've completed all the optional content, but still possible if you haven't done any of it. If you have to complete at least some of the "optional" content to win, then it's not really optional.

On the other hand, I find that challenging final bosses tend to be significantly more satisfying, so if you can find a way to have your cake and eat it too, by all means use it. I also enjoyed the Star Ocean 2 implementation above, but I'd add the caveat that it basically demands a guide; there's practically no way you're going to find the bonus dungeon by yourself, and even if you did, the trigger for powering up the final boss is separate from finding the final dungeon (which actually makes it more narratively consistent, but the trigger to power up the final boss is actually somewhat easier, although still difficult, to stumble on by accident, and if you did that without the bonus dungeon you'd pretty much be screwed.)

author=LockeZ
That's really not totally fair, I know there are games where some of that stuff really does matter, and occasionally when I get really into a game I will actually care about some of the lore myself. But it should still be introduced naturally through dialogue and gameplay as it becomes relevant, just like in a movie, if at all possible. And if there's nowhere in any of the scenes where it's relevant enough to get mentioned, then... it has nothing to do with your game and thus should be excluded, if you ask me. There's a reason Lord of the Rings is one of the most popular fantasy stories of all time, yet no one would even agree to publish the Silmarillion until after Tolkien was dead, and even then his son had to self-publish it.

Hell, I couldn't even get into Lord of the Rings, at an age where I practically never put down a book unfinished, because of Tolkien's issues with shoehorning lore in where it didn't fit the context and pacing of the story. He was great at coming up with the lore, and created a far more developed and cohesive world than most of his imitators, but he wasn't that great at knowing how to introduce it.

In general, I think it's good to know more about the background of your story than you'll ever actually write. When you write with that background in mind, it'll come across as hints which suggest a deeper, more developed world, and the measured doses will help keep the player curious for the amount that they get.