Two video games I dearly love are Dark Souls and Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne. Both of these have a reputation for being "hard games", and for both of them the difficulty of beating the game kind of melts away once you earnestly try to push at them. They are precision-engineered to evoke the feeling of overcoming an obstacle that once seemed totally insurmountable, and in service of that they fundamentally want the player to succeed.

When I played each of those games, I approached their boss fights in diametrically different ways. In Dark Souls (and all the way back to Sekiro, my first From Software game), as soon as I encountered a boss I would throw myself at it again and again with essentially no change to my build. Maybe I'd two-hand my weapon with a Grass Crest Shield on my back if blocking wasn't good, but I would never look up the boss's weaknesses and choose a weapon to target them, never use a buff, and absolutely never grind levels. The game was sending me a clear message: if you can reach a boss, you can beat it. As @ZandraVandra likes to say, "any weapon in the game that isn't immediately awful can carry you through the endgame".

In Nocturne, on the other hand, I would often reconstitute my entire team for a given boss. I'd go in, get a sense of what it was up to, and then meticulously plan out the precise way to undermine that most effectively. Matador wiped the floor with me once or twice, but I came back with a plan and a laser-targeted build and wrecked his shit. The game was telling me "you aren't coming at this right, rethink your approach" and I listened. By the end of the game, I had looked up the stats of the final secret boss and planned out an elaborate chain of demon fusions to precisely undermine the most difficult fight in the game. When the time came, I beat it in one attempt. I felt like the most powerful girl in the world on that day.

One of the deeply beautiful things about games as a medium is their ability to approach the same goal (evoking this sense of triumph over impossible odds) with many of the same tools (boss fights and the trappings of an RPG), and come at it from such different ways. Even more than that, the beauty is that they react to the player, so that they can come to the experiences from a completely different direction. Some people play Dark Souls like I play Nocturne, precision-targeting their build to the bosses they want to beat. Some people play Nocturne like I play Dark Souls, approaching each fight with only the tools on hand and relying on their knowledge of the intricacy of the mechanics to overcome strategic disadvantages. Any piece of art is a different experience for each person who encounters it, but games in particular shape themselves around the player in a way that will always fascinate and inspire me.


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in reply to @nex3's post:

It's also kind of fascinating for me as a shmup player since, you know. Every boss can be beaten by any character1, and your "build" going into a boss in most shmups just consists of how many bombs2/etc. you reserved as resources. I realize that most modern games are based around builds and etc., but it's kinda interesting seeing that as a base assumption here when most of the games I play with hard bosses don't.


  1. Well okay, exept Palm in 1.0 Mushihimesama Futari, but they legit saw that as a bug

  2. Cave designs all their bosses to be completable without bombs, so even that's not crucial as a strategy.