|
TFS -> RE: Saturday, August 8th Design Notes: Arena at the Edge of Time: Danao's Legacy (8/13/2026 23:09:01)
|
Another really great fight, keeping up this year's streak. Some of the super cool interactive things I liked were:
-The two Flesh rotations being manippable around the unchanging Element rotation encourages you to force all of the bad attacks onto consecutive (shielded) turns and all of the filler attacks onto consecutive (burst rotation) turns, allowing the player to self-modulate the difficulty of the fight
-This is an especially effective combination with the crit/bonus empowerment attacks, which are harmless if you make them combo into something like Wind (or better yet, each other) but can be devastating if you combo them into something like Fire, Nature, or the Darkon monster
-But just mapping out this mechanic isn't enough to solve the fight, since you still need to line up your turns with the Lost Souls and Piotr's HP gates, adding two additional layers of complexity so this is actually a real, difficult boss and not just a cool gimmick fight
-I also quite like how the Water and Nature mechanics were handled; heal spam bosses are usually not very fun, but because these are preventable with a shield - and you can chain the Darkon monster nukes around them, so it doesn't feel like you 'wasted' your shield - the player has control over how much he heals and there's another variable you have to keep track of
Something I wasn't quite as excited about was the MP shield - since you can't prevent it from happening, and you can't make any progress while it's up, I found it a little groan-inducing and it felt kind of like I was just being punished with wasted turns (as opposed to something proactive like, him having more MP makes another part of the fight harder and the player can opt into targeting MP in order to make progress). Since the only way the player can interact with his MP shield is by dealing more damage while he's charging up MP in the first place, it feels like the punishment for wasting turns is wasting more turns. This is a super minor thing though, because you still have to engage with his rotations while the MP shield is up, so it's still fun to interact with. I also understand that this is probably just here as a teaser for a class mechanic.
On that note, something that I really hope happens is some sort of game update that actually displays redirected MP damage as an MP attack instead of just displaying it as 0. This is something that would help a lot for presentation and visual clarity - especially if it's a mechanic that a class uses, which means it'll then be something players encounter in every single release that has combat.
Overall this is one of the best fights in the game IMO. They really just woke up and decided that every single boss in 2026 would be a complete banger
|
|
|
|
