Funny Bits in Star Ocean 2 (146)

Here's an example of your typical 'bad guy' mentality: you're clearly winning against the heroes of the story, yet you decide, for no apparent reason (skilled writers can usually put up a decent motivation), to spare them and promise to finish them off 'next time' (which is traditionally when said heroes manage to overpower you). Also, too many ellipses.

I should have mentioned in my last post that the fight I got a Game Over with was against an invincible foe. 'But then' you might say 'isn't it only normal that you would lose?' That depends on the rules of the game: in scripted battles (of which I believe I've already written about), the outcome is already decided for you, but there are variations on how this is handled. Usually scripted battles are made with the same rules of normal battles (reuse is very important in programming), but use additional rules, like:

• Making the enemy invincible
• Making the enemy too strong to be beaten by the heroes in their current state
• Surprise attack the heroes can't fight back
• Timed battle, during which the enemy can't lose, but the heroes losing doesn't cause a Game Over
• Game-controlled battle

Many of these options can however be sidestepped by experienced gamers who want to 'break' the game (it can be fun to play a game differently from what the developers intended), and the outcome of their efforts depends on how many guards were placed in the game to prevent problems. The worst case would be that, after the heroes manage to beat the 'invincible enemy', the game gets to an unpredicted state in which anything could happen, from locking up to randomly changing things. In most cases, though, the battle simply ends and the story goes on as if the heroes had lost. Rarely do games 'acknowledge' these extra efforts (purportedly or not) by making something different happen, without changing the overall outcome: as an example, Xenogears (PSX, 1998) has a scripted fight which you normally lose, but if you win, you gain extra experience and might get a rare equippable item (though the scene after that will still show you beaten).

I've talked about scripted fights up to now, but the fight I lost wasn't really scripted: it was a battle with special rules, in this case you have to survive for a couple of minutes. The problem here is that the game doesn't tell you! And since you should have fought an invincible enemy before (Dias), you might think this would be the same, and decide to let the boss kill you quickly, which would instead bring you to the Game Over Screen, puzzled for the unexpected outcome, and possibly angry at the progress lost. In JRPGs there are some battles with hidden rules, but usually there's some hint about what you should do (for instance, a character says 'He's too strong, should we give up?', and then you figure out you should flee), or what you shouldn't do (sometimes you can play the battle 'wrong', like killing an enemy you shouldn't kill, and get a bad game ending as a result). This is just bad design.