Quote Originally Posted by Bright-Flower View Post
Zenos' fight
His HP isn't inflated, actually. You're literally dealing 90% less damage than you're normally capable of, and you are missing an awful lot. Plus there's two phases to both fights. They both start out with allies aiding you, and then Zenos does Concentrativity after a set amount of time, and it knocks them out of the fight, but you remain (And there's dialogue going on during too).

If he were using his real power in either fight, then you wouldn't really get to fight at all. You'd die to the first swing of Unmoving Troika, unless you were a tank.

I think the first battle presents the situation well. Zenos is bored, and he's just watching you to see how strong you are, while setting out some simple attacks. You fail to impress him, so he ends it and calls you pathetic. Though he did break a sword on you. Which is why you get to live, because you're not worth drawing another one on.

The second fight you're actually dealing somewhat normal damage for the first half while Yugiri is there, and she LB3s him(and it only does 14.3k). He then powers up, and it turns into the same fight as before. You can barely land hits on him, let alone scratch him, and if he didn't choose to just end it, then you would die before you got him half way down. He also does way more attacks than the first time around. Lightless flames, tangible copies of himself, Ame-no-Hibakiri, and loads more of Vein-Splitter. The fighting area is a lot smaller, so if you're not careful you will take damage, and you can duty fail that one relatively easily.

The first fight is a superior foe deigning to see what you're made of, and the second fight is you showing that you've moved up quite a ways but still not enough.

In Zenos's final fight with you, before he mantles Shinryu, he uses his full power. It is enough, and I have seen people fail to it. Should you live through all that he brings to bear, at the end of the fight he takes a book out of 80/180 Behemoth's book and mingles auto attacks with repeated castings of Concentrativity over and over until one of you is dead. He could have done that or anything else in the earlier fights to kill you.

It's much better conveyed and done than the Ran'jit fight in SHB. In that one, especially on tank, Ran'jit definitely feels like someone you could kill if the game would allow it (Lyna be like, "We're overmatched! 10 seconds in and he's at 80%). They don't because they have further narrative use for him, but unlike in the Zenos fight where he uses Concentrativity first to remove people and it deals 80% of your HP, Ran'jit instead uses some overblown version of Raiton one at a time, and then has Gukumatz do a move called wrath to push them out of the arena. Ran'jit is going all out in every battle that he is in, and his fusion later doesn't even seem like an actual power up, because you fight him on Thancred first. By rights though, he should just be able to use his super Raiton to two shot anyone(which I'm pretty sure they hotfixed to make people take seriously, because my first time doing that fight I distinctly remember timing tank cooldowns to the dialogue and having it do nearly 0 damage to me).

Both are timed, so you see different %s on tank, DPS, or healer.