Meaningless Battles...

[Renalt]

Tales of Destiny does it right. At one point you do a 4 v 1 fight and the kid is just decimating your group. You can kinda brute force it with a lot of healing items and what not and might get lucky if you did a ton of early story grinding. If not...he beats you into paste. HOWEVER if you beat him...game is over. You don't get thrown into prison that sets you up for the rest of your adventure. You win. You become successful lens hunters and that's it.

[Atelier-Bagur]

Tales of Destiny does it right. At one point you do a 4 v 1 fight and the kid is just decimating your group. You can kinda brute force it with a lot of healing items and what not and might get lucky if you did a ton of early story grinding. If not...he beats you into paste. HOWEVER if you beat him...game is over. You don't get thrown into prison that sets you up for the rest of your adventure. You win. You become successful lens hunters and that's it.

I cant believe somebody even mentions Tales of Destiny. Too bad that fight becomes unwinnable in the ps2 remake though lol.

Anyway, I think people forget the purpose of unwinnable fights for its interactive element. Too many get caught up in the logistics. However there's ways to make those unwinnable fights be designed well. For starters they could just annex the the boss's HP so that it's not so blatant in your face that youre killing them.

[Renalt]

I cant believe somebody even mentions Tales of Destiny. Too bad that fight becomes unwinnable in the ps2 remake though lol.

Anyway, I think people forget the purpose of unwinnable fights for its interactive element. Too many get caught up in the logistics. However there's ways to make those unwinnable fights be designed well. For starters they could just annex the the boss's HP so that it's not so blatant in your face that youre killing them.

I think the issue is HOW the unwinnable battle is presented and not the fact it exists. I wanna say Xenoblade Chronicles 2 does it several times where you are just absolutely SPANKING the enemy. I mean just straight up handing them their sorry butts and the cutscene plays out where they just immediately hand wave you away like you were a fly the entire time.

Um. No. I was beating the crap out if you. Your bar was zero and you barely touched me. The cutscene should reflect that.

If they want it done right...the boss needs to be fast, your attacks do negligible damage and they hit you and you are practically half dead.

Now the cutscene makes sense. You really were a joke to them and that's how it played out in combat.

Also yeah ToD is on my top 10. PS1 was golden age of a lot of JRPGs.

[Shinkuno]

Tales of Destiny does it right. At one point you do a 4 v 1 fight and the kid is just decimating your group. You can kinda brute force it with a lot of healing items and what not and might get lucky if you did a ton of early story grinding. If not...he beats you into paste. HOWEVER if you beat him...game is over. You don't get thrown into prison that sets you up for the rest of your adventure. You win. You become successful lens hunters and that's it.

I think DMC5 does the same thing if you beat Urizen right at the start