Meaningless Battles...

[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.