Meaningless Battles...

[Eorzean_username]

TL;DR if you want to show us unwinnable fights, make it a cutscene instead. At least it's an enjoyable defeat rather than a meaningless win.

Different preferences I guess.

I personally dislike whenever my character is just suddenly shown "doing stuff" in non-interactive cutscenes — for me, it feels immersively-jarring to flip-flop arbitrarily between fully controlling my character's actions and decisions, to suddenly just sitting back and passively letting a cutscene make my decisions for me.

It's why I kind of tense up every time FFXIV decides to try to show the WOL "doing stuff", because usually that stuff doesn't feel like what "I" would do in the same situation, and it's... frustrating.

Given that, I really don't mind "guaranteed loss" battles, if the other option is a "get beat up" cutscene, because at least with "guaranteed loss", I get to experience a combat flow and make my own "decisions" about how the scene plays out (up to the scripted conclusion point).

The worst possible combination, however, is going through a scripted loss battle which then leads to a completely-separate scripted loss cutscene battle, making the mechanical battle itself feel completely like a pointless gameplay formality.

[Absurdity]

It's why I kind of tense up every time FFXIV decides to try to show the WOL "doing stuff", because usually that stuff doesn't feel like what "I" would do in the same situation, and it's... frustrating.

My WOL certainly wouldn't stand there like a dunce while the villain of the week monologues, but that's unfortunately 90% of the, not even just scripted loss, cutscenes lol.