innegativeion

Undertale: Combat Where Nobody Has To Die

Much ado has been made about the prevalence of violent combat in games, how it is a much-trodden space with an overabundance of focus on the damaging and killing of enemies in games. It’s worth interrogating how we make games and what the systems we put in place represent. ‘Combat’, as a gameplay system takes the form of abstract tasks meant to represent a conflict. Conflict doesn’t have to be violent, or even involve fighting. When you think about it, a lot of the standards and practices that are common for designing ‘combat’ conflict in games can be abstractly applied to a wide variety of real-world situations that don’t directly involve violence. There’s an adage that action or fight scenes in narrative is like a conversation, and I think this broadly applies to all sorts of interpersonal conflict. All this to say that Undertale takes extremely familiar RPG combat design traditions in an extremely nontraditional way to represent its conflict, which can take the form of violent struggle or extremely peaceful, yet tense conversation. I want to talk about this, in particular, the space where the bulk of Undertale‘s gameplay can be found, in the peaceful ‘pacifist’ style of playing Undertale.

A similarly large quantity of ‘ado’ has been made of Undertale‘s underlying morality system, which allows the game to read and react to player actions across save files to drastically alter the story and how characters react. I’m sure there’s not much more I could add to that well-worn conversation, but what I don’t see talked about near as much is the actual mechanics that make up Undertale‘s combat system. Undertale is ostensibly a turn-based RPG, and it has many of the trappings you’d expect of traditional RPG combat. The player and AI take turns taking actions, there are character statistics such as health or defense, and there are the usual available actions such as attacking or fleeing. Compared to the traditional turn-based RPG formula, however, Undertale leans a lot less on strategy, which is to say forethought and formulating a plan of attack. Success in combat in Undertale is much more contingent on one’s ability to navigate enemy attacks, which take the form of ‘bullet’ patterns in a shoot em’ up or shmup styled dodging sequence. Now, that all sounds rather violent, but all this really means is the player must move around a little icon representing themselves (in this case a heart) so it doesn’t collide with any objects on screen. In this way, Undertale works to make defending, in other words passivity, a more engaging and fun mechanic than attacking. Undertale also loves to borrow from genres outside of RPGs to accomplish this, like incorporating elements of text-based adventure games.

Have fun fighting and/or dating a skeleton, no explicit violence involved

When monsters randomly encounter the player, as they’re wont to do in RPGs, the monsters will be naturally on the defensive around you, a human, a member of the vile people that attacked and banished monsters underground. The goal for a pacifist player will be to simply exit the encounter unharmed so they can reach their next story chapter. You see, when it comes to the player’s form of ‘attack’, their agency in all of this, the problem Undertale faced was making the act of de-escalation as interesting and satisfying as the act of chopping dudes in the face with a sword. The solution to this problem was found in three ways. First, the act of defending is made into a compelling game in and of itself. Secondly, the player is given short-term and long-term goals in every encounter. Finally, the incentive for the player to not perform acts of violence is made to take the form of exploration into interesting characters.

We’ve touched on that first item. Undertale’s defense or ‘bullet hell’ sections involve dodging the magical attacks of your opponents. The conceit here is simple, but a time-tested one, utilized in tons of classic games like Galaga or Space Invaders. The player is represented by a small heart, and obstacles will move around the screen which the player has to avoid by moving freely in two dimensions. It’s among the barest, simplest forms of spacial and temporal awareness as gameplay one could think of, but that’s why it’s so effective. Some of the best games are those that start with an extremely simple base that can be built upon, and Undertale certainly builds upon it. Bullet patterns become increasingly elaborate and difficult towards the end of the game. Bullet patterns can take the form of obstacles that are abstract shapes, obstacles shaped like characters, obstacles along vector lines, any of which can move in a variety of patterns. The game will also iterate on these basic designs using new rules and wrinkles that change up the variety, such as adding gravity to the player’s avatar, a controllable shield, or a controllable projectile to destroy obstacles.

These ‘bullet hell’ sections get **very** creative. Here I have to redirect the enemy’s own attacks at them to pacify them!

This makes up the player’s short-term goal in every combat encounter. Each turn, the player has to focus on the imminent danger of enemy bullet patterns. Lots of RPGs have incorporated real-time gameplay into turn-based actions. Integrating short-term goals like this sort of action gameplay with longer-term goals keeps the player’s attention engaged and the tension subsequently high. There will always be something in the back of your mind that you’re working toward, while immediate concerns keep you constantly engaged. In Undertale‘s case, the long-term goal for each monster encounter is trying to figure out how to make them passive, and amenable to ending their attack against the player. Each one is different, and like a little puzzle or text adventure encounter where the player has to figure out how to spare their opponents. The need for dodging enemy attacks, is essentially your payment ticket for each attempt made to pacify the opponent. A wrong answer means needing to dodge more attacks. There is some strategy in Undertale’s combat in how you approach multiple opponents. Sometimes more than one monster cannot be pacified in the same turn, so a consideration of the order in which they are tackled is added to the player’s long term goal achieving process.

Not every puzzle solution is a brain-teaser, but they engage you with the monsters’ personalities. Get it? Don’t **pick** on your eyes.

The final and I think most important of how Undertale solved for nonviolent ‘combat’ is its methods of incentivizing the player. The typical pattern for any game with combat is to reward the player for killing or defeating enemies, increasing the player’s power as they accumulate more and more victories. So it is with Undertale, when you choose to kill. When sparing foes, however, the game goes out of its way to makes sure there is no direct material reward of in terms of player power. Undertale did not have to do this. In a vacuum, there’s no reason a nonviolent victory cannot reward and empower the player. In Undertale it was very important that external rewards like player ‘LV’ be tied exclusively to killing. Undertale is trying to justify its thesis of pacifism by making that path entirely implicitly motivated by narrative elements, or in other words the process of pacifism itself. ‘Not killing things can be fun too, no reward needed’ it seems to say.

The ‘bullets’ players must dodge can take a wide variety of forms from the tear drops of a depressed ghosts, to the flexing muscles of a pompous weight-lifting horse. If those sound odd to you, it’s by design. Undertale‘s first boss throws magical flames at you, but very little afterward will ever be so typical. Undertale uses the contrivance of ‘magic’, a power which monsters can use to express their emotions as power, to explore the character of the enemies you fight, as you fight them. In what other game can you expect to be attacked by the excited barks of an overstimulated puppy? These attacks are used as subtle characterization of each and every monster you encounter. The act of play is characterization in and of itself. In the world of Undertale magic is an outward expression of emotion, and this carries through gameplay as well. It’s not always a direct metaphor, and it’s often subtle, as reading emotion is in real life, but the attack conveys the emotional state of the monster which used it. You can get a sense of monster personalities just by playing. The dialogue does heavy lifting in this department as well, through hilariously absurd and weird scenarios. In this way, your ‘prize’ for victory is often a hearty joke, or an emotional catharsis. It can engender an intense curiosity to see more out of these monsters, more you won’t get to see if you kill them.

The player is ideally motivated by the desire to explore interesting and compelling characters. This, entwined with the short and long-term goals I mentioned earlier. The player’s long-term goal is usually discovering exactly how new monsters will react to their various actions. The monster Shyren loves to sing but is too timid, needing gentle encouragement from the player humming along. The monster Woshua is obsessed with washing things, so asking for a cleanup and successfully intercepting its healing water will make it very happy. The monster Aaron will become so swept up in out-flexing you if you try to match his style, that he’ll flex himself right out of combat. Keying in on visual indicators like the enemy’s emotional state, the personality in their dialogue, and the queues of their overall physical appearance all work as hints to solving the ‘puzzle’ of connecting with them socially and deescalating conflict. One can trace subtle changes in expression even, in certain encounters. The game, as it were, becomes one of determining your conversation partner’s wants and needs. It becomes a game that teaches empathy.

Here our hesitant mentor Toriel refuses to kill us, it’s clear here what emotions her gameplay are meant to convey

Combat, as it is typically designed, in all of its many forms, is fun. That’s just simply true, and it’s probably the biggest reason violent conflict remains so prevalent in games, as it’s the most obvious way to explore this form of play. This form of play was invented to represent violence, after all. Undertale is refreshing in how it explores a world where such play can be representative of all manner of other forms of conflict. Lots of conflict occurs in our daily lives every day that doesn’t end in death or grievous injury. There’s clearly a lot of space yet to explore how to adapt our design conventions to the task of representing these nonviolent forms of conflict in fun and interesting ways. I think part of the reason Undertale made such waves is that there’s a huge appetite for that as-yet only slightly explored space.

Even when you ran away, you did it with a smile…

Boss Breakdown: Dark Riku at Hollow Bastion

Kingdom Hearts does something interesting with Riku. He’s set up at the beginning of the game as the player and the player character, sora’s, rival through gameplay and narrative alike. His initial early-game boss fight establishes Riku as the primary barometer for the player’s capabilities within the game’s systems. That’s the set up. The punch line, coiled and poised to outstretch and clothesline the player at mach 2, is Riku’s final boss fight – Dark Riku, awaiting at the ominous castle of Hollow Bastion. Regular Riku is difficult, way more difficult than might be reasonable at the very start of a game. However, he’s optional and therefor more of a story beat for both the game’s narrative and the emotional experience the player is being primed for. Dark Riku is not optional, and Dark Riku is levels above his predecessor. This boss also represents a notable difficulty spike and more or less fulfills the role of narrative climax to Kingdom Hearts, and that aforementioned emotional experience for the player themselves. People remember this boss fight. There’s something about it that sticks with you. It leaves an impact.

Growing up is finding Dark Riku impossibly cool, cringe, and then unironically cool again, in that order.

Dark Riku is a fight divided roughly into three phases. Dark Riku, as with the Destiny Islands Riku, has a pretty modest repertoire of actions to use against the player character, Sora. Riku fought defensively and passively on the Destiny Islands, almost always awaiting the player to approach or take some action. His voice lines were goading and taunting, meant to lull the player into making hasty mistakes. Dark Riku doesn’t wait. He may pace around for a few seconds before attacking, but will go on the offensive on a hair-trigger. At this point in the game, the player will have access to new defensive options compare to the Destiny Islands encounter; the block and dodge roll. They will also be able to heal themselves with cure magic.

Like clashing, in which Sora negates an oncoming attack by timing one of his own attacks to hit at the same time, the block negates incoming damage and sets Sora up to counterattack. The timing on a block is much more forgiving. However, if a block is whiffed, that is, if the block is used when there’s nothing to block, Sora has to spend a lot more time returning to a neutral stance than if he had just attacked, so there’s an interesting tradeoff between using attacks as defense and using a block as defense. One is more reliable, but more risky in the event of a failure. Using cure magic to restore Sora’s health will also have become a core mechanic by this part of the game. Sora takes a lot of damage and his health is not expected to hold out over an entire battle. The player is expected to keep on eye on their MP resource, which determines how often they can use magic. The MP bar is also another design tool for encouraging the kind of aggressive action that Kingdom Hearts is going for, as the primary way to restore MP is by attacking. Playing defensively will only get you so far. Using cure at an inopportune time can also mean getting interrupted, so the player must be aware of their surroundings and situation to heal. Riku is constantly prepared to counterattack, meaning the player will have to be more aware of how Riku will respond to certain actions, predicatively.

Magic is fueled by the power of VIOLENCE

For example, one of Dark Riku’s attacks is a medium-ranged overhead swing. The attack can be easily blocked or clashed and then followed up on with a counterattack for a pretty safe way to deal damage to Riku. Riku likes to use this overhead after dodging or blocking Sora, so the fight will reward consciously keeping track of Sora’s actions. Being able to switch from attacking to defending and back to attacking is the surest way to deal damage without being hit. One can goad Riku into dodging, which will likely trigger this overhead attack, which can then be countered. That kind of forethought is what’s being encouraged here. For a player, being able to successfully predict and counter enemy moves is a huge signifier of personal prowess, so it’s advantageous to a combat system to be predictable to a degree, if making your player feel powerful is a goal.

This attack-counterattack pattern Kingdom Hearts settles into creates fight scenarios that are both mechanically and visually dynamic

Another of his basic attacks is a two-hit combo that can close the distance between himself and Sora. It comes out fairly quickly, but it’s most often used when there’s some distance already, so the first hit will rarely make contact. It’s more of a tool for Riku to discourage simply running from him, but like with the overhead it can be blocked or clashed, then countered, meaning it’s also another tool for the player to direct the fight and indirectly control Riku’s actions to making openings. That’s the gist of it, really. If you want to make a really challenging boss fight and trust in the fun of your combat system, focusing on fundamentals makes for a solid foundation. In phase one Riku is just a very aggressive, very damaging, and responsive sword fighter. Understanding of the various defensive and offensive options available to Sora will carry the player far through this fight, but Riku still has a few tricks left.

Like Destiny Islands Riku, Dark Riku may take a defensive stance and taunt Sora, though this time with his more villainous tone. This time getting behind him won’t work, as Riku will always turn to face Sora, so taking his taunt with an attack is the only option outside of waiting. Fortunately, Riku almost always responds to this with an attack that can be easily countered with a block. If Sora gets too close to Riku, he’ll do a fast spin attack to help maintain his optimal distance. This helps keep the player in danger, so to speak, which helps keep the fight exciting. This quick attack is blockable, but not easily counterable.

Riku’s third attack in this phase is the helm splitter, where he jumps high into the air and comes down with a magical shockwave on the ground. This attack is unblockable and deals significant damage, so dodging out of the way with a roll or out-ranging the attacking are the only options. Dark Riku has a few of these unblockable attacks, most likely intended to encourage the player engaging with a fuller breadth of the combat mechanics, such as the dodge roll, blocking, jumping, and clashing. Unblockable attacks don’t have a universal signifier in Kingdom Hearts, but it does a pretty good job of making them intuitive. Riku’s helm splitter is quite a bit more exaggerated than his other attacks in animation, with him jumping very high into the air before coming down. It’s obvious straightaway that it’s more powerful than his other moves. The energy his shockwave creates is given a lot of pure white in its color profile, and any attack he or his derivatives use from here on out with similar visual details are likewise unblockable.

The big jump both warns of the impending danger, and gives ample time to dodge out of the way, which I… fail to do, here

Once Dark Riku has taken a bit of damage, the warm up is over. This is phase 2. From here on out, he’ll occasionally empower his weapon with a dark aura, adding some nasty new effects to his attacks. The art and design assets of this empowered state are really just overlays on the basic behaviors he already has. It’s very efficient design, that wouldn’t have demanded too much production overhead, and yet expands the fight in very interesting ways. Every time he does his two-hit gap closer while empowered, he’ll launch an energy disc ahead of himself, which can damage Sora, or even set him up to be combo’d by followup attacks from Riku. Riku’s overhead will now also launch some unblockable energy, in two lines out to either side of him. The way these two attacks in particular are designed utilize a common trick in action games with a dodge mechanic like Kingdom Hearts. By extending out the danger area of these attacks in lines, they require a greater degree of fine control from the player while dodging. Usually, dodging just vaguely away from danger is sufficient, but if you dodge to Riku’s side during an overhead, or directly away from him during a gap-closer, you’ll get hit. Closing off specific vectors around the enemy during their attacks like this tests the player’s ability to dodge in specific ways, a straightforward step up from what is usually expected of a dodge.

The game is funneling Sora to certain positions with attacks like this, keeping Riku front and center.

During his empowered state, Riku is extremely aggressive, moreso even than before, and will barely give the player a moment to breathe. During this state, healing is very risky, as is going on the offensive, so the challenge becomes figuring out what the player can accomplish that won’t lead to their own defeat. Riku’s gap closer is still blockable, as are the projectiles he creates from it. So essentially, Riku’s empowered state has an unblockable attack that is most effectively dodged, and an attack that is most effectively blocked, so that pattern of encouraging the player to utilize a variety of their tools and maneuvers is reinforced. Riku is much less likely to flinch during his empowered state, but it can still happen, so the player must keep an extremely sharp eye out for their opportunity to deal some damage. The longer the fight goes on, the narrower this opportunity becomes, requiring the player to take greater and greater risks to deal damage, naturally elevating the tension as it reaches its crescendo. The narrative in this fight is meant to be an underdog overcoming his greatest rival consorting with pure darkness – a symbol of overwhelming power. Demanding persistence of the player in knocking down Riku’s increasingly ironclad defenses reinforces this feeling.

Persistence is key in turning Riku’s attacks against him

Riku will finish out his empowered state with an empowered helm splitter that unleashes a wave of unblockable energy bursts. As with any enemy in Kingdom hearts, the key to avoiding this attack comes from understanding its behavior. The attack itself sort of acts like a little mini-enemy in that it has its own logic to how the energy bursts appear. They will surround Sora, and appear at semi-random locations, but there’s a bit of a predictable method to it. They seem to predicatively try to lead whatever direction Sora is currently moving, so quick changes in trajectory as Sora dodges drastically reduces the likelihood Sora will be hit. Figuring out your enemy’s behavior through observation is one of the primary skills Kingdom Hearts tries to impart, and that can also be applied to individual attacks like this.

Notice the appearance of energy bursts are clustered around where I’m facing, just ahead of me, but slightly offset

Riku cycles between his empowered state and the attack pattern from phase 1 until he is reduced to low health. Now the final phase begins, and with the player’s competence in regular combat well-established, the game shifts somewhat to introduce feelings of desperation and survival. Riku will permanently enter the empowered state, and the player will now have to constantly deal with his empowered attacks while whittling down the last of his health. The tension is raised and the stakes are at their peak – be defeated now and lose all that progress you made fighting Riku. The player’s ability to manage risk, defense, and offense is pushed to its limit.

Every so often, and with increasing frequency as his health is reduced, Riku will initiate his ultimate attack. This is one of the earliest examples of such show-stopper, set-piece, mega powerful, screen-subsuming attacks that will become a Kingdom Hearts favorite tradition. First, how does it work? Riku will raise himself into the air, announcing his intention, then fly straight at sora in a dashing attack. A series of identical dashing attacks, this time each forming a part of a rotating danger area around the arena happen in rapid sequence. Finally, Riku does an even more empowered version of his helm splitter, sending energy bursts outward from the center of the arena towards the edge. Like the previous empowered helm splitter, the game is asking of the player here to recognize the behavior of this attack, how it works, and formulate a response. Since this ultimate attack is constituted of mostly things we’ve seen Riku do before, it also acts as a capstone to the fight’s mechanics.

The final step of the fight is, essentially, trying to squeeze in a last few good hits against Riku. You’ll notice he’s totally invulnerable during his ultimate attack. He’s also prone to using it very very frequently when his health is almost spent. I have mixed feelings on this. On the one hand I’m wary of ever making a boss completely invulnerable like this when up to this point the fight has been so open ended and player-driven. Riku is never invulnerable otherwise, even if it’s not always wise to attack him, so it can be a somewhat frustrating disruption, especially when he is using it near-constantly towards the end of the fight. I understand what the intent is here. This attack is the most difficult thing to defend against that Riku can throw at you, so it makes sense to use it consistently to up the tension at the fight’s climax. The experience of having only a small window to deal that last tiny bit of damage you need is also a compelling one – it gives the feeling of the fight becoming more and more desperate. Still, the attack is dangerous enough that it feels as though Riku didn’t need to be unassailable during it. The added danger of trying to damage Riku while he’s flying around with this ultimate attack could even be quite compelling, itself.

When this all started, Kingdom Hearts went out of its way to really build up the rivalry between Sora and Riku. It was a rivalry built on a childish sense of possession of their mutual friend Kairi, though that was all merely a pretense to air their own senses of inadequacy toward one another. The rivalry was only ever really about Riku and Sora. They both care deeply for Kairi, but Kairi and her feelings weren’t the real reason they fought. Now, the situation is turned on its head. Riku’s will is suppressed, the real Riku is nowhere to be seen in this dark reflection, and Kairi is in imminent danger. There’s no rivalry anymore. Sora no longer fights for himself, but only for the safety of his friends, both Riku and Kairi. The Dark Riku fight paints a stark contrast to the idyllic playful world our characters once found themselves in, forcing them to grow past the irresponsibility of their rosy childhood to own the consequences of their actions to this point. With the battle wrapped up, Riku is left to deal with the darkness he’s unleashed, and Sora has to be willing to give up his heart, his ego, to save Kairi, proving her well being more important to him than his own.

The Dark Riku boss fight is incredibly memorable. Anyone who played Kingdom Hearts in their childhood will tell you as such. It’s an excellent culmination of the skills one builds up through a long RPG like this, while capping off the central emotional through-line of the game, established all the way back in the opening minutes of the experience. It’s a great fight, but there are some pretty notable issues I should mention. Most egregious, is how the relatively small boss arena interacts with the game’s lock-on feature. The lock-on is meant to keep your enemy front-and-center for easy viewing. While dodging around Riku’s flanks, the camera has to spin and can often get caught on surrounding walls in such a way that Riku will be pushed off-screen, essentially hiding information from the player through the mechanic that is meant to do the opposite of that. It’s a pretty significant technical hitch, and a shame that it can be so readily reproduced. There’s also the repeated periods of invincibility Riku enjoys near the end of the fight, which as I said do accomplish some of the fight’s design goals admirably, but creates a bit of unnatural frustration I feel could have been designed around. While I find what is blockable and unblockable in his fight rather intuitive, that’s a bit of a gray area and I could see it unduly confusing some people. Still, all that emotional catharsis in finally defeating Riku at his best, and seeing how Sora’s matured could make one overlook some of these flaws. I mean who could forget Donald Duck tearfully running to Sora’s side as he disappears.

I told you Donald was the key to all of this

Overall, I think it’s pretty clear why this one fight sticks so strongly in people’s minds. It’s not just the narrative, nor is just that it’s incredibly hard. It’s that synthesis of gameplay and story – action and emotion that really cements moments like this for people. The emotion is heightened by the interactivity, and the interactivity heightened by the emotion.

He sought a way to cross over into other worlds. And he opened his heart to darkness…

Boss Breakdown: Riku on Destiny Islands

Today on Boss Breakdown I’m going to be delving into the wonderfully weird world of Kingdom Hearts to examine an optional boss encounter that comes very early on in the game – the player’s ultimate rival, Riku. Kingdom Hearts is an action RPG developed by Square Enix. Combat in Kingdom Hearts is a fast-paced series of sword battles (well, keyblade… yeah, we’ll just say sword battles) that take place on the ground and in the air with over-the-top fantastical feats of acrobatics and agility. It’s very much larger than life, exaggerated, and full of charm.

The player fills the role of the young dreamer Sora, a resident of the Destiny Islands, a vague sort of childhood-paradise world where teenagers enjoy their seemingly endless summer vacation racing, play-fighting, collecting seashells, and imagining the world outside their own. Sora’s got two best friends – Kairi, a creative, sassy yet kind-hearted girl and Riku, an abrasive, competitive, and contemplative boy. The Destiny Islands act as a safe tutorial space for Kingdom Hearts where the player is free to explore the game’s movement systems without fear of battle unless they seek it out. Riku has an optional boss fight in this early stage and it’s very notable for what it accomplishes. I wanted to talk about Riku particularly for how strong the gameplay-narrative aspects of his fight’s design are. This first Riku boss fight on the Destiny Islands is very basic, comes very early, and is seemingly innocuous. You wouldn’t think it has huge implications on the rest of the game, but there was clearly a lot of thought put into how this early game challenge would fit into the overall experience.

Also Donald Duck is involved, somehow, I understand

Riku is absolutely terrible, at this point in the narrative. I don’t mean to say I dislike his character, in fact he’s very effective in his role. From the moment you meet him he’s a driving force for the player, motivating them to explore the combat mechanics. He teases and condescends to Sora, but it’s all innocent enough. It feels like friendly banter. Some red flags start to go off when Riku and Sora challenge one another to a foot race. Surreptitiously, outside of earshot of Kairi, Riku puts up a prize, a very symbolic and intimate moment with Kairi, as a bet to be won by the victor of the race. It’s somewhat chilling. Sora doesn’t even have a chance to really respond to the rather untoward proposition before the race begins. The player has a single chance to establish who wins this “bet”, though the result is inconsequential, as Riku will play it off as a joke. It certainly doesn’t sound like he’s joking when he first brings it up, however.

This is like wagering her hand in marriage, basically

There’s some clear tension building among this group of friends, and Riku seems to be the source of it. At a later point, Kairi will offer to escape the island with just Sora, the two of them leaving for adventures together, implying Riku would be left behind alone. Sora doesn’t answer quickly enough, and Kairi too plays off her startling proposal as a joke. In actuality, with the benefit of hindsight, Riku doesn’t act all that terrible generally. Perhaps a bit full of himself, but he does show a genuine camaraderie with Sora and Kairi. It’s isolated moments like that proposition at the footrace where an inner darkness peeks through from him. He says hurtful things from time to time, but he’s ultimately a confused teenager from a very narrow world. Before all this though, Riku strongly establishes himself as the de facto leader and strong, wise “elder” of the group (he’s only a year older than Sora and Kairi, but still). He taunts and brags to Sora constantly during encounters with him, demeaning his abilities in a sort of ribbing way, but also the kind of way that gets under your skin and moves you to prove him wrong.

Look at how perfect it is, that text field was MADE FOR THIS

As a young kid, I really did feel like Riku was driving a wedge between Sora and Kairi. It invested me in this microcosmic little world, with Riku as our small-scale antagonist. Riku is positioned that way by the gameplay, as antagonistic. He’s meant to drive you, as the player, to better yourself through game mechanics to better Sora. You feel the same rivalry Sora feels with Riku , and you’re suffering the same way Sora is when Riku beats you into the sand. And he will. A lot. Riku’s boss fight is incredibly overtuned for what I’d consider to be an appropriate early-game boss fight, under normal circumstances, but that’s why Riku is an optional fight. I say optional, but given the aforementioned story context, you’d be hard pressed to find a Kingdom Hearts player who would not at least attempt to defeat Riku a few times.

You can challenge various characters to play-fights with wooden swords. Please ignore the fact that beating each other with wooden weapons would still be horribly dangerous, as this is anime land where human children can effortlessly bound twenty feet in the air, do three backflips, then deflect a flying bullet out of the sky with a sword. It’s fine. These are the only real sources of combat available to the player in this tutorial stage, as the story isn’t ready for monsters to be popping out just yet. They act as a sort of optional tutorial set, with each kid you can challenge specializing in teaching some aspect of the combat system.

Selphie teaches the player how to clash with an enemy’s weapon. Tidus teaches you how to outmaneuver a melee attacker. Wakka will teach you how to deflect projectiles. Riku is the fourth and final kid you can challenge, and he’s here to teach you how to lose. I’ve at times heard individuals deride Kingdom Hearts as a button masher, or in other words, implying the gameplay is overly simplified to the point of being trivialized by mindlessly mashing the attack button. I could go into detail about that misconception, but essentially if you have that experience, you’re playing on too low a difficulty setting for your level of skill. Riku’s boss fight is here to prove that to you.

Riku’s arsenal of maneuvers and attacks is pretty modest at this stage, but very effective. The player too, this early in the game, does not have very many options. Sora can run, jump, or attack with a 3-hit melee combo in the air or on the ground. Your defensive options are severely limited, you don’t even get your proper block or dodge roll until later, so using good positioning is your only way to avoid damage. That, and utilizing Kingdom Hearts‘ delightfully intuitive weapon clash system, which will nullify enemy attacks if Sora matches them with a well-timed attack of his own, deflecting the attack with a satisfying *clash* sound. This system simultaneously rewards attentive observation of your enemies’ attacks for proper timing and promotes aggressive attack-happy play, which makes the combat a very frenetic and fast-paced system. Attacking is, in a way, also a form of defending.

Ahh youth… smacking around your buds with two by fours like god intended

Riku has a fast melee attack that he’ll bring out if you get too close, teaching the basics of how enemies behave in this game. They mostly respond to the player’s position. They can be proactive, but their behavior is extremely contingent on Sora’s position relative to them. If sora dodges this attack but stays close, Riku can follow it up with a second, similar fast and close-ranged hit. At a medium distance, Riku can stab out his sword for a slower but longer-reaching attack. Riku also has a small spinning attack. Observing what Riku can do will also teach the player what Sora can do, as their arsenals at this stage are very similar. The attack button in Kingdom Hearts is contextual, and will activate a different attack depending on Sora’s relative position to his target, and whether or not he’s airborne, similar to Riku! These fast attacks of Riku’s can be clashed, which may stagger him and leave him vulnerable to a counterattack. This is one of the basic methods of dealing damage to enemies in Kingdom Hearts.

Simple so far, right? Well that’s just what Riku wants you to think. In Kingdom Hearts, because battles are so overwhelmingly player-directed, enemies keep track of how much they’re being hit by the player with something called a revenge value. This invisible numerical value, once it reaches certain thresholds, changes the behavior of enemies, causing them to retaliate, or use super moves. Riku has no super moves, but his favorite form of retaliation is so deadly it might as well be classified as a super weapon. If he feels he’s taken too many hits too quickly, Riku will lean onto his back, and point his feet toward the air, before kicking up into a standing position, clobbering Sora if he’s standing in front of the kick’s path. This maneuver deals devastating damage, and has a very tight window within which the player can react and move out of the way. Riku loves to do this in the middle of Sora’s attack combos. Riku’s revenge value is very sensitive, and he’ll start doing this if Sora’s hit Riku with even one full attack combo. The player can stop Sora’s combo, but only between attacks. If you push that attack button one too many times, Sora will be locked into his attack animation, and it’ll be too late. Button mashing is the easiest way to get absolutely demolished by Riku. I think it was very clever to key into this player behavior specifically as a bad habit worth shaking, if one ever wants to be as good at this as Riku. You’ve got to think, look, and listen carefully before just wildly swinging your sword.

If you do keep an eye out though, Riku’s greatest weapon can become your greatest weapon. Riku is unable to retaliate if you hit him just as his kick-stand maneuver ends. If you see it coming, you can step out of the way and respond with a free attack combo, punishing him. If Riku feels he’s in a bad position, or has been hit too many times without landing hits of his own, he may make a short, grounded dash movement to close the distance, or jump into the air to make distance. Riku is unable to attack in the air, nor can he retaliate in the air. The timing is tough, but if you can land an aerial combo on Riku while he’s jumping, he has no recourse. Giving Riku no aerial options at all helps the player realize that aerial and grounded combat have distinct differences and that enemies will react differently to those approaches. Knocking enemies into the air will tend to make them more vulnerable, so this is good knowledge to have.

Riku’s final trick is his taunting. He’s constantly, constantly, goading and heckling Sora and by extension the player about how they’re scared or not good enough. If you act in haste, he’s likely to clobber you, so this really is a game mechanic of sorts. It’s easy for people to tunnel vision in games and make mistakes, which is the main thing this boss fight is trying to teach you overall. One of Riku’s taunts is accompanied by a blocking motion. Any attempts to attack Riku from the front during this extended block will fail, and after a few failed attacks, Riku will hit Sora with a powerful overhead strike. This may at first seem like an impasse where the player simply as to wait for Riku’s taunt to end, but in actuality, if you get behind him, Riku will realize his block won’t work, and he’ll jump to a new position. Given what we’ve learned, and how predictable this behavior is, the player can learn to catch Riku out of this reliable jump to turn the taunt against him. Cool!

I can feel genuine, seething rage start to rise from the depths of my heart. How authentic!

Amusingly, the game takes a moment after each and every confrontation with Riku (you can challenge and re-challenge him to races and fights as much as you want) to highlight your win rate against him, with Sora musing on the current “score”. A fresh player is likely to have lost to Riku many, many times by the time they beat him, if they beat him. The game does not want you to forget that Riku is better than you at this. The race alone, which you are required to run at least once, is likely to give Riku at least one win over you, as the race is also extremely difficult to a new player. The game sets the player up for failure when it comes to beating Riku, and engenders the same sense of dissatisfaction and perhaps inadequacy that Sora feels toward his older counterpart. The player, like Sora, is motivated to improve and master their combat skills as Riku himself becomes an implicit motivator.

It is the game designer’s job to make the player motivated to want to play their game, to spend time in the world they’ve helped to build. Obviously, a designer needs to motivate the player to do so. There’s explicit motivation, which promises the player rewards and treats for doing so, outside motivation. These are useful tools, but potentially much more powerful are the inner motivations whose rewards come from within the player. Fun, satisfaction, and investment in a story are all implicit motivators. These are ephemeral terms, difficult to pin down, which is why when they are designed for effectively it’s so remarkable to behold, and worth studying. Riku will destroy a new player, repeatedly. However, as beating him is entirely optional, this is unlikely to demoralize the player, who is allowed to continue the story, but now carries this internalized rivalry with Riku. One day, you will be able to beat him, the game implicitly promises. Maybe not now, but continue playing, continue improving, and one day, you will. You might see this technique used in games often, if you’re on the look out for it – establish a rival or mentor that both the player and player character cannot overcome, setting the player up to go on a journey of self-betterment alongside their protagonist.

This player-protagonist harmony, where the player feels analogous feelings to your protagonist, is an excellent method of immersing the player in a game world. If the player has nearly the same motivations and emotional responses as the character they are playing, they’ll find it much more natural to put themselves in their shoes and empathize with them for whatever wild scenario you can dream up. This is the real power of video games as a medium. It’s the only form of media where the player can really be part of the story, explicitly, emotionally, mechanically, so I’ve always believed one should lean into that. Gameplay itself can be a form of storytelling.

But this is only part of the story. So Riku is set up as this big imposing physical and emotional obstacle for the player, as well as for Sora. They’re ready to tackle it together. But what next? Where does this story go? You may have heard that Kingdom Hearts‘ narrative gets complicated. People like to exaggerate, but for the sake of simplicity I think next time we’re going to skip ahead a bit and see where this path we’re on leads us, in regards to Sora and Riku. This is, after all, not the only Riku boss battle in this game. Players familiar with Kingdom Hearts will know the others well. In part 2 of this Riku Boss Breakdown, we’re going to take a look at the infamous Dark Riku boss fight.

They’ll remain a part of each other’s lives, no matter what…

Boss Breakdown: Artorias The Abysswalker

Welcome to Boss Breakdown! I wanted to do a series of posts specifically about boss design and the particulars of some of my favorite bosses (as well as perhaps some not-so-favorite ones that are otherwise notable to me). It didn’t take long for me to think of what boss I wanted to talk about first…

We’re going to start off strong with Artorias The Abysswalker from the original Dark Souls. He’s one of my favorites and an excellent study in readability for enemy design. I’m going to go over his general behavior, as I can observe it, then breakdown a number of the specific attacks and moves he can employ against the player. I’ll wrap up by sharing my analysis of what the design goals of this fight were, and how well the final design accomplished them. Some mild spoilers for Dark Souls are to follow. For context, Artorias the Abysswalker is a legendary and divine knight within the Dark Souls world renowned for his heroics and saving the land from a menacing force called the abyss. You happen upon him crusading against abyssal creatures when he turns on you and attacks like a madman. Dark Souls is an action RPG about clashing sword, spell, and shield against various gods and monsters, and thus you must likewise do so against Artorias.

Even with my experience, if I don’t focus on my timing I’m likely to get clipped by his large attacks.

Artorias is a knight, albeit a possessed one, and he fights like a knight. Mimicking many of the behaviors of other humanoid enemies in Dark Souls, Artorias likes to circle around you slowly, as if sizing you up. He’s aggressive, but doesn’t leave you with no breathing room at all. He seems to cycle between states of high-aggression, letting loose a deluge of attacks, and low-aggression, where he’ll be more reactive and less proactive. If in his reactive state, it’s dangerous to engage in maneuvers with a lot of time investment like healing. Enemies in Dark Souls generally do not like it when the player tries to heal, and will move to stop them more often than not if they are able. This is especially true of bosses and especially especially true of humanoid late-game bosses like Artorias. I suspect there is a special behavior baked into his AI to make Artorias lose his cool if he sees you try to slip in a quicky sippy of your healing Sunny-D potion. Healing is not meant to be a free action in this game, rather its something you must do while your opponent is occupied, in order to accomplish it safely. You must take a risk to heal, as healing is, ultimately, correcting a mistake you’ve made to begin with. The added risk is your payment for taking a hit. If you’re hugging Artorias too close he may have trouble hitting you with his wide-arcing attacks, so to counter this problem he may roll away from you to get some distance, or use an attack that allows him to reposition himself like a leaping strike. He also has a dodging side-swipe combination to really dissuade the player from trying to confuse the AI by getting too close. Artorias is most effective when facing the player, so if the player tries to get behind him he’ll splash some dark muck their way. It’s one of his quickest attacks and, proportionately, does the least damage. This move is more an inconvenience than anything, and really meant to just gently discourage getting behind Artorias too often, as it is disruptive and difficult to react to.

NO ENERGY DRINKS ALLOWED IN THE ABYSS! We only drink BLACK COFFEE here!

Most of Artorias’s attacks are slow and sluggish, objectively speaking. He has some extremely generous telegraphs to his attacks, some of which can be almost as long as a full second, while the average human reaction time is at around 250ms, or one quarter of a second. This is purposeful. Artorias is meant to be difficult, but despite a somewhat exaggerated online reputation, Dark Souls always aims to be fair in what obstacles it throws the player’s way. Clearly communicated telegraphs seem to be a priority for the enemy design in this game, and this seems especially true of Artorias. Obstacles simply tend to be more satisfying to overcome for players when they are clearly conveyed, even if they are difficult to overcome, and in an action-based boss fight this means effective attack telegraphs.

Notice how Artorias really drags his sword behind just before he swings it. The sword is so massive it’s very easy to track with the eye, especially with how the animators framed Artorias’s poses relative to the player’s position. They knew Artorias would be usually staring straight at you from the center of the screen, so they knew how to best frame him such that his actions are very traceable by the player. This is important, as a boss that is difficult to read can often mean a frustrating and dissatisfying fight. Most of Artorias’s attacks do not have very strong tracking, meaning he does not aim himself in 3D space at the player with perfect accuracy. Obviously, if tracking on an attack is too strong it becomes impossible to outmaneuver. Artorias’s sword swings have just enough tracking to make casually walking out of the way an unwise evasive tactic, but not nearly enough to overtake the speed of a well-timed dodge roll.

Artorias slowly drags the sword into position and swings it over his head, but then **slows down** the movement of his arm right before he strikes to make sure you can see his sword about to come down, its silhouette clearly defined.

That dragging action of his sword also communicates a part of the narrative; this Artorias is being controlled by an outside, corrupting force. He moves almost like a puppet, as though his limbs don’t act in concert with the rest of his body. Using narrative elements like this as gameplay elements helps make the entire fight feel more cohesive and ‘settled in’ so to speak with the context of the world. I think one of the things that stuck with me so much about Artorias is just how effective his telegraphs are. They are pretty generous with a lot of leeway, but just quick enough to make them feel dangerous, frenetic, and challenging, while at the same time I never feel cheated whenever Artorias gets a good whack in against me (which he does. Frequently). That readability is really essential in making a good boss fight for an action game like this.

Artorias may bound into the air, do a flip, and bring down his sword onto the ground in a slam. For this flipping move you can once again see Artorias’s massive attack telegraphs which give the player ample time to react. This attack doesn’t actually do anything until Artorias has nearly hit the ground, and all that time he spends hanging in the air like he’s posing for a comic book cover is just fluff to telegraph the attack more effectively. Well, perhaps not fluff. It also serves a purpose to cut quite a striking scene. This incredible feat of acrobatics really sells Artorias as an inhuman swordsman. Dark Souls characters don’t really do this. Not usually, anyway. At their most nimble, the player character is a mildly athletic normal person. These sorts of insane stunts really set Artorias and what he’s capable of apart. It reinforces that you’re fighting a monster. Another fun design aspect of this attack is how it can chain into itself. Artorias will do this same attack one to three times in a row, requiring the player to dodge them with correct timing subsequently. It’s one of the best tools in Artorias’s kit for enforcing mastery of the Dark Souls dodge roll. Because the difference in Artorias’s body language between repeated flipping strikes and returning to a neutral position can be very subtle, it’s also an excellent tool for enforcing mastery of observation. To know how to react, one has to perceive their opponent very closely, which can be very challenging with all the moving information in a game like this.

Once again, we can see Artorias’s animation noticeably slow down just as he reaches the apex of his jump to punctuate the attack. Everything the player needs to know is communicated clearly.

The aforementioned flipping attack as well as a long-reaching vertical strike Artorias may interweave in his grounded combat both share the properties of being overhead attacks. Because of how overhead attacks behave in Dark Souls it is probable, depending on the player’s spacing relative to Artorias, that the attacks will go over the player’s shield and hit them regardless of a block, making shields less viable for these specific sorts of attacks unless spacing is well managed. So, these overheads enforce a level of skill in fine spacing – you want these overheads to tip your shield so they do not overreach you. The other option is to engage in at least some dodging, which fits with this fight’s goals of demanding mastery of numerous game mechanics. Another of those mechanics is the stamina meter, essentially a hard limiter on how often a player can block or dodge. If either defensive option is abused, stamina will be drained for a moment and the player will be unable to defend. When Artorias is in his aggressive state, he keeps up the pressure. If defending is done without forethought, stamina will be quickly drained and the player will likely take damage. Managing stamina in concert with your defensive options is another skill demanded of the player here.

Artorias has a stabbing thrust attack with a unique property- it hits twice, and it hits hard. Blocking Artorias with a shield is a plenty viable strategy. Shields are in fact very powerful in the first Dark Souls. This stab move, if taken full-on with a shield, however, may barrel through your stamina, breaking the player’s block and damaging them. Badly. Having your shield stance broken means entering one of several states the game considers to be off-balance, where combatants are vulnerable to bonus damage. The Artorias fight seems to be specifically tailored to ensure a player never relies too heavily on one strategy. To beat Artorias you have to be adaptable, and have at least a cursory understanding of a variety of Dark Souls‘ many combat mechanics, not just one or two.

Block and you’re likely to be hit. Different attacks that demand different strategies keep the player alert and observant.

One of the most devastating attacks in this boss’s arsenal is his leaping stab. Generally I find there are two main kinds of attack telegraphs in action games. There are the momentary tells, which flow directly into the attack they are telegraphing. Think a sword pulling back just before it comes down in one smooth motion. Then, there are the “hey heads up, I’m gonna hit ya!” telegraphs that are more like an ambulance siren alerting you to get the heck out the way, because something is coming. Artorias’s leaping stab is the latter kind. In these situations the game wants you to know that something is about to happen, and you need to be ready to follow up on that knowledge. With this kind of telegraph, you’ll know its coming well ahead of the attack. Designing an attack this way helps build variety in an enemy’s moveset and how the player paces themselves. It also allows the enemy to have an extraordinarily dangerous move that does not feel cheap because it is so forewarned. Artorias will howl at you before leaping into the air from a great distance and slamming his sword down in a stab. Sprinkling in these massively damaging yet easily nullified attacks is a good way to convey the danger and power of your boss without making it feel unfair. This attack also reinforces precision in one’s dodging and spacing, as dodging directly away from the landing site of the attack, toward the camera, is a good way to get stabbed, while lateral dodging, or even dodging towards Artorias’s starting position is much safer.

“AAARRROOOGH” – Sir Artorias D. Abysswalker, Esquire

Artorias is not a multi-phase fight, meaning he does not employ new strategies or abilities, for the most part, against the player throughout the fight. Fighting Artorias is as straightforward as it gets. He does have one last trick he might employ once he’s sustained a decent bit of damage, though. What I often affectionately call his ‘super saiyan power-up’ is an ability where he’ll stand perfectly still while gathering a cloud of menacing darkness around him. Cleverly, this makes boss staggering a central mechanic of the fight, whereas in most other boss fights throughout Dark Souls and throughout the series, even, it is a secondary concern, at best. Enemies in Dark Souls take an invisible stagger value or poise damage in addition to health damage when struck by the player. It represents the force being applied to an enemy’s stance and it’s pretty intuitive- a giant battle axe will inflict more stagger than a rapier. Once a minimum threshold of this stagger value has been reached in a short enough time, the enemy stumbles. Most enemies stagger on every strike. Larger ones tend to be able to shrug off a few hits. Bosses will often require a number of strikes to feel the pain and react. The only way to stop Artorias’s accumulation of power is to stagger him. Fail to do so and you’ll not only be caught up in a damaging explosion of darkness if you’re too close, but you’ll also have to deal with an empowered Artorias capable of decimating health and shields alike with his sword for some time. It creates an interesting dilemma of risk and reward. Do you attack Artorias while he refuses to fight back in the hopes you can stop his empowerment? Or do you take the down time to heal and hope you can dodge his empowered assault later? It demands the player make a snap calculation as to whether they can stagger Artorias in the short window they have to do so, while also making Artorias an even more terrifying opponent.

Now I’d like to briefly go over some of the narrative elements of this boss fight. Any game with a narrative that also has bosses will naturally inject some sort of story into those boss fights. Gameplay is storytelling, after all, so there’s some things worth pointing out. As I stated earlier, Artorias’s sluggish and labored movements pull double-duty in making a satisfyingly readable opponent and selling Artorias as a dangerous, wild monster-warrior not in full control of his faculties. He moves almost like a puppet on invisible strings, with his head leading him where he goes, his limbs dragging behind. The sword is animated to depict its incredible weight, which also informs the shape his attacks take. The sheer might of his heavy strikes, their ability to tear through defenses, and his inhuman acrobatics shores up Artorias as a legendary divine knight. Several of his attacks, especially his spinning horizontal strikes, are very reminiscent of his wolf companion Sif, another boss in Dark Souls. Sif would eventually take up Artorias’s sword, so it’s natural Sif learned to wield it by observing their master. The darkened knight’s volatile, mindless state implies the tragic fate of this hero, and his fall to darkness. Dark Souls is also well known for its environmental storytelling so I’ll indulge a bit and point out a fun detail that can be gleaned about this Artorias from the environment. Elsewhere, it is noted that Artorias is renowned as a legendary left-handed swordsman. You may notice Artorias fights the player with his right hand. Eventually it is discovered Artorias gave up his shield to defend Sif from the abyss. It stands to reason that before succumbing himself, Artorias tried to defend with his left arm, sword-in-hand, shattering all of its bones in the process. The now corrupted Artorias fights, hobbled, with his offhand wielding the sword, main hand a wobbly useless husk. As challenging as the Artorias fought in Dark Souls may be, he is but a shadow of his former self. What a glorious sight the fully capable Artorias must have been in his prime.

But did Artorias carry POCKET SAND in his glory days!?

So I obviously really really like this boss fight. It may be one of my all time favorites from any game. The design suggests a boss that is more straightforward than almost anything in the rest of Dark Souls. Even simple bosses like the early-game Taurus demon have some sort of twist or gimmick, but Artorias is fought in a big, round empty room. His tricks are not that tricky, his attacks are mostly what they all appear to be. It’s a drag-out fight where only one guy can walk away. Dodge and hit better than Artorias to win. It really pushes you to use all of your defensive options. With generous attack telegraphs, but tight windows between attacks in which Artorias is vulnerable, the fight makes knowledge of spacing, Artorias’s animations, and the timing of his attacks your greatest tools. It feels like the purest form of Dark Souls. No fat, just learn your opponent’s moves, learn how to deal with them, and execute well to win. That was the goal with Artorias, and even at this relatively early stage of the Dark Souls franchise he’s one of the stand-out examples of that sort of design. Future games will iterate liberally on what Artorias represents, to great effect, but good ol’ Arty will always be one of the most elegant of these ‘pure fighting’ Dark Souls boss fights. It’s also got some great narrative elements baked right into the gameplay. They really wanted to sell you on the mindless rage of this abyssal thing controlling a once great hero. The way he violently massacres a hapless mook in his intro cut-scene sets an excellent tone that the deranged flailing of his animations expertly follow up on.

Pictured: Me **not** hitting and dodging better than Artorias

Artorias is a microcosm of what Dark Souls wants to get out of you as a player – observation, spacial awareness, and reaction. Thinking while you’re fighting. No matter what approach you take, with whatever tools are at the player’s disposal, Artorias is prepared to respond with the tools at his disposal to ensure you’re awake, and know what you’re doing. He’s an end-game boss, so he’s tuned to be difficult, and a penultimate test of your mastery over the Dark Souls combat mechanics. Artorias also marks the culmination of a shift in boss design for Dark Souls and its various sister series that began with some of the later bosses in the previous game Demon’s Souls. From this point forward, the emphasis the Artorias fight places on in-the-moment decision making, close observation of the opponent’s tells, high-stakes reaction based gameplay, and mastery of the game’s defensive mechanics such as dodging and countering will become a cornerstone of the series, more so than even anything that had come before.

Knight Artorias came to stop this, but such a hero has nary a murmur of dark…

Majora’s Mask Boss Fight Remakes: Boss Design Goals

This is part two of an analysis on the boss design of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask and its remake. Part one can be found here.

Something I’d like to talk about while reviewing these last two bosses is the utility of bosses in general. Rather, what design goals are you fulfilling by including a boss? People love bosses, but why? They tend to be notable spikes in gameplay intensity marking the end of a chapter, level, or other extended segment. Bosses can serve a number of functions be it as a narrative component, accentuating a certain gameplay mechanic, simply being a restrictive challenge, among many others. Considering the design goals of a boss helps keep the experience focused and in-line with what you’re trying to design. I’m going to look at these next two bosses through this lens.

Gargantuan Masked Fish Gyorg is next on the chopping block. As his name implies, this beast will fight you primarily from his home in the water. The fight takes place in a large, deep pool with a single round platform in the center raised just above the water’s surface for the player to stand on. At this point in the game the player will also have access to the Zora form, a power which allows them to breathe and maneuver adaptably underwater by running along the pool’s bottom or swimming at high speeds like a dolphin. I’d definitely call Gyorg the weakest of the original N64 Majora’s Mask boss fights. With very little going on, and a rather disruptive camera, I never find myself looking forward to fighting him.

N64 Gyorg’s fight is kind of confusing, to be honest. While the fight is completely player-directed, it’s also not always clear exactly what you need to be doing in this fight. If you stand on the central platform, Gyorg flails about and tries to knock you off, indicating clearly that you’re meant to fight him in the much more spacious pool, although blind-firing arrows at him with your bow from dry land is also possible. The camera is not very kind when it comes to this method, however. You seem to be punished for not being in Zora form, and once in Zora form Gyorg still just seems to swim aimlessly, occasionally going for a bite at you. There’s so little structure to this fight that one can just sort of… try things out, most of which will only kind of work. What I think you’re supposed to do is use the Zora form’s boomerang ability to stun him.. Then use it again while he is stunned to damage him. He has a weak point you need to hit, but it is targeted automatically if you use the targeting mode. A little odd, a little unclear. If you get the timing right, you can stun lock Gyorg forever and there basically is no boss fight. Get it wrong, and you’ll be seeing a lot of the inside of Gyorg’s mouth in rather frustrating fashion. The problem is, while the targeting mode tries to frame the camera, Gyorg’s wildly moving body will swing it around in an abrupt fashion. Unfortunate, since using the targeting mode is the ideal way to attack him. After he takes some damage, he will release a swarm of small fish to attack you, though they can be largely ignored as one continues to stun-lock Gyorg.

The total lack of structure in this fight makes me wish it was more environment-directed, and makes me question what the design goals with this fight are. It does not utilize this dungeon’s item at all, nor is it very friendly to using most of the Zora’s powers. Swimming at Gyorg can potentially harm him, but I wouldn’t recommend it. It’s not very fun or effective to do. Since actually swimming is not much involved in this fight, it doesn’t really serve as a capstone to the mechanics of the dungeon its found in either. Gyorg is a bit of a low point for me in Majora’s Mask, not providing much by way of narrative, challenge, or mastery for the player. The most effective strategy “throw boomerangs at him repeatedly”, does not make much intuitive sense, and goes to show how some environmental-direction, either through the boss’s actions or the area they are fought in, can help make a fight’s design goals clearer and more effective.

3DS Gyorg sees a lot more structure and direction by the environment in his boss fight, to become a much more effective boss in my opinion.

Once again we have that obvious orange eyeball-weakspot, but also a notable change to Gyorg’s design. Before his body was a continuous color but now his face is a notable stony gray in contrast to a softer looking red-orange body. The structure of the fight is being communicated. On the 3DS it’s a lot more clear what you’re actually hitting; anything besides Gyorg’s mask. It’s the mask that’s armored, but not his body, indicating it is vulnerable. The camera has been improved immensely when it comes to shooting Gyorg with the bow and arrow. He now jumps into the air or swims along the surface of the water like a shark, framing his bright orange body nicely against the blue arena for some bow shots. It’s a lot more satisfying already. It works so well it seems as though fighting Gyorg from the land is the intended method, although the Zora also still works like in the old game.

This still looks so incredibly silly to me.

This time, once Gyorg has taken enough damage, the land disappears, forcing the player to engage as a Zora. The implementation of the Zora’s gameplay mechanics are still not stellar in this part of the fight, but it’s a marked improvement over the original game. Here, the Zora’s swimming ability is incentivized to quickly release sea mines, whose very presence is a good clue as to what the structure of this fight is. Gyorg will often open his gullet to try and suck you in, but will suck in any stray mines instead, stunning him and opening him for attack.

Hey-hey! Swimming to fight him actually.. kind of works now.

This phase is a little janky as the timing for getting Gyorg to start inhaling and releasing a mine is rather narrow and doesn’t feel as smooth as the mechanics of many other Zelda bosses. Still, overall the changes to Gyorg make him feel like a much more complete experience that actually utilizes mechanics from his dungeon such as the Zora swimming. There’s a lot more variety and feedback for what you should actually be doing. If the design goals here were to engage the player to think about how to adapt to an aquatic foe, it succeeds on that front. I’d give the 3DS version of Gyorg a solid thumbs up over his predecessor.

By janky I mean… well it’s a little disorienting to even figure out what’s going on here.

The final boss I’ll be talking about from Majora’s Mask is the Giant Masked Insect Twinmold. With a somewhat misleading yet somewhat appropriate title, Twinmold is actually two giant masked centipede… worm… things, plural.

The original Nintendo 64 version of this boss fight is extremely open ended, extremely player-directed. There is a special dungeon item you obtain in the hours leading up to Twinmold’s confrontation, but it, like many such items before it, in Majora’s Mask is entirely unnecessary to defeating its dungeon boss. Although you are clearly intended to use it. In fact, Twinmold’s boss room is the only location in the game in which that special item, the giant’s mask, can be used. It grants the player titanic proportions, using some visual trickery to transport the player to a scaled-down version of the boss arena inhabited by scaled down Twinmolds that can be much more easily reached with your now colossal sword.

Whether you decide to don the giant’s mask or not, the concept of this boss fight is extremely simple; Twinmold is invulnerable everywhere along its long body except at the head and tip of its tail. The player’s goal is to strike the head and/or tail of each Twinmold until they die, while avoiding their sharp, undulating bodies. If the player is using their limited magic to do so, such as in utilizing the giant’s mask, they must keep on eye on this magic resource and shrink back down to normal size in order to replenish, risking some greater threat to their health in the process. It’s a straightforward rule set borrowed from previous 2D Zelda games where fighting a giant worm meant aiming for its constantly-moving tail, but adapted to 3D space. It works really well! Rarely are you required to keep exact stock of the player’s sword in 3D space in this way, so it’s refreshing and interesting.

I quite like this iteration of the Twinmold fight. It’s simple, but after the difficult and daunting experience that is their home dungeon, it’s a bit refreshing to just stroll up with this huge amount of power in the giant’s mask and let loose. It seems that, along with spectacle, power fantasy was a major design goal of Twinmold, specifically the power fantasy of gaining the might to outmatch an overwhelming evil, as is often the case with Zelda. It’s a bit of relief from the high-intensity part of the interest curve that makes up much of Majora’s Mask’s later stages. Twinmold is not very difficult, but it is very satisfying and momentous. With the final of four major evils stricken from the world, it feels as though the player has truly accomplished something great. Giving them the freedom to completely direct the boss fight helps reinforce this, by making it a labor of their own agency.

3DS remake Twinmold works quite a bit differently. The fight is now a two-phase affair. In the first phase, the player will not have access to the giant’s mask. On the Nintendo 64 this mask was obtained within the dungeon itself. On the 3DS, the mask is obtained after defeating one of the two Twinmolds. This first Twinmold prefers to fly overhead, and has those large orange eyeball-weakspots on its underside. Shooting it with light arrows will take it down. While shooting, the player must be cognizant of the other Twinmold, which will shell the ground with fire balls.

Really, it kind of feels like he’s **asking** to get killed

Now, fighting Twinmold without the giant’s mask on the Nintendo 64 is very fun but very daunting. It’s difficult, requiring the player to be constantly aware of their surroundings to quickly position themselves such that they can reach Twinmold with their attacks. The concept of having to defeat one Twinmold against all odds as a tiny normal-sized person before getting the giant’s mask and unleashing overwhelming force against the second is an appealing one. It builds tension and anticipation of the fight to come, adds some nice challenge to this late-game boss, and makes that ultimate power fantasy all the sweeter. It’s a good change in isolation, though I do wish this first phase on the 3DS was more player-directed, with less reliance on those eyeball-weakpoints, which at this very late stage of the game feel somewhat passe. Having to defeat Twinmold in the same fashion as both a human and a giant would better highlight the contrast between the experiences.

3DS Twinmold’s biggest problems come in the form of the changes to the giant form. Giant form on the N64 controls exactly the same as normal form, you’re just now giant, with reach to match. On the 3DS, however, you become lumbering, slow, and very limited in your moveset. You no longer have access to your sword, instead punching the air in front of you with each press of the attack button. This form on the 3DS just does not feel good to play. It’s cumbersome, difficult to position correctly, and frustrating to hit your targets with. Twinmold is no longer vulnerable on the head and tail, and instead punching it anywhere along its body is viable, presumably because positioning the giant form is so difficult that were the old vulnerabilities in play it would be nigh-on impossible to connect any attacks with Twinmold.

No- yeah, okay. I’ll just… wait here on the ground. You can let me hit you when you’re ready.

Since the player can barely move as a giant, the fight is almost the antithesis of the open-ended fight of the N64, with the player constantly waiting for Twinmold to swing by in a fashion that will allow the player to hit them without accidentally meandering into Twinmold’s spiky body and getting knocked onto the ground. There are also some boulders the player can throw, but you will once again have to wait for Twinmold to hold still in order for them to do anything, and once those boulders are gone, they’re gone. The result is a fight whose exceedingly sluggish flow is determined by the environment, where the player is stuck in a frankly frustrating and unwieldy control scheme unlike anything else in the game.

Gonna go make a sandwich while this is happening.

The fight also lasts forever. This is just a tuning problem – Twinmold clearly has too much health – but I nonetheless became exceptionally bored by the time I had swung Twinmold around like one of those fuzzy worm toys for the fourth time. Where the previous Twinmold’s design goals were clear the 3DS version’s seem somewhat muddied and confused, with good ideas being overshadowed by frustrations and missteps. There’s no power fantasy here, and little sense of awe either. The first Twinmold’s weakness is too obvious, and the second Twinmold is too frustrating.

A mixed bag is how I would describe the remade Majora’s Mask bosses, ultimately. In my estimation, Odalwa is a bit of a step back, Goht has some improvements and some awkward changes, Gyorg is a clear improvement but by no means perfect, and Twinmold is an overall inferior experience despite some good ideas. Aside from my opinion of quality, however, I hope comparing and contrasting the surprisingly different ways all the versions of these bosses were designed helped highlight some of the things to be thinking about when designing bosses. How in control does the player feel? What design goals is your boss meant to fulfill and do they make good on that? Odolwa made me feel the rush of a life or death battle against a swordsman wielding inhuman powers, but some of that is lost if you make the methods by which you can fight him too restrictive. On the opposite end, Gyorg’s confused and meandering original boss fight was markedly improved by the introduction of some structure and environmental cues. Boss design is a deep and broad topic that I’ve only scratched the surface of, but looking at all these different boss designs have given me a lot to think about.

You’re the bad guy. And when you’re bad, you just run. That’s fine, right?

The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask: Remaking Boss Fights

Alright, time to talk about one of my favorite games of all time, The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. It’s an odd one in the Zelda canon, a direct sequel to the seminal Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time developed in only a year, known for its oppressively somber atmosphere and mature themes. It’s a game where an ominous title card greets you at the start of each day, counting down to the end of the world. It’s a weird one, which is probably why I love it so much. I was lucky enough to see one of my favorites receive a total remaster, featuring a big leap in hardware from the Nintendo 64 to the newer, portable, Nintendo 3DS. Remakes and remasters are always a fun topic. What actually gets changed in such revisions? What’s sacred and cannot be touched? I wanted to specifically take a look at the boss battle designs of these two versions of the game as Nintendo made some notably significant changes in this area in particular, while much, though not all, of the game’s other mechanics remain faithfully identical between the two versions. I’d like to breakdown a few of the boss designs to see where the design goals of the versions diverged, while thinking about a concept I’ll call player-directed vs environment-directed boss fights. There’s a lot to go over here, so I won’t be breaking down every single mechanic of every fight and what those elements accomplish (Although, that sounds like a lot of fun. Maybe for another time). Moreover, I want to see how the changes made affected my experience with the bosses. Let’s get started.

This is what I see every Thursday morning

The first major boss of Majora’s Mask for the Nintendo 64 is the Masked Jungle Warrior Odolwa, a demonic swordsman who commands swarms of carnivorous insects. So I mentioned that Majora’s Mask is a weird game, and even its debut boss is proving this true. Traditionally, Zelda boss fights work in a pretty standard fashion. You receive some new item or weapon, and you utilize it in a specific method to exploit a well-marked weakness the boss has. In this way you progress the encounter, like solving a puzzle. Zelda boss fights are usually not very open-ended. This is not universally the case, but it tends to be the norm. That would be an environmentally-directed boss, where it is aspects of the game’s behavior and scripting that dictate the pace of the fight. One can’t shoot the big-eye monster until it opens its big-eye. Boss encounters that can be progressed at the player’s agency, such as where the boss enemy is always vulnerable, are more player-directed. This is not a binary, and there’s a lot of fluctuation on a spectrum between these two styles of boss design. Zelda partakes in both from time to time, sometimes within the same encounter, though I’d say trending more toward environmental-direction.

This boss attack leaves an intentionally designed opening, where striking Odolwa is easy

Odolwa bucks this trend entirely. You can hit Odolwa at any time with a number of implements. In fact, the weapon you find in Odolwa’s dungeon, the Hero’s Bow, is entirely unnecessary for defeating him. It certainly is advantageous to use it, but entirely optional. Odolwa has no obvious weakness, he has no obvious repeating pattern. He has a collection of patterns and behaviors that respond to the player, of which some leave him open to attack, and others less so. Even still, it’s possible to damage him during times that don’t seem like obvious openings, so long as you can connect sword to swordsman. The sum of this is that ‘openings’ are not taken for granted, not guaranteed progress. There is an element of execution and performance required of the player, instead of just following a script.

This attack leaves an intentionally designed opening, where striking Odolwa is- “Insects? Oh god fire!? AHH!”

During the fight Odolwa will summon beetles to hound you from the ground, and butterflies to swarm you from the skies. The beetles can be easily dispatched with sword strikes, while the butterflies need to be more carefully maneuvered around. What I find so distinctive about the Odolwa fight for a Zelda First Boss is how firmly the player directs the pace of the fight. I’m never waiting for anything specific to happen, never just nodding along with Odolwa’s preplanned script. Much more than many other Zelda fights, Odolwa’s encounter on the N64 can go in a wide variety of directions very quickly. He’s basically always vulnerable to attack, and so fighting him becomes a skillful test of how the player can handle an increasingly complex bevy of spacial information. So long as I’m willing to risk it, and I have the finesse to get around Odolwa’s shield, I can deal as much damage as I want as quickly as I want, and even end the fight quite promptly.

In the 3DS version of the game, Odolwa’s been altered quite a lot. Immediately attention is drawn to his new, glaring orange eyeball weak spot. I must compliment the animators for how elegantly it’s conveyed in its intro, much more so than such eyeballs will be in later Majora’s Mask 3D bosses, as it does communicate the new direction the design this fight has taken rather well.

Hmmm… I wonder where his weak spot could be.

On the other hand, while his weakness is clear, a lot of the aspects that made Odolwa unique, if somewhat intimidating, have been dummied out. For one, it is now impossible to deal sword damage to Odolwa while he is brandishing his sword at you. A bit baffling, to be honest, seeing as how Odolwa is a swordsman. It seems rather obvious a player would want to go blade-to-blade with him, yeah? Whereas in the N64 version, Odolwa would use his shield to make hitting him with the player’s sword more troublesome, here it’s all for show. Odolwa is completely immune to sword strikes period.

Blue sparks = no damage. Why does he even need that thing?

Odolwa is once again vulnerable to a variety of attacks, but now they all seem very restrictive, and kind of arbitrary. It seems the goal here was to make the fight more environmentally-directed. One can only damage Odolwa when he presents his new eye, which demands use of the dungeon’s Hero’s Bow item, or the Deku Mask. Perhaps this was in an effort to make the boss more approachable – one advantage of environmentally-directed boss fights is that the player is given a more definitive answer to the problem of how to take down an obstacle, making it more of a puzzle than an actual fight, which is naturally somewhat less stressful. I think there is something to be said for establishing the monsters of Majora’s Mask as these intimidating, aggressive and stress-inducing beasts, however. Some of Odolwa 3D’s changes work against this.

For example, 3D Odolwa suddenly becomes very passive when the player is utilizing a flower with the Deku Mask power, as this is another ‘correct’ answer to the problem of hitting Odolwa’s glowing, orange, eyeball-weak spot. It makes Odolwa seem kind of… stupid, and less of a threat. He stands around patiently to be pelted in the face with an aerial bombardment. It highlights the artificiality of the encounter and could potentially draw a player out of the all-encompassing atmosphere Majora’s Mask is known for. Some of Odolwa’s tricks have also been removed, seemingly, such as his ability to summon a ring of fire to entrap the player. If it seems as though I am being overly harsh on poor Odolwa, it’s just that I really want to highlight the difference in design ethos here. I suspect the 3DS version of this game was meant to be more generally accessible, as Majora was always a niche as far as Zeldas go. These changes seem to be made toward making the experience more familiar to standard Zelda games.

You gonna… You not gonna try and stop me Odolwa?

There are games with much more environmentally-directed boss fights than Zelda, where the boss’ behavior is entirely divorced from anything the player does, where the player just has to wait and act as they are meant to, or fail to progress. As I said, there’s a lot of variation out there. Ultimately, a lot of the changes to Odolwa are an issue of presentation. The big eye, the initial immunity to sword strikes; it all builds up this sense that you have to be very specific about how you approach the encounter, where in reality a lot of the same strategies work between both versions of the game. The N64 version is just a lot more free-form, and open to more experimentation, while the 3DS version excels in clarity of its intentions.

From N64 Odolwa I felt the malice of a monster in fighting him. Things got chaotic toward the end as I was engulfed in a ring of fire, my enemy gleefully taunting me from just beyond sword’s reach. Then I realized; I could skewer the arrogant warrior with the bow I found in the dungeon! But I’d have to be careful, man-eating butterflies and beetles swarmed me. It really felt like a struggle for survival. 3DS Odolwa gave me the feeling of solving a puzzle. It’s more like dissecting a more strict set of rules, as Odolwa behaved much more predictably.

Masked Mechanical Monster Goht, our second major boss enemy, sees much less drastic changes than his little brother in the jump from Nintendo 64 to Nintendo 3DS, but there are still some noteworthy ones. Goht is a giant mechanical, erm, goat of sorts with the face of a man. His fight involves chasing him around a circuit in the form of a rolling goron wheel at high speeds. The player’s goron wheel takes some time to rev up, and requires a magic resource to maintain its speed, but once it does, it protrudes spikes that can be used to damage Goht by ramming into him. Hitting his legs deals damage, but hitting his back by going off of a ramp and landing on him knocks him down, allowing the player to strike him directly with powerful punching attacks.

This fight is almost entirely player-directed, entirely open-ended. Chasing Goht is the name of the game, but how you go about this is wholly up to you. Goht is vulnerable at any time, and the pace of the fight is determined by how well the player can execute on the chase. Knocking Goht down is advantageous, but by no means necessary, and the methods to do so are rather open ended, with the complex mechanics of the spinning goron wheel offering a number of options. If ever the player runs low on resources, it is up to them to decide when and how to replenish by hitting the magic jars speeding by on the circuit, and what risks they are willing to take to do so.

As I said, 3DS Goht is mostly the same, but the changes he does have are significant. For one, Goht can now be knocked down by repeatedly hitting his legs, or by landing on top of him. The ramps lining the circuit are now regularly shaped, and require much less speed to initiate a jump. Since Goht can be knocked down either by landing on his back or by clipping his heels now, and since landing on his back is now much easier in this version, the entire decision is less significant. Both options are still there, but neither provides any clear risks or advantages.

The reason for this is that knocking Goht down is now required to deal direct damage to him. When grounded, Goht reveals a huge eyeball weakspot, in a rather goofy and incongruous fashion. At this point, the player must remove their goron power and take out the dungeon’s item, the Fire Arrows, to deal damage to the eye. This makes the fight simultaneously more stiff, moving away from that more loose player-directed design ethos of the N64 boss fights, if only slightly in this case, while also adding an extra step. It’s a little strange, as though the eyeball only exists as an excuse to make the fire arrows relevant to this boss fight. It also disrupts the pacing of the fight, forcing the player to change from a goron to a human with a slow animation, and then shooting this fast-running monster while standing completely stationary. For N64 Goht, hitting him while knocked down blends seamlessly from chasing him, as one does not even need to change out from being a goron.

The original N64 Goht is such a strange fight for a Zelda game. A high-speed car chase, essentially, complete with bombs, electric gunfire, falling debris, the works. The ability to strike Goht from any angle with the goron wheel adds such an intense dynamism. Thankfully, that’s more or less maintained throughout all versions. The 3DS version of Goht managed to feel mostly reminiscent of the original, which for a remake I think is usually a good thing. Making the ramps for pulling off aerial jumps in the 3DS version more consistent and easier to use may lower the skill floor a bit, but it also lets you do cool fun things more often, so it’s a fair trade. I mean this is only the second boss, after all. The need to pull out the fire arrows occasionally felt like an unnecessary road-bump, and made me roll my eyes a bit (as well as Goht’s, hardy har), but it’s a very minor thing and ultimately the two fights are nearly equally fun.

So it seems the Majora’s Mask 3D remake is going for a lot more environment-direction for its boss fights as opposed to player-direction. In presentation, at least, it gives the impression that the fights are more rigidly defined, with less room for exploratory play. The advantages of such an approach can be a more quantifiable end experience that the developer has more control over, but there are also drawbacks such as the loss of that sense of exploration, experimentation, and realism in the experience. Drawbacks that I’d argue Majora’s Mask wasn’t entirely in need of. I don’t want to give the impression that Majora’s Mask 3D didn’t improve upon the old in some ways. Some accessibility considerations like making the jumps in Goht’s fight easier to pull off will probably make it more fun for most. The heavier involvement of dungeon items in the boss fights make them feel more congruent with the dungeons they’re in, if not necessarily the greater atmosphere of the world. And still, these are only two of Majora’s Masks‘s bosses, but this is running pretty long. I think next week we’ll take a look at the remaining two bosses of the Majora’s Mask superfecta (that’s a trifecta, but four, I just learned). There are definitely some positive changes there that I’m excited to talk about, including ones that exploit the advantages of environment-directed boss design. Hope to see you there.

Certainly, he had far too many weaknesses to use my power…

The Elites of Risk of Rain 2: Efficient Design and The Fundamentals of Real Time Combat

Risk of Rain 2 is a roguelike action game developed by Hopoo Games and published by Gearbox Publishing. It was released in early access for PC and consoles in 2019 before fully releasing on August 11, 2020. The gameplay premise of Risk of Rain 2 is as follows: You are a space-faring adventurer exploring a hostile alien world, overrun with monsters that will appear in order to kill you, in greater and greater numbers the more time you spend on the planet’s surface. You can collect various weapons and artifacts to empower yourself as you go to the face the ever greater challenges that intensify with time.

There’s a lot going on with Risk of Rain 2 design-wise that’s very interesting, but I’d like to focus on the game’s elites system, particularly how it was designed efficiently to accomplish a lot within a relatively manageable scope by utilizing the fundamentals of how an action combat system works, at the most basic level. I want to answer how those pieces fit together, how they create a compelling experience, and how they were utilized in this particular instance for Risk of Rain 2.

Man, there certainly is some… Game Design,, happening here. I mean just. Just look at it go.

The elite monsters in Risk of Rain 2 are randomly generated normal enemies, the likes of which you will see in droves, but with specific extra attributes along with slight changes in appearance to signify this. They are rarer than normal enemies, and thus their appearance is a bit of an event, something to take notice of. Their incidence becomes more frequent the longer a game session goes on. There are five main archetypes of elite monster. Blazing, Overloading, Glacial, Malachite, and Celestine. These archetypes can each be randomly applied to near any enemy that normally spawns. While an elite monster will have enhanced offensive and defensive capabilities, their unique traits also seem to be very deliberately chosen to complicate matters in a much more subtle way. Nearly all of them concern the player’s relative position to the elite enemy, the spatial relationship between them.

When you get down to it, there are some fundamental factors to be thinking about when developing a real-time combat system for a game. One of the ultimate goals in design should be encouraging the player to be making meaningful decisions, decisions that feel, to the player, as though their involvement is having an important and material impact on their experience in the game. Making complicated or fast-paced meaningful decisions is where challenge comes from. Having a variety of ways to answer such meaningful decisions is where player expression and play-styles come from. It keeps the player paying attention, keeps them engaged. One of the main avenues to accomplish this in a real-time combat system is to keep the player thinking about the main variables unique to real-time combat: space, time, and their relation thereof.

When fighting in real-time, the player’s position relative to any danger such as an enemy will be constantly shifting. Meanwhile the time investment of their own actions, compared to the time an enemy takes to execute an action, works in concert with these spacial relationships to determine essentially every outcome combat can have. No matter how complex the system, these two basic pillars of spacial relationship and timing are the building blocks of how it all works. A sword slash creates an area of threat for a set amount of time that damages an opponent if they intersect with it. If the opponent has a defensive action whose duration lines up with that sword slash they can protect themselves from harm. Attacks have limited reach, dodges have specific timing, and thus mastering the way these timings and positions relate to one another is how the player manages their own risk, and is essentially always the way to master this sort of combat system. For a designer, knowing your tools is how you can design for those meaningful decisions, to make the process of mastery a fun and engaging one. Space and Time are two of the most primary tools for designing real-time combat.

In the case of Risk of Rain 2‘s elites, nearly all of them create specific considerations of space for the player. The glacial elite is a good example. Upon death, they leave behind a conspicuous sphere of frosty air and ice particles that, after just a moment, burst with ice, freezing any players present within the sphere in place for a couple seconds, leaving them vulnerable. Perhaps you are already seeing how this situation works with the basic pillars of real-time combat to promote some active decision making on the part of the player. Normally enemies can be cut down with no heed in this game, but when a glacial appears, suddenly there are more decisions to be made. When should they be killed? How will I escape their ice bomb once they are? What are the consequences of how I approach this? Risk of Rain 2, as its name implies, is a high-stakes game where players can die easily, losing a lot of progress in the process. Something as simple as being frozen for a few seconds can mean death depending on the situation. Other times, it’s just an inconvenience. This variability keeps the player thinking and promotes that meaningful decision making. One player might play it safe and always destroy glacial elites from a distance. One player might consciously keep a movement option available to escape the ice bomb.

As the ice bomb forms, my priorities quickly change, I make the snap decision to get clear of it.

The blazing, malachite, and celestine elites work similarly, creating specific and dynamic areas of threat that players must play and plan around. They do different things – blazing monsters leave behind trails of fire as they move, malachite monsters can suppress the player’s healing, and celestine monsters hide the presence of other nearby monsters, making them totally invisible. However, the principle is the same. By creating these areas of threat at somewhat random intervals that all work in different ways, and can even overlap when several elites are on screen, the player has more to consider in their positioning and how they tackle the situation, upping the challenge, and promoting the player’s expression through gameplay. These periodic moments of higher-intensity decision making is one of Risk of Rain 2‘s most interesting aspects.

Blazing monsters and their trail of fire is of particular concern to melee-oriented player characters, as opposed to ranged-oriented ones. They help to differentiate and individualize the different roles and play styles the player can take up. It’s far more dangerous for a melee character to engage a group of blazing monsters, and this affects their decision making when they crop up.

Keeping my foe at sword’s length, hitting it only with the tip of the blade, is an effective strategy.

The overloading elites work with the other pillar of timing. Normally, any damage dealt to enemies is permanent and persistent, meaning the player can at any time retreat, recover their own health, and return to finish an enemy off. The top half of an overloading enemy’s health, however, will regenerate if left alone for too long, making finishing them off somewhat of a priority, another interesting decision to consider. Some of the other elites have elements of timing in their special qualities as well, such as the blazing elites dealing damage-over-time, and the malachites’ healing suppression.

Overloading enemies leave a lasting effect when they hit you, and will keep coming back if not dealt with fast.

Celestine monsters are rare but very disruptive. The principle of hidden vs nonhidden information in games is its own topic, but I hope it’s obvious how completely hiding all the visual behaviors of enemies shifts the dynamic of the player and enemies’ spacial relationship drastically. The player will definitely want to reconsider how they approach such a scenario. Each of these are just a wrinkle; a small, minor change to the dynamic between player and enemy that completely re-contextualizes how they approach the situation.

The result is a player who is constantly on the look out for these wrinkles, these unexpected developments. The surprise and the added danger is invigorating, exciting, and novel. In a word- engaging. A lot can be done with a little, and using the combinative potential of these elite archetypes, there are theoretically unlimited novel scenarios the player might find themselves in. Elites could come from any angle. Above? Below? They could take the form of any enemy. Enemies that shoot from a distance, enemies that rush you down. These elite archetypes can even be applied to bosses, creating a ridiculously hectic and dangerous challenge for hard core players to overcome later in the game.

So these elite monsters accomplish a lot. Periodic moments of high intensity created by manipulating the player’s relationship with space and time lead to a more engaging interest curve. This is all accomplished with some pretty simple mechanics that can be overlaid onto essentially any monster in the game. Risk of Rain 2‘s already impressive menagerie of monsters that all behave in unique and interesting ways is essentially multiplied in number by five. Instead of the art, tech, and design overhead needed to create dozens of more monsters, a huge variety of gameplay situations were achieved by mixing and matching these archetypes, of which only a handful needed to be designed. It seems to me this was achieved through a thorough understanding of positioning and timing in real-time combat and how to manipulate those pillars to organically produce interesting and compelling situations. Understanding the basic building blocks of your gameplay systems, and how they affect player behavior is a really good way to begin understanding how to design efficiently and effectively.

..and so she left, heart still racing…

Galaxy Brain: How NEO: The World Ends With You Recaptures the Experience of its Predecessor

The World Ends With You is a distinct and memorable little action RPG originally for the Nintendo DS. It is remembered and well-loved for an engaging story about coming out of your shell and expanding your horizons by connecting with people. The game also sported an incredibly unique action combat system utilizing the DS’s hardware features – one of the first touch screens used for video games, and two concurrent display screens. In The World Ends With You, combat is conducted through a loadout of unique psyches, the player’s attack moves, that each are used via a respective touch-based gesture to fight enemies. This all occurs on the DS’s bottom screen. At the same time, a second character is controlled with buttons to defend against additional enemies on the DS’s top screen. These features allowed for some standout gameplay mechanics that helped The World Ends With You achieve its cult status, but how has this gameplay evolved as its been ported to other, more traditional interfaces?

It’s a lot to keep track of, but MAN do I feel like a genius when it works!

The World Ends With You has been ported to a number of systems since its original release, including the Nintendo Switch and several mobile devices. Given how entwined the original game is with its hardware, particularly in utilizing the feature of action occurring simultaneously on two screens, it seemed a given that the game’s mechanics would have to be re-imagined for these other systems. The route these ports took accommodating the change in hardware was a simplification of focus. In lacking a second screen, the Nintendo Switch version of the game changed the player’s partner character, normally an independent actor on the DS’s top screen, into another psyche in the player’s arsenal, controlled similarly by touch gesture. Using this partner psyche in conjunction with the normal psyches would confer combat bonuses. This was a fairly elegant way to make the game functional on devices that lacked the DS’s unique features, and the game remains fun, if somewhat more cumbersome to control without a touch screen stylus. However, these ported versions of the game seem to lack something experiential and essential when compared to the original. In cutting the second screen’s mechanics entirely, something fundamental was lost.

In enters the bluntly titled NEO: The World Ends With You, a new direct sequel to the original game for the Nintendo Switch and Playstation 4, arriving some fourteen years later. The PS4, notably, lacks a typical touch screen entirely. One may note further, that NEO lacks gesture control, entirely. The design focus of this game has, perhaps surprisingly, shifted entirely away from replicating the methods of the DS touch controls. Although The World Ends With You‘s gesture controls were incredibly intuitive and satisfying on the DS, they weren’t entirely one-of-a-kind. Other games like WarioWare: Touched! accomplished similar things with their controls, albeit in different genres. NEO shifts focus to what is more unique about its predecessor, and seeks to replicate not the control scheme, but the core experience, what is happening in the mind of the player, something more recent ports of The World Ends With You struggled to do.

One screen, one window of focus, but has something been lost?

The World Ends With You for the DS had some best-in-class gesture controls for an action game on that system, but this wasn’t the only gameplay mechanic that set it apart. During regular gameplay, the player’s main character, Neku, acted on the bottom screen, where he’d have to attack enemies while dodging around them according to the player’s touch gestures. Simultaneously, on the top screen, Neku’s partner would be stationary, and slowly assaulted by enemies. The player would have to control Neku with one hand, while commanding the partner character to defend themselves via button inputs with the other. Neku and his partner share a health bar, so if either screen was not given due attention, both would suffer. This created an absolutely mesmerizing experience of splitting attention between two active scenes, triaging and reacting to both. It was a different and challenging sort of mindset to get into, this constant multitasking, demanding players adjust to a new way of thinking. In fairness, it could even be restrictive to some players, a shortcoming that is assuaged somewhat by the versatile difficulty options present in the game. Once the player got use to this, however, it could create a state of flow and rhythm where successfully managing two characters was almost hypnotically engaging.

NEO once again features multiple simultaneously controlled player characters that share a health bar, this time up to four, all on one screen, in a 3D space. As stated, gesture control is done away with entirely in favor of assigning each psyche move to a button input. Each psyche is assigned to one of up to four characters in the player’s party. The twist is, each party member answers the player’s input independently of each other, but are each still vulnerable to counterattack at all times. As before, all psyches operate with different game mechanics at different time frames, but they can be layered together, offset from one another, done in sequence, executed in any way the player is able to push the associated buttons.

For example, one character might loose a volley of energy bullets when the player repeatedly taps a face button, while another character charges up a big rock to throw when the player holds down a shoulder button. In this scenario, the rock will do extra damage if timed to hit just as the first character’s bullet salvo is finished, using Neo‘s combo system, which encourages finishing multiple psyche moves on the same enemy in quick, timed succession. Bonus damage and and the potential to unleash a devastating ultimate move is rewarded for doing so consistently. In this way, the player is rewarded for roleplaying their party of characters as working together, and supporting one another, just like the original DS title, all while replicating that challenging and engaging split-attention experience through its design alone.

NEO even further addresses the barrier of entry for new players by condensing all the action to one screen. A single field of view is intuitive- it replicates how we view spaces in real life. Two screens, while novel, also create two separate cognitive spaces in our minds. No matter how close together they are, switching between two screens is harder than simply utilizing your peripheral vision on a single screen, due to that cognitive distance the break between screens creates. There is something to be said for that novelty of control across several distinct cognitive spaces, but it is a trade off that fits naturally for game consoles that simply don’t support multiple screens.

The player characters once again share a health bar, but unlike in the previous title, now all exist in the same game space. Each party member’s movement and dodge mechanics become directly controlled by the player when their psyche was the last one to be used. Each time a new psyche is used, control is shifted to a new character. The player must shift their control around like this. To keep things from getting disorienting, the 3D camera is directed by the game, rather than the player, and party members quickly run into the player’s field of view on their own as they are queued up to be controlled, creating a smooth transition.

Enemies will still react and attack in real-time, and all party members are vulnerable, thus the player has to be splitting their attention to multitask and triage the various goings on in the battlefield, all while keeping up their rhythmic combo of attacks. If one party member is pinned to the ground, the player might respond by sending another to help them out. All this together emulates the original game’s sense of almost melodic flow within gameplay, that makes the player feel smart and skillful to maintain. A complete re-imagining of gameplay mechanics was able to recapture The World Ends With You‘s most distinctive feature, by focusing on the core experience. Although the gameplay is structured very differently in many ways, the experience one feels while playing the new game is incredibly reminiscent of the original.

Here we see one character’s melee attack push an enemy out of the way of a rock throw – being aware of spacing and timing is essential

This also serves to reinforce some of the themes of both games – expanding your horizons by reaching out and connecting with other people. As Neku must learn in the original game to open himself to others, the player learns how to coordinate Neku and his partners’ distinct gameplay styles together, to create a greater whole. NEO‘s combo system accomplishes the same result, rewarding the player for being cognizant of the timing, effects, and spacing of each player character independently, and how they work together. They must consider a greater group, and not just an individualized self. The result on screen is an amazingly coordinated show of teamwork, reinforcing the player’s small band of party members as a real team working together toward the same goal. It’s a narrative in its own right, told entirely through the gameplay mechanics, reinforcing the explicitly written and acted narrative told between sections of gameplay.

A friend’s been pinned by wolves, indicated by those red “!!!” in the front. Let’s beat them back together!

NEO‘s renewed shift in focus re-frames what was once a hardware problem into a design problem, while playing to the strengths of the platforms the game was developed for. What’s more, the new angle by which this design problem is tackled plays to the original strengths of The World Ends With You, recreating the experience that makes it unique, not just the control scheme. It does this to draw the player in to this stylish and exciting world, while also creating a consistency of narrative between gameplay and non-gameplay sections. Re-framing issues like this in terms of design, playing to a game’s strengths and unique experiential identity is something that makes games truly memorable. NEO: The World Ends With You knows its strengths, knows the experience it’s aiming to create, and executes on that in a manner best suited to its platform, choosing not to adhere rigidly to old solutions and patterns. As it turns out, entirely changing its approach and expanding its horizons may have been the best way to become a true successor to The World Ends With You.

Expand your world…

The Dark Souls Dodge Roll: Immediacy in Player Action

Alright, let’s get down to business with something simple – the dodge roll. One of my favorite examples of the form, to be exact, the dodge roll found in Dark Souls 1. It’s a common gameplay mechanic, particularly in action titles, that’s well loved for the simplicity of what it accomplishes for the player and for the designer. What the dodge roll is, in the simplest terms, is a snappy maneuver your player character in Dark Souls can do at almost any time to quickly traverse a short distance in a short time, briefly becoming invincible during the maneuver to, well, dodge things. It feels great to do, it’s useful, and helps the player feel agency over the flow of combat. How does it accomplish this?

One of the main strengths that this particular dodge roll has going for it is the quickness and responsiveness of the action. You’ll notice when playing Dark Souls that the dodge roll begins almost immediately when the game detects a dodge roll input- when the dodge button is released quickly from a press, in this case. There is little to no anticipation in the dodging animation, and the dodge maneuver’s invincibility frames, or iframes, the frames of character animation during which a character cannot take damage, start almost immediately. The dodge roll is used in combat as a reaction to danger- the player will see a monster wind up their attack, and dodge in response. The player is already entirely focused on their own, real-life response time, the response time of their digital avatar to input needs to be negligible, lest the player lose that agency over gameplay.

This allows the player to react to dangers in real-time without having to make unnecessary extra considerations for their character’s limitations. If you dodge, you dodge, no preparation necessary. This is important to establishing a sort of player-avatar harmony that helps shore up the illusion of play, and immerse the player in their role (or maybe in their roll). The player *is* the knight on screen, so they can dodge whenever they want, as quickly as they can react. This was so important to Dark Souls‘ design that even the heaviest, slowest, clunkiest version of the dodge roll, the one used for characters over-encumbered by heavy armor, executes almost immediately on input. Like the other versions of the dodge, the vulnerable frames of animation are almost entirely back-loaded on the action. It’s the recovery time where the player places themselves at risk. If they reacted poorly, it’s during that recovery time when they will take damage.

Fall out of the way if you have to, just do it quickly!

The iframe window is extremely brief, and so demands timing and precision of the player, further reinforcing the need to watch one’s opponent, to know exactly when and how to dodge. The dodge roll also has a traversal component, moving the player character in a burst of speed much greater than their typical walk. Any combat action will normally be some sort of an investment or risk. Once the action is called on, it will run through a preset amount of time where the player has little to no control. Using a dodge roll poorly can potentially place the player in an unwanted position, encouraging an awareness of one’s environment. Having a reliable tool like this with the general use of ‘make me momentarily invincible’ puts the onus of taking damage and therefore failure almost entirely on the player. If you can read an enemy’s attacks, you can nullify them completely, just with this one simple tool. This powerful tool’s design enables Dark Souls‘ signature experience of overcoming tremendous hardship through the player’s faculties alone, using an action that maps very closely to the player’s own powers of observation and reaction. It’s that closeness that interests me most about this dodge roll.

A dodge roll is a perfect reactive answer to attacks with big windups

When examining what makes combat actions especially compelling for me, I’ve come upon a concept I call ‘immediacy’. In this context immediacy is the concept of minimizing the friction between the player and the interface, or in other words their in-game avatar. When I push a button on a controller, I expect my character to have already begun the wind up of their action. In my mind, we are acting as one entity, and the action we’re about to take began when the signal to move my finger and push a button first entered my brain. By the time that signal has traveled to my finger, through the controller, across the airwaves, into my game console, through my TV, and into my eyes, there has been an unavoidable bit of latency. There’s a natural delay there, between how I expect the action to play out, and how fast the game can actually render it. That latency has to be accounted for, in order for the action to feel responsive. This may seem obvious, but design decisions such as the time-frame of combat action, the number of frames during which it is active, its visual appearance, all have to be made deliberately. Even something as small as a few extra frames of animation can have drastic gameplay implications.

In fact, it’d be better if by the time I push the button, my character is already partially done with their action, eliminating that bit of unnatural latency that doesn’t exist in the real world entirely. This is why character actions and especially dodges, which act as one of the player’s main avenues of agency, generally crunch down the anticipation time those actions would have in reality. When I go to throw a punch, I have to pull my fist back to wind up, but by the time I push a button in a video game, the wind up has already happened in my mind. The fist should already be thrown, the dodge already rolled as it were. Or at least, it should be perceived that way.

Using animation tricks like single animation frames of anticipation can help in this regard. The player character in Dark Souls practically flops into their dodge roll with almost no transition. If there ever is anticipation for these sorts of actions, they tend to be extremely brief. If you break the sense of immediacy, you quickly create distance between player and avatar, and the challenge of player against world you designed for suddenly becomes player against player character, a frustrating wrestling match between what the player wants to do and what the system is capable of. The system needs to be able to respond to the player’s proprioception, or sense of body position – the fist should already be thrown by the time the button is pressed.

The dodge roll activates on button release, and instantly gets down to business

The Dark Souls dodge does extremely well on this front, but it’s not perfect. The dodge roll specifically comes out when its associated button is released, not when it is compressed. This is not normally an issue, as most players will be pressing and releasing their action buttons in quick presses. Dark Souls is a tense game, however. The squeezing and gripping of controllers is common, and holding the dodge button by mistake, or not releasing your compression before an attack hits you can feel unfair. Again, it’s that proprioception, the sense of body. Even if in this case it’s my virtual body. When I push the button down, I feel as though I have already initiated a dodge, and so it feels wrong if the game does not respond in kind. The reason for this is that Dark Souls has its dodge and sprint inputs on the same button. Holding the button initiates a sprint, releasing it quickly after pressing initiates a dodge. One solution to this would be putting the sprint action on a different button, which later Dark Souls entries would implement as an option. Sekiro implements another solution, where the dodge action transitions directly and seamlessly into the sprint action, if the button is still held.

Despite these issues the first Dark Souls had a laser focus on what it wanted out of its dodging action – fast, responsive, versatile. These qualities create a sense of immediacy between the player’s inputs and the character’s actions that breaks down the barrier between the two. Actions like these are at their best when it feels less like the button pushing and the dodge-rolling is separate, but rather that they are synonymous. Ideally, they would feel the same, as if there is no perceptible distance between the two. This frees the player’s attention up to focus on the game world and their own relation to it, rather than their relation to the hardware. Thinking in terms of immediacy helps for making combat more satisfying and immersive in a really straightforward way.

Perhaps I could try some rolling…

Game Design, Combat, and Parrying Everything

Hi there, I’m Ian J Travis and I’ve decided to start a game design blog, with a particular focus on combat design. Since I was child games have always been my medium of choice for art, entertainment, and exploring my personal self-expression. All of my favorite stories and music comes from video games, but what makes this medium special to me is that ludic aspect, the gameplay itself. Good game design can tell story and make a kind of music all on its own. When game design really sings, the play itself becomes the experience – it works in harmony with all the other art and technology that goes into videos games as the linchpin, to create a cohesive experience.

The goal of this site is to put my own ideas about game design and combat design out into the blogosphere, and maybe grow as a designer along the way. I want to make systems of interaction that are so instantly inviting that the players who engage with them want to get absolute best out of the experience. I’ll be looking at games I’ve played to try and discover what they do right, what they do wrong, and how it all fits into a greater game design context. I’ll be breaking down individual player actions, entire boss fights, and broader concepts – the works. I’ve wanted to formally put down my thoughts on game design like this for a long time. I hope you have some fun reading and learning with me.