Ok, so after the marathon of just blathering about Dark Souls 2, it's back to a entry with hopefully some substance! This one was inspired by Atelier Escha and Logy, specifically a mechanic introduced early in the game that lets you trigger a special fight while in the field.
Basically, as you collect items and fight enemies in an area, you charge up a special "search" meter. Once the meter hits a certain mark, you can do a special Search Action, pulled from three options based on the area you're in and a few other factors. All of the Search Actions are pretty useful, and it's a great addition to the series already, but one of the cooler aspects is that a recurring option is to trigger a special difficult fight. you charge the meter, pick the fight option, then choose among three difficulty options for the fight-- one that's higher than the regular enemies and with special conditions, but still easy; one that's close to the level you should be for the area; and one that's "impossible"-- as in, about ten levels higher than your current level. Winning gets you a decent enough bit of experience, but more importantly also gets you rare materials and high-level equipment. And, with the in-game item-cloning option (the homunculi) it means you can multiply that special item drop instead of hoarding it forever because it's too good to use :-p
In a game like this where boss fights are infrequent, the ability to create your own "boss fight" through normal game actions is wonderful, especially as the penalties for losing if you're in over your head are so small (lose one day of action). You basically can take a break in your current quest to do your own boss fight. And boy, are a lot of these fights clearly "boss" ones-- the enemies start and end the fight with special animations, they get two actions per round, and they can offer a serious challenge/require some careful use of your skills, items, and team abilities.
It's a pretty rare game that allows this sort of dynamic, create-your-own challenge feature, that allows for cool fights and also gives good rewards. The most high-profile game that I can think of that does this is The World Ends With You, where you could chain fights together or weaken your characters for greater rewards, making regular fights potentially difficult but rewarding. It's different than, say, the Tales series' ability to change the difficulty level whenever you want, because it allows a boss-fight level challenge AND reward relatively easily, and it's tricky to balance it amidst normal concerns with plot, gameflow, etc. I wish more games would try, though-- I think it works well with Bravely Default's "customize each part of the game" difficulty modifiers.
BONUS!
Yeah, more Dark Souls 2 talk, but this one will be brief. Old games often had you go through a long sequence to get to the boss fight/challenging part; sometimes this was because of saving limitation, sometimes because part of the challenge of the boss was managing your resources up through the portion leading to them, and usually it was just bad design. When there's a climactic challenge the player may need to attempt multiple times, it's important to keep the challenge a) easily accessible and b) overall pretty brief-- yeah sometimes the challenge is to be zen enough to keep up the same tedious pattern for 30 minutes or through 100 levels of a dungeon or whatever, but I'd do a roguelike if I wanted that, and I don't have patience for losing an hour+ of progress with nothing much to show for it (because if the fight is tedious, I'm not even getting better at the game or learning new tricks). So, long lead-in to a fight are generally bad, unskippable cutscenes before a fight are criminal, and long load times after losing are annoying.
Super Meat Boy got this pretty much right-- each level is it's own climactic challenge, but the death-to-retry is pretty much instantaneous, and few levels go on so long that you're working with tedium. The two recent Rayman games are good about this too (including the iOS running games). Dark Souls has been pretty bad about this-- it's improved slightly here in the latest game in that you can at least kill all the enemies between you and a boss door if you work at it, so future runs aren't having you dodge enemies the whole way up or fighting through a slew of enemies for 10 minutes even though you can kill them in your sleep- mostly. These last two optional fights, though, are torturous-- the Dragon fight is over a minute of straight running to get there even if you kill everything on the way (and there's a LOT of enemies), only to die on your first mistake in a fight that takes probably 10 minutes (I haven't beaten it yet so I don't have the timing down). AND the boss has the potential to do a move that is impossible for you to survive-- there's literally no room to dodge. You can "train" him to be more likely to do some moves than others, but still he might decide to off you if you're unlucky. The other optional fight's a bit better in that you're can dodge anything if you're careful, but it's still a long fight that is more endurance than finesse, and dying means a loooong walk at best and a fight through a room of spellcasters with homing missiles, a narrow bridge, and a long hall with about 8 knights who usually come at you in pairs. When one mistake can kill you, taking forever to get back to the area just to start to LEARN what to do is horrible design. I give a slight pass to the game in that these are optional bosses, and superbosses at that, but that forgives the tedious/sometimes unfair fight design, not the long death-retry cycle wound around them.
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