Topic: SoTN Bosses, yay or nay?

[AlexCalvo]

Am I the only one who finds the bosses in SoTN to be it's most glaring flaw?  Don't get me wrong, I love the game, and consider it almost flawless in every other way.  But going back to it now the bosses just feel incredibly weak... and I don't just mean hp wise.  I think the feeling is exacerbated by the fact that the Igavania's really had exceptional bosses overall.  I would say all three DS games, and at least AoS had much better bosses, in terms of variety and difficulty.  Even the ps2 games with their various flaws had pretty great bosses.  Am I crazy?

[BLOOD MONKEY]

No, SotN was ridiculously easy no matter which mode I played on. I feel ya.

[X]

The Phantom Bat in the inverted castle is the cheapest boss in the game. Not cheap as in difficult, but cheap as in the way it was designed. Rather then animating the wings they decided to go for vectoring instead. It looks cheap and the Boss itself suffers from this terribly so.

[toborprime]

I agree -- mechanically, the bosses are all pretty uninteresting, although I find most to be pretty damn rad looking. Playing the game over the years, I always kind of feel like I either outgrinded (outground?) the boss through XP and gear, had enough healing items, or accidentally won (I am by no means the best at this game, though). As action game bosses, I feel like they're pretty wonky.

But yeah, still one of my all time favorite games :]

[Kale]

I think the problem with the bosses are that they are mostly designed with the old style of castlevania gameplay in mind, where the characters are much more rigid, and doesn't have the mobility and fluidity of Alucard. If you were playing Trevor or Simon from the old games, I can see the bosses working much better.

[zangetsu468]

I don't think that the bosses were all bad, so much as the bosses in the following Igavanias were executed much better than SOTN. Imo Due to a lot of elements which I won't go into each one in detail. Suffice to say AoS and OOE probably had the most innovative boss battles and POR's final boss being one of the most interesting.

What SOTN lacked in boss battles was made up for in the next release being COTM. It felt like the bosses (specifically Dual Dragons) were tailored to suit that game really well. HoD is a mixed bag for me, I love the game but the bosses and game in its entirety felt more like a mini-SOTN. It got better from that point though.

SOTN was definitely the marvel 2 of it's generation with castlevania. They basically took everything good about CV, put it in a blender and presented it to us gamers in a way we weren't used to having it (the Metroid element). Needless to say most of what was done worked, but when you're mishmashing very different ingredients, there's bound to be a few elements that come out lumpy rather than smooth.

[DarkPrinceAlucard]

I think the problem with the bosses are that they are mostly designed with the old style of castlevania gameplay in mind, where the characters are much more rigid, and doesn't have the mobility and fluidity of Alucard. If you were playing Trevor or Simon from the old games, I can see the bosses working much better.

I pretty much agree with everything here ^^^

The bosses or not bad at all, its only FEELS that way because of how Alucard plays and the rpg mechanics and grinding making them pretty easy to beat, but imagine playing against those same bosses with the traditional style Trevor or Simon, would make for a much different experience and level of difficulty.

[AxeLord]

If you were playing Trevor or Simon from the old games, I can see the bosses working much better.

Isn't that just Richter mode? Fighting the bosses without using any of Richter's crazy special moves is as close as you're going to get. Even with Richter, it still feels... off. 

[DarkPrinceAlucard]

Isn't that just Richter mode?

Not exactly given Richter's arsenal of new and convenient moves/abilities/item crashes, not using those things pretty much cripples Richter mode really, we are talking about playing as Trevor or Simon complete with a much less fluid jump and a much smaller arsenal and array of abilities to fall back on, the games bosses would be akin very much to other bosses in the series from a difficulty and enemy attack pattern standpoint.

Point is that they feel uninspired and lackluster to some simply because metroidvania games give so much more convenience ability and arsenal wise than other game in the series of Castlevania, granted games like AOS,COTM, and OOE managed to bring some very interesting and innovative boss fights even with this formula, but I just think SOTN bosses are not as bad as some would think.

[Kale]

Richter has much better mobility than the older games. But in a way, yes. Except he's extremely powerful. Gaibon and Slogra would not have been a bad fight for him, except for Gaibon's weird urgent need to grab Slogra when he's hit and the fact that they die in like 2 hits.

Take away Richter's air mobility, speed, and power, and I'm fairly certain the bosses would be much harder. But saying it like that, ....... is sort of a given.

The difference in SotN and OoE or AoS is that SotN updated the gameplay but not the boss's ability to adapt to it. While the later games updated those bosses to better suit the abilities given to the player. Which makes sense, since SotN was the first in the series.

[zangetsu468]

There were certain bosses that felt specific to SOTN though. Doppleganger (obviously), Death, Beezlebub and Galamoth to name a few. Most of which seem to be larger in area which cater to Alucard's floatier style of gameplay.

The main issue I have with SOTN's boss battle is that some bosses were just normal enemies later on.

[Kale]

I somewhat agree... but even those seem like they are half and half. It's like they did it the original way but then thought about it more and added some new moves.

I mean, aside from certain moves, the 2 lightning moves that hit the lower front side, I think the rest of his moves work better against the old school movement. Beelzebub and Death are the same, (though I'm a bit hazy on death) where aside from their excessive spam of projectile, I think they're pretty well designed for old school gameplay as well.

And Doppelganger... well, it's a doppler. which existed before and is adapted to Alucard's movement.

[zangetsu468]

I somewhat agree... but even those seem like they are half and half. It's like they did it the original way but then thought about it more and added some new moves.

I mean, aside from certain moves, the 2 lightning moves that hit the lower front side, I think the rest of his moves work better against the old school movement. Beelzebub and Death are the same, (though I'm a bit hazy on death) where aside from their excessive spam of projectile, I think they're pretty well designed for old school gameplay as well.

And Doppelganger... well, it's a doppler. which existed before and is adapted to Alucard's movement.

I think that with SOTN Alucard's controls seem quite loose and floaty, the backdash feels slow, even knock back behaves in that way, which makes the controls feel very broad strokes to me. Like I said the following games felt like they were more succinct, even Harmony which had it's own issues.

[Kale]

Floaty yea... but I don't think it's very loose.

[chainsawmidget]

Reading this post made me think how much I'd love to see a Trevor or Simon oldschool NES mode for Symphony.  You could still keep the newer style graphics, just give them the old clunky controlls and weapons. 

You might have to add a few blocks, staircases, or give the Belmont a double jump to make it work, but it would be pretty cool...


Alternatively, you could bring back the whole CV3 party and use Grant's jumping or Alucard's turning into a bat to get past those areas.