The ARPG Super Armor Dilemma

Has anyone else noticed how super armor has become the default method of designing boss encounters in the modern era? In the bulk of modern action RPGs, bosses cannot be flinched except in very specific circumstances, be it when a stagger gauge is emptied or a specific attack is countered - in essence, bosses can soak up countless incoming hits without being interrupted, stunned, juggled or otherwise held back in any reasonable capacity. You can see this in virtually every action RPG from Final Fantasy VII Remake to Tales of Arise to the Witcher 3, etc. The mentality behind doing this appears to be to stop players from simply button-mashing their way through every encounter - by making bosses able to soak up absurd amounts of damage without flinching, it's supposed to encourage the player to think strategically about how they approach combat and time their attacks properly rather than just hitting the attack button over and over again until the boss dies.
Unfortunately, the compounding problem that has arisen in modern RPGs is that this kind of boss super armor is also paired with extremely high boss damage output.

Going back to Tales of Arise again, many bosses have extremely high defensive capabilities - incoming attacks inflicted upon them mostly deal double-digits worth of damage on HP counts in the hundreds of thousands to millions - but can also kill the player's characters in one or two hits with even their weakest attacks. Many of the bosses in Arise effectively become drawn-out slugfests where the player is repeatedly whacking the boss with a feather and doing very little damage while counting down the healing items they burn through before they run out and can no longer restore their characters' health or bring them back to life after the AI eats a single attack and dies from full health.

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Ironically, I think the series that has figured out the proper balance for boss stagger and super armor is a series that is, rather ironically, regularly accused of being a button-masher: Kingdom Hearts. In the Kingdom Hearts series, most humanoid bosses use a gameplay feature called a Revenge Gauge - a hidden function under the hood that counts the number of hits and the amount of damage the player inflicts upon an enemy within a given combo string.

Each boss has their own set Revenge value - some higher, some lower - and when that value is reached, the boss is able to cancel out of an incoming combo and counterattack. This serves two purposes within gameplay: it allows players to feel like they're fighting a boss on equal footing rather than as an underdog barely clinging to survival, thus making the player feel more powerful, and it also prevents players from simply knocking a boss into the air and juggling them with an infinite combo until they're dead. Players who understand how a given boss' revenge value functions can also use this to their advantage by cutting off their combo output right before the boss reaches their Revenge value and resetting the gauge. People who have played Kingdom Hearts 2 Final Mix or fought the Limit Cut bosses in Kingdom Hearts 3 Re:Mind are well aware of how satisfying these bosses are to fight, and while they are all extremely difficult, once you know how they function it becomes extremely fun to challenge them and take them down.

I believe that action RPG developers need to lessen their reliance on boss super armor as their only means of making boss battles. Allow the player to knock bosses down. Allow them to interrupt big attacks. Think of new ways to design combat rather than having every enemy sponge up absurd amounts of damage and have individual attacks feel like they actually matter.

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Make the enemy flinch but only at specific times to reward the player for perfect timing. For example, if you hit a boss exactly right after he performs a specific move you can stagger him and combo.

Kingdom Hearts is unironically one of the best ARPG series out there.

NEO TWEWY actually has some similar revenge properties to KH and it’s fucking great. Basically, when the enemy gets 2/3rds of the way to htting their revenge cap, they'll flash yellow. When they break out of your combo to use their attack, they flash red. If an enemy is being afflicted by a status effect of any kind or held down via Black Hole/Snare Trap/ Poltergeist, their revenge value won't increase, and if an enemy's revenge value isn't increasing for any reason it decays over time. Status effects also work on bosses, which only increases the depth of the system even more.

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>actual gameplay discussion on Any Forums
Sorry OP, maybe posting about trannies will get you more attention.

7R despite it's many flaws has this down perfectly. Every boss (and indeed every enemy) takes significant stagger from getting hit with their weakness, critical hits or if you fullfil some technical mechnic either unique to that monster or universal. Regular attacks are less about dealing damage but instead about building your ATB so you can use actions that will exploit the enemies weakness and put them in a stagger state. That's the best way to do it for ARPGs

Kind of sucks that the stagger gauges get reset when a boss enters into its next phase.

NEO deserved so much more than what it got. I especially love how it made status effects a core part of the combat.

It especially sucks in Arise because the game wants to put in all of this fun and crazy combos for you to pull off, especially with the aerial combat, but it all falls apart at the seams when you fight bosses, especially humanoid ones, that can’t be staggered or juggled which then just boils the gameplay to “use your strongest artes, back away to dodge before the lack of animation canceling wrecks your shit, and rinse and repeat.” No regard for how long you can keep the pressure game up or how you can keep an enemy juggled, combat just devolves into sneaking in a few quick hits before dodging to safety since you cannot cancel an attack to defend yourself and the bosses do a lot of damage. Add in how Artes have had their differing effects neutered in comparison to other games and shit like Mystic artes canceling out combos or spell charges and you have an APRG constantly at odds with itself. Arise has a potentially cool combo system but the actual combat design leaves a lot to be desired.

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