Omg hi aven I hope you are doing so so so well grrrrr!! I saw your DQIX boss tier list and I just wanted to ask since I am so curious like! I know you gave some thoughts about the bosses in the tags but your thoughts on tarantula in specific got me thinking because them being interesting yet weak as a boss fight is like. So real ?? Literally huh?? And it's a SHAME because the Bloomingdale story is one of my favorites from the main game! So I just wanted to ask like, what standout bosses felt narratively gripping but weak as a boss fight? Did any feel kinda eh for you storywise but actually got your blood pumping a little?? I am just so curious lmao. Everytime I see you gush about DQIX it feels like I am a starry (hehe) eyed kid who got transported back to 2009 waakwkwajjansnssns
P.s I hope your party/parties are questing well!!!
this is so shameful i did not see this i am so sorry scuffle my friend sniffle....i will ramble so much just for you. (i hope you can feel me beaming astral gratitude at you, you are very kind to me)
OKAY SO. spoilers for most of dqix ahead tread carefully questers!!! the post our dear friend scuffle is speaking of is this one here where im tiering boss's based on very arbitrary and specific criteria, and im gonna go into more depth rn: disjointed rambles lie ahead beware!!!
i spoke a bit about tyrantula already but - while i dont know if i just happen to be overlevelled everytime i get to bloomingdale or if its just scaled weirdly - shes always absurdly easy for me to beat. ive never felt like im chipping away at her, its always more. okay well theres like 3 turns left moving on. and then shes gone! and thats such a shame given my already long standing feelings on tyrantula. there is something to be said in regards to her being weak potentially fitting nicely into the story if we see it as a sort of "marion(ette) wouldve been easy to save, but no one ever did" kind of concept, but thats almost definitely not what was intended so it feels a little. unearned, i suppose. especially given that the reward is the massive boat and no true happy ending for marion(ette)
story wise i'll admit i was actually kinda :/ about leviathan and porth llaffan - i was really attached to jona because i thought her accent and design was really cute, but the actual build up itself was not particularly interesting to me for whatever reason (felt a little generic? not sure, i found a good chunk of newid isle to be a bit "going through the motions-y", even if i really enjoyed the tower of trades itself*) (my issue lay more with the cave than the story). the boss fight however? i struggled with that SO MUCH as a kid. something about the waves he summoned DESTROYED my team repeatedly and i remember getting so incredibly invested in trying to JUST barely pull through. repeated heart racing and wishing that there was a health bar so i could at least tell if i was even remotely NEAR close to beating it. finally seeing that flash of white with the last hit really got me, and the following scene with jona and her father kinda pulled the whole thing together for me! i really liked going back to porth llafan to talk to jona every once in a while, even if her dialogue didnt change. my friend :)
* want to clarify. i definitely didn't Dislike anything, i think i was just so enamoured and curious about the whole whale summoning thing the ghost was talking about, and then having the focus be turned on "youre going through a cave now" without much extrapolation on this village's non celestrian based worship made me a little disappointed, so by contrast 9 year old me was WAY more excited by going on to bigger places. perhaps also part of my conflict was that i actually beat the porth llafan section BEFORE alltrades. im not even sure if i went to alltrades abbey at all before beating the whale. probably didnt help some of it feeling a little jumbled!
that being said, i think the boss ive come around on most is either goreham hogg and/or the master of nu'un! i ranked goreham hogg pretty low but feel the need to clarify that part of that is just that hes REALLY fun to hate. hes this awful, opulent beast of a boss who destroyed me age 9 and ran/runs that sincerely horrific slave camp/prison so its easy to dislike him! thats good! hes a villain! im MEANT to not like him, and given how much i ADORE goresby purrvis (for being so cool) and hootingham gore (for his sick design) its probably important that i want to sincerely kill at least one of them. there is very little i truly dislike about dq9, since i tend to have Fun getting mad about things in a cathartic sort of way.
re: master of nu'un - he was a boss i never found particularly standout, and found weirdly anti climactic when put in contrast of this weird and mysterious tower (that has no clear purpose btw i need to talk about that in depth sometime what the fuck is the tower of trades actually there for from a worldbuilding perspective im so intrigued) and then this strange glowing room (which is literally referred to as the ??? room in the wiki btw. isnt that sick) where this priest weve been looking for is just. transformed. and that transition is really cool honestly!! i imagine it wouldve been more monumental to me if id done things in order, since i wouldnt have seen the fyggs in action yet, and in theory it also makes a really interesting narrative precursor to corvus (see my previous notes on jack abott and his parralels to the player) but i feel like his abilities and attacks were just a bit...eh? no super standout animations, which is a shame given that he does a quirky little "hehe what should my new evil name be....high jack....jackrilege maybe ....." before the fight and implies some sick mischief in him that doesnt really get communicated further. i think some of my feelings on this got sorta cemented when (over a decade later) i finally fought yore, and his design and fight felt a good bit more fitting to him. sure, it makes sense for a priest to get a fucked up evil demon form, but it just doesnt quite hit the nail on the head! its not terrible, just not the coolest thing in the series!
