Discover Top Posts Tagged with #fight design

One of the Greatest "Non Battle Battle Manga" Fights of all Time

Cipher Academy is an insane current Jump manga about a school for genius code breakers and it just had its most insane "battle" yet. Here's what went down:

Our hero is after the title of Class Leading Private, a cross between class president and the general of an army, who is stated to have the lives of the class in their hands. This is the final test and it starts with a simple vote, but of course there's a catch. The 4 candidates then take their votes as Poker chips which they will be using in a game of Blind Man's Bluff (you can only see your opponent's hands and not your own)

But even that would be too tame for this series! No, instead every single card in the deck has been encrypted so you have to decode people's hands before you can even think about betting!

Oh and that's not all, one of the 4 candidates is also "Anonymity Requested-san" who has an in-universe explained black bar obscuring their face, making them the ultimate "poker face".

Much like every code in Cipher Academy, this isn't just some made up code, it's actually solvable! Now unfortunately as an English speaker it's basically impossible to understand the tricky ways it uses the Japanese language, but I still appreciate the ingenuity of this manga to no end.

Spoiler Alert

So how does our hero decipher the code? Well in a clever thematic twist they do so by reading the expressions of their audience of classmates, not their opponent. This ties into the fact that the Class Leading Private needs to be someone who understands the needs and concerns of their classmates, but it goes even deeper than that.

Every single card in the deck was a code created by a classmate! Thus even if the onlookers didn't bother deciphering the deck's codes, each of them knew exactly 4 cards: the 4 different suits they made for their assigned number.

This is not even to mention the other 3 or so small but incredible subplots this battle ties up, including how our hero overcomes trauma he had from losing a different code battle (insane I know), and how he tackles the cheating of Anonymity Requested-san in previous duels.

Definitely give Cipher Academy a go if you haven't already! I didn't even get into the other great things about the series like how it sometimes censors things the characters say about the world because that information is "classified"

Oh, and I can't end this post without sharing this amazing use of the medium of manga to convey information. These 2 pages revealed the answers to the ciphers before each was explained. Now as I was reading this on my phone, I didn't understand why the cards were flipped horizontally, but then it hit me: with each image printed on the side of a physical page, it creates a front and a back to a decoding table! Absolute genius!

#manga #cipher academy #cipher #academy #fight #shonen #battle #non battle battle manga #battle manga #fight analysis #fight design #analysis #manga analysis #writing analysis

When Bosses Fail: Gameplay and Story Synthesis in Persona 4

I recently was absorbed into Person 4 Golden now that it got released on steam. Since the game is a few years old at this point I’d normally say that this is ground covered by people better and smarter than myself and not write about it, but when fighting the first boss a moment occurred that completely changed my perspective on video game bosses as a whole and that revelation is just too intense not to write about! I’m of course talking about the moment Shadow Yukiko tries to summon her prince charming for a second time and the spell fails. I want to take a look at why a boss trying and failing an attack is probably the single most amazing synthesis of story and gameplay I’ve seen and why it tells you more about that bosses character than anything else could.

For those of you who haven’t played Persona 4, I’ll quickly run down the setup to this boss. I wouldn’t consider it a major spoiler since it is only the first real boss of the game. Anyway enter Yukiko, a girl who is born into a family that runs a famous inn and will be forcing her to carry on the family business when she’s older. She’s not at all into this life and this manifests as the thought that she needs to find a prince to whisk her away and get her out of this life. The boss of this section of the game is her inner feelings manifested into a monstrous phoenix in a cage. Sometime into the fight this monster uses the summon ability introduced earlier via normal enemies to call forth a prince monster that looks like a puppet and which fights alongside her. However, when you defeat it or it runs away, she attempts to resummon it only for her to completely fail and we get a bit of dialogue along the lines of “Why? Why won’t he come!” After you defeat the boss and Yukiko solves her inner turmoil she learns she needs to seek independence by herself and not wait to be passively be saved by someone.

So its pretty clear the designers have baked extremely important narrative details into this fight, but most of the time when you see this its the villain's strengths being turned into their primary abilities. Why is it so important that this boss tried and failed to do something? Well when we’re talking specifically about villains, we’re talking about people who we know have flawed views of the world. These characters are defined by their flaws first and foremost and in most media these flaws directly lead to their undoing. Voldemort in Harry Potter didn’t anticipate Harry’s mother’s love protecting him and accidentally turning him into the Horcrux that would be his undoing. President Snow expected the fear of the Hunger Games to keep people in line not lead to rebellion. The Joker in the Dark Knight didn’t anticipate the two ships not immediately blowing each other up because he believed people were inherently corruptible. Villains by there very nature are meant to have flaws that directly lead to their downfall and this is often how stories present moral lessons.

However in games we find this far less often and its often reserved to finding the weak point is an enemy’s seemingly impenetrable armor. The twist identity of Doc Oc in the newest Spiderman game for example is one of the best interpretations of the character as a whole yet the fight devolves into you just damaging him in generic ways over and over with cutscenes showing you trying to disable his arms. His mechanical arms are certainly showcased to full effect in this fight, but not his superiority complex placing himself above people he wants to “help” in a perversion of Spiderman’s ideology. Arguably the best antagonist in Bioshock offs himself and you end up fighting against a guy who uses too siphons too much plasmids to himself to try to become super powerful. In this boss fight we do see the plasmids as the weak point you use to defeat him but only after a full phase of him wrecking house using said plasmids to good effect. In less story focused games, villains often boil down to really bad people who want power and thus it feels a bit counter-intuitive for the player to defeat them by powering up yourself (but you’re the good guy so don’t worry). Video games in general are less likely to present a boss’s failing during the battle.

When movies have villains who are defeated directly because of their flaws it provides a solid moral framework, but when video games fail to do that the moral lesson can fall flat. How do we know Doc Oc’s idea of thinking of those he saves as lesser is bad? Well he says it in a cutscene and he’s the bad guy so case closed I guess? In Yukiko’s case we know for a fact that her idea of a prince coming to save her is incorrect because we’ve observed visible effects on gameplay. This is far more impactful than if she just said it because in order to win the game we as players are hyperfocused on observing the patterns of gameplay that will lead to our victory. In other words, when something happens that helps or hurts our chances of winning that’s something we care a lot about immediately.

The other reason this boss design is effective is because it gives us a better understanding of the character in a diegetic way which is basically a fancy way of saying its the “show don’t tell” rule applied to video game writing.

Now when making a boss fight like this you can either approach it from a bottom up or top down approach (to borrow magic the gathering design terminology). Top down would be writing the character first and then designing the fight to fit the character, but bottom up would be making the fight first and then writing the character. As always a bit of both is probably best, but lets imagine using bottom up to write a Pokemon gym leader villain. Many joke that the gym leaders are supposedly elite trainers but only use one type of Pokemon and therefore open themselves up to having clear weaknesses. This fact would actually work well if we wanted to write gym leader characters whose flaw is that they are rigorously set in their beliefs and won’t change. For instance the Fire gym leader would be always passionate and excited but not know when to calm down and rest and the Water gym leader could be always calm and not know when jumping into immediate action is necessary. In these cases, them having only one type of Pokemon is symbolic of their unchanging natures. Perhaps when you meet them later in the game they’ve learned and have other types of Pokemon?

So in conclusion most games that aren’t directly trying to create story and gameplay synthesis on every level often fall short when it comes to boss design. Bosses often have powers indicative of their strong points but don’t have mechanical failures based on their character flaws. Honestly the problem is not nearly as bad as I make it out to be, but despite that I still think that if there’s one thing the gaming space needs more of its bosses who make mistakes during battle.