DEFEATING A BOSS WHO THEN DEFEATS YOU IN THE NEXT CUTSCENE
Ah, the good old “win the boss battle but be thrashed by the boss in the very next cutscene”. Just last year, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 did this quite a lot, but really, games have been doing this for as long as they have been able to display more than three colours at a time. There you are, giving the boss fight everything you have, believing that the stakes couldn’t be higher, looking forward to immense gratification upon victory. Except, with victory comes deflation, not gratification- because the game immediately tells you that all that effort was for nothing, that it wants to tell the story it was going to tell anyway, and that no, you did not defeat the boss. In the very next cutscene, even after having been defeated in the preceding battle, the boss wins against the protagonist anyway. Well, then why even bother with the boss fight? Why couldn’t it just be a cutscene? Why put us through all that if, in the end, it doesn’t really mean anything?
Why are we still here? Just to suffer?
