Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-32237043-20170607143625/@comment-25137755-20190408050723

Y'all are wrong. OP asked about game design, and there's one part I'm noticing that's an absolute embarassment from a design perspective: Undyne the Undying.

I'm not even going to talk about the difficulty spike since a lot of it comes from fake difficulty with bullcrap tricking the player. The green-heart portions are an escalade of tricking the player by introducing new mechanics on the fly and immediately punishing the player hard for it. Let's talk about the mechanics for those portions (because nothing says 'GrEaT dEsIgN' like the exact same patterns over and over again to the point where you win by memorization instead of skill):

First, she has a couple of slowly moving blue arrows in a single line, with a red arrow leading. After this, the arrows progress at a more rapid pace. This is a fantastic start that teaches the player that red arrows are the closest. After that, a quick reflex test, then a swarm of slow-moving arrows. Okay, so far so good, then we get some red heart action (RNG can screw you on the spear placement for her first attack here, but what can you do?).

Then she starts another round of green, and immediately flanks you with a surprise blue arrow after illuminating a red one in the middle of a sandwich of vertical arrows. Full stop, this is awful, because it only serves to punish the player for noticing the pattern of the first attack and learning the mechanics it tried to introduce.

Bosses SHOULD NOT punish you for learning mechanics ONLY USED during THEIR fight.

After that, another reflex test, followed by probably the worst part of any of this steaming pile of crap, a rhythmatic alternation between the left and top aisles with blue arrows, then gold arrows coming from the same direction.

Let's think about a hypothetical new player encountering this for a moment: that player will be alternating between the two lanes the yellow arrows are going to be coming from by the time they appear, so the player is going to try to do the same thing to those arrows. They are going to block it, but see that the arrow goes around their shield. This is going to communicate to them that these arrows react to being hit by flipping and need to get hit twice, rather than simply flipping on their own. So, the player tries to handle the rest of the attack by doing some frantic, frustrated circle motion.

Then, the player gets swarmed with slow-moving blue arrows and slow-moving yellow arrows, while still expecting yellow ones to need to be hit twice, while knowing that any arrows flashing red are untrustworthy. When I first started playing this stupid game, I ragequit here for a few months, and found out later in a guide how the mechanics actually work because the game at best was clumsy at communicating it, or at its worst moments outright lied on how they functioned. Even then when I finally beat it, I didn't feel any joy or like I beat some great challenge - I felt cheated that supposedly something that was supposed to be this great moment in the game wasn't a test of skill, but a test of "how many hours did I spend memorizing this embarassment's patterns when I'm literally never going to need this again?"

That's really the crux of it - bosses should test the players on knowledge of the game's mechanics and give them a challenge. Beating Undyne doesn't make you a better bullet hell, or, hell, even a better Undertale player. It makes you better at the Undyne boss fight, and that's it. It's a complete waste of time.