[RMVX] Eventing Boss Battle

Introduction
Hello, and this is my third
tutorial [Unless my second one didn't get approved]. In this tutorial we
will be discussing how to make bosses more interesting. I've been
meaning to do this for a while but have been too busy with my game's
development, but here we go. In my games I always have strived to make
bosses, and normal enemy battles quite fun and interesting for the
player. A lot of this experience comes from playing games like Final
Fantasy X and world of warcraft where the boss battles always had
interesting factors to them. I will discuss some of these as well as on
death sequences. [Tankentai and otherwise.]

Kind of boss battles you should avoid vast quantities of:
Tank
bosses, while these are good in a small variety, its not very fun when
every second boss takes a good ten minutes to kill, i'd limit these to 2
a game depending on length.
Death Sentence battles: these are good
in a small quantity. It makes the player think about his actions instead
of just spamming attack. But when every second or third boss is a death
sentence battle, it becomes irritating.

How to make on death events
If
any of you have played final fantasy and have gotten to an on on death
spell cast mob [a good example is a behemoth who casts meteor.], you
will know what I am talking about.

How we do this in VX is
simple, but rather out of most peoples mind sets. As not a lot of people
use the immortal quality that you can set on the troops in the
database.

To do this, you will have to right click an enemy in
the troops area and select immortal. then have an enemy page with a
condition of HP at 0%, then in the event. do a force action of the skill
you want [like meteor] and after that do an event command of inflict
enemy state>death. that is all, that is all you need to do, this
works for both tankentai and normal, as I have tested it in both. You
need no scripts to do this. Just remember to set immortal, this is why
we need to inflict enemy death through events. because unless that
happens, he wont die. and will remain on 0 HP.

Boss battle examples
To avoid spoiling all the boss battles in my game, I will give you a few examples, and you can think on from there.

Healer/Caster combo:
This
is [IIRC] like Zorn and Thorn in Final Fantasy IX[9], one would do
damaging offensive spells while the other would heal, the idea was to
kill the healer first, because if you didn't, they would cast life on
the other one. [For those who haven't played FF9 but have played wow,
Scarlet Commander Mograine and High Inquisitor Whitemane are good
examples.

What you would do is have a Caster at 0% Condition and
in the event page have Healer cast life on index X, X being the index of
the Caster. You would also have the healer cast heal on said index at
20% or so, you could have this as span turn or span battle, depending if
you want to have the Caster healed once or every time she falls below
20% or so.

I would also suggest as well as casting offensive
spells, the caster would cast protective spells on the healer, not only
does this add a bit of realism, but it make it a little more challenging
for the player who is now hitting for half the damage.

Suicide Bombing Monsters:
Noting
the On Death events I posted above, this is pretty much the same.
Except with a battle system like tankenntai [or eventing] they can use
Use auto-life at 50% or so, and when they hit 20% they could use
detonate, doing massive damage to players and destroying itself in the
process, but if they used auto-life, they would rise again, with players
brutally damaged, it makes the moment of which they revived very
intense for the player as they have to heal [and sometimes resurrect]
their allies and deal with the bomber from whichever % of health he
healed too. If you dont use tankentai auto-life, there is a way to do
this with events, that you can do with tankentai and isn't so buggy.

First,
you'll need a "false" auto-life ability if you don't use Tankentai, if
you do, you will have to remove it if you wan to event it because
honestly it makes it very buggy and if you do it the way I suggest
you'll have two bombers on top of each other. Since this is rather hard
to explain Ill use screenshots instead.



No spoilers for ye... asides from the enemy I am illustrating.

For
the transparent Kobold, you have to right click and select appear
halfway, they should also be on the same spot, just did that to show
you how it all works.

I am using tankentai as you can probably
see, but I still prefer to do it with events because auto-life is rather
buggy. sometimes it'll work, sometimes it wont. And dispelling
auto-life will make it say the things but not resurrect them, when
combined with a special victory scene, this looks quite awkward.

Also,
I forgot to but you should make a conditional to see if auto-life is
inflicted, If it is not inflict, with the event command I showed you
earlier but with no resurrection.
If it is inflicted make this happen
as it does in the screenshot. I didn't do this because It escaped me
and you don't have the character with dispel this early in my game.

Reflect centric monsters [Tankentai Only]
For
those of you who use Tankentai, the reflect system makes a battle very
fun and Interesting, what we are going to do is have an enemy cast a
spell which does an insane amount of damage, and the only way to avoid
being hit by it and one of your party members instantly dieing is to use
Repel or Reflect to bounce it back. We also want to warn the player to
use the repel/reflect spell before it happens. so make the warning
event.

Spoiler:

Change X to the Actor speaking [if you use the
first line in messages], and the Fist x of the second line is the person
who can cast reflect\repel and the second x is who to cast it on as he
will and should be the target of the powerful spell. Then, in the next
page:

Spoiler:

And thats it, select the enemy which will do the
skill and match the x's to the index of the monster and the Index of
which player he is casting it on respectively.

I use Repel and reflect as the names for physical reflection Magical Reflection.

For
those who don't know Reflection in games is usually referring to
bouncing back spells, if anyone has played FFX, you'll know what I'm
talking about, and anyone who has tried out the features in tankentai
will also know what I'm talking about. You'll also want to make sure the
spell kills the player, but if bounced back doesn't do SO much damage
that the enemies end up dying too fast, but fast enough that iit
doesn''t feel like a tank battle.

and now for the last example.

Multi-part boss battle:

If
any of you have watched or played Final Fantasy VII[7] and fought with
Bizarro Sephiroth, you will know what I'm talking about.

These
are battles where bosses have multiple parts that you have to destroy to
make his core destructible: this is a little tricky to do and people
who use tankentai will have to use a special action sequence to prevent
the parts from moving when attacking.

For non-tankentai, Assemble
the parts in the troops scene, ofcourse you'll have to make different
enemies in the database for each part. I would suggest using a different
name for each part, even if going to as little effort to put part A
part B etc.

Once assorted the core should be immortal and you
should make an invulnerability state, to do this you'll need a script
which makes enemies completely immune, this is difficult to do without
tankentai. The Reason we want to make them immune is that we don't want
player getting them to 0 hp, ad have them not die, then when all the
parts are dead they die instantly or will live forever, if you don't
have immortal checked.

Once you have taken care of that, you'll need to make an event like this.

When end of Turn: Span Turn.

Spoiler:

That's basically it, the show text and animations are optional, they just spice it up.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and hope to see more battles where enemies are interesting instead of bland. Happy RPG Making.






Credits: Bizarre Monkey