I love that Chrono Trigger has 13 different endings depending on when you beat it. Fun fact, you can do them all in one NG+ play through if you save correctly.
My brother had some Dragon Ball Z fighting game on Wii where many bosses were beatable and then the next scene shows you getting your ass handed to you.
The game didn’t make you lose. It just kind of ignored if you won for story purposes.
In Budokai Tenkaichi 3 you can end sagas real early if you're good enough. Like, if you stunlock Nappa to death as kid gohan before Goku arrives you get funny dialogue that's basically "Huh, I won."
I never played it, but the second Jedi Survivor game has a fight against Vader, but not at your main character. You win in the fight, then the cutscene makes you lose. It's played off as a "close loss", but it's disappointing when you can no-hit the boss and lose for story reasons.
In that very specific scenario I'd almost prefer Vader to be unbeatable. Make it so he always perfect blocks you, he prevents you from getting close, he interrupts your combos. I almost feel like making the boss actually impossible sells your point harder than making them "beatable" but you lose in a cutscene anyway
the first one has a few moments like that too. I'm guessing the game expects you to suck since it's a souls like, but I started playing it just after finishing Elden Ring so I was more or less breezing through it. And somewhere at the beginning of the game you're fighting with 9th? sister of the brainwashed evil jedi legion or something, and at 1/4 her health and with 2 health potions left a cutscene triggered showing Cal getting beat up lmao
Right? If I'm not meant to actually win the fight, don't include a boss fight, just have the cutscene. Or at least make the boss invulnerable to my attacks
Just played through Borderlands 3 (again) with a friend where this happens frequently. We MELTED the bosses, but then the main villains show up to fuck up the NPC allies. Uh, hello, our characters are technically standing right there. Why aren't we stopping them?
Literally a similar (if not more egregious) thing happens in Borderlands 2, where Roland can take a fuck ton of damage with you fighting in that arena where you kill Angel, but then Handsome Jack shoots him once and he dies?
struggling the first real fight in sekiro and starting over repeatedly...
or other games where it doesn't force you to lose in a scripted way, but the boss is just invincible and losing or glitchcing is the only way to proceed.
You can win it, the reward is a slightly different cutscene but the ultimate outcome doesn't change. It does give a little more insight into Genichiro though.
Excuse me, real cultured people only play games where the bosse's hp just stops going down at one point if you're supposed to lose, and just for spite you keep playing and hitting them as long as you can fully knowing losing is inevitable
(See the first fight against Maja's Dark Spectrobes in "Spectrobes: Beyond the Portals" and the first fight against Nero and Blank in "SolaToRobo").
I really love Kojima for this, many bosses are but in there as a story moment to Warf you down and show you just what you have to build up to fighting. But on NG+ or if you just are really fucking amazing some of those intended to lose battles can be won and the boss will react appropriately like "WHAT?! IM GETTING THE STORY GUN NOW HOW DARE YOU BEAT ME BEFORE I CAN MONOLOGUE BALWAKJLAHKLWA" and even say so on the following events like "YOU WONT BEAT ME WITH MY MCGUFFIN". But yeah I'm so sick of the 'have to lose to this guy so you have a grudge, trolololo' mechanic too.
I loved the end, you can also beat his whole fight by waiting like a month between saves and he dies of old age. The exploding wheelchair though where you can just rando snipe him was beauty.
Isn't a cutscene literally the only part of the game where you can't lose? It's just a video that plays on it's own to move the story forward isn't it?