Tokyo Mirage Sessions and Boss Design Choices. The Good and the Bad

WARNING: SPOILERS FOR TOKYO MIRAGE SESSIONS

    While I've been a competitive Pokémon player for a long time, Summer gives me an opportunity to trade my Monster Balls for other RPGs, as the competitive season of Pokémon ends in the summer. In addition, TPCI has made some interesting decisions that may make me not play competitively. But that's for another article. It's Summer, which means I get to catch up on all the JRPGs that I have in my backlog that have been collecting dust, including Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE.

    I love the Fire Emblem series and I love the Persona series and an acquaintance online constantly OBSESSES about this game. The final push was that my friend got it for me for my birthday. And the game didn't disappoint. Somehow, the game blended in Persona combat with Fire Emblem mastery and leveling along with a quirky story about the entertainment industry, and I fell in love. The combat centers around a mechanic called “Sessions”. Whenever one or more enemies are hit with an attack they are weak to, your other party members follow up and attack the enemy with “session attacks”. It’s why I like calling Tokyo Mirage Sessions “Persona 4.5”, as this combat mechanic made way for Persona 5’s “Baton Pass” mechanic to become a newer staple in the series. But as cool as Tokyo Mirage Sessions is, I started having some critiques for Tokyo Mirage Sessions. A big question popped up in my mind after the final boss. Why was the final boss really boring?

    Before I go any further, I want to mention I was playing on Hard mode, so boss difficulty could vary on different modes. While Tokyo Mirage Sessions has a good combat system, it doesn't mean that all of the fights in the game are done super well. The bosses in this game are either a hit or miss, and most of the hits can be found in side stories. The bad boss fights in the game are repetitive and involve the same steps:

1. Buff your party

2. Find the boss’s weakness 

3. Keep hitting their weakness until they die by sessions

    For the bad bosses, Tokyo Mirage Sessions has this pattern along with a sprinkling of uniqueness. To make the bosses “Not Boring”, the team gave them a special status condition to inflict on the player and made the boss's HP bigger. In addition, bosses will have minions that they can summon, but that applies for most bosses, good and bad.

    Two of these worst bosses are Gangrel and Medus. Gangrel is the 3rd boss of the game and while Gangrel himself is pretty cool in Fire Emblem Awakening, his boss fight was not. Part of hit boss fight is to introduce the new status condition “seal”, that prevents a player from using their mirages (aka Personas for those not familiar with the series). The other half of the boss fight is annoying due to the limited party members the game gives you. Gangrel uses swords and his barbarians use axes. This means that three out of four of your party members in the game are at least weak to one of the boss’s enemies. While that may seem insignificant, the enemies themselves can also perform sessions, and they do massive damage to the player characters. This is due to the fact that the game gives you not enough resources to deal with Gangrel effectively. This can be seen in the final chapter in the Gangrel rematch, which was MUCH easier for me because of the amount of units I had and strategies I could use. What makes this worse is that Gangrel cannot be targeted unless his minions are gone. This leads to a lot of RNG, as the only way I thought of beating the boss was raising my evasion and praying the enemies didn’t hit my team. This causes the fight to be annoying as it is RNG based. In the end, the Gangrel fight is just plain frustrating and the difficulty goes down as long as you beat the minions or get lucky.

    For Medus’ boss battle, it’s problem is that it has two nearly identical phases that are not interesting. Medus’, despite being a final boss, introduces the unique mechanic of burn. This makes the unit take extra damage after they act and makes them weak to fire. In addition, Medus can inflict seal, but his attacks themselves are tame. This boss fight is made easy if the player has Itsuki at a certain rank as well as learned Wyrmslayer, and both of these skills can be unlocked pretty easily at the endgame. These skills make Itsuki immune to seal and give him an attack that Medus alone is weak to. If you have the correct support, Itsuki can slowly hack away at the boss and start sessions while the rest of the party applies healing and buffs. For the second phase of this fight, Medus sometimes switches up attacks to be able to do massive AOE damage, and loses his baddies. Unfortunately, this isn’t enough of a change to make the boss fight feel any different. For Tiki to say that you’re on the cusp of victory, only to go through another slog feels like a huge disappointment for the final boss of the game.

    However, now that I've talked about the worst of the worst fights, it's time to talk about the best of the best, starting with Exelus. While I hate the dude in Awakening, he has a FANTASTIC boss fight in Tokyo Mirage Sessions. Exelus breaks the “find the weakness” cycle because of his unique boss pattern. To beat Exelus himself and win the boss fight, there are two phases of the fight. The first phase throws the whole formula out the window as Exelus loves changing his type affinity. The player needs to balance finding and refunding Exelus’ weakness while healing their party. Each turn Exelus will do a good chunk of damage with an almighty attack and one elemental attack at random. Once Exelus get to half health, it incurs an “all out” mode. In this second phase, Exelus will dish out 2 powerful AOE attacks a turn, but in turn he becomes weak to everything. This turns the first half of the fight into a conservation game and the second half into a mad dash to the finish for both Boss and Player. The balance of the phases creates for engaging gameplay and makes the stakes high when you learn the boss is going to go all out. In addition, Exelus has one minion, which is Yashiro, your current rival and future companion. This by itself makes the fight even more interesting. Exelus will heal Yashiro whenever he's below half health, so in this fight Yashiro is guaranteed to stick around. Instead of dealing with the small fries first and the boss later, you learn that you just have to ignore Yashiro and prepare for when he doesn’t use “counter”. Overall, this break in the formula was really fun and made me excited about a boss for the first time in a game.

    The other main line boss I want to talk about is not actually a “Boss Monster” but a trial the game throws at you. This boss uses four heroes from past Fire Emblem Games, Macelan, Dolph, Gordon and Linde. Each of these mini bosses form a “Party” and makes it extremely hard to deal with. Dolph and Macelan are both armored knights that take turns drawing the attacks of the player. In addition to drawing in the attention, they can buff the whole party with Makarakarn and Tetrakarn, which reflect one non-almighty magic and physical attack to the opponent respectively. Linde is a magic attacker and healer that can restore the health of any party member and inflict seal. Finally, Gordon can dish out a TON of damage and can fish for your weaknesses which start sessions with their other party members. This formation makes it incredibly hard to get any damage down where you need it to go, and therefore requires a good strategy to overcome it. In my opinion, for not being a big boss monster, it is one of the most well thought out fights and requires a lot of thought to beat.

    As much as I love Tokyo Mirage Sessions, I wanted to use this as an opportunity to talk about what makes boss fights good and bad, and with these examples I can provide some points about boss fights. A lot of bosses that have big health bars can get very boring very quickly. If you have a boss that is a big HP bar, you should make sure to change up the fight by introducing phases or changes in the boss pattern to keep players interested or on their toes. If you’re planning a boss fight that involves multiple enemies, think of how these enemies can interact to make the player struggle and what strategies might be better or worse for taking them down. Finally, when making a boss fight, think about how many resources the player has access to and make sure there are multiple ways or small variations players can use to beat the boss. 

    Well, that’s all from me. I hope you enjoyed this article and if you haven’t played Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE yet I highly recommend it.