Difficulty of Boss FIghts

The difficulty of Dark souls fights stems from fights largely being decided within a small number of strikes, on both the player and the boss. This is of course, a simplification, but Bloodstained, with its ability to pause and thumb through the inventory, will likely be more forgiving by design, unless the player intentionally brings additional challenge on themselves.

I want a few things in a good videogame boss (with fair/non-aggravating/non-extreme difficulty):

• Requiring proper preparation, while not being either a pushover or an almost-impossible challenge.
  
• Those that are NOT the invincible type for a long time (and only lowering their full defense for a few seconds). They are amazingly boring/cheesy.
• The same goes for those having one-hit kill moves or absolute stunlock.
  
• Skippable dialogue (but then again, he/she/it trolling you for it would be fun)
  
• Can be vanquished by a few different ways, usually by brutish force or finesse, but always good enough to bring a challenge (in the latter you never know when the next hit will be the winning one).
  
• Readable yet varied patterns. Randomization is the key word here.
• With a rich set of animations.
  

Normal difficulty: Like Symphony of the Night.
Nightmare difficulty: Order of Ecclesia + a bit more.

Rewards in Nightmare difficulty should NOT make the hero "better", but a way to show the world you "defeated it and did not loose your mind".
Wouldn't hurt to add in a code or something to have an Easy difficulty too.

Reasons being, I like the difficulty of SotN. Everything above it, I loose interest quickly. Many have said OoE are this and that hard, this is why I never have had any super priority to try that game. But I will some day. And hopefully have a trusty Pro Action Replay Game Genie Shark by my side for that DS I need to buy.

Most, if not all, Bosses in Igavanias have predictable patterns. Some will change up their pattern [especially depending on Difficulty setting], but you should easily be able to see the telling signs of which moves they're going to use if you've fought against them enough times.

I'd say it would make the most sense to prepare for Dawn of Sorrow-level difficulty on Normal. Plenty of the Bosses hit hard in that game, but most of them make it quite obvious what attacks they're about to use (even Zephyr), so they're easy to avoid. The only Bosses in that game that were truly difficult (in my opinion) were Paranoia & Abaddon.

Yeah I really enjoy difficulty. Not because I'm a masochist or X-treme Leet Gameur or whatever, but because a lot of the fun in gaming to me is getting better at something and seeing the progression of that. The first areas in Bloodborne took me 3-4 hours the first time around, now I can go through there in minutes...and that's not just difficulty, but also knowing where to go and how things work, how the AI behaves, etc. Getting all of that down is the core enjoyment of that older style of game design.

IGA's games are a bit different. OoE does balance it great, but in a general sense the fun of these games is more about lighter gameplay and exploring/finding things than a continual gameplay challenge. Ecclesia itself is more stage based like an older game with less of an emphasis on grinding taking you far, so it all worked together nicely.

For a standard IGA experience, and Bloodstained's, what I expect is essentially: an actually pretty good challenge for the player that plays straight through (without stopping to farm or grind), a bit of an easier time for someone who wanders and strays some, and mostly an easy game period for someone who takes the time to grind and farm on the road to inventory/bestiary completion.

Difficulty and mode options will push the challenging experience back onto the completionist player, which after playing the game that long they could equally either appreciate or ignore. Optional bosses (IGA, whatever else) should stand as difficult even for the person who's collected things significantly, around to the point that learning patterns/developing a strategy is forced. Basically, if say Bloodstained's last boss is SotN Dracula level normally, IGA boss should be Galamoth level (minus Beryl Circlet or Crissaegrim).

Hopefully Bloodstained's will be more challenging than SotN Drac, though. I mean, Doppleganger is harder than Drac when you first fight him lol...

That's an interesting thing and a point I'd like to again make about Symphony, though. The early-mid game, at least the first time we all played it, was a pretty solid challenge. If you didn't know about the stopwatch or any other exploit for Doppleganger, you probably got wasted. If you tried to fight the knight near the bottom of the outer wall too early, you probably lost. Clocktower Medusa Heads probably petrified and killed you. Even to the inverted castle, some of those later areas are rough without abusing certain mechanics you might learn about later.

With some adjustments and lessening the invincibility and attack power of things, SotN could have been a lot different and consistently challenging. Bloodstained might be that way, because I doubt it'll have as many broken ideas.

Eh, it's an intended feature more than anything. It's there so that anybody can do well if they play long enough, an idea behind SotN itself (IGA talks about this in...the old Shmuplations interview I think?). As above, if you want to retain the challenge, you'll either be able to play it straight through or use the other modes.

I'd personally rather have the tougher challenge from the outset, but for the sake of the game doing better and keeping to the spirit of the design he intends, you can power up as you want.

If you want to OCD collect/level and still have a challenge on your first time through with the main game, well...can't have it all lol. Hopefully at least the optional boss(es) will do it, if Nightmare and Classic etc don't cut it for you.

IGA said in a interview, talking about how he creates games, after parting with Konami but before Bloodstained, that he has a method to balance boss fights. After the boss is created, he puts a tester to play the game and fight against that boss, at the "expected" level and gear. If the tester can beat the boss without being hit a single time, after some tries, it means the boss is good enough.

That being said, i expect bosses to be more memorable than hard or easy. Legion is not a really hard boss in any interaction he shows up (maybe excluding Curse of Darkness where he is optional), even so, it's a memorable boss. Eligor (Order of Ecclesia) is a hard but also memorable boss. Does anyone here remembers Max Slimer from Harmony of Dissonance? Probably not, due to how boring it is.

So, i expect some kind of challenge, but i'm more interested in how these bosses can be memorable and enjoyable to fight rather then being super hard or super easy.

They really need to make the damage value for bosses higher, when I played the 2017 demo.. Bloodless did a very tiny damage that I felt dodging is almost unnecessary.

I'm willing to bet that's for the non gaming public to enjoy.