Cleanup of SNK Boss

To clarify, the "SNK Boss" trope is a trope *primarily* about fighting games, where you fight a boss character who by design, either massively jacked up stats or breaking of the in-system rules, is designed to hold the advantage over the actual playable cast. The trope *does* carry over to other genres, but specifically similarly competitive games with similar rules of competitive balance — racing games, sports games, Real Time Strategy Games, and so on.

It does not mean "That One Boss up to eleven," and shouldn't apply to primarily single player games, such as platformers, RPG's, etc., no matter the difficulty or "cheapness" due to these games being an unbalanced experience by design. But there are a lot of just these sort of examples in the main trope pages, enough so that it would actually be a bit of a project to fix it all. I went over it, and here's what I propose (anything that simply says "remove x example" is purely because of the non-balanced single player reasoning I've already given):

Main Page: remove the Sans video example of SNK Boss - while he is hard, specifically due to "breaking the rules," it's still not *Competative* balance he's messing with. SNK Playmore: Remove the Metal Slug 3D example. Capcom Games (other): Remove the Mega Man Battle Network 5 example.

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Remove the Mega Man Star Force example.

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Remove the Asura's Wrath example. It *does* have characters from fighting games, but is still a non-balanced single player game.

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Remove Monster Hunter examples. Namco (other): Remove the Time Crisis example.

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Remove Project X Zone example. Other Games: Remove God Hand example.

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Remove Boxxy Quest example

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Remove Agarest Senki example

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Remvoe Kingdom Hearts examples (there are a *lot*, which is my primary reason for making it a project rather than just going in myself.)

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Remove Dragoneer's Aria example.

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Remove True Crime: Steets of L.A. example.

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Is Armored Core about multiplayer matches or is it an non-balanced single player experience? I honestly am not sure on this one.

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Remove Disaea example.

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Remove Clash of Heroes example.

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Remove Undertale example.

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Remove Digital Devil Saga example.

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Remove Punch Out!! examples — The game follows a lot of Fighting Game tropes, but it's actually more of a Boss Only game.

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Remove Mother Russia Breathes example.

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Not sure on Pokemon. It is a single player RPG at heart, but to the community it's all about the Pv P battles.

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Remove Kamen Riders Generations examples.

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Remove Valkaria Choronicles example.

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Remove Boodborne/Dark Souls examples.

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Remove Xenoblade Choronicles 2 examples.

We may also need to remove and fix a few wicks (such as from the Undertale and Kingdom Hearts pages), but I already know the trope isn't misused enough for any actual Trope Repair. I already did a randomized Wick Check.

Give movies a fair chance. They're often Better Than They Sound, and you may find a new favorite. Like Rango.

If there are any questions about any of these suggestions and why I think they should be removed, think of the following example. Say you join a Chess tournament (Chess being one of the better balanced games in the world), and play your way to the top. Every match is played using the real and true Chess rules, meaning the difficulty is ramping up purely because you are playing opponents with greater skill, but the two of you are still using the same basic tools. Then you get to the champion, and while you still have the basic Chess set of King, Queen, Bishops, Knights, Rooks, and Pawns, your opponent has a King flanked by 15 Queens. That's an SNK boss. The proposed removals don't follow this pattern.

Edited by Shotoman on Jul 23rd 2020 at 7:16:15 AM

Give movies a fair chance. They're often Better Than They Sound, and you may find a new favorite. Like Rango.

I vote to keep the Pokémon example of Ultra Necrozma, but cut the others. Most Pokémon bosses are designed with a “boss’s team vs player’s team” where members of each team are about the same strength as their opponent, but Ultra Necromza is instead “all members of player’s team vs one superpowered opponent.” And said by “superpowered,” I mean likely to one-shot any member of the player’s team that does not have some sort of specialization to counter the boss, which players would likely not know about on a first playthrough.

SoundCloud

Please remember that ONLY characters that break the rules qualify, hard bosses in general go in That One Boss and Dethroning Moment of Suck.

What about Fire Emblem? A lot of Turn Based Strategy Games are competitive (Like Starcraft and Warcraft), but by my understanding Fire Emblem is more a single player thing the way Pokemon actually is.

Give movies a fair chance. They're often Better Than They Sound, and you may find a new favorite. Like Rango.

I've gotten most of the cleanup done, but I am curious what to do about the Sans video example. After all, while he *is* all sorts of That One Boss, he just isn't an SNK Boss.

Give movies a fair chance. They're often Better Than They Sound, and you may find a new favorite. Like Rango.

Perhaps put it on an appropriate discussion page so that interested people can comment on it? That's what I normally do with debatable examples.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

People don't really seem to use discussion pages though unless they already know something is on it.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

I'd prefer Sans to stay, since he does break battle rules such as making you take damage during battle menu selection (I don't recall another enemy in the game has the ability to attack you while in a battle menu). Infinite evasion until a scripted event is also another rule-break, since the game also doesn't seem to have an evasion stat.

Edited by Albert3105 on Jul 27th 2020 at 2:14:58 PM

I'll admit, of all the single-player RPG bosses out there, Sans is totally the *closest* thing to an SNK Boss. Like you say, he *does* break the pre-established battle rules of the game, I get it. And due to that, there are plenty of That One Boss related tropes he applies to. The thing is, he *doesn't* apply to the primary point of SNK Boss, that he specifically breaks *competative* balance by being super unbalanced compared to a selectible cast of Characters.

In short, if Undertale was a fighting game, or a racing game, then Final Boss Sans would absolutely be an SNK boss, but that's not the case. He's breaking rules, but not Competitive Balance, which is the salient point here.

The SNK Boss trope was created as a Fighting Game trope. It's expanded a bit, but only with regards to the fact that there *are* other principally competitive genres out there, like Racing Games, Sports Games, and some Real Time Strategy games, and others. Fully single player games are imbalanced by nature, so even a fight like Sans isn't an SNK boss, by the definition of the trope. I don't want to come across as being pushy or pedantic, but this is the very point that has pidgeonholed so many questionable examples to begin with.

Give movies a fair chance. They're often Better Than They Sound, and you may find a new favorite. Like Rango.

So what would be the trope for "boss's difficulty is due to blatantly breaking rules no other enemies or bosses follow?" The restriction to fighting games and games with Competitive Balance comes off to me as striving to be a subtrope of a Missing Supertrope.

Edited by Albert3105 on Jul 27th 2020 at 11:35:50 AM

I've spent some time looking up Boss Fight tropes, and I'll admit you have a point, here. There actually doesn't seem to be a trope for a boss who literally breaks the rules of other enemies and bosses, apart from using the Super-Trope of Fake Difficulty (which is, in fact, SNK Boss' Super-Trope), and citing that as the reason behind the fake difficulty.

Though in Sans' case with the odd things he does, as well as what it actually takes to fight him, an argument could be made that he's a Puzzle Boss, a True Final Boss, one of the very few final boss/True Final Boss examples of That One Boss, and even Bonus Boss, with his cheating being "justified" due to his falling under these roles, and *most* of the pigeonholing I've been working to remove fall under these tropes.

That said, given how blatant and obvious Sans is as a rulebreaker, I personally wouldn't actually be against considering Sans a special exception SNK Boss, but I'd also be a bit concerned about the precedent it kind of sets. Non-Balanced single player examples should *really* be more of an exception than a rule, just due to the rules they fall under being really quite different the Competitive Balance rules.

If possible, we should probably put Sans in particular to a vote of some kind. If it's generally accepted that, yes, his particular brand of rule breaking *does* count him as an SNK Boss, I'll gladly put his example back in the "Other Games" section of the trope myself and not look into removing the video example.

I just have a long history of fighting these guys and want the trope to be used correctly and not weakened by pigeonholed examples. If a mild change to the description can bring in proper examples outside of competitive examples without flooding it with more questionable ones, I'm all for it.

Edited by Shotoman on Jul 27th 2020 at 9:56:07 AM

Give movies a fair chance. They're often Better Than They Sound, and you may find a new favorite. Like Rango.