This is an IGN opinion piece from Travis Northup. He loves action RPGs, including Phantom Blade Zero. Read his review here.
I play an obscene amount of soulslikes and sweaty action games, and although I largely enjoy my time facing off against these intentionally challenging gauntlets, one thing I’ve grown increasingly irritated by in recent years is something I’ve taken to calling the Scrub Tax.
But what is the Scrub Tax exactly? Well, it can take many forms. Sometimes it’s a nearly minute-long walk back to the lair of the boss I’m trying to beat. Or maybe it’s a super obnoxious unskippable cutscene I’m forced to watch every time you beat the boss’ first phase as they transform into an even more gruesome monster. Other times, it’s just a good ol’-fashioned 30-second loading screen that has me rubbing my temples in annoyance between failed runs. In other words, the Scrub Tax is an irritating procedure (intentional or otherwise) that games make you go through after getting yourself killed like the low-skill scrub that you are – things that waste your time unnecessarily beyond the hours you’re already investing in learning the encounter and “gitting gud.”
Phantom Blade Zero, though, shows us it doesn’t need to be this way, just by sprinkling a little sugar over the medicine that so many modern boss battles force you to swallow — Mary Poppins would be so proud.
Don’t get me wrong: I love getting my butt kicked in every single FromSoftware game – learning the attacks of some horrifying new foe and slowly building confidence after multiple deaths before utterly dominating the enemy is an impressively compelling loop. But I’m much less enthusiastic about the tiresome ways in which my time is wasted while I’m working to hone my skills. It’s already an odd choice to make players go through this kind of stuff in an era when more things are competing for our attention than ever before, but it’s an especially bizarre thing to include when you’ve specifically designed a game with repeated failure in mind.
This brings me to one of the most infuriating forms the Scrub Tax takes: a complete lack of checkpoints during boss fights. Nowadays it’s not just common, but almost universally accepted that if I die at any point in any phase of a boss fight, I should have to start over again from the very beginning. This means that every player is destined to spend significantly more time replaying through less exciting phases of these encounters than the later phases that are actually still challenging them. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve been excited for a final confrontation with a boss I’ve crawled over hot coals to face, only to find myself irritated 20 minutes later when I’m grinding through the first phase of the encounter for the 10th time, just so I can enjoy about 30 seconds of the second phase I keep dying on.
For example, I have a vivid memory of playing Lies of P for the first time and facing off against an extremely cool and challenging boss that had a very slow first phase. What should have been a highlight instead became incredibly frustrating. I’d fought my way through that first phase dozens of times, to the point where I’d done several completions of it in a row where I didn’t even take damage, effectively shifting gear into autopilot for the three minutes it took to get through it. By the time I finally did beat the final phase of this boss, I was so vexed at having over half of my time wasted repeating the first one that I couldn’t even enjoy my hard-fought victory.
This practice has become so shockingly common that I don’t even think most people understand just how much of their time is being wasted by these tedious roadblocks. In fact, this philosophy of game design has been so ingrained into my expectations that until I recently played through Phantom Blade Zero, it didn’t even occur to me just how much of a thorn in my side this has become. I can count on one hand the number of games that haven’t followed this format over the past decade, the most notable being Final Fantasy XVI, which isn’t really all that concerned with providing the player a challenge. God of War Ragnarok included the choice to turn on checkpoints for certain boss fights as an accessibility setting, which is an interesting option for those not wishing to bang their head up against a wall repeatedly, but I’m referring to a more specific niche of players who crave a tough fight and simply don’t want their time wasted. For people like me, having precious hours eaten up by tedious boss checkpoint design has simply become an accepted cost of doing business for a long time now.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.ign.com/articles/phantom-blade-zero-fixes-my-biggest-annoyance-with-boss-fights
