Game:

Hyrule Warriors (2014)

Duration: 7:15

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2

Fair warning... this video has no real "reason" to exist... technically... ... ...or maybe it does. I don't know. There's a COUPLE of reasons I figured qualified for saving it from the scrap heap.

For starters... new weapon field test! Yay! ...I mean, it'd be kinda cruel to show you the last mission... and then NOT let you see the fruits of that labor, right? Nice! Considerate! Extremely attractive! (Wait, what? No? Okay, right, that didn't really hold any relevance, my bad.)

...that's about where the good news ends... because I forgot to upgrade his weapon... at all. All of the combos are therefore frustratingly basic.

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Challenge Battle:
Defeat all Giant Bosses within the time limit!

Yep! Bosses! JUST the kind of opponents you'll want to have a complete inability to use complex attacks on, right?! Even if they're actually just two King Dodongos.

However, this gives us a good chance to examine the anatomy of a boss fight outside the set pieces and gentle prodding system messages of the Legend mode.

You will always do either zero or essentially zero damage to a boss unless you can coax out their weak point gauge. This is basically where all those sturdier enemies from before were leading up to... once I finally discovered that you were intended NOT to fight them straight out, but to play the dodge-and-counterattack (but on very SPECIFIC attacks of theirs!) that the game never formally instructs you on... and only proved to be an issue AFTER I'd already fought three proper bosses anyway... so the learning curve is really all over the place here.

So anyway, King Dodongo's the most basic boss the game has to offer... you throw bombs in its mouth, just like in Ocarina of Time and go to town. But there's where the Hyrule Warriors boss mechanics take over. By revealing the weak point gauge, you have a set period of time in which to deplete it before a boss gets back up and resumes fighting you as normal until you hit it in some desired fashion and reveal it again. (In Zelda series boss tradition, this is usually accomplished via some item that WAS relevant in Legend mode back when you first fought them.) Once you deplete the gauge entirely, you do some specific attack that does tons of damage to the boss's even more massive life meter that you couldn't reasonably have accomplished otherwise. Tons of bosses don't even take chip damage, although King Dodongo does... well, see what happens if you do in this very video.

But wait, there's more! If you have multiple bosses afoot, like you have here... they'll do some other quirky things! They'll randomly decide to "notice" when one's been engaged in battle "long enough" and start closing in to join forces. If you can't eliminate one before they join up, you'll be in for big trouble as the openings one creates will more easily be covered by the other's large-scale attacks... and goddesses help you if you get them both on a rampage. The only cure will be to wander off and avoid contact until their short memory spans kick in and they start getting forgetful about why they're even present and start to drift apart. (It's weird, to be sure.)

Of course, the whole point here is that you're on the clock and thus have limited time for such foolishness and therefore will want to finish the job with either of them before it proves any real issue... which will almost always be the end result if you want to make the grade. (If you really DID spend the whole time fighting, you'd have to be deliberately passing on openings or be in serious peril of taking massive damage for having not treated them with any weight or respect... or at least not enough to just slaughter them casually.

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Don't worry, we'll be seeing more bosses in the future... they'll show up when you least want them to and a lot of them safeguard some really nice loot besides. This just happened to not be one of them. It just seemed to show off enough of the basics with really low stakes while I gouged at their scaly necks with the equivalent of a rusty spoon...

(And yet, SOMEHOW this was all worth an A Rank finish... wonders never cease. Of course, the A Rank has absolutely NO value whatsoever except to make me feel good for having scored top marks.)

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