Iga makes boss designers beat boss with a dagger

Going to repost what I said on reddit here:

REPOST START

Interesting, OOE had a similar rule, but I believe only the lead tester (who was apparently really good) had to beat bosses without getting hit. It's cool that IGA's kept and expanded that idea.

Edit: I am curious as to what shards they were allowed to use though. I'm going to guess no shards were allowed given that dagger-only shardless is proven possible.


REPOST END

Going to add on a bit more here.

When a designer is making a boss they obviously know the ins and outs of every attack a boss can do. Things that are not immediately obvious to a player such as how to dodge OD's timestop, Craftwork's phase 2 charge, or Zangetsu's one hit kill ofuda on nightmare/hard are already known to the designer and thus the boss' designer is going to have an easier time doing a no-hit dagger only run than a player. This still doesn't explain why Alfred's timeslow is basically a run killer even when you're not going for no-hit but that's splitting hairs.

I have to admit, I like the philosophy. While I'm not good enough to completely avoid damage, it's nice to know that it's due to a lack of skill/practice, and not because of any forced hits.

Forced/truly unavoidable and cheap hits are very rarely a thing at all in any games I'm aware of, unless they're just outright bad. I wouldn't ever assume that was the case. Iga's old way of doing this is notably novel and something cool to point out, though.

I'm pretty sure the game had an AI play the tactics in real-time. I don't have links, but I recall seeing people manipulate them with glitches, and a quick search on google just now got me to an old gamefaqs thread with people mentioning Alucard dying in the tactics and even getting a Game Over screen, lol

Still true that the design philosophy was applied to SotN though

Oh! Just realized I skipped the word "input" in Astaroth's post, so I thought it just said "recording of those fights" and thought of a video. My bad.

Either way, I just checked the tactics for Olrox in a perfectly normal save file and without any kind of glitch that could interfere with it, and Alucard takes damage a bunch of times (most of it happens to be pretty questionable, too), so it doesn't seem to be a recreation of one of the devs' perfect run or anything. I think he takes damage in others too but haven't checked.

In the Olrox one for instance, he mostly takes damage from fireballs, which can just be blocked with any shield, but for some reason he never uses any shields during this one and chooses to avoid them with Mist Form instead. Problem is, he doesn't have enough MP to keep it up for long enough, lol. A couple of times he just tries to avoid them by just walking/jumping around them and ends up getting hit. Another time he just goes from Mist back to Human, except for some reason he does that while being on top of the boss's sprite and takes contact damage.