Still, we shouldn'y be blatantly counting minibosses as bosses.
I forgot about Mauswheel.
I would be fine with making them all minibosses. I don't think it would be too difficult to come up with a definition that includes all of these and excludes other enemies. But I still feel that this group includes at least two different "types" of enemies, and lumping them together in the same category feels unsatisfying.
I still think the Start Cutscene + End Cutscene requirement has merit, but it's clearly not sufficient.
I don't think the Unique, Lore, and Unrecruitable points matter at all. A miniboss is a miniboss if you fight them as a miniboss, not anything about their character per se. Of course, it's not a coincidence that most minibosses do fit these points, but they shouldn't be thought of as requirements.
We should. No character in that list is anything more than a miniboss[1].
Jackenstein feels more like a boss than most enemies in the game. The only characters who feel more like a boss than him are the chapter antagonists and the Shadow Crystal Holders. And yet, the game calls him a miniboss.
No one on the same "tier" as Jackenstein, or any "tier" bellow Jackenstein, should be considered as "more than" a miniboss. Of course, they're still bosses, because minibosses are bosses.
Spamton is in there because of his first battle, not his NEO battle. ↩︎
Bosses are chapter bosses and secret bosses. Mini-bosses are the tier below that. Susie/Lancer is a miniboss. RK is a recurring miniboss.
The cutscene thing is definitely very close to what I have in mind. (Only Shattah and Tasque Manager are borderline everything else lines up with what I’ve considered minibosses as far as I’m aware, I’ll go through those to see which side I’d want to put both of them on.) I’ll have to replay (or maybe just watch this time) some chapters and get a good feel for what is and isn’t a miniboss and work out what conditions are causing this. I’d say we have five tiers, normal enemies, Elite Enemies (Undertale has a counterpart for this, take Knight Knight and maybe the RG pair?) proper minibosses, bonus bosses, and the main bosses. (There’s also the final boss… who doesn’t exist yet so we don’t need to worry about that yet.)
I think the biggest ambiguities are in Chapter 3 (is the mantle a bonus boss or miniboss? Is the main boss Tenna or the Knight?) with one big ambiguity in Chapter 4 (are the Mikes a miniboss or a bonus boss?) but could just be because it’s been a while since I looked into 1+2.
Well, I can't argue if the game itself considers them as such.
I do feel one more thing should be taken into consideration: Would the story move on the same if we removed their fight from the game?
For example, Susie and Lancer. They're boss fight plot significant as it what causes Susie to rejoin the party. Shuttah on the other hand has no story impact, and if you didn't fight them, there'd be no impact.
(Unless this is just what lore is)
Bosses have always traditionally been the thing you fight at the end of a “world” or area, at least in classical video game structures. In classic Zelda games, bosses are at the end of the dungeon. Kirby, bosses at the end of a Level. Mario, bosses at the end of a World. Sonic, bosses at the end of a Zone. RPGs had boss battles be the ones with one of the plot items and are at the end of a certain portion of the map, beating them leads to the next chapter and exploring somewhere new. Minibosses were things that were sort of like boss fights but NOT at the end of such a level/world/zone (and usually take less time to defeat) Things start to diverge away from that in more open-world games like Minecraft and Terraria or even Metroidvanias, but Undertale (Toriel/Ruins, Papyrus/Snowdin, Undyne/Waterfall, Mettaton/Hotland [Toby considers Hotland and the CORE as one singular area, kill count says this and the dev updates refer to Area 4], Asgore/New Home, Flowey/????, Asirel/New Home (Pacifist), Sans/New Home (Murder Route)) and Deltarune (King/Card, Queen/Cyber, Tenna? Knight?/TV World, Titan/Sanctuary are linear enough for the standard we’ve defined here to take hold. And it fits in with what the game has given us.
I meant when classifying minibosses from special enemies.
I neglected to consider difficulty before because that's really subjective, and Deltarune isn't a very difficult game anyway, but time is a much easier to figure out.
Since the game wont go too high with difficulty (outside of the Shadow Crystal Holders, of course), when it wants to make fights tougher it will make them longer. Longer fights require more effort to go through, so they feel more difficult.
I believe this is how many turns we need to spare each enemy:
- 12 Turns: Mike&Mike&Mike
- 11 Turns: Jackenstein[1]
- 9 Turns: Sound of Justice
- 7 Turns: Berdly#2, Lanino&Elnina, Rouxls#2
- 6 Turns: Berdly#1
- 5 Turns: K. Round, Susie&Lancer, Sweet Cap'n Cakes, Spamton, Shuttah, Watercooler, Miss Mizzle
- 3 Turns: Clover, Tasque Manager[2], Mauswheel, Werewerewire, Rouxls#1?[3]
- ? Turns: Titan Spawn
So, I found a poll about “miniboss encounters”.
https://undertale.wiki/d/t/favorite-miniboss-encounter/1192
What’s interesting is that every single entry is one of the ones I don’t consider minibosses.
I’m not sure what the rules determining encounters are, but maybe saying minibosses specifically ARE NOT encounters is a way of narrowing things down? I’m not sure what criteria was used to determine “encounters” but I also consider anything that’s just a random encounter to not be a miniboss.
Shuttah is 4 turns (11 Spare actions, so you even have one free) although definitely not the intended way to finish (I guess 5 for playing reasonably well without that is reasonable though it really feels like a 6 turn fight to me), but the rest of this seems right.
There are plenty of 3-4 turn encounters out there like the mandatory Kris-solo Wicabel in Second Sanctuary, though, so seeing things that are definitely bosses that far down makes me think it's not necessarily a good metric.
Is it possible to do the Shuttah battle in 4 turns? I suppose if you can get at least 9% TP by grazing on the first turn, but not otherwise.
Under the 4-Turn mark, the only upset is the first battle against Rouxls. Clover, Tasque Manager, Mauswheel, and Werewerewire were precisely the characters I wished to exclude with this definition.
... Though Watercooler and Miss Mizzle ended up clearing it at 5, so yeah it's not a good metric.
Yes. As mentioned, Spare 11 times. Since Spare is +10% mercy.
Oh! I didn't know that!
Oh, those were just the ones that go under MY definition of a miniboss. Basically, what editors here consider special enemies.
Sorry, I'm just having trouble considering every non normal enemy encounter miniboss apart from final chapter bosses (plus I already called everything else a normal boss in my previous polls so I had nowhere else to go)
I don’t consider encounters to be bosses. I’d consider minibosses to be enemies like Jackenstien, Susie+Lancer, etc. Full-on bosses I only count end-of chapter bosses and Shadow Crystal Holders. (And maybe the Mantle.
Looking back at Chapters 1+2, I can definitely start seeing a few ambiguities now. Starting with Chapter 1, I say Lancer+Susie definitely is one, Clover isn’t, K. Round is… Lancer VERSUS Susie is the first battle that I consider genuinely ambiguous. It fits most of what I’d consider a miniboss… but you also can’t lose. At all. It’s more of a long cutscene than a fight. Then again, that’s also what Asriel Dreemurr is like in Undertale, and he’s still a boss…
Actually, looking back, I can see why people are calling Clover a miniboss. Clover IS the way out of the Scarlet Forest. If we were to take the somewhat reasonable assumption that every mini-area ends with a miniboss (like towers in 2D Mario games always end with a miniboss), Clover would be a miniboss. (K. Round would be one too, being the miniboss of Checkered Fields. And Susie+Lancer wouldn’t be one. …I think I get why people are counting Clover but not Susie+Lancer now. They’re probably using “Is this the final battle to unlock the next section of the Dark World?” as the qualifier.)
What? No!
Sure, you can't die in the Asriel fight. But you still need to be able to dodge or you will make no progress. Unlike Susie VS Lancer, which progresses no matter what you do.
Susie VS Lancer is no miniboss. Lancer's Castle Town battle is also no miniboss. Either the battle with Susie and Lancer at the end of Scarlet Forest is a miniboss battle... Or neither of those characters are minibosses.
I think simply being a unique encounter is enough, that would make all but Werewerewire and Watercooler mini bosses. The Shuttah you fight in Board 2 is very much a unique not repeatable encounter, all future Shuttahs function differently. You can make a case for Werewerewire because there's technically only 1, but the Ch2 Allstars makes me think it's not a miniboss, being placed in a gauntlet challenge with other normal enemies, while Clover, Tasque Manager, Lanino and Elnina get unique gimmick battles.
Okay, yep, fair point. So the only miniboss involving those two characters is the Susie+Lancer fight (The scarlet Forest one you have in mind. That’s actually the fight I consider to be the Scarlet Forest miniboss, not Clover. (It comes after Clover as well. So, I retract my statement that the model that minibosses are the last fight of a zone would somehow make Clover miniboss make sense. I’m back to having zero idea why anybody would EVER say Clover is a miniboss. They’re definitively not one.
By that logic, Snowdrake is a miniboss in Undertale. You can only encounter them once, after that you get Chilldrake instead. (Although, I never thought of using All-Stars as an indication. I’ll take a look there and see what happens if we define a miniboss by what encounters get their own entries.)
Lancer's Castletown battle could be debatedly a miniboss. He's the only enemy of his kind, is relevant to the story, AND has a cutscene before his fight.
I’d say he’s an actual boss, because he has such plot relevance