Ace combat 3 :)

Mostly the gear segments since there's no healing (Ramsus... I KNEEL) but even on foot stuff like beating Rico's friends or Redrum had nice strat to it. I also appreciate the attention to detail in some on foot battles like defending endlessly against Dan to get the wedding dress

no healing items*

yeah man its real engaging doing the same button combo every turn indefinitely regardless of whether or not you're in the robot suit

there's a couple interesting gear bosses due to being unable to heal mid-fight but yeah i'd still say they're pretty few and far between. the guy who said "i still have that" and the last boss were the most memorable imo

also based ac3 enjoyer above

there is gear healing doe

yeah there was literally a part that gave you healing

there's healing but it's really not very efficient

they shoulda just replaced all the boring jrpg comabt with the robot fighting minigame in that one city

"there is gear healing doe"
Read my post right under about items lol. The ability even if you equip it is also way too costly to use more than once or twice per battle and you can't grind your gears to overpower bosses so you have to use strategy for all of them

"there's a couple interesting gear bosses due to being unable to heal mid-fight but yeah i'd still say they're pretty few and far between."
"yeah man its real engaging doing the same button combo every turn indefinitely regardless of whether or not you're in the robot suit"

I wouldn't say few and far between. Also Compost you're clearly just making shit up at this point because you can't spam combos in gear form so it's a balancing act of whether one should use their booster, recharge, decrease stats, build up combos with either a weak or medium or strong attack, use their very limited healing, use Elly's funnels due to physical resistances, etc.

Calamity has overwhelming power and the only way to beat it reliably is to keep reducing its hits with Wild Smile. The Gebler Units can beat your ass if you don't save up enough energy for them and booster to kill Swordknight asap. Fis-6 relies on an overheating gimmick and you have to kill his mechanics. Haishao had to be taken down a peg with elemental magic. Giant Wels needs its ether reaction to be taken advantage of before comboing. Alkanshel is a battle of patience and longevity. G-Elements is rock paper scissors based. Shakhan, Deus, Amphysvena, Opiomorph, and true Deus are all notoriously difficult and speak for themselves. There's even a boss that can be easily ran away from or killed in a really risky maneuver.

Also you can't even just spam the deathblow on foot like is being claimed. Some enemies such as Dorothy or Medusa can only be killed via healing them. Some enemies are resistant to physical damage. Other enemies like Redrum, the on foot boss in disc 2 or one of Rico's friends rely on the combo buildup system. Fights like G-Elements on foot are once again reliant on elemental abilities to go by swiftly. Beyond that I also enjoy how some enemies are position based and can be killed with ranged ether to avoid getting damaged at all since they waste turns running up to the player. Not to mention in general status ailments are actually really useful in XG which is refreshing; haste makes all the difference and I found myself constantly using the powerup chis. My favourite part about the on foot battles however is giving Fei a Power Crisis and keeping up a balancing act to keep his HP just high enough where he won't die in one hit to everything but also just low enough he can kill gear-sized enemies on foot.

i beat every boss fought in the mech suit by mashing the x button (or whatever the strongest attack was) and maybe turning on the booster thing. so even the turns when i didn't have the combo level thing i was still doing the same thing. on foot things were slightly more interesting cause the combos usually required more than one button, but you're still just spamming the same thing over and over.

granted i didn't finish the game (because its fucking awful) but i'm pretty sure i fought some of those bosses you described with zero thought whatsoever

you won by mashing strong (dumb as hell tactic since it wastes all that extra fuel you can save for combos and has low accuracy) because of the first 5 or so gear boss fights, Calamity is the only one you aren't forced to win against lmao
the gear segments stop pulling their punches after a few dungeons

they definitely don't stop pulling punches and they're pretty consistently braindead but the final boss can be pretty challenging due to it being a little more complicated than a simple one on one fight

The sheer amount of people I've seen complain about having to rewatch Shakhan/Hammer/Ramsus/Maing/whoever cutscenes without being able to skip them really goes against the notion the boss fights are consistently braindead tbh, even on replay I couldn't just mash strong attack to win despite being good enough to go through the dungeons with more fuel for the end. Saying they don't stop pulling their punches when they go from unlosable battles to battles that not only require attack variety to fight but commonly kill players is just incorrect.

also Deus isn't the final boss

I don't have much of an opinion since I'm only about 15 hours in but I garunteed I've already played more of the game than compost tbh

@RedTheFunnyLad that makes sense

@Red no doubt

according to my save file i have 46 hours
so in reality that's about 23 cause i played with speedup on the whole time

that's like saying the first 13 forms of the persona 3 final boss aren't the final boss. the real "final boss" borders on being a scripted sequence

also i would never take jrpg fan consensus on the difficulty of anything. i've seen those dumbfucks call sephiroth a difficult boss

i mean it's probs worth 15 hours for somebody who didn't hold a speedup key the entire damn game since you add so much in-game time just idling or fiddling around with the speedup sooooo

"that's like saying the first 13 forms of the persona 3 final boss aren't the final boss. the real "final boss" borders on being a scripted sequence"
the difference is it's still possible to lose to the true final boss of XG unlike with P3.
Also it's the jrpg fan consensus on top of my own experience. I've beaten some of the hardest games in the genre like Wizardry 1 on SNES, Dragon Quest 2 on NES, Ys I & II Chronicles+, Phantasy Star 1, Actraiser, Grandia 2 on hard mode, Shadow Tower, Parasite Eve NG+, and Gobli's Quest. So when I say Xenogears' battles are involved after going through it multiple times and lay out countless examples of how the game won't let you just mash X I think their take is valid.

true

"still possible to lose to the true final boss of XG"

yea maybe if you've got an entire hemisphere of your brain missing

and sure you may have found xenogears challenging but for the most part i sure as hell didn't and i'm going off my experiences over anyone else's that the game is pretty generally easy as shit

gotta agree with chandler here

"yea maybe if you've got an entire hemisphere of your brain missing"
or you didn't find the super hidden Joe shop and grind fuckhuge amounts of money for gear parts?

"and sure you may have found xenogears challenging but for the most part i sure as hell didn't and i'm going off my experiences over anyone else's that the game is pretty generally easy as shit"
you may have considered the experience easy overall (i thought it was more in the middle generally with some real hard roadbumps) but the key point is you can't just spam strong attack to win every battle and I posted many specific examples of where the game will kick your ass if you try to get away with that. you can sorta mitigate that on foot if you play like compost and just speedup 24/7 so there's no weight to level grinding and you can gain a bunch of levels in no time unlike a regular player. you can't ever mitigate this fully with gears however

Also now that I remember it, disc 2 had a really challenging bonus dungeon as well where you had to fight gear-sized dinosaurs on foot and it was barely possible even with the Power Crisis