While looking through my FTP folders I found some interesting stuff that I completly forgot and among that there was a screenshot of Illusiat 3 recorded in 2007. This screenshot shows me going pretty close to beat the final boss with all game quests completed, in the original 2001 release of the game (altough the optimized and trilingual version).

This game, despite being extremly simple, being my third RPG ever made and first with leveling up system, was special in three ways.

First, as soon as the game started, you could immediately access the final boss and all dungeons and bosses were optional. Obviously beating the final boss at LV1 was not common sense so you were kinda forced to at least do some leveling up first. Basically you would level up in dungeon 1, and when you needed more experience, moved to dungeon 2, and finally 3. You didn't had to beat the boss of a dungeon to unlock the other. No area was locked down in this game, except a secret boss in the first dungeon

Seconly, the only locked unreachable thing in the game was a secret optional boss in the first dungeon like I just mentionned, which was only avaliable after beating the bosses from dungeon 2 and 3 without beating boss 1 first. After beating the first boss your character said I must go down, but the sole action of having beaten boss 2 and 3 before the first one allowed you to go up instead. It was a one time go. If you went down anyway you would never be able to challenge the secret boss. Also because in this game your progress was saved automatically every move and before/after battle, if you died during the secret boss fight, you would never be able to beat him again (altough I think I fixed this problem in a later update), as boss 1 would alerady be dead when reloading your game. This boss was extremly hard. You needed a lot of luck to defeat him because he made you waste your entire MP curing yourself from powerful attacks while you needed it to attack him. The boss used to give no reward but in a later update he instantly gave you LV99 (altough it was kinda pointless since you had to be at LV95 or so to beat him and gaining these 4 levels only took like 5 minutes in the third dungeon).

The third reason why the game is special is that unlike in other RPGs where doing side quests and beating bosses makes your task easier when it comes to the final battle, doing so in Illusiat 3 does the complete opposite. In other words, completing the dungeons is only to add more challenge to the game. When triggering the final battle, you have to fight the final boss first form, which is easy at high level, but afterward the final boss will morph into each bosses you alerady defeated, and you will have to fight them one after another to finall beat the final boss in its original form again, altough twice harder. It's not a big problem if you didn't beaten the mothership secret boss, but if you did, you have very little chance to succeed in finishing the final foe. The main problem is MP. There is no item to restore your MP in this game, so first you must be LV 99, secondly you have to do the entire fight with only 999 MP and third you need luck, A LOT of luck. After 3 attempts last year I still haven't beaten the final boss in its hardest form, but in two occasions I went pretty close (the boss had about 20000 HP remaining in the first attempt I think) and I recorded the last attempt. This fight takes a long while because you must save your MP for most important parts of the fight. In the screenshot linked at the bottom of this post I lasted about 13 minutes before dying. I used physical attack through every part of the boss except the mothership, where I used the ultimate spell. To restore all HP lost when fighting the first form I used about 30 potions in a row during the second part of the battle (since boss 1 does fewer damage than the 300 HP potions recovers and because of the fact in the original version of Illusiat 3 you had infinite potions) to get my HP back in the 9000s then did a single hit kill on the boss. Then during the mothership battle I pretty much wasted all my MP, then during all other parts of the fight I just did normal attacks and used Curamax to restore my HP whenever needed. However I ran out of MP near the end of the final part so I died and when I went back on the homescreen to check the enemy HP variable content it was in the 20000s. So here's the crappiest but most challenging boss fight in the entire Illusiat series (even more than the Legend Weapon optional battle in Illusiat 11)

http://xlib.mtv-music-generator.com/illusiat3_final_boss.gif (you may want to download this on your PC and open in a browser or media player because for some reasons it skips back at the beginning after one minutesometimes. It's a huge file)

From what I remember, the Illusiat 2004 version of this battle won't even come close in term of difficulty, but I would need to retry. I might also post another screenshot in this thread

Yeah true some RPGs has really easy final bosses, or they are beatable at lv 60 so if you try at LV 99 it's way too easy.

And now here is the final battle seen in the screenshot linked above, except that this time it is from the Illusiat 3 remake in Illusiat 2004 package (which contained Illusiat 1 through 4 using Illusiat 12 engine and ROL2 asm libs and text routine). This time I got lucky the mothership part of the final boss didn't casted his Fatal attack too many times (the one that reduce your HP to 1). In a previous attempt to defeat the motherbrain alone he casted it 4 times in a row, then used a powerful spell, then fatal and so on so I had to cure myself 8 times and ran out of MP.

Because this version of the game doesn't work properly in Wabbitemu (glitchy Quake effects and incompatibility with the contrast changing routines) I had to use PTI so I had to speed up the screenshot at 2x speed afterward so it,s at 15 MHz like the previous one, by recording it with PTI screenshot maker first, then opened in quicktime player and recorded with Calcapture set to capture from Quicktime window. This caused the screenshot to be split into two files so I eventually had to make a wmv video. My apologies about the huge file size

http://xlib.mtv-music-generator.com/i3_v2004_final_full.wmv

Lol I was ready for a rickroll ..

That does look difficult, but I am not much for RPG battles (FPS types are where I am at ). The second SS (Vid) was really nice graphics, and the menu was nice!

Wow that's like the limit of ascii art.

Wow, I had idea of some cool ASCII art in these kind of RPGs. But actually see them... Very nice and yes, with some imagination you can make ships and other things in ASCII.

I never saw a RPG with more than 100000 of HP or MP until now... But I would enjoy one around that, more is something strange. xD

And I can understand most of the french. ^^ (latin languages have enough similarities to understand)
English speakers can't say the same. 

yeah French is a bit similar to Spanish and Portuguese. Italian too actually, but not as much. Italian is very close to spanish though

IMO Italian is more close to French, but if a French speaker reply that not, I have little to argue against.
For me we could speak about languages one more page, but it is outside this topic.
Finally I could use your RPG's to learn some French vocabulary like I did with English.

But why not extend outside Illusiat series? I am curious about other RPG bosses for calcs. Of course, it does not need to have more than 10k of HP to be a hell of a boss. (k=*1000)
I can always create a new topic for that, I respect the title given to the topic.

oh I made much more than Illusiat. Illusiat series is just the longest series I ever did. As for HPs I usually make your chars and the bosses HP similar to existing games, mostly FF. Bosses usually range between 1000 and 250000 HP, but bosses with over 100000 HP are usually optional ones that are super hard.

If you meant about posting videos of other bosses, I could always do that though, as I was planning with Illusiat 11. I could do screenies of Mana Force and post some ROL ones and of course Reuben

reuben was awesome.

Nice stuff omni! Seeing this old stuf still amazes me. The first vid was really insane, but the second one wasn't as bad. I still have problems in opera download for some strange reason. The first one downloaded fine, but I had to use IE for the second one. I'm still waiting for my ROL 4 >_>. *hint**hint*