Poll of the Day > Are there any other games where to kill enemies you have to do critical damage?

(+) Yeah! (+)

The only games I can think of that do this are Bushido Blade and Overgrowth (which is awesome if it controlled better) directly, and Dwarf Fortress/Rimworld in the abstract

shedinja

There's enemies in Pathfinder that, unless you strike their specific weakness or deal critical damage, will just fall down and regenerate HP upon hitting 0.

https://roll20.net/compendium/pathfinder/Regeneration#content

Playstation All-Stars, kinda.

Dragons in totk

Kingdom Hearts II, if you count finishers as "critical damage". I'm fairly certain, though, that critical damage is defined to be something else in that game.

Mettables in dragon warrior are almost that

games I dunno but I seem to recall there are some FF bosses where you will only hit 1 unless you get a crit

Never played it, but doesn't Titan Souls(think that's what it's called) do this thing where you only have to hit the boss once to kill it, but figuring out how to hit its weak point is a puzzle?

Onimusha 2 (and possibly other games in the series, 2 was the only one I remember having it), had "Issen mode", which only allowed you to damage/kill enemies with super hard to pull off counter attacks which were pretty much instant kills for monsters and bosses. For context, I think in my average playthough I was lucky to pull the move off 3 or 4 times. Beating Issen mode would require you to do it hundreds of times.

Shinobi and Nightshade on the PS2 also had a pretty cool combo system which, if done correctly, one-hit kills most bosses. It requires you to slash and kill enemies, building up power with each kill until after a few your slashes can essentially one-hit kill them. Eventually, you slash the boss and do tons of damage, which in most cases kills them instantly. Really fun when you can pull it off.

papercup posted...

Never played it, but doesn't Titan Souls(think that's what it's called) do this thing where you only have to hit the boss once to kill it, but figuring out how to hit its weak point is a puzzle?

yup, that totes counts

GanonsSpirit posted...

Playstation All-Stars, kinda.

This was my thought

Xenosaga

It's not a video game (it's a tabletop RPG), and it's not strictly critical hits, but the original rules for TimeLords ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timelords_(role-playing_game) ) divided the body up into different sections, and calculated damage based on different factors and damage types.

So in other words, a called vibrosword shot to the neck has the potential to insta-kill any enemy, while it would be nearly impossible to kill someone by hitting them in the toe with a hammer. The game didn't calculate character health via HP or other point-based systems, but required you to keep track of limb damage and how much of what sort of damage you were doing to any specific body part in order to actually kill someone.

It tracked different damage types based on type (ballistic, slashing, piercing, blunt, explosive, etc) and amount. Based on that you'd calculate whether or not the damage should be applied as "bruising" or "lethal". Then you applied it to about six different target regions (each leg, each arm, torso, head). If a given area took a specific amount of damage, you'd suffer from impairments, and if you took enough it might be fatal (max damage to a limb mainly just sends you into shock and you'll lose the limb, max damage to the head or torso kills).

This was complicated even further by the fact that different types of armor could soak different types of damage in different ways. And armor might cover some areas and not others (so a chestplate would protect your torso but not your arms, legs, or head).

AND there was special damage that counted for the whole body - which didn't add damage to each area equally, but counted as a completely separate measure of damage.

Basically, you pretty much needed a doctorate to play TimeLords. Which was a shame, because it had a great setting (which is why I always used to scrap the rules entirely and just ran the game using different systems).

ParanoidObsessive posted...

It's not a video game (it's a tabletop RPG), and it's not strictly critical hits, but the original rules for TimeLords ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timelords_(role-playing_game) ) divided the body up into different sections, and calculated damage based on different factors and damage types.

So in other words, a called vibrosword shot to the neck has the potential to insta-kill any enemy, while it would be nearly impossible to kill someone by hitting them in the toe with a hammer. The game didn't calculate character health via HP or other point-based systems, but required you to keep track of limb damage and how much of what sort of damage you were doing to any specific body part in order to actually kill someone.

It tracked different damage types based on type (ballistic, slashing, piercing, blunt, explosive, etc) and amount. Based on that you'd calculate whether or not the damage should be applied as "bruising" or "lethal". Then you applied it to about six different target regions (each leg, each arm, torso, head). If a given area took a specific amount of damage, you'd suffer from impairments, and if you took enough it might be fatal (max damage to a limb mainly just sends you into shock and you'll lose the limb, max damage to the head or torso kills).

This was complicated even further by the fact that different types of armor could soak different types of damage in different ways. And armor might cover some areas and not others (so a chestplate would protect your torso but not your arms, legs, or head).

AND there was special damage that counted for the whole body - which didn't add damage to each area equally, but counted as a completely separate measure of damage.

Basically, you pretty much needed a doctorate to play TimeLords. Which was a shame, because it had a great setting (which is why I always used to scrap the rules entirely and just ran the game using different systems).

Don't forget the other cousin to horrifically complicated timetravel RPGs, Cntinuum.

In Punch Out on Wii, you can't knock down Bald Bull in title defense without using a star punch. That should count.

FF13, it made it considerably easier, in fact for some stronger enemies basically a requirement, to hit with criticals to kill. You had to stagger the enemy first and then you'd be dealing crits.

a lot of tales games feel that way

Sekiro is a lot like this. you can kill enemies by getting them to 0 HP, but most of the time you don't and instead you stagger them and get a critical hit. bosses have to be done that way, and some bosses you have to do it multiple times for.