Shining Force: Finishing Dark Dragon with a Miss.

[DomingoRules!]

Something I've thought about from time to time is what happens if Max attacks to deliver a finishing blow to Dark Dragon, but he misses. Does it still play the special animation? Or does the game make it impossible for Max to miss if he's going to deliver a fatal blow? I don't think I've ever seen him miss that finisher before, which is what makes me wonder about it.

On that note, what if it's a double attack? Does it do a double normal animation? Or a normal, followed by the special one?

[ZethaPonderer]

I think your answer can be found if you decide to use the SF1 editor and mess around with Dark Dragon's stats to see if he can dodge. Because in none of my playthroughs have I ever seen Dark Dragon dodge any physical attack from any of my characters. So I find it doubtful.

[Lobo]

I believe I did finish him with a double attack before.
The first one being normal, the second one being the special one.

Never seen him missing though.

[Stordarth]

I can confirm Lobo's statement.

[ShininGeek]

I believe Dark dragon has a 25% reduction in evasion, making it nigh impossible to miss him in vanilla. However, i have seen enemies with -25% evade, so I'm not sure if it is impossible as much as improbable.

[DomingoRules!]

In that case, I wonder what would happen if one were to modify his evasion, then trigger the conditions.

[ZethaPonderer]

If one were to do that DomingoRules! then Dark Dragon would be able to dodge your attacks which doesn't make any sense since he's such a big sitting duck throughout the entire fight. Plus, it might make the fight unintentionally more difficult (Demon Breath Head anyone?)

[ShininGeek]

It's not about actually doing it for the game, we are just theorising over hypotheticals. While, yes, Dark Dragon is, logically, inept at dodging, all we wanted to know was wether or not it would be possible to trigger Max's special finishing blow animation should Dark Dragon evade.

[ZethaPonderer]

Thanks for clearing up the details there ShininGeek. Actually I do have SF1 Editor and having fun hacking SF1. Pretty sweet editor. I could try to use SF1 Editor to give Dark Dragon the evasion of a Marionette and see if he dodges Max's finishing strike. But, not right now. I'm too busy playing SF3 along with FF2.

[rubixcuber]

I actually saw the code for this part not that long ago when I was working on stuff for the editor. I wouldn't stake 100% certainty without pulling it up again but I'm almost positive the flow goes like this:

Check for miss, if miss just skip to end
Compute damage, etc
Check for lethal damage
If lethal and target is Dark Dragon and attacker is Max then change animation

The animation gets changed if an attack hits and deals a lethal blow. If the attack misses it never gets to the point of calculating damage and seeing if it would be a lethal attack to begin with.

So, by my knowledge, no. You can't get that animation on a miss. It's not that the 'finishing blow' is incapable of missing. It's just that an attack doesn't become a finishing blow until it's already hit and killed them. The miss check comes first, because there's no point in calculating damage and all that on a miss.

[DomingoRules!]

Plus, it might make the fight unintentionally more difficult (Demon Breath Head anyone?)

Domingo welcomes this challenge.