Break Points - Balancing the Math with the User Experience - Extra Credits 

Sometimes you've got perfectly calculated systems running in your game, but actually playing the game feels... off. Let's learn how to design purposeful break points, and avoid unintentional loopholes!

"They're not necessarily bugs, they might even be legitimate game features." A story as old as time itself.

A lot of this comes from doing the *wrong* math. The most obvious example comes from calculating damage per second, rather than time to kill. You actually see this a lot on things that reduce incoming damage. Let's say you have a skill that has 10 ranks, and each rank reduces the damage you take by 1 each time you get hit. There's a general intuition that, since each rank decreases damage by the same amount, each rank must be equally good. Now, imagine that enemies hit for 10 damage. If you have 100 hp, the 1st rank you take in this skill increases the number of hits it takes to kill you from 10 to 12. Fair enough. The 9th rank you take increases the number of hits from 50 to 100. The 10th rank increases the number from 100 to infinity/undefined (you're invulnerable). The damage you take is decreasing linearly, but doing the math that actually matters, we can see that the time to kill is increasing at a staggering rate. There's an obvious breakpoint at rank 10, but we can find that, and the other unintended trends, if we do the right math.

I like how Earthbound handled break points; when you were significantly stronger than the monsters, they A) ran away from you on the world map, rather than towards you and B) if you did engage them you either got a guaranteed "green," engagement OR instantly killed them without transferring to the battle screen at all.

Skyrim is so awful for this. No damage is randomized so most damage upgrades are useless against most foes while some are substantial (3 hits to 2 hits, 2 hits to 1 hit). Also the armour system is garbage with each point being more valuable than the last because its flat %, and then everyone caps it out eventually so it stops mattering at all by mid game and everything is harmless until you fight monsters who can hurt you despite only doing 20% damage or whatever it is. One thing that helps a ton with breakpoints is small randomization consider a game where you always do the same damage, when fighting a 10 hp foe, the only numbers that matter are 1, 2, 4, 5 and 10. But if attacks do X plus or minus 1 damage than the numbers that matter are 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 11. Another way to prevent breakpoints is with easier methods of doing a lesser result. XCOM uses this to great effect as a weapon upgrade of 4 damage to 6 damage might not change the number of shots to kill an 8 hp creature, but the 6 damage shot will leave it in range to be killed by a frag grenade (3 damage) that is a guaranteed hit. Xcom also uses +/- 1 damage and crits to eliminate breakpoints.

This Allison Utterback is a Hot Fuzz fan? I can't tell.

Games: Where 10% of health are 50% of health.

It took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize that half of the images in here were Point Break references...

Gandhi in civ1, when your break point is so epic that it makes Gandhi goes into a nuclear frenzy

So many hot fuzz references, oh my god. XD And that "feels" face at the end was just perfect. ...Anyway, I get the feeling that Warframe takes Break Points and runs the whole thing into the endzone. I'm like "Man, this weapon sucks, I'm barely killing enemies with it" and then tweaking a few Mods on it makes it suddenly one-shot just about everything. I'm at the point in the game now where I need to actively look for break points because the game is now suddenly REALLY freakin' challenging and if I'm not trying to break the game, I'm not winning anymore. XD

Yep, I get a 1% extra damage passive in many games due to equipment, skills, whatever. I never feel a difference and even forget they exist. So I dread skill trees or equipment that have tons of those small buffs, because I know it will take so much time until it becomes relevant, basically at endgame or post game.

Break points should be graphed out too. Functions like div, floor can be very useful for that.

In StarCraft 2, we have that sort of things. They called critical upgrades, and on of the things that you learn to keep track of to compose your strategy. For example, a zergling with +1 armor takes 3 hits to kill by a zealot, instead of just 2. Given the attack speed of the zealot, this thing completely changes the dynamic of this match-up, and protoss learn not to go out if the opponent has +1 armor. The +1 armor also allows zergling to resist a baneling hit with just one hitpoint left, a huuuge change in the dynamic of the match-up. So to complete your thing, in RTS, those breaking points can be (and often are) thought intentionnaly, both by players and designers, to mark turning points in a game, and also defining game stages. It encourages progression I think, since to counter a critical upgrade, you also need to tech up, which in StarCraft means building advanced building, which produce more high-tier units. It's a nice progression incentive.

This is actually a pretty significant problem in Breath of the Wild. The way the armor boosts and weapon durability increases work, the way that a late-game Link fights can afford to be way less skillful than in the early game.

When I used to play Payday 2 (before the weapon overhaul) I remember most of the talk about weapon strategy was about hitting damage breakpoints. When choosing a gun and modding it to be optimal, you had to try to hit certain damage values that would let you, say, 1-headshot a normal SWAT or 2-bodyshot an armored cop. Any damage over each breakpoint wasn't important, so you could swap out some damage mods for other stats once you got to that point. I remember there was also this bit about "fake 40" where you needed to hit 40 damage for a breakpoint, but the game displayed 40 when it meant 39.95 or something (which wasn't enough). That was a weird bit of math that made the game a little more difficult to figure out. Also accuracy in that game was on some weird logarithmic scale where 18 was perfect accuracy and every 2 points was way better than the previous 2 points. Payday math was weird.

I am so glad this came out right now... I'm currently working on a combat system for my role playing guild in wow and have spent the past 2 days trying to balance out how a bunch of different classes can do about the same amount of damage with different abilities. It's been a lot of work so far but i think it's time i put the excel ark aside and actually put this thing to the test if i can just convince my guild master to approve the system.

WHERE ARE YOUR PRECIOUS SPREADSHEETS NOW, EMMONS!?

I don't know you, but that beginning statement is the first time I've heard someone take that stance. As far as I have seen, every player is excited and happy that they can one shoot every enemy, in Dark Souls for example, when I can one shoot everything in the Undead Burg for the first time it feels like I've progressed, all the time spent there that felt like just traversing the land was actually my character improving, and that's rewarding, it makes me feel I'm moving forward

Hmm, this might explain why I find Pokemon games to always suddenly get a lot easier at around level 25-30.

For a big example of this look at the balancing in Smash games where even making a move do not even 1 more damage even like 0.1 more damage makes an insane difference hence why teir lists are made, the character that has more very slight unbalance adds up and sometimes the Smash developers overlook certain minor exploits of the system that create things such as wave dashing, ledge canceling attacks, melee Fox and Falcos' amazing reflector or "shine", ladder combos for a large variety of characters some being much easier than others, rage making certain attacks way to rewarding on hit due to how much difference the addition knock back makes and also making some weak and or fast moves kill way sooner than even the development team expected, also look at how much stale moves can effect a match in Smash as a series to prevent spam...but then there's unintentional infinite combos, chai grabbing to death and "wobbling" with Ice Climbers in Brawl and Melee respectively....the difference of super armor vs heavy armor vs neither and much more is what makes certain match ups *very* different and for the most part very dynamic actually...

I think dark souls was one of the first games that made me really think about particular break points, and is a good example of them done right. By the time you have leveled up and learned an area well enough to traverse it quickly and kill all the Dudes, you have ascended the rewards in that area usually. It was one of the first games where I got actually thinking about how many hits an enemy takes to kill.

mixing and matching weapons with armor with character skills is why I still play Borderlands 2. that game seems to avoid the break point issue by dramatically ramping up difficulty in each new area, and shuttling the player along by limiting how many side quests are available. which is great! creating this sick melee build Zero is so great because that build is dependent on the quality of shield and the power of the other weapons. the game constantly getting harder means you are constantly hunting for new gear, which means constantly tinkering with your character. which means i am constantly coming back to that game

Another great example of this from the game Duelyst is that there is little difference between a minion with 1 health and a minion with 2 health, but *all* the difference in the world between 2 and 3 health. This is because duelyst heroes all start with a base 2 attack (like a permanent 2 power weapon to compare with hearthstone). 3 health is the breakpoint where a general cannot remove a minion instantly any more.

0/10 not enough Point Break jokes

I've got to say, That music track you put at the end of this episode led me on to play one of the best games I've ever played.

Love the "Hot Fuzz" reference(s) :)

When does 1 + 1 =/= 2? In a field of characteristic 2

I love it in D&D where that static upgrade of stats means a bizzare progression. Like think about Base Attack Bonus for worriors. You start with +1, at level 2 you have a +2 and at lvl 3 you have a +3. That means at lvl 2 you base attack becomes 100% better but leveling up to level 3 it has only grown by 50%. The same issues happens in D&D with HP. Getting to level 2 and suddenly you are about twice as compatent as you used to be.

In Biology, technically 1+1=3 !

test early test often (it's cheaper that way in the long run)

This episode could have been shown with the old Zerg versus Protoss matchup in starcraft 1. an unupgraded Protoss Zealot takes 3 hits to kill a Zergling. with one attack upgrade it becomes 2 Hits. A defense upgrade of the Zerg turns it back to 3 Hits. This is not just a balance point between 2 units, but the breakpoint of the whole matchup. It isn't just a breakpoint between 2 units, but the whole matchup hinges on these units. On the other hand it creates a strong theme of a race of upgrades or going to new kinds of units which makes these breakpoints obsolete.

The art in this one is a return to form. I'd forgotten that your videos used to be full of constant funny little jokes. Please reincorporate them back into your main artists' work

One thing you can do to soften up break points is to add some randomness to your game like crits and damage spread, so that (in the example the video gave) you can't one shot a mob at level one, you can with a crit at level two, you can with a high damage non-crit at level three and then you always one shot at four.

I love you guys for throwing in a reference to Disgaea in there.

Thanks Extra Credits. I've seen you mention 'break points' in other videos, so it's great to see a video specifically about that. It's very interesting to learn about 'game feel'. It's something I'm aiming to focus on in the game I'm working towards making... but I'm only at the 'block breaker' module of my game course at the moment, haha. Oh well. All big things have small beginnings. Thanks for all your videos. Looking forward to your future content. Peace

There is this tabletop rpg in Italy called The Last Torch that works a lot on breakpoints, given obviously that tabletop rpgs have much different feel from videogame rpgs. And it does it in a good way, in my opinion. Basically it's a fantasy roleplay game where the character can't level up, can gain few additional abilities that can allow them to do more stuff or empower them but overall they don't increase stats, health or such by playing normally. As such, the monsters have almost always the same health pool given how much they have to be strong. To give a comparison, an elven sorcerer has 6 hit points and a dagger deals 1d6 damage, and those health points do not change. This means a lot while deciding how and with what attack. For example, a wolf has 5 hit point and with a sword you deal 1d8 damage ( you roll an 8-sided dice to determine damage). There are few modifiers there, from -1 to +2 and the possibility to roll two dices to keep the highest depending on class, and that means that while wielding a sword you can oneshot wolves, even thought that is not certain. And unless the foe you are fighting is not a common wolf ( wolf chiefs exist that have 8 hp) the damage you deal has a lot of chance to kill it. Same applies to other weapons, from bows to daggers, that deal less damage but can still kill them on hit. Then there are two handed weapons which deal 1d10 damage, but occupy two hands and don't let you equip a shield. A shield is important in this game since it allows you to evade ranged attacks, so damage wise is not that good to deal few points of damage more only to be much more vulnerable. But having a 2-handed weapon dealing more damage allows you to kill immediately stronger enemies that otherwise would be much harder to kill, or impossible to do so. While facing trolls that have 20 hp you can defeat one in one turn if you manage to hit with two well-placed attacks together with your allies. The game has very quick combats with low health pools ( the strongest enemy in the game has 50 health points, which are MASSIVE compared to other foes but is not quite so intimidating), and since that applies to the player too it feels like always living on the edge and makes every fight not a trivial challenge.

I think that the damage example can be fixed by having multiple enemies with different amounts of health. For example: In the binding of Isaac, a +0.5 to damage doesn't change the amount of tears it takes to kill most enemies. However, you can now kill the dips (tiny poops) in one shot. It is also more useful against bosses where you can stack this bonus. This allows constant break points for a powerful experience.

I'd love to see an episode on this sort of effect in the Borderlands games. Specifically in borderlands 2 with the Bee shield and the raid bosses forcing a total rework of future DLC.

All the Hot Fuzz references were terrific!

You know, a perfect example of when this goes right is the Paper Mario games. If you get to a high enough level, smaller enemies won't give out star points.

Making common rewards in low-risk areas be almost negligible sounds like a good solution for RPGs. You could make EXP go down significantly if the encounter is much lower level than the player, or give equipment specific upgrade materials that means you'll need to go on to more difficult areas to find what you need to keep upgrading. You could also tie permanent character upgrades to story progress, like expanding Zelda's heart container system into different stats that you put limited progress and exploration based points into, balanced in a way that someone investing heavily into one thing feels very powerful in that way, but not so much that someone skipping all optional content would have no reasonable chance against the next area.

Well now I need to watch Point Break again. THANKS A LOT. No, really. I love Point Break. Thanks for getting me to watch it again.

Monster Hunter feels like the perfect action series that manages to avoid breakpoint's by doing simple measures. First, making sure most unimportant stats are hidden (such as enemy health bars) to ensure your not actually noticing when your effectively killing something. You have to get a feel and understanding when you are. Second, when you feel like your getting the hang of thing's, it ramps up the difficulty with High Rank, which alter's your play style drastically.

There's a neat example of designing around this in Splatoon. Everyone has 100.0 max HP, which means weapons would have damage breakpoints at 100.0, 50.0, 33.4, 25.0, 20.0, and so on. But there's a hidden mechanic where Damage Up gear can never cause a weapon's base damage to cross a breakpoint. For example, a weapon with 24 base damage per hit with +10% worth of Damage Up gear actually only does 24.9 damage. Even if you stack +30% worth, it still does 24.9 damage. Now, this doesn't actually make Damage Up useless -- for example, a charger that does 100.0 base damage with +25% Damage Up can 1HKO with an 80% charge instead of needing a full charge. But it does prevent Damage Up from breaking the meta.

As someone who frequently plays Pokemon Nuzlockes, I tend to rely on the break points found in most early-game areas to speed up grinding. For instance, Viridian Forest is a pretty good grinding spot up through level 10, and even a bit higher if you get a lot of Metapod encounters. Since those Metapods become exponentially longer fights the weaker your pokemon are, it's much faster if your initial hit takes out a fair swath of health. The break point is when the first hit deals 60% of its HP. At that point, Harden no longer prevents the second hit from KO'ing, since it will only reduce that second hit to 40%. Since Metapods tend to give about ten times their level in EXP, they are actually just as efficient as most of the trainers between Pewter City and Mt. Moon, with much less danger of losing a Pokemon to a lucky crit (RIP Leonardo, best Wortortle). Then again, abnegation is one of the core appeals for me, so maybe its just me.

As someone who hopes to mainly do RPGs, this video was very handy.

In certain games, after a breakpoint, the loot you get from easy enemies becomes trivial, and the XP also trivial

5:30 I actually believe in a different method. Say for each slime you killed, you get one piece of gear, levels 1-4. When the breakpoint occurs, instead of leaving them dissatisfied by only giving them level 1-2 gear so they cant improve, I would give them level 4 gear all the time. The is a great way to make your player feel awesome as well as know exactly what power level they are at. And of course, now that they have all the super rare stuff and can't get anything better, they still move on. Except now you know how powerful they are so you can design future levels accordingly, and they also feel great.

Looks like someone forgot to give Allison the memo: Hecks should always cause Sneks.

Skyrim's break point: getting lvl 100 enchanting. After that, nothing else matters anymore.

References in this are amazing

Just a note: Including visuals that don't directly act as a visual aid can distract from the message of the video itself, even if ( _especially if_ ) it's replaced with a reference that's loosely related to one of the words/phrases said in that segment, rather than the concept of the segment as a whole.

I also just love how he's leaning on the podium

I wonder what wins the award for subtlest break point. My nominee is Rainbow Six Siege, where the big differences between the operators (playable characters) are SUPPOSED to be their special gadget, like thermite wall-breaching explosives, EMP grenades, bear traps, and various methods of seeing your opponents through walls - not weapon stats. Ash has always been one of the most popular operators, especially by the world's top players, largely because of her weapon stats. Ubisoft's latest attempt to make her a more average operator is to reduce one of her rifle's base damage from 41 to 39 (in a game where all players start each round with 100 health). This means that her 860rpm fully-automatic rifle sometimes needs an extra bullet to knock down her opponent (depending on various factors such as the target's armour rating), which takes 0.07 seconds to fire.

So... "Break Points" is the proper name for how nearly every CAPCOM game ends up being broken as fuck in various ways? I say "nearly every" so that people don't start listing CAPCOM games where they think something is not completely broken--but I actually mean "every CAPCOM game" This is part of the charm for playing them. I wish we were back in the days when we had three different Mega Man games coming out every year.

You guys are great! Keep up the good work!

Just a small correction* In League of Legends your ultimate ranks every 5 levels up (at 6,11,16)

Breakpoints are a huge part of raiding in Pokemon GO. When fast attacks deal 3-4 damage, getting your attack high enough to raise them by one point is a 25-33% increase in damage. That's a pretty solid example from a simple game.

I am someone who enjoys being over powered in videogames. One of the first things I do is look for console commands to unlock all my skills. I don't like missing things and needing like 10 playthroughs to see all the options the game offers.

One method that can be good in stat based games is to add a small (+-5-20%) vairence in the amount of damage that an attack would do.

I know I have encountered this in many games, but I can't recall which ones. I just know I felt an overwhelming "Oh yeah, THAT!" while watching.

A couple of days ago, I clicked on extra credits season 1 episode 1. I guess I'm all caught up.

There's another design hazard to watch out for that you didn't mention at all. It's partially related to this. Very early in a game, every single stat point tends to matter immensely and tends to have immediately noticeable consequences. But a short while later in the game, individual points will only occasionally make a noticeable difference. And in late game, they can be almost meaningless. Buffing the player based on percentage theoretically mitigates this to ensure that break points will still occur. But you'll still need to pay attention to when they happen and design around them.

The hot fuzz references are gold

You're right Extra Credits, I do want to go replay Cave Story.

That wasn't about breakpoints, that was about bad choice of diagnostic parameter. For example "damage per attack" means very little in a vaccuum, damage per second is more relevant, and in the end it's about Hits (or Time) to Kill. Breakpoints are what you should worry about **after** you've found the right parameters to observe.

Call of Duty games do this a bit. Some guns deal 34 damage up close and 33 damage at a distance. Why? Because 34 damage on a 100 health player is a 3-shot kill up close, but 33 damage on a 100 health player is a 4-shot kill at a distance. Decreasing the damage by 1 makes the gun take 33% longer to get a kill.

Persona 3 is a good one for this. In Tartarus you fight enemies that appear as crawling black blobs on the tower floors. At levels lower than them, they aggressively lunge and chase after you. When you are higher than them, they run away. They added purple ones that ran after you all the time as they were always higher than you at that particular time, and yellow ones that were rare ones that always tried to escape you. This made the exploration of the tower that much more thrilling. Shame Persona 4 dropped this mechanic and only had the enemies always chase you....though they did add the Reaper that was extremely hard to kill!

Oh hey, Cave Story remix for the ending. ... But isn't everything in Cave Story all power spikes, not break points? When your guns become better, they do so in mechanical ways from mechanical means. Like, the bubble gun gets better because you can charge and store your next shot, not because it automatically kills enemies in fewer shots. And nothing's really automatic, you have to dodge in order to maintain your power, and you get more powerful by pushing for EXP instead of playing safe. It seems more like carefully designed power spikes rather than carefully designed breakpoints, even when the upgrades are mathematical.

Entire metagames in ccg’s can be defined by breakpoints.

Kingdom Come Deliverance has a break point. It used to take me 10-15 minutes just to kill a bandit but when i got a spike in strength and equipment, all those raiders and Cuman soldiers become one hit kills. Heck, even Runt, the mid-boss barely got a hit on me and he fell in just two strikes.

Shooters, especially co-op ones, run into this all the time. For example Payday 2 weapons are gauged almost entirely off the breakpoints in damage for certain difficulties. If a gun can't easily reach a certain breakpoint, it's deemed worthless or a joke weapon.

Loved the Hot Fuzz references! Great lesson too. 🐱

Of course, where at all possible, make your maths describe the payer experience. In your admittedly simplistic example, you should not have looked at the linear progression of damage, but rather the jerky and unbalanced regression of hits-to-kill, which you can formulate as enemy health divided by player damage, rounded up. If possible, maths is better than testing. I’m not saying testing isn't always important, but if you can’t find the reason why your system doesn’t play well, any fix you make will be of the sticky plaster variety, rather than a true repair of the underlying problem.

Reminds me of the old Loch n' Load in TF2 Back in the days, it did +25% more damage than the regular Grenade Launcher, at the cost of having a way smaller radius blast and smaller clip size. But the thing was that in most situation, it might've as well did +200% damage, because that damage increase make it so that it did around 130 damage, in a game where half the classes only have 125 HP, so you used to one-shot most of the ennemies as opposed to the grenade launcher, who needed two.

Nice topic once again! And awesome cave story end music! :)

I wanted to give an extra like for those Hot Fuzz-references. Nice job!

I feel like Dark Souls avoids this trap well, you can grind all you like, but by the time you can start one-shotting, you're so overleveled to the point of all soul drops being borderline meaningless (Also shoutout to that Cave Story music at the end!)

"Joke's on you; I'm designing a new Math Blaster game!"

4:18 please consider the difference between a bug and a glitch: The player CAN NOT take advantage of bugs. These are errors that freeze the game, cause dead ends in the sequence of events or anything simliar that PROHIBITS the player from doing something.

I feel like Pokemon could learn a thing or two from this. I’ve recently got into Nuzlockes and there, you mainly end up using 1 or 2 Pokes the whole way through. It/They become overleveled SO FAST, that the only challenge is staying alive until the end of the game. On the other end, I feel like some Pokemon don’t learn moves early enough (or at all through level up). In Platinum, I’m using a Tangrowth, and it only learns one good Grass move and that’s Power Whip...at level 57...And you’re stuck with Mega Drain until then.

"2+2=5 It has always been equal to 5. Big Brother is watching." -1984

Who else loved that feels face on dan at the end

When you hit 6th level as a bard and realize you have access to all class spells. POWEEEEEEEERRRRRR

This is why I can play Path of Exile for over 3000 hours and still be interested to make a new build every 3 months.

This video would benefit greatly with real examples, especially of BAD break points that escaped testing or surprised the dev team. Great topic, nonetheless!

I appreciate all the Hot Fuzz references here. ^^ Great vid.

As a kid I reached a break point in The Simpsons: Road Rage (The Crazy Taxi knock-off). I had learned an optimal route through one of the levels, and after a few weeks of playing everyday, I managed to gain enough technical skill to always barely beat the clock on every part of it. My high score, which had been increasing by a couple hundred points every day, jumped from around 25,000 (The highest named score tier) to over 100,000 in a single play session. Perhaps a different kind of break point, as the system broke under the weight of a determined 12 year old as opposed to the introduction of new stats or mechanics, but certainly one that drastically changed the play experience for me. Which was a shame, because until I broke that skill barrier, the game was a perfectly tuned arcade experience.

Loved the Hot Fuzz references.

As an engineer I gotta say - the example of linear progression there is because its not balanced even mathmatically. You're increasing input linearly below a saturation limit so the increase has 0 value until a new saturation point is obtained. This is a case of bad understanding of math in systems.

mmm that Cave Story at the end

4:34 Disgaea! I was just playing that.

Excellent episode as always, and great Hot Fuzz references

Might artillery in Civ 5 be a break point? Until you unlock it, your city-destroying units have to be in range of the city to deal damage. Artillery doesn't. It makes taking enemy cities a cakewalk as long as you position your units correctly.

Or, for example an enemy has 3 hp (low numbers for simplicity), at the first level you deal 1 dmg, level 2 - 2 dmg, level 3 - 3dmg, so every level is worth it.

I love the Hot Fuzz reference.

maybe it's just the example you used, but i actually appreciate break points (i actually parsed "break" as in "take a break" when i read the title of this video). i use them as a sort of guidepost for when it's a good time to move on to a different questing area, or as a way to end that "just one more turn/battle/etc" loop when i need to turn off for the night. in numbers-heavy RPGs and the like, it actually frustrates me when there isn't a clear break point of this sort, or if the one that exists is so far off that i'd have to be certifiably insane to grind my way to it. sure, you definitely want to be *aware* of what and where all these things are, but i didn't quite like the "these are bad things you should avoid having" tone. again, maybe it's just where my mind went after the example you used at the beginning, but still...

>Summon Stitch >Spam magnet and thunder >Profit

This is all over the place in RTSes, especially games like AoE and StarCraft where damage and health values per unit are relatively small. Certain upgrades will be a top priority in certain matchups, as +1 armor allows Unit A to survive three hits from Unit B instead of only two. I gotta wonder: exactly how much of these "classic" break points are due to the fact that most player characters and enemies still do the same damage when they're only at 1 HP vs. 100 HP? Granted, if the enemy is being one-shot it doesn't really matter, but I feel like because the difference between 1 HP and 0 HP is so suddenly drastic (the classic "critical existence failure"), it's probably emphasizing math that wouldn't normally be emphasized.

The cavestory theme remixed caught me off guard