Close, But No Cigar Moments

[Moonface]

I'm sure we've all had them. You're up against a challenging boss, a time limit, or came against some other obstacle that you were just about to overcome when disaster strikes right at the last moment to rob you of your glory. If you're really lucky, you might find yourself in a situation like I did last night where even trying to save scum can't change your fate and inch you across the finish line...

There I am, doing an Ascension 6 run with Ironclad in Slay the Spire, and I've got a good run going. I'm two floors from the final boss (one of which is a bonfire, so really it's one floor), I have a great deck, I'm at full health, and there's no elite enemies in my path. I choose my next floor and I'm met with this lovely bastard:



This is Dippy.

Good old Dippy here is an enemy with 999 HP, and their whole gimmick is when they lose HP by any means, their attack damage decreases by the same amount until the end of that turn. So if Dippy here wants to hit me for 60 damage, I just need to deal 60 damage to them before I end my turn if I want that number to be a 0. There's just one problem. Every hand I get dealt for the first three turns conveniently ends up being mostly anything but attack cards, so now Dippy here gets to slap me silly with almost their full attack damage for each of those turns. Try as I might to see if I can manipulate my hands to get a better draw on one of the turns by save scumming, the outcome doesn't change. No matter what, there's nothing I can do to get a better hand to try and survive this, and I watch as my full health bar melts before my eyes on each futile attempt I make until I'm forced to accept my fate.

I die.

All I needed to do was make it past Dippy to take on the final boss. I had what felt like a nicely balanced hand of defense and attack, but RNG decided to throw all of that out the window. Oof, I was not happy to lose a good run on the final stretch like that, and that's how I ended up with this thread idea.

I really shouldn't blame Dippy in all honesty. It's not their fault I was given bad hands. But screw you for showing up when the RNG gods decided to screw me.

[queenzelda]

Reminds me of the good old Kingdom Hearts days when it was just Sora against Sephiroth and he was the boss to beat since Sora can't really take him down on his own. So you have to either lvl him like crazy or umm.... use codejunkies codes. :p Back when using hacking on a game using a blue disc was fine. *cough*kinda*cough*

[Mr EliteL]

There's been many moments I can't recall right now of being so close to achieving something but failing close or right at the end. Ones I do recall have been Genshin events that are timed, namely Spiral Abyss and I think there has been on Wuthering Waves too.

Most recently on my PS5 Genshin account the final stage of Floor 12 I've restarted many times because I'm trying to complete it within 3 minutes to get the best reward. I run my Geo Noelle/Furina team on the first half of the stage and a Wriothesley Freeze team, that normally has Furina in it but she I chose my Noelle team and I can't have her in both. I got the final enemy down to a speck of health and the timer went past the 3 minute mark, I needed a mere second or two saved earlier and I would've won. I've had better time runs in my Noelle side but lost Wriothesley to stupid mistake/poor dodging so the run fails. I restart each time so I don't have to clear the other two stages, I could change teams as I have used quite literally different sets of teams to clear Stage 1 & Stage 2, but I really don't want to have to go through them again this cycle. If I can just get the correct timing I'll have it done, got until the 15th March to do so. I have cleared on my PC NA server, yet to try on my PC EU but doubt that one will clear like my NA or what my PS5 main can potentially do.

[Kyng]

Yesterday, my sister and I were playing Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (for old times' sake). We tried to master the first spell challenge (the Rictusempra challenge) - in which we had to complete the challenge with at least 4130 seconds left on the clock in order to achieve mastery.

We completed it with... 4128 seconds left.

Fortunately, we didn't give up - and on the very next run, we saved the required 2 seconds, finishing with 4130 seconds exactly!

[Moonface]

Reminds me of the good old Kingdom Hearts days when it was just Sora against Sephiroth and he was the boss to beat since Sora can't really take him down on his own. So you have to either lvl him like crazy or umm.... use codejunkies codes. :p Back when using hacking on a game using a blue disc was fine. *cough*kinda*cough*

This description makes it sound like the fight is one of those "scripted to lose" moments but if the player is good enough they can still "win" the fight before inevitably losing in the following cutscene.

Yesterday, my sister and I were playing Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (for old times' sake). We tried to master the first spell challenge (the Rictusempra challenge) - in which we had to complete the challenge with at least 4130 seconds left on the clock in order to achieve mastery.

We completed it with... 4128 seconds left.

Fortunately, we didn't give up - and on the very next run, we saved the required 2 seconds, finishing with 4130 seconds exactly!

Oof, reminds me of numerous times in any games with a time trial mode where I would miss out by mere seconds and have to start over.


For a flip side of the game itself getting close but no cigar, shoutout to the time a boss in Elden Ring got my health this low before I killed it: https://i.imgur.com/GqM2KPl.jpeg