The design flaw in Chapter 8.

In Castlevania: Harmony of Despair, most of what you’re trying to do is get good loot to drop off bosses. Ideally, you’d do this by pushing a button that causes the boss chest to open. Unfortunately the game isn’t quite that user-friendly. In order to have a decent shot at good loot from the boss chest, you actually have to be alive when it gets opened.

The optimal strategy for getting phat lewt, therefore, is to join a multiplayer game and then sit there doing nothing while you wait for other players to win the level and kill the boss. Unfortunately, other players are inconsiderate assholes who tend to resent people who are freeloading, so you’re not likely to get away with this more than once in a single group.

So you have to do something, even if all that something involves is moving forward and taking a few cursory swipes at the boss. There’s no illusion you’re doing anything useful, not when that Soma is ten steps ahead of you Valmanwaying it up, but people at least like to know you’re pretending like you know how to contribute.

Now let’s look at Chapter 8, with its two switches.

There are two doors that must be opened in order to get to the boss room in Chapter 8. The first is in an underground lake in one of the side areas of the map. This region has a one-way exit, so the player can dive in, hit the switch, then re-emerge about where he entered. A necessary detour, but a relatively painless one.

The other switch is at the end of a relatively short hallway to the right of the level entrance. Upon appearing in the level you have two options: heading right takes you to the required switch, while heading left takes you to everything else. If you’re playing solo you must go hit the switch, then backtrack.

In multiplayer, though, you have another option! The door at the end of the right-hand tunnel can be opened from the other side. So a player can head right, hit the necessary switch, then wait a few minutes until someone comes through and opens the door for them. This is an appealing prospect for two reasons:

1) It’s the closest a player can get to “do nothing; get loot” without looking like a total dickcheese, and

2) Once you throw the required switch, you effectively cannot do anything else useful in the level. By the time you’ve made it back out of the area folks will have killed all the monsters, and by the time you’ve made it all the way back up and around the rest of your group will be in fighting the boss.

Once in a while, though, you get a team that doesn’t understand these two completely true and awesome points, and who will construe your prudence as laziness. These misguided souls will reward your contribution by either leaving you locked in the dead-end hallway, or booting you from the group after a single boss drop.

And that’s Chapter 8’s design flaw: it’s built in a such a way that the optimal style of play can be mistaken for shiftlessness to less observant players. (Who very often tend to be Soma players who are Valmanwaying it up.)