A pet theory about Gideon Ofnir
So, for no apparent reason, I’ve been thinking about the Gideon fight. I know that he has a rep for being a shockingly easy boss, even though he’s a pretty potent spellcaster. That ease comes from his monologue at the beginning, giving you ample time to approach and prepare your big spell/stun lock combo/10-minute buff sequence/etc.
Should you let him actually engage you, he is unique in the spells he has access to depends on the bosses you’ve beaten and told him the location of. This feature makes him more powerful the later in the sequence of bosses you take him on. And that’s when a though hit me:
*He’s been following you the whole time you’ve been in the lands between*. He’s tracking your progress and picking up the scraps you leave behind. It would stand to reason then that he’s familiar with how you’ve taken on all those other ring bearers up to this point. And several of those ring bearers have monologues of their own, sometimes even in the middle of the fight. And for each of those monologues, you have waited patiently for them to finish—because it’s a cutscene.
Gideon doesn’t bother to engage you and instead says what he wants to say because he’s expecting you to hear him out just like you have for every other major opponent up to this point. I think it’s telling for this to be the only fight in which you can break your own trend and cut him off, only to never do that again for the rest of the game.
I’m not prepared to say Miyazaki did that on purpose, but if I ever met the guy it would be the first question I asked.