And good Dragon Quest bosses do it, too – and it’s another channel of success and failure and dramatic clench-points besides party members falling; there’s a good game of momentum that builds up and can be crashed down.
Final Fantasy XIII’s battle system is all about that momentum, if only it were better at communicating what it wants from and used better metaphors I would like it a lot more (to me, it sits in the baroque design world next to Diablo III, obvious touchpoints like “sword” and “armor” relegated to bare DPS factory inputs)