If I understand the question right, I'd feel that the game bugged out, but in my favor. But if, after the fight, the hero is shown recovering and defeating the enemy with ease in a cutscene, without any explanation of why he couldn't do that before, I'd probably roll my eyes at how cheap that victory felt.

I have mixed feelings.

So I guess it depends on how you are prepared to look at it. A bit like the journey is more important or rewarding than the destination.

Perhaps there is some kind of alternate reality involved ... you win but you don't ... or you lose but you don't.

All the weapons being discharged have warped reality maybe.

If that's the case, then I'd probably feel indifferent about it, even if the cutscene were to show that I won the fight with ease. That said, I'd be lying if I said I was not confused as to how I managed to actually win the boss fight. But I agree with what some of the other users have said, maybe it's a bug?

Leaning towards the problem they had with the Tombraider reboot in 2013, cognitive dissonance where the actions of what you see don't match the gameplay or how you'd seen the character act.

Disgaea has something similar to this. But instead of you easily defeating the boss and enemies it rewound and you repeat the battle but get a bunch of help from monsters loyal to you. (On the other hand on the second playthrough you didn't need their help and they didn't come).

Curiously i remember one of the Mechwarrior 2 games (mercenaries i think), where i loaded a mission, the program crashed and it returned with mission summary 100% complete and all salvage successful with all mechs at 100%. Quite confusing. From that i felt cheated of actually being able to play.

edit: remembered the exact term, updated

I was about to say this. This is what happens with Vile in Megaman X where Zero comes to your rescue.

Of course, more often then not, the boss retreats to lick his/her wounds and then you get a rematch later in the game when your character is more powerful and you get to show off how your character has become stronger by later defeating a boss that was previously beyond your reach.

Its a narrative that plays well to people I think, because it mirrors how a lot of things work in real life. When you learn a new skill, you initially have a task (ie, the boss) that is beyond your reach where others like an instructor, corworker or third party (ie, Zero) can assist you in doing it, but eventually you rampup your knowledge and what was previously an impossible endeavor becomes feasible, sometimes even easy.

Of course, some games push this to absurd extremes (ex: your character starts the game with 100 hp and by the end, has like 100000 hp and can take on a god and win). Real life tends to impose limits on what you can reasonably hope to achieve, especially by yourself.

Disgaea also does something rather strange. The end of the first chapter has you fighting a boss battle, one that is of appropriate strength for that point in the game. While the battle isn't completely trivial, it is still one that a typical player will win on the first attempt. However, if you lose the fight, instead of the usual game over, there's a special cutscent that includes an ending, followed by the option to start a new cycle, as though you had beaten the game. (In other words, by losing this early boss fight, you just saw one of the game's endings and are on New Game +.) I note that this is the sort of thing that can confuse many players, who aren't expecting to have "beaten" the game that early.

That's tame compared to what I've seen in incremental games. Like, in Plague Tree, you go through all that work to get *1* death, then have to keep repeating the two previous layers to get another death (though more of it gets preserved over each attempt), but later you get to the point where, every second, you get well over 1e308 deaths.

(Real life, of course, imposes limits on how many people can die to a disease. A disease would not be able to kill more than the world's population, yet in Plague Tree you somehow manage to do so.)

how would I feel if a game is badly made and incohesive? I would not like it, and play something else

Sometimes, incohesiveness can be interesting. See SaGa Frontier's setting, for example.

(Wait, why does that one ruined village have arrows stuck in the roofs when the invaders clearly had guns?)

PsychoMantis sends his regards lol

Metal Gear Solid does exactly this.

Mhmm... Curiously there's fights in the second game where you are suppose to lose, and when you win you get like 'demon lord title' or something (he was suppose to be a human). I do enjoy games with multiple endings :) (Though Chrono Trigger was one I'd rather just see the variations rather than beat the game 13 times myself)

Speaking of losing early in the game, ever played Recettear? (no longer sold here....) If you fail to pay off your debts the game is 'over' but you keep all your skills and equipment, so you can literally choose not to beat the first section, buy a ton of equipment and restart in a NG+ method making paying the debt MUCH easier the second time around (when you can sell higher quality items in larger numbers), rather than scraping by if you didn't do near perfectly.

but i guess it's going off topic.

I would be surprised, ashamed, perplexed, intoxicated and nullified.

I think the main issue is how it fits into the narrative and gameplay, like most people are saying. For your basis, I know it used to frustrate me when I went into a battle way OP and easily defeated the boss battle itself and seemed to be drastically superior to the boss but then the cinematic showed them beating my team or whatever. Now I'm able to see the constraints of game design and appreciate how the developers had to build the game for the narrative they wanted. I think the same would apply to the flip side if I ever saw it, I just can't think of a game that would proceed with a cinematic if the battle was lost, unless the next cinematic shows the things you mention like allies or some other twist to account for the story moving forward. The only pure instance of a moment like you describe that I can picture would be a fight that takes the party down to one character with almost no HP but then the video shows the group easily beating the boss that had caused so much trouble just before.