[i]And this was a completely blind first-time attempt at him, on Honour Mode of all things.
I'm tempted to call BS on this. You waited all this time to get Honour Mode to try this fight?
It is quite difficult to balance these fights properly. The game must provide a number of ways to defeat any main boss. They could have made Rafael immune to any crowd control effects, and do a massive AOE attack of 200 damage at every turn. They could have made him so powerful, you needed some very specific cheesy exploits to defeat him. I actually would have loved this, IF he was some secret boss, unrelated to the main plot. The fact that this fight has a unique music suggests that it was designed to be experienced by most players, so Raphael had to be defeatable by the usual conventional means. Unfortunately this means a passive boss with a massive HP and a large amount of trash mobs to spice up the fight. It wasn't designed to be hard, but to last long.
