Breath of Fire 4 - 0 Exp Challenge Part 4: Ymechaf
8Challenge playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbSv8zSDR9c3ilm03NGBn_GGmnY7aukpm
The last notable boss of the game's chapter 1, Ymechaf is another gimmick boss exploiting whose weakness allows the fight to be trivialised exceptionally easily.
Unlike one of the previous similar bosses like Maman, who can be defeated by the base-level party without resorting to giving him an Apple to completely neutralise him as a threat to the party, Ymechaf's weakness simply must be exploited if we want to stay alive in this battle.
If this is not done... Ymechaf's offence is incredibly threatening, as he possesses a multi-hit AoE physical, MT wind magic in iirc Cyclone (the 2nd wind spell Nina learns basically; I think that's the one) aside from attacking single targets with physicals and magic. It's not a problem for the boss to deal such damage to the party that they can't recover from it easily. Furthermore, Ymechaf is exceptionally sturdy on the physical side, resisting about three fourths of any physical hit you choose to strike him with as well as having above average resistance to magic spells.
Ymechaf's weakness is that he loses balance every time you strike him with a combo, foregoing his action during that turn (if he hasn't yet acted) and becoming very susceptible to physical damage, much unlike his regular self. Hitting him with his back turned automatically causes him to face our party again, and if this is done just before he would otherwise get his turn, he WILL act. This means that after leaving him off balance during the first turn, the sequence of hit - combo starter - combo finisher should be adapted every other turn to ensure the boss (hopefully) doesn't get to act ever again.
I'm writing (hopefully) because of the chance that the combo spells will fail to be strung together into a combo successfully, allowing the boss to get an action in, which could very possibly be lethal for the party. All combos can fail, but since the person starting the combo (Ryu) is slower than Nina, and they're comboing basic fusion magic, the chances of that occurring are, as far as I understand, the lowest you can get when you conduct any sort of comboing in this game.
The choices of party members for said tasks are self-explanatory, I should think. Cray has a very high phys attack score, resulting in heavy 1-hit damage and has enough AP to use Shadowwalk once (as a finisher on the turn after Ryu has run out of AP). Ryu has a +1 AP advantage over Ershin, giving him an extra turn during which he doesn't run out of AP if he continues to set Nina up for Burn+Sever fusion combos. And of course, Nina has a ton of AP (for base level anyway) and knows Sever naturally, though I think Eddy would work just as well (and is cheaper but also slightly weaker too; however, it's not the damage that we use it here for considering that it's fairly weak regardless and it's Cray's attack dealing the most damage).
Not much flexibility is possible in this fight. Since we don't want to die, we stick to the same sequence of attacks every turn after the 1st, and it makes sense to RainbowTrout Cray once so that his attacks hurt more on subsequent turns.
After the fight, the game's first and shortest chapter comes to its conclusion. Some interesting fights and broken setups await us in the next one!
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