FF The 4 Heroes of Light - Low Level Game Part 14: Leviathan
10The playlist of the whole challenge can be found here (updated with each new video):
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=7E52E2031D6AB0D6
Last Demon Lord's servant boss we have to fight before Horne (excluding the one in Horne obviously), and I did deliberately postpone Leviathan for last so that I would gain extra levels needed to make this battle easier in the process as well as get some fancy equipment (pretty much all the Light stuff) from the other Demon servants.
Leviathan is the healthiest of the servants, boasting some 8-9K. Nearly as healthy as the final boss actually, just far more easily penetrated.
Beating Leviathan just gives you Cestus, sea transportation necessary to reach the lv. 2 bonus tower and the final battle, but neither of those are available at the moment so it's best to him for last.
Another reason is that Leviathan is just a tricky boss, mostly because we're playing a low level challenge, having to minimise exp gain by killing off three people.
When Levi's health drops, he goes into Charge mode, in which he'll do nothing at all, gathering energy and defending from your attacks (he seems to take less damage from them). However, after charging up for 5 or so turns, he'll use Tidal Wave which deals CRAZY damage, more than any low level character can take, even with all the Light equipment upgraded to +9 and thrown on one character.
His charge can be broken by dealing some ~500 damage to him, so he'll land and continue attacking.
The problem is that we do NOT want him to charge before we have Aire, the surviving character, about to deliver the last spell. Since you can't target your own characters with attacks, we should have the boss kill the other three off beforehand.
This is why I deliberately equip my party with really awful equipment, the worst I could find. Hopefully they die by then, and Aire will do it alone.
Leviathan has a lot of water element magic and his physical attacks can inflict instant death. I'm not sure if Ribbon prevents death, but Aire was fully status-protected with the Shield of Light and seems to have avoided being instakilled.
With all the Light equipment on her (besides the sword, which went to the Hero, equipped to penetrate the boss's fire weakness), Aire doesn't have much trouble soloing the battle.
At first I thought the boss's charge is broken by fire elemental magic, which he's weak to, but the second time I was breaking his charge, I figured out it has something to do with the amount of damage you deal.
This knowledge isn't of much importance to anybody besides low level gamers though, seeing how ANY, and I do mean ANY, party is more than capable of dealing around 500 damage necessary to break his charging phase. It's the necessity to finish this battle solo, coupled with inability to withstand Tidal Wave at our levels, that makes this tricky in this case.