FF3 DS - Low Level Game Part VI: Echidna

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MoogleBoss

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Published on March 12, 2010 2:18:31 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ag8FwY9SWsY

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Final Fantasy III (2006)

Duration: 5:58

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First boss in the World of Darkness we face.

It is well possible to fight Cloud of Darkness without fighting any of the four bosses but Particle Beam will be doing 9999 damage to us, so we need to beat the 4 warriors of Darkness before we can take on the final boss.

Some of the four bosses are impossible at lv. 22, so I came up with a good order of how they should be fought. The order is important because once the party defeats Xande, they're all still at lv. 22, whereas they will be at lv. 29 before the final battle. That's seven levels there and since the stat gains become more crucial here than in earlier levels (especially in the HP department), there is a huge difference in vitality before the final dungeon and before the final boss, some 300-400 HP, I would say.

All four warriors of Dark have 100,000 HP, twice as much as Xande. They also all give us a challenging fight, some moreso than others.

Echidna is hard, really, but she is hard even if you face her last of the four. Why is that? A lot of the deadly magic she casts will still hurt even when we have considerably more health. Tornado will reduce the party's HP to single digits for example, and if it's followed by a physical attack it won't matter if you have 500 or 800 HP, you'll just die and that's that.

The Viking isn't awfully effective here. Sure, he handles the physicals but not all of them even. If Echidna casts Death on her first turn (which may well succeed, who knows), her next attack will not be affected by Provoke. This means we are likely to lose a half of our crew in one turn (Death on one party member + physical against the Devout/Bard), which would make continuing the battle impossible.

As much as I'd like to conserve Shurikens for the final boss, we want this done fast so a Ninja is very welcome instead of a party of Viking/Devout/Bard/Bard which is more economical but a lot more likely to fail (Bard's Requiem deals fractional damage which is very cool when the boss is at max 100K HP but not very cool at all when she's about to die and you can't even hurt her).

The boss also uses Quake, which hopefully doesn't kill anybody (you should be able to survive it just fine even without the help of Apollo Harp's boost to magic defence), but if Tornado is used the next attack will ignore the Viking's Provoke yet again, so this is all very risky shit.

When Echidna loses a half of her HP, she has a 10% chance of casting Meteor each turn. This ability is about as heavy as eating a Particle Beam, nobody can survive it, period. This is why we're fighting with a Ninja in the party, a party with two Bards won't kill the boss fast enough and is just asking for a Meteor.

The Viking needs a Turtle Shell (because apparently defence boosts also improve magic defence in this game) and two Aegis Shields to be able to survive the Drain spell assault, which Provoke also draws.

Hard, but very doable.

Before the battle, I fought one Xande's clone for a Ribbon. Since our folks will finish at lv. 29 anyway, with enough experience to the next level numbers to afford to fight the battle, I might as well take my chance to get one (no more) Ribbon right now so that there's use for it in the four boss battles before the final boss.

Next is Ahriman, I believe. Nasty guy.

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