Game:

Final Fantasy VI (1994)

Duration: 18:10

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6

Rules reminder:

-Battle Message Speed 1 at all times
-No Jump
-No Step Mine
-No Merit Award
-No Quick
-No Offensive Items
-No Joker Doom
-No Paladin Shield (except to learn Ultima)
-No incapacitating status effects on bosses
-No MP milling bosses
-If there's a gauntlet of fights, the same character must be used for all fights in a row

Sorry for the lack of uploads recently, but I've had to put in a fair bit of overtime at work to make the next release, so I haven't been able to devote time to these videos.

This is another time that we need to bring out Gau, but the key moment is a bit later. The first challenge is to get through the six Sky Armour and Spit Fire battles. The first thing to note is that I found a way to manipulate the perfect IAF Sequence with the lowest number of enemies per fight for a previous challenge. It's way too much to explain here, so I'll drop a link to the video I made about it (   • Final Fantasy VI Low Level Game - Man...  . While fighting fewer enemies isn't needed for EXP distribution here, it still improves our odds of victory here.

Normally, the biggest threat here is Absolute 0, which just wipes the party. Since all fights are Pincers, the enemies typically get a chance to use it once before you can even move. However, it's no threat here thanks to the Flame Shield's Ice nullification. Propeller is the actual big threat here since we're forced into the front where it can just OHKO us. Vanish is the ideal way to deal with it, but Absolute 0 and Tek Laser (which we can survive without fuss) will remove it, so we need to silence the enemies first. Summoning Siren is the way to do this efficiently, and we still have the MP for Vanish afterwards.

IIRC, we don't get quite enough time to setup Vanish and then throw out Siren before their next attack, so even if they remove Vanish, we should summon Siren first. If we try to setup Vanish first, the enemies may just remove it again, and then we won't have enough MP left. This means that the enemies do have an opening to win. If they remove Vanish and use Propeller immediately before we can set Vanish back up, then we lose. The first battle is the riskiest since we can't start that one with Vanish, but we at least face Gau towards the left so that he might evade the first Propeller.

Other than that, we just equip Gau with the Ribbon to avoid getting Muted by Backlash and the Running Shoes (Auto-Haste) so that we can sometimes pre-empt one or both of the enemies. Luckily, Gau is one of the fastest characters in the game, so he pre-empts fairly often... though not as often as it looks like; these enemies will often just choose to do nothing. The Spit Fire can barely survive a Giga Volt from the Aspik Rage, so we'll hit it with whatever we have the MP for before Raging. The first battle is a good demonstration of why Gau isn't Raging very much in this challenge. Just look at how many coinflips we lost here! If the enemies could do anything, we'd be dead for sure.

Ultros' has had some pretty complicated scripts in the past, but he does a complete 180 here. Every attack he has is physical, and sometimes he'll chat instead of attacking. Vanish wins us the first phase, and his Magic Defense is so low that this barely feels like an LLG.

After a while, Ultros will call upon Chupon, who will have a chance of using Fireball every other turn. While this can't hurt us, it may give Ultros a chance to obliterate us with Tentacle. Unfortunately, Chupon is so slow that it can be difficult to ensure that he always attacks after Ultros does. In hindsight, maybe it would have been more consistent not to Slow him, but whatever. I do my best to ensure that we always get a turn between Chupon's attack and Ultros' on Fireball turns, and he only gets a couple chances anyways, so it doesn't matter much.

Obviously, that's not the fight that we need Gau for, so the next one must be it. To beat Air Force, we'll need to take a look at its script:

1 - Tek Laser
2 - You're already dead

Well... shoot. Normally that's a bit more helpful. With two enemies using spells nearly every turn, we struggle to survive this fight through normal means. Mog with Shell could actually get ideas about winning this fight, but we'd absolutely need to Missile Bay to attack after the other two enemies every turn. While it does have the lowest speed stat, this is far from a guarantee, and I suspect that we'd need to give up all of the turns where we could attack to manipulate the enemy ATB afterwards. This means that we'd be waiting for Missile Bay to run out of MP before we do anything, resulting in a fight that's not much faster than the one in this video. Either that or we bank on god-tier RNG to get Slow up. With the gauntlet of fights beforehand taking 10-15 minutes, we don't want to reset a bunch of times to use Mog here.

(continued in the comments)

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