Game:

Final Fantasy VI (1994)

Duration: 1:40:15

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This is the segment I feel like people have been waiting for since I started this run. And guess what? Not only is it hard, but it's proportionately harder in this run than a regular run. Many attacks in this fight can be subverted and prevented fairly easily in a normal playthrough IMO, as long as I know what to do. Also, he is geared towards powerful attacks that can often KO somebody outright. Not a big deal in a normal playthrough; if you have two people on standby, healing from something like that is no issue, and it can't pose any immediate danger by itself if you're on the ball.

This lent itself well to the LLG, where he has a general lack of MT attacks that can finish off the party easily, making him proportionately easier in an LLG than a normal playthrough. But here, attacks that can wipe a character are exactly what I don't want to see. Healing is easy, but reviving is extremely difficult, because I can't target a revive to hit the whole party. And while I can normally stay on top of keeping Float up fairly easily, it's hard to remember how my Float is doing with all the other things to keep track of. Healing from status effects is the same issue as reviving. When you have to heal a status effect from one character, you spend one turn using a Remedy. When you don't know what's going on, or who, if anybody, is inflicted with statuses, what can you do? Hope for the best? Chuck Remedies everywhere? All the options suck here. Even with solid status protecting Relics in place, there are still plenty of ways that Mind Blast (a move which I normally sneeze at) can mess with me, and there's no solid way around it. Even if I don't make a single mistake, which is nearly impossible (although relatively speaking I do pretty well IMO), I still have a huge lack of information here.

Oh yeah, and the battle takes a freaking hour. Literally.

The first phase is pretty easy by the point of this recording. Slow him, keep Regen on Celes/Setzer, and start attacking. For the most part, this doesn't get very crazy. Although there are a bunch of things he can do that will slow me down, such as Flare, he is more likely to give me a ridiculous number of free turns instead. He has both Magnitude and Quake, for one, which will fail dramatically. I can recover from Purge and his Gravity attacks fairly easily on their own- but the catch is that they sound the exact same, so if he trolls me with the timing like he does in the video, it's hard to tell which is which. This is the only time that I had trouble with this though, IIRC. If he just hits me... meh? He gives me so much time here to do what I want that there really aren't any problems here, once I got the hang of it.

The second phase is the only meaningful part of the fight, for the most part. Throughout his first phase, I need to constantly pay attention to when he should be attacking. I have a much better chance of dealing with the period after Flare Star if Celes is prepared to Slow him immediately after he uses it, and the other two also have turns ready. The run practically hinges on turning his Haste into Slow, so this needs to be done immediately. One of the other two can revive Relm, and the other can heal the party. Best case scenario is that the status quo hasn't changed. Atma Weapon is still on Slow, and the party is all on their feet at full HP. But there are plenty of things that can go wrong. Slow can miss. Atma Weapon can target Celes to use her level with Flare Star's formula, in which case Shadow will die. He may counter Slow with Full Power, and in my experience counterattacks to Slow have loopy targeting, so Shadow/Setzer may not be safe to revive Relm. None of these scenarios are explicitly run-enders, but multiple of these things happening, or a strong follow-up by the boss could be dangerous.

(continued in the comments)

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