Game:

Final Fantasy VI (1994)

Duration: 15:54

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2

I recently participated in the FF6 "Four Job Fiesta" (https://www.fourjobfiesta.com/ff6/), and after some theorycrafting I realized that I should be able to do a low level game of this. A reminder of the rules (explained in detail in my Ultros video):

LL - Low Level
LECGO - Locke, Edgar, Cyan, Gogo Only
NM - No Magic
NR - No Rods

First off, I'd like to note that we want an extra Tempest and the Debilitator for this fight. The former is stolen from Number 128 in the Magitek Facility, and the latter is stolen from Missile Bay during the IAF Sequence. As you probably recall, we didn't Steal either of those items. That said, it wouldn't have been too hard to Steal them if we really wanted to. We had a fair bit of control over the Number 128 fight and Air Force wasn't dangerous at all once Laser Gun was dead (thank goodness the Debilitator isn't stolen from Laser Gun). While the Steals are rare, neither boss has a common Steal, so we can just keep trying until we get them.

That said, the Debilitator and second Tempest would have still been rather tedious to get, and they're really only useful for this optional version of the fight. The Debilitator will be buyable soon, and the second Tempest will be more or less useless in the WoR. Therefore, I temporarily edited these items into my save file for demonstration purposes. The jumpcheese strategy will thus be the "official" version of this fight even though we can absolutely win without it.

In this fight, attacks usually either do nothing or kill people, so most equipment slots are irrelevant. Everybody needs Wall Rings since Atma has a lot of Reflectable spells that it would be foolhardy to try playing around, so our Relic slots are limited too. The most important thing to note is that we're banking on Locke being barely able to tank an MT Blaze. This attack would normally be our bane in an LLG since we can't use Gau (the normal EXP sink) offensively and defensively at the same time. However, if we give Locke a shield (so no dual-wielding), the Green Beret (for the HP boost), and the White Cape (yes, reducing damage by approximately 8 is critical here), he can just barely tank an MT Blaze. In addition, the White Cape gives us a small chance of dodging physical attacks and improves our odds of surviving Meteo, though that's usually a death sentence regardless.

Surviving Blaze is huge since it means that the long first phase of the fight (~12 000 HP) isn't very dangerous anymore. In Atma's first phase, he only uses physical attacks, Flare, and Blaze, and Blaze is fairly uncommon. Physical attacks can only kill one person, so we can just revive as often as necessary. Physical attacks on Locke are the worst, as we need to both revive and heal him to survive Blaze, so we don't get any attacks off. Flare is great, as he'll deal a bit of damage to himself and give us a chance to queue our ATBs. Locke is the only character who can double-turn this surprisingly speedy boss without Haste, and we even need to use the Menu Trick to make that work. An extra bonus of Flare is that Locke can always get two turns before Atma acts again.

If Atma uses an MT Blaze, that's when things get spicy. In general, we'll enter a res-loop until Atma uses Flare. A second MT Blaze at this point is game over, but that's very rare. Once Atma uses Flare, we can get back on our feet and slip in an extra attack with Locke to boot.

Since the first phase is so tame, we have a chance to Debilitate Atma (i.e., make him weak to) to several elements before the more dangerous second phase. The ones that we want are Poison, Fire, and Wind. Poison isn't critical, as it only increases the damage of the rare reflected Bio spell from Atma. If it doesn't show up, it's not worth spending extra turns to get it. Fire is needed to increase Locke's damage output slightly with the elemental blades and increase the damage of Atma's Fire 2 spell, which he uses on a regular basis. Wind is important since Cyan is our main damage dealer here.

This is why we really want a second Tempest. With Cyan dual-wielding Tempests in the front and hitting the forced Wind weakness, he can deal a whopping 700 damage on average every turn thanks to Wind Slash procs. Compared to a regular playthough, this isn't great, but for our circumstances it's pretty darn impressive. We try to attack with Cyan every chance we get and heal with one of the other two when possible. It takes a bit of time to get to Phase 2, but with this setup we're ready to go in guns blazing.

(continued in the comments)

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