Game:

Final Fantasy VII (1997)

Duration: 18:22

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117

While Ruby was rather easy by super boss standards, this was a nightmare beyond imagination. Emerald's AI is absolutely unforgiving against low level parties, so he will pretty much always be harder in a low level challenge. Especially with regular stats. Needless to say, this is going to be a KotR ridden luck fest, but good luck trying to come up with a working strategy.

Emerald has two phases. In the first phase, he uses Emerald Shoot and Foot Stamp. The former is single target, but the latter will hit the entire party with an At% of 255, so it's almost guaranteed to hit even with Mystiles. Both are non-elemental, so Ziedrichs will not do shit about the damage. In other words, you can just forget about surviving Foot Stamp, because it's not going to happen.

The second phase is when he takes his eyes out and this one is actually survivable under certain conditions. Emerald Beam deals percentage based damage, Aire Tam Storm deals 0 if you don't have materia equipped and the yellow eyes only deal MP damage. So, just take out the blue eyes, and you're home safe? Oh no. You will get Revenge Stamp'd to death unless your attacks is a counter and you will get spammed with Aire Tam Storm to keep anyone with materia alive for a long enough time to do any damage. Also, keep in mind that if you kill the eyes again, it's back to phase one.

Since I didn't want to break any of the rules and I still wanted to include him in this challenge, there was only one solution left and that was to bring a certain someone back from the dead. It's technically not against the rules and this is only an optional battle, but I do need that Peerless status. With it, it's going to be easy, right? Oh no, you have no idea.

KotR isn't exactly free. It costs 250 MP and they only way to get that much is to Transform, but that's not going to work. Peerless doesn't last forever, even at the lowest battle speed. You can only cast KotR once anyway, so it'll have to be mimed, and that rules out Sneak Attack. That leaves us only with Magic Counter, which has a 30% chance of working at level 1. It's not good, but it's gonna have to do.

When the battle begins, you want to set up Planet Protector ASAP and beef up Red with Hero Drinks. Thankfully, they are not blocked by the Peerless status, and neither are counters.When he's ready, you just have to wait for Aerith to get attacked and hope she counters with KotR, so that you can mime it. Hopefully, it will happen before the Peerless status runs out, or else you will get slaughtered by the eyes.

KotR will deal near maximum damage, which is more than enough to take care of the eyes. This brings us back to phase one. You know, the one with Foot Stamp. Thankfully, it only takes one more KotR to trigger phase two again, and Red will get another turn to use Mime before Emerald uses Emerald Shoot. However, he will get to use that one Emerald Shoot before phase two, so if Red gets killed, you need to feed him Hero Drinks all over again. Thankfully, that only happened once during this battle. I know I say "thankfully" a lot, but you should really be thankful if everything goes your way in this battle.

Once back in phase two, Peerless will most likely be over, so you're gonna need to get another limit break. Emerald Beam will take care of that, but you need full health, so make sure to heal in time. I wanted to use Great Gospel since it's cooler, but then Emerald Beam isn't enough to get you a limit break, even with Fury.

Now that you're back in phase two, you just have to repeat everything until you have used KotR eight or nine times, and hope you don't run into any bad luck on the way. Even though this battle uses a dead character and a really overpowered status, it is still a very strategy reliant and nerve wrecking battle. I only needed three attempts once I knew what to do.

The battle took 27 minutes, which is pretty much half of the Ruby battle. All KotRs except the last are sped up.

This is the regular version of FFVII and Hardcore is only the name of the challenge. Rules:

- No Damage Dealing Items
- No HP Plus
- Level 1 Materia Only
- No Sources
- No Poison

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