Game:

Final Fantasy XIII (2009)

Duration: 10:56

1,579 views

3

Single Crystarium, No Accessory Upgrades, No Ultimate Weapons challenge.

Snow - Paladin (Shouldn't have had this since I didn't need to guard) - Doctors Code, Tungsten Bangle
Sazh - Procyons - Tungsten Bangle x2
Hope - Vidofnir - Gold Bangle, Tungsten Bangle

Party setup and why:
Snow - High HP is good for survivability and switching to his Sentinel will greatly increase defense when things are looking down or you get hit hard when you're HP is in dangerous levels in comparison to his strong attacks, which is around 900 and less so unless you stay above 1k HP and have Protect up then you're in risk of dying from Cid's air kick combo unless you get a lucky item off and it prevents him from knocking you around or if you switch to a medic paradigm but there's no guarantee they'll heal you in time.
Sazh - Haste, Bravery, Faith, ravager, commando, increased stagger duration...
Hope - Without Protect and Shell then constantly switching to Sentinel is a MUST, that's the only reason he's in this battle.

Cid can be the hardest boss so far when he's in Metamorphosis but you can also make short work of him and never see him enter Metamorphosis at all making him one of the easier bosses too.

During the 1st phase of the fight do the usual buffs and when Cid staggers get him to a set amount of HP, with my stats 170k was perfect, you want to do this so that you can stagger him again just before he uses Metamorphosis, if you use the Eidolon correctly you can outright kill Cid or bring him on the verge of death, if you don't kill him then he'll most likely restore 11k HP and it can be a pain to finish him off since he can do this often and it's hard to damage him when he has Protect up and is throwing around damaging attacks and debuffs.

In the above paragraph I said how 170k HP was perfect for me to stagger him again just before entering metamorphosis, now I screwed that up in this video which didn't happen often and it's bound to happen as if you leave him with too much HP, you won't be able to kill him with the eidolon and if you deal too much damage he'll go Metamorphosis, now you can either attempt what I say on the bottom paragraph of my guide (2 paragraphs down) to finish Cid easily if that does indeed work or if you do as I do you can carry on the fight and leave Cid so he's close to staggering and hold of raising the gauge, after he uses Seraphic Light, at this stage his buffs are gone so you want to summon the second he uses the attack then stagger him and beat the crap out of him before he can get the buffs back up.

If you have to deal with Cid's Metamorphosis phase then he's alot harder, you may need to have Sentinel at hand to survive his kicking combos when you're lower on HP and another problem is his Seraphic Light attack, this deals massive damage to all and removes all buffs. Just whittle away slowly at Cid and make sure your HP is near full at all times when he's in offensive mode and work on staggering him and you should eventually beat him.

Another way I just thought of that could easily work is to have Vanille in the party for Deshell and Deprotect, with these on Cid then you should easily kill him with your Eidolon before he can use Metamorphosis - this is of course Deshell and Deprotect help Eidolon damage, if not then it's a waste of time! You also want Sazh in the party to Haste Snow to quickly build up the stagger gauge when the Eidolon is fighting by your side and for his Procyons increased stagger duration for some major ass whooping.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Why take this challenge?

It's very challenging and doesn't require much grinding/farming, in fact gil farming isn't required, I never did it at all and only did a bit of CP grinding when I got to chapter 11.

Recomended Roles:

To clarify on single crystarium - This means you can only level 1 type of role, recommended roles are as follows:
Lightning - Com (Highly recommended)
Snow - Sen (100% must have)
Sazh - Syn (Could be changed - It isn't a must have but Haste is great until/if Hope learns at chapter 12 it if you take him the Syn route)
Hope - Syn (Highly recomended but may be able to be changed only for med)
Vanille - Sab (100% needed)
Fang - Com (Highly recommended)

Really Sazh or Hope are the only ones you may want to change (1 of them definately needs to be Syn though), the others are highly recommended though, Vanille needs Sab no matter what and same goes to Snow's Sen.

For those not sure about Sazh's and Hope's Syn's then Sazh gets Haste, Bravery and Faith early and he also gets En-spells (Enfire, Enblizzard, etc.) which are unique to him, Hope gets Protect and Shell early and Bar-spells (Barfire, Barthunder, etc.) are unique to him, each character learns the none unique spells come chapter 12.

Other Statistics