Game:

Final Fantasy VII (1997)

Duration: 0:40

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7

Rules Reminder:

Low Level
Solo Character
No Attack Command
No Non-Mandatory Inns
No Scavenging
No Independent Materia

You can't tell from the video, but this is one of the most difficult bosses in the challenge, and the boss that's most unique to this challenge in particular. Reno's gimmick is that he'll trap your characters in pyramids. When playing with a single character, this is an instant game-over. The pyramids can't miss, and he'll use them on a consistent turn, so we can't pray for good luck. There's only one way around this in a Solo Character Challenge: learning a level 3 Limit break.

The problem is actually learning a level 3 Limit break (we'll be targeting Cloud's Meteorain here). To do this, we need to kill 320 enemies with Cloud. Normally, the solution here is just to whack some Mono Drives, the lowest EXP enemy we can farm at this point in the game, until Cloud unlocks it. However, the rules come together to restrict our options here. No Attack Command means that we can't land kills without consuming resources. No Non-Mandatory Inns means that we can't use cheap Inns to restore MP/HP. No Scavenging means that we can't farm Ethers from Mono Drives and sell/use them. And Solo Character itself prevents us from using !Fury Aerith's Healing Wind to restore HP forever and farm Limit breaks with Cloud.

You might think that we should just ration our resources and use the mandatory Inns to our advantage, but I think we can only get ~100-150 kills with this strategy. Barret's level 3 Limit requires fewer kills to acquire, but we have so few opportunities to land kills with him that it's even more bleak. We need a way to grind indefinitely.

After digging around the wiki, I came across the Vice enemy in Sector 5. The idea here is that Vices drop 80 Gil, just enough to re-purchase the Grenade used to kill them. On top of this, Vices only attempt to steal items, but they skip their first turn and need an extra turn to run, so they never actually steal anything if we toss two Grenades right away. This means we'll never run out of HP or lose items. Even better, the encounters you fight after a hard reset always follow a predetermined order, and the first battle is against two Vices, so we'll only ever fight the battle we want. Finally, they only give 24 EXP - that's only 6 more than than the Mono Drives. It's about as good as we could have asked for.

Of course, I'm not really a purist in these challenges; I'm mostly interested in the strategies and boss fights. So after fighting a few dozen to confirm that the strategy worked, I cheated a bit. Normally in FF6 I'd just edit my save, but in this challenge I'm cheating the old-fashioned way: just breaking the rules of the challenge temporarily to speed things up. I gave myself the appropriate Gill and Items afterwards, and I saved just enough Bolts for Scotch.

You'd expect we'd be net neutral on Gil after that, but we can still abuse the mandatory Inns during and before Sector 5 to use as many Bolt spells as possible. It may not be enough to learn Meteorain, but it does solve our Gil problem in Midgar, netting us ~5000 Gil, enough to buy everything we need comfortably. I lowballed the Gil a little bit since I wasn't doing the grind legitimately and didn't want to accidentally cheat in a minor way.

There's one last hurdle to the grind: stat growths on level up are random in this game. Additionally, the physical damage formula is a bit weird in FF7, as your damage with jump sharply upwards every time your Attack + Level reaches a multiple of 32. It's critical that we reach the benchmark of 64 here, so we need above-average Strength growths from Cloud even at level 16. It's not too hard to manipulate this, but we shouldn't forget unless we want to redo hours of grinding.

As for the battle itself, Barret enters at full HP, and we have no option to kill him off beforehand. Normally I'd kill him in battle before acting, but it's not feasible here, so we'll have to accept him having no positive impact on the fight. If he gets hit by Pyramid or Paralyzed by Electroshock, we'll reset since that would end the fight if used on Cloud. Otherwise, we'll continue, as it's clear that Cloud isn't dying by HP damage here. Barret's presence is actually bad here, as Reno delays Pyramid by an extra turn for each character that's dead, and an extra turn would make this more consistent.

The battle is a little less straightforward than it looks. Even with all this prep, we don't have enough damage without some luck. First, we need a critical hit from Meteorain, which isn't as bad as it should be since we get six chances to crit. However, on top of that, we need to either act before Reno (not very likely in this game) or get a second crit. I should have used the Wait ATB to increase the odds of getting Meteorain off first here, but I was trying to stick to Active ATB since it seems to be a "thing" in FF7 challenges to do that where possible.

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