Game:

Tales of Phantasia (1995)

Duration: 3:38

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Oh man. That fight. That fight.
Dhaos deserves his name of demon king for sure. Though Cheap king is definitely a more appropriate one.
I won't detail again why all his Artes are absolutely run killers, you already got the point last time. Spell pause makes this run much more harder than necessary.

Before I start, I will mention that I grinded like hell and used all my herbs to be able to deal deal decent damage. Otherwise, I would be stuck with using the basic attacks for 3 more minutes. Indeed, 2 of my Artes cost 50 tp each meaning I can use them only 20 times at max. The game even trolls by giving a way to reduce you TP consumption just after this fight.

The demon lords have each more Hp than Ishrant and Dhaos' HP are just completely inflated at this point of the game (90000HP).
Even though the demon lords resist physical attacks, the weapon choice was extremely obvious since dhaos is less manageable than those 2 minions.
Due to that, the only way to get rid of the lords without fearing to be countered is to use light elemental attacks. Once again Light Spear proves to be an incredibly valuable tool in this game.

The second demon lord usually tries to run away in order to cast a spell. If this happens you can't really do anything as this means you'll to come closer to dhaos and get pummelled by Tetra spell.
The strategy was then to get in the middle of the two lords. Thanks to the way Phantasia's Ai works, the lords will always try to come closer and use physical Artes instead. The goal is then to keep pushing them back alternatively in order to prevent spells, counters and deal good damage in the meanwhile.

However, this strategy isn't entirely flawless since I will consume more TP than if the lords were grouped together. The second issue is that it doesn't solve the problem of dhaos casting spells. Unlike most enemies, Dhaos will never follow the leader in the battlefield. He will stay at the same place, meaning you can't reset his AI by pushing the leader away or attracting him.
The only solution is to make Dhaos the leader by removing any enemy between yourself and him. This is why you should try to jump over the lords to reset Dhaos' AI, as risky as it sounds.

Even if you end up killing the lords with no retalation, the fight will be far from over.
Dhaos is a heavy opponent and pushing him back isn't an easy task. Since he can't be downed, he can punish pretty much every Arte and the setting I found is the one that relies the least on luck.
Aerial basics are definitely the safest way to deal damage. However, it's boring and can also be punished if Dhaos guards the attack or use a well timed tetra assault.
The safest combo is swallow dance into chaos distortion blade. Swallow dance moves cless completely next to Dhaos unlike the other attacks. Thanks to this, Cless can deal an extra hit during chaos distortion blade that will push away dhaos enough to avoid any counter attack. This is still luck based as it won't work if Dhaos blocks at least 1 single hit.

Satsugeki bukouken is mandatory for that fight as it is the only way to dodge Tetra spell and dhaos laser (high level spells can't be dodged at all though). Unfortunately, this costs 50tp just for a single dodge and obviously Dhaos can use those attacks at will. You can't even use it to damage Dhaos as he will counter you after that. As for Dhaos laser you have to do the full extention of the Arte to dodge the attack. In addition, the hitbox of the laser travels much faster than the animation so you kinda have to trigger SB as fast as possible.
As for the ending I got very lucky. I didn't have much Tp left so I kinda gave everything on a desperate assault and I wasn't expecting to beat him on the last hit.
And now I'm done with Arc 2 of FVE. Time to switch back to X which was overall much easier (thankfully).

Sorry for all the typos. I wrote that in the subway.

- Sent from my terrible samsung phone with a damn small screen -

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