Final Fantasy bosses that really had me stuck

Sandleaf@gachaphobic

JRPGs be like CHAPTER 1: find lost kitty FINAL CHAPTER: kill god

3:41 AM · Oct 27, 2019

287 Replies · 18.6K Reposts · 49.8K Likes

There’s a joke that all JRPGs boil down to killing god at the end. God - lord and master of all, creator and destroyer of worlds, a being of infinite power and knowledge. Should be easy, right 😬? Well, actually, it usually is. By the time you reach the end of the game, if you’re anything like me, your team is massively over-leveled, you’ve got all the OP gear, and you could probably nuke the last boss with a flick of your finger.

Today, we’re not here to talk about the battle with god (well, we will once). We’re here to talk about the other beings that get in your way before god, the real pains in the arse. Or at least the ones that have been a personal pain in my arse.

When you read through this list, please don’t laugh. Looking back, a lot of these bosses are not at all difficult, and I am throwing my head in my hands at how terrible my gaming skills could be way back when. So here’s me being “vulnerable” and exposing some of my most embarrassing stuck moments, and some that are just actually too hard.

*Spoilers for multiple Final Fantasy games from here on *

He’s big, he’s purple, he’s a complete menace! And he won’t go away!

Ultros is a giant purple tentacled monster who pummels your characters with his many arms and his cantankerous wit. The wise-cracking, hungry asshole shows up in Final Fantasy 6 a total of 4 times, but for me, the first was the worst.

This fight can be quite tough; Ultros’ strong tentacle attacks can easily smash through the whole party if you’re not careful. He also throws out ink which can blind your characters, making their attacks miss more often. Just to make things a bit harder, you also have to make sure Banon, the resistance fighter’s leader, survives the fight. If he goes down, it’s game over. Luckily he doesn’t get targeted too heavily, but it’s hard enough keeping the rest of the party alive! Ultros also enjoys taunting you throughout the battle, which makes it all feel a bit daft and ridiculous (as well as really bloody irritating if he’s winning).

I don’t know how my party was so underprepared for him, but I got annihilated every time I faced him. I went round that stretch of the river Lethe about 20 times before I eventually trounced him. Unfortunately, he doesn’t die and you have to roast him later in the game again, and again, and again before he finally goes away. Purple calamari, anyone?

Countdown timers in games are always stressful for me. I like to play games how I like to do long runs - slowly, as relaxed as possible, and always heading towards something unknown. I am the queen of “what’s that?”, veering massively off track to look at an interesting rock that probably has absolutely nothing to do with anything and definitely isn’t a side quest, collectible or fun glitch. This is not at all conducive to being timed, so any introduction of a countdown clock will send me into a spiral.

At this point in the game, your team infiltrates an enemy missile base and reprograms it to self-destruct. The game graciously allows you to set a time limit for your escape: 10, 20, 30 or 40 minutes. Being a countdown timer hater, and not very confident in my team’s ass kicking abilities, I chose 40 minutes. On the way out, you’re accosted by a ridiculously large mech who can kick like a coked up donkey. You must exit the base and defeat the giant assault bot within the time limit, or you’ll all go kaboom.

I must have replayed this fight nearly 50 times, easily meeting the definition of madness by thinking I had even the slightest chance of winning each time I restarted. At the time, I couldn’t understand what I was doing wrong, what I was missing. It’s worth mentioning when I first played through Final Fantasy 8, I had no idea the Guardian Force summons (GFs) needed to be drawn from bosses. Therefore, I progressed through the main story with only 3 GFs (rather than 7 or 8) and did not know how to equip magic to my characters, making them about as strong as a dead twig. Looking back, I have no idea how I made it so far, this fight is about halfway through the game FFS! My characters hadn’t got a chance in hell and died over and over as I threw them into battle with no real strategy or clue what I was doing.

As luck would have it, my best friend accidentally overwrote this cursed save file for FF8. I was very annoyed at him when he did it, but with hindsight, he did me a massive favour. I bought the official Piggyback FF8 strategy guide, started again and made short work of this asshole boss when I reached him. When I later replayed the FF8 remaster and actually learned the junction system, complex as it is, I nuked this boss in less than 5 minutes. It felt good to get revenge for my younger self.

This is the only time I’ll talk about killing god in this piece (I think). Orphan is the final boss at the end of the long and straight road that is Final Fantasy 13. It’s one of those bosses similar to Final Fantasy 9’s Necron; they just kind of appear at the end as some evil deity and everyone agrees they have to die. It’s easier just to shrug and go along with it, down with overpowered deities!

Now Final Fantasy 13 has this really irritating mechanic where if your party leader gets KO’d, the game ends. That’s it, game over, reload your last save and try again. It can be a real kicker when it catches you off-guard. Luckily, this didn’t happen too often while I was pottering around; I’m quite a cautious RPGer, I’m more the type to heal and defend rather than going for a Hail Mary hit and crossing my fingers. But then I reached the final boss and it didn’t really care about my healing and defending strategies.

Orphan has a lovely instant-death attack, which randomly targets one of your three party members and straight up knocks them out. Let’s combine these two bits of information and you’ll see why this boss pained me for weeks.

Party leader dies, game over. Boss has insta-kill attack that has a 1 in 3 chance of targeting the party leader. 🤔😮‍💨 reader, the odds were never ever in my favour.

This cheating scumbag kicked my party leader to the kerb every time I challenged it, like some twisted game of Duck, Duck, Goose. There’s nothing I hate more than unfair video games, and this felt hideously unfair to 19 year old me. To rub salt in the wound, I had friends who completed the game completely untroubled by this attack. “Don’t think I got that one, I thought it was easy!” I felt personally targeted by this vengeful machine. Sure, during the course of the game I’d destroyed all its defenses and dismantled its systems of controlling the population, but come on mate, it’s all part of the very linear story! Get on board!

After unsuccessfully throwing everything at Orphan over ten times, Lady Luck looked down and took pity on me. In the early hours of a Monday in April 2010, I evaded insta-death and won the fight. I probably cried because I was so glad it was over and I didn’t have to play it again if I didn’t want to.

Sephiroth is one of those inevitable boss fights at the end of most Final Fantasy 7 iterations. He’s one of the most iconic JRPG baddies with his long flowing silver locks and giant katana, but that doesn’t stop him from being a massive arsehole.

I’ll be honest, I never really fully got to grips with the 7 Remake and Rebirth battle systems. I understand stagger and weakness mechanics, but they never felt very natural in both games, so I usually opted for a “get over levelled and hammer attack” strategy for most parts of the game. I mostly used Yuffie to break down bosses stagger bars, as she was the easiest character for me to learn. I rarely used Aerith, finding her attacks slow and underpowered. And we all know what’s going to happen to her anyway, so what’s the point in investing in her? As I approached the final boss fight, I had to eat these words.

Rebirth’s final fight pits Cloud and recently deceased Aerith against Sephiroth. Forget all that levelling and maxing out you’ve done on the other party members, they don’t even get a look-in. Sephiroth is his usual speedy, overpowered self, flashing around being a royal pain in the arse. There comes a point where he’s pretty bored with this fight; if you haven’t smacked him down by then, he just unleashes an attack that knocks you both down to 1HP. If you haven’t got enough ATB charge to make a healing move when this happens, oops, looks like you’re a dead guy.

Oh, and by the way. If you lose this final fight, you must return to the very start of the whole final boss charade, which has 5 phases involving the rest of your party. The other 4 phases aren’t too difficult, but the whole shebang takes about 20-30 minutes to plod through, plus cut scenes. I attempted this at around 10pm, thinking I’d be able to smash out the final boss and roll credits before the day was out. Cut to 12am, I’m on attempt number 4, yelling at my husband to find an online guide that gave any tips to destroying this guy. I get close, once - he must have had around 10% health left. But that victory just falls into the jaws of defeat, bloody and wrecked like the other attempts before it.

I’ll be honest, I could not be bothered to go through it again, especially after putting over 100 hours into a bloated game that mostly felt like walking through 3 feet deep mud. We brought up the ending cut scenes on YouTube and I never opened the game again. That’s one PlayStation trophy I’m content in never winning. Life’s too short!

Final Fantasy 10 fans are probably reading this thinking, “yeah, Seymour Flux is pretty difficult”. Well, I hate to disappoint you but I’m talking about the very first fight you have with Seymour. When he’s just a dude, not even some ethereal god-like being. However, I do feel a bit better about this one, as a quick search showed a lot of Reddit and forum posts titled “how to beat Seymour” - clearly I’m not alone!

This fight comes about halfway through the game; Yuna and her crew have just gained a fourth Aeon summon, Shiva, and found out that holier-than-thou Seymour murdered his dad just so he could take his job. They try to do the right thing and get him to confess his crime and turn himself in. However, Seymour quite likes his fancy life and decides to do away with these pesky kids so he can carry on being a big-shot Maester. A battle ensues!

Seymour himself isn’t too difficult to thrash. He has some pretty tricky defence mechanisms in the form of two Guado Guardians who defend and heal him, as well as a magic barrier reducing any spell damage. But that’s only the first part. Once sufficiently weakened, Seymour, will call forth his Aeon Anima. She is absolutely terrifying and can really pack a punch if you’re not prepared. Anima’s Pain attack can cause instant death to one of your team, and her Overdrive “Oblivion” smacks you about 16 times and is scary as hell. This is the part where I died. A lot.

It’s also quite a sticky part in the game; if you save at a certain point, there’s not a lot of opportunity to go back and grind to have a better chance at winning. I don’t have any big reveals or tactics here; it was one of those fights that I kept attempting until finally, Anima fell and Seymour was slain. Phew.

I’m sure this boss needs no introduction to a Final Fantasy fan, and probably makes everyone’s “bosses I hate” list. But for everyone else, I’ll explain.

Final Fantasy 12 has a bounty board side quest - a list of monsters increasing in strength that the player must defeat to gain money, cool gear and status. Once you’ve poked, prodded and scraped your way through this list, the monster to end all monsters appears: Yiazmat. He’s a big bad wyrm who has over 50 million HP, the most of any Final Fantasy boss ever. It can take anywhere between 1 to 10 hours to kill him, and you better have some pretty solid strategies in place before you start. This boss is so long, it even allows you to leave the arena to rest and return to carry on slaying him.

I admit, I love Final Fantasy 12, it’s one of my favourites. The gambit system was fun and interesting to use, requiring much more thought than my usual “just press attack until the enemy dies” way of playing. Set up in the right way, the game actually just plays itself; you can sit back and read a book, cook a meal or have a nap while the system plays for you. This is especially useful for some of the more difficult bosses later in the game. The player almost take the role of coach on the sidelines, subbing in team members and switching up strategies while your characters do all the physical work.

When I first played 12 back in 2007, I thought I had it all figured out. I easily trawled through the bounty board and unlocked the Yiazmat fight. I had heard about its difficulty and length, but thought I was a pretty superior Final Fantasy player at this point; surely all these other posers just didn’t know what they were doing. Hmm. I was humbled very quickly.

It wasn’t that the fight was too hard, it was just finicky and, well, boring. I toiled for an hour or so, slowly chipping away at Yiazmat’s enormous health bars. When I looked at the clock and saw how little time had passed and how few health bars I’d depleted, I realised I just couldn’t be bothered. There are few things in life that feel worth spending that amount of time on, and prodding this squiggly wyrm with a sword is not one of them. I replayed 12 when I bought the updated FF12 Zodiac Age a few years back, and still didn’t entertain the idea of this fight. Maybe one day, when I’m retired and can’t sleep? On my deathbed, perhaps?

So, that’s my Final Fantasy boss shit list. Any surprises? I have to say, I’m still embarrassed about some of these, especially Ultros and Iron Clad. Replays proved to me these are not at all difficult fights, I think I was just too young to properly understand and strategise. Now I’m older and not much wiser, but I know just bashing “Attack” like a bull in a china shop works sometimes, but definitely not all the time.

What boss fights have you been embarrassingly stuck on? Or ones that have made you just give up on a game completely?