FFVI - LLNENMG: The Finale

Third and last part of the final battles. If you want to know what's going on here, check the previous two parts if you haven't.    • FFVI LLNENMG Part IX: Tier 1 & 2   (part 1)    • FFVI LLNENMG Part X: Tier 2 continued   (part 2) Yes, Low Level No Equipment Natural Magic challenge is finally complete! Has to be the hardest one I've done in this game by far, too, and when I began I didn't believe I would end up beating the game. Levels of the victorious party: Shadow - 6 Gau - 12 Strago - 8 Gogo - 8 In the previous video, we kill Magic and end the most painful, luck-reliant and just blatantly frustrating part of the final battles that is the second tier. As his death counter, Magic casts Quarter on the party, followed by Dispel. The latter removes Image and Auto-Reraise statuses from Shadow. I still have Image on Gogo, and Auto-Reraise on the other three. And we enter the third tier. Immediately Sleep, the main enemy here, is of great threat, as he has a 33% chance of destroying the party with Merton. Fortunately, he uses W Wind instead. Three characters are at 1 HP now, so I use a Megalixir just in case. Girl has 9999 HP which is exactly the damage Step Mine does, so what we have to worry about here is Sleep himself. Shadow renews his Image status because it may well save us during the boss's Calmness deathcounter(-s), and Gogo & Gau begin using Step Mine. Sleep has 40K so we need to use it only 4 times in addition to any other attack to end the battle. The problem here is that when Sleep has 4 digit HP (and slightly more), he starts using Meteo every turn. This one hits the whole party but has a good chance to miss, too. He can also use Meteo 33% of the time as counter on this stage, and also Train. Train sets silence, blocking the casting of Step Mine, so it's quite annoying too. Meteo is used here once, missing Shadow and Gogo but killing Strago and Gau. They are revived with Auto-Life which is nice, but that leaves me with only one character in this status, that being Gogo (and he hasn't been given the Item command). We kill Sleep with the next Step Mine and advance to fight Kefka himself. I'll save you time from reading on Kefka's AI, though I have to say this challenge was the first time I actually felt obliged to check how exactly he acts at which stage. The main problem here is surviving Goner. In a normal low level game, you can equip your party with Dragonboots and just jump in the air before it's executed but we can't equip anything here. Palidor summon? Well, we do have a 4% chance of Palidor being summoned if we use Magicite Shards but the percentage is nothing even remotely reliable. Auto-Life? Gogo has the status still, and if he isn't hit before Goner is used he can technically solo the boss after that. He'll most likely die from Havoc Wing/Meteor the next turn though, or get silenced by Train and won't be able to do anything but use Edgar's crappy tools then. I found only one solution to "surviving" Goner and that's to destroy Kefka before he gets the chance to use this. Kefka has 62K HP. He'll enter his Goner phase once below 32640 HP, which means 3 Step Mines are enough to trigger Goner. He'll still have 32K HP left and even if every attack coming from Gogo and Gau is a Step Mine we'll probably be defeated anyway. This is where Ice Shields come into play. I honestly wish that instead of trying to kill Shadow with Calmness Sleep would've got rid of Strago instead, but Terra in Morph status can toss those things for nearly 7K damage to a target weak to ice, giving us a good reason to debilitate the boss. But Shadow and Strago aren't very good Ice Shld users, so I decide against debilitating the boss (dangerous, seeing how he can just target everyone with a lv. 3 spell any time). Shadow does 1,2K damage with each shield, Strago - 1,5K. It's not much but at least by the time Kefka enters the Goner stage I can be sure I need 3 more Step Mines to finish the battle, as opposed to 4. I make as much use of the menu "trick" (common sense, I would say) as I can, and the Image status saves me on more than occasion. When Kefka's been hit by 3 Step Mines, I stop throwing shields and wait with Shadow and Strago. Reason: at this stage, Kefka counters everything with physical attacks and Hyperdrive and we want Gogo and Gau to be alive when Goner is used at all cost. Image saves me again, we see Goner, toss some shields, see a Step Mine, cry at Gogo attacking the boss instead of casting another one and dance when Step Mine is used once again, possibly a second before Goner. Victory! The "impossible" challenge is complete and I'm glad I recorded all those vids despite being sure I would never beat it. Thanks for watching!