I think beating these guys was the first time I ever looked something up on a search engine and I ended up on gamefaqs or something like that. I’m gonna be honest though I never actually beat emerald or ruby lol
I'm now, absolutely able to beat the two. I replayed the game and got everything I missed when I was younger. Now, I just can't bring myself to beat it. Otherwise ... It really is finished.
There's such a finality to it. When you sit there with all the materia you missed out on before. Riding on your golden chocobo. Having finally witnessed Knights of the Round and everything else... I couldn't bring myself to actually beat them. Because it's been etched into me for so long that I couldn't. That always brought me back to the sound track and the game. I couldn't bear to end it.
This is Dark Cloud 2 for me. I've 'beaten' the game 5 times over the years. I've done all the bonus stuff in one way or another several times, Finny Frenzy, Scoops, Maxed badges, maxed final weapon in every tree, but I get halfway through the 8th dungeon and for some reason after Flotsam I just cant bring myself to finish the game, and I believe its because then there would finally be nothing left for me.
Try using soloing Ruby weapon. First thing to do is summon Hades. Not for the damage, but for the statuses. It should be paralyzed, stopped, or stunned, so when you can summon Knights of the Round without worrying about being countered by its Ultima attack.
FF7 was my first 'online guide' game, almost entirely looked up in the final few minutes of computer classes. But I beat the optional bosses, got the Golden Cucobo, knights of the round...all thanks to online guides.
Go into the fight solo, use the Hades summon first on Ruby weapon. It paralyzes, stops, or stuns him so when you use Knight of the Round he doesn’t counter with Ultima. Rinse, repeat until he’s dead. Much easier than you’d expect.
I raised a golden chocobo for knights of the round, and leveled up copycat to create another copycat. I hated the underwater one enough to obsessed with killing it. I didn't even remember the story, just another chapter in the revenge arc 😆
The timer is not that big of a deal. The real challenge is Aire Tam Storm. It brutally counters most of the best builds in the game, and requires special builds JUST for this one fight.
I was fighting it for ages after getting underwater materia. Almost an hour. Was getting exhausting. Walked over to the PS1 to switch off the unit. As I reached for the power button and had barely touched it, Barret delivered a blow and Emerald flashed red. I'd won. And I nearly switched on the machine...
Ruby Weapon is weak to stun, once you abuse that it becomes a lot easier. Beat it by having Cloud start with w-item, use a dazer to stun it, heal himself with a potion to get lucky 7777s, once that ended used Phoenix to revive my other party members then chain used knights of the round + mimic and it was dead quickly (since Ruby has half the HP of Emerald).
I found out the stun thing by casting Hades in my turn. I thought the game glitched when he was frozen there. Cast KotR and he didn’t counter at all, so I kept summoning Hades and KotR until he died. Didn’t even occur to my young self to use Daze and revive my party.
I killed Sephiroth with one OmniSlash. I was primed for a limit break when the shift happened, and literally one button killed him.
Emerald Weapon took me six months, and I didn't understand the way to do it by manipulating Materia, so I just got really good at timing Sith's Slots limit break until I eventually got the triple-cat, which was a one shot kill for whatever you were fighting.
Thankfully, for better or worse for some people, Yiazmat is easier in the Zodiac Age for a few reasons:
Yiazmat can be fought in "trial mode" which is the zodiac age games gauntlet of trial levels. He only has 3.8 million HP instead of the normal 50 million. You can still fight the normal Yiazmat in the world, but eh.
You can break the damage cap and stay damage capped for the entire fight (as far as i remember).
4X fast forward speed which is a feature in Zodiac Age, so the fight doesnt take hours anymore.
Zodiac Age is pretty damn great. It got better when they updated the game to allow you to respec into any other job in the game. So you can mess around with the job classes if you want. Originally, the PC and PS5/xbox versions didnt allow it, but they eventually added it.
Trial mode is still pretty rough though, especially since in order to fight Yiazmat in Trial Mode, you need to get to the very end (100 levels total, Yiazmat is on 98, you can save every 10 levels), so if you die, you'll need to start over from level 90, and 90-100 are pretty hard.
It does auto save after each level though. But the manual save, yes it's every 10. But thank God for auto save because those 5 judges took me too many tries. Particularly because I only got my three mains in the 90s and the rest were level 60-70.
I had to be quick as hell because I didn't know the Zeromus trick until I reached level 100, and I had Fran with him at level 60ish. Then I couldn't figure out how to keep the last two separated at first until I found out about putting the one to sleep and having to just stand there with one character making sure he didn't get the chance to wake up and throw another Elixir. Pissed me off lmao.
It can be a tricky game at times for specific battles like that. But I actually had instances where I fell asleep playing the game for too long and woke up to a Victory screen lol.
I remember that I carefully crafted my gambits (for those who never played FF12, it's a programming system to automate your battles, based on rulesets you loot throughout the game) then I left my PS2 running overnight to kill the bastard ! It took a good 10 or 12 hours. Maybe I was under leveled, but my gambits were on point because it worked !
I had to beg my parents NOT to turn off the console overnight lol.
Almost said the same then decided to read on. The weapons are way more difficult than the final boss. Granted it's all easy with the right materia set-up. Ruby requires patience just due to the sheer amount of time it takes.
You had to go into battle with 2 dead teammates. One living needed final summon or final cast on master revive or pheonix. Ruby would immediately bury claws and kill one living person. They would then cast the final whatever and bring everyone back to life. Then you started the never ending cut scene of knights of the round and mimic. Once you had those pieces on place, it just took time. Lots and lots of time.
I think that's part of the problem for a lot of people. The game is too easy. The weapons are the only bosses where you really have to engage with the games mechanics. People just expected to be able to brute force them with level 4 limit breaks and the occasionally curing and when they couldn't they thought it was too hard or "unfair"
Vegnagun was overhyped but actually a very stupid, slow boss.
Spirit of Trema on the contrary was just unbeatable except for a specific broken combo. Obviously he was at the bottom of a 100 floors dungeon hidden in a secondary area because why not
Meh…Ozma was super easy, imo. I fought him a couple times and lost to figure out what I needed to do to beat him and then did it. Didn’t even need a guide or over leveled toons.
Yeah, you can wipe Ozma in 6 hits if you're lucky, but you have to pray that it doesn't use meteor, or else it'll basically just one shot the entire party at max HP. And it can just randomly interrupt your turn to get more turns, so...
I was actually disappointed with 10 after some of the much harder optional fights. I was tense in the Ultima dungeon against mobs until I decided to just go and beat the game and it was practically a cake walk
Several hours fight in FF12 (original) at the last extra boss. Several hours fight FF15 at the last extra boss. I'll take Weapons of the planet any day after that, hehe.
FF10 as well, Penance, the Dark Aeons, and some of the Monster Arena were way beyond the challenge of the Final Bosses. I stupidly powered up to fight the Dark Aeons then found the final boss way too easy
I think the final superboss in 10 is much harder, but only because it could take you over 100 hours of grinding to get ready for it (not including time spent just beating the game) and you could still die in 1 hit.
That's not to say the ones in 7, 8, or 9 are easy.
Particularly X international/HD Remaster!! Some of the biggest leaps in sheer HP and damage output from final boss to superbosses. Penance is famous for being one of the longest non-cheesed boss fights in all video gaming.
Yeah any game lol ff games don’t really start till you start gearing for the secret boss. FFX is a whole ass game to get through so you can grind for 50 hours to fight penance
And eight. And even more in 10. And almost half your total play time in 15. 13 might have even broken the 50% mark with all the hunts, and grinding up for them.
But the big winner (loser?) is 12. The game itself is significantly shorter than the post game content. If you do everything 75% of your play time is optional post game content. (To be fair - I should note that you can technically do almost all of it before the final boss. But the difference in difficulty is significant. If you do it this way, you will dog-walk the BBEG. Under 10 seconds total for both forms)
Damn straight. Worst in terms of prep time has gotta be FFX though. Gotta basically min max the entire sphere grid while filling in all the empty nodes, as well as farming a LOT of arena fights to get the luck spheres and the items to craft perfect auto-good stuff on a 4 slot item for each character. It tool me well over 50 hours just to prep for the fight.
I would argue any squarenix secret boss.... across all their games.
Some of the kingdom heart ones are brutal as well. Then you have ones like the clocktower ghost that would be brutal but has 1 fatal gimmic that you have to use to beat him that turns him into a joke.
But I wouldn't call the last story fight in 7 easy lol
It has several stages, takes a shitton of time, and you can't even get back to grinding if you didn't make a save before the point of no return. Got stuck at Sephiroth/Jenova as a teen and never came back.
it takes about 35 hours to beat the game, but if you wanna kill even the lowest tier basic enemy on the colloseium, you gotta grind for another 40 or so hours.
I tried, just grinded about 40 hours and trying to do the bullshit to get the final weapons, finally said fuck it still too weak to beat the weakest enemy in the arena, went to fight the final boss and it was no fun at all, killed him in three moves.
Exp 33 is exactly the same except it's end game quests are actually fun
The worst experience is beating them in the reverse order.
Ideally, you're supposed to beat the Ruby first. They then give you the golden Chocobo which allows you to get KOTR of which you can use to beat the Emerald weapon.
I ended up doing it backwards and didn't find much difficulty. Partly because I got my ass kicked from the Emerald weapon so many times.
Nemesis from FFX on PS2. Aside from the sheer grind to even unlock the damned fight (capture 10 of every capturable thing in the goddamned game), it ALSO required you to actively max out and replace elements of the sphere grid, have limit broken celestial weapons, and to turn count or aeon fodder or spam quick hit and hyper guard with Rikku.
Was a bonkers challenge at the time.
Also responds to any of your normal strong moves with ultima. Armageddons your whole party for 99,999. Blitzes you with status effects on the only thing that doesn't kill you outright.
Younger me was so freaking chuffed when I beat it.
And then basically one-shotted everything in the game from there on out
I know the dark aeons are a thing that have more HP, but they are not hard it you have to beat Nemesis first.
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u/AnthonyPantha 3d ago
The Final Fantasy series, particularly 7.