FFVII - Solo Rotating Character No EXP Challenge, Part 44: Bizarro Sephiroth

Even though I now have access to pretty much everything in the game, these last two battles combined is the biggest obstacle in this challenge. This battle on its own is not a problem, but Safer is much harder and you need a setup that will work for both battles. It's rare that I have to do trial and error in these challenges. Some battles can be very hard, but I usually know how I'm going to do it and then the challenge is to execute it perfectly. Here, I had to go through this battle at least five times before I finally came up with something that worked. First, you need to pick your equipment. The Outsider is an obvious choice, as it has 8 materia slots and a +48 magic bonus. That's 14 more than his ultimate weapon. For the armor, I'm going with the Escort Guard, since it conveniently protects against Earth and Lightning, the exact two elements you need to deal with in these battles. It hurts to give up the Wizard Bracelet since it has two more slots and a +20 magic bonus, but its defense stat is crap and you don't have enough slots for two Elemental combos. To make up for it, I chose the Cursed Ring as my accessory. The materia was the biggest problem. I have 14 available slots and all the setups required at least 15 to have the necessary amount of HP, MP, magic and protections you need. This is why I had to do a lot of trial and error. I tried all the compromises, but they just didn't work. If I equipped a stronger magic materia to get a better magic stat, I would suddenly have too little HP. 477 really is the absolute minimum. With a stronger materia, I'd have 464, and that's not enough to guarantee surviving two of his attacks, or a critical one. However, with 477, my magic stat would be too low to guarantee enough damage for my MP Absorb against Safer. The MP is a whole other issue. You can only get to 112, but 106 really is the minimum for Safer. All these issues would be solved if I only had one more materia slot, but I didn't. The ultimate solution I finally came up with is something you don't think about, because it's something you never use in challenges. So, what did I end up with? 2x HP Plus, 2x Magic Plus, 1x MP Plus, Added Effect=Hades, Final Attack=Revive, W-Item and W-Summon are all required. In addition, I need one KotR for its +8 magic and +20% MP. That leaves only the MP Absorb combo with what I'm going to use for damage. I tried both Comet and Contain, but I quickly realized green materia wasn't going to work at all since at this point it misses nearly half the time. Not to mention they didn't work with my setup anyway for the reasons I mentioned above. Summons it is then, since they have an Attack% of 255 and won't miss. The obvious choice was Bahamut, since it's the most powerful one I can afford to use and it ignores defenses. Oops! You can only use it five times per battle, so again I needed that extra materia slot that I don't have for Mime. Then I finally realized it. The one thing that solved all my problems - Master Summon. It has no stat penalties and you can use the summons as many times as you like. So, how do we do this battle with the perfect setup? I said it's not a problem, but that doesn't mean it's simple either. You can't survive his regular attack without Barrier or Hero Drinks, so if he opens with that, you will die. If he uses Bizzarro Enegy instead, you can defend. Either way, use an Elixir and a Light Curtain on the next turn. I've told you many times that Barriers and the highest battle speed is a bad combo, but this is a special kind of battle where there's so much going on, you can make it last the entire battle with ATB at Wait, since the gauge will stop every time somebody takes an action. The head must be killed after Quake3 to prevent Stigma on the next turn, so launch two Bahamuts. This will take care of the arms as well. After one more attack from Sephiroth, you will get a few free turns where he does nothing. Use these to get your HP and MP back up, get Sadness back and start buffing up with Hero Drinks. Once you've used four, you can survive two of his attacks unless they go critical, so you can start killing him off. Bahamut is the most effective, but I mixed it up a little just because I can. It's not every day you get to play around with Master Summon in a low level challenge. Still reading? This must be the longest description I've written in a while. Only one more to go! Rules: 1. Solo Rotating Character - Only one character may be used per battle. This can be any character, but no character may be used in more than five boss battles. All optional bosses must be fought. 2. No EXP - Achieved with gameshark codes 3. No Damage Dealing Items Character uses so far: Cloud - 5 Barret - 5 Tifa -5 Aerith - 5 Red XIII - 5 Yuffie - 5 Cait Sith - 5 Vincent - 4 Cid - 5 Final Fantasy Challenge Discord:   / discord