GarlandTheGreat | FFVII - Solo Rotating Character No EXP Challenge, Part 45: Safer-Sephiroth @GarlandTheGreat | Uploaded May 2023 | Updated October 2024, 1 day ago.
It's rare that the final battle is the hardest in any of these challenges, but this is one where it is. One of the reasons has to do with what I talked about in the previous video - finding the right setup that will work for both battles, but this is a much harder battle on its own. He's got several attacks that will kill you, so you need to be able to deal enough damage before you run out of Final Attacks. In the previous battle, my HP and defense stats were the most important. Here, it's the magic and MP. That's why I needed a setup that got all these stats right with absolutely no compromises.

So, what's the strategy then? Sephiroth has a fixed attack pattern and it goes like this: Wall, Shadow Flare, Wing, Ascend, Pale Horse, Super Nova, Break, Descend and DeSpell. Then it repeats from Shadow Flare on the condition that he's got Slow, otherwise he uses Deen instead. Since we can prevent him from using Deen, only Wing and Pale Horse will kill you. That means you have until the third Pale Horse to kill him, which gives you exactly 19 turns. That may sound like a lot when you have W-Summon and unlimited Bahamuts, but there's a limit to how many turns you can actually use to attack. In fact, it's very few, since you lose any turn where you get revived and we have to use many of them for preparations.

On the first turn, use a Mirror and Holy Torch. This will reflect Shadow Flare and make it deal full damage. Now launch your first Bahamut. Without Hero Drinks, it's only going to deal about 5000 damage, so you won't get enough MP back to use two. You also need 34 MP to get revived on the next turn, so you can either select Bahamut again and see it fail to summon, or do something funny instead. After being revived, you'll be low on MP, so use an Elixir and a Spider-Web to slow him down. Added Effect=Hades in the armor takes care of all the statuses from Pale Horse and Super Nova, so that's one less thing to worry about. After Pale Horse, you are now in the longest streak of harmless attacks, so it's time to start buffing up with Hero Drinks. Ideally, you should use four, but you also need to use another Elixir and can't afford to waste another turn for that, so three will have to do.

Then it's finally time to launch your main damage dealer - a double Bahamut buffed up by three Hero Drinks. This costs 200 MP, so with only 106 at your disposal, you need to get at least 94 of it back through MP Absorb, which requires at least 9400 damage. However, you have one more turn coming up where you get to W-Summon, but you won't be able to use an Elixir before it. So, in order to use Bahamut four times, you can't afford to lose more than 2 MP on average from the first three attacks, meaning you want to see at least 9800 damage. Now you know why my MP and magic stat had to be as high as possible. Any less MP, or any less damage and it's just not gonna work. Sadly, I couldn't quite get there. I would get 9800+ most of the time, but I did get as low as 95XX once. This is not a problem on the first turn, but if you get to the second turn with less than 100 MP, you'll have to use Odin instead and I never got as far as checking how much damage it would deal.

Before you even get to the second turn where you can use W-Summon, Sephiroth will use DeSpell on himself. This will remove Slow, so you need to give him another Spider Web, or you'll get Deen'd on the next turn. With Slow, he'll use Shadow Flare instead, so the other item must be a Mirror. This is why you couldn't sneak in another Elixir before your next attack.. Then it's time to W-Summon again. If you do have 100 MP or more, you should select Odin as the second attack just to make sure you don't waste the turn. I don't know why I didn't. Now, you've done a full cycle of his attack pattern, so next up you'll get killed by the wing attack and lose all your buffs. From here, you just have to repeat everything you did before and you will be able to deal enough damage to take him down before the next wing attack.

That's it. While Demons Gate may be harder in the sense that it's more stressful and unpredictable, I already knew beforehand how I was going to do it, so it was only a matter of pulling it off. Here, the difficulty was actually figuring out what to do. I had a vague idea, but I had to go through a lot of trial and error to come up with something that worked. That's why I consider this to be the harder battle, and this can still be really nerve wrecking, since it only takes one small mistake to mess it all up.

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 - 5
Cid - 5

Final Fantasy Challenge Discord: discord.gg/4gqshK6