Thursday, June 27, 2013

Final Fantasy VIII: Omega Weapon

Final Fantasy VIII has a couple of challenge bosses. Ultimate Weapon is hidden in a secret dungeon (under Bahamut's cave I think) and Omega Weapon is in the final dungeon. Final Fantasy VIII is also set up such that when you enter the final dungeon you can't go back. In my current game I ended up meandering into the final dungeon without really realizing what was going on, and I played for a while after that, so either I reload old saved games or I give up on the secret dungeon and Ultimate Weapon. I remember him being quite easy, so I decided to press onward.

Omega Weapon, on the other hand, I could still try. I didn't remember anything about him except that he was harder than Ultimate Weapon, supposedly very hard, but that I beat him pretty easily when I first played the game way back in the day. I didn't want to look anything up about it until I'd tried him a few times first. Those few times made it clear just how hard this guy is for a level 7 party... The problem is he has an attack that hits the whole party for 9998 damage. And with me being level 7 and all, getting to 9999 max health is hard. I think I could have done it if I'd taken the time to farm up 300 copies of Ultima, but I hadn't, so I couldn't. The best I could do was around 9300 or so, which was not good enough.

I tried a bunch of different ideas for how to survive it. Protect? Nope. Shell? Nope. Float? Nope. I had a couple one shot items that made me invincible for a short period of time. Those would work. But I only had 2 and couldn't get any more in the final dungeon. The game doesn't have an auto-raise spell of some kind which would be my typical fallback trick for this sort of problem.

I went and did some reading on the internet and the claim is the fight is doable, but in order to win at level 7 you need to pick up as many copies as you can of an item that makes your whole party invincible for a short period of time. I didn't have any of those! But you can crush a card I didn't have into some.

I now have two options... Skip Omega Weapon on this playthrough or load an older game. If I was still transiting to work every day I might be willing to play the PSP more and do the reloading thing, but as things stand now I think I'm just going to skip him. I've beaten him before, I know it can be done, and I know I was on the right track with my own plan for beating him with the invincible consumable. If I ever play a low level game again I'll be sure to grind up Ultima spells and/or scoop up a bunch of invincible items.

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