While Final Fantasy has its own share of hard bosses, Record Keeper managed to have so many bosses over its currently ongoing run that it managed to earn its own page.
Note: Final Bosses and Wake Up Call Bosses are not allowed unless they're overly difficult by their standards. Superbosses are not allowed; they're optional and have no standards for difficulty.
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- Any boss who is "out-of-range". Out-of-range bosses can't be hit with melee weapons, which means you can only rely on ranged weapons and magic to kill them. Bottomswell in particular can be quite tedious to fight because it can remove party members from the fight for a time.
Realm Dungeons and Challenge Events
- Final Fantasy II:
- Apocalypse+ Red Soul and Ogre Mages, from Scott's introductory "Inherited Blazing Will" event. In previous fights, their Blink could be bypassed with Lifesiphon and Soul Breaks. In this battle, all physical attacks have a flat chance to miss, even abilities meant to be guaranteed to hit like Flashing Blade and even Soul Breaks. Thus, magic is strongly encouraged... except the Red Soul and the Ogre Mages have different element weaknesses (Earth and Fire respectively), with massive resistance or outright absorption against all elements they aren't weak against, when magic characters tend to have trouble with non-elemental damage. And on top of that, the Red Soul has a significant amount of HP on its own while the Ogre Mages will use a high-chance group Sleep spell followed by non-stop RES-ignoring magic spam if you let them live too long.
- Final Fantasy III:
- Leviathan, even in Classic dungeons. Once you get past the trash mobs, you have to deal with a boss that attacks twice per turn, can petrify with its standard attack, can cast Protect and Haste on itself, and starts unleashing Tsunami after Tsunami once half of its enormous HP meter is taken down. And Dr. Mog's tips don't mention his double turns and self-buffs at all, making for an absolute nightmarish battle if the player didn't know to bring dispelling abilities along. This might be the hardest story dungeon in the game if you're short on manpower or Realm Synergy.
- Final Fantasy IV:
- Pretty much any of the Lunar Ruins bosses. They include two of the hardest and the most RNG-dependent boss in the game. When a Time-Limit Boss is the easiest boss out of the bunch, you know you've got a rough series of dungeons up ahead.
- Most incarnations of Dark Bahamut. Introduced to players in the Golbez event, he resisted every element but Poison, started the fight off with Megaflare, healed himself, and bounced Flares off of himself, hurting the party even more. Also uses Megaflare every five turns. It was even worse in the dungeon version - same relative difficulty, except with enemy mobs to kill before. You better be up to full health, or you are going to die.
- Ogopogo is also the same way. Aside from the Deluge, he resists all elements but Lightning and Poison, counters Lightning attacks with a spell that takes 90% of your HP, and has a chance at countering Poison with a 25% AoE HP spell. And he also uses Deluge twice. Get mitigation up and heal quick or you lose.
- Ultimate+ Asura and Leviathan. Leviathan bombards your party with powerful magic attacks while Asura will buff herself and Leviathan, debuff and dispel your party, and counter most attacks you make against her with a strong physical hit. You're also required to defeat Asura first, as she will revive Leviathan with full HP if you defeat him first, which also will lose you mastery medals—not an easy feat, given that she absorbs multiple elements, including lightning (which Leviathan is weak against). It went From Bad to Worse when they returned as the second Apocalypse+ battle, and are still considered to be the most difficult Apocalypse+ yet.
- Ultimate+ Cagnazzo in the Twin Mages of Mysidia event. Imagine your average Cagnazzo fight. Haste, status effects, all that jazz. Now make it level 160. Now jack up his stats to make all his magic attacks a guaranteed OHKO without mitigation and give him blazing speed. Now expand his magic arsenal to a single-cast spell, a triplecast, and an AoE Water spell. Now strengthen his Tsunami barrier so it takes three Thunder hits to dispel instead of one. Now make his Tsunami attack ignore RES, making Shellga or Wall useless. Now make his single-target Slow and Sleep spells become AoE. That is U+ Cagnazzo - the first boss in a long while that combines high DPS with A.I. Roulette.
- Final Fantasy V:
- Elite Ronka Ruins, Part 2. Tanky trash mobs leading up to a boss with various AoE Magic spells of different elements, three HP-based spells, and the ability to proc Poison, Sap, Paralyze, Blind, and Confuse. Archeoaevis is not a fun boss to face, even accounting for the fifth stage's Death vulnerability. Silence is basically mandatory here. Very hard for beginners.
- Ultimate+ Bartz in Gilgamesh's Burst Soul Break event. This fight encompasses exactly what it feels like for the enemies in FFV, because Bartz pulls no punches. Unlike most bosses, which are limited to weak/non-damaging actions for their first few moves, Bartz can immediately choose to use his AoE Kick Physical, sometimes even managing to use it twice before the party's first turn is done, which means any attempt that gets into the fight has to scramble to stabilize everyone's health. In the actual fight, Bartz has a myriad of multi-hit attacks, including 3-4 hit Random Target Spellblade moves, and a chance to counter Physicals with a 2-hit move and Magic with an AoE Gravity move. On top of being strong by typical bruiser boss standards, Bartz uses certain moves when his HP drops below certain numbers, and they're his playable version's soul breaks! After dropping to around 60%-70%, Bartz uses "Trueblade of Legend", which like his SSB is 5 hits (thankfully Random target for the player's sake) and a hefty defense boost, and at 30% uses "Light of the Four", his 6 hit Burst Soul Break, and subsequently gains Haste and a buff to ATK/DEF/MAG/RES. Since these are not statuses like Protect or Shell, they can only be removed by overwriting them (with Armor Break/Breakdown and Full Break, respectively), lest Bartz take that much longer to kill and hit even harder. And then there's a Cid Mission. It's a good thing this event's first banner was highly rated, because if you don't have good synergy, Bartz is going to hurt.
- Final Fantasy VI:
- Legendary Plunder (Event): Red Dragon, an enemy that will begin spamming powerful fire attacks as they get weaker, and if you get the smart idea of using Reflect, they go out of their way to get rid of it. While Classic Red Dragon is manageable, the Expert version is worse - and if you want to master the event, you have to not use ice attacks, their weakness, and bring Locke with you on top of that, who must survive the encounter.
- Apocalypse+ Chardanook alternates between its Goddess and Evil Spirit forms. If it gets too much time in its Goddess form or is hit by a non-holy attack, it'll hit your entire party with crippling status effects. Its Evil Spirit form is immune to physical damage until you hit it with a magical fire or holy attack (and is highly resistant to holy damage as well), and will switch back to Goddess form after its third attack. Defeating it requires keeping track of its turns, which makes for a challenging but still fair boss. But then there's the Jump Start version of this battle, which starts your entire party with zero ATB. Without preparation, Chardanook will horribly overkill one of your heroes for its second action, before you even have a chance to do anything.
- The "Feast of Glory" festival had as its main event the "Gauntlet of Warriors", of which Siegfried from FFVI is the last boss. Like his original game, you first fight a push-over knockoff of him. But when you fight him proper, you end up discovering that he's far more dangerous than his FFVI counterpart: First because he has no element attached to him (despite being weak to all elements by 20%), making resisting his attacks a massive challenge and forcing you to resort to Break stacking to get at least 50% of his ATK and/or MAG down, as he plays mixed, meaning you can't just defend against one stat. This is important because one of his opening moves is Hyperdrive, which pierces RES and does over 6k damage unmitigated (and, as you guessed, Godwall will not protect you from it). He also has various Gravity and non-piercing attacks to compound his moves, and very high speed to ensure you will be battling for your life. Everyone save for the middle slot will need some sort of resistance to Interrupt as well, which is his main strategy when his weak phase starts at 70%, and at 40%, he just opens the phase with Blademaster Truestrike to deal a fixed 6000 HP damage to the party. If someone is under that amount and has no Last Stand, that someone is as good as dead, and from that point on it becomes a massive DPS race where you need to finish the fight before he does. Now, the worst part about this fight? DeNA locked a story event again behind a hard boss, just like they did with Gabranth in the Autumn Fest.
- Final Fantasy VII:
- JENOVA BIRTH, in her Elite painting and as the final boss of the The Jenova Project! (Event). First, the fights leading up to her are full of Goddamned Bats (with soldiers able to blind your characters, and dragons who can use Flamethrower on your whole party). Then the boss itself: JENOVA has no weakness, is susceptible to only one status ailment (Slow), has over 150'000 HP, and attack twice per turn. Tail Laser will hit your whole party for quite a lot of damage, and on the off chance you brought Power Break with you, she can use Gaz, a single-target magical attack which stings a lot (so you have to take Magic Break as well, unless you are ready to gamble on her not casting it). Long story short, the battle is a test of endurance in which you have to slowly but surely kill her before you run out of abilities and she kills you. And don't even think about going into this battle without damage mitigation such as Protectga, Tyro's Sentinel Grimoire and Power/Magic Break: you will not survive without those. Now even made worse, considering her Elite painting until a balance update used to block the way from getting Cloud's RM3, Mako Might — widely accepted to be the one of best in the game — and his RM4, Truthseeker, a great damage buff RM that is compatible with a huge amount of characters along with Core Warrior's own RM4.
- Reno and Rude during the "Footsteps of the Cetra" event, mainly because your odds of mastering the fight are very RNG-dependent. First, it is essential to set up some mitigation (such as Magic Breakdown, Shellga or Sentinel Grimoire) before Rude uses Fira: if he acts before you do and cast Fira, you may as well immediately quit and reload the app. Second, Reno has two extremely annoying attacks which will make you lose a lot of turns: Turk Light, a very powerful physical attack which is almost guaranteed to confuse its target (80%), and Pyramid, which traps its target, preventing the victim from taking actions and removes all status buffs or debuffs, meaning that if Reno hits your Retaliate user, not only you have to free him from the Pyramid, but you will also need to re-apply Retaliatenote . You can prevent Reno from confusing your characters by Blinding him, since Turk Light is a physical attack, but since Dark Buster only has a 30% chance of blinding the target, it can be frustrating to actually get it to stick. However, you have no way of stopping him from hitting your characters with Pyramid, and he is perfectly able to make you waste turns freeing your trapped characters on top of disabling your buffs, making Magic Breakdown all but mandatory in order to stop Rude from killing your characters, since some of them will lose the protection granted by Shellga or Sentinel Grimoire because of Pyramid. Thankfully, both can be Slowed, though since Leg Shot has a rather low probability to inflict Slow (30%) most players are better off using Slowga, which is more likely to work (80%). Once you manage to kill one, the other is just a formality, but together they are a force to be reckoned with, and if you are unlucky this fight can be extremely frustrating.
- Gaea's Cliff (Elite). Jenova DEATH is everything about the first two Jenovas amplified - attacking twice a turn in many different ways and hitting like a truck. Thankfully, she is susceptible to Sleep and Stop, but that does not help bring down her DPS.
- Ultimate Bahamut SIN during the Cloudy Wolf event. Bahamut SIN by himself has 231,000 HP. On top of that, he has respawning adds (with ~36,000 HP each) that can cause Stun, Sap, and later on, Slow. Which you have to kill 8 of to master. And to make things worse, in order to avoid his two most powerful attacks, you have to destroy a 37,000 HP sphere four times - and you can only take a minimum of two hits to get Mastery. In order to get mastery, you have to do 305,000 HP worth of damage to SIN (including his spheres) and 222,000 HP worth of Shadow Creepers. To avoid Petaflare and Gigaflare altogether, you have to do a staggering 379,000 damage to Bahamut SIN. This boss is a massive DPS check - complete with strong AoE physical and magical attacks.
- Ultimate Rufus and Dark Nation, from Vincent's event. Dark Nation will spam buffs on Rufus and debuffs on your party. Rufus's attacks are painful enough, but once enough turns pass, he'll start spamming Mako Cannon, dealing ridiculous amounts of damage to your entire party even with multiple layers of mitigation. The battle amounts to praying that Dark Nation doesn't haste Rufus and that you can DPS him down before he goes trigger-happy.
- Hell, the first Rufus and Dark Nation fight from the very first event, Of Shinra and Legends, qualifies as this. The only way to mitigate his strong attacks (long before the age of Protectga or even Medica) was Blind. The only way to land Blind was a Dark Attack - which only has a 10% chance to land.
- Ultimate+ Sephiroth, from Sephiroth's Wardrobe Record's event. His DPS was very high and included three powerful, scripted Defense-ignoring attacks. It was widely seen as the hardest Ultimate+ since Caius. This was even harder if you attempted the Cid Mission, which restricted the characters you could use to FFVII characters. And to make things worse, in Japan this boss wasn't tooled to a Cid Mission party.
- Nearly averted by a glitch. This glitch allowed the Cid's Mission to register as completed despite not with a party from FFVII. DeNA gave the community Mythril as an apology and said that this would not be fixed to ensure fairness to the community, but reversed a few days later and fixed them. They gave the community 2 mythrils as compensation for it.
- The last boss of the "Mired in Crisis" event, Despair Sephiroth. He hits very hard, hits very fast (with most of his actions having low cast times), and uses a dangerous mix of physical and magical attacks that hit single targets or your entire party. But what makes him truly give you despair is his Dispel of Despair, which removes all buffs and stat boosts from your party members. And he will use Dispel of Despair three times during the battle, making Roaming Warriors useless for filling a gap in your team's Soul Breaks unless you can recover from one of them on your own. To add insult to injury, his second Dispel of Despair is followed by three near-instant-cast group magic attacks that can very easily wipe out your now-unbuffed party unless you're at full health and he's been debuffed enough, and he will begin spamming Octoslash in his final phase. The only real form of mercy you get in this battle is that his attacks are almost completely scripted, allowing you to prepare for them in advance.
- Final Fantasy VIII:
- To Slay a Sorceress (Event - first issue): In the Elite version, the Archaeosaur is an insane damage sponge (over 150'000 HP). You'd better pray that Poison and Blind stick, and pack a lot of Blizzard-related abilities. Seifer is arguably worse, since he doesn't share Archaeosaur's weaknesses, and has a very high defense (how high you ask? He has 495 Defense and 165,888 HP), though he is susceptible to Slow, and while you can't Poison him, he has a weakness to poison damage. And then you have both Iguions, who can use Magma Breath, an attack able to petrify your whole party in one go if you are unlucky, leading to a game over. Thus, you need to bring a character equipped with a honed Stona and the accessory preventing petrification. The worst part? You need to fight Iguions, Seifer and Edea all in a row. If you ever manage to reach Edea, your party will be severely exhausted, with little to no abilities left to use and little to no Record Synergy in the realm. Bluntly put, if you don't spend Mythril to regenerate your team and refresh your abilities, it is impossible to win those fights.
- To Slay a Sorceress (Event - re-issue): the ++ boss fight, which pits the player against Seifer, Raijin and Fujin at the same time. The main difficulty is to avoid losing more than two medals if you want to get Mastery, which is a very harsh requirement: it is very difficult to not lose medals for Damage Taken in general, even with good mitigation, and downright impossible to not lose at least one medal for Actions Taken. The good news is that all three of them can be put to sleep: with a Roaming Warrior friend equipped with an AoE Sleep Soul Break relic, it is possible to make them fall asleep and kill them with spells only (magical damage won't wake up targets). The bad news is that there is no guarantee that it will stick on all three of them, and it is very likely that they will land a few attacks before you finish casting Sleep (and if Seifer casts Fira before you finish casting, you will have no choice but to immediately close the app and restart the fight), or when they wake up before you have the chance to reapply Sleep.
- Galbadia Garden 3 (Elite): the last stage is a Sequential Boss against Seifer and Edea. The good news is that Edea will actually stand idle as long as Seifer is alive. Now here are the bad news: while Seifer will only be able to use two single target attacks, you still need to put up some mitigation, since his Fira can deal quite a lot of damages. What's worse is that he has a lot of HP and one of the highest defense score among bosses: even with a 5★ FFVIII sword and Advance, you will be lucky to do more than 3000 damages per hit. He is just that tough. The only way to deal with him quickly is magic (his resistance is abysmal in comparison to his defense), especially -aja spells and Biora, his weakness. The problem is that Seifer is the easy part of the fight: once he is down, Edea jumps into the action, and her first move will always be to cast Maelstrom, a gravity-like attack which will reduce everyone's HP by 50% (meaning that your Damage Taken medals will tank), and she can repeat that attack anytime she wants. After that, she will use powerful black magic, protect herself from your magic with Reflect, and dispel your protection spells. She is also the polar opposite of Seifer, with one of the highest resistance score but very low defense, meaning that she will shrug off any spell you throw at her. Thankfully both are weak to the status effect Slow, and Power Creep over time made this fight much more manageable.
- Conquer Tonberry King, from the "As The Sky Falls" event. Its moveset consists entirely of a weak group attack...and Ultimate It's Sharp!, which is practically guaranteed to overkill whoever it hits—it hits for 9999 damage at first, then 99,999 damage once Tonberry King's HP drops, then gains a 93% automatic One-Hit KO chance in Tonberry King's final phase. And just to counter Last Stand, its group attack has a decent chance to inflict Sap, which will promptly kill anyone who survived a Ultimate It's Sharp! with it. The solo version of the fight, however, completely inverts this, to the point where it can easily be completely broken by using Galuf's invulnerability Soul Breaks since It's Sharp! always targets whoever has the lowest HP and as an additional form of mercy, it also skips the first 3 turns, allowing you to easily set up your buffs and deal additional damage to it.
- Final Fantasy IX:
- Tantarian in the Realm Dungeons is a nightmare, not for its demands or difficulty, but for its mechanic, inherited from its home game. You need to hit for 25%~45% of its max HP in one turn (12~15k for Classic, straight around 20k for Elite) for the book to open and enable you to directly damage it. Brought weapons and abilities that can't do that range of damage by either doing too much or too little damage? Well, you're fucked and stuck in a never-ending fight. To add insult to injury, it was also used in a number of newer IX evens with the same mechanic still in place, until they finally changed it so that you only need to inflict enough damage to open it up.
- +++ Soulcage in Zidane and Amarant's event. Very high DPS but could be mitigated with Blind. Landing statuses before Machinist skills were added was hell too - the maximum chance to for Blind was 30%. Fire was a weakness, but got hard-countered by turning those fire attacks around on you.
- Ultimate Beatrix, from her own introductory event. Her Reflect completely neuters mages for this fight, most of her attacks inflict massive damage, and she will twice use Climhazzard to reduce the entire party's HP to one. And her Stock Break inflicts Sap to your entire party, making it entirely possible for your entire party to drop dead a second after Climhazzard without being able to do anything about it. On top of that, two mastery requirements are to inflict holy-elemental damage to her (which she isn't even weak against) and to use Armor Strike (a 4★ Knight ability that has limited effectiveness without high-level synergy armor). To this day, it's considered one of the cheapest and most unfair boss fights in the game's history.
- Ultimate+ Kuja in his introductory event is seen across the community to be the hardest boss since Bahamut SIN. This boss is very fast and constantly spams powerful physical and magical attacks. Combine that with a scripted Gravija and it's pretty deadly.
- Ultimate++ Meltigemini is also considered a very hard boss fight. The fight starts off with Zorn and Thorn. On their 1st turn they use scripted magic attacks and than a physical attack on their 2nd and 3rd turn. If you don't defeat one of them before every 5th turn they'll use dual meteor. Now that's the easy part. After you defeat both of them they'll fuse into Meltigemini. He starts using Venom Powder which will poison your party and then use Ultimate Meteor on his 2nd turn which ignores your resistance. He has a chance to counter your attacks with Ultimate Wings which ignores your defence. Once he's been brought to around half hp, he'll use Viral Smoke which saps your party and do another Ultimate Meteor. But his most deadly attack is his AoE Bioga, which hurts even with mitigation. And he spams it. And he's fast. And there's a Cid Mission for this. It was awful.
- Final Fantasy X:
- +++ Sanctuary Keeper, in Auron's Legendary Guardian event. Hits like a truck with both magic and power (to the tune of 5,000 HP without mitigation), buffs himself, heals himself, and if you put Poison on it, cures its own statuses. And then, debuffs you. Many a player was triggered by the heavy RNG involved.
- The very first Apocalypse+ boss pitted players against a Sequential Boss consisting of Valefor, Ifrit, and Ixion. Valefor uses multiple attacks that can Slow your party members, including a scripted use of a group Slow attack, while Ixion frequently dispels your party members, with its own group dispel. Ixion on its own is a Marathon Boss, but the nearly one million HP between the three is a major test of your resources and endurance.
- Final Fantasy XII:
- While all bosses along the Pharos of Ridorana are just as bad as their FFXII counterparts on the Realm Dungeons, Fenrir takes the cake. Blindingly fast (and starts with Haste on top of that), very high defenses, will not react to any element that's not Earth (it absorbs Wind, so Wind-based Cloudburst strats are useless), and opens the fight with an AoE move with high chance of blinding your party. Needless to say, the Elite version of this fight is just stupid if you're bringing a physical team.
- The last dungeon of the Pharos may actually be worse. You're pitted against a Boss Rush comprised of Gabranth, and then Dr. Cid and his pet Esper, Famfrit. Gabranth is a damaging whore who forces you to go all out in a fight where you shouldn't, because it's the second of three rounds. He does pretty well his job of wearing you out, because Dr. Cid Bunansa will hit you like a truck unless you bring proper mitigation, and only answers well to Holy attacks. And should you bring his health down to half, he'll sic Famfrit on you, and expect it to be immune to most elemental damage, absorbing Water and being weak only to Fire, as you have to beat it while Cid buffs it in an unreachable state until you take his Esper down. After you finally bring his beast down, Cid pulls out all the stops and starts pulling massively damaging moves that will subjulgate your party if you're not on Wall + Protectga. You really need to bring a team prepared for both fights, and have appropriate answers for both Cid and Famfrit at that, while still doing the medal requirements. Have we mentioned this Dungeon on Elite is D212?
- The event that brought Balthier's Arcane Soul Break brings both Fenrir and Cid/Famfrit as their top bosses (D220 and D260, respectively), almost as if DeNA was basically intent on spitting on your face. At least you don't have to fight Gabranth right before Famfrit on this one...
- Ultimate Vossler, in the Tempered Resolve event. The event's design hamstrung you into bringing Black Magic, a Slow ability, and Dispel, which made it harder to run a physical setup. He casted Reflect on himself, which made it harder to run a mage team. His adds use AoE Magic and can Slow your party. And once you got them down, he used Triplestrike and Quadstrike. Three to four strong attacks that targeted the party member with the highest HP and ignored Retaliate. This boss is so hard that he single-handedly changed the entire metagame, making Retaliate teams much harder to use.
- Ultimate++ Daedalus, from the "Heir of the Dynast-King" event. He uses numerous group attacks as his HP drops, including a Defense-ignoring group attack. He can inflict Slow with one of his attacks. But far worse, his Pulsar Wave attack has a chance to stop whoever it hits for up to twenty seconds, guaranteeing your party will be crippled if he manages to land Stop on too many of your characters (or even just your healer or Support).
- Final Fantasy XIII:
- One of the last Realm dungeons for the first game has Bandersnatch and Jabberwocky as a boss. Like in the original, they force you to fight with a mixed team, as one is immune to physical attacks and the other is immune to magic. The normal dungeon just has you blasting them with Soul Breaks and being done with it. The Elite one? Good luck with that. It's a D187 fight, and unlike most fights where you get a Dual Boss, Bandersnatch and Jabberwocky happen to be Damage Sponge Bosses that pack a big punch, meaning you have to bring powerhouses on both physical and magical sides if you want to keep pace and survive the fight.
- Elite Bahamut was scary. Mitigating his attack isn't hard, but depleting his 271,000 HP in 60 seconds is another challenge in and of itself. This was before the days of Shout, which conveniently combined the most helpful skills for this together.
- "Lightning Strikes" (Event): Brynhildr, who was That One Boss in the original game, comes back with a vengeance. The aptly named "L'Cie Despair ++" stage pits you against the fire eidolon, who has a devastating ability set, including Gunshot, a 6-hit attack, and Pyroburst, which deals heavy fire damage to everyone. Brynhildr also has top notch defense, with over 200,000 HP, and unless one got lucky with the gacha most players would have next to no FFXIII equipment to use against her. Thanksfully, she has an easy to exploit Ice weakness, and it is possible to exploit her Gunfire attack with the Sentinel Soul Break of Paladin Cecil as your Roaming Warrior: bring a character able to use Retaliate, make him use the Sentinel RW Soul Break, and watch him counters Brynhildr six times in a row after being targeted with Gunshot.
- Actually every incarnation of Brynhildr is That One Boss level. Fast DPS machines tend to do that.
- Ultimate+ Caius in Serah's event is considered one of the hardest Ultimate+ fights in the game. The battle starts off with him doing two scripted physical attacks to your party followed by launch. His damage output is so insane that wall is pretty much required. He's also incredibly fast and gets EVEN FASTER when his HP is brought under 50%. The worst part though is that he has an ability called Body and Soul which grants him regen as well as increase his Attack and Magic.
- Ultimate++ Anavatapta Warmech. Twice in the battle, it activates Omnegator, which No Sells all damage it takes until it is hit by six attacks (lightning-elemental attacks counting double). And if you don't take down its Omnegator fast enough, it spams an HP to One attack. Past 50% HP, it begins spamming an extremely-powerful Defense-ignoring attack that can easily wipe out your front-row heroes. It was one of the bosses to return for the Rebirth Dungeons, in which its Omnegator required even more hits to deactivate.
- Apocalypse+ Proudclad, from the "Led by Fate" event. It's a simple battle, with the Proudclad accompanied by two "bits" that inflict weak laser attacks on your party...until the boss drops below 70% HP, at which point it deactivates its limiters and begins destroying your party. Its Ultimate Retaliatory Strike ignores DEF and is ranged, doing huge damage to your Squishy Wizards and healers. But far worse are the two bits, which begin hitting harder, do four attacks a turn, and due to being untargetable adds cannot be debuffed. Defeating it boils down to saving your strongest attacks and Soul Breaks to wipe it out before it wipes you out.
- Bahamut SIN, Cagnazzo, and Caius were so infamous that there was an event dedicated to getting revenge on them with a lucky draw with the relics that were available to get at their respective times.
Torments
- Old Torments
- The FFII fight against the three Gigas remains one of the hardest Torment bosses released on that age. The Fire, Ice, and Lightning Gigas each absorb their own element and have their own weakness that must be exploited for mastery (as well as a shared Earth weakness). Unlike the FFV Torment, using group attacks is strongly discouraged, as the Ice Gigas will counter everything that can be countered with a painful group Blizzaga. The Lightning Gigas is both the strongest and the fastest, forcing you to blitz him down as fast as possible—not an easy feat given that his weakness, poison, is the hardest-to-exploit element in the game.
- The FFIII battle against Bahamut. It's a Jump Start Battle, which is only minor respite against a foe that has over 800,000 HP. To make matters worse, he's only weak against wind below 40%—at which point Bahamut begins using Curaja on itself every other turn for over 9300 HP healed, and counters everything that can be countered (everything but summons, Soul Breaks, and dances) with the same Curaja. Unlike its lesser-difficulty battles, D300 Bahamut is immune to Reflect which could be used in those lower-difficulty battles to bounce his Curaja spells on your party, requiring a massive amount of offense to power through its healing and finish it off before you run out of abilities and buffs, and because it's a Jump Start battle, the 3 bars of SB are all you're going to get and you can't gain any more during the battle.
- FFV's Torment was the famous Trench Trio: Phobos, Nereid, and Triton. They combine punishing AoE attacks, 50% weakness to differen elements, and high health. They also can't be zerged down one by one - if you don't finish off the other 2 quickly enough after you kill one of them, they resurrect and perform another punishing attack with a high chance to Petrify, and down you go.
- The Tactics Torment pits you against Belias and the three Archaeodaemons. The Archaeodaemons will bombard your entire party with three consecutive Gigaflares on their ninth turn, making them a Time-Limit Boss to tear through their 234,536 HP. Belias uses several status-effect spells, including the petrify-inflicting Seal. But the cherry on top is that while Belias himself isn't too much of a threat alone, he has a a total of 937,554 HP. Even though he has a constant 50% holy weakness, his extremely-high defensive stats mean he'll take little damage from other elements without Imperil stacking. Good thing Agrias already excelled at it back then.
- Neo Torments
- Calcabrina for FFIV hits hard with both physical and magical attacks across Water, Earth, Fire, and Dark elements, and most of its attacks are group-hitting. However, it's the gimmick-y attacks you need to be careful of. It can use Ultimate Hold on your middle party member to Paralyze them on its second turn, and in its third and fourth phases it'll use Ultimate Hold on your three middle party members; since the IV realm has no one with Esunaga or Astra on their Soul Break, you either need to do enough damage to push it to its next phase before it can use Hold (very difficult since it is always used on the second turn of each phase), a Magicite effect to heal or negate Hold (which will only work once), or a Blink effect to avoid Hold entirely. In its third and fifth phases it will use Incubus Darkness on the member in the top slot of the party, dealing 99,999 damage and inflicting Instant Death, and the only things that can save them are Reraise or a properly timed Jump. Finally, it opens each phase of the fight with Ultimate Lightning, halving the party's current HP, and Ultimate Lightning will use up any Blink effects the party has, leaving them exposed to Ultimate Hold on the very next turn unless you recast Blink instantly. Taken together, this makes for a boss that has very strong attacks, can instantly cripple 4/5s of the party with status ailments and Instant Death, and getting past those moves unscathed requires paying close attention to its AI script and carefully timing your party's actions to nullify them properly.
- Zodiark for FFXII has no particular gimmick to the fight and only one element he attacks in, but he hits really, really hard in it. His most deadly attack is Darkja which hits around 3000-4000 damage to everyone even with Shell and Dark resistance on the party, and he has Piercing Gravija which does damage equal to 50% of the party's max HP, so anyone below half HP is dead. The real difficult, however, comes once you start to get momentum going. In the third stage of the fight he will make himself immune to physical damage for a period of time, and then in the next phase does the same for magical damage — you either need to bring a mixed party, do enough damage to put him through to the next phase before he activates his immunity, or sit there and wait for it to wear off, which will kill your time. And if you're really unfortunate in your timing, he can throw up his magical immunity while his physical immunity is still active, making him completely invincible. Mustering an effective offense is difficult, because the XII realm's characters don't synergize well with many different elements between them, and if you want to bring a mixed party to get around Zodiark's alternating damage immunities, you have exactly two options for mages, Ashe and Vayne. Don't have good Relics for them? Oh well.
- Dahaka for FFXIII hits in Ice, Lightning, and Holy throughout the fight, and adds Fire and Water in his first phase too. Keeping Regenga from Vanille's Ultra is impossible because it constantly uses attacks that inflict Sap, it'll begin its second phase by buffing its Magic (ergo you need to bring Magic Breakdown, or it'll just overwhelm you), it can inflict Slow on the party, and in its third phase it will Dispel all your buffs. The hardest part against it is just staying alive; from its second phase on, pretty much everything it uses will ignore Resistance and/or be non-elemental, creating a devastating barrage of attacks to weather.
Dreambreaker
- Dreambreakers as a whole are pretty brutal. They have the same Rage mechanics as 6* Magicites plus the Realm mechanics of the Torments, thus players will need teams for all 17 realms (plus Core + Beyond as one realm) with at least three characters in that realm that can pull their weight and a White Mage to keep the party alive, a tall order for many players. The Dreambreakers all share an effect that when they phase change at 70% and 40% HP, all damage inflicted upon them is negated until the current action ends, at which point most of them immediately (as in during the character's turn and in-between their current actions) use a Full Break attack that reduces the party's ATK/DEF/MAG/RES; the debuff is 40% the first time and 70% the second time, and some even inflict the 70% version the first time too. These mechanics to their phase changes means it is impossible to brute force rush them down like Magicites and Torments, because characters will have their damage nulled at their phase changes and then likely have their damage crippled by the Full Break. Unless you just wait for it to wear off (which will kill your time), the only way to deal with Full Break is to overwrite the buff with an effect that raises ATK/DEF/MAG/RES, but at the time Dreambreakers began no one had such a Soul Break except for Tyro's (pathetic) Overstrike. Enter another mechanic of Dreambreakers, where when they phase change they cast an unblockable Stop at any off-realm characters; most of them have a decent MND stat, so it'll lock Tyro down for at least several seconds and any non-White Mage-type off-realm characters are pretty much removed from the battle. All of this means that Dreambreakers need powerful realm teams used with careful strategy to tiptoe around their phase changes, and unless you had the latest tech at the time of their release (when more characters got Soul Breaks with ATK/DEF/MAG/RES buffs on them) you would struggle to achieve a timely victory.
- Sin, the X Dreambreaker boss, is considered to be among the most awful of the Dreambreakers. The main problem is his status effects; he'll use Confuse on the character in the top slot early in the fight, and in his second phase he'll Petrify the character in the second slot. While Confuse is not too problematic, Petrify is just as bad as death since the character loses all their buffs, so you either need to go the rest of the fight without them or have access to Astra or Esuna; except no in X has Astra or Esuna, so you either need to bring an off-realm character that does or have someone use the sub-par Ultra Cure (and that only heals Petrify, the character still loses their buffs). Since most characters in the X realm are physical Water-elemental characters, Sin will buff its DEF and Water resistance and does the latter often, making it very tanky and forcing you to bring counters for those mechanics too. And all of this is to say nothing of his attacks, many of which are Gravity-based or non-elemental and several of which inflict Sap to overwrite Regenga and nullify Last Stand. All of this makes for a painful and obnoxious boss that is very difficult to beat without a X team stacked with great relics. The going is a bit easier if you use a mage team that can ignore its defensive buffs, but aside from the White Mage/Summoner hybrid Yuna (which will be focused on healing anyway), the only mages in X are Lulu, Braska, and Seymour, so they don't exactly have the best synergy with each other.
Dragonking
- The next level of Cardia content after Dreambreakers are Dragonkings, a battle with Bahamut. He has the usual phase change like Dreambreakers where the damage stops before a phase change, and the same Full Break debuff that is used in Phase 1 (fortunately its the less powerful version) and Dreambreaker Full Break at Phase 3. The most difficult part of the fight is Phase 2. Bahamut starts by using up Dragonking Wing Wall, with gives him a massive 85% damage reduction boost for 5 seconds, which will likely halt your momentum and stall whatever Break Damage Limit Soul Breaks you have active. During Phase 2 Bahamut will regularly summon "Historia Souls" to him that appear as crystals floating around him, up to eight. Two attacks, Dragonking Challenging Roar and Dragonking Sphere Ray, grow more powerful the more souls he has; Challenging Roar inflicts Anti-heal and Sphere Ray inflicts Interrupt and Sap, and at certain soul levels they can break the damage cap and Sphere Ray can hit the entire party. Finally there's Dragonking Megaflare, which is a Total Party Kill if he has eight souls and otherwise inflicts fixed damage to the party. The only way to lower his Historia Souls level is to use a Soul Break or Limit Break, which will take away one Historia Soul for each gauge segment expended. However, throughout this phase Bahamut will gain at least two Historia Souls every turn, and he can gather six to him at once the turn before Megaflare. This means players will need to be able to spam Soul Breaks throughout Phase 2 to manage his Historia Souls, and either need to tank the more detrimental versions of Challenging Roar and Sphere Ray, or time their Soul Breaks to go off before Megaflare. Players also have to deal with Memory Bite, an attack that damages a character's Soul Break gauge, making this more challenging. When he enters Phase 3 he uses King's Rage, a special Rage form that needs several hits that deal over 20k damage to break. Until it is broken, he's treated as having eight Historia Souls, and a few turns into the phase he uses Megaflare, which is once again a guaranteed party wipe if the player can't break King's Rage in time. Finally, if at any time he is damaged by an off-realm character's Soul Break or Limit Break, he immediately counters with Dragonking Full Break to cripple the party.
- The XI realm version of Bahamut is regarded as the hardest of them all. He's one of the tankiest versions by stats alone, with an extra 700k HP than normal, and he's one of three versions (the others being V and Tactics) to use Dispel on the party after his first Full Break, so you either need Shield to block it or have a way to rebuff the party immediately. Putting together a good team is difficult because XI events are uncommon and its characters overall have little tech, limiting your options, and the realm doesn't have good synergy; a full mage team isn't possible because the only mages are Shantotto and Arciela (which came very late into the game's seventh year anyway, long after the XI Dragonking was released), physical teams have no way to boost their critical hit rate and damage, and they all specialize in different elements so imperils and elemental boosts aren't as helpful as they could be. Finally, the only White Mage of the realm is Aphmau, who is considered one of the worst White Mages in the game: she only has Regenga on her Sync, her only healing follow-up outside of her Awakening is her unreliable Legend Materia, and she doesn't have Last Stand, so she'll struggle to keep the team alive. Needless to say this one tends to be the last one completed by many expert players.
Magicite
- Among the 3-star Magicite, Bismarck can throw you for a loop. Unlike most Magicites, Bismarck doesn't stick to its main element, its offense is a Fire, Ice, Lightning trinity with the Water-elemental Breach Blast to round it out, which includes a Savage variant that ignores Resistance. It's also almost entirely random which attack it'll use each turn, and if it'll be single-target or group-hitting, but overall it has a 30% chance of using either version of Breach Blast every turn, so expect to see it a lot. Mitigating its damage output isn't easy, especially since Bismarck itself is the 3-star Magicite that boosts Water resistance, so you need a full set of Water-resisting accessories to hope to survive it, and you'll have to hope your other Magicites can handle the other spells.
- Magicite bosses in general are strong and can be tricky and annoying, but Tiamat is considered to be one of the worst of the 4-stars. Unlike most Magicites, she has a dual-elemental offensive, with the magical Wind attack Twister and the ranged physical dual-elemental Fire/Wind attack Jet Fire. While other Magicites have attacks not of their main element, they're usually weak and/or not used often; Tiamat has Savage versions of both Twister and Jet Fire that ignore Defense and Resistance, and she will use both abilities in both variants frequently. Also, she has Absorb Strength and Absorb Magic, which buff those stats of hers and debuff a party member of them for 25 seconds; she will use both of them repeatedly throughout the fight, and any buffs not part of an EX Mode that only affect Attack or Magic will be overwritten by the debuff. In summary, beating Tiamat requires a team able to handle both physical and magical attacks of both Fire and Wind elements, and even if you have such a team, any single battle against her can be stopped cold if she decides to cripple one of your main fighters by debuffing their main offensive stat. While she lacks the status ailments other Magicites use, Tiamat makes up for it with one of the steepest numbers games of the 4-stars.
- Hades of the 4-star Magicites is no slouch either, thanks to his schtick of Status Effects. It opens the fight with Savage Black Cauldron, doing Resistance-ignoring Dark damage to the entire party and inflicting Doom. For the rest of the fight he'll use the Resistance-ignoring Shadow Flare, and Black Cauldron, which has a 30% chance each of inflicting Poison, Silence, Paralyze, Confuse, Slow and Sleep: unless you have a character who can cast Astra or Magic Blink on the team, this is pretty much guaranteed to incapacitate the entire party in some manner or another. When Hades falls to 50% HP, he immediately casts Dispel on your party, and if it comes the turn before he uses Black Cauldron, you're probably going to be watching someone die in short order. Finally, every time his attack patterns shift to his second and third phases, he opens with Savage Strike, dealing physical Dark damage to the entire party and inflicting Interrupt; if you had Astra it just got used up, so you'd better recast it quick before Black Cauldron comes three turns later. Beating Hades requires not just a team with Astra and/or Magic Blink to avoid Black Cauldron, but also constantly monitoring his HP in fear of when Dispel and Savage Strike are coming.
- The 5-stars Magicites are very hard in their own right, but among those, Syldra is just brutal. For starters, like Tiamat, she mixes her Wind element with Lightning attacks, so that you are forced to expect devestating hits from two elements instead of just one. Once she enters her Enraged Mode, she gets a massive boost to damage resistance and ATB bar fill rate, so she'll quickly overwhelm you with pure DPS, and her damage resistance makes it difficult to nail an Overstrike hit to break her out of Enraged Mode. The rest of the fight isn't any easier — she'll use NulFrost to boost her Ice resistance, will periodically use White Wind to heal herself, and her offense includes Gravity-based percentage damage moves and Wind attacks that lower Wind resistance. When you finally get her to the last 40% of her HP, she'll use "High Stakes" to cast Haste on herself again and give herself a boost to DEF, RES, and MND; because of how stat buffs/debuffs work in this game, you need an attack that lowers those same three stats at once to cancel out the boost, and no one who is actually feasible to fight Syldra had such a move for the longest time. Also in her third phase, she gets a second Gravity attack that deals damage equal to 75% of max HP, so anyone below 3/4s health is going to hit the ground. The sum result of all this is a boss that moves like the wind, hits like a sledgehammer, and takes hits like a self-repairing brick. Even with Ice Chain and Imperils, Syldra is extremely challenging.
- Dark Odin is the final boss for the 5-star Magicite fights, and is a reward for a player who's managed to clear all the elements. He has 9 elemental variants (Including Poison, which was absolutely not a viable strategy at the time), which is chosen the first time someone attacks him with an elemental attack. And all of them are dangerous in their own ways, often using mechanics that made the prior Magicite fights as annoying as they were. Odin has a few tactics that were unique to him at the time, however, and they easily make him more dangerous than the other fights. First is his use of multiple elements. His chosen element will make up the bulk of his attacks, but he will mix in attacks from an unrelated element, just to reduce the effectiveness of accessories that reduce one element's damage. For example: the Fire-wielding Odin will cast Waterga midway through the fight, to bypass Fire resistance. He also uses Elemental Drive, which contains 3 elements at once. There are accessories that resist all elements... which one can get by defeating each version of Dark Odin. The second thing that makes him dangerous and frustrating is his version of Rage. Each of the 5-star Magicites had a Rage effect, where they would gain a boost in certain stats (usually a combination of defense, attack, and speed), which could only be removed by dealing more than 9999 damage with a single hit. Dark Odin introduced the concept of layered Rages. He builds up Rage levels with certain actions, or upon taking a certain amount of damage, and this could stack up to 3 levels of Rage. It is also not possible to just ignore the Rage and fight on; Odin periodically counts down to the use of Zantetsuken, which increases in power with his Rage. If he is allowed to use Zantetsuken at rage 3, the attack will bypass doing damage at all, and will just end the fight with no chance to survive or recover. And since his Rage can be increased by reaching certian health thresholds, and is capable of raising 2 or 3 levels at once, it's possible for a player to trigger rage 3 just before Zantetsuken, by trying to break his Rage with an Overstrike Soul Break. This multiple Rage mechanic would be used throughout the game ever since, by Magicite fights and Cardia fights alike. Towards the end of the fight, Odin drops his Rage mechanic, and instead forces the party into a DPS race. He repeatedly attacks with Savage Elemental Drive (which hits all elements and strikes many times), while building towards 3 uses of Zantetsuken. A party needs considerable power to finish the fight.
- Ramuh is considered the hardest Magicite boss of the 6-stars. He regularly uses Staff of Olduum that grants him "Electrify" status depending on how many of your party members have Earth Infusion (the fewer infusions, the higher his Electrify level). While he's electrified any action your characters take causes them to take Lightning damagenote , and eventually he uses Thunderous Judgment Bolt, which removes Electrified and can break the damage cap. Both the auto-damage and Thunderous Judgment Bolt grow stronger with his Electrify level, and at Level 5 Thunderous Judgment Bolt gets a huge power boost, so if Ramuh uses Staff of Olduum when no one has an Earth Infusion, the party is going to eat upwards of 12k damage from Thunderous Judgment Bolt in a few turns. His other attacks all hit hard too, including Stormlance, which hits 2 characters for massive damage and can break the damage cap, and it targets depending on their "hate" level (how much damage they've done/healed and how much Soul Break gauge they've consumed), so if you don't keep track of who it's hitting it can kill someone who is only moderately wounded. And when you finally get him to 40% HP to enter his third phase, he goes ballistic — he gives himself Haste, uses Earth Diffusion immediately followed by Staff of Olduum (without a way to stack Infusions, this guarantees he'll have max Electrify level), uses Anti-Heal to cripple your White Mage's healing, and in his third phase his damage boost in Level 3 Rage jumps to 200% and his ATB speed jumps to 300%, making him hit harder and faster than ever while your White Mage will struggle to keep the party alive.
- Following the 6-star Magicites, the game introduced Argent Odin; an even more deadly variant of the Dark Odin fight. Compared to Dark Odin, Argent Odin is considerably more predictable; his attacks are elementally-themed, but they follow a very strict pattern throughout all versions of the fight, as opposed to the many mechanics Dark Odin used from the other Magicites. This doesn't make Argent Odin any easier, especially since he has at least 1.5 million more HP to begin with as well as higher overall stats. Like the 6-star Magicites, Argent Odin resists damage from heroes not using the right elemental aura. And to make matters worse, he will always dispel your elemental auras between phases, sometimes multiple times. Like Dark Odin, he uses Zantetsuken, which is an instant game ender if he does so at rage 3. Stopping this is even harder than with Dark Odin; he always rises to rage 3 the turn before he launches the attack, and he has multiple Rage trigger thresholds in the space between 90% HP and 80% HP. Which is generally where parties at the power level for the fight will tend to be at the time if they're on track with damage. This means that parties will need even more coordination than with Dark Odin to avoid losing to Zantetsuken. Odin also likes to use Antiheal, to reduce the amount of healing party members can recieve. This hamstrings many white mages, and makes the comparatively rare stocked HP effect more valuable, which heals for a fixed amount of HP and isn't affected by things that increase or reduce healing. Upon reaching 75% HP, he will use Achromatic Aegis, which is similar to Syldra's High Stakes; a defense buff that makes it nearly impossible to do meaningful damage for several seconds. Parties will either need to have someone who can dispel that rare buff combo, or lose momentum for a few rounds. Even without that buff, Odin's rages give him a *lot* of defense. Since they deal a fixed amount of base damage, 6-star Magicite summons won't be able to break his rages after the initial call. Once again, you need to beat Odin (and get his Magicite summon) in order to effectively fight Odin, and if you don't have his innate elemental 6* Magicite in your deck, his damage is increased by 23% and your own damage is reduced by 30%, making it basically impossible to keep up with his damage output or inflict meaningful damage in return. Finally, Odin has mechanics in every fight that will, almost without fail, kill 2 specific party members (either with massive Antiheal, Doom, or the Death spell). Much like stocked HP, Raise effects are comparatively rare and unpopular, so dealing with an unavoidable pair of deaths makes party construction more difficult, so a healer with an Awakening Soul Break, which usually heal, revive and Haste everyone at the same time on use is basically mandatory unless you can somehow finish the fight with just 3 party members. The rewards for Odin are worth the hassle, but only just.
Other
- Ifrit in the original run of Mote Dungeons was the hardest boss in the game at that point. It has blazing speed, sky-high DEF and RES, and powerful attacks (including an arsenal of AoE attacks). And to make things worse, there's a Cid Mission requiring you to use FFVIII characters. His Meteor essentially becomes an "I win" button without a Wall-type Soul Break. Having a Hastega and a Medica (preferably Dreamstage) is mandatory.
- The "Isle of Betrayal" optional Zidane boss in the Record Dungeons. To start, as it's a Record Dungeon fight, your party is locked to a specific set of characters and abilities. If you can't do enough damage to reduce his HP below a certain threshold by his third turn, he uses Shift Break, dealing ranged physical damage to the entire party. Shift Break is strong enough to KO Tyro and Elarra if they aren't at a high enough level, and can inflict Sap and Slow, so it's basically a Game Over if you let him use it. Reducing his HP enough to stop him from using Shift Break requires a precise series of commands that include counting on him attacking Steiner on his first turn and not landing a critical hit, because that'll KO Steiner. Even once you get Shift Break out of the equation, though, Zidane hits hard and can use an area-of-effect attack when he gets low on health, and can also use Mug to debuff someone with an Attack and Defense penalty on top of Slowing them, and then buffing Zidane and giving him Haste. Also, you basically can't heal Steiner in this fight, because if Steiner is healed then Minus Strike becomes useless and your main source of damage is gone.
- Goldor as an optional Record Dungeon boss is scripted hell. You get a locked party, with your only option being exchange a team member other than Tyro or Luneth for Elarra. The boss has double turns every time, attacking with both physical and magical attacks, and the first of these scripted turns comes with a Blind against the front row. You must time Luneth's Jumps (a thing that can be fincky at the very least) just so that he avoids his first Blind and later his Confuse, also going for the front row. It's a hair-tearing speed and timing battle against the boss' scripted AI where a minimal mistake can cost you either medals for mastery, or the whole fight altogether.
- The Autumn 2018 event had a fight against Judges Ghis, Bergan and Gabranth, and because of how heavily the deck is stacked against you, it was harder than the intended superboss of the fest. At the start of the fight, Gabranth starts off invincible until you kill Ghis and Bergan, but trying to focus on one of them just gets you killed: if the current HP difference between the 2 of them reaches 100k, they use a Total Party Wipe move, meaning that you need to either kill them at the same time with AoE abilities or alternate between them. This isn't easy because their DEF and RES are different and they have moves to either heal themselves or reduce the damage they take, so unless you can hit 9,999 on both of them, you'll struggle to keep them together. Naturally, as you're whittling them down, all 3 will deal significant amounts of damage in return, and at specific HP threasholds use script AoE attacks, one of which deals damage equal to 75% current HP. When you finally get rid of Ghis and Bergan Gabranth uses Judgment Enrage, buffing his ATK/DEF/RES by 75%, and he uses Judgment Sentence next turn, which deals 40% max HP of damage to your party and Dispels them. He also has Judgment Guilt which inflicts Sap, making Last Stand much less useful and which also overwrites Regenga if you're using Elarra's USB as your main source of healing. To add insult to injury, the fest's events were canon to the story of Record Keeper, and the final cutscene was locked behind this fight. DeNA would fix this for future Fests by locking any cutscenes behind lower-difficulty bosses, but not for this one.
- While all versions of Dark Odin are extremely difficult for an underprepared party, the Dark-weak one has a few tweaks that make it harder than the others. He has several non-piercing attacks, both physical and magical, so you either need to bring Tyro with Divine Veil Grimoire or use Fabula Guardian as your Roaming Warrior to properly defend, and you can't be hasty using the former because on his second turn Odin Dispels 4/5 party members. His AI script builds up to Savage Zantetsuken faster than other forms but generates two levels of Rage the same as they do, giving you three fewer turns to lower his Rage before eating 8000 raw damage. Even without the tight time limit, breaking his Rage is very difficult — he uses Dampen Dark on his third turn to boost his Dark resistance, his Dark form has a steep damage resistance boost, and Dark is not the easiest element to Imperil. Oh, and he also has Sleepja to put 4/5s the party to sleep, and the turn immediately beforehand he'll use Savage Climhazzard, which will inflict Sap on the party (using up Astra you may have used to block Sleep) and is practically guaranteed to deal 9999 damage to everyone. This makes for a boss that hits hard and fast with less time for you to prepare to fight back than in its other forms, is very hard to deal damage to, and you need to have a party capable of weathering Dispel, status ailments, and defense both physical and magical.
- The Record Dungeon boss fight in the 2nd half of Act 2 Chapter 6 against The Lich is considered much more challenging than a lot of the preceding bosses before it. And this is due to it's main gimmick where it puts up a shield that makes it invulnerable to all attacks when it's HP falls under 50% and 20% respectively and the only way to break it is using attacks that break the damage cap. Your only options to do this are Tyro's 2 Arcane Overstrike soulbreaks which can only be used once and Bigg's Ultra chase attack. And if you thought the fight would be over once you deplete his HP? Think again, because he survives and puts up one last shield much like the player would have last stand. You pretty much have to level up Biggs and hit a high enough chain count from Dr Mog's chain so the chase will break the damage cap if you want to win this fight.
