FF7 MMO Challenge: 11 - Jenova*BIRTH

Challenge description:
http://video.femlob.com/projects/final-fantasy-vii/

What can I say about this one? Well, it's a Jenova battle, which means any kind of reliable game plan is instantly out the window. Her move list is fixed, but the number of times she can use her moves per turn is randomly one, two or even three. As follows:

1. Stop (can be used three times during the battle)
2. [Nothing]
3. Laser (randomly used once, twice or thrice per turn)
4. Tail Laser (randomly used once or twice per turn)
5. W-Laser (randomly used once, twice or thrice per turn)
6. Gas (has a 1/3rd chance of being used)

And repeat. After Jenova*BIRTH runs out of MP, and given the nature of "Gas", there's a good chance she won't do diddly for three turns in a row; but turns three, four and five remain unpredictable from beginning to end. Even knowing that none of her attacks can ever go critical, it's still quite possible that you Cure too early, or too late - she got very close to killing a couple of characters prematurely in this video.

Because of all this, and because of YouTube's ten-minute time limit, I decided to just throw all caution to the wind and set the ATB to Active (which normally never do). With the Battle Speed set to maximum, any character inflicted with "Stop" is only immobilized for a dozen or so seconds, reducing it to nothing more than a mild nuissance.

As for the strategy - I held off equipping Cloud with the Force Stealer I won in Junon so all three characters would deal around 90 points of average damage. Since Jenova*BIRTH has 4,000 HP, that means hitting her 43 times, then killing Cloud and Nanaki (that was the easy part) and finally having Aerith make the killing blow. Mildly amusing: near the end of the battle, the long pauses between moves betray that I'm double-checking my spell count.

Cloud: Level 9
- Initial Equipment: Earth, Restore
Nanaki: Level 9
- Magic Comb, Mythril Armlet: Earth, Restore
Aerith: Level 10
- Initial Equipment: Earth

Category:

Gaming

Tags:

• final
• fantasy
• vii
• ffvii
• ff7
• magic
• materia
• only
• challenge
• jenova*birth