Final Fantasy V Optional Battles

Final Fantasy V is known for having a wide array of tough battles - back when it was an underground game, never officially released outside of Japan, gamers who played the unofficial translation would often whisper the names "Shinryu" and "Omega" in hushed, reverent tones. These names were often followed by the words "gave me a serious beating and I threw my controller through a wall." However, thanks to Djibriel's guide, maybe things aren't so bad. Below you can find strategies for all of what he calls "The Undeathables," which includes the aforementioned megabosses as well as some foes who were never quite intended to be killed but can be anyway.

• The Not-Quite-Superbosses
  • Magic Pot
  • Gogo
• The Actual Superbosses
  • Omega
  • Shinryu

Magic Pot

Only a single Phoenix Down or Ab Splitter is hidden beneath that most impish of encounters, the Magic Pot. Truly a crazy, crazy, gimmicky fight, the battle with Magic Pot is not actually meant to give you a Game Over if you piss it off (as was the case with the Famed Mimic). Attacking the Magic Urn is like bashing your head against a wall: a wall made of titanium, backed up by other walls made of titanium that are cheering it on and underwater. Well, you get the idea. But have no fear, I'll help you.

If you left one alive in the Phoenix Tower, now's the time to kill it, for it can be done! Search out the Black Chocobo you tamed and fly it to the forests to the east of the great desert between North Mountain and the Phoenix Tower. Descend from the Chocobo, walk over to the Phoenix Tower, and start climbing to the vase you left the Magic Pot in.

Here's the thing. The battle starts with Mute already set, so !Black, !White, !Time, !Blue (unlike in normal Mute, where Blue spells still work), !Sing and !Spellblade are out of the question. Things that do work are !Condemn, !Predict, spells cast by using an item (such as Masamune's Haste or Fire Rod's Fire3), !Call, the Magic Lamp and all Bells. As far as the Monster Bell and Tinkerbell go, that's definitely an inconsistency. Apolon Harp also works.

Magic Pot uses (full heal) every turn; it shares an animation with the Elixir, and fully heals the Magic Pot back to 65255 HP. Magic Pot has ridiculous Defense, Magic Defense, perfect Evasion and Magic Evasion, a level of 91 and is weak to no elements or status ailments. It is the perfect roadblock of a battle.

Mute is set, so the characters can't speak, sing or chant, but even if nothing can come out, stuff can still go in! Increasing the level of a single character is the key to Magic Pot's defeat. !Sing can't be used, so Hero's Rhyme is out. Instead, !Mix a Tonic or with a Dragon Fang to create a brew called Dragon Power, which increases the character's level by 20. With a one or two Dual-Wield !Rapid Fire attacks between its turns, this thing must go down. Since both Slow and Haste can be set during the battle, you can get in more than just a single attack.

Now, for the specifics! Obviously, Dual-Wield !Rapid Fire is a must. !Rapid Fire allows us to always hit and pierce Defense. Sadly, Protect is still up, and we can't cast Dispel to remove it. Using the Judge Staff as an item gets the Job done, and the Wonder Wand can even cast Dispel if you don't have a Judge Staff and are reluctant to fight T-Wrecks creatures for one.

With Protect down, it's time to start buffing. Keep creating Dragon Power and stack them up on your designated kill machine. Using the Masamune in-battle allows you set Haste to the character. You can also set Slow to the Magic Pot; while you could theoretically release a GloomWidow to use a Web attack, the chances it'll hit are astronomically small. No, you'll want to !Combine some gunpowder with a Turtle Shell for a clean 75% shot at setting Slow.

With Magic Pot Slowed and un-Protected, you're pretty much set; with one or two !Rapid Fires you'll be done! An alternate strategy would require you set the Dragon nature through Dragon's Kiss and have your super-warrior wield two Dragon Lances or a Dragon Lance and a Dragon Beard. Every successful attack with these weapons will deal twice as much damage; you'll hardly need to boost your level if you have these weapons preset. Apolon Harp and deal some damage if you're short on it, but you shouldn't be.

Congratulations are in order: you've accomplished nothing you couldn't have done by simply feeding the guy.

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Gogo

In Kerwin, some cross-dressing dude fled from your gaze after transforming into, well, you. That isn't cool. Normal people would have followed him earlier, would have done nothing for a while, then got the Mime shard and continued playing. Normal people. BUT WE'RE NOT NORMAL PEOPLE. THIS THING WILL DIE NOW BECAUSE WE'RE SPECIAL.

Gogo, for all his outlandish attire and speech, is one of the most difficult opponents in the game. If you provoke him with a physical attack (including !Steal), he may either counter with a normal physical, !Critical Attack or Strong Fight, which will kill a character. If you use a spell on him (even if it is beneficial), he will counter with either a Holy, Flare or Meteo spell, all of which are very powerful.

If you deal 14714 damage to him and survive to see it, he will become extremely agitated. "You uncultured boors! Know you nothing of an artist's soul? Cut! Cut! Stop TRYING to mimic! Start over, recenter, and begin!" Then, he will castMeteo thrice in a row and kill you with powerful attacks. You are not equipped to handle this fight at all right now, so this is a Game Over for you.

There is another thing to consider, however, and that is the fact that this fight is bugged. When Gogo starts the Uncultured Boors speech, he'll lapse into saying that and cast Meteo, which is good. Well, not exactly good, but that's the way it was meant to be. Then, he'll say it again! And cast another Meteo. Then a third Meteo will follow, with all kinds of useless speech at the end that's not meant to be there:

Dragged into another dimension!
Odin: All right, that's far enough!
Turning to stone...
Can't escape!
Countdown to Pestilence...4
KO'd!
Countdown to Eruption...5
KO'd!
Level halved!
KO'd!

The next two turns are 'normal' in that they do what they're meant to do: a consecutive Maelstrom, Ice Storm and AquaRake combo, followed that next turn by a consecutive Frost, Ice Storm and AquaRake combo. This sounds nasty, but you need to realize that by this point you have either killed Gogo already or have failed. After these attacks, Gogo will try another Meteo, but it'll be followed by all the garbled text again. Loop from there.

See, the trick here is to defeat Gogo really quickly and brutally. The fatal commands must be unstoppable in nature and given to the character before you actually see the 'uncultured boors' speech in the first place. Tactics capable of killing the Famed Mimic include:

• Get a single character with !Rapid Fire, !Spellblade 6 and two of your most powerful enchantable blades in the game. Enter the fight and start buffing that character with s (Mix a Tonic with a Dragon Fang) to boost his level. If you deal around 6000 damage per strike with a Flared Up Rapid Fire Attack, you will be able to defeat the fiend.
• Use only attacks that circumvent counters! This is taking advantage of bugs, but if it works for you, it works for you. Set up three Reflected characters and one character to absorb, then cast the appropriate spell (Fire3 or Ice3) on yourself. (Combine with Dark Matter) also doesn't provoke counters.
• Mix a Dragon's Kiss (Dragon Fang + Maiden'sKiss) to set the Dragon nature to Gogo. Now, equip five Dragon Lances and use !Jump with them (at least one character will have to Dual-Wield). The Dragon Lance will deal 9999 a hit, killing Gogo on the fifth one.

If you really have no shame, Gogo has a rare Hair Ornament; if you must have it, you can cast Reset until you get it; note that the Reset spell doesn't Reset your drown timer.

If you win, you get the Mime Job! Of course, you didn't need to kill him to do that.

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Omega

"The roiling skies let loose a vile beast without a soul; Omega was its name."
- Thousand-year-old book

Omega is not a coincidental weapon of mass destruction; it is a purposefully orchestrated one. Once, we learned that Galuf came from an 'alien' planet; now we know that the two worlds were once one and that there is no such thing as alien. Except for the two creatures that came here from above, the dread machine Omega and the dragon Shinryu. When the warriors wielding the Twelve Legendary Weapons defeated Enuo, they were unable to destroy this eldritch machine. But we have a fair shot, because Omega is not just a walking atom bomb spelling death for all that it encounters; it is also lonely at night (I promise this will make sense).

Omega is a murder machine, and it was designed to be very good at it. This is the AI Script Omega was coded with:

• 33% chance of either Atomic Ray, Delta Attack or Blaster
• Wave Cannon
• 33% chance of either Rainbow Wind, Burn Ray or Atomic Ray
• Wave Cannon
• Without interruption:
  • 33% chance of either Delta Attack, Blaster or Wave Cannon
  • 33% chance of either Maelstrom, Earthquake or Rainbow Wind
• Search (save target until end next turn)
• 33% chance of either Rainbow Wind, Burn Ray or Atomic Ray (on Search target)
• Wave Cannon
• (return to start)

Counterattack to all HP damage:

• Without interruption:
  • Target: Random target
  • Rocket Punch, Rocket Punch or Mustard Bomb (33% chance each)
  • Rocket Punch, Rocket Punch or Encircle (33% chance each)

See what I did there? By directly listing the AI Script, I not only displayed the relevant information in the clearest manner possible but provided a reminder of Omega's mechanical nature. Form and Function baby, form and function.

So, any attack that deals damage will cause two counter-attacks. Rocket Punch will set Muddle to all characters lacking protection against the ailment (Lamia's Tiara, Prism Dress, Genji Helmet, GenjiArmor and Bonemail are all means of avoiding the status), Mustard Bomb will kill a character and Encircle will remove a character from the battlefield for the rest of the fight.

Search will save its target, and Omega will exclusively deal with this target until the end of its next turn. If Atomic Ray is the next attack, it will only be fired at the Search target; if any counter-attacks are provoked in the meantime, they'll all home in on the search target as well.

Omega will wait for a small margin of time before starting its onslaught; it'll start the encounter automatically inhibited by a Stop status that will quickly expire. But you can re-set it if you want! Omega may be the most powerful creation of all, but it has never known the love of a woman. Or probably anything, for that matter. Exploit this weakness in the circuits that make up its heart with Love Song, which stops the eldritch machine in its tracks. Despite Omega's stellar level and Magic Evasion, Love Song will never miss. Know that the small duration of the Stop status is less than the time it takes for Omega to reach a new turn, and it's also shorter than the time a single Hasted character takes to reach a new turn, so a single Hasted Bard is not enough to keep Omega at bay. Two should do the trick. There's a catch, however, in the fact that Romeo's Ballad overlaps; if you have both Bards sing right after each other, Omega will still get some turns. You'll have to find a flow in which you can spread out the two timers so that one takes effect shortly after the other expires. This is something I can't really tell you how to do; you'll just have to experience it.

Omega's got an inherent Shell up, so even barrier-piercing attacks will deal less damage than you'd expect. Its inherent reflect barrier stops what would have otherwise been assumed as proper fighting tactics when facing this thing: Bolt3 spamming. Sappy poetry is all well and good, but it will only delay the thing. We need to destroy it, and that is where !Spellblade comes in. The solution to the Omega problem is Bolt3 spellblade paired with Dual-Wield !Rapid Fire. Set Bolt3 spellblade effects on the swords, unleash !Rapid Fire, win the battle.

A single character can do this. For maximum potency, equip the Omega Slayer with a Ribbon (protects against Delta Attack), Bonemail (protects against Blaster's Death) and a Fire Ring (protects against Atomic Ray and Flame Thrower). The other three characters will need to keep Omega busy while your Slayer sets up the Spellblade effect; characters that can Sing Love Song and wear Winged Shoes are a good idea; White Mages can respond quickly with Cure3, Arise and Esna as well, so take your pick there.

When your Slayer is set, unleash !Rapid Fire. You'll kill Omega in a single turn. Good for you! As they say, it is better to have loved and lost then to have never loved at all and be killed in a waterfall cave for no clear reason whatsoever.

The above strategy is not the only one; a party draped in Flame Shields (a rare steal from Grenades in the Ruins), Ribbons, Bonemail and Wall Rings can withstand most attacks Omega can dish out. The goal here is to cast Bolt3 on your own party in return (to reflect back at the colossal machine). WhitWind can heal Bonemail wearers between the Wave Cannon attacks and Rocket Punches (these will not Muddle due to our equipment choices, but they can still damage). This is a messy, uncertain tactic, but a viable one; will help out here, as it's the only way of setting Slow to something with a level of 119 and a Magic Evasion as high as Omega's. Carbuncle can help out as well; it reflects Delta Attack, Blaster, Atomic Rays and Search (Search!). Yes, that is as awesome as it sounds: if you Reflect Search to back on the boss, it'll attack itself the next turn.

You now receive 50000 Gil, 100 ABP and an Omega Badge! Congratulations.

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Shinryu

"The dragon Shinryu came upon (Omega's) heels. Not e'en the legendary weapons twelve were able to subdue these evil beasts. Inside the Rift the demons were interred; so should they stay until forever's end their names to stay unspoken evermore."
Thousand-year-old book

Omega paced back and forth inside its cave, either incapable or unwilling to go beyond its prison. But where a machine is easily confined, a dragon adapts. Especially if that dragon is a God-King of dragonkind, which are assumed to be wicked smart. So the Ancients, who could not defeat Shinryu, had to put him in a chest. You know, to seal him away. It's like a mystical chest, hidden away in the darkest corners of reality. They also put a really good sword in the chest. Some might argue that hiding ancient treasures somewhere along with unspeakable evil is a great way to encourage dumb-ass adventurers to seek out the treasures, releasing the evil and messing up everything in the process. But what were the Ancients to do? Just let the sword lying around in some treasure chest not guarded by a God-King of Dragons? That's not how the Ancients roll.

Shinryu starts its battles off with a Tidal Wave of enormous magnitude; it deals over 8000 damage. That means that every character not equipped with a Coral Ring or, in a stroke of luck, protected by an Aegis Shield (33% chance) will be dead. Tidal Wave - or any other Water-elemental attack - will not make an appearance for the rest of the battle, so even though you'll want at least two characters with a Coral Ring, you don't need to have them across the board as long as you're prepared to fully revive any character not protected at the start of the battle. Both !White 6 and !Mix grant access to full HP recovery.

Important note: Shinryu will have to get a turn before it can use Tidal Wave; a character with a Masamune or sufficient Agility and the Winged Shoes can outspeed the God-King of Dragons to do stuff like set Bersrk before this wave comes crashing down, thus allowing you to avoid it altogether. More on Bersrk later.

The first turn following Tidal Wave can mean either Maelstrom, Attack or Roulette. Roulette may kill a character, Maelstrom can be very dangerous, given that Shinryu's high level means Maelstrom is quite accurate and will often hit. Cure3 is great way of countering its effects; Arise can counter Roulette.

The next turn means either Ice Storm, Atomic Ray or Lightning. Lightning isn't too bad: only 25% of the character's maximum HP in damage. Those equipped with Coral Rings will take double damage though, so watch out for that. Atomic Ray and Ice Storm are both really powerful. Atomic Ray will be nullified by Coral Ring characters, but Ice Storm will kill everybody; Ice Shields can protect against this, as can Resist Ice potions (Mix a Phoenix Down with some Antidote) or Dragon Shield (Mix a Dragon Fang with an Ether). Dragon Shield also helps against any Atomic Ray and Lightning attacks Shinryu may unleash at a later time.

If you're still alive by this point, Shinryu will get serious. The dragon's third turn is a double-turn. Its first move is either Maelstrom, Attack or Roulette (just like it's first turn), and his second action will be either Guardian, L2 Old or L3 Flare. L3 Flare either kills or does nothing; Guardian is a nuisance which you can Dispel with the spell or the Judge Staff.

The fourth turn is another double-turn, and the last unique one before Shinryu loops its AI script. The enemy will begin with either an Attack (66%) or Evil Eye (which sets Stone to a single character), followed either an Attack (66%) or Poison Breath (which deals Poison-elemental damage to all). Compared to stuff like Ice Storm, this turn is not as nasty, this meaning it doesn't kill you outright. After the fourth turn, that is, the second double-turn, it doesn't use Tidal Wave but just picks an attack from the first turn again.

When Shinryu hits 20000 HP, it'll let loose with a one-time Zombie Breath attack. So, you know, watch out for that, 'cause it kills you and turns you into Zombies.

There are two strategies, the first of which would be to Bersrk Shinryu. In its rage, it'll be a far easier target and can either be completely nullified or just be outmuscled. The Bersrk spell is a simply infallible way to enrage the dragon; calling its father a 'fat, flatulent git' is not quite as effective but twice as fun. I would perhaps suggest using the two in conjunction. Another strategy is to pile up enough super-effective damage quick enough that Shinryu will be dead before he realizes what's going on. Both are popular and effective, so you can take your pick.

Setting Bersrk to Shinryu is easy, as the White Bersrk spell is unblockable and lasts forever. The Power Staff can duplicate its effects, as can the !Mix outcome Bacchus Wine (Holy Water + Turtle Shell). Now, Shinryu will unleash a simple physical attack each turn; when it lands, it will kill a character. If the character charged with setting Bersrk is given the Masamune as a weapon, he or she can act before the Tidal Wave hits. Golem and Mirage Vests can combine to cause a lot of physicals to miss, even before Evasion kicks in. With !Mix, you can set Darkness with a Gloom Sight (Eye Drop + Dragon Fang): it'll never miss. Going in with three characters who are near-death and a character with !Guard gives you immunity as well. You could even just keep up with Shinryu's death count and revive any character that falls. Basically, Shinryu was dead in the water as soon as Bersrk was set; the rest is just being fancy about it.

If you want to let Shinryu go about its business like normal, you'll need to be more careful. Shinryu is a Dragon; an archaic strategy would have you acquire six Dragon Lances from assorted CrystlDrgns right here in the Void, set Dual-Wield to three Dragoons and !Jump for joy. This is possible, but not necessary.

A character with the Quick spell (!Time 6) and Apolon Harp can deal comparable damage, since Apolon Harp is so effective against dragons. Giving a Quick spell to a Dragoon with a Dragon Lance is also a great idea; you'll give the Dragoon two !Jump attacks in the time-pocket you create with Quick, so you'll get the same result without having character disappear from the battlefield, the Dragoon will still be able to wield a Shield, you'll only need a single Dragon Lance for that character and you won't be giving Shinryu time to utterly annihilate you, as he so often does. Thus, with but a single Dragon Lance, you already have four extremely powerful hits. Dualcasting Flare, Meteo or Bahamut is also as effective as usual, since Shinryu lacks a Shell status (unless he gets Guardian up).

With enough Agility and inherent Haste status, you can have all characters act before Tidal Wave appears; give Quick to all, and you can take out Shinryu no problem without Coral Rings at all. A risky venture, but hey, that's us. Danger is our middle name. Unless you just went with the first option in which case efficient is our middle name.

You get a Dragon Seal for your trouble, and a Ragnarok. Following this walkthrough, you could've stolen Ragnarok swords from NeoX-Death; this is your most likely source, though. It's not as good as a fully-powered Brave Blade, but it doesn't lock you into a no-run game. The Dragon Seal is useless. Hooray!

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