Final Fantasy VI All Enemies and Bosses

The parts to this battle: Air Force, Laser Gun (the part to the right of Air Force), and MissileBay (the dark red part below Air Force). In the SNES game, the MissileBay was light grey like the Laser Gun. Why they decided to change *that* of all things will forever be a mystery.

MissileBay fires off Missile attacks. Nothing ground-shaking there. If it gets weak and reaches 1536 HP - that's after taking 1464 HP damage - it might get a shot at using Launcher. Laser Gun uses Tek Laser and Atomic Ray. If it hits 1536 HP – after taking 1764 HP damage - it loses the Atomic Ray option, but gains Diffuser, which is slightly weaker than Atomic Ray.

Air Force itself will just use Tek Laser and Diffuser. When Laser Gun dies, a Speck will be released. Speck is an opponent that takes no turns; the only thing it does is float about on constant Runic stand-by, absorbing all your Magic spells. At this point, Air Force will try to self-apply Haste status (and fail, as he's immune to Slow) and start counting down; at this point, the Speck will leave the battlefield and Air Force will use WaveCannon, a very strong multi-target Lightning-elemental attack. By this point, you should be fully healed though, so you won't die from it if all is well. After WaveCannon, Air Force will launch another Speck and start counting again.

The first thing on your mind is taking out MissileBay. If you have Locke in the party, try to Steal for as long as he's around; MissileBay has a rare Debilitator you probably don't have yet. Zoneseek is a brilliant summon here, as the Shell status can really help you out in this battle, and once MissileBay is gone, you can safely summon Kirin to override all Sap effects with the positive Regen blessings.

Heal regularly, keep your defenses up, and you'll defeat Air Force in no time at all. If you're really having trouble, you can break Thunder Rods. Something to remember if you're playing the game blindfolded. Or just blind.

An alternate strategy if you picked three characters that all heavily rely on Magic (Locke, Relm, Celes, for example) is the following. Since you want to prevent Speck from showing up above all else, don't kill Laser Gun. Instead, you can stop his attacks for long periods of time if you combine the Slow and Stop status ailments on it. Kill off MissileBay, use your speed-reducing grey magic on Laser Gun and focus all spells on Air Force. No Speck, no WaveCannon, no fuss. Expand Full Strategy

Remember when some scholar-type guy told you there were two so-called Atma Weapons? Strangely enough, you ought to own one and have defeated the other, so what's the deal with this guy? Clearly, now that Kefka has control over the Goddesses, he's made them craft an even stronger version of the legendary beast of mass destruction we destroyed a year ago. Or something.

I'm Atma... Left here since birth... Forgotten in the river of time... I've had an eternity to ponder the meaning of things... And now I have an answer!

Atma isn't as interesting as it hypes itself up to be. Normally, he uses the level 3 spells, switching to a N. Cross or S. Cross attack every now and then. When he hits 32640 HP, he'll revert to Fire 3, Quake, Meteor spells, Clean Sweep, and Flare Star. When you hurt the fiend, he may counter with Battle, but what Atma is actually doing here is storing the hate he develops from your blows into the ultimate attack: whenever he is hurt 12 times, he will stop acting and start storing energy: "Unknown light surrounded Atma!" The boss will proceed to glow yellow and do nothing for two turns before unleashing the strongest attack known to man: Ultima. It hurts really bad (count on around 2400 HP worth of damage), and you don't want that.

Atma's unique elemental coverage makes Pearl Lance Dragoons useless, so give them Partisans at the start of the battle. Summon your barriers: Big Guard, Haste 2, Zoneseek's Wall, Earth Wall, Moon Song, Life Guard, you know what works. Don't forget to set Slow on Atma, and you might try Stealing too, although there's nothing especially grand to obtain in this fight.

Keep yourself healed and make sure you only execute the strongest attacks. Ideally, if you don't have Runic, you want to take out Atma in twelve hits or less, which makes for a needed average of around 4600 damage a hit. That shouldn't be too much of a problem, right? If it is, there's a few ways around the situation:

• The Life 3 spell;
• Have a character summon Palidor around the time Atma flashes yellow for the second time, causing Ultima to miss all your characters.
• Don't attack Atma - just set Rflect and keep yourself healed with Heal Rods, Potions, and Pearl Wind until his own level 3 spells have damaged him enough to lower him into his 'dangerous phase'. Debilitator might help to speed things up there. Now that he's already fairly damaged, you should be able to kill him before he gets to Ultima.

Obviously, if you do have Runic at your side, there's nothing to worry about as, when Atma starts glowing, you can just initiate the Runic skill and watch the attack be absorbed by the blade. Expand Full Strategy

AtmaWeapon is quite a challenge. Not quite as disgustingly horrible as Air Force, but you don't have the ability to divide and conquer that made the Air Force battle palatable. AtmaWeapon starts like a rather tough monster, and as he has the most HP of any normal monster so far (Intangir excluded), he'll be quite the little troublemaker.

His normal battle script starts with a pretty rockin' speech, and then it continues to simply pound your character into submission with Attack, Flare, and Blaze. Flare is a snazzy new spell you're probably not familiar with yet. Flare is non-elemental and barrier-piercing, though you can protect yourself with Wall Rings and the like. This is, until he reaches 12800 HP, at which point he'll start casting Bio, Quake, or the enemy version of Meteor, use either Attack or !Full Power, use an multi-target Fire 2 spell, and end with Mind Blast.

Mind Blast is a multi-target attack that randomly selects a character four times and sets one randomly selected status ailments out of the following possibilities: Darkness, Zombie, Poison, Imp, Petrify, Doom, Silence, Berserk, Confuse, Sap, Sleep, Slow, and Stop. If a character is never chosen, he won't be affected by the spell; if a character was randomly selected three times, he'll get three randomly selected status ailments set on him. As you can imagine, you can come away from this attack with relatively minor damage, or with some fairly severe damage. It might be a good idea to summon Unicorn if you have it after Mind Blast has been used.

After Mind Blast, AtmaWeapon will get even stronger. The message "Vast energy focused" will appear, and AtmaWeapon will give himself Protect, Shell, and Haste status and glow an eerie yellow. He'll wait for his next turn and glow yellow again. That next turn, he'll glow yellow for a long time, some cogwheels will spin (as a hobby assembly enthusiast, I wonder how the heck they did that), and AtmaWeapon will use the move Flare Star.

Flare Star is a neat attack. It's fire-elemental and its damage depends on your level. It multiplies the level of a random party member by 80 and splits the damage by the amount of characters you have. So, if you have a four-headed party, all level 25, the damage will be 500 per party member. After Flare Star, he basically starts over again with Bio/Quake/Meteo, etc.

When you knock him below 6144 HP, he'll start using another set of spells: Attack, Quartr, W Wind, Rasp, and Blaze. Every time he is damaged in this stage, he'll have a 33% chance of countering the attack with Flare. He'll keep this up until he dies.

You can basically do two things here. In both scenarios you'll want your party covered in Wall Rings. Celes shouldn't need to use Runic until the final stage of AtmaWeapon, when he gains the ability to cast Quartr, as this can be absorbed by Celes' Runic blade yet flies past Wall Rings.

If a lot of your characters know the Rasp spell (say, three or four), you could try to Rasp his 5000 MP down to 0 and kill him that way. It will take longer than HP violence will, but if you just stick with attacking his MP, he'll never leave the 'safe' offensive scheme (Attack, Flare, and Blaze), against which Zoneseek and Wall Rings result in easy victory. Even without those two, it'll still be easier on you to handle it than the standard HP-depletion method will.

If you decide to just smack him to death with your ouchies, beware. Start the battle off with Zoneseek to soften the blow of his magical attacks. Make staying alive priority one: Flare can do over 600 damage, so be prepared for a Flare spell at all times if you're not covered in Wall Rings. Cast Slow on him to slow him down.

Try to steal a Ribbon with Locke; you'll thank yourself for the effort later. If Edgar is in your party and can use a Debilitator, use it until you've nailed a nice weakness to exploit. Then exploit it (as if you needed me to say that!).

If he uses Mind Blast, cure the most dangerous status ailments and proceed. If the message "Vast energy focused" appears, use Dispel to remove your adversary's positive status effects (and don't forget to cast Slow again).

Basically, it's a story of heal first and damage later. Terra, Celes, and Relm should just use their level 2 spells (Ice 2 is, by a very slight margin, the strongest of the three – unless, of course, you've Debilitator'd him to have a weakness). Have Locke steal until he has acquired either an Elixir or a Ribbon, and use Hawk Eyes to fight with for the duration of the battle. Edgar can use Drill and Sabin Aurabolt for superior damage.

Mog's Dance is up for debate. The Earth Blues is the home Dance, so it will never fail, and it also has the most damaging attack of all Mog's attacks: Rock Slide. The Water Rondo, on the other hand, has a more constant damage output, as both El Niño (most common attack) and Plasma (2nd most common attack) will work. In contrast, Earth Blues' Sonic Boom will fail whenever it's used. I'm leaning toward Earth Blues myself, but it's more a matter of personal preference.

Setzer will probably want to stick to Gil Toss. Even with double Earrings, his level 2 spells are inferior to Gil Toss and his Slots aren't very useful in this fight. 7-Flush can't compare to Gil Toss, Chocobop misses entirely due to AtmaWeapon's inherent Float and the other attacks are too rare to consider an option.

Cyan's Quadra Slam out-damages Dispatch, so try to have other characters attack while you wait for Quadra Slam to load. It might be safer, if you're less experienced, to simply stick to Dispatch and have him run utility work if that's necessary. If you seriously brought Cyan for some reason I expect you to have taught him at least one level 2 spell; with one pair of Earrings, a level 2 spell will outdamage Dispatch.

Strago's Aqua Rake attack is the strongest he'll be able to do. If you equipped Wall Rings, his Pearl Wind move will be very nice to have around. Step Mine might be stronger than Aqua Rake, but it should also be much more troublesome on your MP. Try it out and see what works for you. An added benefit of Aqua Rake, by the way, is its dual-elemental nature; if you brought Edgar, there's a double chance Strago can exploit the Debilitator-induced weakness with the attack.

Gau's best choices are probably Ninja (Water Skean), Chimera (Aqua Rake), Bomb (Blaze) or Ing (Lifeshaver). Ninja is the strongest offensively, but you probably didn't go back to pick it up. Ing is very defensive; since it makes Gau absorb Fire-elemental attacks, is inherently Floating, and gives the Undead property, Ing will protect against Fire 2, Bio, Quake, Blaze, Flare Star and (due to a bug) all the effects of Mind Blast. If you have level 2 spells on Gau, I'd advise you to use Magic rather than Rages in this battle, as the level of control will be nice to have. And, with all the Attacks Gau uses, damage output will be higher overall. Expand Full Strategy