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Up to 40:00 of play time on FFX -- that matches my first week's worth of play time for FF Tactics Advance. Scary. Though I guess I can't really keep that up, since I'm nearing the end of the game.
But anyway, I finally found a couple bosses in FFX that managed to kill me. It was by damn cheap methods, but they did get me. Three times, no less; twice on the first one, once on the second one.
The first was the Spectral Keeper. Now, I have to say, there really was no way for me to avoid dying those two times. And if it had decided to keep being cheap, I would've died still more times. Basically, what would happen, is that I'd be attacking the thing from behind so it wouldn't hit me with the counter-attacks, and it would just decide to turn around and hit Yuna -- who I had Haste cast on so she could move around and still have time to heal -- with Berserk Tail. And of course, each time it did this, Yuna just happened to be the next one to get a turn. No, not just one turn, actually; two turns in a row. And of course, since I was just attacking this thing, all three of the characters are next to each other, so that means all three of them got hit by the two counter-attacks that was the result of Yuna smacking the Spectral Keeper. This, invariably, would kill all three of my characters since the only one of them that can survive two of its counter-attacks is Auron, and only if he has full HP.
The first time this happened, I had gotten the Spectral Keeper down to about half of its total HP. Needless to say, I was kind of pissed, since it was basically an instant death that I had no way of avoiding. (What I would've given for armor that nulled berserk. . . .) What pissed me off even more, however, was that on my second time fighting it, it did the exact same thing on its second attack, and I died again. At that point, I was pretty much sitting there going, "Well, what the crap? Are you supposed to just keep dying until you get lucky and it doesn't do that, or what?"
I almost got up and turned off the PS2 then and there to go do something else . . . but then I realized I didn't have anything else better to do. So I tried yet again, hoping that the Spectral Keeper wouldn't decide to be a cheap bastard again, and thankfully it didn't. And besides that, the fight wasn't incredibly hard, so I had no problems on my third try. Even overkilled the thing with a Mega Flare from Bahamut. Biatch.
The next fight that I died on was the very next boss in the game: Lady Yunalesca. That fight is what I like to call a "know the pattern or die" boss fight. Because really, how are you supposed to know something like Mega Death is coming? There I was, trying my best to keep myself healed using my meager supply of 16 Holy Waters, and then. . . . Mega Death! Two of your three characters are now dead, and guess what? You have all of three Holy Waters left, because you used the rest trying to rid yourself of the zombie status during the second stage of the fight. Oh, and by the way, the third form of Yunalesca has 60,000 HP. Have fun dying. So yeah, that's basically how it went on my first try.
On my second attempt, however, I totally and completely trashed Yunalesca, because I knew the pattern and knew what was coming. Suddenly, now that I knew to use the zombie status to my advantage, the difficulty level of the fight dropped from "near impossible" to "plan carefully and you'll have no problem." And actually, it was kind of funny; on my second try, I only ended up using two or three Holy Waters throughout the whole fight.
The best strategy for the third stage of the fight, I found, is to try and keep each of your three characters -- I was using Auron, Tidus, and Wakka -- all at different levels of HP. One character should have near full HP, another should have about 1,000 HP less than the person with near full, and the last one should be near death. It sounds really odd, but it worked amazingly well.
What I'd do, is just sit there and pummel Yunalesca with attacks from all three characters. And since all of her attacks besides the counter-attacks hit all three characters, their HP levels would drop by about the same amount, maintaining the balance. And when one character would finally die, I'd use a Phoenix Down and an X-Potion on them to bring them back up to full HP, thereby replacing one of the other characters as the "full HP" character. And since the others were taking damage during that time, the one that was previously near full HP would be in the middle, and the one that was in the middle before would then be near death.
What makes this strategy work so well, though, is that you'd only ever have, at the most, one person that wouldn't have zombie status. So, then, Mega Death would only take out one character max, in which case you could just use a Phoenix Down on them and then heal them up to fill whatever position in the "HP cascade" was needed, and you'd resume attacking.
So basically, your characters would be in a constant cycle of death and healing, but since you'd be keeping them all at different levels of HP, only one would die at a time, and that would lead right into the next step of the cycle when they're healed. Pretty nifty strategy, eh? Sure made the fight easy for me, at any rate.
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