The Final Battles
Contents
THE FINAL BATTLES
MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD! Please don’t read if you don’t want to find out what happens at the end of the game. So turn back unless you’re the type of person to read the end of the book before you finish it! 🙂
So you’re inside Sin right now. Boggles the mind, doesn’t it? Did you ever notice that on top of Sin’s head is a mini-model of what looks like Zanarkand? Take a closer look, especially when you battle Sin’s head. Anyway, the airship gets sucked into Sin, and here you are, in the Sea of Sorrow. (By the way, you will be able to still go everywhere from the save spheres inside Sin. However, you will only be able to return to the very first save sphere.)
Wander through the Sea of Sorrow, where you will fight some tough monsters, even some bosses from previous areas. Watch out for Behemoth Kings, who cast Meteor when you defeat them, so make sure your party’s HP is high enough to survive it, or you can cast Auto-Life on everyone. You’ll notice treasure chests that look like they are on top of waterfalls. You can’t get to them from the bottom of the waterfall however, so you need to find a path that gets to it from the other side. Most of these items aren’t terribly crucial, especially if you have leveled up a lot at this point.
Finally you get to a staircase, and at the top, it’s you know who – Seymour! This time he’s got some strange objects around him that look like wheels with elemental color dots. The key is to get a particular elemental color to line up onto Seymour – and then the opposite element will be what you want to Doublecast on him, or use an Aeon of that opposite element. He really isn’t that difficult at all to defeat. Nul spells are useful here too, as he continues to have a similar attack pattern in previous fights (doublecasting elemental spells), but he also has some tough spells in his arsenal as well.
After Seymour you will be in the Tower of the Dead. If you need a Lvl. 4 sphere, you can follow the quest to kill 30 fiends to open the door with a glyph in the beginning of the area to get to a treasure chest with the sphere. There are three doors in a row that you have to go through, each allowing you access after 10 fiends. This area is kind of tough to navigate, but if you appear to get stuck, just remember to search every nook and cranny for hidden exits. At some point you will find yourself trapped by walls that shoot up in front of you, so look for a hidden exit on the right side of the screen. Then you will slide down a tunnel, and from there you can climb back up (the game will prompt you to hit the ‘x’ button to go up, keep moving sideways on whatever platform you are on to continue upward). From there you should be able to get to the final save sphere of the game.
Go forward to find what looks like a huge twisting tower of metal and glyphs that comes crashing to the ground, and enter it. You’ll be transported to a strange area that looks like a funky version of Macalania Woods, but is simply an oval-shaped area. The camera angle constantly moves, and you’ll see things that look like icicle spikes shoot up from the ground. The ground lights up just before a spike comes up, so move away from it and start looking for shiny oval crystals that form on the ground and touch them. You only have a few seconds to get to them before they disappear. When you hit a spike, you get into a fight, but you can always flee from those fights if you want. After you touch a crystal you receive an item, and after 10 items you are transported to the final area, which should look familiar to you.
At Dream’s End (a nice metaphorical name for this area), you finally meet Jecht. He eventually transforms into Braska’s Final Aeon, which is the only real fight in the final boss battles! You will fight two forms of this final boss, and you have the opportunity to lower his overdrive gauge by having Tidus talk to him. You don’t want him to get to Overdrive! However, if you’ve spent some time at the Omega Ruins leveling up, you probably won’t need to lower it at all, just keep hacking away, and especially use Doublecast for area attacks to stop the Yu Pagodas from healing the boss.
After the fight, a series of strange events will occur, and you will find yourself summoning and then fighting your own Aeons who become possessed by Yu Yevon! (If you’re confused, just remember what the Fayth says in Bevelle – that Yu Yevon needs to inhabit a new Aeon, but will be weak at first so you can defeat it). Once all your Aeons are defeated, you’ll fight Yu Yevon himself. For these last fights however, your characters have Auto-Life. I don’t totally understand the point of this – I mean, it makes the game ridiculously easy to win. Oh well…. the final cinematic is truly a treat, and I won’t reveal the ending here, but in typical Asian melodramatic fashion, things don’t always have a Hollywood ending…