LeonHellsvite said:
Safer Sephiroth, I killed him with too much ease... Glad they made Ultmecia challenging...
Time for a rant.
You'll have to excuse me, but this thread DID ask my opinion on the worst final boss or final battle. Seeing your comment gave me a dose of Snerkohol. Say what you like about Sephiroth, but the *****-sorceress gets no love. Ultimecia is an entire crapload and I will, at length, explain why. This is not meant to be offensive. If you like FF8, that's your business. I don't, so I gotta say my peace.
A very BIG peace. Bear with me, because I've got some build-up here.
Final Fantasy 8 should actually be the winner of this thread for - prior to ever GETTING to the final boss fight - setting you up with a magic, leveling, and battle system which
did not work. Your combat commands are linked directly to junctioning summon creatures to you which is tedious and irritating, and you'd have to reset and rearrange them...meaning that all your carefully-balanced stuff had to or were indeed FORCED TO be ripped out and put back into some order. The magic drawing system was only a little less irritating. At first, I thought it was a neat idea. Then, I realized it was an ungodly fetch-quest. Give me spell purchase and mana every time.
And as for leveling...it was entirely a crap-shoot. Why bother? Everything grows with you, so you can't even expect your characters to be better than anything else by virtue of their experiences. (Take note, there's an ability to encounter creatures less or not at all. Congratulations, you now have taken gameplay out of the game.) It makes EVERY battle a struggle, basically, and I don't find that fun.
Off to a nasty start already, aren't I? Well, I'll skip my hate for the plot, the characters, and even the irritation of bad limit breaks and get to the meat and potatoes, Ultimecia. The entire game has been leading to this, a battle with a sorceress. Thus far, considering all the sorceresses I've dealt with in the game, I would have to consider them to be generally weak creatures. They have nothing to justify Ultimecia. High magic, low stamina. Not very physical people, so why did she have probably more HP than the FF7 Weapons (the TOUGH ones)?
Technically, Ultimecia has FIVE forms, the first one being herself. And by virtue of Arbitrary Game Rule #47, she has alot of health because it's the final battle and the final battle must be long. And it will drag on as she flings spells and you - hopefully - have done whatever's necessary to have the appropriate power to put God off his thrown. (I did.) This should've taken half the time it did.
Upon running out of HP, she goes "Hey, I think I'll sic my pet demon on ya!", and there's Greiver, who's a part of her so you're still fighting HER in this. And THIS carries on because he has more HP than she started with, according to AGR #
48 regarding cumulative HP counts in boss forms. The summon beast at least has a point to be tough, though he shouldn't have been more than a summon attack like everything else. Nevermind.
Then, once the demon is taken down a notch, Ultimecia decides to merge herself with the thing. So, the pooped sorceress that we just handed her ass to and the pooped lion-thing merge to become...bullshit! They should be exhausted, but instead they're a merged abomination with much more HP and no reason to account for them still being alive (or at least in fighting shape).
Now, after some rounds of spell-spamming from the sorceress-abomination, it all actually starts to fall apart, like whatever's holding them together isn't doing so well anymore. This forces a change in tactics and fighting (as a levitating bottomless torso-thing with claws), but do we see any REAL signs of weakness? Hell no. Why? It's obvious that we're burning the candle at both ends AND the middle.
FINALLY, the abomination-remnant-of-a-once-human-sorceress explodes. This should be the end, right? Everything clearly must've expended itself because otherwise she'd still be spell-spamming. And I mean that because a sorceress ain't good for much else. So...
WHY IS SHE SUDDENLY A FACELESS DIETY?!?!?! There's no justification for this. She blew up, her throneroom and place of power blew up, and we seem to lack the entire world, for the moment. Why is Ultimecia still alive in ANY form with much more HP than even before?
So, in conclusion, I hope they never do something like this again, because it wasn't a
challenge. It was just long, and irritating, and she still wasn't splattered across time and space after I beat her. This is impossible even for a magic-filled Final Fantasy or the term "A wizard did it". Fantasy still operates on a premise to TRY and make sense. This one didn't.
Uhh, I'd like to thank you all for sitting through this. God knows I needed that off my chest.
