Final Fantasy VII Strahl Community Challenge - 27 - Yuffie, Diamond Weapon

Rules Reminder:

Low Level
Solo Character
No Non-Mandatory Inns
No Attack Command
No Independent Materia
No Scavenging

Yuffie is better as a character than as a boss, thankfully.

Diamond Weapon has more bark than bite. Its gimmicks center around its physical immunity, but our usual strat of chucking Dragon Scales is unaffected by this. Now that we have the sub, we can Steal Fire Armlets in the Sunken Gelnika to absorb its fireballs. Thanks to this, we just need to attack when it uses fireballs and heal if it stomps us. We also want to Steal the Rising Sun (a weapon for Yuffie that will be handy during the Wutai Pagoda), and we may as well do this in a risky way since this fight can be restarted quickly if we die here.

The one part of this fight that is interesting is the massive EXP dump we get here. Most FF7 challenge runners don't discuss the EXP routing anymore, so I'd imagine that many people are in the dark about how it works. When routing the game, we have a tool called "Tseng" that does a lot of the heavy lifting for us. This would otherwise require enough math and game knowledge to be painful and error-prone. With Tseng, we can specify who lives and dies in each battle, when characters join, etc., and it'll show the resulting EXP total on each character. With this tool, we can simply play around with the numbers until everything lines up.

That said, we still need to understand the basics of how EXP works and have a strategy in mind. When a character survives a fight, they'll gain full EXP, as you'd expect. If a character is KO'd and present for the fight, they'll gain nothing. If a character is in your party, but not present for a fight, they'll gain Inactive EXP (half the EXP normally earned in the battle). If a character is not in your party (e.g., when Yuffie leaves during the Wutai sidequest), they'll gain nothing, as if they were KO'd.

The idea behind the Yuffie EXP route is pretty simple. Diamond Weapon gives 35 000 EXP and Hojo gives 25 000. To put those numbers into perspective, any individual character can only absorb ~57 000 EXP across the entire game. If we're careless, we could easily end up without anybody to eat the large EXP pools from these bosses. Therefore, we need two underleveled characters to eat the EXP. Most characters join around the party's average level, but Yuffie is special; her join level is based exclusively on Cloud's. Therefore, we can keep Cloud underleveled until Diamond Weapon to recruit an underleveled Yuffie, who has essentially dodged Inactive EXP for the entire game. Then we have one person to eat EXP from each of the big bosses. This isn't the only viable EXP route from my understanding, but it worked out well enough for this run.

While we can't end the run with everybody at level 27, many characters would end up at that level if we didn't fight extra battles. This means that we have the chance to gain extra EXP if need be. Rather than randomly leveling up when it feels appropriate, this EXP headroom should be treated as a precious resource to be spent on things like farming droppable items or killing Carry Armour's arms. In this run, most of it was spent early to learn Meteorain, which was even more expensive than usual because we had to kill Vices instead of Mono Drives. A smaller amount was spent to get Cait Sith an extra level before Schizo, but it was otherwise straightforward.

After determining what to use the extra EXP on, we need to figure out how to organize the remaining EXP. Let's take a look at the EXP route from the perspective of each character:

-Aerith eats as much EXP as possible since she'll be taking it to her grave anyways.
-Yuffie's EXP route isn't flexible. In basically any run, she eats Inactive EXP from Diamond Weapon/Proud Clod and full EXP from Hojo.
-Cloud, as discussed earlier, is left underleveled for the entire game before suddenly jumping to the cap of 28 in this fight. Filling in his EXP gaps is harder than with most characters because he can't get Inactive EXP; this means he must fight any battle where he wants EXP solo when he is often underleveled and weak. He takes free EXP from weak mandatory enemies like Submarine Crews to solve this problem. It's lucky that Diamond Weapon is such an easy boss. Imagine if Carry Armour gave 35 000 EXP...
-Cait Sith, as you've seen, needs to eat as much EXP as possible early to get us through Schizo and Carry Armour. This means he really must be dead for Diamond Weapon. Even dodging this massive EXP pool isn't enough, so Cait is left on the floor for most other fights post-Carry Armour as well. He'll still be able to absorb Inactive EXP from Hojo though.

(continued in the comments section)