Final Fantasy VIII (PSX) - Final Boss and Ending

Time to defeat the furry sorceress.

First off, the 3 party members will be chosen completely at random at the start. There's no way that I know of how to manipulate it. You can either equip your entire party with GFs and good Junctions, or you can just equip your favorite 3 characters.

EDIT: turns out the party chosen is determined by the steps you take until you reach the door. You can manipulate this by saving on the nearby save point, then counting how many steps to the door gets the party you want.

Throughout the battle, characters who are KO'd and remain that way for a bit will be permanently removed, and subbed by one of your other characters at random. If there's no character to sub, that spot will just be empty for the rest of the fight.

The whole final fight is capped at Lv 65 for some reason, so the rest will be written assuming as such.

Ultimecia has several phases here. First, it's her human form. Maelstrom is her signature attack; it's unblockable and reduce everyone's HP by 75%, and also inflicting Slow and Curse. She also has an array of elemental spells, Dispel, Stop and Meltdown, which can cause Vit0 status. She can also cast Double on herself for double the pain.

Once you deplete her 43k HP, it's Griever's time to shine. Big boy here has a hefty max 116k HP, can do physical attacks, Doom which causes a countdown that will then kill your character when it reaches zero, Gravija which reduces HP by 75%, can Draw spells from your characters to cast back at them, Flare for damage and Pain to inflict Darkness, Silence and Poison, and can also use Triple for triple the pain.

Griever can also (and for the remainder of the other phases of the battle) blow away your character's magic stocks at random, so you can't linger too much or you'll be at risk of getting your Junctions ruined. Summoning GFs against Griever (and the remaining phases) instantly KOs them so if you rely on them at this point, whelp.

After a few turns, the screen will change. That means Griever will use Shockwave Pulsar, an extremely damaging magic attack on all characters. If you kill Griever before he does it, he'll do it as a death counter so you can't avoid it (unless using Invincible status).

Next, there's Griever + Ultimecia. This form has two phases: first one has a gimmick where Grievermecia will summon Helixes after a few turns. If there's one Helix, Grievermecia will be able to cast Ultima; two Helixes, she can cast Meteor. With both Helixes alive, every two turns she'll use Great Attractor, a massively powerful physical attack on everyone, so you must not let it get to this point! Once you deplete 65% of her 176k HP, she'll lose her tail and won't summon anymore Helixes. Besides all that, she can cast Holy, Dispel, Quake and Tornado.

Then here comes Ultimecia's final form. She has 279k HP, can cast Ultima, Meteor, Flare, Holy and Dispel, and physical attacks. The most dangerous move is Hell's Judgment, reducing everyone to 1 HP. After wailing on her for a while, she'll spawn an add below her; it does nothing, but periodically Ultimecia will Draw Apocalypse from it and then cast it, and it's an extremely gnarly magic attack on everyone. Once you do enough damage on her, she'll start talking and then all you need to do is to keep hitting her to progress the dialogue.

FF8 is extremely easy to break. Junction your stats and use Limits to utterly destroy everything, or 100 Holy Wars to make everyone invincible while refusing to level up to reach Ultimecia at Lv10 or so.

If you don't want to break the game apart for some reason or be extremely inefficient like me, sensible things to do: have everyone with max status defense to Slow, Curse and Stop. Those are the main dangerous statuses in this fight. Remedy+ items will remove Doom and Vit0, and make sure you fill up your magic inventory to reduce the risk of your stats being obliterated. XX+60% abilities are great to equip to bump your stats further, and so is Auto-Shell (more valuable than the other auto abilities here as most damage is magical). Haste is awesome, and Meltdown will improve your damage against each boss (make sure you cast it after each phase). Darkside and Item are some of the best abilities you can have. 3 physical attackers are the way to go, but I wanted to use magic and for that, Meteor is the best damage spell. Aura doesn't work too well on full speed Active ATB.

Yes, that Lion Heart there was absolutely unnecessary. But it LOOKS cool and Squall refused to use it in all my practice runs, lol.

Final Fantasy VIII
1999, Squaresoft
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