The Final Fantasy Legend: Ashura

I plowed away last night getting up quite high in the tower. I discovered that one of my characters actually had a healing spell which meant I could actually fight the guys that hit for a quarter of my health each swing without too much trouble. (I also had to burn an elixir I found to get to the boss. It turns out elixirs restore ability points and have 3 charges so I could get an extra 30 healing spells out of my Titan.)

I got into a fight with the boss and his first action was to attack for more than my maximum possible health in one swing. Meanwhile I was trying out different abilities and she seemed to be immune to almost everything. When I did attack her for damage it would be for around 40 damage. She has 2000 health. So I need to get in around 50 swings when she likely kills one character each round. In short, I have no chance with my current party.

What I need to do is figure out if he can be hit with any spells and otherwise I need to figure out if I can find a monster that either does a lot of damage or can possibly survive her attacks. Fortunately someone reverse engineered the stats for every creature in the game and posted it on gamefaqs!

ASHURA    [c6] 

Undead
hp  2000  6ARMS   5        
          3HEADS 10        
str.  90  GAZE   10        
def.  90  FLARE   3        
agi.  90  BLIND  10        
mana  90  HEAL   10        
          oDAMAGE -        
au  9999  oCHANGE -        

rFIEPSPW- w--------        

The bottom row that starts with r indicates what stuff she is resistant to. In this case she is resistant to Fire, Ice, Electricity, Poison, Stone, Paralyze, and Weapon. Being resistant to the first 6 means being completely immune to spells of those types. Being resistant to weapon means taking half damage from all physical attacks. The only resistance she doesn't have is to Quake, so maybe I should try to find some monsters with quake attacks?

The stuff on the right is her ability list. oDAMAGE and oCHANGE are the things which add on all those resistances. Beyond that we can see how she can attack. 6ARMS attacks 6 times with an attack multiplier of 4. 3HEADS attacks 3 times with an attack multiplier of 12. Both of these seemed to do around 600+ damage to my characters who have maximum health around 600. GAZE seems to have multiple entries. I'm not sure if that means one cast of the spell does 5 things or if there are 5 different spells all named GAZE. They all inflict various negative status conditions. I vaguely recall getting cursed by her and not any of the others so I'm going to assume the spell she has is just a curse. What does curse do? I don't know! It seemed to decrease the damage I did. FLARE is a massive AE spell. It is a mana power 8 attack and seemed to do around 200 damage to each of my characters. It also seems to be non-elemental damage which means I can't defend against it but also means she can't defend against it either so if I can find a monster that can cast flare I may have a way to hurt her reliably. BLIND unsurprisingly tries to blind someone. It halves the damage done and is of spell type Paralyze so I can't hit her with it. HEAL seemed to heal her for around 250 or so and pretty much meant I couldn't plausibly win.

So, it seems most of her damage can't be negated and she's pretty much immune to everything except maybe Quake and FLARE. Huh. I know the monster transformation FAQ I read earlier to work out how meat worked said she could be beaten by a single monster (pudding type) so there has to be something going on here. What does pudding have going for it?

PUDDING   [6a]

hp   729  MELT   10
          BOTHER 10
str.  57  P-SKIN 25
def.  56  GAS    10
agi.  55  STEALTH -
mana  94  oPAR/WP -
          oQUAKE  -
au  2400           

r-----PWQ w--------

MELT is a generic physical attack and seems to have nothing special going for it. It doesn't have a stat associated with it which seems a little strange. BOTHER looks to be an agility reducing spell. P-SKIN is a self-buff which paralyzes people that attack you, but she's immune to paralyze so I can't see this doing anything. GAS is a poison attack spell which will do nothing to her. STEALTH gives you a chance of getting a surprise round at the start of combat. The two o abilities give resistance to paralyze, weapon, and quake. Curse and blind are both paralyze element and weapon should cut the damage she does in half so this monster does seem well suited to being tough against her. But unless MELT does something pretty spectacular I don't see how it wins.

What about getting a quake element attack? Well, there's only one of those, the QUAKE spell. And of all the possible tier 13 monsters only the Sandworm can cast it. I've been avoiding that monster as he is weak to ice but since Ashura doesn't seem to have ice attacks this seems ok. I may die on the way up which would be unfortunate but I probably need to stock up on revives and elixirs anyway.

I do know this has been done before but I'm having a hard time understanding how a single pudding can kill Ashura. Something weird has to be going on with MELT (or maybe reducing her agility somehow completely ruins her ability to do damage?) but I figure I should give it a try and see what happens. I probably need to leave the tower and stock up first. I'm thinking my party should probably end up as Pudding, Pudding, Sandworm, Titan.