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Wednesday, June 04, 2014

Final Fantasy X: Dark Shiva Down!

I've had a lack of motivation to play Final Fantasy X lately. I was at the point where Tidus had 99 levels to spend but I didn't think I had any other useful spheres to farm up for him. He had max strength, agility, magic, defense, and magic defense. Because I couldn't get his ultimate weapon thanks to Dark Bahamut I had to spend a bunch of hard to get crafting materials on his weapon. This meant I didn't have them available to make a good piece of armour so I was mostly grinding easy to kill arena bosses for cash and a chance at dark matter drops. But when he stopped earning experience because the game only lets you store 99 levels up I got a little depressed and moved on to other things I guess.

Today I finally turned the game back on. It had been over a month since I'd last played which is sad. Final Fantasy X is such a good game, why would I leave it for so long? Anyway, instead of farming arena bosses when I turned the game back on I decided to go catch some more monsters in order to unlock the boss that drops hp spheres. Eventually I'd break the limit on his max health and having useful spheres to plug into the grid would be useful. I did so, and it turned out that boss counterattacked with a big damage attack (even into my max defense) and I realized I'd ignored evasion. Farming up some evasion spheres would give me something to fill in the grid with too, so I went to get those. Turns out evasion sphere guy is hard to hit and I'd also ignored accuracy. So I killed accuracy guy a bunch and then evasion guy a bunch and filled in a good chunk of the grid with those two types of nodes. Along the way I finally hit 99 dark matters (every arena boss has a 1 in 8 chance of dropping 2 of them) and was able to put ribbon on a piece of armour. That was the motivation I needed to finally sell off all the weapons I'd found and bribe a few marlboros to break my max hp limit and finish off my good armour. Ribbon/break hp limit/auto-haste/auto-phoenix. Woo!

I plowed through all the arena bosses I had unlocked and that ended up filling Tidus back up to max level again. My other characters managed to spend their banked levels down because they either gain tons of experience or do tons of damage. Tidus does both at the same time, so on 'real' fights he still gains levels while everyone else doesn't. All I have left in the arena is the guy who unlocks for catching 10 of everything I think, so I headed off to do that. One of the monsters could only be caught right outside where Dark Shiva hangs out so I decided to pay her a visit. Tidus now has max strength, agility, magic, defense, magic defense, accuracy, evasion, over 20k max health, and ribbon. So I should be good to go, right?

Wrong! Dark Shiva blew me up over and over again. Each time I'd learn something new about the fight. Eventually I made an actual plan to win and took her out. I tried lots of ways to mitigate her limit break (which hit my whole team for 80k) and eventually decided that couldn't be done and just summoned an aeon of my own for her to kill when her limit break bar filled up.

After she died I took a look at the things she can drop... For me she dropped armour for Tidus that breaks the hp limit. A little late for that, Shiva! It also only had 3 ability slots instead of 4 so it's bad. But it looks like she can drop 4 slot items with ribbon and break hp limit for all characters, or a weapon with break damage limit. Either of those things could be really useful for building up other characters. I can't fight her again unless I reload the old save... Is that worth doing?

Considering how long it took to build the items for Tidus I absolutely believe it is worth scumming Dark Shiva for drops. If I want to play with other characters. At this point I've decided the reason I got burned out was my assertion to get all of the achievements. A couple of them look to be really, really hard (possibly not even possible for me with my tv) so my motivation fell off the charts. I think I'm just going to throw that aside. Beat the challenge bosses, maybe max out just Tidus' grid so I can finally say I've done that, and beat the game. Now that I've killed one dark aeon I'm probably strong enough that with good play I can beat the rest, right? Right?

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