Final Fantasy VI All Enemies and Bosses

Goddess is, in my eyes, the toughest of the trio to defeat. Not only are there no crippling status ailment weaknesses to exploit (not even Slow!) and no elemental weaknesses, Goddess also tends to use your own characters against the party, and that's just plain rude. Her Lightning-elemental nature isn't your biggest concern as you can easily absorb or nullify those attacks; it's her sneaky manipulation attacks you need to watch out for.

Her normal AI script features Battle, Thundara, Thundaga, Lullaby, and Entice. Lullaby is the same multi-target Sleep-inducing attack as it was when fighting Still Life, and Entice is still as grotesquely annoying as ever. Since this is the only battle in the game where the danger of Entice isn't limited by quickly eliminating the monsters that use it, it might be wise to kill off the character affected to make sure no really horrible things come shooting out of the affected character (Banish, Soul Spiral, Transfusion, Meteor, and Ultima all come to mind).

When damaged below the 32640 HP mark (that's the critical number of Ultima Buster and all three Goddesses; coincidence?), she actually becomes less of a threat. She'll focus more on plain damaging attacks: Flash Rain, more Thundaga spells and the non-elemental barrier-piercing Lore, Quasar, which is for all relevant purposes a slightly weaker version of Grand Delta. But we haven't touched the true power of Goddess yet.

When she is hit by a Fight command, she has a 1/3 chance of employing the Overture attack, which I discussed earlier (when facing Coco). It basically causes every Fight and Special attack your characters perform to hit the affected character. This is bad news for the Lockes, Gaus, and Setzers of your party. When damaged in any other way, she might counter with a Thundara spell, which is nowhere near as bad.

But here's the kicker: When damaged eight times, Goddess will use her unique Cloudy Heaven attack. It looks all swirly and features those cute little angels that have thus far been seen only when using Raise, Arise, or Reraise. What exactly does Cloudy Heaven do? Basically, two things. First off (and this would be bad enough by itself), it sets Doom on the entire party. This means that once the timer reaches 0, your entire party will die unless you managed to get rid of the timer, either by using Rippler or by dying and reviving preemptively. There's yet another catch, however. When a character hit by Cloudy Heaven dies, it doesn't simply receive the traditional Wound status, but is infected with the Zombie status instead. This means that your deceased characters may attack you as well, and that reviving them back to maximum HP is impossible.

Thankfully, Mighty Guard covers the entire team, even when they're split across the screen. Hastega isn't quite as strategic in the area, even though you still may want to speed up your characters, especially since Goddess herself has inherent Haste status. Throw out your most damaging attacks, and know that Goddess (with her high Magic Defense and inherent Shell status) is most susceptible to Ultima, Quake, and Flare (in that order of potency, too). Your Holy Lance Dragoons are useless, as Goddess will absorb their Jump attacks. Switch to the Radiant Lance or a Partisan if you haven't already. Make sure you keep an eye out if Overture is in effect and act accordingly.

Quickly throwing out your strongest attacks, covering the party in Thunder Shields and Safety Bits, and just having a little bit of luck are the keys to success against Goddess. Lacking any one of those three elements can really break this battle in Goddess's favor, so be prepared, keep yourself healed, and make sure Entice, Overture, and Cloudy Heaven don't catch you off-guard. Expand Full Strategy

What does Gold Dragon do? First off, every four Fight commands, it will get especially pissed and the message "Gold Dragon begins storing energy..." will be displayed. Gold Dragon will spend a turn doing nothing (aka, charging for Thundaga) before casting a Thundaga spell on the entire party. We faced a level 3 spell with fair warning halfway through the WoB, for crying out loud! If any living character has the Reflect status, Gold Dragon will cast the Reflect spell on itself and will start bouncing Thunder and Thundara spells off at the party. Every Magic spell can be countered by a Thunder or Thundara spell normally, but Gold Dragon will not counter Magic spells when he is charging for the Thundaga spell. Normally, Gold Dragon will just attack with Thunder and Thundara spells, and Gigavolt attacks.

Gold Dragon is an incredibly easy enemy at this point; all of its attacks are either Battle or Lightning-elemental. The magic attacks are all vulnerable to Celes's Runic, and Lightning is very easily absorbed or nullified by equipment such as the Thunder Shield, Paladin's Shield, Minerva Bustier, or Berserker Ring. The bane of Gold Dragon's existence, however, is summoning Phantom in conjunction with the Berserk spell. Heck, set Berserk in some other way; the neat thing about late-game battles is that you have so many options. Expand Full Strategy

Gold Dragon (Redux) absorbs Magic exactly like Celes does. This means that most of your spells will be absorbed and have no effect. Though you'll probably immediately understand that means Firaga and such are out of the question, the real threat here is that you can no longer use support and healing spells either.

Just in case you never did pay much attention to Celes, notable spells that can't be used: Cure, Cura and Curaga, Drain, Osmose, Esuna, Float, Dispel, Berserk, Haste and Hastega, Libra, Raise, Arise, Reraise, -aga spells, Flare and Ultima. Also, note that the only enemy attack that's vulnerable to Runic's effects worth mentioning that you can use is Northern Cross, which Ragers can use by emulating Fiend Dragon.

Notable spells that you can use include: Quake, Meteor, Flood, Meltdown, Valor and Quick. You can also summon Espers without any troubles. FYI, If you have both Celes on Runic stand-by and you cast a spell, both will try to absorb it. If it's a multi-target spell, both will absorb half of the MP normally used to cast the spell. Gold Dragon (Redux) will, due to a cute bug, even use Celes' blade animation when that happens. When the spell is single-target, a dominant Runic user is picked at random and only that one will gain MP, but still half of the MP normally used to cast the spell. Man, fun stuff.

Gold Dragon (Redux)'s battle logic is pretty simple. Since it can't use the most prominent Lightning-elemental attacks (it would absorb them), Gold Dragon (Redux) is pretty much stuck with Plasma and Wave Cannon. It'll use physical attacks a lot, countering with them and possibly with !Mighty Claw as well, which sets Confuse. Make sure to summon Golem or otherwise null Confuse effects, since you can't restore affected characters with Esuna for obvious reasons. Once past 25600 HP, Gold Dragon (Redux) will set Protect to buff up its Defense and will start to attack more, adding Wave Cannon to the list. Very simple and not threatening at all!

So yeah, Gold Dragon (Redux) is absorbing magic, which isn't that big a deal since about the strongest spell you can use against it not called Ultima flies past Runic: Flood! Flood spells are very powerful and feed off of Gold Dragon (Redux)'s weakness to water. Very sweet. In addition, Valor-centric set-ups are powerful, since you can cast Valor no problem, then unleash Fang, Drill, physical attacks, you name it.

This is such an easy battle compared to the previous one! Spellcasters should just focus on Flood and Quake spells (Flood is stronger). Shadow and Gogo can Throw Water Scrolls or Tridents, depending on your ammunition. Other Water- elemental attacks such as Aqua Breath and Tsunami are too weak to really take into consideration, and Dancing the Water Harmony is nowhere near as powerful as Dragon Horn Jumping. Hastega is out and you can't cast Reraise, but it doesn't matter. Summon the Maginot Line which all suffer no ill effects from Gold Dragon (Redux)'s Runic status to make sure !Mighty Claw doesn't become a problem. Absorbing all Lightning-elemental attacks and having negated physical ones, there's no threat so we can just kill the thing. Expand Full Strategy

Unless both Mog's team and Locke's team have been beaten down severely, there's no good reason to use the four-generic-Moogle party against the Guard Leader. Between the other two, the choice is up to you. As you cannot get a Game Over in this part of the game - a defeated party is sent back to a certain point with all characters at 1 HP - you can always fight Guard Leader with Locke until you have stolen a Mythril Knife. If you have trouble with the actual 'killing' part of the Guard Leader battle (Power-wise, not moral-wise), Mog has extremely dangerous attacks to offer, so you can use him for that.

If you picked Mog's team, the Twilight Requiem will make short work of the fight regardless. If you picked Locke's team or the third and inferior party, you will want to kill one Silver Lobo and then focus your attack on the Guard Leader. As long as he's not alone, he won't use !Charge, an extremely strong physical attack that can kill weaker units in the Front Row. He will, on the other hand, use the Net attack to stop some of your party members. You can try to stall if Locke is hit if you want to. Expand Full Strategy