Part 73: Max's Dragon Shirt

Okay well I dunno what the fuck a Pearl Armlet is and the Straw Hat is kinda offensive but everything else is pretty much spot-on.

I have a few aloha shirts in my wardrobe. I don't really wear them unless I'm going out, which was funny when I was in the continental US since aloha shirts are our dress attire, so I'd be over there with an aloha shirt and slacks when everyone else was in this fancy shit and for all of its contrast, folks found it more endearing than out of place, which was cool of them. I mean you'd never wear them in public on just a normal day, but yeah, it's definitely a substitute for formal dress attire.

Backwards from the acceptance aloha shirts get on the mainland, you generally appear incredibly douchey if you wear continental-US dress attire in Hawaii.

my favorite aloha shirt has prints of plumerias and surfboards and dragons and pakalolo smoke on it


This cracked wall can only be reached by air. Of course you could land here with the airship, but you couldn't do anything here without a Chocobo to break the wall open.

















"...Kweh."
"Then come back when you finish what you must do."

So to fully complete this quest, you need to get all the Chocograph Treasures, find Mognet, get all the Cracked Wall treasures, and find all the treasures buried under the ocean.


The Chocobos here all give you hints to where some of the treasures are, but you have to find the oceanic ones on your own. You also have to get the one under Quan's Dwelling, which is kind of hard to get because you need to approach it creatively.

There's also a fifth, unmarked ocean treasure that you can't get until the fourth disc, so you can't completely finish this sidequest until then.


AND NOW








"I feel a strange presence inside, kupo!
I've never felt anything like it, kupo!
It's not of this world, but not like a ghost, either..."


... uh

what




Let's fuckin' do it






OOPS

Long story short, we all died fantastically.

TRY AGAIN

Ozma is all about chance and percentages based on his current HP. You can't manipulate them, so no matter how prepared you come, you'll die a lot simply because of bad luck.

At high HP, he has about a 70% chance to hard-counter every attack with Berserk, and 30% chance or so to not counter. Well, I was still kind of unprepared, and I didn't have everyone equipped with Auto-Reflect, which you should.


The best setup, if you have the abilities and AP for it, includes Auto-Reflect (Berserk is a reflectable spell), Auto-Life (which can sort of be substituted with Phoenix Pinions, as mentioned by someone else in the thread, but this is unreliable at best), and Clear Headed. If you bring a caster, Loudmouth can help, but they'll probably outright die if Ozma casts Curse anyway. Which he does a lot.

As far as eqiupment goes, you want the Egoist's Armlet, I think, which will nullify Ozma's Dark-elemental Doomsday spell. You could also use the Ninja Suit or Dark Gear, which absorbs it, but casters and heavy armor characters can't equip those, so N-Kai Armlets really are your best bet.

Actually, you probably WANT to put an Egoist's Armlet on Iz, since unless you're at Level 99 with 101 frogs caught, your best bet for a guaranteed 9999 attack--Limit Glove--requires Iz to be at 1HP.


And you REALLY want Ozma to cast Doomsday. You want Ozma to open with Doomsday. It is a spell that hits everyone, even the caster and his allies.


See, his whole thing is that he operates on the FF4 Hardtype principle: whenever you input commands, Ozma gets a free action.


However, you can circumvent this by inputting commands while Ozma is in the middle of an attack animation; Ozma doesn't get bonus commands if he can't "input" them, and the game doesn't allow a character to input commands as its animations are being run. So as long as Ozma is in the middle of casting a spell and you input commands, he doesn't get free actions.

Ozma absorbs Dark damage, but due to Doomsday's ridiculous length, you get all the time in the world to input commands while he does it. If he opens with the spell, you get a "bonus": Ozma heals for 9999, but it doesn't matter since he was already at max HP. And you follow up with four 9999-damage attacks, bringing Ozma's HP to 15,539, just two 9999s from victory, which you can theoretically pull off with a maxed Thievery and a maxed Dragon's Crest, which is, however, highly doubtful.


Ozma usually leads the second round with Curse. This is a pain in the ass because Curse not only has a short animation, but it does obscene damage and will likely flat-out wipe your party. Which is why you brought along the Auto-Life, which cases more problems because your ATB resets when you revive.


If you're lucky, Ozma will cast Flare Star, the formula of which I believe is either 50*TargetLV or 60*TargetLV, and anyone can tank that even at Level 1. As a bonus, it even has a longer animation, giving you time to charge your ATB and hopefully get your next two or three attacks in.

UNFORTUNATELY, Ozma only has something like a 20% chance of casting Flare Star next, and some ridiculously high chance of casting a second-round Curse.


Curse, of course, has the added negative effect of giving your characters almost EVERY SINGLE STATUS EFFECT IN THE GAME--even to the ones who die--including Zombie, which means that they're effectively out of the rest of the battle since removing the Zombie then reviving them wastes far too many turns.

Ozma also has a miniscule chance of casting Flare instead of Curse or Flare Star, which is great news for you because Flare is super-long and it'll reflect off of you anyway.


On the off chance that you get another action, Ozma will stop countering with Berserk and start countering with Curaga on itself. I guess you could theoretically bring along Holly or Makie and cast Reflect on Ozma to prevent this, but what a waste of a turn that is.


So basically the setup you want is:
Kilika with 9999 Thievery
'Iole with 9999 Dragon's Crest
Iz with Limit Glove or 9999 Frog Drop
and your fourth is a wildcard.

Your first round will always look like this:
Thievery
Dragon's Crest
Limit Glove/Frog Drop
Dark Matter

because Dark Matter does 9999 damage, one time, to one enemy. Perfect for Ozma, really. Some people suggest bringing along a healer, or Huihui for Shock, but I brought Makakao because I had my entire party Auto-Reflected and he had Reflectx2 equipped, so bouncing Bio off my party was essentially doing Bio*5 as his second action. BUT, magic is really variable against Ozma. This combo will sometimes do 9999, but I've had it do as little as just over 1000. It is also completely impossible with a low-level party, because Auto-Reflect and Reflectx2 alone cost like 30 ability stones.


And you know what? Honestly, Ozma is just plain cheap and frustrating. You'll die a lot, and you'll go through the trouble of approaching him again by loading your save and flying to Chocobo's Air Garden and going through Mene's lecture and Ozma will open with Meteor, just killing you outright. No second chances here, I wouldn't doubt that Ozma has 50 Spirit and has a 99.5-100% chance of making Meteor connect; he's Level 99.


In the end, you have a working strategy with Thievery+Dragon's Crest+Limit Glove+wildcard, then followed up with another round of Thievery+Dragon's Crest+Limit Glove, deliberately have your fourth act last in case you have to clean up the scraps of Ozma's HP after some unlucky Curaga counters. It is guaranteed to work, if only you get the chance to use it.


Statistically, I think it's supposed to take like 4-10 tries to do this. It took me twenty or so, go figure.






Your reward is variable. If you have a Pumice Piece, it will give you a Pumice. If you have a Pumice, it will give you a Pumice Piece. You only get the Dark Matter if you don't already have one.

I could theorycraft here and say "oh yeah you could get TWO dark matters if you don't use the one you buy from the auction house and steal the one CARRIED by Ozma" but you would need to be an idiot to try.






The Strategy Guide tells you outright, literally, how to break the game. By which I mean "glitch out" in that it tells you how to get a maximum card collector's score, which of course in turn forces you to discard a card.





We now return you to your regularly-scheduled LP.



You can get the Rosetta Ring--and by proxy Concentrate--before Holly gets her voice back. You might think that, since the prompt is, "Holly can't concentrate!", it might guarantee her actions. The answer is no, but I am fairly certain that it raises her success rate.


Nope, there's a desert on the Mist Continent and the Desert Palace is in a desert on the Outer Continent.




I don't fuckin' know


Pretty sure it's false, but I've never studied Latin-base languages.


the most fabulous jabberwocky


Nope, it supposedly brings you happiness.


Yup.


Yup


No, it's a village of Dwarves.


The Anemones are the first enemies you can learn Bad Breath from. If you bring Iz to the Forgotten Continent when you go to Oelivert, you can learn it "early" at that time.

You might also be able to pick it up earlier than that in the Salvage Archipelago marsh, but I dunno. I think that's just Adamantoises for Earth Shake.




I DUNNO, LET'S FIND OUT




(yes, you can)




"You got...
100% correct!"