How do you beat Zeromus ?

[Rude]

Hello,

I'm level 85 and i still can't beat Zeromus. He just cast the tornado that put to 1health and meteor me before i can cast any heal spell (even if i spam it every round). It's the third time i try. Do i need to be level 99 or what ?

[Blanc]

Don't use holy against him, it causes tornado counter.

[LilG]

Its best to avoid using black magic spells/holy on Zeromus since he counters with tornado/flare which can wipe your party easily.

Keep Rosa on healing/buffing duty, black hole removes buffs & hits you with sap. You'll need to heal asap when the boss uses Big Bang too.

Kain just needs to keep using jump , or if you got the darkness augment combine them together.

Have Cecil attacks normally & backup heal if needed & Edge throws shurikens.

I can't remember if using the Stardust Rod doesn't make Zeromus counter & he can counter summons with osmose but that shouldn't be a problem if you got plenty of mp restoring items.

[Rude]

Oh really ? That's weird i don't remember casting white spells attack on him. Does "slow" make him use the tornado ?

The issue is that bigbang one shot level 85 party (appart from cecil) and sometime rosa.

Thanks both of you. I'm doing exactly what you say.
Cecill attack/backup
Kain Jumpp
Rydia dies really fast but i launch bahamut with her. I have 900mp so osmose don't really bother me.

Edge throw then attack.

I'll try today again.

[Rude]

I tried again. Got killed. So... because devs like to put savepoints just before a 15minute cynematic (wtf ?) and it was THE LAST TIME i was going to go through it...

i just opened macro recorder, made a macro for battle and auto battled until level 95ish. There i smoke his ass (and i nearly died). But i have finish it now. It wasn't AS tedious as FF3 but man this boss was hard when you missed double magic and stuff llike that.

[Jul]

Just felt like chiming in with my experience.

I was roughly level 75 and wasn't having that much of a difficult time with dungeon monsters. Tried to beat this boss ~4-5 times and Big Bang ended up wiping my entire party most of the time. Not sure I feel like spending hours getting to level 90, as that's not my definition of fun. All the other bosses in the game were actually interesting and provided unique challenges that could be overcome with strategy and tactics, but a one-shot attack is not what I consider a fun mechanic. It's a gear/level-check that prevents you from completing the story.

Ended up deleting the game and just going to watch the ending on YouTube.

Question: Does anyone know if game balance differs from the SNES version? Apparently this boss wasn't as badly tuned in the original version, but I can't confirm.

[Rude]

Originally posted by Jul:

Just felt like chiming in with my experience.

I was roughly level 75 and wasn't having that much of a difficult time with dungeon monsters. Tried to beat this boss ~4-5 times and Big Bang ended up wiping my entire party most of the time. Not sure I feel like spending hours getting to level 90, as that's not my definition of fun. All the other bosses in the game were actually interesting and provided unique challenges that could be overcome with strategy and tactics, but a one-shot attack is not what I consider a fun mechanic. It's a gear/level-check that prevents you from completing the story.

Ended up deleting the game and just going to watch the ending on YouTube.

Question: Does anyone know if game balance differs from the SNES version? Apparently this boss wasn't as badly tuned in the original version, but I can't confirm.

Artificial difficulty was not there a on original version.

[Elmeric]

I rembember something from the SNES version :
Near the beggining/middle of the story, Cecil trun from a Darkknight to a Paladin. There is a fight there in wich Cecil is confronted with himself.
The first time a did the game I killed the Cecil-shadow and was unable to kill the final boss even near lvl 90.
I redid the game months later and did not kill the Ceci-shadow and killed the Zeromus with level around 80.
Don't know if this is still in effect but I was informed by a friend of mine wich prompted me to retry the game...successfully this time around.

[Molly House]

Yeah, the SNES version he wasn't that hard. I beat the game around level 45ish, iirc? Rydia didn't even learn meteo yet, lol. Gotta save them MegaLixers xD. THen again, wer're talking US SNES versiom which is EASY-TYPE for you folks playing at home. The japanese/PS1 versions were harder.

[Doppledumb]

Yeah the DS version is the hardest one, and since it's a port of that... I post a video on the FFIV community page on how to beat him. Honestly once you have the technique it's not that hard. Use your healer for heal and protection, and summon the mist dragon. The other should just focus on attacking the beast

[Nailfoot]

I remeber beating him on the SNES so many years ago. My friend and I added up every attack we did to him, and IIRC he has 120K HP on the SNES version.

Not sure about this version.

[Logia666]

Originally posted by Rude:

Hello,

I'm level 85 and i still can't beat Zeromus. He just cast the tornado that put to 1health and meteor me before i can cast any heal spell (even if i spam it every round). It's the third time i try. Do i need to be level 99 or what ?

I have your back, bro. This guy bent me over and penetrated me without even so much as applying lube about 6 or 7 times before I beat him.

There are many ways to beat him, but in short:

85 is more than enough. I think 70 or so was what I had, which in hindsight was overkill.

Your strategy should basically be this:

Cecil (front): attack. Why do anything else? If you are desperate enough to have to use his WM constantly, you've already lost. Counter does didly, as Zeromus doesn't use physicals as far as I remember.

Kain (front) Jump. What else are Dragoons going to do?

Rosa: (back) realistically, you should be buffing like crazy, primarily with Haste. Don't back down when Zeromus negates your buffs Keep buffing, and remember to ALWAYS Haste the Haster first. In other words, Haste Rosa, THEN worry about the others. Don't use Holy, Zeromus likes it when you use Holy.

Rydia: Bahamut, period. Yeah, Zeromus likes that too, but at least the damage is worth it, especially with Rosa healing over Tornado.

Edge: (back if you have an ample amount of throwables, front if you don't) if you have him in the back, toss ♥♥♥♥ at him. In the front? attack? Either way, unless you have the Knife or something, Edge is only good for whittling away at him, just like Cecil.

If you're playing how I did on the first go, expect Zeromus's Big Bang to kill everyone but Cecil and Kain, assuming they are at mostly to full health. If Kain is in the air (likely) pray he kills him like when I played. Regardless, have Cecil raise ROSA (reviving the healer first is beyond words common sense) and have Kain revive either Edge or Rydia, preferably the former due to his speed. granting you quicker item usage. Having Kain revive Rosa and Cecil healing her works too.

At that point, you have four party member up, two hasted, two not. Take advantage of Cecil/Kain's Hasted speed to revive Rydia/heal, rather than rushing to have Rosa do it. More importantly than Rosa healing others, she needs to be able to apply Haste to herself to get better usage in the long run.

Get everybody up and back to full health with Haste and repeat the process until the bastard is dead. If you do this four or five times and still fail, then you need to level up abit (doubtful)

Just what I did on my first playthrough, Hard mode, having never played any other version, using whatever Augments I had that run (No Dualcast/Omnicast to hax my way through the battle) Zeromus hits like a truck, but that's all he does. You can see every move he throws out coming. He is a stat boss period.

Pro (noob) tips: Edge's Ninjutsu skills do you little here. Don't use them. Use Bahamut or nothing at all. If you don't have Bahamut, things are bad for you, as that is your MAIN source of damage. Don't bother with buffs like Protect, Shell, Blink, etc, as they do nothing against Black Hole.

Good luck.

[Evilnapkin]

Level range when I killed him my first (and so far, *only*) playthrough was late 60s-low 70s with really terrible augments (no Dualcast or Omnicast for example) because I wasn't using a guide, no Adamant or Onion equipment, and I was even missing one of the armor pieces you get from a miniboss in the subterrane. Still killed him on my third attempt.

It was also on Hard difficulty.

Btw you only have to put up with a couple minutes of cutscenes before each attempt if you use the button to skip the non-battle ones.

My ability setup for the run from final save point to killing Zeromus and beating the game:

Kain (Level 68): Attack - Jump - Items - Gil Farmer - Analyze

Rydia (Level 72): Attack - Black Magic - Summon - Items - MP +50%

Cecil (Level 73): Attack - Draw Attacks - Level Lust - Items - Counter

Rosa (Level 72): Aim - Auto-Potion - Pray - White Magic - Items

Edge (Level 69): Attack - Steal - Throw - Ninjitsu - Items

[Quote_1207]

Originally posted by Rude:

Hello,

I'm level 85 and i still can't beat Zeromus. He just cast the tornado that put to 1health and meteor me before i can cast any heal spell (even if i spam it every round). It's the third time i try. Do i need to be level 99 or what ?

i'm astonished at how hard the ds version is compared to psp. all zeromus does in psp is three attacks: bio ( hits all ) black hole, and big bang, with bio doing almost nothing thanks to black hole.

is it so hard because lunar ruins were removed or what?

[Leost]

Way way back in the day I read that this boss scales up with you and depending on your level can be harder sometimes as you get higher. SNES version is easy mode as others have said and he didn't have such punishing counters (which is a ♥♥♥♥ mechanic honestly).

[Barf]

Originally posted by Nailfoot:

I remeber beating him on the SNES so many years ago. My friend and I added up every attack we did to him, and IIRC he has 120K HP on the SNES version.

Not sure about this version.

Sure it is an old post but gotta give clarification because of reasons. SNES version of Zeromus had around 65k hp while the DS remake popped him at around 150k. Most likely what you encountered was this.

If Zeromus has a turn while he is between 16,000-12,000 HP and in phase 2, he will refill his health to the max (this action is invisible to the player) and switch to phase 3. He will not do this if the party knocks his health below 12,000 HP before he can heal himself, thereby leaving him in phase 2.

This is only in the 2d versions of the game. Credit goes to finalfantasy.wikia.com