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While one would expect a long-running RPG series such as Final Fantasy to have some powerful enemy attacks, these take it to another level.

Unmarked spoilers ahead.


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    Specific attacks 
  • Bad Breath from every Malboro variant ever. Causes all status ailments, potentially leaving your entire party paralyzed, bleeding to death, and attacking each other from a single attack.
    • Final Fantasy X gives us Great Malboros that uses this as its opening gambit. Wouldn't be a problem if it didn't also get "Ambushed!" every single time. With the characters now poisoned, confused, and blinded, they will now constantly attempt to kill one-another only to miss and take poison damage, which does 1/4th of their maximum HP. This makes poison essentially a 4 turn doom. Frequently you will die without having been given a single chance to do anything. Especially annoying since this actually makes your party worse as it gets better - if you have a high Evasion, your only chance to get un-confused - the Greater Malboro's bite - keeps missing. The only way to even have a fighting chance in this encounter is if one of your party members has a First Strike ability, which lets you the first strike before the enemy does.
    • Final Fantasy VIII comes in second as far as Malboro terror goes only because this game's version doesn't always ambush the party, providing a window of opportunity to run away. Unless you've specifically loaded your party's junctions toward resisting Berserk and Confusion at a bare minimum, it's a chance you'll want to take, since like in FFX this game's Malboros almost always lead with Bad Breath and it's potent enough to leave you watching helplessly as your party kills themselves.
    • Averted in Final Fantasy IV, where being immune to one status effect meant immunity to Bad Breath.
    • Final Fantasy VII has it bad too. Sure, the Malboro doesn't get a free first turn in this version, but in this game its only attacks count as magic, so when it uses Bad Breath to put the entire party to Sleep (if neither of your party is equipped with a ribbon or a sleep protection), its other attacks damage you without waking you up, so you can just sit there and watch your slumbering party members die off one-by-one. If you want Bad Breath to hit you, learning the Blue Magic, it won't use it. Enjoy your half-hour battle. On the other hand...
    • Final Fantasy XII nerfs it. It only causes Blind, Silence and Slow, but the game also has Putrid Breath, which has an even wider range of statuses (nearly all of them) and Curse, which gives you Poison, Sap (constant health drain), Disease (no healing) and Confuse. The game also has Cloying Breath, which inflicts Sleep and Slow. Also see Sporefall below.
    • Final Fantasy Tactics A2 nerfs Bad Breath to only inflicting Blind, Silence and Poison in a short conical range. It's not the one you need to worry about. There's a variant of the Malboro called the Cassie with an attack called Honeyed Breath that has the same range as Bad Breath. The difference? 100% chance of charm on every target that isn't immune. Enjoy watching your team kill each other over the next half hour.
  • Any game with 10x Needles, where x>=4. One-Hit KO that can't be blocked.
  • Coeurls usually have Blaster attack, that they use with surprising frequency, and which either Stops or instantly kills whoever it hits.
  • Grand Cross is usually used by the Final Boss and it inflicts even more status conditions (sometimes some that can't be defended against) than Bad Breath. What makes it worse is that it inflicts at the same time conditions alongside death such as Zombie that makes it so revive spells and Phoenix Downs can't revive the downed character as they are zombied.

    Final Fantasy I 

Final Fantasy

  • Astos. RUB/Death. Instant death to a party member. And in this game (in earlier versions at least) you cannot resurrect characters during battle, or even outside of a town, via any means except a very impractical late-game spell (which, unfortunately, you don't have yet), and it's a long trek back to the nearest town even if you win. Hope he didn't hit your Fighter or White Mage.
  • WarMECH's NUCLEAR/Atomitize attack. Unless you've leveled up enough to be ready for the final boss, it stands a good chance of taking out any wizards in your party, and reducing your meat shields to a fraction of their hit points. If it managed to ambush you and used this attack in its free turn, just accept that some total party kills were simply meant to be.
  • It's not enough that Chaos, the Final Boss, averts No Cure for Evil. Oh no, he can manage to use CURE4/Curaja, the most potent cure spell in the game, which instantly restores all of his hit points. The only thing keeping him from abusing this and his One-Hit KO and Total Party Kill moves (of which he has several) to become impossible to kill is A.I. Roulette.
  • Mindflayers' standard attacks are this, because they carry a chance of inflicting a One-Hit Kill regardless of damage.

    Final Fantasy II 

Final Fantasy II

  • If the characters' health is particularly high, then normal attacks from enemies that drain health become this, since they follow the same rule Blood Sword does - each hit deals additional damage equal to 1/16 of target's health. Players who did not level agility and evasion, expecting their HP and defence to carry them are in for a rude awakening with those guys. Notably, this includes the final boss. It's pretty telling that Starfall X, a move exclusive to the final boss that hits the whole party and seems specifically designed to invoke the "Holy Shit!" Quotient with its animation, is far easier to deal with than the boss' basic attack.
  • Normal attacks from Parasite-type enemies, simply because they have the audacity to drain MP with their normal attacks.
  • Any high-level status inflicting spell that target the whole party.
    • The Coliseum have Specters, who will either cast Sleep VI or petrify the entire party, leading to a cheap game over.
    • The imps have a nasty habit of spamming Confuse XVI. Unless at least half your party is immune to confusion, it's a crap shoot every time you meet them. And sometimes you meet groups of eight at once.
  • The relatively-humble Cockatrice became an unholy terror in the initial release of the Pixel Remaster version, as it normal attack is meant to have a chance of petrification. However, a bug in the code meant that any normal attack that had a chance of a status ailment had a 100% chance of inflicting its pain, and as petrification is a One-Hit KO...

    Final Fantasy III 

Final Fantasy III

  • Garuda's "Lightning" attack deals high lightning damage to the entire party; at the time you fight him, it's most likely three-quarters of your max HP. Even if you bring a party filled with Dragoons (his weakness) and use Jump right off the bat, there's still the chance he'll go first, use Lightning, and leave you with a party one hit away from death.
    • Even if he doesn't use it first round, you'll be praying he does the following round, because if he doesn't, when your Dragoons land, they'll get hit by Lightning. It's an extremely difficult battle because there's little you can do but keep jumping and hope that the turn order works in your favor.
  • Cloud of Darkness' Particle Beam deals lots of damage. And by "lots" we mean instant death to your entire party unless you defeat four other tough bosses. If she uses it twice in the same turn, you're pretty much screwed.
    • Amazingly enough, this is a little better than the original Famicom version. In that, DarkCloud used FlareWave every round, every. Single. Round. It hits all four characters for 2000+ damage, in a game where, if you leveled up a character to level 50 with the best stat growth for HP, he might have 4500 HP. In order to have a chance of winning, you have to have two Sages casting nothing but Cure 4 (Curaja) every round on all your party members. And if one of those Sages goes down before you kill DarkCloud...well, fuck.

    Final Fantasy IV and The After Years 

Final Fantasy IV

  • Trap Doors' Ninth Dimension. The first turn, they target someone, the next, they hit him with this ability, which is a One-Hit Kill. While you can Reflect the attack to one-shot the door, it is MP-costly (considering the amount of Trap Doors scattered around the dungeon), and depending on Rosa's level, she might not even know Reflect in the first place. The DS version allows you to No-Sell it by giving Cecil Draw Attack Augment (which makes Ninth Dimension target only Cecil) and equipping him with Aegis Shield (which makes him immune to death effects), but Aegis Shield can be only bought at that time in optional location, Feymarch, and you're unlikely to pull this setup unless you know exactly what is coming. The doors and Ninth Dimension return in the sequel, with the only change being that you use Stop rather than Reflect, which is still costly.
  • Big Bang from Zeromus. Deals lots of damage, and any survivors suffer continual hit point loss. The Super Boss version of Zeromus in the GBA version, Zeromus EG, can do this move two times in a row.
    • In the GBA version, a glitch can happen against Zeromus EG, where his Big Bang gets stronger and used more often in a row as he loses life. If you use codebreaker to set your party's health to 9999, it won't save you. Once your damage starts to cause an integer overflow on him (healling him rather than hurt him), his next Big Bang will cause 9999 points of damage on the ENTIRE PARTY.
  • The DS version makes Meteor and Whirl/Maelstrom into these. While in the original game, Zeromus's final phase Meteo did pitiful damage, this version's Meteor does damage comparable to Big Bang. In addition, his end phase now has Whirl/Maelstrom, which drops all party members' HP to single digits unless they used Jump or Hide beforehand. Coupled with Big Bang's Sap effect, Whirl can end the battle instantly, and Meteor comes right after if anyone survives. Maelstrom is also used by other enemies, notably Barbariccia/Valvalis or Behemoths (as a counter to spells such as Meteor) and is just as lethal.
  • The dungeon that leads to Zeromus has the Blue Dragon/Blue D's' Ice Storm/Blizzard, which deals nasty damage faster than Rosa can heal; Red Dragons' Thermal Rays, which pretty much do the same thing; and Luna Dragon/Lunasaur, who casts Bad Breath... as an Area of Effect spell. In fact, Luna Dragon/Lunasaur is hardcoded to start one shotting your party members if the fight lasts too long: considering they wind up being confused and blinded at the same time, rendering them unable to hit themselves out of it, it feels more like a Mercy Kill when it does so.
  • The Brachioraidos' high stats make any of its attacks this. It starts out with Scorch which not only outspeeds your entire party, but is instant death. After a bit, it'll begin counting down from 3. Fail to stop the countdown and you'll be hit with a Mega Flare which, if you don't have Reflect on at least one member, is a guaranteed Total Party Kill. Actually stop the cooldown (by attacking at all), and it will begin countering everything with Object 199, dishing out 9999 damage every time without fail.
  • In the DS version, Dr. Lugae loves to use Reversal Gas right when your caster finished charging up a big spell. Reverse Gas changes if a move hurts or heals every character, so if your were going to use that -aga level spell to heal your party? Congrats! You just nuked them into the ground. Were you gonna try to nuke him instead? So sorry, you just healed him for a good chunk of his health!
  • In the DS version, CPU Attack Node's Laser Barrage. One use is enough to bring most of your team to critical HP, two uses kills everyone but Cecil. If you follow Fusoya's advice (which is correct in non-DS versions), prepare for pain. Laser Barrage is also used by Deathmasks, which is just as strong, making it all the more aggravating because Deathmasks are regular encounters in Lunar Core (though the boss music playing when fighting them suggests otherwise).
  • CPU's second attack in all versions of the game is Globe 199/Object 199, which does 9999 damage even with Adamant Armor on. CPU will use it only if you fight the boss incorrectly (you kill both nodes), but newer versions of the game add Super Boss or more that use this at leisure; The Brachioraidos above is one such example.

    Final Fantasy V 

Final Fantasy V

  • Almagest from Neo Exdeath and Neo Shinryu. It's Holy-elemental, which is practically impossible to resist, and deals absurd damage to your entire party, then drains the health of any survivors. The only way to survive it is to have a Job with a very high HP stat, or a Shell barrier active. And in the case of Neo Shinryu, even having both at once may not be enough.
  • Encircle, from pretty much any enemy that uses it (thankfully, not many of them). It erases a character from the battle, which means they're effectively dead, and it's impossible to reverse the effects of it once it's been cast (except by ending the battle). The only way to stop it is with the Aegis Shield, which only has a 1 in 3 chance of actually succeeding, and only on the character targeted by the attack; it's very unlikely you'll have four Aegis Shields. Oh, and one of the enemies with access to this move is Omega.
    • And in case Omega wasn't satisfied with Encircle, it can also use White Hole, an attack that instantly kills and petrifies any target it hits, meaning you'll have to either Dualcast Raise and Esuna or waste two turns bringing them back.
  • Shinryu's Tidal Wave, which he always uses at the start of battle. Didn't bring Water protection or a way to Berserk him? Enjoy around 8000 damage to everyone. It left so big an impact on players, this attack reappeared in pretty much every game where Shinryu is, and he (almost) always opens the battle with it.

    Final Fantasy VI 

Final Fantasy VI

  • Kefka's Forsaken/Goner isn't so bad on its own. It's a non-elemental AOE that's practically impossible to defend against, but doesn't do that much damage. The problem is that he loves using it right after his "Heartless Angel/Fallen One", which reduces everyone's HP to 1. Hope you remembered to cast Life 3/Reraise— or had a Lakshmi/Starlet Esper queued right after the Heartless Angel lands. Oh, and the only reason it does so little damage is because it's affected by magical resistance. If it wasn't, it would do even more damage than Ultima.
    • Not helping matters is that Kefka has a share of other nasty attacks. Trine/Train inflicts Darkness and Silence and will screw you over. He can use Vengeance/Revenger, which will remove all positive statuses, even Life 3/Reraise. And Hyperdrive will deal damage comparable to the aforementioned Forsaken.
    • When you face Kefka, you line up your allies in twelve. The first four are your initial party, and after that, if you defeat one stage of the final boss with anyone dead, stone, or zombie, they will be replaced. Did we mention that the third stage of this boss likes to use a petrification attack as a final attack? (This is beatable: Just equip everyone with the right relic, but still...)
  • The Magic Master/MagiMaster uses Ultima as its last attack. Hope you used Life 3, which you can only get on That One Sidequest. (Ultima is survivable, but requires a lot of level grinding — more than you need to beat anything else). Or you could just use Rasp and Osmose to drain his MP, killing him while preventing the Ultima; or use the Palidor/Quetzalli esper to only kill the one that gives the final blow).
  • In the Advance remake, the Holy Dragon's souped-up form in the Dragon's Den will dualcast Heartless Angel with Southern Cross. That's a total party kill unless you used reraise, which is unlikely, since the dragon gives no prior warning to this combo. Worse, you have to trek through the entire Dragon's Den again!
  • Stun/Seize, used by the tentacle monster in Figaro Castle. It causes slow, and if a slowed party member is hit with Grab/Seize, then the tentacle grabs him and leeches off his or her health, as well as taking them out of battle for a couple turns. And there's four Tentacles, when you have three characters max at that point in the game. There is a way to counter it, thankfully; equipping Hermes Sandals/Running Shoes on Celes and Sabin will auto-Haste them, preventing the tentacles from grabbing that character. Good luck figuring it out yourself, though.
  • The Goddess's Cloudy Heaven/Overcast attack. It inflicts everyone with a count-down timer which up to this point most players know it means instant death when it goes off. Reraise/Life 3 should take care of that right? Except this one has a twist: it causes zombie, which is as good as dead but is only curable with Holy Water. If you try to Take a Third Option and kill the party member to null the countdown, they're zombied. If you cure the zombie status but that character dies still, they're zombied. The only thing that prevents the zombie effect from happening is if you're party is equipped with relics that prevent instant-death, not the zombie status effect.
  • Magnitude 8 from the Hades Gigas/Hill Gigas in Zozo. Does a good chunk of damage to the whole party at a time when you've got one magic healer on your team at best. Also in Zozo, SlamDancer/Veil Dancer's -ra magic, which is enough to oneshot any of your party members, at the time when revival is not cheap.

    Compilation of Final Fantasy VII 

Final Fantasy VII

  • Sephiroth's Supernova, which divides the party's hit points by 16 and can inflict confusion and mute. It also takes a minute and a half to sit through. However, it can be noted that Supernova is a percentage based attack, so it cannot actually kill you... and it's kind of cool-looking, at least the first time he uses it.
  • There's also Super Boss Emerald Weapon's Aire Tam Storm, which deals 1,111 damage per materia equipped on the target party member. Since nobody mentions this little detail it almost always does maximum damage, and since it targets everyone, well... You'd better have Phoenix and Final Attack equipped. And if you know the trick, it becomes trivial to take out half of its hit points in retaliation. Still a Guide Dang It! on the first play through, but one you can use to your advantage.
  • Super Boss Ruby Weapon also has quite an annoying That One Attack in Whirlsand, which removes one character from battle, basically making them permanently dead for the rest of the battle. He can use this attack two times in a row if you're not prepared. You have to wait until Ruby Weapon buries its claws in the sand, and start the battle with two members dead to dodge Whirlsand. Still, not an ideal start one would like for the battle. Not to mention that if you try to use Knights of the Round on it, it'll retaliate with Ultima.
  • One of Rapps' attack is Aero 3. At that point in the game, it'll be a one hit kill, since you have no materia thanks to Yuffie stealing them all, and as a result, you can't use Enemy Skill Big Guard to at least minimize the damage you get from this boss. You'll need Barret's Mindblow to stop him from attacking with that move, but good luck trying to figure that out without knowing beforehand.
  • Carry Armor's Lapis Laser hits the entire party and is terrifyingly powerful. As you damage Carry Armor, it Turns Red and starts spamming Lapis Laser, eventually using it every turn. Even with Big Guard active, it tends to take over a third of your properly leveled party's HP off. And the true issue with Carry Armor is the attack that gives it its name, every once in a while it'll come over to one of your party members and grab them. You must destroy the arm holding the party member to release them. If you don't, it'll do damage to the captured party member by smacking the party member against itself. You can't heal or use Barrier on the party member as long as they're grabbed and any buffs that were cast are nullified once the party member is grabbed, it can do this twice (because it has two arms, natch) and parties are in groups of three, often leaving you with a single character braving through Lapis Laser and Carry Armor's attacks.
  • The Ghost Ship enemy has an attack where it uses its oar to fling a party member out of the battle. Normally, this is mildly annoying as the Ghost Ship is not a particularly tough enemy. Where it becomes infuriating is in the Gold Saucer's battle arena, which Cloud has to beat solo in order to earn Omnislash. Despite being the only party member, the Ghost Ship can still use this attack, instantly ending the fight and losing any progress you may have made.

Crisis Core

  • Flare deals a few thousand damage even through a MBarrier. What makes it worse is that you will meet enemy encounters with multiple Flare-users before completing half the missions, so you most likely won't be able to interrupt them all. Time to build your HP+ 999% and max Spirit materia.
  • Delta Attack is an attack used by the Movers, harmless-looking fluffy balls in the final dungeon. It involves them floating, following you and using consecutive thunderbolts to hurt you. If you don't roll around madly to avoid it the best you can, you will end up dying. Note that while the attack looks Lightning-elemental, it actually isn't, which can lead to death if you expect Lightning protection to work.

    Final Fantasy VIII 

Final Fantasy VIII

  • The Superbosses have some annoying attacks. First is Light Pillar, which instantly kills one party member with 9999 damage. This isn't too bad, you can fix that quickly enough with a Phoenix Down or the Revive command. They also have Gravija, which deals percentage-based damage. Can't kill you, but makes it easier to die unless you heal fast. There's also an attack called Megiddo Flame which does 9998 damage. The game assumes that by the time you're facing a Superboss, you're good enough to have 9999 HP and a repertoire of healing spells, which is pretty much the only way to survive that attack. But the worst of them all is Omega Weapon's Terra Break. It is a more powerful clone of the Meteor spell, which randomly divides ten attacks across your party. Now, Meteor isn't too bad, if you're lucky, it'll hit someone with lots of HP or spread the damage out evenly enough that your party survive, and the ten hits don't do much damage anyway. But Terra Break is not like that. Terra Break is like a physical-attack version of Meteor, except each hit does upwards of 3000 damage, damage which is not mitigated by your Vitality stat like most physical damage is. Even if your entire party has 9999 HP at the time, without proper preparation, it is nearly impossible to survive. Your only options are to make your party invincible with items, or had everyone summon their GFs beforehand to absorb the damage. You can also cast Protect on the entire party to halve the damage of each hit, but that won't ensure that your whole party remains standing. Alternatively, assuming you have GFs that still know the otherwise useless Defend command, you can order your party to Defend against the attack, which will nullify the damage completely. And even then, you have to know where Terra Break comes up in Omega Weapon's attack sequence. The easiest way to 'deal' with Terra Break is just to kill Omega before he uses it, which isn't actually all that hard if you're well-junctioned and spam Limit Breaks.
    • The aforementioned Light Pillar is not that bad when Omega Weapon uses it, as Omega has a set pattern of attacks and will at most use it once at a time in a predictable moment. Ultima Weapon, while weaker than Omega on the overall, will use it randomly, and it's much faster than Omega. If the A.I. Roulette decides it wants to spam it three times in a row, you've pretty much got an unavoidable Total Party Kill, unless you have invincibility on someone.
    • Omega Weapon also uses Lv5 Death. The maximum level for your characters in Final Fantasy 8 is 100. Fortunately you can negate this by junctioning 100 Death spells to everyone's Status Defense.
  • Diablo's gravity attacks. It drains your parties health rapidly, especially considering you are probably fighting him early in the game, and he is pretty darn quick to attack again with his normal strikes, which WILL finish you off. The only way around this is to Blind him, but that always takes several casts to work, and unless you grinded Blind spells in a specific battle earlier in the game, you may be out of luck.
  • Ultimecia's Hell's Judgement spell that will put the entire party's HP down to one and she will use this often. Interestingly, this otherwise devastating attack can make the final battle a cinch, giving the whole party (or what's left of it) an opportunity to spam Limit Breaks. If ever there was a time to use the total-party-invincibility-granting Holy Wars that you've been hoarding, this would be it.
    • Ultimecia's unnamed Time Compression related move that completely deletes one of your Magic Stockpiles at random. This can instantly render one of your characters completely helpless or useless.

    Final Fantasy IX 

Final Fantasy IX

  • Grand Cross, used by Necron, as it can inflict just about every combination of status effects. Yes, including KO and Zombie at the same time.
  • The magic spell Curse from the same game also has the same effect while adding in significant damage. Super Bosses Hades and Ozma use this spell (without warning in Ozma's case).
  • Ozma has Those Two Attacks (arguably four, depending on the player's actions).
    • Its Flare Star is even stronger than Kuja's, doing damage that's 50xtarget's level (and it targets all party members), and it will kill anyone who doesn't have enough HP.
    • Doomsday will do massive damage to the whole party (unless they have equipment to nullify/absorb Shadow damage) and heal Ozma for 9999 health (unless the player has done the friendly monster sidequest to remove Ozma's Shadow absorption).
    • Meteor has the potential to kill the entire party due to its high but random damage. It targets all opponents, and what makes matters worse is Ozma's version is slightly different to the version the player has access to, in that it cost 40 rather than 42 MP to cast and it doesn't miss.
    • Finally, Curse does random non-elemental damage and spreads status effects at the same time, pretty much Meteor combined with Bad Breath. Enjoy.
    • All this ignores the rest of its moveset, with powerful attacks such as Flare and Holy, and the more immunities the player has in their party the greater the chance Ozma will use the aforementioned Curse and Meteor (which aren't as easy to prepare for).
  • Trance Kuja's move Flare Star is incredibly annoying. He can continuously use the move many times with others up his arsenal dealing heavy damage to the entire team, bound to have at least one party member killed from it. Even though the move itself is avoidable, it's still a very lethal attack, though Kuja's version isn't as dangerous as Ozma's, as Kuja's version is either 40xtarget's level or 35xtarget's level damage depending which version you fight.
  • Beatrix has Shock, which is best described as "deal two to three times target's maximum HP in damage", and is her nastiest move in all the battles against her.

    Final Fantasy X and X-2 

Final Fantasy X

  • The Demonolith have two really nasty attacks. Pharaoh's Curse, which inflicts Curse, Darkness, Silence and Poison, crippling whoever's hit with it. The other attack, Breath will petrify the entire party if they don't have Stoneproof armor.
  • Yunalesca has an attack called Hellbiter that does a good share of damage to each party member and causes mass zombie status. And what's your first reaction upon seeing your entire party in a state of near death? For more fun, this attack is followed up later in the battle by an attack which kills any non-zombie characters. Oh, and watch out for Mind Blast too.
  • Seymour Flux's aptly named "Total Annihilation" will one-shot your party if you don't use Shell first. If you can't kill Anima in time, "Oblivion" will break you. Pretty much any attack that one-shots aeons is one of these, but if you're facing an enemy that does this, you're probably just using them for their Overdrives.
  • Sin's Overdrive Giga-Graviton not only takes the party out, but it takes out the airship you're on for an automatic Game Over, putting a fixed round limit (16 rounds) on a battle you basically have to start with magic only (Sin is out of range of physical attacks aside from Wakka's, which limits you to using magic or long-ranged Overdrives until he gets close enough).
  • Dark Yojimbo's Zanmato overdrive, unfortunately for you, works exactly the same as its playable version (An instant Total Party Kill, impossible to resist in any way). Did you have another Aeon out? You live this time. Did you not have a summon out? Congratulations, your party's dead, and your Auto-Life crumbles like a biscuit hit with a hammer.
  • The Dark Magus Sisters' overdrive, Delta Attack, deserves a mention too. It deals six hits of higher Damage Cap and like Dark Yojimbo's Zanmato it removes Auto-Life. While it can be performed only when all three sisters are fought together, are alive and have their overdrive bars fully charged, if you're unable to run away farther from them during minigame they'll get an ambush on your party with them being ready to perform it.
  • Evrae's Poison Breath will damage your entire party and leave you with a serious poison status that will probably kill in a couple of turns. Also, you don't have Yuna in this battle which means you can't use either your healer or your Aeons to take the damage. The only saving grace is that it's telegraphed, allowing you to move the ship you're fighting on out of range if you catch it coming.
  • All of the Monster Arena bosses have some frankly ridiculous attacks, but special note goes to Fenrir's Fangs of Hell, which is a guaranteed One-Hit Kill against the target. Even if the victim has armor with Deathproof on it. And since Fenrir's Agility is cranked up to high heavens, it is possible that Fenrir will use this move two or three times in a row. Thankfully it can be dodged, but good luck to get high enough evasion or weapon with Evade and Counter on it.
  • The Shinryu's Eraser attack that instantly petrifies a character and, like Fangs of Hell, punches through any status immunity the target has. This wouldn't be too bad, but this fight takes place underwater, meaning the petrified character instantly shatters and cannot be replaced for the rest of battle, and the attack cannot be dodged. The only saving grace is the fact Shinryu stops using it once there is only one party member left.
    • Speaking of petrified, it can be a dangerous move too, as any enemy can be able to use a physical attack against the petrified character, like Seymour's Shattering Claw, and the character would instantly shatter. To prevent this, The petrified character would have to be un-petrified with Soft or Remedy.
  • Nemesis, the final Super Boss of the Monster Arena, has an attack that is aptly named Armageddon. It's a straight-up Total Party Kill that is unblockable, unavoidable, and not telegraphed in any way. In order to defeat Nemesis, you will need Auto-Life, as otherwise Nemesis can just cause an instant Game Over in one attack with nothing you can do about it. While it is also possible to sacrifice an aeon to protect yourself from it, you will need to know that it's coming - either being very lucky or memorizing Nemesis' exact attack sequence. Funnily enough its weakest attack that could be mitigated is Ultima, the strongest black magic in the game. Even its standard physical attack does more very high damage.
  • Penance, International/PAL's version Super Boss has Judgment Day. It is performed only when both of its arms are alive, is guaranteed to kill the whole party and should you have Auto-Life, the arms will finish you off. The main point of this fight is to prevent this attack.

Final Fantasy X-2

  • Dark Magus Sisters' Delta Attack is at it again. It is a party-wide HP to One and Mana Burn (to zero, mind you) rolled in one package. Hope you have an Alchemist ready to use some recovery items, otherwise you might be screwed.
  • Likewise, Dark Yojimbo's Zanmato. Pretty much the same deal as above, except it generously leaves you with one MP.
  • Mushroom Cloud and Pernicious Powder. Pretty much Marboro's Bad Breath, it also lowers the stats of a party to one sixth if it doesn't kill you outright. Not good considering what enemies it appears with.
  • Chac's Stony Glare, which petrifies one of your characters and ignores any immunities. And Chac can follow it up with Heaven's Cataract, shattering all petrified characters.
  • Anything that inflicts Confusion in this game. X-2's flavor of Confusion not only causes the victim to attack allies, but just straight up use attacks, skills, and items indiscriminately. Like, for example, use a Megalixir on That One Boss that you were one hit away from defeating.
  • Mega Tonberry is already horrific enough, but pray to the gods if you meet an Oversouled Mega Tonberry. Its flavor of Karma may not one-shot characters with high kill counts, only inflicting half of their remaining HP and MP in damage, but it also inflicts Stone, Confusion, and Poison, and bypasses Confuseproof. Hope you don't have any full-heal items in your inventory...

    Final Fantasy XII 

Final Fantasy XII

  • Sporefall from Elder Wyrm. Inflicts on the order of 7 status ailments with a large area of effect, probably hitting your entire party unless you really know what you're doing. If you're not prepared, by the time you've recovered from these ailments, it's probably close to casting it again.
    • Note that all of the status effects from Sporefall can be cured with Esuna, which you do have access to at this point...all of them except Slow and Oil, the latter of which you're likely to ignore the first time because it doesn't seem to do anything. What does Oil do? Makes you extremely weak to Fire damage. What's the Elder Wyrm's other favorite attack? Fireball. Boom, KO.
  • Disease. It's a debuff that causes the users' HP to not be restorable by way of Maximum HP Reduction, meaning if you get hit, your HP drops to that and cannot be healed above it again. If a characters gets killed then revived, they're left at a single HP. What makes this debuff so frustrating is that the only reliable means of countering it are the Vaccine item and the Cleanse spell, both of which are not found until during the last chunk of the game; Esuna cannot remove it, and you need to upgrade your Remedy Lore to the max if you want to cure it with Remedy. As a result, when you start encountering the damn status effect, the only way around it is to return to a save point. If it gets combined with Poison or Sap, it's effectively the same as your character being killed because even if you remove the other debuff, the damage is done, and you'll need to likely bench the unit.
  • Curse. This one move can make any enemy into a demonic spider. It works by hitting your party—all of them—with a mana-free (so you can't silence the enemy or drain its magic), unblockable, unevadeable status bomb that inflicts poison, sap, confusion, and disease. As Ribbons are stupidly, horrifyingly rare in this game, you will only be able to protect against ONE of these ailments—if any monsters (plural, they come in groups) who use this attack can be available long before protective armor is. Basically? If three or more of these status effects stay on your party for more than, oh, three seconds? Death. If you are caught without fully upgraded Remedies? Death. No accessories to protect against confusion? Death. Command priority unkind to you? We're so sorry. Zodiac Age partially remedies this by giving you possibility to steal Ribbons from Trial Mode at your leisure relatively early as well as giving them Regen, but it is still damn annoying.
  • The Final Boss has Flare attacks. Mega Flare isn't too bad, but Giga Flare Sword can be nasty and Tera Flare is even worse. For the record, the latter deals 4000+ damage to everyone, in a game where the maximum is, without Bubble, around 6500. Worse yet, you can't prevent it because the boss will use both Palings before pulling this off. Hope you didn't neglect your secondary members too much otherwise this attack alone can finish you off.
  • Growing Threat is used by some bosses to double their level, and thus their damage output.
  • Zalera's Kill. Three guesses on what it does. Spammed often if you don't understand how the battle is to be fought. In addition to Kill, Zalera seems to be the math instructor from hell. Any spell he has is a level based disabler of some sort, and his ultimate attack is a group wide instant death spell. Don't worry, it won't kill you if your level isn't a prime number... which is the easiest way to not get hit by all of his other level-based spells. You can beat Zalera by just knowing not to be a prime or a multiple of 2, 3, 4, or 5 note .
  • Divide, which is used by some ghost enemies such as Necrophobe. Enjoying a fight against Death and Doom-spamming ghost that likes to teleport out of your range? Hope you like fighting one more!
  • Zodiark's Darkja, which blinds and does an instant kill. You can absorb the dark damage, block the blind status, but you will have nadda for the instant kill effect. Luck will almost never be on your side after it is cast.
  • Chaos's Aeroja. It deals wind damage and confuses. Not so bad since your allies will snap out of it with a bonk to the head right? Normally so; except in Chaos's battle, you can't use physical attacks at all. So you can't snap yourself out of confusion if all three allies are confused in the fight.
  • Ultima's Holyja. It deals holy damage and causes Reverse. Ultima then casts Renew on your team shortly after Holyja (no charge time required) causing an instant kill. If Reflect is on your team when it happens...
  • Yiazmat's Reflect and Renew strategy... if not caught, you can heal the boss of all of its HP. all 50,112,254 of it. Its basic attack also becomes this once its health becomes very low (enough to cast above Reflect on your party). Why? Its attack has 5% chance of an instant kill, in case of combos this chance is per hit, and at low health it gets combos very frequently (up to 12 hits), meaning assuming the damage didn't get the victim before (which is really possible only with Reverse), (s)he still has only about a 54% chance of walking away.
  • Any sort of barrier or paling that a boss may put up on itself. An impregnable defense that only goes down over the course of time? Enjoy your unnecessarily long boss fight.
  • By the end of the game pretty much any enemy that can cause confusion will be extremely dangerous. Your party members will be strong enough to effortlessly one-shot each other with physical attacks, so a single confused ally can wipe out the rest of the party in just two turns. In theory this should be more than enough time to cure thim - except that the command priority always gives a huge advantage to physical attacks. Even if you see an enemy casting confusion on a character and immediately tell both of the other two to throw him a curative item there is still a good chance that he will wipe them both out before they can perform the action.
    • This can be mitigated by the fact the game allows you to switch equipment of your team at any time, even in the middle of combat, so you can switch weapon of confused character to something much weaker. In fact, there is an entire class of weapons called Measures, which seem to serve no other purpose than to hit other party members with them, as they deal little damage and grant positive status buffs upon target.
  • Time Requiem is a monster-exclusive spell that inflicts Stop over a wide area. Hope your party members weren't too close together, or else you're going to be there for a while.

    Final Fantasy XIII Trilogy 

Final Fantasy XIII

  • Merciless Judgment, employed by the final boss, Orphan. It's basically like Supernova, except it can kill you unless you have nearly full health or a sentinel on your team. Oh yeah, and it resets the boss' stagger meter.
  • Final Boss Orphan has a few:
    • Dies Irae. The first tends to use this move when you're close to defeating it. It can be an instant Game Over if your party leader doesn't have full health.
    • Progenitorial Wrath, a One-Hit Kill attack that he targets your leader with, in a game with We Cannot Go On Without You (even if your AI Medic is ready with a Revive), and Death resistance items that can never give 100% immunity to it. Fake Difficulty, ho!
    • The second form's Temporal Hollow. Doesn't do much, dispels a few buffs and debuffs, and resets the boss' stagger meter...except said boss can't be damaged except when it's staggered...and its AI is set to use Temporal Hollow when you approach stagger...and you're on a strict time limit for this fight.
  • The Adamantoises generally don't have attacks that don't suck, but the worst by far is Roar. It deals horrifying damage to ALL party members, and, worst of all, tends to inflict Daze on at least one party member. Daze prevents a character hit with it from performing any kind of physical or magical attack. If it lands on the healer or the leader, or anyone at all if the damage from Roar KOed some characters...well, you're screwed. Everything else the toises have can be dealt with simply, but the best strategy for handling Roar is to kill the monster before it uses it. Good luck with that.
  • Barthandelus' Destrudo. Total Party Kill unless you can damage him enough while he's charging, which is never hinted at anywhere. Granted, it takes forever to charge, and you really don't need to hit him that hard to weaken it, but woe be unto you if you figured the long-ass charge time was ideal to swap to a defensive paradigm to heal and reapply your buffs. Also, and even more infuriating, it resets his stagger meter.
    • Every attack used during the second fight with him. His basic laser attack can cause Fog or Pain, Apoptosis neutralizes any buffs and debuffs you've cast, Thanatosian Laughter devastates your party, and Cursega and Dazega for obvious reasons. The third and final fight with him is a damn joke, but Thanatosian Laughter is even more dangerous.
  • Dahaka's Diluvian Plague, which causes a whole host of status ailments and dispels any buffs you've cast. He also has several powerful elemental spells, the worst being Aeroga.
  • Wladislaus' Mounting Contempt. It first inflicts Deshell and Deprotect, and then hits the target with a terrifyingly powerful attack. If either of the status ailments stick, it's pretty much a guaranteed kill to anything but a Sentinel.
  • Vercingetorix's Wicked Whirl. If you're not in a Sentinel-heavy paradigm, Wicked Whirl will tear you up, and you only get a few seconds' warning to swap; even with Tortoise (3 Sentinels) it'll leave you in dire straits. It gets worse towards the end of the fight, when he'll start spamming it; he initially uses Imprenetrable Aura immediately afterwards (he's invincible, buffs and regens for its duration, but doesn't attack you; itself a candidate for That One Attack), later he'll keep attacking after using Wicked Whirl, and the rest is all down to luck that he leaves your party leader alone. Putrescence is also problematic, as it dispels the buffs of whoever it's cast upon.
  • For a lowly mook with an obnoxious attack, there's the Falco Velocycles you fight with just Snow and Hope. When a popup reads Gatling Gun, smart players immediately switch Snow to Sentinel and get Steelguard ready, because it is about to badly injure Snow or KO Hope.

Final Fantasy XIII-2

  • Sunder used by some Behemoths after they stand up. Usually by the time you meet these Behemoths, this particular attack is too strong for your party to survive without being taken to critically low HP, and even then the Behemoth can just cleave the rest of the HP away.
    • Proto Behemoths met in the Final Dungeon are actually harder than the Final Boss due to this attack being able to one shot your whole party, unless you are way beyond the levels needed to take down some of the hardest optional bosses. The only way to have a fair fight is to kill it before it manages to stand up, which you probably can't do by the time you first arrive here.
    • In fact, even its regular cleave attack will probably one shot any party member the first time around.
  • Chaos Bahamut's Megaflare. If you're a bit banged up, this will wipe the entire party, and even if you're at full health, it still does horrifying Wound damage, slicing off up to a third of your party's total HP unless you knew it was coming.
    • The Giga-, Tera-, and Exaflare combination attacks used by Jet/Garnet/Amber Bahamut put Megaflare to shame.
    • Oh man, the final boss fight is made of these. Garnet Bahamut's Anti Force dispels any buffs you try to cast (except Reraise). Jet Bahamut's Dying Sun has a very quick casting time and is extremely powerful. Amber Bahamut is probably the weakest, but its Apparition Ray is still not something to mess around with.
  • Caius' Chain Break. It resets the chain gauge, and he can use it pretty much whenever he feels like it. It's less deadly and more just irritating, although it can be problematic in the Paradox Scope fights.
  • Raspatil's Aleph Zero, which is a fairly typical nuke attack that can tear you up if you don't have a defensive paradigm to swap to.

Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII:

  • The final boss has four forms, and the fourth one casts Heartless Angel, which will reduce you to one (1) hit point if not blocked. To make it more annoying, he is vulnerable during the long charge time, and you won't want to waste any of that time by putting your shield up early.
    • Said final boss can also use Hypernova, which is notable the one attack you can't block, since it's a cutscene attack (and once it starts, you can't switch schema until it hits). Woe be to players who get targeted with this in a low HP schema.

    Final Fantasy XIV 

Final Fantasy XIV

  • The final boss of Cutters Cry, a Chimera, has an attack that is fairly hard to keep track of for a early, level 39ish Dungeon. The attack in question involves either running into the boss to avoid being hit by lightning and getting the stunned status effect, or running away to avoid being hit by ice damage. The main issue is that you are warned only by it saying that bosses eyes are violet or blue, violet being run in, and blue being run out. For new players this is a difficult mechanic to remember because few bosses have used patterns like this, making it hard to keep track of.
  • Bad Breath, from Morbols and their cousins. It's so virulently debilitating it might as well be a one-hit-kill move. How bad is it? Bad Breath can cause Poison (HP slowly drains), Blind (attacks miss more often), Silence (can't use magic), Paralysis (you randomly freeze in place and any attacks you were using are interrupted), Heavy (slower movement), Slow (casting time and recharge for spells and skills take longer), Determination Down (damage taken is increased while attacking and healing is less effective), and Maximum HP Down (self explanatory). Esuna can cure it all, but it only removes one debuff at at time. Gets even worse if you encounter a Malboro during your dig of the Alexandrite maps; not only does the monster have the usual Bad Breath attack, but it will inflict Bind (can't move) on you first before using Bad Breath so that you can't avoid its attack. Unless you can quickly cause Stun to stop Bad Breath or use Esuna/Crutch to free yourself, you're screwed. For this particular variant of morbol, abilities that afflict Silence will also stop its Bad Breath, when it doesn't for any other kind of morbol.
  • Deathgaze Hollow in Dun Scaith in Heavensward has one attack that causes a huge gust of wind to blow you to the side... off the stage. How do you avoid this? You have to either stand in front of the ice crystals that it formed on the ship (Which you tried to avoid less than a second ago) and then you get the warning... unfortunately you are given almost no time to actually run to one of the two ice crystals. So off you go. Unless you knew to cast Arm's Length or Surecast... which most players, even in The New '20s, still may have forgotten about (or never bothered using) as almost no encounters ever required this before. Or you may simply time it wrong and off you go. Or you may defeat the boss during this attack, causing all of the ice crystals to immediately despawn, and the knockback to send you flying through a wall that suddenly disappeared as you fall to your inevitable death (this thankfully still technically counts as a win).
  • During the early days of Stormblood, Final Boss Shinryu was noted for his very first attack wiping unprepared parties only seconds into the battle. Tidal Wave deals massive knockback, you see, and the arena doesn't come with railings to keep you safely on the platform. Due to this, players might assume that, like their fight with Leviathan, they need to stay away from Tidal Wave, instead doing so throws you off the platform and kills you outright.
  • Tsukuyomi has an attack in which she drops several fans around the arena, which do an AOE that moves around the arena in the order they dropped. On paper it's an easy to dodge attack because you just need to move to the last one that dropped, wait for the first ones to go off, and than run into the middle to avoid the attack. The issue is that she starts adding either an AOE focused on roughly the spot of the last one, or a stack marker, meaning the party has to go to one of the last spots, while avoiding an AOE, or group together and hope they can safely move together. More people die to this combo than most of her other attacks.
  • Construct 7 from the Ridorana Lighthouse raid is notorious for its "Computation Mode," which reduces each player's HP to single digits and requires them to stand in zones that boost their HP to fulfill certain values (divisible by 2, 3, or 5.) Success gives a damage buff, while failure increases damage taken. Not only does the debuff put extra strain on healers, who already have to heal thousands of HP to each player to survive the raid-wide AOE that immediately follows, but beating the DPS check is nearly impossible without a majority of the raid gaining the damage buff. "Computation Mode" returns in the second phase, only this time, it can ask players to turn their HP into prime numbers. Remember, one is not a prime number.
    • Leading into Ridorana Lighthouse was the quest line where you have to go help Montblanc fight a pair of Red Chocobos. Up to this point in the game, few regular enemies spam their area-of-effect attacks so liberally, so suddenly getting Choco Meteor dropped on your head is bound to catch virtually anyone off-guard for how hard it hits and how there's two of them dropping these at once while being fairly tanky. For less mobile classes, this is a nightmare as they spam the everliving hell out of the attack, and when the content initially released, so many players were trying to unlock the lighthouse at the same time that Choco Meteors were one-shotting even the tanks and devastating the entire area. If one appears during Bozja, be prepared for pain or run.
  • Suzaku, from the Hells' Kier Duty, is infamous among Duty Finder groups due to the opening mechanic of her fight; Scarlet Ladies. After barely a minute of being able to DPS her, she will spawn several phoenixes that target the DPS. However, if the Phoenixes are not killed quick enough, they explode and do massive unavoidable AOE damage, one of these is enough to kill all but the tanks if it happens, meaning you have to kill them right away. The issue is that right after they appear, Suzaku does a cone AOE that usually ends up aiming in the direction of the DPS, meaning that the party will have to move to avoid it, locking down DPS for a moment and giving the party less time to kill the adds. Worse is that after the adds die, Suzaku fills the arena with large feathers that the party has to kill to create a safe spot, but if any of the dead phoenixes are remotely touched by the AOE circle, they are revived with more HP and have to be killed again or else the party is going to likely be wiped. This mechanic often trips up players due to how quickly a single mistake can wipe the party, and given it is essentially the opening mechanic, it makes running it blind extremely difficult.
  • Alphascape V3.0 Omega has one attack that the community hates with a passion; Star/Larboard Wave Cannon. The attack is a cone like AOE that attacks either Omega's right, or left side, while placing a Vulnerability Up debuff on any player hit. The main issue players have is simply the name — not everyone immediately recognizes the nautical terms "starboard" (right side) and "larboard" (left side). Even those who do have difficulty figuring out quickly because the terms are so similar — real-world sailors long ago retired the term "larboard" in favor of "port" for exactly this reason. Making this worse is that Omega immediately rotates 180 degrees and follows it up with a second one — and since "Starboard" and "Larboard" are from his perspective, you have to quickly figure out whether to stay put or move to the other side to dodge the next one. This attack alone is considered the reason the fight is hard, as nothing else in the fight is as difficult to figure out as that. The developers seemed to realize this and worked to give the attacks more understandable names, such as the first boss of the Orbonne Monastery having a similar move that is easily identifiable by the name.
  • Thunder God Cid, the third and second to last boss of the Orbonne Monastery has a few.
    • "T.G Holy Sword" takes Confusion Fu to a new degree. The attack is actually one of three moves, but they all share the same name, the way to tell what to do involves his animations. If he plants his swords down and leans in, you need to run into the platform to dodge the attack. If his swords point to a platform, each of the platforms he points out will be struck, meaning you need to run to a different one. If he stabs into the platform, you need to run to the back to avoid it. All this the player has to remember from watching his animations, something new players heavily struggle with, since this is the first time they ever encountered this particular thing.
    • Orlandeau also has Shadowblade, an attack that places an AoE on one player from each alliance that causes a slowly-expanding sphere to appear where each player was when it went off. The spheres explode if they touch, giving a stack of strong Bleed to the entire raid for each sphere (since you need two to touch, it's always at least two stacks of Bleed). Not too bad, but after his ultimate attack, he starts placing the AoEs on two members of each alliance, with very little room for error. He also always follows this attack up with Duskblade, which requires at least six players in each alliance alive to survive.
  • Ultima the High Seraph, the final boss of the "Return to Ivalice Raid: Orbonne Monastery", summons various Espers from the previous raids all at once in a sort of final exam. Probably the worst of this is Hashmal cleaving half the arena along with his Earth Hammer requiring players to move away from it and Famfrit's pots spraying water (usually incorrectly called "Tide Pods) below going across the arena. Half the alliance surviving is par for the course. Immediately after, it starts the transition phase where there's a DPS and healer check.
  • One mechanic in Eden's Promise: Eternity, known only as Lions for the lion-like adds that show up, is similar to light rampant in that there's zero room for error. The gist of it is that the players need to stand at specific spots to bait a conal fire wave the lions breath out while avoiding hitting anyone else on top of the boss casting two half-arena cleaves, a knockback, and a junction cast. The mechanics alternate between the lions and the other attacks, but the players need to be in the right positions in a strict time limit, otherwise the lions breath fire on someone else.
  • Elidibus as the Warrior Of Light has Ultimate Crossover, which will instantly kill the entire party and has no way to be dodged. The only way to avoid it is for a Tank to use a Level 3 Limit Break. It should be noted that no other regular, non-Extreme Trial boss ever required a Tank's Level 3 LB to survive before him, so there's no real way to prepare for it other than to know this beforehand. Doubles also as a Kaizo Trap, as he only uses it after his first phase is over. Die, and you have to start from phase 1 all over again, survive and a checkpoint will be made after the attack.
    • Even worse is before this, there's a relatively hard button mashing session where if anyone fails, the entire party wipes.
    • The Extreme mode version also adds Quintuplecast, which has Elidibus cast five spells: one that damages any players that are moving, one that damages any players standing still, one that requires players to stack together, one that requires players to spread around the boss, and one that damages any players looking at a specific party member. The tricky part is that each spell is cast immediately after the last in a random order, which can only be determined by looking at the icons displayed during the cast bar.
  • Right after the first boss in the 24-man raid "The Puppet's Bunker" is a mob fight with three large mechas and their minions. The three mechas routinely cast an attack that causes paralysis the entire alliance. While it can be interrupted, it must be done so with Interject. Tanks have this (as do ranged physical DP Ses), and it's clear by design each tank should take a mecha to interrupt it, but this doesn't always happen as Interject isn't a commonly used ability elsewhere.
  • From the Eden Savage raid, specifically Shiva, we have one of the most dreaded mechanic that ever graced the game: Light Rampant. note  The whole mechanic leaves absolutely no room for error, as a single mistep by any player will inevitably kill everyone. Dozens of different strategies have been made to deal with it, and even the most popular ones are still hard to execute. This is the mechanic that broke many static teams, and that newcomers and veterans alike dread.
  • One reason that "The Dark Inside" is seen as That One Boss is because of two attacks:
    • One which will summon areas you should avoid and have been trained to avoid since A Realm Reborn. However, the boss will start rotating the stage after a certain point into the fight. This makes it hard to avoid because the player has to pay attention to the direction the arena is rotated, then move to a spot that will be safe after the rotate is finished. Many players struggle with this mechanic because instead of your character moving, its the platform, which is hard to do for many. It doesn't help the boss locks you in place, preventing you from course-correcting.
    • Later on, another attack will drop meteors onto the platform, with the telegraph being a set of lines and an arrow that points to the area they will hit. Players are supposed to move to safe locations based off where the meteors will land, but not only do the meteors fall from essentially behind the players perspective (and up at that, something players almost never had to actually do before), but a single meteor hits hard enough to nearly one-shot even tanks. The only saving grace is that in the normal version they have a fixed pattern, not so much on Extreme.
  • Vanaspati's final boss has an attack called "Crumbling Sky", which functions similar to the meteors from "The Dark Inside" Trial. Unfortunately, you have to do this while avoiding attacks being thrown at you, and you have to completely get out of the column that the meteor is thrown at you. If you get out by a second before it goes off, you'll still get hit, and which ones are safe can often range from being next to the spot where you are, or ones on the opposite end of the area. The floor also is decorated with visual patterns to try and distinguish it, but for many players it is a visual mess.
  • Hesperos, the fourth raid boss of Pandaemonium, has an attack called Pinax. This attack has several different elemental variants, each with a different but fundamentally simple method of solving them (water creates a big knockback in the center, fire is a big fireball that has to be shared, poison hits everyone at once so players have to be far away from eachother) but one variant in particular is very dangerous: lightning, which will cause a big lightning strike to hit the center of the arena and cause proximity-based damage. On paper this sounds easy enough, just go to the corners of the arena, but what makes it noteworthy is that it's an all-or-nothing attack: if you're outside the range, it will do damage so small it will barely need healing, but if you're even slightly inside the range it's an almost guaranteed death. Pinax also has a delayed effect from when it's cast, and can happen at the same time as other mechanics, which makes it entirely possible for a party to forget about the lightning Pinax or be too late in getting to the corners, causing a full wipe. It's even worse in Savage as, beyond all four effects being active from the start and coming out much faster than in Normal, now just standing in a quadrant when it activates its effect will kill you, and while the third quadrant is getting ready Hesperos will prepare a Shift, which requires everyone stacking on a specific cardinal or spreading on a specific wall depending on what item of his is glowing, all while having to identify and resolve the third and fourth quadrants.
  • In Hesperos's Savage exclusive form, Akanthai Act 2 stands out as rivaling Pinax in terms of difficulty. At the start of the move, Hesperos drives two pillars on each cardinal, one AoE and one tower soak, and players must quickly identify which two cardinals will be safe when the first AoEs go off. The real issue comes when Hesperos marks players with orbs and tethers them to other players with the same orb. If a tethered pair goes too far from each other, the orbs will activate and unleash either a raidwide, three/four person stacks, or a knockback AoE. The entire party needs to purposely set off the former two orb types carefully as the pillars go off while the knockback players stick together until the orbs disappear, carefully making sure defense down debuffs wear off and the tower soak pillars are taken. If the raidwide or stack orbs are allowed to run out, they automatically activate anyway, and after the move ends, Hesperos lets out an extremely powerful raidwide that will kill anyone with a defense down debuff still active. It's quite telling that most players are able to clear fairly quickly after learning Act 2, which is only the second of six major mechanics in the fight.
  • In the Aglaia raid, the final boss Nald'thal has a mechanic in the add phase that splits the arena in half and requires players to "balance" their weights (including the adds) between each half. While there is a tell indicating if the arena is balanced or not (it's behind Nald'thal), it can be chaotic trying to get the balance on top of it being a complete party wipe if even one person steps out of line. The more aggrevating part of this is it happens well into the fight, so you lose a good 5 minutes or more if the alliance wipes.
  • The last boss of Alzadaal's Legacy, Kapikulu, has a mechanic that forces the player move slowly in a straight line while pressing left or right steers them ala awkward tank controls. You're supposed to guide yourself around spike floors and later, an AOE the boss does. The problem with this mechanic is where you actually go is relative to the camera angle, not the direction the player is traveling. So if you move the camera around to see what's going on, you're going to have to learn where left/right direct you to. Which you'll have to move the camera around to see what the boss is doing every time this happens after the first.
  • Proto-Carbuncle's Devour attack quickly became infamous amongst the playerbase. In short, Proto-Carbuncle will stop in place and telegraph several spots, in sequence, where he'll pounce. The way to avoid getting damage is simple in theory: don't get hit. However, Devour has two peculiarities: First of all, the radius of effect of the pounces are absolutely massive, and come out in very quick succession. Second, if (when) you do get hit by the pounces, your character will be permanently stunned, then eaten, and then spat back out. This is instant death, bypassing even a Tank's invulnerability. The Savage version in particular has such tight timing with the pounces that players have to be very surgical with their movements, and even the slightest mistake can cascade into a horrible, horrible death. Oh, and in Savage, the mechanic right after Devour requires a certain amount of characters to be alive to avoid taking massive unavoidable damage. Have fun!
  • Hegemone's Polyominoid Sigma, which largely replaces Aetheric Polyominoid in the second half of the fight, is the most infamous part of what's considered the hardest fight in Abyssos. Hegemone's arena is divided into a 4x4 grid, with Aetheric Polyominoid marking certain squares as going to explode and damage players standing on them in a few seconds. The Sigma version adds pillars in the center of each quadrant and tethers them into pairs, transferring the quadrant's tile layout to the tethered quadrant. If you're bad at mentally swapping layouts in your head, this mechanic is an absolute nightmare. It's especially bad at one point when she combines it with Strophe Ixou, which fires out conal AoEs in front and back of her eight times, with her turning clockwise or counterclockwise. The safe spots for the initial conals and the Sigma explosions are extremely tiny, and if you're unlucky you may not be able to avoid the second or third conals afterwards.
  • In Savage, Hegemone's Polyominoid Sigma is overshadowed by her first use of Cachexia. This marks each player with a marker that causes certain attacks to be fatal if the player is on the wrong half of the arena, but is a mere setup for the actual attacks. Every player is also marked with a timer that hits them with an AoE and defense down debuff at four second intervals from 8 to 20 seconds, and starting at the 16 second mark, will use Dual Predation four times, which targets the nearest two players on each half of the arena and will kill anyone either on the wrong half of their Cachexia marker or if they have a defense down debuff. The result is a precise game of positioning where everyone has to make sure not to clip everyone with their AoEs and make sure they take Dual Predation in the correct order to survive to the end. The move even comes with a sort of Kaizo Trap as she ends with Ptera Ixou, a raidwide that also forces players to be on the correct half of the arena, but also requires players to notice that getting hit with Dual Predation swapped which half of the room is the correct half for them, meaning everyone has to run to the other half of the room at the end.
  • Hephaistos's Savage exclusive form has two major ones:
    • The first is, of all things, his basic auto attack/tankbuster/raidwide set, which has become infamous for being abnormally brutal to deal with. His auto attacks are small AoEs that require both tanks to stack together. His tankbuster Tyrant's Unholy Flare, which typically comes in the middle of the auto attacks, target the two highest enmity players with an absurdly powerful AoE, requiring the tanks to quickly spread to survive them. His raidwide, Aionopyr, is not only absurdly powerful, but comes with a Bleed debuff to deal damage over time for the entire party for a few seconds after the initial hit. Alone they wouldn't be too bad, but all three are typically used together and create a nightmare scenario that is very difficult for tanks and healers to deal with at first.
    • His first actual mechanic, Natural Alignment, is regarded as the hardest actual mechanic of the fight. Two players are marked with the titular debuff, which does heavy damage over time for the roughly 45 seconds the mechanic lasts and makes it so that, if those two players take damage from anything else or die to the natural damage, the entire party wipes. Two meters appear above one of the marked players' heads, one with a stack marker and one with a spread marker, and fill up at different speeds. The remaining six players need to do both in that order, with the caveat that Hephaistos will fire on half of the arena for the second one. The real tricky part is when another pair of meters appear over the other marked player's head, one for fire and one for ice. Fire will hit the three players furthest from the marked players with two person stacks, while ice will hit the two closest with three person stacks. While this is going on, the back two rows of the arena and one of the front two rows with be fired on by clones of Hephaistos twice, with the safe row alternating between fire and ice going off. In addition to the randomness of who gets marked making consistent positions impossible, it is very easy for a pair or trio of unmarked players to get hit with two attacks because the groups aren't perfectly symmetrical with space between the fire/ice baiters and the people stacking with them. It gets worse when he does it again later, as he marks one or both marked players with Inverse Magicks, which causes the meters to go off in the opposite order of what they say. If only one player is marked with it, you have to determine which player has it and whether they get stack/spread or fire/ice.
  • On Savage, Kokytos's Levinstrike Summoning/Scrambling Succession combo is considered an abnormally hard mechanic for a first fight and the first real wall of Anabaseios. Levinstrike Summoning creates four orbs, each numbered with an odd number from one to seven, and marks four players with even numbers from two to eight. Scrambling Succession properly starts the mechanic and makes it so that the four non-numbered players will be marked throughout the execution of Levinstrike one by one for massive AoEs. The way it works is that Kokytos will start by kicking the orb marked as one, which will explode at the opposite wall and create a tower that must be soaked. As the tower goes off, Kokytos will jump to the player marked as two with a moderately sized AoE that does less damage the further the player is from Kokytos's starting position, in addition to one of the Scrambling Succession players being hit with their massive AoE. All three players that take damage here are hit with a debuff that makes any damage taken for the rest of the mechanic fatal, meaning the positioning and order of how everyone resolves their duties has to be done in one of a few specific methods. Once it's finished, Kokytos will cast Two Minds, a simpler which must be resolved quickly and will likely kill one or more players if anyone fell to the preceding chaos.
  • The battle against Pandaemonium itself has Harrowing Hell. This mechanic has no fancy bells or whistles; it's just roughly ten rapid hits of raidwide damage which increases every hit, with the last hit knocking players back almost the entire length of the arena. New players are often taken completely off guard by this attack for how unexpectedly powerful it is, and the length of it means debuffs like Reprisal or Feint won't cover the entirety of it. Savage makes it even worse by upping the damage considerably, making the two players closest to Pandaemonium take increased damage, and most notably increasing the knockback distance to more than the length of the arena - before Harrowing Hell, Pandaemonium unleashes a rapid fire combination of multiple mechanics from the fight that can be used to create a wall. If this is messed up, Harrowing Hell will wipe the party.
  • On the Savage version of Pandaemonium, Daemoniac Bonds is a deceptively simple mechanic that is responsible for many wipes. All it does is inflict the party with debuffs that require them to spread apart and either stack with one or three other players, with the order and how many players are in the stacks being randomized. There are three major issues that turn this into a nightmare. For one, Daemoniac Bonds is never standalone - it is always cast before another mechanic (the last of which being the aforementioned Harrowing Hell) and resolved during or after it, meaning you have to determine the order while doing other things. Secondly, each explosion from the debuffs actually checks how many people are hit by them and, if it doesn't match the intended number, everyone hit by that explosion instantly dies. Lastly, dead players are not exempt from exploding - corpses will still explode their debuffs like normal, which means their presence makes it harder for the living players to resolve theirs.
  • Pallas Athena, the final boss of Savage Anabaseios, has her first use of Caloric Theory. Four random players are marked with a fire debuff that will explode once or twice and must be stacked with another player, while the remaining four will be marked with a wind debuff that will go off at the same time as the second fire explosions and knock back anyone near them. The catch is that everyone will also be inflicted with Close Caloric, a debuff which increases by simply moving or being hit with a fire explosion. If anyone's Close Caloric hits five, the entire party dies on the spot. The maneuvering for this is extremely precise and requires moving as little as possible, which means panicking or making a mistake will doom the entire pull.
  • The Final Boss of Thaleia, Eulogia, being a Fusion Dance of the Twelve is a Final-Exam Boss so all the mechanics throughout the raid series returns in addition to having some annoying attacks themselves. One is Quintessence, where Eulogia will prepare three attacks where each can either hit to their left, right, or around them. The party has to figure out quickly which way they will be facing when they teleport and run into the safe zones in time, which can be easier said then done especially if there is lag. Another is their Limit Break which is a series of thirteen unavoidable raid wide blasts that are each heavily damaging and come out in rapid succession, requiring the party to keep up on their heals and mitigation.

    Final Fantasy XV 

Final Fantasy XV

  • Ravus' tentacle attack. It can hit Noctis anywhere in the arena, can't be parried and is preceded by a very easy-to-miss tell. If it connects it's almost guaranteed to put Noctis into critical health, but making it worse is that it inflicts Stop, preventing you from healing or being rescued until it wears off. Adding insult to injury, Noctis will fall over after Stop wears off, and he has to get back to his feet before he can activate that Hi-Elixir you desperately selected. At any point during all this, Ravus can use any one of his other, equally devastating attacks and instantly kill you. All you can do is pray he targets one of your teammates instead until it's over.
  • The Ronin-type Daemons have a barely telegraphed, very fast and surprisingly long reaching sword slash that just kills you instantly if it hits. Not "put into Danger state" - just instant death out of nowhere.

    Final Fantasy Tactics series 

Final Fantasy Tactics

  • Wiegraf's signature move is Hallowed Bolt, a long-rage Holy-elemental attack that takes effect instantly. Because the battlefield in which you fight Wiegraf - alone, mind you - is so small, he can hit you with it on the first turn. A second hit from Hallowed Bolt will kill you, no matter what class Ramza is or what equipment he has. Literally the only way to survive Hallowed Bolt is to heal after every hit (Auto-Potion and Lifefont are both godsends for this), and then boost your speed stat up high enough that you can kill Wiegraf before he uses it. Agrias and Cid both have Hallowed Bolt, but they never get to use it to completely own a duel in the way Wiegraf does.
  • Shirahadori, a reaction ability as opposed to an attack, can get super annoying when you're attacking the Marquis Elmdore, as he has a high chance of automatically blocking any of your physical strikes. This is another move you can use for yourself with the samurai class.
  • Suffocate, an One-Hit KO move used by Celia and Lettie that never misses. Bad enough on its own, but during the Riovannes Roof battle, you fight Celia and Lettie with Rapha as a guest, and her death will lead to a Non-Standard Game Over.
  • Blood Suck is a rare but extremely nasty status effect. It turns the target into an undead vampire who goes crazy and starts sucking the life out of nearby targets—friends or enemies. And friends get turned to vampires too if they get Blood Sucked. If your whole party is vampirized it's game over! Status effects usually don't spread, let alone game-ending ones.

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance

  • Adrammelech's Firestream . In a battlefield which is much longer in one direction than the other, having a very powerful attack that hits a straight, unbounded line in one direction is a bit too much.

Final Fantasy Tactics A2

  • Sheol from Illua. This slows down the player while speeding up Illua and giving her Regen. By the time you get your turn again, she's taken several turns and probably recovered most of her health.
  • The Gold Hourglass spell used by almost every enemy in the Bonus Dungeon, Brightmoon Tor. Does damage to your whole party and casts Slow on them. The enemies will each get roughly half-a-dozen turns before you get to go. Oh, and bear in mind the enemies in this dungeon ALWAYS get to go first, so you can start the battle then go jogging for half-an-hour or so until your turn comes up again.

    Dissidia Final Fantasy series 

Dissidia Final Fantasy

  • Chaos has several attacks like this. First is Divine Punishment, in which he summons exploding flame pillars around your character, stabs you with a flying sword, and then deals HP damage with an enormous explosion. People new to this fight will die to this move a lot before finding out the trick.note . In phase 2 and on, he has Demonsdance: a long string of combo hits that hit you for HP damage several times within the combo (and if he's used his summon to freeze his Brave value so it doesn't go down...) and can kill you in seconds.note  Finally, his last phase gives him Scarlet Rain; a merciless shower of meteors for insane damage.note  They can all be dealt with, but they are easily Chaos's most unfair tricks.

    Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light 

Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light

  • Quite possibly the most notorious attack in the game is without a doubt, Asmodeus's Sidewinder ability. Not only does it deal massive damage (to everyone in the party no less) but it can also inflict nearly every single status move in the game, bar petrify (which he can already do, no less). And the worst part is that its spammable. You better pray to the high heavens your healer doesn't get silenced.
  • Beelzebub's "Fall of angels" if not stopped, can dish out massive damage that almost always KO's your party. Thankfully it takes a few turns to charge up, giving you a small window of opportunity to stop it, which will result in the hilariously named "Beelzeteor' which damages him significantly. However his defences get a serious buff during that time, so you need to hit him with as much power as you can throw at him.
  • In the same boat as Beelzebub, Leviathan has an attack called Tsunami that takes quite a few turns to charge up. If you don't stop him before he finishes charging it up, you're going to at the receiving end of a an attack that is more than capable of wiping out your entire party, should you not have anything to resist water. Likewise, Leviathans defences are buffed during this period, making it rather hard to bust through.
  • The final boss has an ability appropriately named "Big Bang" which not only dishes out a veritable ass-ton of damage, but is also spammable. This can be incredibly infuriating to lose to, given how far you have to travel through the final dungeon to get to him.

    Bravely Default 

Bravely Default

  • Airy's second form has Acedia, which removes all buffs on all party members and makes them weak to all elements. That is bad enough on its own, but the boss can sometimes decide to Brave and use Acedia followed by Flare or Zeta Flare, which does extra damage thanks to your newly-acquired fire weakness.
    • Any and all attacks that deal damage equal to the enemy's lost HP. Qada's Dark Breath and Alternis's Minus Strike are not fun to get around, especially since you do not have access to Reraise until the loops begin (or if you use the Salve-Maker's Font of Life compound, but that won't help against Qada for obvious reasons).
  • Rusalka, the second crystal boss, has a combination attack that more or less forms the main gimmick of the battle: Seep causes it to vanish into the floor, making it completely invulnerable, and then Dark Flow makes it pop back up, deal roughly 900-1000 HP damage to the entire party (by this point, everyone will likely only have around 1100 or 1200), and spawn three clones that have less HP but can do every other attack that the boss can, including defense debuffing and Charm-inflicting. And if you don't know the trick to tell the boss apart from the clones, the battle can take forever because you keep hitting the wrong one.

Bravely Second

Bravely Default II

  • The average player of this game can get traumatic flashbacks from just three words: "Counter Any Ability". To elaborate, while all of the myriad counters newly added to this game are various degrees of annoying, this one is likely the worst and cheapest of the whole bunch. It's not an attack per se; what it does is, whenever you use any job skill, the boss can get additional BP for free, which they will merrily use for whatever nasty attack or combo they feel like. The only limitation to this is the maximum BP stock of 3; there is no limit to how frequently or how many times they can do it, nor is there a way to turn it off (unless you can inflict Dread on them). Have fun when the boss you're fighting randomly takes three extra turns because you decided to heal or buff multiple characters. Late in the game, you can even face multiple enemies that can all counter simultaneously, giving the enemy party three or four extra actions for your one. (Granted, those are optional fights, but the Infinity+1 job skills are locked behind them, and if the developers wanted to discourage Game-Breaker strategies, this probably wasn't the way to do it....)

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