YMMV / Final Fantasy IV: Free Enterprise

• Breather Boss:
  • Generally, bosses that fall into the early game boss spots like Mist Cave, Waterway Passage, Antlion's Cave, etc, tend to be much easier due to their stats being reduced. Even with more complex battle scripts, later game bosses deal less damage and can be defeated quicker due to significantly lower HP.
  • Ironically as he is easily That One Boss, the Dark Knight's boss spot in the Mt. Ordeals mirror room makes bosses easier to fight. They are all capped at low HP, so it just comes to a race to finish them off before you, especially if you enable the flag that requires a one on one fight.
  • Water Hag, coming from a cutscene fight, has low HP and speed and only a single target physical attack.
  • King and Queen of Elban are weak no matter what spot they land in, being less of a breather boss and more of a freebie boss.
  • While seeing the shining spot icon used for the moon bosses typically causes fear in players, the relief that the fight is Pale Dim is palatable. Of all the moon bosses, his fight moves are predictable and manageable, mostly a strong physical attack and countering physicals with Slow, but only if you avoid using magic on him.
• That One Boss: Just as the shuffled boss positions can make some bosses easier, they can also make easy or standard bosses much harder and others almost impossible, particularly in boss positions from the final third of the game.
  • The further you go into the game, the more you dread that the Dark Knight will show up. His battle script is simple: he is taken from the original game, so if you sit there while he attacks with Darkness, then you will win after the third time. No fuss, right? The problem is that Darkness gets a massive boost the higher the boss position. This means that it's possible for each Darkness attack can do from 1000 up to 4000 points of damage to the party, essentially taking out everyone but the tanks on the first shot alone. And since it's a percentage style attack, nothing can defend against it. In the original game, he has alot of HP in order to stop players from just brute forcing the Paladin trial, which means the end game spots scale up his HP significantly. Trying to fight him takes a long time, and as the battle drags on, Dark Knight's turns start occurring faster and faster, until eventually he's firing off Darkness every second like a machine gun, making victory impossible. Many consider him a game dead end if he blocks a required spot or item.
  • Golbez can be tricky regardless where he lands. He keeps his original cutscene battle script where he freezes the party then takes them out leaving just two spots, unless you are protected against death. Then the fight starts. Even with lowered stats, he'll be throwing mid game spells at a weaker party of two characters. However, he's a menance later in the game where bosses have a huge magic stat, and he only attacks with magic. Now he can easily one-shot a character. He is made trifling easy if you get Wall or a Star Veil up since he only casts single target spells that can be reflected back to him, essentially winning you the fight. However, early on the player may not have access to the spell or found the item yet, and later on, Golbez may be slaughtering you too fast to even get a chance to use them.
  • In a twist of the typical problem, Asura is actually much harder early on than in later positions, despite her lowered stats. The trick is to cast Wall on her so her support spells now get bounced back to the party. But odds are higher that you don't have Wall available in the first half of the playthrough, or even a mage to cast it. The main problem is that she uses both Cure 3 and 4 on herself, with Cure 4 healing her fully, destroying all your hard work. So eventually she will just heal faster than your damage output, causing a stalemate.
  • Fights that have multiple mooks appearing in late game boss spots can make Zeromus look like a cake walk. Bosses like Calca and Brinas, Mom Bomb bombs, Dark Imps or the Fabul Rush have very limited moves, mostly just a physical attack. Appearing later on gives them late game boss strength. However, the normal late game bosses have a variety of moves that limit their strong physical attack usage. For mooks, it's all they have, so they end up wailing on your party for 3 or even 4 digits worth of damage every turn. Coupled with matching your party amount or outnumbering you, you can easily get overwhelmed. Mom Bomb is worse as she explodes near the end of the fight, doing critical damage to the party, then splits into 6 mooks, leaving your weakened party to be picked off quickly. Not helping things are the mooks getting a far bigger boost in HP than you would think, catching you off-guard that they are still standing.
  • Previous versions of the randomizer had Wyvern be a potential game over regardless of where he appeared. He would always open the fight with Mega-Nuke, which if you didn't act fast enough with that Wall or a Star Veil, would result in a total party kill. In fact, it was such a deal breaker that a special flag script had to be programmed just for him where his opening attack would use a randomized move, just to give the players a chance to survive past the first 5 seconds of the fight.

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