FF4 Solo FuSoYa Part I

(art by sakizou)

FuSoYa is a 10000+ year old semisentient beard who melts into a pile of goo when defeated. He's a Lunarian who happens to be Cecil's uncle, and one of two temporary characters in this version of the game. This means he won't be getting any crazy equipment in the postgame, should I do it with him. In fact, he's the only other character besides Dark Knight Cecil who can't equip the Hero's Shield. Even Tellah can equip it, so it seems this was a conscious decision.

His unique command, Regen (also known as Spirit Wave), is arguably the second most useless ability in the original SNES version of the game - and only because there is one that is truly 100% useless. The advent of it in the series, it allows your party to gradually recover HP. Um, 10HP at a time. This is way too little to make a difference at the stage of the game he formally shows up in. The higher the Agility of FuSoYa, the less is recovered. Furthermore, in the SNES version, FuSoYa is immobilized for the duration of the command. This differs in the remakes and he becomes able to act again immediately afterwards, but it's still a command that's of little help.

The good news and FuSoYa's real hook? He knows every Black and White spell in the game. To this end, he can also use equipment for both Black and White mages.


Because of the nature of this character, I'll be uniquely breaking up this report much differently for him, rather than the usual Overworld-Underworld-Cave of Trials/Moon. Let's take a brief look at his stats. Note that these are boosted by his equipment (his magical stats being 40/40), and he has no stat gains or losses until level 70. Not bad for what he is, and especially great for now. That high level means most fighting in the early game will only be making tiny steps towards his next level, though I fought a lot anyway. FuSoYa notably happens to have the worst HP growth in the game, although ends up with more than Tellah due to his high base. This makes Apples very desirable for him to consume. His MP growth does exist, but only starts to happen later on.


Needless to say, everything early on was a total nonthreat. Everything but Mombomb died in a single spellcasting. Most randoms were dealt with via Bio. Mist Dragon to a Flare, the soldiers to a Meteor (used and activated before they even moved, and that includes the time it took to Flare Cecil!), Octomammoth to a Flare, Antlion to a Flare, the super Sahagin to several Flares and some Bios, Mombomb to two Flares, Scarmiglione the first to a Meteor, Scarmiglione the second to a Flare, both Cecils to a Flare.


One spell from FuSoYa's arsenal worth talking about is Osmose. Ordinarily relatively ineffectual and taking quite a while to cast, this is a very useful spell for him to replenish his very limited stock of MP. Of course on Ordeals it was out of the question against the legions of the damned up there, but hey! The only problem with it is that it's - like I said, relatively ineffectual. Unless you go after certain targets or happen to luck upon a miracle Lilith Rod drop, you'll only be draining 1MP at a time.


Yang went down to a bunch of Flares - MP could be replenished by hitting him with Osmose. FuSoYa got his first level-up in the Old Waterway, which, as-discussed, had no effect on any stat but HP. Baigan went down to a Meteor. Cagnazzo to a Flare. The monsters in boxes in Eblan also stood no chance, being nailed with Break.


Dark Elf's first form to a Holy. Dark Dragon to...wait, what? Apparently this thing is weak to Holy, yet it absorbs it too. So you end up with a FFL-esque situation where the enemy is weak to physical attacks of the element (such as Cecil's sword), yet resistant to magical attacks (incidentally, which you have no access to at this point). In any case, a Tornado and staff strike ended this. Also for some reason, I forgot to take a shot of Holy's damage when absorbed (it was around 1500), but did take a shot of Meteor getting absorbed.

The Puppeteers in Zot greeted me with a Rune Staff drop. Which is good, as it's the strongest physical weapon for FuSoYa and happens to come just at a time where I'll need to physically fight with him!


The Magus Sisters to a Meteor...and after them is Barbariccia. First off, I was going through this game so fast that I'd forgotten to get the Change Rod and Gaea Gear! Had to go back down the Tower of Zot to get those. Now for the spinny lady herself. Recall from my Palom solo that magical evasion is included when she goes into her spin. And recall from others that it is possible to hit her with Spider's Silk before she goes into her spin.

In other words, there's a small window at the very beginning of the fight where you can hit her with magic.


Before I did this, I went and got a Rune Armlet drop from the Puppeteers. This was difficult - they were being stubborn, giving up another Rune Staff and two Healing Staves before I got this. With this, the Change Rod, and Gaia Gear, FuSoYa achieved 48 Intellect - good for an additional multiplier. Now the only thing to do is hope the Flare devastates most of her health down. Or more specifically, reset until that happens.


After a while of trying, I end up with a good roll. That said, there's still 1317 left to clear from here. And FuSoYa was going to be missing a lot. Needed to kill everyone else too, of course.


The good news was, she was zero threat. Blink stopped the physicals, Gaia Gear stopped the petrification, and Tornado only reduces HP to critical, doing no actual damage. So it didn't matter that this was going to take a while. She was never killing FuSoYa.


With her out of the way, I could now resume my regularly scheduled curbstomping of this video game. The dolls went down to Quake. Golbez - with poison preventing paralysis - was brought down by Holy as soon as the Mist Dragon showed up and he became vulnerable.


Worth noting, most of the time at this point of the game, I was tearing through randoms with the Break spell. It's cheap at 15MP a casting, can be multi-targeted, and instantly kills when it works which is often. Also whenever a Mystery Egg showed up, that was just an invitation to Osmose whatever's inside dry.


Lugae and Barnabas, the latter dropped to a Flare. Barnabas-Z was hit with Bio twice to reduce its HP enough so its explosion would not one-shot FuSoYa. Why not just Flare it too? So FuSoYa would have 100MP left, just enough to Flare Lugaeborg twice before it can really do anything. Gotta find creative ways to save on MP, with healing items for it limited/expensive and FuSoYa having only 190.


Eblan Cave had those annoying bats, as well as an interesting staff for sale. The Power Staff has 99% accuracy. This would've been nice to have on Barbariccia!! Rune Staff's accuracy is 60%, for the record. In the Tower of Babel part 2, it was back to Breaking.


So yes, you can do this. Like I said with Palom though, this takes a Spider's Silk, Hermes Sandals, and Elixirs, so I didn't actually do this.


How about Rubicante? Who I again just got rid of everyone in the party for so there was nobody to restore to full strength. Well, his Scorch was survivable by FuSoYa, so that's all I really needed. He started off with a Blizzaga for 9999. He then alternated Curaga (to heal from Scorches) and Flare (to deal damage, due to Rubicante absorbing ice when his cloak is closed). Had to use a Dry Ether at one point due to MP running low.

At this point I was going to try to farm a Lilith Rod. This is one of those rare drops, which was made not as rare in this version of the game. It's dropped by Liliths and Lamia Queens, the latter more commonly, When used as an item, it casts Osmose at much higher effectiveness than the normal spell, not to mention instantly. So why not farm it? Because I got my enemies mixed up - Lamia Queen is postgame only, and Lamia Matriarch is what's hanging around in the lower floors of Babil part 2.


Doing a bit of a different order in the Underworld than I usually do here. All the Trap Doors were of course made to commit seppaku with Reflect. The enemies in the Sealed Cavern unfortunately had some high magic defense, necessitating the use of Tents or tactical retreats to restore MP. They were worth fighting - this is where experience really starts to become plentiful. The doors in particular were 30000EXP apiece.


And the Demon Wall in five Flares - this needed a Dry Ether to restore MP partway through, as well as an Esuna to get rid of some of the gradual petrify from its counterattacks.

On the crux of being able to properly recruit him, FuSoYa has finished all that in 5:53. Not bad for a soloist who tends to fight often. But next time, before we recruit him proper - I'll be doing the sidequests.

Next | Index

FF4 Solo FuSoYa Part II

FuSoYa had no such frustration as Rosa had when dealing with Asura due to just being able to petrify his companions, except when his own wall ran out and I made him Flare himself. I guess one way would've been giving her a wall first so I'd know when it ran out, but another way was just using Meteor. I didn't measure it, but this was probably slightly more efficient on the MP consumption due to...well, he didn't even need to refresh her wall - just two Slows for her, two Hastes for him, the wall, and Meteors and healing as needed. It did run out as he started to charge a Meteor, but this Meteor killed her. Final cost was 9 Ethers and 1 Dry Ether. Very good.


I found a good strategy for Leviathan that used only two Ethers and an Elixir: Slow, Slow, Reflect (on FuSoYa), Thundaga five times, Curaga since he's at low health at that point and because his Reflect has run out by then, Ether, Thundaga.

Nothing to report in the Sylvan Cave. FuSoYa could cast Float to avoid the damage tiles like Rosa, and use Toad on the Bog Witches to stop them while draining them for tons of MP.


Then, the sidequesting hit a small snag. Odin was the first instance of FuSoYa's big problem coming into play - his low HP meant he could not survive Zantetsuken, and his low speed meant only getting in two moves before this. Even if he could do 9999 each time, this wouldn't be enough to beat Odin. So we'll be back for this guy!

The Behemoth brigade before Bahamut...the best way to beat them was with Blink and Meteor. The former stopped their physicals, and while the latter would trigger a counter of Maelstrom...it's not an issue since their only other attacks are their physicals.


Bahamut itself...here's a way to make a fight risky but faster!! Use Reflect of course, the idea being Hasting him makes him kill himself faster. It worked!! Took several uses for him to off himself, but this was a nice, MP-efficient way (maybe overly so) of getting the job done.


With that out of the way, I've hit the point of the game where FuSoYa formally comes into play. He's now starting to sag - enemies can really hurt him now that his equipment is relevant, his magic isn't as strong as the normal characters, and his HP growth is of course abysmal - it's 200 higher than it would be, due to use of two Silver Apples and a Golden Apple. I have a potential strategy to tackle this, but for now...I got him up to level 70. So let's see what he has to offer.

~ -1 Str, ±0 Agi, -1 Sta, ±0 Int, ±0 Spi
~ ±0 Str, ±0 Agi, ±0 Sta, -1 Int, ±0 Spi
~ ±0 Str, ±0 Agi, ±0 Sta, ±0 Int, -1 Spi
~ ±0 Str, ±0 Agi, ±0 Sta, ±0 Int, ±0 Spi
~ ±0 Str, +1 Agi, ±0 Sta, +1 Int, +1 Spi
~ ±0 Str, +1 Agi, ±0 Sta, +1 Int, ±0 Spi
~ ±0 Str, +1 Agi, ±0 Sta, ±0 Int, +1 Spi
~ +1 Str, ±0 Agi, +1 Sta, ±0 Int, ±0 Spi

Talk about terrible. He has the worst post-70 growths in the game! At least they exist, and there's one clear winner - option 5. Boosts to all the important stats. By only a single point, but at least all of them are there in one package. Also worth noting - his MP has increased a bit!


The Babil Giant highlighted a lot of FuSoYa's problems. I just ran from everything, under threat of being ripped apart. The Last Arm casts Search and (electro)Magnetic Radiation repeatedly, just endlessly stunlocking a solo character. Reflect solved this and won FuSoYa an Elixir.

The Four Elemental Lords battle exemplified just how bad things had gotten for FuSoYa in the span of no time at all. This fight was batshit insane. FuSoYa needed to open with Hermes Sandals and then Spider's Silk when he could. Otherwise, he wouldn't have enough speed to deal with these things. Using spells to achieve the speed differential was out of the question - Scarmiglione moves too quickly and deals too much damage with his physicals, compounded by Curse which lowers physical attack and physical defense. With this up, all there was to do is Flare away and heal as needed.


Rubicante at least was not too troublesome. Scorch was survivable, and the key was to use Reflect to protect against Fira and Firaga. They would heal Rubicante, but FuSoYa's damage output was more than enough to keep up. Cagnazzo and Barbarricia are considered another monster, which meant using Slow twice (there was enough time to do this, unlike with Scarmiglione). Several more Flares and Elixirs later, and the fight was essentially won. With Gaia Gear on, Barbarricia's Rays were neutered. With Blink and careful attention to her attack script (physical -> Ray -> physical -> physical -> Maelstrom), she could never kill FuSoYa. The most annoying elemental lord in her original incarnation turned out to be the easiest phase of this fight!!


So how to deal with this thing? Preferably in a timely manner? There's Reflect again, but FuSoYa's lower magic stats mean I'll have to land two more of those coinflips. But that doesn't matter, as it turns out I was a big fat liar - there is in fact a tiny interval in which Reflect is down in which it's possible to hit this thing with a spell!

I found a consistent setup that allowed me to deal with this in this manner, MUCH faster than just beating it down with a stick! To start, Flare the Defense Node, use two Slows on the Attack Node, and two Hastes on FuSoYa. From there on out, the CPU's Reflect will alternate between dropping (almost) immediately after Piercing Laser gets used, and around one and a three-quarter cycles of their floating animation after the damage numbers from that attack disappear.

1300HP is the magic marker. I had FuSoYa heal after every Flare. Whenever he hits this amount of health is the time to strike, in accordance with the timing above. I even uploaded a video to better demonstrate this. Note that it is possible to land the first Flare, but the timing is strict.


Since FuSoYa has nothing to get in the Cave of Trials, it was onward to the moon to start out with. Amusingly, the game seems to treat him as Cid - he appeared instead of FuSoYa when I stepped onto the transport tile, and made a quick run down to the bottom to test if the game would crash. If I had Cid himself in the party, I'd see two Cids. More amusing is what happens at the Hall of Prayers. The game sees not everyone switchable is in the party, and reacted in the reasonable yet unexpected way of placing two people in the center. You can see Edge behind Kain, there. It was also possible to switch FuSoYa out, which gets him stuck there. He doesn't talk and vanishes when you leave the hall. The only way to get him back is to edit him back into the part.

White Dragon was another boss who uses physicals and critical HP moves. It was frantic to get up the Slow-Slow-Haste-Haste, but from there on out, Blink could protect FuSoYa as Flare damaged it - thankfully without Slow counters. Sometimes, I needed to wait for Blink to be worked all the way down to refresh it to make the timing easier, but that's about it. This battle was surprisingly execution heavy.


There were a couple pickups of note in the core. The most notable of these was the Stardust Rod. The best of its kind in vanilla, it gives +15 Intellect and casts Comet when used as an item. The Sage's Staff is the second-best of its kind as a monster-basher behind the Rune Staff. Though it gives +15 Spirit, which is higher than the Rune Staff (and casts Life when used as an item, pointless for a solo). The White Robe was also around, although I generally preferred the Light Robe for the Intellect bonus. And last, but not least, the Protect Ring is as usual a useful asset.

Break was a fantastic spell throughout the trek down, just being able to instantly get rid of vulnerable enemies, including both skeletal dragons, the Dark Sages, and Selene Guardians. Tornado was also good, weakening enemies to the point of where one more blow would do them in. Better than using multiple spellcastings on enemies immune to Break.


The Lunasaurs were an interesting fight, highlighting how enemy status skills have no respect for the boss bit, regardless of the boss bit being present on the skill itself or not. Bad Breath happens to be one of these which is reflectable. Once they were both messed-up toads, that was it. With Barrier status being permanent, there was nothing they could do ever again. To save on MP healing resources, I had FuSoYa equip the Sage's Staff (would've used a Rune Staff, but my inventory was too full and there were three of them, so I couldn't swap), Haste up, and Berserk himself. I went out to water the backyard while he gradually beat them down, and came back to find him victorious.


How about Plague? FuSoYa with 27 Agility (4 from level ups and 3 from a Black Cowl) was just enough to get off a Reflect in time, at which point the fight became elementary. Just needed two Ethers for some MP restoration.

Speaking of, leveling up down here wasn't going to be a problem. The Li'l Murderers just float around casting Scan on themselves, and make for great Osmose targets that I can actually drain a ton of MP from! Those things have been in short supply for the last few dungeons. As for what to fight, B6 has groups of three Dark Sages who don't do anything really dangerous (except Tornado when alone), can be taken out with a multi-targeted Break, and give up 51009EXP a fight.

Before going into that grind, Dark Bahamut did fall. But FuSoYa only had 7 Elixirs in stock, and it took five of those (plus Silk/Sandals) to win. No, holding out until a more financially appropriate moment was the way to go here. Same goes for Ogopogo. The strat goes Haste-Haste-Slow-Slow, healing as necessary, and using Blink to stop the physicals.


So with this in mind, I took to grinding right now!! I took FuSoYa up to level 87, which is really just an arbitrary number (I went to 85 at first, then a bit more for 400K Gil, then grinded a bit more). Irritatingly, I ended up with three Soma Drop drops during this, although they all came on level-ups. At least I got to keep one of them!!

FuSoYa had gained a lot more MP over the course of this. This and added Intellect was enough to comfortably win the Ogopogo encounter with only two Ethers used. Although running from Ivan Ooze along the way got annoying...he takes forever to run from and can easily kill you with Holy and Flare. Teleport works to instantly flee, but that of course costs precious MP that I was trying to hoard.


And Dark Bahamut? I didn't even take it seriously...I managed to get this to line up, and it was quite glorious.


I went up to Level 89 before heading into the Cave of Trials. This place has rare Golden Toads, which are capable of dropping Golden Apples. Dealing with them is easy - just Stop, Tornado, and Bio. They're rare, but running into them wasn't too bad due to fixed RNG - they'd always be the 8th encounter after a reload. Surprisingly, I got a drop after a few tries!! This is the strategy of getting more HP that I was talking about. Fortunately, I didn't need to do so, because this isn't a very reliable strategy.


When dealing with the five Cave of Trials bosses, the one to pay attention to is as always, Master Flan. FuSoYa couldn't get off a Slow or Silk in time, but could cast Haste twice and, most importantly, survive the Flares. The good news about this thing is that it has minimal HP. A Quake wiped out the goons, a Curtain was used...for no good reason, but not like it's too tough to stock back up on them in the Ruins if I go there, and Flares off the wall quickly brought an end to it. If healing was needed, reflected Curaga did the trick.


Thankfully, there was a ready source of Osmoseable MP available, saving me some Ethers and Elixirs. Did have to use the HP ones sometimes though - they counter magic with Tornado. While I usually ran from the enemies due to them not being worth my time anymore, I did actually have to fight and gain couple levels here, because the bosses and Golden Toads pay out quite a lot. And having to get a good level-up on a boss fight is just a bad idea.


As I've established, any boss that strictly uses physical attacks against FuSoYa is simply toast. However, when noticing the Gigas Worm really wasn't doing that much damage and FuSoYa having exactly 300MP after two Slows, two Hastes, and a Blink, I decided to try having him just go all in and used six Flares. Bad rolls prevented him from getting the kill off this, but the speed differential really can't be understated. He was able to rebuild his HP with just Hi-Potions. The beast had 2872 HP left. So FuSoYa took to using the Stardust Rod!! This did a small amount of damage each time, in the 300-500 range, but it was more than adequate to take this sucker down without using any more MP restoration items. Almost think I'm going too far with this, honestly...but hey, it's fun to think up these strategies.

T-Rex was much the same, with Float instead of a Blink to deny Earthquakes. This time, though, it was left with too much HP to reasonably take down (4638) after the six Flares and I was running low on Hi-Potions. So I used a single Ether followed by Quake, which was enough to finish it off.


So how about the others? Death Mech had a nasty Laser attack that was impossible for FuSoYa to survive with his HP, no matter what the combination of Flare and speed manipulation were used. Luckily, it could be Reflected. He did need to use the usual 2xHaste and 2xSlow; Death Mech would eventually use Globe 199 to over around 5000 damage. Other than that, it was a simple fight. Storm Dragon also got the speed treatment. I did use Blink against it; the physicals of the dragon were just a bit too strong. Funny enough, when deciding whether to refresh Blink or just deal a final Flare (checking its HP with a Bestiary), I found out the latter was optimal. I messed up the menuing and it got a turn in-between which it used on Maelstrom, but of course, it didn't matter.


One last thing to take care of on Earth. FuSoYa now had the agility to kill Odin, so he did so.


And one last thing to take care of before moving to finish the game: leveling FuSoYa up to 99. It was a bit annoying to get option 5 in the post-70 level ups every time, but the result was 29 in each of Agility, Intellect, and Spirit. Also note just how much experience this took! It wasn't exactly the cap, but only about 5000 points behind from it. Only one "normal" character compares to him (taking 9.7 million), and everyone else isn't even close.

As for these stats themselves, they're okay, I suppose. They'll usually be boosted by equipment, although you can only boost one by 15 at a time (Sage's Staff/Stardust Rod).


Zeromus, I was expecting to be difficult given Big Bang and FuSoYa's low HP. Instead, it was a complete shitshow. The only hitch being needing to use an Elixir before the fight started, because FuSoYa started with critical HP and 0MP, neither of which was healed automatically. For the fight itself once everyone was quickly petrified...FuSoYa's Flares were doing like 8000-9999 damage. With access to Reflect, Zeromus proceeded to further kill himself (although thinking of it for the first time, maybe it should be themselves given the use of 'we'?) with his own counter Flares. Big Bang wasn't that damaging. Strangest of all, at low HP, Zeromus is supposed to change into a second 'form', giving the illusion that he has more HP than he technically does. Instead, he just died.


By killing himself with his own Bio. I don't even know what happened. There is a glitch in the SNES version of the game where Reflected magic doesn't trigger counterattacks, but that's supposed to be fixed on this version. One source, also a source that claims that Zeromus absorbs Flare, says the switchover happens between 16000-12000HP, which seems kind of narrow. But from a bit of testing and looking at other sources, might be it (he went from 16587 to 7387 in the course of two Flares). Really silly stuff!!

The Bio bit was unintentional, I just accidentally used Bio instead of Flare due to menu lag and mashing too much, prolonging the fight a bit and ending up the result you can see in this video. It feels a bit weird to have done this fight in this way, although I don't really forsee the rest of it being that hard - just repeat the same strategy. Reflect, Flare, reflect counter Flares and other magic, and Elixirs after every Black Hole (or as needed).

So two final things. Remember how FuSoYa showed up as Cid? What happens if I had Cid in the party at the same time as him...?


Surprisingly, nothing crashy. The scene plays out as normal, with Cid chastising Cid for being boastful twice - strangely, with two different lines (saying humans still have goodness and that they must thank the dwarves). Next, when you beat Zeromus for the first time with a character, their trial in the Lunar Ruins is unlocked. What happens when FuSoYa is in the party at the time?


Nice. Actually reloaded and switched him for Yang after the battle had ended, just in case this causes something unforeseen to happen. 13:45 gametime to finish the main game.

As I expected, FuSoYa wrecked most of the game, and even towards the end, it was manageable after level 70. Although the fact that he had to go above it to perform well does say something, I suppose. At any rate, this was a fun curbstomping.

I originally wrote that wasn't fully sure about wanting to do the Lunar Ruins. The equipment is all character-specific. FuSoYa has little to gain besides fighting the fights themselves and potentially a ton of HP by farming the personality test floor for a ton of apples, which might be wise, given the beard's pathetic HP total. Like I said, he can't even equip the Hero's Shield. But...

Next | Index