I got owned by the two boss guys the first time.

(SPOILER) Enlil has some uber Raging Tempest attack that can wipe you (Enlil is Lightning-strong, Water-weak, and Enki is the opposite I believe). I think it's possible to kill him before he gets it off if you're fast enough. Anyway, you may want to use Spark Rings to help mitigate some of the damage.

After you're buffed with Sazh as a Synergist, seems best to just focus entirely on Enlil with Commando+Ravager and Ravager+Ravager until he's dead (and keeping your party's HP from getting too low by switching Vanille to a Medic temporarily of course).

Make sure you use Libra (or a Librascope, which is Libra on all enemies) so the AI knows what abilities to use for each Paradigm role. I believe Enlil has a weakness to poison so you might want to try having Vanille apply it on him as a Saboteur early in the fight while Sazh is buffing as a Synergist. You can try throwing on Deshell and Deprotect also -- a Saboteur has a similar effect on the Stagger bar as a Commando, but without nearly as much damage -- but don't waste the whole fight trying to do it if they don't stick (which is what happened to me the first time).


And as with many difficult enemies, getting Staggers and killing quickly is a key to winning -- the longer something lives, the much worse off you're going to be.

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Anyway, I felt the story started to drag a bit in these chapters. We get a bit more character insight and some backstory, which is certainly nice, but the main storyline is still stalled until we get to Palumpolum and Nautilus. A couple of hours of exposition is kinda meh, particularly when you're being forced to fight with two unchangeable two-person parties.

I get the whole formula where you draw the audience in with an exciting introduction, then take a break which you use to introduce the characters more intimately, but following Chapter 4 this just seemed to take a bit too long for what we got IMO.

I'm also getting a bad itch to do something other than follow the maps to their end, except that I can't. Tried messing around with the upgrade system, but you still don't have enough of the nice base items, components, or cash to do too many cool things with it yet.