Been a fruitful evening.

So I went back Yuyan (Romancing Nippon) and took down Wagnas' annoying flying fortress. He was definitely the most obnoxious to fight against besides Rocbouquet until I realized most of his attacks are fire based and Fire Wall made him useless. Afterwards, I was struck with an event within Avalon itself, which I won't devolve too much info because it's an optional event that requires you did something earlier in the game. This was easily the most obnoxious sequence I've dealt with in the game. Also the one that brought back bad memories of the massive and aggressive monster spawn rate from RS1. With that sequence over, I went back to the Irises and grabbed the treasure there so I could finally reach the Hidden Village. Here I met the oracle and finally got a bit more of the backstory concerning the origins of the Seven Heroes. From there, I finally unlocked the final area and for a lark, decided to try my hand at fighting the final boss.

This boss has several phases, basically it starts with you fighting one of them and eventually more of them appear. By the final phase, you're basically fighting another party. The two most obnoxious phases has to be the starting phase and the true final phase. The starting phase is a pain because Rocbouquet is the first hero to fight and she brings her obnoxious Temptation skill with her. Unfortunately for me, I have only one woman on my team and only one accessory that protects again Mind attacks, so this phase is obnoxious because she's constantly removing two of my party members from the battle. Surprisingly, this gets mitigated as more Heroes appear because she uses the move less frequently. I may need to invest in another accessory to protect myself though because the two characters she keeps making useless are my two best damage dealers.

The final phase is annoying because the boss gains a few extra attacks and starts being far more aggressive with all the new abilities it gets from each of the heroes. The real trouble here is that the boss finally starts getting several turns in a row, so the fight becomes more about survival. I may need to prioritize Fire Wall just to protect me from one of the more obnoxious group attacks they have and I may need to equip the Anti-Hell Claw move as well since that attack can be dangerous when merged with some of their other abilities. I could return home and better set up my team, but I kind of want to try and beat them down a few more times because I am able to reach their final phase pretty easily outside of the hiccup with the Rocbouquet rematch.

In development news, I unlocked the final spelss for Fire and Earth, which if I had to redo this game, I would have specialized earlier if I had known what these skills were. Fire's final spell is Auto-Life (Reviver is it's actual name) and the final Earth spell is Vajra Shield which works like the Golem spell in FFV but only affects one character. I also have one more change to the city I was able to make, which sounds like one that I felt should have unlocked earlier and may had I not waited so long to open all the areas where recruits are. You basically build a new section of town where all of the special regional classes can be recruited so you don't have to march all over the map to recruit people like the Herders or Amazons anymore. You can potentially build your party from just Avalon.

I'll attempt the final boss a few more times and see if I can just end it with what I have, we'll see.