Screen Rant ranked the FF bosses from weakest to strongest (gameplay)

[Wolf Kanno]

This is a weird list but I thought it would be fun to discuss.

For those who don't want to read, here's the countdown. Note that XI and XIV are skipped over and replaced with two FF bosses from non-numbered games. There are obviously spoilers here as well. Starting from easiest to hardest.

15. Yu Yevon
14: Orphan
13. The Dark King (Mystic Quest)
12. Emperor Mateus
11. Safer-Sephiroth
10. Ultima The High Seraph (FFTactics)
9. Ardyn
8. Kefka
7. Neo-ExDeath
6. The Undying
5. Zeromus
4. Necron
3. Chaos
2. Ultimecia
1. Cloud of Darkness

[Jinx]

lol what

yu yevon is, hands down, the easiest boss in the entire SERIES

[Karifean]

Including Yu Yevon over BFA, but Safer Sephiroth over the final duel, goddamn double standard bs >.<

*shrug* I dunno. Haven't fought Chaos, Mateus, CoD or Ardyn but I think I'd put Zeromus, Necron and BFA highest with Ultimecia and Orphan following soon after (and Caius' Bahamuts too if that counts) and Neo Exdeath, Kefka, Safer Sephiroth and the Undying further down. All bosses can be made pretty easy by going out of your way even a little though.

[Forsaken Lover]

Wait, did they use Orphan 2 as the final boss of XIII? Orphan 1 is the real final boss and it is significantly harder than most of the bosses on that list. I'd swap it and Ultimecia.

Ultimecia CAN be hard but FFVIII is such a broken mess of a game that she isn't. On paper, pretty tough. In reality, not at all.

And I guess they only used the NES version of CoD who you throw Shurikens at until she dies? Very challenging. [/sarcasm] At least in 3D she comes with her Tentacle helpers, one immune to magic and one immune to physical. It makes the fight a lot more varied and it can be pretty smurfin' intense at times when you have to pray your healer gets Curaja off before she does something again.

Overall though she would be in the Top 3 most certainly.

[Wolf Kanno]

Including Yu Yevon over BFA, but Safer Sephiroth over the final duel, goddamn double standard bs >.<

*shrug* I dunno. Haven't fought Chaos, Mateus, CoD or Ardyn but I think I'd put Zeromus, Necron and BFA highest with Ultimecia and Orphan following soon after (and Caius' Bahamuts too if that counts) and Neo Exdeath, Kefka, Safer Sephiroth and the Undying further down. All bosses can be made pretty easy by going out of your way even a little though.

Yeah, it' kind of a double standard, but Yu Yevon is also a longer fight than the intentionally cinematic Sephy duel.

Honestly, I think you give BFA too much credit. He's like Kefka and Sephiroth where there are multiple ways to break that fight in your favor and the only way it would be challenging is if you went in completely unprepared and low leveled or you purposely dragged the fight out which frankly any end game boss in the series can be lethal if you drag the fight out for too long. Even without the celestial weapons though, Yuna can two shot him with Bahamut or any Aeon above him as long as you went in with full Overdive gauges. So it really doesn't require a whole lot of extra effort on your part to beat him easily, at least nothing more time consuming as getting KotR or teaching your whole party Ultima.

Wait, did they use Orphan 2 as the final boss of XIII? Orphan 1 is the real final boss and it is significantly harder than most of the bosses on that list. I'd swap it and Ultimecia.

Ultimecia CAN be hard but FFVIII is such a broken mess of a game that she isn't. On paper, pretty tough. In reality, not at all.

Poison will wreck Orphan's first form though and you can effectively beat him by just poisoning him and then switching to a defensive Paradigm set and turtle your way through his attacks. How I beat it. I think the second form is actually a bit tougher, especially since the list forgets to mention how low the odds are for Death to land.

As for Ultimecia, she was the oddest ranking on the list cause frankly, I don't think I've ever lost to her. Like you said, she sounds devastating on paper, but she usually only spams her HP=1 attack which frankly screws her over big time. Her anti-GF abilities are not dangerous cause GFs are kind of useless in this fight, and her anti-stock could be devastating but only if you were silly enough to have the character equipped with only spells Junctioned to them and even then, it's a crapshoot if she'll hit the one that will hurt you like Strength Junction. I never even realized she had a cinematic super attack until I purposely dragged out the fight and it's frankly the least impressive of many FF villains.

And I guess they only used the NES version of CoD who you throw Shurikens at and spam Cure 4 every round until she kills you or you kill her? Very challenging.

Fixed that for you. The strategy for beating her is simply in theory until you realize her Flarewave does ridiculously high damage and nothing short of exploiting the HP Trick with high levels or grinding for a FEOK is going to not allow that attack to kill you in two rounds, if not just the first round. Throw in the fact you have to beat four incredibly tough bosses just to actually be able to hurt her to begin with, I feel she deserves first place on this list. I beat her in the Famicom version and it was a much closer battle than I would have liked, and she honestly would have killed me in the following round if she had just enough HP left.

I honestly found her DS incarnation to be significantly easier. More varied for sure, but a lot easier to deal with considering how beefed up many of the classes are in that version.

I think Emperor Mateus is the character who got robbed here because he's actually a bit more challenging and easier to waltz into the fight unprepared. The Blood Swords make the fight ridiculously easy but it's very likely you may only be going into the fight with one of them cause you either missed the second one by not talking to a specific character in a very short window of time, or your playing the remakes and gave one to a dying character in order to have it for the Soul of Rebirth segment. Even with maxed stats this fight can drag on as it quickly turns into a war of attrition since he can regain all his health by punching your party. He's not ridiculously powerful like some bosses, but he's certainly tougher than Kefka and Ardyn.

If I had to rank them...

15. The Dark King
14. Safer Sephiroth
13. Kefka
12. Braska's Final Aeon
11. Ultimecia
10. Orphan
9. Ultima the Last Seraph
8. Ardyn
7. The Undying
6. Chaos
5. Neo ExDeath
4. Emperor Mateus
3. Necron
2. Zeromus (if going by original, he'd be fourth otherwise)
1. Cloud of Darkness

[maybee]

Would put...

15. Yu Yevon. As already previously mentioned. You basically cannot die against this squid- thing.
14: Vegnagun. Just Dark Knight him.
13. Ardyn. Not too tough.
12. Safer- Sephiroth. Can be rough if you don't understand the Materia system.
11. Paramecia. A little tougher than Sephiroth.
10. Amber Bahamut. Struggled a bit.
9. Braska's Final Aeon. If you don't "cheat " if aeon overdrives, and Yojimbo that is.
8. Kefka. He can be a bit nasty at times.
7. Ultimecia. If you don't understand Junction. Yeah, goodbye.
6. Ex-Death. Can be really brutal.
5. Orphan. I really struggled with this brute.
4. Zeromus. In the DS version he's a right ass. Took me about six times to finally get him. I can't remember what he was like in the SNES. Just remember the SNES version of the Big Bang REALLY hurting my eyes.

3. Chaos. From memory, he was rough.
2. Necron. Gave him the 2nd place spot because he's a total b

tch

1. Cloud of Darkness. I think I would prefer to battle a angry pub gruff than this girl again.....

edit : forgot about Vayne. eh oh wells.

[Loony BoB]

Well trout, I'm playing FFIII right now and you guys are all giving me worries about that last boss.

Ultimecia is perhaps the easiest boss in any game I've ever played because you can literally just pop your Laguna card into 100 Hero Potions right before you fight her and be invincible the entire fight, and Aura + Low HP yourself to make your limit breaks pop forever. Invincible with incredibly high damage? How can this fight not be the easiest one? Even without using hero potions, the fight is insanely easy if you learn the junction system regardless.

I get that poison can be considered OP vs. Orphan but I still counter that with any FF boss tends to be easy if you have overleveled, and who is to say what the appropriate level is? With Orphan you are restricted to just how OP you can be, and that kind of factors into my thinking of how easy or hard something is. I think Poison + Defensive (not what I did personally, I went Poison + a lot of tactical switching between heals, tanking and offence) is just as much cheating the system as over-leveling is.

If we include the MMOs, the only other place in which you can't really overlevel (you can overgear, but only long after the boss is out), I'd say the boss of Stormblood and the boss of the Heavensward Dragonsong plotline were particularly tricky affairs compared to many other FF bosses.

Emperor was the toughest boss fight I've stumbled into, probably, so far. Yet to finish III and IV. All the others kind of muddle into each other as far as I'm concerned, aside from those mentioned above. I'm not counting the super-easy end "bosses" that pop up as others have pointed out.

[Wolf Kanno]

I get that poison can be considered OP vs. Orphan but I still counter that with any FF boss tends to be easy if you have overleveled, and who is to say what the appropriate level is? With Orphan you are restricted to just how OP you can be, and that kind of factors into my thinking of how easy or hard something is. I think Poison + Defensive (not what I did personally, I went Poison + a lot of tactical switching between heals, tanking and offence) is just as much cheating the system as over-leveling is.

Except Poison is a basic skill, and if you use a Saboteur, he's likely to get poisoned in the fight. It's barely a secret, you'll likely find it so I can't agree that it's the same as "overleveling" which frankly helps you more in the early games as opposed to the later ones. Throw in the fact that XIII is like MMO entries where you can be overgeared as well if you spent your time farming money to level up your equipment, then I really don't feel there is much of a challenge here. I might agree with the whole "Death" thing since that is something you likely wouldn't try until someone told you, but poison is a basic starting skill for it's role and using a saboteur is kind of a no-brainer in XIII so this hardly requires skill, foreknowledge, or excessive time wasting like grinding to pull off.

[Fynn]

Yeah I pretty much beat Orphan on accident, on my first try. Wasn’t even remotely strategizing, just went full-on autoattack. Whoever rates Orphan so high on a difficult bosses list... I struggle to imagine we played the same game even.

[Loony BoB]

I'm not saying Orphan was hard, but I am saying that it's far from the easiest. Maybe I just found some bosses in FF way too easy... I'd say it's on par with most of the bosses I faced. Poison might do most of the work for you but there have been bosses in Final Fantasy games that I have basic attacked + cured my way through. I think that's the definition of easy, personally speaking. But then maybe I'm always overleveled/geared by the time I fight the end boss? I dunno.

Ultimecia is just too easy to be anything but #1 for me.

Also, just realised that Bhunivelze isn't on this list as far as I can tell. I think it took me multiple attempts to beat him, which is more than I can say for most FF bosses.

[Mercen-X]

Ultimecia is just too easy to be anything but #1 for me.

I'm not sure I'm understanding your ranking system. Is Ulti weak or..?

Personally, I'd rather list off who players would like to take control of as central characters as villain-protagonists, anti-heroes, or anti-villains.

[Rez09]

Poison might do most of the work for you but there have been bosses in Final Fantasy games that I have basic attacked + cured my way through.

There are final bosses in this series people don't do that for? Well damn.

If I were to rank these . . .

Unranked) Orphan - Haven't Fought.
Unranked) Ardyn - Haven't Fought.
13) Yu Yevon - Basically impossible to lose.
12) The Dark King - Horrible Cure allergy.
11) Ultima - I don't even know if this supposed to be a real fight or a glorified cutscene like Yevon; I just run/teleport up to her and attack until I win.
10) Chaos - The dungeon is the real final boss here; FAST + basic attacks and healing win the fight with little fuss.
9) Kefka - Horrible Gau allergy. Even ignoring that the fight is oddly easy though, and I've finished the game with an average party level under 15 without using espers due to that.
8) Sephiroth - Horrible Arthurian Legend allergy. Also have had party members do terrible things to each other in the fight after Supernova when I forgot about ribbons. Otherwise a pretty simple attack and heal affair.
7) Ultimecia - I've never fought her without limit spam, which makes nearly the whole game a complete joke, but I do seem to remember at least something annoying in the fight, which is more than I can really say about the previous bosses.
6) Mateus - Horrible Toad allergy. Horrible Blood Sword allergy. Horrible naked man with a buckler allergy. Hits surprisingly hard when you aren't abusing any of that, though. Which you probably will be, because it is FF2.
5) Necron - I've actually had problems with this fight due to Grand Cross, though usually only when I haven't done any grinding and Trance Kuja tended to be the real problem in those situations with that whole 'Flare Star' spam thing.
4) Neo Exdeath - Horrible alchemy allergy. The difficulty here might be a bit inflated due to me mostly doing 4JF runs of the game, but this is a great fight when you are at the appropriate levels and he has definitely killed me before. Also, White Hole, great attack, probably my favorite final boss exclusive skill in the series, more enemies should be jerks and petrify your corpses.
3) Cloud of Darkness - This boss' strategy was so good Trance Kuja decided to partially mimic it six games later. Double healers make this fight reasonable, but it is complete hell otherwise.
2) The Undying - Absolutely inflated; I am total garbage at this game. Complete and utter trash. I don't know what I'm doing wrong, but this boss likes to remind me it is everything.
1) Zeromus - Also inflated because it turns out, just like FF6, I love this game at low levels. Also turns out the moon sucks at low levels. A lot. And so does this boss. And Big Bang. And Flare. I love it.

[Loony BoB]

Ultimecia is just too easy to be anything but #1 for me.

I'm not sure I'm understanding your ranking system. Is Ulti weak or..?

Ulti is not what I'd call overly strong, but more to the point, your own characters are absurdly overpowered beyond all reason.

[maybee]

Ultimecia is just too easy to be anything but #1 for me.

I'm not sure I'm understanding your ranking system. Is Ulti weak or..?

Ulti is not what I'd call overly strong, but more to the point, your own characters are absurdly overpowered beyond all reason.

If you understand the Junction System, Ulti is easy peasy lemon squeezy.

[Forsaken Lover]

Poison is the only way I ever beat Orphan. I could not beat it legit because the constant barrage of status effects was too much. You only get a couple accessory slots if you use ther ight characters and there's just no way to protect against all of statuses you get hit with.

My "avorite" is dying to Poison during the big sword attack animation because you continue losing HP while the whole thing plays out and then of course you get hit by the damage from teh attack and die. It's...something alright.

Kefka, Kuja, none of them compare at all to Orphan. It's really only a contest beween COd, Zeromus and Orphan in my opinion.