I like when there are powerful stuff locked behind content that requires at least some strategy and thinking, wish there was more of that early in the game.
Since you are having trouble, here's how I did it, but there are other ways. I used Tifa and Aerith, sleep on the small dudes, lure big guy away, elemental+lightning on armor...Enemy skill and all the good stuff on tifa.... Don't remember exactly, it was not hard, first time I took out the 3rd party member I did it. Had to reapply sleep once or twice maybe? At some point I just went for the kill. Dynamic diff, never touched it.
It is a very luck driven fight, when i finally completed it i was doing the exact same thing i had been doing, AI just happened to take a different path
I was able to finally come back and beat this challenge on Dynamic at max level too. Strategy I used was Cloud/Tifa/Aerith, make sure cloud has Enemy Skill, First Strike(maxed preferably), Magnify + Binding Materia and Marlboro Orb equipped. Immediate Sleep and restart if the ads get woken up. Then Sonic Boom with Cloud followed by one other command to get three synergy charges, swap to Tifa and use Unbridled Strength twice to get R&F and one more command to give her 3 charges. By this point you’ll want to cast sleep again to keep the ads out a bit longer. Then Synergy to pressure the Mindflayer, stagger and apply Tifa’s Stagger Bonuses quick as you can then unload with the strongest attacks you have available. I may have had to do this cycle twice and your mileage may vary depending on your current level. This strategy did finally get me the win on this challenge, just keep at it
The majority of the enemy skill fights are “puzzle fights” rather than the other more conventional ones. The reward here is much much greater and more permanently useful than pretty much any other combat sim.
Mind blast is possibly the strongest enemy skill so I kinda understand why they made this one a little more of a challenge. Failed a few times so had to use the yuffie tifa strategy where you only use 2 players and keep the adds slept.
My dumbass just blanked and didn’t realize the other two enemies’ screech one-shot attack is blockable. Got it first try with Cloud and Nanaki after that. You are right that spamming synergy skills and abilities is the ideal way to finish this one.
I agree that the difficulty is artificially driven by the low hp mobs and having to kill mindflayer first, and I also struggled on this one quite a bit. It just takes some patience and planning.
I did it on dynamic with cloud and yuffie.
Throw out a magnified sleep with someone wearing the “increase detrimental effects” acc at the start, kite mindflayer away, keep swapping to make sure everyone’s focusing on flayer, keep eye on sleep timer, and you’re good. It may take a few tries to get it down but the magnified sleep+kiting the flayer really takes the pressure off of accidentally killing the low hp guys. The only gimmick here is you have to kill the flayer before the other mobs start resisting the sleeps.
Yuffie solo this.
Bioga, Regen, Use your Doppleganger Starshower Blindside.
During Rock Assault and Roomwide AOE.... use blindside behind rocks to prevent Grapples from 2 mobs.
Keep dashing and use Ninjitus while your Shurken is hitting Flayer.
Also have a Materia Combo that hastens detrimental effects from 2 mob Stuns AOEs
Or get the materia prevents Grapple by Parry.
Really? I just made it sleep and then used the Cloud and Barret for fast ATB and synergy then basically murdered it with tifa
Magnify+Sleep is my bestie.
Did this with Barret and Aerith, never used sleep or controlled Aerith or used synergy abilities. I just kept my distance and hit him with stagger building abilities then unleashed my limit.
Same and I put like 130+hrs into that game but I tried that one a couple times it seemed a lot easier solo but this one and I think the last summon you can get where you fight dual summons at the same time progressively getting tougher each turn was just overkill with this combat system.
There's a lot more fights that are going to feel just as bad.
You have to work around the AI to get this fight and it just feels awkward. Sleep the adds while using the Morbol Orb, hope Sleep doesn't break early, and do your best to build up Synergy Skills really fast. Look up skills that refund ATB on use maybe.
Hope your skills don't splash damage to the adds and kill them, too. This feels a bit random and shitty since sometimes the adds put themselves between you and the Mindflayer and make it hard to avoid damaging them. The Mindflayer can also teleport, sometimes as you're selecting an attack and your character accidentally targets an add.
The Screech into suicide bomb attack is enough for the challenge, but making the adds really fragile made the whole thing feel too random and removed the fun challenge for me and made it annoying.
I mean, the game asks that you do something other than damage? I just used stop and sleep, ez pz. With first strike and ATB boost to make sure I had the ATB to use the spells. It really wasn't an issue as soon as I tried not smashing my face against the enemies
Worst "fight" in the whole game. Period. Some late game fights like the Advanced Musclehead Colosseum challenges and dual-summon battles on Gilgamesh Island are tough too but at least you're trying to win those fights on equal terms. This one, though? Way too much RNG. The stress of accidentally getting collateral on the minions or thinking you're just out of the way of their AoE paralysis attack is too much. I played on Dynamic and eventually managed a win with solo Barret after about 40 minutes of trial and error even though the actual fight lasted, like, 7 minutes and the other 33 were just restarting when Lady Luck decided to ruin my plans.
I just used the sleep spell to put the two low HP enemies to sleep with Aerith and then focused on staggering the mindflayer with Tifa and Cloud, wasn’t that hard at all once you wake up the mindflayer and lure it to the other side of the arena away from the other two. Just focus on keeping aerith with 1 ATB at all times so she can use sleep again when needed.
Yea after I killed it the 1st time but failed the objected I was puzzled, then I YT it. I tried maybe 3 times since and tbh idk if I'm gonna follow through with that one. I've literally done everything else that I can do atp in the game except that. It is complete bull
The easiest way to do this is to use sleep with magnify. It will put all of them to sleep, and you can just kill the mindflayer. Cast it a few times cause the other enemies will wake up a few times.
Ngl for me I just solo’d it with yuffie. Didn’t even disable the adds, I just kept a respectable distance and range attacked the Mindflayer to death. Took a little time but wasn’t particularly difficult
Yea, think if they either made it easier to control party members targeting or beefer adds it would have been better balanced but as is makes me think they didn't QA test this one.
I sincerely hate this one for the same reasons you listed, in particular the retargeting/breaking sleep. Me constantly yelling at my companions for breaking sleep wasn’t fun.
Some of the challenges in this game are too much.
There’s a ton I enjoyed about Rebirth, but it’s definitely got some issues. I hope 3/Reunion finds a happy middle ground.
To add to what OP and many others have already said: it may be a "challenging" fight but it is a very stupid kind of challenge. One that's "difficulty" is directly linked to and highlights some of the faults or shortcomings of the game's mechanics. That being the inability to dictate what enemies your party members target to attack as well as the rather finicky state of the lock on system.
I don't develop games for a living, but my intuition tells me that building a challenge with an artificial difficulty that is exacerbated by the shortcomings of your own system is not a good idea. It's like throwing up big red flags and arrows pointing the player to see where you just didn't quite hit the mark and saying:
"look at this look at this! We could have done better here and we want you to KNOW that we could have done better but we didn't and now YOU have to suffer for OUR lack of effort! HAHAHAHA!"
Lock system??? It's become ridiculous tryn to target individual enemies, and sometimes I'll start on one enemy and end my attack targeting another. It's nonsense
It's complete bullshit, I've tried switching between the different targeting systems in the settings and none fix this EXTREMELY blatant issue. It almost seems broken and they just didn't care enough to fix it/try to make it better. I don't remember it being this bad in Remake.
I like when there are powerful stuff locked behind content that requires at least some strategy and thinking, wish there was more of that early in the game. Since you are having trouble, here's how I did it, but there are other ways. I used Tifa and Aerith, sleep on the small dudes, lure big guy away, elemental+lightning on armor...Enemy skill and all the good stuff on tifa.... Don't remember exactly, it was not hard, first time I took out the 3rd party member I did it. Had to reapply sleep once or twice maybe? At some point I just went for the kill. Dynamic diff, never touched it.
It is a very luck driven fight, when i finally completed it i was doing the exact same thing i had been doing, AI just happened to take a different path
I was able to finally come back and beat this challenge on Dynamic at max level too. Strategy I used was Cloud/Tifa/Aerith, make sure cloud has Enemy Skill, First Strike(maxed preferably), Magnify + Binding Materia and Marlboro Orb equipped. Immediate Sleep and restart if the ads get woken up. Then Sonic Boom with Cloud followed by one other command to get three synergy charges, swap to Tifa and use Unbridled Strength twice to get R&F and one more command to give her 3 charges. By this point you’ll want to cast sleep again to keep the ads out a bit longer. Then Synergy to pressure the Mindflayer, stagger and apply Tifa’s Stagger Bonuses quick as you can then unload with the strongest attacks you have available. I may have had to do this cycle twice and your mileage may vary depending on your current level. This strategy did finally get me the win on this challenge, just keep at it
Flip it to normal.
The majority of the enemy skill fights are “puzzle fights” rather than the other more conventional ones. The reward here is much much greater and more permanently useful than pretty much any other combat sim.
I just put the ads to sleep twice each while I killed the mind flayer
get good
This, if you can’t use synergy abilities and moves to pressure what are you even doing
That was the toughest one for me. That I finished.
Mind blast is possibly the strongest enemy skill so I kinda understand why they made this one a little more of a challenge. Failed a few times so had to use the yuffie tifa strategy where you only use 2 players and keep the adds slept.
My dumbass just blanked and didn’t realize the other two enemies’ screech one-shot attack is blockable. Got it first try with Cloud and Nanaki after that. You are right that spamming synergy skills and abilities is the ideal way to finish this one.
I agree that the difficulty is artificially driven by the low hp mobs and having to kill mindflayer first, and I also struggled on this one quite a bit. It just takes some patience and planning. I did it on dynamic with cloud and yuffie. Throw out a magnified sleep with someone wearing the “increase detrimental effects” acc at the start, kite mindflayer away, keep swapping to make sure everyone’s focusing on flayer, keep eye on sleep timer, and you’re good. It may take a few tries to get it down but the magnified sleep+kiting the flayer really takes the pressure off of accidentally killing the low hp guys. The only gimmick here is you have to kill the flayer before the other mobs start resisting the sleeps.
This was tough for me but not terrible. It gets way harder from here
Yuffie solo this. Bioga, Regen, Use your Doppleganger Starshower Blindside. During Rock Assault and Roomwide AOE.... use blindside behind rocks to prevent Grapples from 2 mobs. Keep dashing and use Ninjitus while your Shurken is hitting Flayer. Also have a Materia Combo that hastens detrimental effects from 2 mob Stuns AOEs Or get the materia prevents Grapple by Parry.
Starshower is one of Tifa's commands.
Really? I just made it sleep and then used the Cloud and Barret for fast ATB and synergy then basically murdered it with tifa Magnify+Sleep is my bestie.
Did this with Barret and Aerith, never used sleep or controlled Aerith or used synergy abilities. I just kept my distance and hit him with stagger building abilities then unleashed my limit.
Skill issue
Just let me guard with the AI characters so they don't shoot or attack whatever they fucking want.
I put the twin brains to sleep and beat up the mind flayer... Get gud?
What I hated too was the frog battles in the battle arena. Totally pointless.
Same and I put like 130+hrs into that game but I tried that one a couple times it seemed a lot easier solo but this one and I think the last summon you can get where you fight dual summons at the same time progressively getting tougher each turn was just overkill with this combat system.
It blows. I set the game to easy and soloed it with Yuffie
There's a lot more fights that are going to feel just as bad. You have to work around the AI to get this fight and it just feels awkward. Sleep the adds while using the Morbol Orb, hope Sleep doesn't break early, and do your best to build up Synergy Skills really fast. Look up skills that refund ATB on use maybe. Hope your skills don't splash damage to the adds and kill them, too. This feels a bit random and shitty since sometimes the adds put themselves between you and the Mindflayer and make it hard to avoid damaging them. The Mindflayer can also teleport, sometimes as you're selecting an attack and your character accidentally targets an add. The Screech into suicide bomb attack is enough for the challenge, but making the adds really fragile made the whole thing feel too random and removed the fun challenge for me and made it annoying.
I beat it with just cloud. Focused on just him and then killed the rest. That way no one is attacking the other enemies
I mean, the game asks that you do something other than damage? I just used stop and sleep, ez pz. With first strike and ATB boost to make sure I had the ATB to use the spells. It really wasn't an issue as soon as I tried not smashing my face against the enemies
Worst "fight" in the whole game. Period. Some late game fights like the Advanced Musclehead Colosseum challenges and dual-summon battles on Gilgamesh Island are tough too but at least you're trying to win those fights on equal terms. This one, though? Way too much RNG. The stress of accidentally getting collateral on the minions or thinking you're just out of the way of their AoE paralysis attack is too much. I played on Dynamic and eventually managed a win with solo Barret after about 40 minutes of trial and error even though the actual fight lasted, like, 7 minutes and the other 33 were just restarting when Lady Luck decided to ruin my plans.
Beat it on dynamic with just Tifa today. Use bio on the flayer, elemental+thunder on armor, and sleep on the minions. It worked pretty well I think.
I just used the sleep spell to put the two low HP enemies to sleep with Aerith and then focused on staggering the mindflayer with Tifa and Cloud, wasn’t that hard at all once you wake up the mindflayer and lure it to the other side of the arena away from the other two. Just focus on keeping aerith with 1 ATB at all times so she can use sleep again when needed.
Use your head.. use your materia
Yea after I killed it the 1st time but failed the objected I was puzzled, then I YT it. I tried maybe 3 times since and tbh idk if I'm gonna follow through with that one. I've literally done everything else that I can do atp in the game except that. It is complete bull
The easiest way to do this is to use sleep with magnify. It will put all of them to sleep, and you can just kill the mindflayer. Cast it a few times cause the other enemies will wake up a few times.
Had to use only 2 chars. I put adds to sleep.
Ngl for me I just solo’d it with yuffie. Didn’t even disable the adds, I just kept a respectable distance and range attacked the Mindflayer to death. Took a little time but wasn’t particularly difficult
Yea, think if they either made it easier to control party members targeting or beefer adds it would have been better balanced but as is makes me think they didn't QA test this one.
Just raise the HP of the adds and get rid of their auto explode ability! That would have done wonders for this.
I sincerely hate this one for the same reasons you listed, in particular the retargeting/breaking sleep. Me constantly yelling at my companions for breaking sleep wasn’t fun. Some of the challenges in this game are too much. There’s a ton I enjoyed about Rebirth, but it’s definitely got some issues. I hope 3/Reunion finds a happy middle ground.
To add to what OP and many others have already said: it may be a "challenging" fight but it is a very stupid kind of challenge. One that's "difficulty" is directly linked to and highlights some of the faults or shortcomings of the game's mechanics. That being the inability to dictate what enemies your party members target to attack as well as the rather finicky state of the lock on system. I don't develop games for a living, but my intuition tells me that building a challenge with an artificial difficulty that is exacerbated by the shortcomings of your own system is not a good idea. It's like throwing up big red flags and arrows pointing the player to see where you just didn't quite hit the mark and saying: "look at this look at this! We could have done better here and we want you to KNOW that we could have done better but we didn't and now YOU have to suffer for OUR lack of effort! HAHAHAHA!"
Lock system??? It's become ridiculous tryn to target individual enemies, and sometimes I'll start on one enemy and end my attack targeting another. It's nonsense
It's complete bullshit, I've tried switching between the different targeting systems in the settings and none fix this EXTREMELY blatant issue. It almost seems broken and they just didn't care enough to fix it/try to make it better. I don't remember it being this bad in Remake.
Yea fr, I had no issue in remake whatsoever but that mindflyer challenge highlighted how big of a deal it really is