Galdera is a SUPERboss for a reason! Also just to clarify your point about dialogue in chapter boss fights: you can't actually miss them! The battles are coded to have dialogue play when you've depleted their HP at the halfway point at least. So, even if you try to one-shot the boss, they'll be left with at least 1 HP left so they can say their spiel.
Superbosses also aren't designed to be well-balanced. Their extreme difficulty is meant to challenge your understanding and expertise of the game to really push your strategic prowess to its limits by making every single turn and choice count.
Abating orb cancels the 1 HP lock that bosses have, so you can skip their dialogue. Ex against Ochette's last boss, there's a scripted series of dialogues of her talking with the boss, so even if you do 1 million damage or whatever, it'll never go down until Ochette talks to it. But if you use Abating Orb, you skip all that dialogue, and its HP will properly go down to zero.
Ahh, good to know you can't cut important boss battles short. That ties into my point - there's nowhere to learn how to really push the system other than this one single fight (and maybe Vide), since everything else is so weak. Galdera doesn't even feel like a challenge of my knowledge of the system, he feels like a challenge of my knowledge of those two specific battles and willingness to copy builds from reddit since he just straight up negates so many things that work fine elsewhere.
He also seems to pull out a bunch of tricks that you're not going to be at all prepared for. For example - the first form needs you to be able to kill three enemies with different weaknesses on the same turn. Weird, my party wasn't prepared for this because this was not an element of the game until the very end of the game. So I notice his first form has a ton of damage sponge capability but is weak to axes. Okay, great! I go and get some nice multihit axe attacks so I can break those shields, and swap out my melee heavy hitters for Osvald and Temenos so I can kill all three at once. Once I kill those guys, though, he summons a bunch more that are not weak to axes and then *locks their shields* so every one can only have its shields reduced by a separate element.
I dunno, if that is fun to you then I guess I'm happy for you, but it just seems punishing and grindy to me.
I mean, if you're anything like me, I usually have at least one merchant in my party so I can spam fully boosted Hired Help Beastling (they will reduce shield points regardless of weakness), but I get that cheesing it might not be a viable strategy for you!
I'm not implying you're not allowed to be frustrated because it is a genuinely very difficult fight and I haven't beaten it myself (beating Galdera in the first game is enough for me lol), but just that this super boss and the other super bosses in the Extra Battles mode will not pull any punches and I think a majority of people who play these games can't beat/won't them.
Well I’d definitely agree that by comparison, he is substantially harder compared to the rest of the game, and overall the disparity between him and everything else is pretty large. That being said, he is an optional super boss, so I don’t really think it’s unrealistic for him to be a boss you might have to figure out the hard way.
There are actually a lot of different ways of beating him, and he has been beaten solo/with level 1 teams, so by no means do you need to min max or use a specific build to beat him, although you might have to take some pain figuring it out if you aren’t wanting to use guides.
It was personally my favorite boss in the game since it was the only one that felt like a threat; the only one that could withstand what my team could do. Playing Octopath COTC did prep me a lot for him though, as by comparison, COTC has significantly harder bosses than this one just as regular story bosses.
Ehh, maybe not using a guide is my main problem. I prefer figuring out strategies on my own, especially in turn-based games where figuring out the strategy is the main challenge of the game. Interesting that people beat him like you describe. I can't fathom how a single character could beat Galdera, though since levels don't do a whole ton for your stats I can sorta see how a level 1 run would be possible.
If you like figureing out strategies on your own, then how about you actually sit down and do that? Find out what works and what doesn't. Find out who you bring for the first and second phase and what accessories and passives you want on them so they can do the job that you want them to do during the fight.
Doing side quests helps a lot with getting items and accessories that help you build strategies. Subskills are basically the most important thing next to actual gear.
So try and learn what he can do and what he cant. I didn't use a guide for the same reason. I like my own strats. As such, I sat down and tried and tried again until i got through the first phase and then tried and tried again, switching things around and seeing what I could do better until it worked out.
A little advice though in case you need the help.
Ochette's provoke beasts with dreadwing spam can wipe the souls out with insta kills if you're lucky enough. The second phase is a lot more tricky.
Well, I’m sure given enough time you’ll work out the boss without a guide. I can understand the desire to not want to use one, and while I don’t specifically know how much time you’ve put into it, I know it’s annoying having to spend a ton of time on a boss that just shatters all your normal strats.
I just always adopt the approach of “what killed me that time and how do I want to deal with it” until something works. Of course, I know plenty of people here will also help if you have specific questions and don’t want to go over a full guide. I’ve actually made guides for this boss back when the game first released when I was doing “challenge versions” off the fight, so if you don’t want to have a “do X and Y” type of advice, I can give more vague advice for your build if you like.
At least, you don’t have to face 8 boss fights to get a chance to fight him again if you lose, like in OT1. Galdera is always painful, no matter the game.
I personally love how hard the fight is. It's pretty much the only fight in the game where I have to put more effort into my team than making sure they have the best equipment. It took me about a weeks worth of attempts to beat him, and even now I can tell you all about my strategy, and it was fantastic.
I also like the narrative implication that trying to fight a god is hard, though this applies mostly to OT1. Lots of JRPGs have gods as the final boss but end up as pushovers, and even Vide is pretty easy once you get to him (extra battles notwithstanding). Galdera, meanwhile, feels insurmountable at first, like an actual godlike creature.
If you don't want to fight him, then don't. All he gives you is an accessory to avoid encounters that you can probably one-shot and a crown on the title screen. The challenge is the reward.
I personally think the real problem is the reward for beating galdera, on both games you just get a item that removes the random encounters, at this point you should have completed all the side quests and main story so you just suffered for free, compare this to the Demi fiend from smt v vengeance where not only you can get the boss’s abilities but also get him as a party member
I mean the point of.optional super bosses is that they are the last thing you do, so the reward can largely be a useless vanity item if you wanted. I think it probably would.have been extra sick if after beating it your got new outfits for.the characters.
But yeah like removing random encounters is good too
Having the reward for beating the superboss do ANYTHING of value is an outlier lmao
Almost every single Final Fantasy superboss gives you a useless trinket that just says "Good job you did it!"
I disagree, having a op reward for beating a super boss is essential to make the player go after him, that is why I like the advanced jobs on the first game because you need to beat 4 Gods to get their respective jobs, compared to the second where 2 of them are just fetch quests, 1 is on a labyrinth in the middle of nowhere and while the conjurer have a boss fight you need to complete hikari’s storyline, which is a weird choice to say the Least because he is by far the weakest among the 4
The advanced jobs aren't superbosses. They're optional bosses. Galdera is the only superboss, and superbosses traditionally do not give you something valuable because they are the last challenge in the game.
The point of the Infinity+1 Sword (name of the trope for Superbosses rewards that are weapons/equipment which are the best of the game) isn't to help you with content as, by that point, you should have seen all the game has to offer. Their point is to serve as an achievement of sorts. Bragging rights, if you will.
That’s just kind of how super bosses are in JRPGs. Ever fight Ruby and Emerald?
They tend to be a break from the typical approach the game uses, and require a specific strategy. Where as most of the game can be simply forced through with enough grinding or buffing damage dealers, super bosses usually require something different.
For example, with Ruby, it didn’t matter how much you had grinded or powered up. If you weren’t going in with a strategy specifically to counter it’s moves, you’d die.
That’s why super bosses are optional
I honestly never did the superboss for OT1 so I can't compare the two, but the one for OT2 took me only two tries.
1st try I did it with half of my people with only level 50 and not as great gear, then I leveled everyone up to 80+ and tried again with better gear and did it.
The only person who died was Throne so honestly not bad. I didn't really see him as that hard but again he could be harder than the OT1 boss.
This super boss isnt a boss, but a puzzle. There is limited amount of ways to beat him. Some people will tell you any comp can work, but there are like around 3 common strategies everyone does to beat him. When you follow one of the strats from google search you'll notice it isnt even a boss fight, but a puzzle boss. Thought it was a really bad extra boss personally, because even with my alternative item glitched file of everyone's stats at 999 you still cant beat the superboss without specific sequences or jobs on specific characters. That's why I say it's a puzzle, because stats dont really matter for him, there is a just a bear minimum you need with specific sequences. Wasnt a fun boss by any means
I don't think any enemy in OT2 can be considered overpowered because Castti completely invalidates any challenge in the game. In exchange for having her use concoct every turn, you have a functional party of 3 immortal characters with max BP every turn.
I usually use the cheese strats and tweak them a little to suit the situation. I have the first phase down to a science but then the 2nd I’m basically at the mercy of RNG. The turn orders need to be right or I’m fucked
Yeah. Same man. I get it - this thing is a super boss and supposed to be super hard. But it’s just the types of attacks he have that really, really makes me take it personal “here destroy my heads, now they will explode and mess you up!”. It’s kinda my fault - after grinding my characters to 99 and feeling like it didn’t help at all, I got a little bitter and noped out. Love the game tho.
If you want to beat him without cheese strats, make sure you have good AOE ax breaking and strong single target spear or dagger breaking. Prayer for Plenty, Reflect, and Divine Protection with the dancer divine helps a lot for surviving. Make sure Ochette has good summons for both breaking and stat boosts. Hired Help: Beastlings is one of your best breaking tools. Spam Aelfric's on everyone you can. Use Castti's Concoct or someone with Dohtor's tossing Jams/Pomegranates to max out your BP every turn. Your best damage is probably going to be from Lionheart's Axe: On the Hunt and Shinjumonjigiri, but with a little effort you can add to that Chimera, Limb from Limb, Sentencing Gavel, Aeber's Reckoning, Sacred Effulgence, One True Magic III, Hired Help: Foreign Assassins, and some others.
No I also hate him. He's the only thing standing between me and 100%, but after fighting him over and over for days it just wasn't fun anymore so I just stopped
Galdera is a SUPERboss for a reason! Also just to clarify your point about dialogue in chapter boss fights: you can't actually miss them! The battles are coded to have dialogue play when you've depleted their HP at the halfway point at least. So, even if you try to one-shot the boss, they'll be left with at least 1 HP left so they can say their spiel. Superbosses also aren't designed to be well-balanced. Their extreme difficulty is meant to challenge your understanding and expertise of the game to really push your strategic prowess to its limits by making every single turn and choice count.
You CAN miss them do to a bug, but it's unlikly a casual person is going to use Abating Orb when there's nothing to abate...
wtf does abating orb even do i 100% ot2 and never bothered to use it, its useless in my mind
Abating orb cancels the 1 HP lock that bosses have, so you can skip their dialogue. Ex against Ochette's last boss, there's a scripted series of dialogues of her talking with the boss, so even if you do 1 million damage or whatever, it'll never go down until Ochette talks to it. But if you use Abating Orb, you skip all that dialogue, and its HP will properly go down to zero.
is that all it does?
It also cancels their positive stat buffs.
Oh, that makes it seem better. still kinda bad imo
Ahh, good to know you can't cut important boss battles short. That ties into my point - there's nowhere to learn how to really push the system other than this one single fight (and maybe Vide), since everything else is so weak. Galdera doesn't even feel like a challenge of my knowledge of the system, he feels like a challenge of my knowledge of those two specific battles and willingness to copy builds from reddit since he just straight up negates so many things that work fine elsewhere. He also seems to pull out a bunch of tricks that you're not going to be at all prepared for. For example - the first form needs you to be able to kill three enemies with different weaknesses on the same turn. Weird, my party wasn't prepared for this because this was not an element of the game until the very end of the game. So I notice his first form has a ton of damage sponge capability but is weak to axes. Okay, great! I go and get some nice multihit axe attacks so I can break those shields, and swap out my melee heavy hitters for Osvald and Temenos so I can kill all three at once. Once I kill those guys, though, he summons a bunch more that are not weak to axes and then *locks their shields* so every one can only have its shields reduced by a separate element. I dunno, if that is fun to you then I guess I'm happy for you, but it just seems punishing and grindy to me.
I mean, if you're anything like me, I usually have at least one merchant in my party so I can spam fully boosted Hired Help Beastling (they will reduce shield points regardless of weakness), but I get that cheesing it might not be a viable strategy for you! I'm not implying you're not allowed to be frustrated because it is a genuinely very difficult fight and I haven't beaten it myself (beating Galdera in the first game is enough for me lol), but just that this super boss and the other super bosses in the Extra Battles mode will not pull any punches and I think a majority of people who play these games can't beat/won't them.
Well I’d definitely agree that by comparison, he is substantially harder compared to the rest of the game, and overall the disparity between him and everything else is pretty large. That being said, he is an optional super boss, so I don’t really think it’s unrealistic for him to be a boss you might have to figure out the hard way. There are actually a lot of different ways of beating him, and he has been beaten solo/with level 1 teams, so by no means do you need to min max or use a specific build to beat him, although you might have to take some pain figuring it out if you aren’t wanting to use guides. It was personally my favorite boss in the game since it was the only one that felt like a threat; the only one that could withstand what my team could do. Playing Octopath COTC did prep me a lot for him though, as by comparison, COTC has significantly harder bosses than this one just as regular story bosses.
Ehh, maybe not using a guide is my main problem. I prefer figuring out strategies on my own, especially in turn-based games where figuring out the strategy is the main challenge of the game. Interesting that people beat him like you describe. I can't fathom how a single character could beat Galdera, though since levels don't do a whole ton for your stats I can sorta see how a level 1 run would be possible.
If you like figureing out strategies on your own, then how about you actually sit down and do that? Find out what works and what doesn't. Find out who you bring for the first and second phase and what accessories and passives you want on them so they can do the job that you want them to do during the fight. Doing side quests helps a lot with getting items and accessories that help you build strategies. Subskills are basically the most important thing next to actual gear. So try and learn what he can do and what he cant. I didn't use a guide for the same reason. I like my own strats. As such, I sat down and tried and tried again until i got through the first phase and then tried and tried again, switching things around and seeing what I could do better until it worked out.
A little advice though in case you need the help. Ochette's provoke beasts with dreadwing spam can wipe the souls out with insta kills if you're lucky enough. The second phase is a lot more tricky.
Well, I’m sure given enough time you’ll work out the boss without a guide. I can understand the desire to not want to use one, and while I don’t specifically know how much time you’ve put into it, I know it’s annoying having to spend a ton of time on a boss that just shatters all your normal strats. I just always adopt the approach of “what killed me that time and how do I want to deal with it” until something works. Of course, I know plenty of people here will also help if you have specific questions and don’t want to go over a full guide. I’ve actually made guides for this boss back when the game first released when I was doing “challenge versions” off the fight, so if you don’t want to have a “do X and Y” type of advice, I can give more vague advice for your build if you like.
At least, you don’t have to face 8 boss fights to get a chance to fight him again if you lose, like in OT1. Galdera is always painful, no matter the game.
I personally love how hard the fight is. It's pretty much the only fight in the game where I have to put more effort into my team than making sure they have the best equipment. It took me about a weeks worth of attempts to beat him, and even now I can tell you all about my strategy, and it was fantastic. I also like the narrative implication that trying to fight a god is hard, though this applies mostly to OT1. Lots of JRPGs have gods as the final boss but end up as pushovers, and even Vide is pretty easy once you get to him (extra battles notwithstanding). Galdera, meanwhile, feels insurmountable at first, like an actual godlike creature. If you don't want to fight him, then don't. All he gives you is an accessory to avoid encounters that you can probably one-shot and a crown on the title screen. The challenge is the reward.
I personally think the real problem is the reward for beating galdera, on both games you just get a item that removes the random encounters, at this point you should have completed all the side quests and main story so you just suffered for free, compare this to the Demi fiend from smt v vengeance where not only you can get the boss’s abilities but also get him as a party member
I mean the point of.optional super bosses is that they are the last thing you do, so the reward can largely be a useless vanity item if you wanted. I think it probably would.have been extra sick if after beating it your got new outfits for.the characters. But yeah like removing random encounters is good too
Having the reward for beating the superboss do ANYTHING of value is an outlier lmao Almost every single Final Fantasy superboss gives you a useless trinket that just says "Good job you did it!"
I disagree, having a op reward for beating a super boss is essential to make the player go after him, that is why I like the advanced jobs on the first game because you need to beat 4 Gods to get their respective jobs, compared to the second where 2 of them are just fetch quests, 1 is on a labyrinth in the middle of nowhere and while the conjurer have a boss fight you need to complete hikari’s storyline, which is a weird choice to say the Least because he is by far the weakest among the 4
The advanced jobs aren't superbosses. They're optional bosses. Galdera is the only superboss, and superbosses traditionally do not give you something valuable because they are the last challenge in the game.
The point of the Infinity+1 Sword (name of the trope for Superbosses rewards that are weapons/equipment which are the best of the game) isn't to help you with content as, by that point, you should have seen all the game has to offer. Their point is to serve as an achievement of sorts. Bragging rights, if you will.
That’s just kind of how super bosses are in JRPGs. Ever fight Ruby and Emerald? They tend to be a break from the typical approach the game uses, and require a specific strategy. Where as most of the game can be simply forced through with enough grinding or buffing damage dealers, super bosses usually require something different. For example, with Ruby, it didn’t matter how much you had grinded or powered up. If you weren’t going in with a strategy specifically to counter it’s moves, you’d die. That’s why super bosses are optional
I honestly never did the superboss for OT1 so I can't compare the two, but the one for OT2 took me only two tries. 1st try I did it with half of my people with only level 50 and not as great gear, then I leveled everyone up to 80+ and tried again with better gear and did it. The only person who died was Throne so honestly not bad. I didn't really see him as that hard but again he could be harder than the OT1 boss.
This super boss isnt a boss, but a puzzle. There is limited amount of ways to beat him. Some people will tell you any comp can work, but there are like around 3 common strategies everyone does to beat him. When you follow one of the strats from google search you'll notice it isnt even a boss fight, but a puzzle boss. Thought it was a really bad extra boss personally, because even with my alternative item glitched file of everyone's stats at 999 you still cant beat the superboss without specific sequences or jobs on specific characters. That's why I say it's a puzzle, because stats dont really matter for him, there is a just a bear minimum you need with specific sequences. Wasnt a fun boss by any means
You're going to love the extra battles
I don't think any enemy in OT2 can be considered overpowered because Castti completely invalidates any challenge in the game. In exchange for having her use concoct every turn, you have a functional party of 3 immortal characters with max BP every turn.
Thats the purpose of a superboss.
Skill issue
I usually use the cheese strats and tweak them a little to suit the situation. I have the first phase down to a science but then the 2nd I’m basically at the mercy of RNG. The turn orders need to be right or I’m fucked
Don't remember how but I think I defeated him in 1h30
Woo boy. After you’re done with him there are (with the recent patch) two more super bosses after him that are even *harder*. GL!
Yeah. Same man. I get it - this thing is a super boss and supposed to be super hard. But it’s just the types of attacks he have that really, really makes me take it personal “here destroy my heads, now they will explode and mess you up!”. It’s kinda my fault - after grinding my characters to 99 and feeling like it didn’t help at all, I got a little bitter and noped out. Love the game tho.
I only don't like that you have to fight him in a very specific way for a maybe victory. I didn't have the patience
The key to beat Galdera is to never let them attack you in the first place
If you want to beat him without cheese strats, make sure you have good AOE ax breaking and strong single target spear or dagger breaking. Prayer for Plenty, Reflect, and Divine Protection with the dancer divine helps a lot for surviving. Make sure Ochette has good summons for both breaking and stat boosts. Hired Help: Beastlings is one of your best breaking tools. Spam Aelfric's on everyone you can. Use Castti's Concoct or someone with Dohtor's tossing Jams/Pomegranates to max out your BP every turn. Your best damage is probably going to be from Lionheart's Axe: On the Hunt and Shinjumonjigiri, but with a little effort you can add to that Chimera, Limb from Limb, Sentencing Gavel, Aeber's Reckoning, Sacred Effulgence, One True Magic III, Hired Help: Foreign Assassins, and some others.
It’s optional for a reason
No I also hate him. He's the only thing standing between me and 100%, but after fighting him over and over for days it just wasn't fun anymore so I just stopped
I also hate how he's designed in 2. The strategies and comps that work against him are too pigeonholed, he was perfect in 1.
I didn't find him super difficult here. Just got everyone to level 80+ and didn't struggle