Zombie Zalbag (8+ resets)
This one caught me off guard; mc commented that it was a hard fight for some SCCs so it didn't surprise her.
In LFT Zalbag is super tanky (770ish HP, innate defenses + Protect/Shell), and now comes with HP->1 (Gravi 2) and the ability to instantly resurrect all dead demons on the field at half health. This is obviously bad. To boot we don't really have the damage to take the demons out anyway, so the gameplan is simply to ignore them and try to blitz.
Life Drain is an obvious necessity, but my offense is anemic at best so we're looking at a 5HKO (3 Life Drains, 2-3 hits from me) under optimal circumstances. To boot mc has high faith so Dark Holy is a serious problem - she has to equip for HP just to avoid getting oneshotted even post-Kiyomori. Depending on how much faith and compat they load Dark Holy is quite capable of going up to a high 2HKO on me as well, despite equipping Crystal Mail over Wizard Robe. The demons close in immediately on their first turn, albeit with Auto Haste I get two actions first - the first is usually spent with Kiyomori, the second using Scream to go from 11 to 12 base speed threshold and gain an extra speed point. We hang back near the start. During the first few runs I head to a bad spot and get immediately HP 1'd by Zalbag, which forces healing out of mc; eventually we correct this.
Pretty much all of the wipes are due to failing the blitz. Damaging the demons is a no-no, but they take us out in 2 actions at worst, sometimes 1 for mc, and Zalbag does eventually close the gap and eating a physical is a 2HKO for mc as well (not a factor for me due to Blade Grasp). One run I ended up on a 0v panel and got Blood Sucked which actually looked promising, but the HP Zalbag got back was enough to stave off Life Drain from being fatal before a wipe occurred. I suggest trying a plan to status out the demons at one point because we seem to keep failing to stay alive long enough, but mc has other ideas and pulls out our trusty Ch1-Ch2 cheese: going Knight.
It's worth noting that even as a Knight Dark Holy is still a 3HKO, but fortunately this is sufficient to mitigate the damage with healing. Also I run off at some point with an Angel Ring to draw demons away and just let mc drain Zalbag to victory.
Underground Kappa Storage Floor 4 (5-6 resets)
In all of the attempts we had at this, only in the first one did Nitori not have an turn 1 fatal charge on mc.
So the gist of the fight is this: I'm effectively invincible (full of enemy units that cry to Blade Grasp, aside from the Monks that do not start in range turn 1) but breaking Muramasas hurt (we come in with 6, all that we could afford before the endgame sequence). mc, on the other hand, is basically a pincushion for arrows. She basically never survives past a turn or two, even after I found out I can Throw Stone Nitori out of his charge and deal like 190+ fall damage depending on where he teleports and the Charge used. Lots of shuffling around speed to see if this situation changes, but it doesn't; ultimately I end up mopping up most, but not all of the enemy units (the fact that there's a Lancer who almost always loads with Masamune doesn't help, at all). And break lots of katanas along the way, which sucks. There's also a Lancer with Elemental that could easily end the fight if Kata procs Don't Act (mercifully it never does).
So tl;dr mc just can't live long enough. It's time to pull out Knight again maybe?
?? But no we decide on a much cooler strategy: 4 Speed all-MA Calculator with Angel Ring. I get roughly a billion turns before her first action, which is getting up from Reraise and then locking on with Non-charge Meteor on a pack of baddies. This helps mitigate the katana brain drain some and when she inevitably dies again, I have far more than enough time to clean up.
Underground Book Storage Floor 5 (2 resets)
Our damage is still pretty bad on tanky boss units. Rofel opens with Shell 2 always which makes it even worse, and half of the enemy mages come with MDU so OHKOs aren't happening with Bahamut. To make it worse the Jumping Priests are actually a real threat, they easily OHKO mc, and she finds this out the hard way because neither of us realized that Jump was even a thing until it was a bit late.
The first wipe just comes as a result of overestimating our damage, letting the entire enemy mage platoon advance and status/kill us. The second wipe happened with aforementioned Jump. Also Rofel breaks a lot of stuff; fortunately weapon breaking is last on his priority (doesn't lower max HP!!!) and we have spares, but it's definitely irritating and if he DOES snap Excalibur that's basically a wipe.
So we check our Chemist JP and set Maintenance and the fight basically becomes a joke. Kill the support with prejudice, watch Rofel flail uselessly. Yeah he has Slow 2 and it's pretty bad when it lands but mc had swapped over to Wizard with Time Magic. I had suggested Time Magic for Slow 2 on enemies, but mc decided against it last second because she wanted the JP in case we ended up using MP Switch - Move MP Up combo later. That said, Haste countering Slow ended up being the actual relevant interaction.
Also the majority of damage I incurred during that fight with Poison ticks from mc's indiscriminate Poison due to having like 24 effective speed or something from all of the Screaming I did while approaching Rofel.
No More Fucking Counter Magic (4 resets)
Kletian is 8 speed, so mc equips such that his first action is to fly over and lock Dark Holy on her, which she can counter with Silence Song.
I barge in and find out that getting slowed is awful. In addition to that the Samurai can kill me with Draw Outs, and the Ninjas with Two Sword. The latter gets stopped effectively by opening with Scream and raising my Brave to 100 so that the AI sees a 0% hit chance on its physical and doesn't even try (whereas 3% is still good enough!!! Thanks FFT AI.) There's always a huge clump of units that pack up early that makes teleporting in and unleashing Muramasa extremely tempting, killing multiple Time Mages as a result, but it always ends up being the wrong plan because it keeps Kletian back. Also the ninjas do eventually close in on mc from the side, and while she's evasive (Feather Mantle), sooner or later a hit does sneak in and kill her.
In a couple of runs I drop and mc tries to solo the rest of the fight hiding in a cubby hole where everything is forced to hit her against frontal evade. These attempts stall out unfortunately due to crystallization, but were amusingly valid attempts at pulling off a win.
On the winning run we just hang back once more, silence Kletian and pick off the Time Mages advancing forward (I swapped to Aegis to deal with their spells over a Two Hands setup trying to blitz Kletian) until I can Draw Out everything with impunity. The fight gets locked down hard enough that we can actually crystal farm at the end, not that most of them have anything relevant, but mc does pick up Slow 2.
mc covered Balk 2 in her post.
Graveyard of Airships, Part 1 (2 resets)
Hashy Hash Hash. MP Switch + Move MP Up gets pulled out for this. At like 78 Brave it's far from a sure thing and when it does fail it's a reset of course. Otherwise very straightforward: bait him to OHKO mc with Melt, kill his Brave with Foxbird (mc goes PRIEST for the speed and because we don't have anything we care to cast outside of Yin-Yang), I go Two Hands Excalibur and smash mid-charge. A Quake catches us off guard but it doesn't OHKO me and MP Switch rallies in. The wipes were simply from being too hasty with attacking (juicy mid-charge physicals hurt a lot with Damage Split, so I really needed to wait despite the temptation to hit) and MP Switch failing.
He never used Delirium, which would've been pretty hard to deal with, but setting up to bait OHKOs from him means he'll pretty much never do so.
Graveyard of Airships, Part 2 (2 resets)
Both wipes on part 1. Final setups here were:
Me - Ubersquire, Item secondary. Two Hands Excalibur smaaaash.
mc - Time Mage, Item secondary. Move MP Up / MP Switch combo wombo. Also MDU instead of Short Charge.
So yes, Item OP. Anyway part 1 is the real fight, and is a mixture of Alma baiting and keeping the demons zoned out/under control with status. Altima spends most of her time casting Ultima on Alma while the two of us tangle with the demons. As usual you don't want to hit them unless you have the OHKO, although in my case having so much speed I can often doubleturn lap.
Wipes just came from bad stuff happening, demons advancing too far, Dark Holy hurts, getting turn economy on us by both killing Alma and someone else with Hurricane landing, etc. Status is pretty good when it lands on multiple demons (honestly the first fight where Confusion Song really ended up shining to interrupt spells or waste turns), on the winning run two demons get confused early on and I can just hit the other ones over the head with Excalibur as the opportunity presents itself. Alma is as usual extremely vital and when we finally get enough of a breather that we can spare a turn not statusing out or killing a demon, she gets a Hi-Potion tossed her way so she can stave off the next attack on her from being an OHKO (Altima having run out of MP, this prevents a Nanoflare or Hurricane from offing her).
With all of the demons dead I make sure Altima doesn't do anything untoward (Despair 2 would be bad) by preventing my backside to her at all times and letting her stab me in the ass while Screaming loudly. Once I'm satisfied we advance to phase 2 and Don't Move completely shuts her down. She lands some Grand Crosses and shit but Alma is quick to the rescue with Dispel 2 and mc equipped a Barrette to prevent such status shenaigans. FAITH does land though and I tell her to gtfo quickly lest she eat a 522 damage Return 2 to the face.
Completely locked in place, we land the killing blow with a non-Short Charged Meteor, dealing 960ish damage with a 14 CT spell in the final fight. Eat your heart out, Kletian.
