Final Fantasy VII Strahl Community Challenge - 34 - Jenova Synthesis

Rules Reminder:

Low Level
Solo Character
No Non-Mandatory Inns
No Independent Materia
No Attack Command
No Scavenging

Jenova Synthesis is different from the other Jenova battles. In this fight, she has two tentacles that act like Hojo's arms. Only the main body acts, but the action used depends on the arms that are alive.

We'll use Red XIII for this fight simply because he doesn't participate in a mandatory fight otherwise. Now that the Northern Crater is unlocked, we finally have a sustainable way to grind AP for our Materia. The Mover enemy gives loads of AP and no EXP, so a few fights with those can level up our Materia. There are other preparations we could make for the final battle like getting some things from the Gold Saucer Battle Square, but I decided to do the bare minimum needed to beat the final battle consistently. In the end, leveling up the Barrier Materia to learn Reflect and leveling up the Contain Materia to learn Break are the only significant upgrades I went for.

Jenova will start by attacking once with each tentacle that's alive. With the Left Tentacle (left from Jenova's point of view, not the party's), she'll use Repeating Slap, a physical move that inflicts Fury. Since the loss of Sadness will cause us to take extra damage, it's best to equip the Peace Ring. Status immunities in this game prevent statuses from being removed in addition to preventing them from being set, so equipping the Peace Ring after we've already obtained Sadness prevents Repeating Slap from removing it. This requires sacrificing the Protect Ring, which makes the opening stage of the fight a little trickier, but it's worth it to maintain Sadness for the entire fight.

Jenova's Right Tentacle will use Absorb, a magical attack that does more damage, but it won't be alive very often anyways. After each tentacle has moved twice, Jenova will cast a spell. She'll use Bio 2, Cure 3, or Stop depending on which tentacles are dead. If both tentacles are dead, she'll revive them instead of casting a spell.

All of this is important because we need to run Jenova out of MP. If we kill her, we'll incur 60K EXP, more than doubling a character's total EXP. This is obviously unacceptable, but when Jenova drops to low HP, she'll toss out an Ultima and die. If Jenova dies this way, we dodge the EXP entirely. Ultima isn't survivable, so we need to run her out of MP first. The fastest approach is probably to kill the Right Tentacle to limit Jenova to using Repeating Slap and Stop. Absorb hits quite hard, so we need to setup M. Barrier for the opening phase of the fight. The Bio 2 miss in this attempt wasn't important, as it wouldn't have killed us.

Unfortunately, Stop isn't Reflectable in this game and we have no source of immunity, so we just have to take it. Whenever Jenova uses Stop, we need to make sure that we have decent HP and either Barrier or Defend. When Barrier was up, I chose to gamble on a Stop miss in the hopes of doing more chip damage with S-Mines rather than defending. We could toss 8-Inch Cannons for more damage here, but I wanted to ensure that we didn't send Jenova into the Ultima phase early.

After Jenova has used enough Stops, we can start spamming Dragon Scales to finish her off. We can get away with spamming attacks since the tentacles only revive at half HP, meaning that they go down almost as fast as she revives them.

As an aside, I originally tried a strat where I tried to run Jenova out of MP using Cure 3 since that costs more. My thought was to give Jenova Reflect to prevent her from healing herself. However, when Cure 3 bounces back to the party, it can target the dead characters! This won't revive them immediately, but it will increase their HP! Unfortunately, once we enter the next battle, all characters with an HP higher than zero are revived, and it's no good for Cloud to be revived here, so this strat is unviable.