There’s no going back to the world map if you screw up.

What’s worse is the game offers the chance to save your progress directly before this battle because it happens during a chain of encounters. This is easily the nadir of Ramza’s – and your – adventure unless you’re psychic. That’s almost always a guarantee you’re not told to be ready for such a battle. If you didn’t plan ahead, your party is completely slaughtered. They can summon a darker version of the Holy spell to inflict massive damage to far-off areas of the tiny map, making most of your party unsafe. Your team finally shows up to help, but to level the playing field, Velius summons three Archaeodaemons. The antagonist cashes in on his pact with a Lucavi demon (a member of a group ultimately trying to resurrect their leader and bring ruin to the world), turning over his body to Velius, a monstrous being with four arms who is able to petrify players, and also summon a Cyclops for area damage.

Things get even worse when Wiegraf is brought down: a demon takes over. This is especially agonizing because of the high-damage sword techniques Wiegraf employs. The initial stage of this two-part battle has Ramza fighting alone. Ramza is responsible for some of Wiegraf’s turmoil, so it isn’t a friendly reunion, and things quickly turn violent. There’s more to the story – explaining Final Fantasy Tactics would take a novel’s worth of text – but after these events Ramza, the game’s main character, runs into Wiegraf who is now working for the evil Church of Glabados. He then loses his sister after a foiled kidnap plot. Wiegraf becomes a revolutionary after he isn’t paid for fighting in a war preceding the game. That’s exactly what happens in Final Fantasy Tactics when the player comes face to face with Wiegraf Folles. Getting decimated in a boss battle dozens of hours into a video game isn’t very fun.

Final fantasy tactics bosses