Final Fantasy VIII

Omega Weapon
Side Quests

So you’ve decided to take on the most difficult boss of the game? Great! No play through of any Final Fantasy game is complete until you’ve completed the most difficult challenges in the game, and for Final Fantasy VIII, that’s Omega Weapon.

There are no important rewards that you get from completing this challenge other than to be able to say that you did it and, if you’re playing the PlayStation 4 or Steam versions of the game, the achievements and trophies that you can obtain.

As far as final bosses go, Omega Weapon is one of the easier ones in the series, but this primarily has to do with the preparation that you do leading up to Ultimecia’s Castle and the preparation you do ahead of this specific battle.

Read the guide below before you complete the steps to spawn Omega Weapon as, once you do, a 60 second timer will appear so you need to be ready to go.

Preparation

The first and most important thing to keep in mind is that this is the last difficult challenge that you’ll face. As a result, there’s no point on being stingy and saving your powerful items or Triple Triad cards. Now is the time to Card Mod your most powerful cards to power up your characters and to stock up on powerful headings items. So lets get started.

1) Commands: Make sure that between your three characters you have access to the both the Magic and Item commands. Consider removing the Draw command as you won’t require it for this fight.

There are two other commands that you should consider assigning to your characters. The Defend command provides a strong method to reduce the incoming damage from some of Omega Weapon’s more powerful attacks, and Revive can help you quickly recover from some attacks which will instantly KO your party members (and can’t be prevented).

2) Guardian Forces: Now is the time for you to maximize the effectiveness of your Guardian Forces. Make sure that you have used up any remaining Rosetta Stone in your inventory or that all three of your characters have access to Abilityx4. These are the abilities that you will want to assign to your party members where possible:

• Auto-Haste
• Auto-Protect
• Auto-Shell
• HP+80% (only if your character is below 9,999 HP)
• Str+60% (if you have extra room)

You may not be able to fully accomplish this, but you can still defeat Omega Weapon without having all three of your characters have each of these abilities. This just improves your odds.

The easiest way to get these abilities at this stage of the game is to use Card Mod on some of the Triple Triad cards that you have, assuming that you have been collecting most of them along the way before reaching this area, and using the refined items on your Guardian Forces. As a reminder, you can use Amnesia Greens to remove unnecessary abilities from your Guardian Forces such as any SumMag+% ability or and GFHP+% ability.

• You can refine the Kiros Card to get 3x Accelerators which can teach a GF the Auto-Haste ability


• You can refine the Alexander Card to get 3x Glow Curtains which can teach a GF the Auto-Shell ability


• Bahamut already has Auto-Protect learned, but for two more, you would need to have 2x Steel Curtains, or refine 20 Adamantine into 1 Steel Curtain (so you may not be able to get this done now but you should be fine without it)

3) Items: Stock up on some of the more powerful items available in the game. More specifically, you can refine the Bahamut Card to refine it into 100 Megalixirs which are extremely helpful for this fight.

Megalixirs both heal your party members and remove any negative status effects. You may also want to rearrange the items in your inventory to move Megalixirs closer to the top of the list so you can select them easily in battle.

4) Junctions: Your standard magic junctions will work for this fight with two very important exceptions. The first is that Omega Weapon will open the fight with a move called Lv. 5 Death which will instantly KO your party members unless they have resistance to this attack. Make sure to junction Death magic to your ST-Def-J stat for all three characters.

Secondly, Omega Weapon absorbs ALL elements (fire, water, wind, etc.) so make sure to remove any elemental junctions from your weapon attacks (Elem-Atk-J), otherwise your party member’s regular attacks will heal the boss.

Initiating the Fight

This fight can only be completed after you have defeated all of the bosses in Ultimecia’s Castle. Check out that section of the strategy guide for more information:

Kicking off the battle against Omega Weapon requires using both of your two parties in separate areas of Ultimecia’s Castle and beating a 60 second timer. Have your primary party travel to the Courtyard (with the fountain and where you found the Treasure Vault Key) and then switch over to your secondary party, i.e., the ones that will not be fighting Omega Weapon.

From the Main Hall, take them up to the second floor and head off to the Stairway Hall on the right side of the room. This is the room with the rope attached to the bell, and you need to pull the rope to ring the bell in order to initiate the fight against Omega Weapon.

Make sure you’re ready though as you will only have 30 seconds to switch parties.

Switch back to your primary party in the Courtyard and quickly run into the Chapel to find Omega Weapon standing in front of the organ. Touch it to begin the fight!

The Battle Strategy

Omega Weapon will start off the fight by immediately casting LV5 Death (assuming your party members have a level divisible by 5), so if you accidentally forgot to junction Death magic to ST-Def-J for any of your characters, they will die right off the bat. Omega Weapons upcoming attacks include:

• Meteor: Similar to other enemies that have cast Meteor before this fight, it deals a flurry of magic attacks to your entire party but not a threatening amount of damage on its own.
• Megido Flame: This attack always comes after Meteor, and it will deal 9,998 HP to the entire party, so its important that you heal your party members up after Meteor is cast.
• Gravija: Similar to the attack Diablos used which will always deal damage equal to 75% of your party member’s current HP. It cannot KO a character on its own.
• Terra Break: Sends 16 bolts of energy hitting random party members for around 4,000 damage each. This is the most difficult attack to face and its why you should make constant use of the Defend command on one of your characters, which is to help them survive this attack. It is likely that one or two of your party members will be KO’d when this is cast, so use Revive or Full-Life to get your party members back up and into the fight as quickly as possible.
• Ultima: A standard cast of the magic spell, Ultima, which deals magic damage to the entire party.
• Light Pillar: Causes 9,999 damage to one party member which will cause an instant KO and cannot be avoided.
• In between this sequence, Omega Weapon will throw in the odd physical attack, but the pattern will then be repeated.

The strategy for beating Omega Weapon is similar to what you would use for some of the other more difficult boss fights, with the added challenge of dealing with its very heavy damage output.

Cast Meltdown on Omega Weapon and keep the status effect up on it for the duration of the fight, then cast Aura on Squall to make use of his Renzokuken Limit Break attack as often as possible. As a reminder, if his turn comes up and he does not have access to his Limit Break, press the Button to cycle through your characters and back to Squall until it does come up.

The rest of the fight is a rinse and repeat.

Congratulations, you have defeated the most difficult boss in Final Fantasy VIII!

Use the link below to return to Ultimecia’s Castle to complete the story of the game if you have not done so already: