Three months ago I defeated Shell Dragon in the No Menu Challenge by throwing a Dark Matter at it, but (as you can see at the beginning of the video) I had a feeling that it might be possible to do the fight without the Dark Matter if I just leveled up more and farmed more healing items.
I didn't originally have any interest in doing this, but in the end my curiosity got the better of me. I just had to know if the No Menu Challenge in FFIX is only beatable because the auction house in Treno happens to sell a single Dark Matter.
You can see pretty much all the preparations in the first three minutes of the video. I thought stealing the 99 Lapis Lazuli was gonna be the most annoying part of the preparations, since I would need the Epitaph to create a mirror of either Steiner or Dagger, but it turned out to be maybe the least annoying part. The room you're in determines what characters the Epitaph can mirror and each Epitaph will create the same character up to three times. In the first room inside the building in Oeilvert the Epitaphs can only create Eiko, Freya or Steiner and I think you encounter Epitaphs around 50% of the time, so that's a 1/6 chance to encounter a "Steiner Epitaph" and considering each of those battles yielded at least three Lapis Lazuli (normally four, since I'd usually get a drop as well), that's not bad at all.
The most annoying part was actually the level grinding. It turns out that leveling up all the way to level 99 on nothing but Grand Dragons actually takes quite a while even with the built-in 4x speed in the Steam version. I killed Amarant to make it faster. I could have given Quina the Zombie status (with Zombie Powder from a Whale Zombie), but I decided to let Quina level up too, for two reasons: The level grinding would be even more annoying if Quina kept dying from one hit, and the Abadon fight would be a lot easier with Quina at level 99 as Frog Drop would deal 9999 without needing to catch more frogs.
What I didn't show in the video was that I also got Freya to level 99 (I didn't realize that would be a good idea until later). I gave the three others Zombie, so it was three times faster than the first time. Still something like 200 Grand Dragons, though.
After selling everything I didn't need (which I did just because I can't sort my items), I bought an Orichalcon for Amarant to throw at Amdusias. For Amdusias I realized that with some luck I wouldn't need to use any items (since both Zidane and Freya are level 99 this time), so I just attacked with Zidane and jumped with Freya until Amarant showed up and finished it off with the Orichalcon. For Abadon I just spammed Frog Drop until it died. Managed to save all my healing items for Shell Dragon.
And then, after all those preparations, the Shell Dragon fight ended up being a bit of an anti-climax unfortunately. I really thought it was gonna be another epic fight that would come right down to the wire, like the two Emerald Weapon fights I've uploaded recently. But no, in the end I didn't even need half the healing items I'd farmed and the fight was just a little bit longer than last time. Oh well. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The party's levels:
Dagger: 99
Zidane: 99
Playlist: • Final Fantasy IX - No ...
Негізгі бет No Menu Challenge - Part 42: Shell Dragon (No Dark Matter) - Final Fantasy IX
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