Now with the Sandworm and Sol Cannon out of the way, the game was over.
Don't belive me? Beowulf was Level 83 while still in the first world!!! He had 8200 HP! 106 hours played! Almost 2 million gold! Nothing was possibly going to kill him. That's the downside of all this, as the high level needed to beat Sol Cannon effectively ended the rest of the game. (I was indeed curious if the clock counter would go over 99 hours, and apparently yes, it does go to three digits. Since Beowulf made it to the Sandworm with less than 10 hours on the clock, he ended up spending nearly 100 hours of in-game time on those two bosses. Yeah, a lot of that was spent using Fast Forward on the emulator, but a lot of time was also spent on boss runs that failed and never added any time. Have I sufficiently managed to convey how painful this all was yet?!)
Thankfully, everything was about to get significantly less painful. I was greatly amused walking through the Lonka Ruins, watching Beowulf one-shot every single enemy he faced, even those in the back row. This is normally a relatively difficult area for solos, not so much when your character has a level in the 80+ range. Watching enemy attacks pinprick Beowulf for 100-200 damage, knowing full well he had 8200 HP to work with, gave me a little bit too much enjoyment. The percentage based attacks were the only real danger - even knowing they were out there, it was a bit of a surprise to see a Thunder attack deal 1/4 of Beowulf's health, which was over 2000 damage. Rather a change from those 100 damage attacks! I also experienced the funniest death here in quite some time. Beowulf was attacking the rare Hydra enemy down near the bottom of the dungeon. As it turns out, the Hydras are in permanent Wall status, which I actually didn't know. Beowulf attacked with his Doom Axe, got the 33% chance to cast the Doom spell... which then reflected off the Wall and instantly killed Beowulf. Done in by his own reflected Doom spell! That had me laughing so hard, I didn't even mind walking back from the previous save point.
ArchaeoAvis is normally a difficult test of endurance for solo runs. It would not be in this case. The only thing I had to watch out for was the percentage based damage attacks, so I gave Beowulf the Flame Ring and was rewarded when ArchaeoAvis' Flame spell hit and healed him for 2000 HP instead. Heh. The physical attacks of the boss were doing about 200 damage. Beowulf chopped through many of the first four forms in a single hit, and then on the final form, ArchaeoAvis missed both a Maelstrom and an Entangle attack, because Beowulf's level was so much higher. (Maelstrom has a base 99% chance to hit the target, but ArchaeoAvis was only Level 20 compared to Beowulf's Level 83, so the odds dropped to a mere 36%. Power leveling saves the day again!) Beowulf won on the first try and his health didn't even drop below 7000 HP. The poison damage was actually the biggest source of injury, doing 500+ damage per tick! Another percentage-based source of damage (it does 1/16 of max health each tick).
The Meteor Miniboss trio were even more amusing, if possible. The Chimera Brain took a single 2000 damage hit, the Doom Axe cast its instant death spell, and that was the end of the battle. I was laughing so hard again here that I didn't even screenshot it. Against Titan, Beowulf equipped the Guardian (25%), Elf Cape (25%), and Gold Shield (30%), for a total of 60% Physical Evade. Titan could barely touch my Berserker, and his dying Earth Shaker move did a paltry 400 damage. Wow, forgot that that level of damage is actually threatening against most characters here! Beowulf barely felt it.
Now the Puroboros would have been an incredibly difficult roadblock battle as well, if Beowulf wasn't already so overleveled. This one really is another nightmare, with no way to control where the Berserker attacks and the Puroboros sure to be reviving one another at will and blowing themselves up with Exploder. The saving grace was Beowulf's monstrous health total, allowing him to absorb a full five Exploder attacks before falling. I'd like to say there was a strategy here, but there really wasn't, aside from equipping the more reliable Guardian dagger over the Doom Axe. Just keep playing the battle repeatedly until the Puroboros failed to use Exploder very often (it's a 1/3 chance in the code each time they get to act). Beowulf died a couple of times, then got it right on about the fifth attempt. He certainly didn't act any smarter on that occasion, just fewer of the little enemies chose to blow themselves up. The end of the battle is pictured above, with the last Puroboros out of MP and unable to revive its fellows. If this battle took place before Sol Cannon, then Beowulf would have also been stuck here for ages on end. Instead, Beowulf made it through with minimal fuss due to his level.
Before entering the second world, I had wisely remembered to unequip the Elf Cape from Beowulf, so that solo Galuf would be able to make use of it in the Gilgamesh fight. With Elf Cape + Gold Shield + innate Samurai evade, he was able to get his GilToss off without a problem. The battle on the Big Bridge was another case of Beowulf powering his way through all obstacles with nary a threat in mind. I don't have much to say about this, Beowulf chunked Gilgamesh in the second fight for 2500 damage in one swing - and Gilgamesh only has 6000 HP. It was amusing how many more rounds of combat a Hasted Gilgamesh received compared to Beowulf. I think Gilgamesh was getting four actions for every one of my pathetically slow Berserker.
Normally, I always try to keep the other three characters on 0 experience for a solo variant. There are a couple of enemies in the second world who always try to screw this up though:
These Faerie Orcs use an attack called Spirit, which has a random chance to either revive a fallen teammate or turn them into a zombie. Either case results in them getting experience after the battle concludes. (Yes, zombies learn XP. I don't get it either. Learning to eat brains better?) Normally this is a non-issue because I can have solo characters refrain from ending the battle until all of the teammates are safely dead again. Not so much for the Berserker though, sigh. The other characters all unavoidably leveled up in the 10-12 range here as a result. And while it might seem minor, killing off the other party members repeatedly is a real pain!
Upon reaching Rugor village, I was able to purchase an Orihalcon dagger for Beowulf. The attack value was slightly less than the Doom Axe (41 to 43) but the Orihalcon had a steady damage rate and didn't miss 15% of the time. Hate that property of axes! Nearly everything would die in one hit from Beowulf, he just needed to hit the target. I was further amused in the trek past Kuzar Castle when Beowulf ran into a random encounter with the super-strong Kuzar monster. Normally these guys will destroy your party if you try to fight them, but Beowulf was strong enough that he could take a 3000 damage hit and still surive. Heh. It was the same deal in the underground waterway dungeon:
No Phoenix Down for the Tyranosaurus this time. I rarely talk about this battle much, so let me explain. Any time that this boss is hit with physical damage, it has a chance to counter with the ???? move, which deals damage equal to how much life the enemy has lost. It's exactly the same as the Blue Magic spell ???? for those who remember my Blue Mage game. This normally means instant death for a solo character, as the boss has far more life than they do, and an appearance of ???? near the end of the fight will mean thousands of points of damage. That wasn't a problem for Beowulf though, as he took one of those 4000+ damage attacks like a champ! Yes, yes it is nice to have 8000 health.
I made sure to get the Dancing Dirk as always in the Moogle Village, which I expected would be hilarious when combined with my solo Berserker. I had to try it out. Sure enough, first battle afterwards, against the Abductor upon leaving Bal Castle, and BAM!
Sword Dance. 9999 damage. Word. 
There are even more enemies around Bal Castle and Kelb Village that pull the zombie/revive foolishness:
Check this out. The Ridicule enemies (those green... things) have turned all of the other party members into zombies, while paralyzing Beowulf so that he couldn't attack. They even paralyzed zombie Galuf, which was funny on several levels. I should have had the foresight to buy four Angel Rings back in the first world, which would have prevented this from happening. I had more than enough gold, and Angel Rings will stop dead party members from being revived as zombies. Instead I had to suffer from this nonsense. Normally I run from these battles... uh, not an option on this quest!
There were a lot of undead enemies in the Hiryuu Valley, which meant the Doom Axe was out as a weapon. I actually had one fight where Beowulf ran into the "save Golem" battle, only to go into it with the Doom Axe equipped... and the Doom spell kept popping up against the undead monsters attacking Golem, healing them to full every time! It was actually an unwinnable battle with that endless healing, and Beowulf died. Pretty funny stuff again. In other undead news, Beowulf was able to pick up the Bone Mail here, the perfect armor for a character who could never heal himself anyway. I would wear this in basically every fight for the rest of the game, including against bosses. Too good to pass up. Because of his Berserk status, Beowulf actually had an advantage against the Hiryuu Plant:
Berserkers cannot be confused, as I've said about the only real thing they have going for them. Charm Pollen hit and it did nothing. The only one of the little flowers that could use its status ailment was Flower #4, the one that can paralyze you. Beowulf spent a lot of this battle paralyzed. Naturally Beowulf wasted huge amounts of time targeting the flowers, while ignoring the Hiryuu Plant itself. Fortunately there was a ready solution to this boss fight: the Hiryuu Plant does not have an immunity to death spells, and the Doom Axe eventually proctored an instant kill. Would have been a lot easier if I could have controlled Beowulf's attacks instead of wasting 30 of them against the endlessly reviving flowers, but hey, done is done. Another boss killed.
Did you know that Gilgamesh and Enkidou also do not have an immunity to the Doom spell? They don't. The real danger in this fight was Death Claw or Sonic Wave popping up against Beowulf, and even that was muted due to Beowulf's leveling advantage. (Death Claw has a base 66% chance to hit, then add in the fact that Beowulf was 55 levels higher than Gilgamesh... yeah, 11% chance to hit. That's why it never was a problem here.) I didn't get an instant kill from the Doom Axe, but Beowulf had plenty of damage to spare, and the Bone Mail completely nullified their physical attacks. Easy fight.
A Wall Ring dropped without much fuss in the Barrier Tower. I knew what the strategy was going to be against Atmos:
Two Sword Dances out of the Dancing Dirk would kill Atmos instantly. I fought the battle a couple of times until that happened. Simple stuff. Some people online have said this is a roadblock battle for a solo Berserker, but it just isn't. If you can make it past the Sandworm and Sol Cannon, and have basic knowledge about how the Dancing Dirk works, this should be cake.
In Mua, Beowulf upgraded from the Orihalcon to the Air Lancet dagger (56 attack). There weren't many axes available in the second world, and the ones that were available were too random for my tastes. The Air Lancet cut through everything in the Forest of Mua with little opposition, one-shotting virtually everything. The Bone Mail kept Beowulf well protected. I think I had to use about 10 Hi Potions in the whole dungeon. The Crystals at the end are yet another boss vulnerable to the Doom Axe:
Makes you wonder whether the designers just forgot that they made the Doom Axe available as a drop earlier. That's a lot of bosses who can be killed in cheese fashion. Equipping a Flame Ring turned out to be pointless as Beowulf instantly eliminated the Fire Crystal at the start of the fight. Ooops. Three of the four Crystals never even reached their elemental attacks, dying to Doom spells first, and the Earth Crystal's 600 damage Earth Shaker spells were not exactly intimidating. Another victory on the first try.
Continuing on into Exdeath's Castle, more lawnmower mode from Beowulf. Everything died quickly. Even the dreaded double Yellow Dragon random battle wasn't enough to kill Beowulf most of the time. He was equipped with a Diamond helmet that reduced their Thunder attacks from 1/4 max health to 1/8 max health, which made a real difference. Up on the top levels, I had one of the most amusing Gilgamesh fights I can remember:
Gilgamesh uses a whole bunch of status ailments, which were all failing due to Beowulf's level. However, right as Gilgamesh changed into his second, extremely weak form, Beowulf was hit by a Maelstrom attack that dropped his health to nil, along with a Tiny Song spell that turned him into a midgit. But since Gilgamesh had already changed as well into his second form, Gilgamesh's attack power was now too low to get through Beowulf's defense! So a tiny shrimp with 9 HP sat there blocking Gilgamesh's attacks until the cinematic finished playing and Exdeath banished him into the Void. Hilarious stuff. Look, the shield is bigger than he is! 
Exdeath was the first serious opponent that Beowulf had faced since Sol Cannon. The standard method for the Exdeath fight is to get past the first AI routine as quickly as possible, then sit back and just defend/heal during the second AI routine as Exdeath kills himself with reflected spells off of a Wall Ring. This wasn't an option for Beowulf though, as he would never be able to heal himself in battle. That health total would only go down in battle, as massive as it was to start, the lack of any healing whatsoever put a time limit on this fight. Once again, Beowulf had to win quickly before time ran out. That meant going with the Dancing Dirk yet again and crossing my fingers for those 9000 damage Sword Dances to pop out. Four of them would kill Exdeath - it was a matter of surviving long enough for the Sword Dances to pop up. I also decided to take the Flame Ring instead of the Wall Ring for this battle. The Bone Mail's vulnerability to fire made this a more attractive offer, and the Flame Ring would allow Beowulf to get some minor healing from Fire 3 while nullifying the damage from Ice 3. The Diamond Helmet that Beowulf was wearing even cut the damage from Bolt 3 in half. An Aegis Shield completed the gear setup, as the best shield possible for this situation.
Condemn quickly wiped out Beowulf on a number of attempt, but that was old new by now. Every solo character other than the Chemist and Time Mage had also been vulnerable to that spell. What I wasn't expecting was the havoc played by Exdeath's Dynamo spell, which swaps whatever row your character happens to be in. Exdeath swapped Beowulf to the back row, where all of his damage was cut in half. Uh oh. I tried to swap Beowulf to the back row to start the fight, only to have the Aegis Shield repeatedly block the Dynamo spell after that! Heh, outsmarted myself there. Anyway, I was getting a goodly number of Sword Dances, and Beowulf wasn't in that much trouble, so once Beowulf managed to get his front row situation sorted out, I was on to the second half of the battle relatively quickly. Unlike all the other solos, however, the second half of the battle was hard! Beowulf was taking a lot of damage from those repeated Vaccuum Wave attacks, even with the Bone Mail equipped, and there was still no reliable way to heal the damage done. Fire 3 only healed for about 600-700 damage when it popped up, which wasn't much. I'm sitting there waiting and hoping for more Sword Dances, and meanwhile Beowulf is throwing out useless Mystery Waltzes and Tempting Tango. Oh look, stole 40 MP from Exdeath, bet he's real scared now! Right when Beowulf was getting into the critical zone, he fired out a fourth Sword Dance and put an end to the battle:
Had me scared there, Beowulf was getting awfully low in terms of health. Ultimately this wasn't too bad, although it was no walk in the park either. I still think that the Dancing Dirk was a better weapon to take into the fight than the Air Lancet. Powering as quickly as possible through the first half of the fight, the part with Condemn and Hurricane in the list of possible dangers, has always felt like the ideal way to defeat Exdeath.
Now into the third world, time to grab the Chicken Knife and start kicking ass, right? Well, not so much. Remember, you have to run away from battles to power up the Chicken Knife, and Berserkers cannot flee from combat. Nor can you take the Chicken Knife into battle, starting fighting with it, and have the "Flee" effect kick in - I tested and it will never trigger for a Berserker. This leads to a highly ironic situation: the Berserker won't ever get the unwanted "Flee" effect out of the Chicken Knife, but conversely, for that very same reason you can never power up the weapon! I did not think it was sporting to power up the weapon by changing Beowulf into the Bare job, or to run away from battles when controlling another character during a story event. No running away means no running away. So the Chicken Knife was entirely wasted on a class that could have benefitted from it enormously. Sigh.
Then Beowulf reached the Pyramid and realized he wasn't getting in without a difficult fight on his hands. The four dungeons with the sealed tablets are all guarded by Gargoyles, a pair of them at the entrance to each dungeon. These Gargoyles are easy to kill, but they will revive themselves endlessly as soon as one of the two perishes. This doesn't even cost MP, so you can't run them out of magic on this move. The two simple ways of doing this battle are to knock out the Gargoyles together with some kind of multi-targeting spell, or use some kind of status ailment to put the Gargoyles to sleep/stun/etc. which will prevent them from reviving each other. Barring both of those options, a solo character with enough speed can simply wait and time their attack to kill first one, then the other before it gets off its revive move.
Beowulf had none of these options available. I couldn't even control him in battle, and with no multi-targeting ability, the Gargoyles just revived themselves endlessly. I checked for weapons that would inflict status ailments, with no luck there either. Only the Doom Axe and Mage Masher on hand, neither of which would do anything. Uh, how exactly was I going to do this one?
The answer lay in the Fusion move used by the Gargoyles. They will only use this move very rarely, with a chance to appear once every four rounds of combat and at 1/3 odds on that singular round. When Fusion did appear, one Gargoyle would sacrifice its life to heal the other Gargoyle to full health. That's what the white light is doing in the above picture. I realized that there was an extremely slim possibility to win the battle here; when one Gargoyle used Fusion, Beowulf could immediately attack and kill the other one if his Doom Axe got a death spell off successfully. This required perfect timing to pull off, and with no way to control Beowulf, he couldn't hold his attack until the right moment, plus his pathetic speed meant that he was getting fewer attacks than the Gargoyles anyway. Most of the time the Gargoyles would just revive each other after Fusion appeared, before Beowulf even got a chance to attack. But there was a slim chance for this to work, as I confirmed when Beowulf got off an attack with only one Gargoyle on the screen. I turned on the Fast Forward key, and eventually it all lined up perfectly. This battle had me legitimately worried until I thought my way through it using the AI coding.
The Pyramid itself was pretty easy, Beowulf dealing great damage with the Air Lancet and protected against all of the nasty status ailments by his Aegis Shield/Bone Armor combination. I enjoyed clearing out the treasure in this low pressure environment. This find was the most significant:
The Earth Hammer is something that I normally sell for 6400 gold with the other classes. It can only be equipped by the Berserker (and Bare job), and Beowulf was my first character who could actually use the darn thing. While the damage itself from the Earth Hammer is only average (although it can be used at no penalty from the back row), there is also a 25% chance to cast the spell Quake on a successful attack. Now this also would be negligible due to the horrendously low Magic Power stat of the Berserker, except that there's a bug here that can be exploited. A Berserker can equip the Thornlet helmet, which has a side property of causing -5 points to Magic Power. Because the Berserker's Magic Power is so low, this causes the value to go below zero and wrap around the opposite way, giving the Berserker the maximum possible score in Magic Power instead! I'm not entirely sure if this is 99 or 255, and didn't bother to test it. Either way, Beowulf could bang out 5000+ damage to all targets if he made use of this bug and equipped both the Earth Hammer and Thornlet. Here it is in action against the Gargoyles in the Solitary Island Temple:
Did I feel bad about using this bug? Well, normally I might have, but not this time. It's freaking solo Berserker! I would take any advantage I could get here. Besides, the Earth Hammer bug wasn't even an uber weapon. Quake only kicked in 25% of the time, and it was completely useless against any flying enemies or those immune to Earth element. I actually used the Assassin Dagger instead most of the time, as it had a much higher base attack value (81 attack to 58 attack) and the same chance to cast the Doom spell as the old Doom Axe. This was genuinely more useful for most random battles. I would keep the Earth Hammer in Beowulf's back pocket to break out as needed.
Next up would be the Barrier Tower... except how in the world was I going to get a Berserker through there? Yeah, Minotaur presented no problem, but how could I deal with Omniscient when I couldn't control Beowulf? The only available option was equipping the Mage Masher dagger, and hoping to getting lucky and see it pop the Mute spell on each attack. I calculated that I would need roughly 15 attacks to defeat the boss, and at 33% odds of Mute appearing on each attack, that simply wasn't going to happen. Even leaving aside the vanishingly small odds that Beowulf needed to win the battle, just to get to the boss I would have to climb the Barrier Tower for every boss attempt, plus have the three girls kill the Minotaur on the other tower first. Remember, there's no save point in the Barrier Tower, and I don't cheat my way around that with save state abuse. For something that had odds considerably lower than one in a million, it wasn't worth the attempt. Beowulf wasn't going to get this feather in his cap. That also meant no submarine, so no Underground Trench or Istory Falls dungeons either. I would have given them a try, but oh well, simply not possible. If anyone knows of a way to get a Berserker past Ominiscient without emulator save state abuse, let me know. I'm curious if it can be done somehow.
That meant Beowulf was heading into the Cleft of Dimension already, and why not at this point. He had more than enough levels, and little to gain from fighting Odin/Bahamut. I knew Beowulf could win those battles, and was looking to get this variant finished after spending so much time on it. Wood Sprite and Apanda presented little obstacle to my Berserker in the first few areas. I was more considered about my inability to run from random encounters, making sure to equip a Flame Ring in the underground "Caves" area to protect Beowulf from the Flame attack of the dragons there. Otherwise a single spell would take out half his life from the Bone Mail! Heh. The Ninjas and AvisDragons were another irritant in the "Sky" portion of the final dungeon, although I had plenty of healing on hand to deal with their harassment between fights. I could actually drink Elixirs with impunity on the status screen - they were useless in battle, after all! Might as well, eh?
Apocalypse presented an interesting fight. Because of his high Magic Defense, trying to use the buggy Earth Hammer was a poor decision. Instead, I had Beowulf equip the Rune Axe, the Berserker-only legendary weapon that I had never seen fit to use before. This weapon is actually not all that great, with a basic attack of 71 that goes up to 81 if you have enough MP to power it (costs 5 MP per attack). At least the hit percentage goes up to 90%, practically sniper-like for the Axe class of weapons. And you also do get that white flash of light when using it, which looks pretty cool. The most deadly spell that Apocalypse could cast was... Tiny Song! Beowulf had no protection from Tiny status, and could not use an item to fix things if the spell landed. For the Berserker, it was effectively an instant death spell. I had to do this battle with several repetitions until Tiny Song or Condemn failed to hit.
I knew that there was one more axe weapon in the Dimensional Castle, but I had forgotten where it was located. I actually fought all of the Jura Avis enemies in their cells, because of the treasure chests located inside, only to find some useless Dancer gear. Bah! Well, the battles weren't that tough, and it was still easier than tracking down a guide. Eventually, I found what I was looking for elsewhere in the castle:
I never get Thor's Hammer normally, as the Dimensional Castle is a dangerous place for random encounters and the thing is completely useless to a non-Berserker anyway. For Beowulf it was a pretty nice weapon, with base attack of 81 (same as the Assassin Dagger), albeit with a hit rate of only 80%. Best of all, Thor's Hammer can be used at no penalty from the back row - the Berserker literally throws it at his opponents, just like in the Norse legends. This is one of the best weapons available to the Berserker, even though it falls far short of the best weapons that other classes can use. Look at Excaliber (attack 110) or the Masmune (attack 107, casts Haste in battle) compared to the Berserker axes (attack 81, with a large chance to miss). Yet one more way in which this job gets screwed over. Seriously, how many penalties do Berserkers need to have?!
This was too funny not to snap a picture:
Die, Halicarnassus! Fear my froggy fury! Her "Kurururu!" attack turned Beowulf into a frog, with no way to fight back, but the next one turned him back into a human again. Reflected Holy spells off of a Wall Ring did their trick as always.
I did have a bit of difficulty with Twin Tania, again solely due to the inability to heal in battle. I was trying to go for the Giant's Axe, which is a common steal possible off of the "Charging Up For Giga Flare!" version of the boss. For whatever reason, I could not get this thing to drop with the Thief Knife, in something like a dozen different steal attempts. Either I was phenomenally unlucky here, or this was a piece of loot that wasn't going to drop to someone using the Thief Knife. I have no idea which one. In any case, Beowulf didn't really need the Giant's Axe (though it would have been nice), so I swapped over to Thor's Hammer instead. That's the mystical Mjolnir in action above, flying in the air towards Twin Tania. Beowulf had to equip a Coral Ring to defend against the Tidal Wave counterattacks from the boss, and that meant a slow battle with no Haste status. I had enough health to win the battle before Giga Flares finished off Beowulf, but not by a very wide margin. It was closer than I had expected. Even with all those hit points, 3000+ damage attacks do add up.
This meant that Beowulf would be proceeding into the Void for the game's final bosses. And this was where thing just fell apart for this character. I had no idea how to defeat any of these opponents. Against Necrophobia, I couldn't make any progress at all:
My only plan had been to abuse the Earth Hammer bug to deal mass damage to all of the Barriers; if Beowulf hit on two consecutive Quake spells (1/16 odds), he could kill them all before they started using their spells. There was only one problem with this: the Barriers are immune to Earth element and the Quake spell. Oh crud. Each of the Barriers has 8800 HP, and Beowulf could only target one at a time. I couldn't focus down low health Barriers either due to the lack of control in battle. Beowulf would also attack Necrophobia himself 20% of the time, doing no damage and wasting an attack. All that time, the Barriers would be casting away with their spells and doing massive damage. The only way to do this battle would be to get very lucky at killing the Barriers in sequence, while also getting super lucky in having the Aegis Shield block a crapton of incoming spells (33% chance to block on each spellcast). I think it would be technically possible to win this, but I tried it about ten times without ever killing even one Barrier. Not even one of them! And then Beowulf still would have to kill Necrophobia himself after it was done. Uh, don't think that's happening, chief.
Of course, you don't have to beat Necrophobia to beat the game. It's an optional fight, which grants you a save point next to the boss. Now obviously I needed that save point to have any realistic shot of defeating Neo Exdeath. However... Beowulf wasn't going to beat Neo Exdeath either. Think about it. The last boss has 220,000 HP across its four parts, I had no way to use the Magic Lamp, and I had no way to heal Beowulf in battle. The only possible option was relying on the Earth Hammer bug and getting ridiculously, stupidly, otherworldly lucky in dodging everything bad and landing everything good. Do all that while walking from the Dimensional Castle save point on every attempt? Good one, you guys crack me up!
The Exdeath Tree form wasn't that tough of a battle. With Thor's Hammer equipped in the back row, along with the Running Shoes, Beowulf could hack that tree into splinters rather easily. I did get creamed with Meteo about five times in a row, typical par for the course on Beowulf's luck. That opened up the second half of the battle:
That's the message printout when you kill the Exdeath Tree form. Beowulf could make it to the last boss without much trouble. But it just wasn't happening there. Way too much health, way too many parts, and guess what? A Berserker will actually attack the two random "dead zone" parts in this battle. (There are in fact six parts to the final boss, not four, with two of them being untargettable normally and never attacking.) The Berserker can hit those dead spots though, just as a Hunter can when using X-Fight. That made an already impossible fight that much more impossible, and that sentence doesn't even make sense.
This has been the traditional stopping point for the solo Berserker quest, making it to Neo Exdeath and resting there. Recently, however, Not Dave of Gamefaqs has reported an actual victory over Neo Exdeath with a solo Berserker. Kind of, anyway. The basic idea was to make use of the Earth Hammer bug, along with Aegis Shield, Bone Mail, and Guard Ring (for slow regeneration of health in battle). Defeating Neo Exdeath requires getting eleven castings of Quake with the Earth Hammer, and surviving long enough to see that happen. I'll quote from Not Dave's posts to explain how he did this:
"So, I'm unable to just reload save states from right before the fight without it being the same fight over again, and sometimes it doesn't even reset if I go in and out of the last portal.
What exactly resets the sequence? It would be awesome if I could just trigger a sequence that would auto-fight this guy every time I die.
I programmed a key combination in ZSNES that will walk my Berserker from the save point to Exdeath, so I just have to jam on 'A' a couple times whenever I die, and the fight sequence is effectively reset.
i've had this going automatically since yesterday and still nothing. came really close a couple times (once got ~8 earthquakes off - not sure on exact number since it was going so fast)
i know this is possible. just need mad evade and a lot of luck with earthquake.
got killed by (i think, it was in mega-frameskip) the last meteo. while mini, hah.
it'll only be a few thousand more tries to get that far again!
added some frame pauses in my auto key combination that walks from the save spot to exdeath... it's now set up automatically again in a more efficient manner (while resetting the AI sequence as well), and i'm just going to let it run until it wins, while recording. if it makes it to the end screen, then i'll know it's done and i'll just have to sift through the playback to find the correct battle. i have it recording directly onto a 320gb external hdd.
...some day, dear non-existent readers. some day !!
Time to download as many versions of ZSNES as possible to increase my likelihood of succeeding !!
i now have twelve instances going between two computers with a macro set up to auto-fight exdeath after a set amount of time
it's just an eventuality now.
Managed it yesterday with the most ridiculous run against NeoExdeath I'll ever see:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gy4BHrohdJg
Recorded in kind of crappy quality and missed a lot of frames, but oh well. And does anyone know what the heck happened where it earthquaked only the farthest target? That was weird."
Well, kudos to Not Dave. As I've said before, I don't think someone can pull off these crazy solo Berserker feats without *HEAVILY* leaning on special features available through emulation, such as rampant use of save states, RNG randomization, and macro programs that run endless repetitions without need for human input. I like to ask myself, could someone pull this off while playing on the actual SNES cart? It's the general rule I try to follow as much as possible with my solo games. For the Neo Exdeath battle, I think the answer to that question is a clear no. As for me, I just play the darn game.
Beowulf's quest comes to an end the same way that I spent most of the time playing him: lying flat on his back after getting pasted yet again by another unbeatable boss. I leveled him to 83 in the first world for Sol Cannon, and then ended the game at Level 85, which was rather convenient for getting healed by Level 5 Doom while wearing the Bone Mail. Not wasting my time to take this character to Level 99, sorry. It wasn't going to make a diference against Necrophobia or Neo Exdeath in either case. I'll be content to know that the final boss can theoretically be defeated with an infinite number of repetitions, and be satisfied with that knowledge.
The solo Berserker was not a particularly fun or interesting solo to play. While there were some hilarious moments from time to time, it was mostly a long and arduous grind. I did enjoy the early and late portions of the game, before and after the Sandworm/Sol Cannon horrors. Unfortunately, I spent about 99% of my time on this variant working on those very Sandworm/Sol Cannon battles. Heh. Not being able to control your character in battle is the worst thing possible. I'm not sure there are any restrictions that could be worse than that. Even crippled melee fighters like the White Mage and the Thief can make their way past tough battles with careful planning and preparation. The Berserker... it's all luck. Nothing else. There's no skill or finesse involved. You can't do anything other than powerlevel and equip the right gear ahead of time. The whole thing could not be more tedious. I wholeheartedly advise against trying to play this one from the bottom of my heart. Reading about it once should be more than enough for anyone.
As always, thanks to anyone who read this far. Hope you got a laugh out of some of the struggles of poor old Beowuf! 
