This is a post about an optional boss fight in FF7 Rebirth. This post will contain no story spoilers.
Who in the what?
FF7 Rebirth has several optional fights against summons you could find in the original game. Each has 4 difficulty settings. "Full might" refers to the most difficult setting. These bosses are also level synced, which means their stats are adjusted to your level so you cannot just grind to max level to make the fight easier, though of course having access to your entire kit of abilities certainly helps. Odin is the final summon fight you unlock and is quickly gaining a reputation for giving people trouble because his mechanics are left somewhat obtuse in his assess information.
This reddit post for example calls the fight "unnecessarily complicated", "bugged", and "bullshit" while attempting to explain its mechanics. I also believe they get some of it wrong.
Why do this solo when the game is designed around a party of 3?
I dunno. Just felt like it. Wanted to see if it was possible. I like trying to push game mechanics to their most extreme. The Odin fight itself is pretty fun. The moment I first saw how he was animated I figured he'd be really fun to solo. Each character in the game plays very differently and I was curious to see how I could defeat him with 7 different move sets.
How does it work?
General mechanics
Disclaimer: the following is how I think Odin's mechanics function based on my observations. I do not have the ability to check the code so this information may be inaccurate.
Odin basically has an invisible meter that I will call his "mood gauge". Think of it like a status effect gauge in FromSoft RPGs.
The fight starts with the gauge half full. The gauge depletes slowly on its own and taking damage from Odin, even blocked damage, will decrease it significantly. If the gauge is empty, Odin essentially gets bored of you and unleashes Zantetsuken, an unavoidable cutscene attack that kills the entire party instantly. Odin sounds Gjallarhorn's Warning when the gauge gets very low but it is still technically possible to recover from that position as long as you stop taking damage and hit him very hard right away.
Doing a perfect block on his attacks, dealing damage to him and landing ATB abilities builds up the gauge. If the gauge becomes full, Odin will cast Sleipnir's Furor, giving himself an attack buff, a defense debuff and all his animations become faster. Crucially this is also when he becomes pressured and this is your chance to stagger him. After a successful stagger, Odin's mood gauge will go back to its middle position and the process starts over.
I think people get frustrated by the fight because the assess information implies dodging his attacks should build up his mood gauge. I do not believe moving away from his attacks has any effect on it. I suspect that the word "dodging" refers to skills like Yuffie's Brumal Form or some of the synergy skills which have an additional effect when you use them to dodge an attack at the last second. I think perfect blocks make it go up but not by much and simply blocking his attacks over and over is not enough to prevent the gauge from emptying. You really have to deal sufficient damage to Odin to avoid making him bored of you. I feel like landing ATB abilities also gives a boost to the gauge regardless of the actual damage they deal but it's hard to know for sure.
There is another mechanic that complicates the fight however and the assess information does not tell you about it.
Odin can "bind" a character. When a character is bound, any ATB command they use that targets Odin will cause him to use Reprisal, an unavoidable, unblockable attack. There is no cast that indicates Odin is binding a character. The only way to tell is to look at your character's wrist to see if they have red circles around them. As far as I can tell, Odin will periodically bind whichever character you have been using the most. There is no way to prevent it. So the key to success is to switch often and keep an eye on everyone's wrists. If you are giving yourself the very silly self imposed challenge of soloing him, this mechanic will get in your way a lot and you'll have to find ways to work around it.
One final thing to keep in mind. Almost all of Odin's normal attacks have a fast and slow variant. If there's a magic effect charging on the attack, Odin is doing the slow variant. Otherwise he's doing the fast. Keep that in mind when trying to learn perfect block timings.
Phase 1
Odin will exclusively use his lance. Most of his attacks only hit once and are fairly well telegraphed. He tends to throw his lance at you when he's far away and hit you directly if he's in melee range. He can also charge you with his horse at any time. Both his lance and the horse have hitboxes that can hurt you and the timing can be slightly different depending on how far he was from you when the charge starts. Dodge on his right (your left) to avoid the swing of the lance. Or you can perfect block the charge 4 times in a row if you feel fancy.
Phase 2
Odin will exclusively use his sword. His attacks have weird wind-ups that feel slightly longer than you expect to throw you off and almost all of them will combo you. Shimmering Blade is unblockable and very hard to dodge up close so try to move away from him as soon as you see the ability name. If Odin is far away from you, he will generally close in the distance with a jump attack. I find these are the easiest attacks to block in this phase.
When Odin reaches half health, he will cleave the arena in half and create a wall. One half will be full of bad floor that damages you over time so make sure you step away before the wall appears. Incidentally this is a great time to attack him as he cannot cancel out of his animation to Reprisal you during this.
Phase 3
Odin will use both his sword and lance at the same time. All his attack become combinations of his lance and sword moves. His combos have almost always one more hit than you'd expect.
At about 1/4 health, Odin will cast Temporal Imprisonment, a spell that freezes a character in time. This status effect cannot be cured with Esuna and goes through immunity so anti-stop accessories are useless. There is however one way to avoid it. If you activate your limit break just beforehand, the spell will whiff. This is essential for Solo-ing Odin.
Odin Vs Cloud Strife
Cloud is a pretty comfy character. His punisher parry is great for learning block timings because if you press the button too early you still get a less good counterattack. The game plan is simple. Stack every buff you have. Counter every attack until Odin is pressured and unleash all the damage when he's staggered. You can tell Cloud is the first one I did this with. I was not at max level yet so the damage numbers are overall lower than later videos. I got smacked around a bit but got the job done. I also didn't know yet that you could avoid Temporal Imprisonment with your limit break so I burst him down before he could do it.
Odin Vs Tifa Lockheart
Tifa is probably the easiest one to do this with. She can dish out so much damage that Odin gets annihilated on the first stagger, essentially skipping phase 2 and 3 entirely. She doesn't really need to target Odin with ATB to deal damage. Unbridled Strength makes her triangle moves deal more than enough damage to pressure Odin. So the bind mechanic can easily be ignored. Her burst damage comes out in a quick succession of small hits rather than a very big one so she doesn't even have to worry about hitting the damage cap much.
Odin Vs Cait Sith
This is when I realized some of the weirder quirks of how limit breaks work. You are invulnerable during your limit break animation but any attack that hits you still builds up your limit gauge. For most characters that's not too exploitable because their limit break starts stunlocking the enemy with small hits right away. Cait Sith though has very long wind ups on his limit breaks during which Odin has time to fit an entire sword combo. If you can also get the dice to cast furor on Cait, that's basically half your limit break built back up before you're even done using it. In hindsight, I'm actually not suuuuper happy with the fight here because I completely ignored the Moogle's triangle gauge abilities and that thing can pack a serious punch once it's maxed out but oh well. A clear is a clear.
Odin Vs Yuffie Kisaragi
About this point I felt like using about the same build and strategy with everyone would be boring. Also the game dropped the HP<=>MP materia on my lap and I had to find a way to use that. Obviously the advantage of this materia is you essentially have infinite MP to cast spells and the drawback is you die in one hit. But hey, just don't get hit right? This materia however has an incredible hidden power. In this game, the amount of limit gauge you build up when taking damage is inversely proportional to your max HP. This is why you probably noticed Aerith gets her limit break pretty fast while Barret generally takes a long time get it. But what happens if your max health is 2 digits? Turns out you get your limit break after 3 hits, this includes perfect blocks. Also it's pretty funny to watch hyperactive Yuffie jump around and pelt Odin with a thousand spells who has no idea how to react to it.
Odin Vs Aerith Gainsborough
This one was definitely the hardest to pull off. I wanted to use the HP<=>MP materia again because Aerith is obviously the one best suited for it. There are two major obstacles here. The big one is that she doesn't really have non-ATB ways to deal enough damage to pressure Odin. The limit break trick doesn't work since she has no offensive limit breaks. Luckily I found one way to damage Odin with ATB spells while being bound. Did you know Aerith is invulnerable during a spell casting animation if she's standing in her Radiant Ward? No? Someone didn't read the ability description. She can still be knocked out of the casting animation... except when casting a -ga tier spell. It seems some of the higher tier spells give Aerith more poise when casting. One important detail is to make sure Odin is not in melee range. He actually has different Reprisal animations depending on how far away he's standing. If he is in melee range, the reprisal animation gives him iframes and the spell will miss, otherwise it should hit.
The other obstacle was Temporal Imprisonment. Aerith can survive it with her limit break like everyone else but, uh oh... You can only use her limit break if someone on the party is wounded!!! Otherwise it's greyed out! And I can't afford to get hit with the HP<=>MP materia! So the plan is to equip a weapon with Reprieve, take damage intentionally (or unintentionally) once, and then use limit break to dodge Temporal Imprisonment. But then i uh... I somehow burst him down before he could cast it so that's kinda funny.
Odin Vs Red XIII
I was actually a bit worried about doing it with Red because I find he tends to have pretty low burst damage. Red is great at dealing with crowds. Stardust Ray is broken as hell and will erase an entire crowd of small guys. But when it comes to single target damage, he feels a bit weak. His only attack with really high damage potential is Reaper Touch but Red needs to be at a low % health for it to deal the big numbers. I can't intentionally take a ton of damage from Odin. He would quickly get bored and Zantetsuken me. If only there was an ability that significantly lowered your health. Enter the enemy skill Self-Destruct. It deals both a massive amount of damage to yourself AND instant death. If you want to survive using Self-Destruct, you need to have a ton of health AND instant death immunity. There was a bit of trial and error to figure out the correct amount of stats and buffs to get at very low health without dying. You are also stunned for quite a while so there's not a lot of opportunities to use it without getting smacked by Odin during the recovery. Once Red's health is in... the red... the plan is simply to use Reaper Touch over and over until Odin dead. Constantly reaching max damage on an ability that only costs one ATB feels absurd.
Odin Vs Barret Wallace
Barret is a big health boy. He has lots of health. So much so that if Odin didn't have an instakill move, Barret could probably get smacked by him all day and be completely fine. Just cast Chakra when you're low and there you go, good as new. Abilities that consume some of your own health such as Lifeblood Cannon can seem scary to use until you remember that health is a resource and only your last hit point matters. Also Barret doesn't really give a shit about Reprisal. That spear goes right through him and he just shrugs it off without interruption.
Conclusion
I had lot of fun making different very silly builds and learning how to use each character to their maximum efficiency. And what can I say, I think I just enjoy smacking Odin around a bunch. He's far from the hardest boss in the game but i dunno, I find him really fun to fight. I feel like folks are too quick to call a game mechanic bugged when they don't understand it. Granted the assess text on Odin is a bit misleading but I do not think any aspect of his fight is malfunctioning. It's pretty clear to me he's intentionally obtuse to catch you off guard. Figuring out how he works is half the fun! (the other half is dealing BIG DAMAGE)
