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Information¶

Item Drops¶

How To Unlock¶

Capture at least one of every fiend on the Thunder Plains:

• Aerouge
• Buer
• Gold Element
• Iron Giant
• Kusariqqu
• Larva
• Melusine
• Qactuar

Strategy¶

At first glance, you might think that the Cactuar King is pretty easy, as it has a lot HP count. However, it can be one of the more challenging enemies in the game, since it is very hard to hit. First, the Cactuar King is immune to every single element, and it has max Magic Defense, so even stuff like Flare and Ultima is not going to do much. Second, it has very high Evasion, so it’s going to be dodging the majority of your physical attacks. Whenever you target the Cactuar King, it will counter with 10,000 Needles, which as you guessed from the name, does 10,000 damage to a random character.

On its normal turns, it can do the above, but it can also do 99,999 Needles, the max HP you could ever have. That means it will always one-shot you with that move, as there is no way to mitigate the damage it does. Note that there is also a chance that the Cactuar King will do nothing on one of its turns. If the boss does nothing twice, then will have a chance of fleeing the battle on its turn. Unlike previous enemies in this family, its HP value has no bearing on whether it escapes or not.

So, how do you defeat the Cactuar King? Well, your Accuracy stat will have no bearing on whether your physical attacks will hit it or not, even if it’s maxed out at 255. In fact, you only have a 25% chance of hitting it, but then you will need to factor in your Luck after that. Thankfully, you don’t need the actual Luck stat, as you have abilities like Aim, Luck and Jinx to help. That is one way of doing it, but getting five castings of each of the above can take a long time. The easiest way of dealing with the Cactuar King is to simply use attacks that don’t miss, like Overdrives. Both Tidus and Wakka are ideal here, since they have Overdrives that hit multiple times.