Final Fantasy VII Strahl Community Challenge - 6 - Hundred Gunner, Heli Gunner, Rufus

Rules Reminder:
Low Level
Solo Character
No Independent Materia
No Non-Mandatory Inns
No Scavenging
No Attack Command
As a kid, I felt like this battle was almost unfairly difficult. As an adult, I now understand the power of Grenades. Hundred Gunner is relatively tanky (no pun intended), but with Sadness it's weak enough that the largest chance of a game over is the player suffering a cardiac arrest halfway through the fight. I meant to heal before Heli Gunner, but overestimated how many Grenades it would survive.
Heli Gunner's first phase is the most dangerous in the fight, as it can inflict Poison and Sleep. Luckily, we don't need to wait for our ATB to refill after we wake up in this game, so it's unlikely to stunlock us with Sleep. Healing at ~100 HP seems pretty safe. Heli Gunner's second phase has the most raw damage, but is still less dangerous. IDK why I bothered with Healing Wind here, but this is another fight with a long cutscene beforehand, so I didn't want to clean up the mistakes.
I decided to shove Rufus in this video since he's barely a boss and there's no save point between the fights. I didn't realize that killing Dark Nation gave EXP for another couple of hours, but it's only 70 EXP, so it doesn't cost us much of our EXP headroom.

[@FarAwayTimesGames]

What's the budget looking like throughout Midgar? I know a chunk of money's going towards grenades, what are some of the other essential purchases?

[@Lockirby2]

Here's the shopping list:
-Grenades (most of the money was spent here)
-Restore Materia to replace the scavenged one from the first reactor
-A bunch of Tranquilizers to inflict Sadness
-A couple Hypers to inflict Fury
-The mandatory Batteries
-Any piece of armour so that we can swap Red's Mythril Bangle onto Aerith later
-We also need to conserve 1200 Gil for when we reach Kalm
I also bought a handful of "just in case" items that ended up going unused. In particular, I bought a couple Phoenix Downs in case I needed them to swap the soloing character, but didn't need any. So even playing fairly loose with the Grenades, we still have about 1K Gil to spare in the end.

[@FarAwayTimesGames]

@@Lockirby2 Awesome, thanks for the full rundown!