As always, complaining about it on TT works and I beat it on my next go lol.
Wow, that looks awful, looking at an LP. That being said... do you have anyone with Aura? Apparently there's a version (Level 4?) that heals your entire team.
Yeah, I leveled Cynthia up, and she learned Aura 4, but I ended up using items to mitigate as much damage as I could, while I tried to keep both her and Knuckles alive to have two healers going into the final boss, which... worked. Somehow. I had six characters for the final boss, and with spamming the Power Ring I luckily had and basically going in, attacking, taking a hit with one character, retreating, healing, rinse and repeat all that, I was able to take down the final boss with three characters left alive at the end.
In retrospect, though yes, that last set of battles is tuned a bit too difficult, I have to give the Shining Force team credit, as Final Conflict kept me on my toes the whole game, and other than feeling like a wall there at the end, I thought it through and was able to pull it off (with some luck, mind. My strategy easily could have failed had I suffered one too many critical hits, or if some enemies chose to use magic rather than attack, etc.).
Despite the above post, I still strongly recommend Final Conflict to anyone who hasn't played it - it has excellent battle design, possibly the best in from the early 90s if I'm honest. I prefer Shining Force II just because it's a bit more fleshed out storywise and has some good battles overall, with more choices in party composition, etc. It's also sliiightly fairer and doesn't have a wall like the end of Final Conflict lol (and also, you know, nostalgia).
Which isn't to say I didn't enjoy the story - it's fairly minimalistic, but what's there does tie together the entire Shining series at that time (yes, even that one. It's pretty neat). It really leans heavily on Shining Force II elements, which I enjoyed as a big II fan, but I still have some questions as to how certain things could be... (spoilers for pretty much the whole series follows)
is the Hawel that the Shining Force sees die in II the same Hawel as in Final Conflict, or a descendent or something? I'm guessing a descendent, as even though Hawel is known as a wise researcher in II, he's not implied to be a former member of the Shining Force or anything, even if he was teaching Kazin magic. Also, there doesn't appear to be a Granseal in Final Conflict, so I assume some of the characters in Final Conflict found it? Does Nosshu really end up being the King from Shining Force II, or his ancestor? It's super weird lol. I guess it could be him because he doesn't know much about the ancient legends, considering he wasn't with the Shining Force the whole time in Final Conflict, though that's a bit flimsy. It's probably just that a bunch of time passes between Final Conflict and II, you have to assume things like "Hawel" are just nice references to other games in the series. And I guess since the Game Gear games reused all kinds of names from I and II for some reason, even if there's not a connection there.
Loved seeing a young Odd Eye, even being able to control him. He wasn't the most useful character - his defense was noticably lower than the rest of my team - but it was awesome to see him again.
In any case... the Shining Game Gear games are extremely good. Play them! Probably on Sega CD, but don't pass on Final Conflict, which is probably my second favorite Shining game behind II at this point. I loved it, frankly, even if I was super frustrated in my last post about the last couple fights lol.