Hey there! Welcome to my guide! I imagine you're here because you encountered a situation that gave you that overwhelming, "How is ANYONE supposed to beat this!?!?" feeling. I was there a few times myself my first time playing through the game. I'd say it's pretty par for the course with this game.

I'm not the best Ys player in the world and you won't be breaking any world records with any of my strategies, but I've employed all of these on inferno difficulty and finished the game, being forced to learn just about everything about each boss in the process.

For the sake of this guide, I'm going to assume you haven't missed any items along the way. If you think you have, there's plenty of other guides out there to consult about where to get these items.

Here are some general tips that can be applied to just about any boss encounter.

Avoid taking damage at all costs.
I know, right? Who would have ever thought of something like this? My absolute genius knows no bounds! Seriously though, when I say "at all costs" I mean just that. Don't try to damage the boss if you know you're taking a risk of getting hit yourself. If you attempt trading blows in this game, you're going to lose every time.

Be patient
This is closely tied with my first tip. These fights can get intense and you have to keep your cool and wait for the proper time to attack or else it will cost you dearly.

BLOCK!!!
This tip only applies later in the game when you've gotten the earth bracelet. With the earth magic you do a shield slam that temporarily will block all incoming damage. If you get good at timing your blocks, you'll be taking much less damage as well as creating more opportunities for yourself.

Gain a level
You'd be pretty surprised just how large of an impact a few extra stat points will give you. If you're really having trouble on a boss, go grind out a level or head back to town and upgrade your gear if you haven't already. Those little numbers go a much longer way than you'd think they would.

Armed with some of this general information, let's take a look at the actual boss fights now, shall we?

So Dularn starts the fight out in the center of the map. In case you haven't already learned this the hard way, attacking him while his force field is up will only result in you having a bad time. You just have to wait him out. He'll start off using three different attacks before lowering his force field. Luckily, he is nice enough to show all of them to you in the first set of attacks he does so you'll know what to expect from then on.

In order of their appearence in the first phase:

He groups three swords together and sends them flying straight at you. These can be avoided simply by running to the side of Dularn.

He sends four swords homing in on you from different angles. This is his most difficult attack to avoid, but isn't too difficult once you get the hang of it. Keep running to the side and jump before they reach you and you should be okay. I've also noticed if you quickly turn around and jump the opposite way you were facing before you'll have an even better chance of avoiding them. I do it in the video...just...just watch the video. You'll see what I'm talking about...hopefully.

The third attack he does is he sends a line of swords straight out. Just jump over them.

Once you've done enough damage, he'll start mixing up the order he does these attacks in. It's not a big deal once you've gotten the hang of avoiding them.

After taking a bit more damage, dularn will begin teleporting after his series of three attacks and either shoot a bunch of fireballs or a big crescent wave thing. Just jump over both of these and cut him. Do it a couple more times and you're done. Sweet.

This boss is tiring because you're constantly having to scramble away from her attacks while sneaking in your own. The only way you can hurt this boss is with your fire bracelet, by the way.

At the start of the fight she'll use two different attacks. You can tell which one she'll use by which arm she's winding up.

Her left arm (your left) will shoot out a large, purple disc moving horizonally. Jump over it.

Her right arm (again, your right) will shoot a large vertical disc. Run to the side to avoid this.

After taking enough damage, she'll start making tornadoes that slowly move toward you while continuing to assail you with her first two attacks. The best way to avoid those is to lure them to one side of the map (easier said than done with all the crap flying at you) then run to the other side once it gets close.

If there's a break in her attacking that means she's getting ready to do her final attack type. She'll charge up and then send a horizontal line of explosions at you. You can avoid these by jumping either up or down.

The most effective way to deal reliable damage that I've found is to aim your charged fireballs at her head (you DID get the ruby before the boss, right?) If you aim for her head, then you won't run the risk of your shot hitting one of her arms when they're in an awkward position and doing very little damage. You want to maximise your damage per shot as much as you can so there's less time in this fight for you to mess up.

Getting the opportunity to beat up this jerk is an indescribable pleasure, so let's make the most of it, shall we?

My strategy for this fight is fairly simple. Just keep your distance from him and he'll throw a couple knives at you. After, he'll start running towards you and, when reaching the correct distance, he'll charge up and do a long range stabbing attack that looks like a lance. Jump over the lance and start slicin' his pretty boy face up. Do not hit him more than FIVE TIMES. If you do, you'll hit his shield and he'll counter attack with a mini explosion.

Once he's taken enough damage, he'll start teleporting around and throwing a bunch of knives at you. The strategy is basically the same as it was before. Just try your best to avoid taking damage and keep busting him up!

I should probably also mention that if you get too close to him while he's not momentarily stunned from his lance attack, he'll do a pretty mean combo on you with his sword. That's avoided by simply not letting him get that close to you.

This boss is more annoying than anything else, really. Trying to do decent consistent damage can get frustrating.

So anyways, Gulien will burst out of one of 5 holes in the ground and he'll be covered in fire when he does so. He'll charge straight at you in an attempt to damage you. When he's doing this, you can get him circle you without actually being able to get at you if you get inside his turn radius. If that doesn't make sense, just watch the video. You'll see what I'm talking about.

So once the fire is extinguished, he'll start flying around for a little bit. During this phase, he will do one of two things three times. He will either shoot an exploding fireball at you, or he will lower himself down to ground level and try to breathe fire at you.

The fireball, I've found, is easier to avoid if you jump when you see him doing it so it targets where you were in the air and shoots harmlessly off the screen.

When he comes down to breathe fire at you, try to get inside his turning radius like you do when he's on fire and do as much damage as you can to his tail.

So after doing either of those attacks three times, he'll go back in to one of the holes in the ground and the fight pretty much repeats. He gets smaller and faster as you damage him, but it really doesn't change the strategy much.

Oh man...this thing is absolutely miserable to fight on the higher difficulties.

So this fight changes drastically when you raise the difficulty. Probably more than any other fight in the game. This is mostly going to focus on fighting this boss on higher difficulties, but a lot of the general ideas are the same.

Your main chance to deal damage is when he's flying over the bridge you're standing on. He'll shoot fireballs at you, causing the tiles on the ground to shoot up, giving you a chance to deal damage. On the harder difficulties, these tiles are seperated into a top row and a bottom row and only one of the rows will be shot up from the fireball. As far as I can tell, it's totally random which row is shot up.

The ideal way to play this phase is to keep a charged whirlwind ready. If the row you're standing on is raised up, great. Let him have it. If it wasn't, you can still run underneath the boss and give him some whirlwind action. It won't do as much damage as it would if you were in his face doing it, but it's better than nothing.

Now and then he'll fly away from the bridge and charge at it, causing the tiles to flip and hurting you if you're standing on them...so don't stand on them! Stand all the way to either side. If you see the boss preparing to charge all the way from the left, then run to the right side and vice versa. On harder difficulties, this will leave one of the rows of tiles flipped over, spike side up.

Gyalva will also sometimes center himself in the middle of the map to the side of the bridge you're on. When he does this, he's going to do one of two things. Either he'll shoot a bunch of fireballs at you in a rapid sequence (easy to avoid if you've got room to run) or he'll puff his cheeks (?) up and shoot a huge fireball at you, flipping a row of tiles. If you're cornered, your best bet for avoiding both of these attacks is with a jumping whirlwind.

You can also try throwing in some fire bracelet action to do some extra damage when you can't otherwise hit him, but I wouldn't recommend it if you don't feel comfortable doing it as it can backfire and taking damage is a bad thing.

This fight is kind of stupid and sometimes you just have bad luck.

This is a two phase boss battle. The first phase is against some giant worm. The second phase is against some weird...crystal...monster...thing...I don't even know.

Phase 1
So the worm is pretty simple in its attack pattern. It'll either try to body slam you, spin around and knock you away, or start spitting out little crystal dudes. Oh yeah, and when you hit him, he sprays slime all over the floor and it makes you slide around. Gross!

The most effective way I found to deal with this phase is to keep a charged up whirlwind ready to go and wait for him to start spitting crystal dudes (yes, I'm going to keep calling them that) then run up and unleash your whirlwind in his face. This should do good damage to the worm and kill most, if not all of the dudes he spat out. If he's still spitting them by the time your whirlwind is done, then just hit him with another. It's not as effective not charged (duh) but it's still helpful. If there's any crystal dudes around after he goes back underground, use your regular attacks to finish them off while you keep charging your whirlwind...it's important to have that for getting in his face and keeping him from spawning more crystal dudes.

Phase one is mostly about keeping the crystal dudes in check. The reason I put such an emphasis on this is they start bouncing lasers between eachother and you and if you let enough of them get out it quickly becomes a nightmare you can't wake up from.

Speaking of nightmares you can't wake up from...

Welcome to Phase 2!
So yeah...Don't even bother trying to hurt this guy if his core isn't exposed. You can do minimal damage if you attack his tail, but it's not worth the risk.

He's got various attacks. Some of them involve dodging multiple projectiles and I don't really know how to put into words how to avoid them so uh...don't get hit. Just watch the video and you can see how I dealt with them.

He drops bouncy balls that explode after a certain amount of time or if you touch them. Some of them chase you, others seem to be perfectly content to spend their very short life in one place.

When he turns purple and his crystals fly away from him, that means his core is exposed. Get in there and let him have it! Be careful on harder difficulties because he drops a bunch of bouncy balls when he opens up and if you try to rush in there you can get exploded. At the same time, if you don't hurry up and get in there, you run the risk of getting hit by the lasers he's shooting from his crystals. Just be careful and try to find a good opening.

After taking a good amount of damage, the boss starts shooting more stuff at you faster. He'll also pull out a new attack where he surrounds himself with a giant enegry ball and charges straight ahead. After he reaches the opposite side of the map, he'll start circling the outside. If this attack hits you, it'll do a lot of damage and most likely ruin the attempt you're on, so don't get hit by it.

So this fight you're against 3 Harpies. Thankfully, the game was nice enough to color code them according to their weaknesses. That's right! Their weaknesses go as follows:

Red is weak to fire.

Green is weak to wind.

Blue is weak to physical.

The trick to this fight is spreading your damage out equally between the three of them because when you kill one, the remaining ones get enraged and power up. You want to spend as little time fighting them powered up as possible.

Your best chance to damage them is when they form a triangle to make a bunch of music notes burst out of the middle of the map. When they're not doing that you can safely pelt the red harpy with fireballs from a distance.

There's really not much else to say. Sometimes the red harpy will dive bomb you, sometimes the green one will whirlwind at you and sometimes the blue one will shoot homing feathers but none of those are much of a threat if you keep your distance.

Just remember to give equal attention all three of the ladies, otherwise the other ones will give you a bad time. Adol, you player!

Am I the only one that thinks this dragon looks like he has chicken legs? Is that just me?

Anyways, the idea of this fight is to use your fancy new shield bash (earth magic) to take out the boss' legs so he falls over. Then you can go to town on his head. At first this is pretty easy as he only tries to stop you with some short range bite attack, but he quckly finds new ways to make it not as fun.

He can flap his wings, which blows you backwards and causes icicles to fall from the ceiling as well as causing any icicles that happen to be coming up from the floor to come forward. For this I'll usually double jump and if it looks like i'm going to land somewhere bad, I'll use my shield bash to soak up any damage that might be waiting for me.

He'll also start stomping the ground, which causes icicles to shoot up out of it. If you've got enough magic in your bar, you can just sit next to him and time your shield bashes to hit his leg and soak up the damage from the stomp.

He can also fly up and drop icicles on you. At lower health when he does this he'll also fly by and try to grab you. If he does, he'll drop you down a pit and you'll hit a bunch of rocks that are sticking out and take damage. If you're bad at not getting grabbed (like me) then when you get dropped down the pit, move to one side and use your shield bash to block damage from any rocks you're about to hit.

This guy gave me a lot of trouble for a long time. He's got a good amount of attacks that are difficult to avoid.

He can shoot a bunch of homing missiles at you while simultaneously having spears come out of the ground around him. Seems like the best way to avoid the missiles is to run toward the boss and they'll overshoot you.

Your best chance to do damage is when he throws his fire boomerang thing. You can jump behind him and get in a lot of hits. Sometimes an occasional stray fireball will wander back there and hit you, but it doesn't happen too often.

You'll notice that Death Faleon will start changing colors. This means he's only vunerable to the corresponding element that he currently is. Just in case you need that spelled out for you...

Green is vunerable to wind.

Red is vunerable to Fire.

Yellow is Vunerable to earth.

White is vunerable to physical.

He always changes in the order I listed above, by the way. After white, he repeats back to green.

His most troublesome attack is when he decides to go HAM on you and he does these dash attacks simmilar to your charged shield bash. On nightmare he does it five times in a row while I believe he only does it three times on normal. This attack is most dangerous when he's in his red phase because you're most vunerable to it with your fire magic selected. You can either try to wait it out in the air with whirlwind or soak it up with shield bashing. If it catches you off guard (like it did more than once in the video for me) then it can be really difficult to get out of.

So I should probably point out up front that there's a move this boss does that I didn't have happen in this video. Sorry about that.

The move in question is one he does when near death. He turns into a fireball and starts bouncing around the screen. You can manipulate how be bounces by running around and manipulating the camera since he bounces off the invisible borders of the camera instead of actual walls. He ends his bouncing with a ground slam, so try to avoid that too.

This fight got a lot easier once I realized the best way to damage him was to get him up against a wall and charged shield bash him. The trick was actually getting him against a wall. The solution? just sitting by a wall and waiting for him to come to you. He's actually quite good at cornering himself.

This boss can breathe fire. It covers quite a large area in front of him, but leaves him very vunerable to you just jumping over him and attacking him from behind while he does it. I recommend you do that.

He also will do a flip and then lunge forward. This attack is best avoided by jumping over him before he reaches the peak of his jump.

He can jump in the air and then come down with a ground pound. This will make a large shockwave that will knock you back if it hits you. If you see it coming, either shield bash or get away.

When near death, he will howl, which summons a pack of baby wolves that charge through the area. You can shield bash your way through them and be pretty safe. you might have to shield bash more than once though.

This boss is pretty straightforward, but that doesn't make him easy! He's got a lot of large area attacks that are difficult to avoid.

He can drop firey spikey ball things on the ground...not a lot to say here, just avoid them.

He can fire a bunch of cone-shaped homing missiles at you. Jumping seems to make them slow down, so you can get away from them with that.

When he stands upright he's going to fire a bunch of explosions in a circle around him. You can jump over them easily enough.

He also can fire a bunch of bombs in the air that come back down and explode over a wide area. You can jump over the explosions, but if your landing looks iffy, use a shield bash just in case.

His most annoying attack his giant laser. He doesn't give a very big warning when he fires it so it can be difficult to anticipate. He leans forward slightly then flashes yellow and fires. Keep your eyes open for it.

Last but not least, he'll try to jump on you and create a large shockwave. He doesn't actually hurt you until he lands so if you jump and meet him in mid air you'll be fine. If you attack him while he's walking back to the center of the room he'll jump again, by the way.

To hurt this boss, you have to attack his tail with your shield bash. Preferably charged because it hits multiple times and does much more damage.

Because the game designers knew you wouldn't be content with beating up Chester just once, they give you the opportunity to do it again! Awesome!

Joking aside, this is an intense fight. Possibly the hardest in the game...at least on the higher difficulties. There's quite a few subtle things you need to pick up on to do well here.

As I'm sure you don't need me to point out, Chester has traded in his knives he used in your first fight against him for energy balls that he throws at you. They're not too hard to avoid by themselves. Just jump over them. Just be careful because chester will always throw energy balls before his lance attack.

Speaking of his lance attack, let's talk about it! It's much more dangerous than it was the first time you fought chester. It's still the attack you go in on after he does it to do damage to him. There's a big difference this time, though. After he does his lance attack, he'll have a force field surrounding him for a short duration, so if you jump the gun and try to attack him too fast, you'll take damage instead and miss your window to deal damage to him. You need to be paitent and wait it out.

Chester will also jump forward and have a bunch of energy balls shoot out in all directions. Just jump over them. Whateva.

When he stops and has a greenish aura surround him, he's going to do his large area attack. If you don't think you can get away from it in time, shield bash to absorb the damage.

Once chester has reached about half health, he'll start teleporting around and shooting energy balls all over the place. Once he does this, try your best to keep your distance from him so you have time to react to these. Easier said than done, I know. I use my burst for those times for the damage mitigation.

So let's talk about actually hurting him. As I said before the lance attack is your window of opportunity and you need to wait out his force field after he does it. What I didn't mention was that you also need to approach him from the sides or the back also. If you try to attack him from the front, he'll just jump away and you'll miss your chance. When you DO land hits on him, remember not to hit him more than four times. Any more than that and he'll raise his shield and counter attack explode you. Sometimes even four hits can get dicey. I've found the safest way to attempt landing four hits is after the fourth hit, transition into a shield bash, so if things go wrong, you've got that to prevent you from taking damage.

This is a really intense and difficult fight, but when you finally get it...awww yeah!

Suck it, Chester! I beat you up so bad not even your sister can look at you anymore! She totally wants me, by the way. She even gave me that teleport to save points family heirloom of yours!

Dularn's back and he's out for your blood! Unfortunately for him, he's also extremly weak against fire.

The fight flows pretty much the same as it did the first time you fight him, but he throws more swords at you this time. It's pretty much the same principles for avoiding them though.

When Dularn's force field drops and you go in for the damage, have a fully charged fireball ready to go and smack him with it after hitting him a few times. In the later phases where he splits into mutliple Dularns, you can hit him up against the wall so your fireball hits him more than once!

The only real significant different between this fight and the first one aside from the fake Dularns (the real one always shoots the fire, by the way) is that when he's almost dead, he brings out these floating things that shoot lasers at you. At that point just keep moving or else they'll get you.

Overall, it's not a very difficult fight if you exploit his extreme weakness to fire.

You can totally get away with just getting in this guy's face and beating him to death.

At the start of the fight he sits in the middle of the room. Break his shield with your sword and then start whippin' up on him. He'll try to defend himself, but just about everything he does can be blocked without much trouble.

He's got his scythe attack. It can be both high and low. If it's high, simply don't jump and if it's low, either jump over it or block it with a shield bash.

He'll shoot lightning at you, but it's pretty inaccurate for the most part. I just kind of ignore it.

After doing so much damage he'll push you back. If you're getting pushed toward one of those purple orbs, just shield bash it.

At about half health he'll realize that just standing in the middle of the room isn't working for him and he's go into his second phase. He'll start using some new attacks, too.

The first new attack you'll probably notice is the ridiculous one where he makes himself look like a space ship and he starts rocketing back and forth leaving explosions in his wake. Just run to the side to avoid it.

Another new attack is the thing on his back...I'm not sure what you'd call it...anyways, it'll come forward and attempt pounding you into the ground. Just shield bash it. It's pretty hard to avoid otherwise.

You'll also notice as you're fighting him that the afore mentioned gold...thing...on his back will start getting all shiny. This starts happening as you damage him and is a warning that he's getting close to doing his most dangerous attack. He only does it after taking a certain amount of damage. It's just an indicator that it's close.

His most dangerous attack is he moves to the center of the room and starts pulling you in. If you get caught in it you're going to take a lot of damage. You can avoid it by running away and spamming attacks.

Once the fight is over, it's not actually over! He starts pulling you in and then self destructs. It's avoided the same way you avoid his other attack that pulls you in.

This is a three phase fight. It also happens to be the last fight of the game! Let's get started!

Phase 1
There's a few different attacks you have to worry about for the first phase. Let's take a look at them!

First is the fire bursting out of his hands. Just jump over it. No bigz.

Second are the giant energy balls he shoots at you. This is his most troublesome attack in this phase. You can avoid them most reliably by getting the hang of the timing and running through the gap in the shots. I did it in the video so you can use that as a reference.

Third, he shoots ice at you that turns into little platforms that start floating upwards.

You need to ride those ice platforms up and shoot Galbalan in the glowy red gem that's up there with a fireball. This will cause him to drop an eyeball below. Wait for the eyeball to stop shaking before shooting fireballs at it. If you go too early the hits don't register and you'll waste precious magic that could have been more damage.

While in this eyeball-dropped state, the boss has a couple new attacks. One is he makes a giant sword that he slams down vertically, making huge explosions and the other is he swipes the halves of the sword across the platform you're on and you have to jump over them. They're both easy to avoid.

After a while, he'll put in eyeball back and it goes back to beginning of the phase and you have to do it all over again.

Phase 2
This is probably the most difficult phase of the fight. Galbalan starts it out by taking all of your magic and turning it into a big bomb he throws at you. You'll be doing the majority of this phase with no magic.

Galbalan will release a bunch of orbs around the platform and you have to dodge the lasers they make along with the other attacks that will be coming simultaneously from his hands. It's extremely chaotic and difficult to really give advice on what to do. Just try your best to avoid the attacks as they come.

Your goal is to attack his hands when you're able to. Once you've done enough damage to them, Galbalan with rear back in pain and you'll notice your magic bar will start refilling. Switch to your earth magic and charge it up. Galbalan will rush forward and cover the platform you're on with ice spikes. Time your charged shield bash to soak up the damage from this and then use your burst and unload on his eye as much as you possibly can.

At this point he resets and starts phase 2 over and the beginning until he's almost dead.

Phase 3
Palms are sweaty, mom's spaghetti.

For this phase, you and Galbalan take turns bouncing a giant ball of energy back and forth until one of you messes up and gets hit by it. There's a couple of obstacles keeping this from being a walk in the park, however.

First are these vortexes that form in the ground and try to pull you in. You get away from these the same way you got away from Garland's vortex. Spam attacks.

Second are spots that shoot out a spiral of bullets. You don't want to jump over them because jumping will potentially mess up your hitting of the energy ball back at Galbalan.

Basically, when you get to phase three, you want to stand all the way back in the center of the room. That way, when the vortex spawns on you, you can run away from it and spam attacks while still facing galbalan so you can hit the energy ball. After taking damage, Galbalan will switch to the second type of attack. The spiral bullets. You can run around anywhere to avoid those, just don't jump or you can make things bad for yourself. After taking damage, Galbalan will switch back to the Vortex again and repeat.

It's a long and involved fight. If you're able to finish him then you deserve a pat on the back. Good job!

You may have noticed that I left out the two bonus bosses. That's because I feel it would be best to let people figure those ones out on their own. They're purely bonus bosses that provide nothing more than an extra challenge for players and I'd prefer not to rob you of that. Also, I haven't really tried fighting them myself, so I couldn't give advice for them even if I wanted to. ;)

Well gosh...thanks for reading my guide! I hope you enjoyed it. I made it because I hoped by doing so I'd be able to share my love for this game and the Ys series with others.