Well, volume one is in the books so how about another? This one isn't as complicated as getting the Buster Sword, it just requires some patience and math skills. Can you guess what this one is about? Hint: Think back to Final Fantasy VI, it was one of the very first of the Weapons in the series. Yup, Atma is back and wants some payback in this final installment of Final Fantasy for Playstation 1.

Ok, the first thing you have to understand is that nothing in the world of Final Fantasy IX will hint to the location of this magnificent beast. Unlike obtaining the Buster Sword, this is done purely by messing around with the game for hours on end. But fret no more fellow fans, I am here with the step by step instructions on how to get your butt kicked whenever you want to!

First, collect 100 ore stones, have an airship (Gold Chocobo will not work), and have the best Magic-Defending armor you can find because as we all know Atma is all magic. Weapons aren't really a factor in this quest as you'll find out later on.

Alright, now that you have everything you need go to Daguerreo. By now you should have examined the stone wall in the middle of the entrance with a serpent type creature engraved in it. It will ask you for an ore and in return will give you a set amount of Aquamarines. Here's where the math comes in handy. Write down Daguerreo on a piece of paper and and under each letter write the number that corresponds to it. For example: D=5, A=1 etc… Now, give the wall as many ore stones as each letter corresponds, like for example: 5, then 1, then 7, like the first three letters of Daguerreo (DAG) get it yet? Now don't get ahead of me, these numbers have no relevance to ANYTHING Final Fantasy. When you put the final amount of stones in suddenly the ground shakes uncontrollably and what happens next will make any fan cry.

As most of you remember from Final Fantasy III/VI, there was an island that contined 3 statues that controlled the balance of the world, and how that island rose from the ground to the sky becoming the floating island. Well remember the little cinema from the SNES version of Final Fantasy III? Yep, it is shown during the shaking at Daguerreo. Amazingly you find yourself atop the world on the floating island of Daguerreo! Hurry and save your game at the Moogle and pray.

When you exit, you'll see a ball of light right above Daguerreo, sort of what you see above the Lifa Tree in Disk 4. Now, make sure you have a lot of Magic Casters on your team, physical attacks will not work in this fight. Now, take your Airship up on throught there and prepare for the battle of your life!

Instantly Atma gets the jump on your team and casts "Void of The Gods" to suck ALL of your party's MP, so be sure to have elixirs ready. You can cast Scan on him if you want to, but to save you a turn I'll give you his stats: Level: 99! HP: 2 !? MP: 99,999,999 !? Weakness: None (obviously). You have your work cut out for you. Don't think for one minute that 2 HP is pathetic. You can kill him with Dagger if you want to, he'll only cast Auto-Life on himself. There's no way to prevent him from doing this and he WILL keep casting it on himself everytime you physically kill him. So how do you fight this weapon? Well as some of you might have guessed by now, suck the freakin magic outta him! Osmose, Magic hammer, Lancer, whatever! Get his MP down to zero and you win! But he won't make it easy on you. He will counter with DoomsDay everytime you suck any bit of magic from him. Plus, to make even harder, he will use Void of The Gods whenever he feels, but he will only take as much MP as your characters have when he casts it so he can only recover around 3,000-4,000 MP.

His physical attacks aren't to be worried about at all since his attacks are eclipsed even by a Muu!!! Auto-Life, Auto-Regen are a must for this as well as anything to keep you alive, status protection isn't needed, he doesn't hit with Curse or anything remotely similar, he just wants you dead right there and then so he'll keep using DoomsDay. But don't think that you can get away with using Egoist's Armlets to absorb DoomsDay. Atma has in his magic inventory something called "Majesta Beam", he'll fire it off and it will look like a flicker of light dashing across the screen, then that's when it happens, the biggest explosion you've ever seen done in a video game. I can only speculate that this is some sort of a Super Nova type attack, when this happens, everyone is down to 1 HP, but don't worry, Atma will not attack unless you attack first, so heal up and get ready for more!

As you may have noticed Atma uses magic as well, so everytime it casts a spell, its digging its own grave, especially with Majesta Beam which takes 2499 MP to cast!! You can't sit back and just watch it kill itself, it will occasionally attack Ultima just for kicks so be ready.

In about an hour or so, you'll be done with him, he'll disappear in the classic Final Fantasy fashion in which he fades into lines till he finally disintegrates. So what do you get for frying your brain for an hour? You get 9999 EXP, and 100 AP, and 1 G(LOL) not to mention the "Atma Weapon" which anyone can equip. It works just like the FF3 one so I won't go into detail about it. Also, look in your Key Items section to find "Proof of Atma". Neat huh?

Better, harder than Ozma? You be the judge, Atma was plenty tough for me, and plenty frustrating as well, but remember, only a myth...