Final Fantasy’s Tiamat the Terrifying: Every Incarnation of The Formidable Queen of Dragons Within The Franchise, Ranked!

Tiamat truly is terrifying in Final Fantasy: Stranger of Paradise. She is encountered as the first of the four crystal guardian fiends in the Floating Fortress, and it’s actually her voice actor that gives her so much of her intimidation factor. Well, that and those sweeping low-level camera angles as she slowly turns around, heads swaying in a serpentine manner, to tell the party in no uncertain terms that they will not be wielding the power of the crystal, thank you.

Her words aren’t exactly unfounded puffery either. The battle is designed to be a long and arduous one from the get-go as every time Tiamat’s health dips below 50%, she starts to regenerate. Attack-wise, she deals magical and physical damage, using her tail to strike a blow at the party, which can be dodged if you’re lucky enough to catch it. She’ll utilize the usual poison and wind-based arsenal should she choose a mana-heavy route.

Unlike in the original Final Fantasy, where it’s important to ignore the poison and focus on dealing damage, you want to have a lot of regenerative potions and abilities to deal with it here, or things will go south quicker than you can say: ‘multi-headed dragon’. Tiamat’s battle has two phases, the second of which is particularly difficult due to that pesky regeneration, but it’s not all terrible. If the party is able to cut off a head, the damage she inflicts on the party will be weaker, so it pays to be aggressive.

#3: Final Fantasy IV

The Tiamat of Final Fantasy IV is very much like the challenging foe of the original Final Fantasy, right down to the fact that she uses the same model. Like her original counterpart, she is given a devastating range of attacks, including a magical counter called Maelstrom that takes the party down to a single hit point. Let’s hope your healer has had ninety-nine cups of coffee and is ready for the showdown of a lifetime.

What makes this version of Tiamat particularly deadly, aside from everything about her, of course, is that there’s not a lot that the party can really do to defend against her other than equip Thunder-resistant items and use Shell in the later stages of battle. The poison that she’ll inflict if physical attacks are used against her is more or less a permanently draining feature that there is no point removing because she’ll simply re-inflict it the minute it’s removed.

#4: Final Fantasy XI

While Tiamat doesn’t sport her trademark six heads in this title and her color palette has been switched up from blue to orange to reflect her allegiance to the fire crystal, Final Fantasy XI’s version of Tiamat has to be one of the most impressive. This is mostly down to her size, her constitution, and the fact that it takes an enormous party of people to bring her toppling down, not just the bog-standard Final Fantasy single-player affair.

She spawns in a certain area every three to five days and in thirty-minute windows. Once again, she has a terrifying attack roster, including Tebbad Wing, which inflicts the party with Plague in much the same way as her poison attacks ruined lives in the original Final Fantasy. She spends the battle both in the air and on the ground, to make things difficult for those hard-hitting tank types, and in both cases, her sheer size and muscular build really gives that awe-inspiring ‘actual dragon’ feel.

This is technically an optional boss, but people still like to take her on because she drops a coveted set of boots that will increase the movement speed of any mage. And an item drop is always worth it to keep those out-of-range fighters out of range, right?

#5: Final Fantasy XIII

Okay, Final Fantasy XIII’s Tiamat Eliminator gets to be this high up in the rankings just because it looks cool. No, really. Machine hybrid-dragons are the gateway drug into sci-fi, people! The Eliminator is encountered in the final dungeon and alternates between aerial and ground attacks. The battle is fast and furious, and you have to be seriously adept at changing through those paradigms to make sure this boss stays on her toes.

She is susceptible to debuffs and poison when grounded, though her own attacks have the potential to inflict debuffs of their own, including the subtle Imperil, which lowers magical resistance for sixty seconds. That doesn’t sound like a long time, but when you’re right in the middle of battle and every second counts, that is a very long time to weather something like that.

Building parties for this conflict can be difficult, but with her weakness to debuffs, it is recommended to have a Synergist on the field. If your Synergist of choice happens to be Hope, then it is quite threatening to see a kid like him face off against such a creature. Thank goodness his summon is the wall, the rock: Alexander, is all we can say.

#6: Final Fantasy XII

Tiamat is encountered in the Henne Mines in Final Fantasy XII while searching for Fran’s sister, Mjrn. The party finds Mjrn, driven mad by her exposure to the Mist inside the Mines, at the same time as finding the newly awakened Tiamat. She is described as a fiend of wind and has a more muscular, single-headed appearance, which coincides with the lore of the Dragon’s Game, whereby a God tricked a nameless dragon into putting her head into a magical ring that subsequently dampened her powers.

Tiamat uses a different range of attacks, a Disablega, which disables all party members within range. This can only be cured with Esuna or Remedies, so it’s important to stay alert. Her Breath attack also inflicts Sap on an enemy, which will rapidly drain a party member’s health, much like Poison, and is cured using Regen. Within the Zodiac version of Final Fantasy XII, it’s possible to fight Tiamat again in Stage 13 of the Trial Mode, where the Assassin’s Dagger can be stolen.

She’s a challenging boss fight if you’re anywhere below Level 25, which does make you wonder what she would be like if that ring wasn’t restricting her power. Pretty badass, if you ask us.

#7: World of Final Fantasy

In this Final Fantasy release, Tiamat is the queen of persistence as she’s available to fight a total of four times throughout the game’s run, once as a boss, then as an optional Colosseum fight, as a regular enemy as the game progresses, and then she pulls a Pokemon moment and evolves to give you a real challenge in the Maxima version of this game.

She uses a mixture of Acid Mist, Jet Fire, and Thunderbolt to attack, all doing elemental magical damage, and has a weakness to ice magic. She has a more traditional design with multiple heads and the teal blue colour palette she sported in the OG Final Fantasy, though the cutesy art style of World of Final Fantasy does rather detract from her intimidation factor. Overall, it’s not a bad fight, so having to face off against her multiple times isn’t exactly a hardship, though the sudden skill increase in Maxima can give you a jump scare if you aren’t prepared.

#8: Final Fantasy IX

Yeah, she can literally be finished off in like three minutes if you have the correct party members and have spent the time leveling up their respective skill sets here. Final Fantasy IX is particularly broken for the way you’re able to freely build up the player characters, and we’re all here for it. Destroying the game this way is immense amounts of fun, but it does end up lowering the stakes of these high-end battles quite significantly.

Tiamat is one of the guardians that you’ll meet in Memoria, born of Kuja’s manipulation of the Crystal’s memories of the original fiends, and she must be defeated before the party can progress. She uses a lot of Absorb abilities, which can be quite annoying if you’re not stocked up to the eyeballs with Ethers. We usually are; we like to err on the side of caution over here. She also uses Wing and Jet Fire to set players’ teeth on edge, but really isn’t a problem despite her epic character design.

Providing you have Freya’s Dragon Crest up to max, Quina’s Blue Magic Frog Drop, Steiner’s Shock ability, and Eiko’s Holy, then Tiamat is really rather unfortunately wrong when she says that: ‘For Tiamat, there is only victory!’

#9: Final Fantasy VIII

Tiamat opens with a line about how she’ll punish us for stealing her power up in Ultimecia’s tower of future lies right at the end of the game, but the fact of the matter is: it’s the end of the game, honey, and by this point, y’all should have your party stats right up there with the latitude numbers for the tip of Mt Everest. Providing you do, Tiamat is an easy fight, which is why she’s been bumped so far down the list despite being a more or less an end-game encounter.

She spends the fight building up an attack ‘do ray mi’ style to the Dark Flare which is pretty sinister but the time she takes to pull that off means that your party should be able to get in some serious hits with their Guardian Forces as well as just the swing and click of the Gunblade. If you’re lucky and haven’t yet managed to draw Eden from the Ultima weapon, you can draw Eden from here, which is quite a refreshing reward following this fight.

#10: Final Fantasy II

A formidable foe, but one that is optional if you don’t want to bother collecting the Genji Helm in Pandemonium before going to face off against the Emperor. She’s one of the easier bosses in that she doesn’t do anything particularly special either. Though she does absorb elemental attacks, her own are straightforward and, inevitably, it ends up being a battle of attrition as you beat away at her HP like the sea on a sedimentary cliff face.

The best strategies involve casting magical protection straight off the bat, keeping your own MP high, and casting Slow or Stun on Tiamat to give you more time to prepare your moves. Casting Mini or Teleport is also a good way to reduce Tiamat’s stats, but the more efficient way to go about inflicting damage is to simply have your strongest Blood Sword user go to town.

Strangely, the change in her color palette for Final Fantasy II makes her look a lot less imposing, less mythical hydra, and more mutated dragon. This, coupled with the fact that she is completely optional, makes her feel rather redundant all around.

#11: Final Fantasy XIV

So. This version of Final Fantasy’s Tiamat is arguably the best damn looking dragon of the whole bunch. Why, then, is she so low down on the list of ultimate Tiamats when Final Fantasy XIII’s Tiamat Eliminator gets to be much higher up? Simply because you don’t get to fight this version and that kind of sucks. We know she’s supposed to be an ally, and the cut scene where you talk to her and her father is cool as. But, come on! I wanna fight the cool ass dragon trapped in a binding ring! I want to test my mettle against her firepower!

The part where your character gets to ride her into battle against Bahamut once she is free is pretty freaking cool, mind. And the voice-over work for her is wonderful as well. The scale of the battle between herself and Bahamut is breathtaking, really capturing the audience in that patented Square Enix way with flashing lights, beautiful colors, and stunning battle choreography.

But in the end, it’s all just pyrotechnics. Give us the thrill of battle for the war drums beat in our veins! Give us our turn-based impossible challenge with the wind-based fiend! We want Stranger of Paradise levels of epic with this wonderfully designed frenemy, and, in fact, dangling such a glorious, grand dragon in front of us without letting us engage in battle is almost cruel, don’t you think?

#12: Final Fantasy Tactics Advance

Making Tiamat, the big bad precursor to the final boss in the OG Final Fantasy, the leader of a ragtag group of Moogle criminals? Yes. Give us the rights to the sitcom and we’ll have a Netflix super hit in the first week of airing. While the situation is amusing and the Wind Sigil storyline is a pretty cool side plot, Tiamat really isn’t formidable in this version, and she’s not exactly central to the plot overall.

She is a Thundrake-type enemy, which can be quite challenging if you’re not really familiar with Tactics, but for those in the know, this Tiamat is nothing to be worried about at all and is, sadly, easily forgotten once the party moves on to the big, bad plot overall. Like her earlier iterations, this Tiamat uses variable, strong, elemental magic to hold her enemies at bay, along with Counter and Flight.

Ryozan Silk and Whale Whisker can be poached from her if you’re looking for those items, and if you’re not, they do sell for a pretty penny, which can be used to buy equipment you do need. Or a house in the Bahamas, whatever floats your boat.

#13: Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Grimoire of the Rift

There’s not a whole lot to say about Tiamat in this Final Fantasy instalment. She’s a standard enemy that’s encountered in a bonus dungeon called Brightmoor Tor and isn’t that much of a challenge at all, certainly not enough to be remembered as anything other than rather annoyingly quick on the uptake.

Tiamat is a subspecies of drake in this world and uses an ability called Dark Elixir, which can get quite annoying if it hits. You can get some decent loot off of this enemy, including an X-potion and a Phoenix Down, always a bonus when you’re the sort of player that dies a lot during various playthroughs…which we’re not. Definitely not…

#14: Final Fantasy Legend

Tiamat is less a stand-alone entity in this instalment and more a coat that some of the monster units can pick up and wear for a minute to perform some neato tricks, kind of like the Holocaust Cloak in The Princess Bride, and hats off to you if you get that reference.

The problem here is that there are a lot of ‘summonable’ creatures like this, with different abilities, sure, but it’s nothing to write home about, and Tiamat certainly isn’t memorable enough of a coat to wear for more than the most basic of special occasions here.

#15: Final Fantasy Dissidia and Dissidia 0.12

Ah, the frustrations of Dissidia. On the one hand, this game creates the idea of the crossover we never realised that we needed in our lives. On the other hand, the lack of coherent storytelling between the game’s protagonists is a bugbear that haunts our dreams in the dead of night. Don’t get me wrong, anything with Bartz, Zidane, and Squall gets a rip-roaring thumbs up, but the others have a lack of interweaving character drive that breaks hearts.

What has all this got to do with Tiamat? Not a whole lot to be fair. Tiamat is a summon in this game and a pretty decent one at that, but the summon itself is an underwhelming 2D homage to the six-headed fiend without even a whiff of the usual Squeenix pyrotechnics we’ve all come to know and love. Pitted against the moves the main characters throw down and the backgrounds they play on, it’s an entirely underwhelming sight and so makes the bottom of this list as nothing more than a glorified number generator.

The GOAT

Though Tiamat has never been the most powerful player on the field, she is more or less always up there with the scariest of badasses, pulling snake-like poses and destroying enemies with soul-sucking poisons and life-changing elemental barrages. The fact that she has appeared in so many Final Fantasy games is a huge indicator of just how steadfastly interesting and versatile she is as both an enemy and an ally, so it’s almost guaranteed that we will see her name again in the coming Final Fantasy instalments.

And who knows? Perhaps the #1 spot will be taken by a new interaction, a grander hydra, a more regal dragon. Maybe our dear devs up at Squeenix will see that Tiamat is tired of playing second fiddle to other bosses and give her a chance to shine as the ultimate boss on her own terms. But what do you think? Do you think that Tiamat could be an overarching antagonist, the big boss, the driving force of a narrative? Or is she better off sticking to the buried nostalgia of Babylonian myth?