Fans of either Super Smash Bros. Ultimate or Final Fantasy are no doubt already aware that Sephiroth was recently added to Smash as a playable character. The community is only just now starting to parse out his strengths and weaknesses, but overall, he seems to be a very competitive character. One of Sephiroth’s most notable features in SSBU, aside from his outstanding reach with his melee attacks, is his neutral special attack, Flare. On its own, this technique is a slow moving fireball that travels the length of the stage before exploding, but players can charge the move to create more powerful versions of it.
Charging Flare up one level creates Megaflare, a more powerful version of the initial attack. The result of fully charging Sephiroth’s flare attack is Gigaflare, one of the strongest moves in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. While players have been loving this technique for its huge range, massive damage, and powerful knockback, there’s a silver lining that adds a great deal of humor to the situation. Sephiroth’s most powerful technique in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate pales in comparison to Donald Duck’s greatest feat of arcane power from Kingdom Hearts 3, the casting of Zettaflare.
Flare has appeared in nearly every single Final Fantasy game to date, and usually occupies the position of being one of the three most powerful spells that players can learn, the other two being Holy and Ultima. In the original Final Fantasy, it was the strongest 9th level spell that Black Mages could learn, and it has held that reputation since then. While player characters can’t go much higher than this usually, there are even more powerful versions of Flare often cast by the franchise’s villains. These include things like Sephiroth’s Megaflare and Gigaflare, but it goes beyond that as well.
The power of a Flare spell is represented using binary prefixes. Most are familiar with terms like megabyte and gigabyte, as these are frequently used to define how much digital storage space something has. Above the gigabyte is a terabyte, and going beyond that, there are petabytes, exabytes, and so on. Examples of these spells have been seen very rarely in Final Fantasy games, but they show the incredible scaling of Flare spells that is unlike anything else in the franchise. For reference, each prefix is 1,000 times stronger than the last, or in other words they grow exponentially more powerful.
Assuming the standard Flare spell is the base (equivalent to a byte in terms of data storage), then the next level up, Megaflare, is theoretically one million times stronger. In Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Sephiroth is able to cast Megaflare by charging up his neutral special one tier, and the effect is a slower but more deadly and explosive attack. From there, Gigaflare is the next step, theoretically creating an effect that is 1,000 times stronger than Megaflare, the equivalent of one billion Flares. Again, in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, this is the strongest spell that Sephiroth can cast, and it is truly devastating.
Throughout Final Fantasy, stronger versions of the spell have appeared. Petaflare would be 1,000 times stronger than Gigaflare, and Exaflare would be 1,000 times stronger than that. Doing the math, that would mean that the Exaflare is as strong as one quintillion Flare spells, or one billion Gigaflares. Donald Duck in Kingdom Hearts 3 has somehow surpassed this, casting Zettaflare. Assuming the nomenclature continues to scale in the same way, Zettaflare is equal to 1,000 Exaflares. That’s one sextillion Flares, or relating it back to Sephiroth’s strongest attack in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, one trillion Gigaflares.
In the anthology of Final Fantasy 7, Sephiroth has never been able to cast Zettaflare. There are a select few Square Enix characters that can cast Zettaflare, and he was never one of them. Instead, Sephiroth gains the power of the Black Materia and learns how to cast Meteor. In the world of Final Fantasy 7, this is considered the ultimate destructive magic, so it is assumed to be more powerful than any of the forms of Flare that appear in that game. In Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, this ability is replicated by Sephiroth’s Final Smash, an attack called Supernova.
If Sephiroth were to have the capability to cast Zettaflare, it would require significant time to charge. As it stands, it takes a little over two seconds for Sephiroth to charge his Flare up two stages into Gigaflare. In order to get to Zettaflare, he’d also have to pass through charging stages for Teraflare, Petaflare, Exaflare, and finally Zettaflare, a process that at the bare minimum would extend the charging time to well over six seconds. More likely than not, it would take even longer due to the exponential increase in how much power is being gathered.
All of this poses the question: Is Donald Duck stronger than Sephiroth? Realistically, the answer is no. Given the other feats that Donald performs in Kingdom Hearts, it’s very likely that in a one on one fight, the Royal Magician of Disney Castle wouldn’t stand a chance. Players have actually already seen this play out twice, as Sephiroth is a secret boss in both Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts 2. If Sora doesn’t help, Donald will likely die quickly, and even with players at max level, he and Goofy spend most of these fights KO’d.
In terms of who has more raw power in a single strike, it’s difficult to say. Sephiroth in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate may be limited to casting Gigaflare, but it’s not clear just how strong his Supernova ability is compared to Zettaflare. Again, Meteor is listed as the ultimate destructive magic in Final Fantasy 7, and since there’s no Zettaflare in that universe to compare it to, it’s really impossible to say. Regardless of the actual answer, it’s fun to picture Donald Duck being so much more powerful than Sephiroth, at least in one way, and it’s terrifying to imagine what Zettaflare would look like in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate given how powerful Gigaflare already is.
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is available now on Switch.
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