Amon Y defeated:

One of the two Orb Boss III's, Amon Y, fell to my blade.  This orb boss was vulnerable to fire, while all the characters in my power party are fire affinity, so I knew I could win if I could just survive his planar collapse attack.  For whatever reason I could survive the planar collapse attack this time around, so I won.  I'm still not sure what the attack does.  It seems to me an area of effect damage technique combined with an instant death mechanic aimed at only one person.  The instant death attack can be resisted if you're lucky, and the area of effect attack is powerful but nothing I can't heal.  So I guess this time I lucked out.

I tried the other Orb Boss III, but it's vulnerable to thunder, not fire, so I couldn't marshal the firepower necessary to break through its shields.  Ideally I would cultivate a bunch of powerful lightning affinity characters to throw at it, but currently the only one I have is Sumomo, and 1 is less than the 6 I needed to beat Amon Y.  The other solution is to just keep leveling until elemental affinity no longer matters and I can curbstomp it.  That's probably what I'll end up having to do, but I'm not capable of doing that yet either.

I still need more tears of fire, but at least I've gotten to the point that I can reliably travel down to floor 38 and still beat the last boss on floor 50.  Previously that strategy only worked about 50% of the time and I was actually losing out on tears overall as a result.  But all these tear trips have made me stronger and possibly more skilled at the game.  Also, at least all the mainline members of my power party have fully upgraded their tear enhancements, so the remaining tear hunt is mainly about aesthetics instead of necessity.

I've almost reached the 35 million total memoria power level requisite to complete my master mission.  If I had just been able to beat that crimson vertex anachrony I could finish the mission this weekend.  But that was a timed battle and my damage output simply wasn't high enough in the time window they gave me.  It's frustrating because overall I was much stronger than the enemy, but that timer meant it didn't matter.  So instead I'll have to wait until Super Bowl weekend to bag the extra anachrony I need, which is basically only one week from now.  Not long.  The game has thrown a lot of challenges at me, but with this Orb Boss down and the master mission almost completed, it feels like I'm actually beating the game, and all without purchasing any aid.  I've accomplished all of this using the free-to-play mechanics only, making every accomplishment that much more impressive.