Angel Wing (Limit)

Angel Wing (ヴァリー, Varī) is Rinoa Heartilly's second Limit Break in Final Fantasy VIII.

Rinoa acquires the Angel Wing Limit Break after Squall saves her from drifting in outer space in disc 3. When entering Angel Wing mode, a pair of white feathered wings, similar to the ones printed on her blue sweater, will emerge from Rinoa's back.

Mechanics
Activating Angel Wing will cause Rinoa to enter a sort of "Magic-Berserk" status; players will lose control of her until the battle's end, or until she is defeated or petrified. If Rinoa is petrified/defeated, the Angel Wing status will be gone when she is revived/cured. During Angel Wing, Rinoa will be immune to Berserk, Confuse, and Silence.

During Angel Wing, Rinoa will automatically cast one offensive spell present in her inventory without actually expending it, important for maintaining the effects of junctioned spells. Unfortunately, Double and Triple statuses do not stack with Angel Wing. Rinoa's magic damage will be five times more powerful than its base damage, even when her magic stat is already at the maximum 255. The increased damage multiplier will work even with Demi, which instead of draining the opponent's HP by 25%, can kill the target.

To prevent Rinoa from casting unwanted spells like Scan or Dispel, the player can simply remove those spells from her inventory. Rinoa can become quite the devastating character if one manipulates her magic junctions in such a way that Meteor is the only offensive spell she has in her arsenal. With the boost in magic damage and the appropriate magic stats, Rinoa could potentially be doing close to 99,990 damage in one attack round (Meteor hits 10 times, potentially for 9,999 each hit). Even with the 5x damage multiplier and capped magic at 255, it is still rather difficult to force the Meteor spell to exceed 7,500 damage per meteorite strike on harder bosses such as Omega Weapon, even at level 100. The player can inflict the target with Vit 0 to reduce its spirit to 0 in order to deal more damage.

In most cases, executing Angel Wing with Meteor is still the stronger alternative to attempting Rinoa's Wishing Star. Also, if one takes into account the concept that Final Fantasy VIII's battle system is based on the infamous ATB gauge, and takes place in pseudo real-time, the mere fact that a player does not have to manually input commands for Rinoa after Angel Wing is initiated, increases her damage-over-time capabilities tremendously, especially when equipping with Auto Haste.