George's Ghost

So what happens if you fail at the Cumberland scenario, or leave prematurely? Well, everybody dies, and now you're stuck facing a Spriggan to get into the castle. But first, you gotta take on George's ghost in castle Nerack. Turns out, he's a lot tougher in ghost form than as a human. To be clear, he's not a hard fight, but it can surprise you.

The basics

 * 1) this is a duel, meaning in this encounter the emperor will face him alone.
 * 2) George's ghost is immune to all forms of status ailments, so no status locking
 * 3) George's ghost has a defense of 24 in all physical defenses. What this means is that if you're fighting early in the game, chances are good you will end up doing NO damage to him what so ever with physical attacks.(Smash, for reference, at sword level 13, would do about 95-150 points of damage per hit on him)
 * 4) Weak magical defense. His defense value for fire is 6, and everything else is at 4. If you have fire magic at level 13, and throw a fireball at him, you'll end up with 200 points of damage each blast.
 * 5) George has a tech level of 13, a strength of 21, and an obsidian sword. He ONLY uses standard sword attacks. If you have Gerard wearing say, steel armor, open helm, and gauntlets (for a combined slash defense of 20), each swipe from George will still deal around 200-250 points of damage each round.

Tactical Options?
As you can see, going the normal route of just hitting as hard as you can with your physical attacks is NOT going to do the job here. As always, you're left with two options: out damage him or mitigate damage.

Let's look at the resources available for each option, assuming you're around the same tech / magic level of 13.

For each school of magic, level 13 would have one of the following spells: As you can see, the only options here for damage mitigation is mist shroud and hydro shield against George's ghost.
 * 1) Water: Mist Shroud, Hydroshield
 * 2) Earth: Earth Heal
 * 3) Wind: Missile Shield
 * 4) Fire: Flame Whip
 * 5) Light: Sunlight

Hydro-Shield, at level 13, would give you 6 extra points of defense. If you had 20 points of defense from your gear, and 6 points from the spell, at 26 you can expect around 140 points of damage from each sword swipe. At this point, if you had any spell options like blades of wind or lightball, it's still a challenge to outpace him in damage, given that you might be sitting on maybw 150-200 HP yourself.

Mist Shroud is actually a good option, as it can completely mitigate all damage from him, but you will lose it the first time you attack. One option here is to use mist shield to cloak yourself, heal up, attack, mist shroud, heal, attack again. That cycle loop might allow you a chance to wear him down through attrition.

On the flip side, both sunlight and flame whip at level 13 can dish out about 400 points of damage per hit to George. So you can potentially use that to quickly burst him down if you have enough levels in light or fire magic. And from that perspective, you just need to figure out how to withstand ONE round of attack to finish him off.