Was that stairway always here? (No, it just appeared from the take-five-steps switch.)
There's a dragon in the basement!
It's blue!
In addition to the water-elemental attacks you'd expect, including Tsunami and Aqua Breath, the Blue Dragon will cast Slow on itself, then follow with Rippler. Rippler trades status buffs and ailments between the caster and the target -- so the Haste possessed by a party member will be given to the Blue Dragon, and the Slow Blue Dragon cast on itself is transferred to the party member.
...except Strago blocked Rippler. Haha, I screwed up your strategy, Blue Dragon! Suck Force Shield!
Blue Dragon really isn't difficult.
Rippler is kind of terrible as spells go. Most statuses prevent Lore from being used -- Berserk, Silence, Confusion, and so on -- so it's not as useful as you'd think. Furthermore, a bug in this version of the game prevents it from working on anything that's immune to Imp... so come to think of it, it may have been Strago's Ribbon that blocked Rippler, rather than his shield. Well, whatever.
In any case, it's better than the Rippler bug from the SNES version. In both games, many things are treated as a change in status that's hard to set or dispel. Cyan's second Bushido technique? The counterattack is set by a status flag. Piloting Magitek armor? There's a status flag that changes the sprite to include the armor, and change the Fight command to Magitek. Shadow's habit of blocking attacks with Interceptor? Oh yes, that's a status too.
In the SNES version, Rippler could swap around
every status, even those hidden flags. An enemy casting Rippler on Shadow would
steal Interceptor from him. And since nothing
sets the Interceptor flag -- it's just innately on Shadow -- defeating the enemy means you never get Interceptor back. He stops protecting Shadow forever.
If an enemy Ripplers Shadow and steals Interceptor, then Strago Ripplers that enemy, the Interceptor status is instead transferred to Strago, and the dog protects the old blue mage for the rest of the game instead. Weird.
Anyway, that's one more dead dragon.