Concerning Cats with Megaphones

Final Fantasy VII Playthrough
Playtime 08:02-10:58

"We'll cross the ocean to the new continent.... even if we are wearing Shinra uniforms."

Nearest I can tell pretty much everyone hates Cait Sith. While I certainly don't make a point of using him regularly in my party (whoever decided that his Slots limit break should have a chance of killing the entire party is a douchebag), but he makes me laugh sometimes. I love his goofy little jigs and just the absurdity of the whole character. Its a cat with a megaphone telling a giant, fat, frankly somewhat retarded looking moogle what do to. And since you find out later that Reeves is telepathically linked to Cait Sith, I guess there's some type of weird multi-tiered mind control thing going on, since presumably Reeves is controlling the cat which is controlling the moogle.

I made two attempts at the Speed Squre game at the Gold Saucer and failed both times, slightly less miserably the second time. God, that's incredibly frustrating. I don't know who thought it was a good idea to put a shooting minigame into a game that uses the PS1 D-Pad, but suffice to say it wasn't a good idea. After the Gold Saucer you get thrown down into the desert prison and have to find and confront Dyne, Barrett's also-gun-armed and now somewhat crazy in the head acquaintance. The flashback to Barrett and Dyne trying to dodge Shinra gunfire is kind of awful. I realize that circa 1997 there was only so much you could do with 3D, but if you look at Scarlet during the cutscene, she's not even holding a gun. She's literally "firing" her empty arm at them. That bugs the hell out of me every time I see it.

I'm starting to gain levels some of my basic materia (All, Fire, Ice, Lightning), and I have mostly weapons with double growth slots equipped right now (you find a big string of them going along at this point in the game). I really like materia as a magic system. It can be frustrating at times, and having to swap around materia as you swap around your party members gets tedious. Its much less frustrating though, than the bizarrely concived Junction/Draw system they implemented a game later in FF8. It wasn't in any way intuitive at all to learn, although at the same time, once you got late into the game and had a stockpile of good magic, it was easy to completely break the game. With the push of a button you could, say, bring your characters HP from something like 2,000 to the max of 9,999. Materia isn't at all volatile like that, but its also pretty customizable. With some tweaking, you can come up with some interesting combinations, especially with Elemental and Added Effect materias. I also like that most materia will buff and/or debuff some of your stats, somewhat making up for the fact that unlike the earlier FF games, all of the characters aren't all that dissimilar to begin with, as opposed to a game like FF4 where you sure as hell weren't ever going to get anywhere mashing Attack with your caster class characters.

Right now Cloud's at level 21, and I'm saved outside of the Gold Saucer doing a few random battles before taking my sweet-ass buggy down south. Its not too long before I get to Nibelheim. I don't remember what level you have to be at to feasibly beat the boss you need to get past to get Vincent. I'm probably going to try it on the first time I get to Nibelheim regardless, so it could get ugly.