"What the... no countdown? It doesn't seem the same without it!"
"We ain't no Ancients if that's what ya mean."
Final Fantasy VII Playthrough
Playtime 27:23-28:56
Hey, remember when I used to update this? After a long hiatus, I started up my playthrough again, starting with the last Huge Materia quest in that takes place (echo effect) in spaaaaaace. Granted, over the course of the story, the whole party sees all manner of strange stuff, but it's still a bit bizarre and rather amusing that no one in the party other than Cid really seems to care that they're the first people in outer space. Cid is pressed up against the wall peering out the porthole, arms clutched around it like he's trying to capture all of space in his hands, while everyone else just sort of sits motionless, wondering when they're going to be done with the whole thing. After the Huge Materia quests, the next plot point is going back to visit Bugenhagen, who tells you to take him to the City of the Ancients, where he conveniently finds writing scribbled by a scientist (who writes in riddles?) about where to find the Key to the Ancients. I guess they don't quite show how deep the pool is or if it feeds into flowing water or something during the cutscene at the end of disc 1, but it's a bit perplexing why Cloud is so dead certain that they're completely fucked when Bugenhagen explains that Aries's White Materia is the Holy power that can save the planet. Having just made it back from outer fucking space on a spaceship that was on an irreversible collision course with a giant meteor, does fishing something out of a big pool of water seem that impossible?
Before returning with the Key of the Ancients though, I've stopped off for a few more diversions first. I went to see Lucretia behind the waterfall, which is kind of a fun scene culminating in Vincent telling her the white lie that Sephiroth is dead. I also did the pagoda sequence in Wutai to get Yuffie's final limit break. I dunno if it's supposed to be a direct homage, but the whole "fight one guy with a different style on each level of a pagoda" thing is the same premise as Game of Death, the movie Bruce Lee was making when he died. Sadly, unlike Game of Death the final battle here does not involve a vampire Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. It never really occurred to before that Wutai could be seen as a commentary on post-war Japan. I mean, granted, it's obvious that Wutai's culture is supposed to be like the in-game equivalent of an Asian culture set aside from a largely Westernized world, but I think you could make the comparison more specific than that. There's a lot of ranting amidst the Wutaians about how after they lost the war, the country was opened up to a bunch of outsider touristy types who started messing up the place. At the end of the pagoda sequence, Yuffie's father tells her to steal the party's materia after their quest is over. Does Square-Enix have a secret plot to steal America's materia? I think it would irresponsible not to speculate.
Right now I'm saved in the Sunken Gelinka, where I'll get what is pretty much free XP from The Turks in a battle that has a really bad AI glitch, but then I'll have to fight some stuff that can probably actually kill me.
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