Why Does That Wall Hate Me?

Final Fantasy VII Playthrough
Playtime 16:38-18:24

The "Demon Wall" boss appears in at least one other game that I'm aware of, that being FF4, and you get it again here at the end of the Temple of the Ancients. The FF4 boss is much more sadistic, and you pretty much have to throw the kitchen sink at it and down it in a couple of turns or else your whole party gets crushed to death. FF7's version can hit you pretty hard, but you have much more time to deal with it. Really, the entire Temple of the Ancients was a lot easier than I remembered. Granted, I'm probably a little bit overleveled right now. The end of disc 1 throws a ton of goodies your way. In the big clock area of the temple you can pick up a Ribbon, essentially negating status effects for one of your characters. After fighting Sephiroth's big-ass dragon friend that is inexplicably hanging out at the center of the temple, you get the first Bahamut materia. And on your way into the Sleeping Forest, you get the Kajata summon, the big plus of which is the fact that it's considered Fire, Ice, and Lightning elemental, so equipping it to your armor linked with elemental grants you immunity from all of those. I put both the Ribbon and the Kajata-Elemental combo on Cloud, so right now he's immune to all status effects, and all three of the most common elemental attacks. Not too shabby.

The whole sequence with Cait Sith going into the temple to get the black materia is just sort of weird. I'm not sure if it was intended to be funny, but it is. When he's skipping down the hallway in slow-motion, falls, gets up, and does his little jig for no reason I laugh every time. I'm a bit perplexed by Aeris's whole explanation about having to solve a series of "puzzles" to get the black materia. I don't know if this is a weird translation or if there was some sort of a minigame that you did with Cait Sith that they decided to scrap, but it basically seems like he just kind of runs up and grabs it (and does a jig). There's no puzzles involved. Kind of odd. The little excavation minigame is a cool idea as well, although I think it would make a lot more sense if it were a bigger area. You can deploy up to 5 of the diggers, but its hard to really find space for more than two together on either the upper or lower level. Not really that much to it ultimately.

Anyway, the City of the Ancients is next, and the end of disc 1. Bad things are going to happen to Aries.

Inglourious Basterds

Inglourious Basterds (****)

I see those red squiggly you-misspelled-something wrong lines underneath the title, so I guess I wrote the title as it was supposed to be. Judging by the intentionally misspelled title, one would perhaps assume that Inglourious Basterds would be nothing more than another vehicle for Quentin Tarantino to go nuts with random B-movie references and winks at the audience, as has been his recent formula with Kill Bill and his half of Grindhouse. In truth, it does have its fair share of nods to past movies and stylization in it, and it takes more liberties with history and convention than just about any other World War II movie ever made, but the crux of the movie isn't really haphazard craziness at all. It has its share of the violence and debauchery that Tarantino is pretty much synonymous with, but it also has some excellent performances, a tight, suspenseful plot with some poignant moments, and some great visuals. At times--like when Eli Roth, playing "The Bear Jew"--is beating a guy to death with a baseball bat, the movie seems to border on becoming an exploitation picture, but always manages to pull itself back again and throw something different and slightly more profound at us. This is the most thoughtful movie Tarantino has put out in a while, and I think it might be his best outside of Pulp Fiction.

As has become a trademark of QT, Basterds is separated into several chapters--five, I believe, in this case--separated by title cards. The first is "Once Upon a Time in Nazi Occupied France", not coincidentally similar to the title of Sergio Leone's spaghetti western, Once Upon a Time in the West, and not just because of the strands of Ennio Morricone music that pop up throughout this chapter and the rest of the film. The scene involves Nazi Col. Hans Landa--known to some as "The Jew Hunter"--arriving unannounced with a group of troops at a poor dairy farmer's home. Landa is played by Christopher Waltz, a German actor who speaks German, English, and French in the film and has a terrifying, commanding presence throughout regardless of what language he speaks. He won Best Actor at Cannes, where the film debuted, and if he doesn't get nominated for Best Actor at the Oscars, it'll be because of the sort of movie that this is and not because of any fault in his performance. Landa suspects that the farmer is keeping a Jewish family in hiding. He is, although we're not shown this explicitly until a while into the scene. It reminds me a lot of the opening scene of another Sergio Leone movie, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, where Lee Van Cleef as the villain, Angel Eyes, comes to visit a terrified man and his family and sits down and helps himself to some salad before getting down to business. Given Tarantino's love for Leone's movies, I'm sure that's what he modeled it after. The scene is slow-developing and is built around a long conversation, but is nonetheless incredibly tense. Part of this is a result of Tarantino's direction: though the characters are just sitting around a table talking, QT moves his camera around, cutting between the character's faces as they study each other while the other is talking and then, only towards the scenes conclusion, panning down to show the family laying prone hiding just underneath the floorboards. But a big part of what makes it worse is also Christopher Waltz, whose performance creates one of the most remarkable cold-hearted bastards in any movie I've seen. I suppose he's a bit like the evil Spanish military man in Pan's Labyrinth, but he's less outwardly angry. Oft-times he's smiling and acting jovial, but at the same time manages to make it known that his character can and will kill anyone in the next instant if need be.

Chapter two bears the same name as the movie itself, and introduces us to the titular "Basterds" and their commander, Lt. Aldo Raine. If you've seen the trailer, then you've already seen his speech to his unit where he explains that they're going to be dropped into France and that they'll "be doin' one thing, and one thing only: killin' Nazis." Aldo harks from Tennessee, and Brad Pitt plays him with a heavy drawl as he delivers most of the movie's funniest lines. His performance doesn't have the same impact Waltz's does simply because his character isn't as serious, but its good in its own right. The basterds quickly make a name for themselves with their somewhat questionable tactics, like collecting the scalps of the Nazis they kill. Word of their exploits gets back even to Hitler itself, who is quite upset about the whole thing; especially that some of the German soldiers even think that one of them is "a golem." A soldier is called in to recant the tale of the Basterds ambushing his squadron, which ends with Raine carving a swastika into his forehead.

The third chapter introduces our last main character--who in many ways is the films purest hero, since the Basterds would most certainly have to fall into the anti-hero realm--Shosanna, a Jewish woman living in Paris under a false identity. She's the proprietor of a movie house, and one night when she's changing the marquis, she piques the interest of a German soldier walking the streets. Turns out, the soldier is a hero of Germany, having killed a bunch of Americans from a sniper's post in battle, and is going to be the subject of a new Joeseph Gobbels propaganda film. The soldier persuades Gobbels to debut the film at Shosanna's theater, and all of a sudden she has to find herself maintaining her cover while dealing with Gobbels and Landa, who is working security for the premiere. The premiere is to be attended by all of the Nazi high command, and the Allies devise Operation Keno: a plan to have the Basterds blow up the theater. Shosanna has no knowledge of this plan, but she's pretty much had her fill of Nazis, and she devises her own plan to burn the theater down using a bunch of old, highly flammable film reels. And so, as happened in Pulp Fiction, the previously unrelated storylines begin to gradually intertwine.

I've heard some people declare this film "insensitive," and I'm not sure why. Despite how the film is depicted in the trailer, this isn't Kill Bill: World War II edition. The Basterds are brutal, violent, anti-heros, but the violence on screen is very brief. The Basterds don't even do that much actual fighting in the film. There's a couple of violent images, but it never feels crazy, over-the-top sadistic. The movie also pretty much throws away actual WWII history to invent its own, but it doesn't really change the entire idea of what was going on. The Nazis are still the bad guys, the Allies are still the good guys. I don't know what there is to find insensitive about a movie that's obviously trying merely to entertain and not to teach anyone about any actual World War II events.

More than anything, the movie is a reminder of what a genius Tarantino is at dialogue. Even though this is a war movie, so much of it plays out through conversation, and none of it is boring. There's an extended scene that only towards its conclusion becomes relevant to the main plot, where a bunch of people are sitting around a table in a tavern playing a game where they try and guess which famous person somebody wrote on a card they have stuck to their foreheads. Tarantino manages to make it absolutely fascinating. Every once in a while you'll hear somebody call Tarantino a hack, on the basis that his best movie, Pulp Fiction, was co-written with someone else, and that he's been milking Fiction's success ever since. There's no other writing credits to be seen here, and while its not on the same level as Pulp Fiction, which is thus far his best movie, it is nevertheless really damn good.

Keep Going? Off course!

Final Fantasy VII Playthrough
Playtime 13:16-16:38

"I'm number 13. Am I going to go mad too?"

One thing about replaying RPGs that you already know really well is that sometimes you get ahead of the game. In the section where you return to the Gold Saucer to get the Keystone, immediately after getting it I went right to the hotel since I knew that's where you end up eventually. There have been a couple of instances where I've done stuff like that thus far. Before this brief unpleasantness was the actual getting of the Keystone, which involves you running through the Battle Square. For the most part, Final Fantasy VII's translation is actually very good, although here there's one typo that never fails to make me laugh, after you've completed a round of the Battle Square and you're asked "Keep Going?" with the choice of "No way!" or "Off course!"

I ended up spending some time grinding in the Shinra Mansion and in the mountains, then doubling back and opening the safe in the mansion. Evidently, this was about as strong as I've been fighting him because I really didn't have a tremendous amount of trouble with him and beat him fairly easily. Doing so got me the Cosmo Memory limit break for later in the game, the Odin summon and, most significantly, Vincent as a playable character. I haven't played a minute of the games that Square has spun off of FF7 like Dirge of Cerberus, and whatever the recent one on PSP is called. Based on what I've heard, especially with Dirge of Cerberus, I'm not really missing that much, at least in terms of gameplay. I don't really know how much further backstory Vincent gets in either one. In Final Fantasy VII proper, you learn that he was with the Turks and you learn through him that Lucretia is Sephiroth's birth mother, but you don't get a lot of details to fill in the broad strokes. I kind of like his whole vampire schtick though. Its a bit over the top when you find him in his coffin and the lid flies off as you approach it, but I think it works in a weird way.

I like Cid as a character too. For right now he's a bit of a comic relief character more than anything, with his whole "sit down and drink your goddamn tea!!" routine. I find it interesting that in the world of FF7, where technology has advanced at least to where we are, and in some ways a bit further, that they haven't made it into space yet. I'm not sure if there's a commentary in there or not, but I find it interesting. Maybe because the Shinra and Midgar don't have their own version of the USSR as a rival they haven't been compelled to put forth more effort towards it. I am a bit confused as to why Rufus shows up wanting to buy the Tiny Bronco. There are at least three different scenes where you see a Shinra helicopter in fight, and all of a sudden they need Cid's little prop jet? Whatever, I'm not gonna lose sleep over it.

I was somewhat taken aback when I ended up with Tifa as my Gondola ride partner. I wasn't really trying to get her, and my understanding was always that Aries was sort of the "default" option, and that Tifa, Yuffie, and Barrett (lol) are all progressively harder to get from there. I don't quite remember all of the criteria used to determine who you get, but in general I didn't really make a point to give douchy responses to Aries and nice answers to Tifa when prompted. Maybe the amount of time they're in the party factors in as well or something. Not really sure. Storywise, I think it makes the most sense for it to be Aries. Obviously, at the end of Disc 1, Aries is going to be at the bottom of a lake, and the gondola ride--if its with her--is one of the last scenes where she's in focus.

Right now I have Cloud at level 35, which should be more than sufficient for me to just go ahead and mow through the rest of the disc without anymore going out of the way specifically to level. That may happen anyway though, as the opening part of the Temple of the Ancients that looks like an MC Escher painting always gives my a bit of a headache, and I might find myself in a bunch of random battles as I struggle to not get lost. I'm going to do my best to not get crazy over-leveled such that every battle is trivial, but I do want to try and milk Aries for just about all she's worth before she's kaput. I'm not going to spend the time to get her all the way to her Great Gospel limit, but as of right now she's still on her Level 1s, and I want to get her more than that.

The Great Warrior, Seto

Final Fantasy VII Playthrough
Playtime 10:58-13:16

Played through the whole Cosmo Canyon sequence, from Bundenhagen's whole Powerpoint presentation about how the planet's going to die, to fighting through the Gi Cave. Cosmo Canyon is probably the coolest single locale in the game, with some of the coolest music to boot. I don't think anywhere else in the game has the same sort of character that it does, with the hut-like buildings set into the mountain and the whole tribal feel of it. I've never been one to think it absolutely critical that Square come out with a remake of FF7, but I think Cosmo Canyon is one area that would be very cool to see in a game without pre-rendered painted backgrounds where they could open it up more and let you explore a bit more.

I went through the Gi Cave with Red XIII and Tifa. Among the loot you can pick up there, is your first piece of Added Effect materia, which is very cool, but wow is it a pretty annoying little area. The big spiders that you run into at the five-way tunnel area towards the end especially hit hard. Its not that long, but there's no save point in the middle, which means you might be a bit depleted in MP by the time you get to the boss, which makes it a bit annoying. Got through with no serious disasters, though. Also what the hell is the deal with the face in the stone wall that comes alive just before you fight the boss? Kinda confounding and kinda creepy. The reveal of Red XIII's father, Seto, looking over the cliff with a bunch of arrows still protruding from him, is kinda cool, although when he literally cries big crystallized tears at the end, that was a bit much, I think. There's a lot of points in this game that are kind of short on subtlety. I'm still not sure I get the whole explanation for why Red XIII couldn't know until now that his father was actually a hero and not a jackass that abandoned his mother. Bundenhagen says his his mother told him to keep the cave sealed, which I guess makes sense since its still roaming with vengeful spirits, but I don't see how that requires making Red grow up hating his father. Whatever. Its a pretext for a little mini coming-of-age story for Red to grow his character a bit, and to give you an excuse to fight some more before getting on with the main plot.

I'm currently saved just outside of Nibelheim with Cloud at level 27.