Smarter than the Aver-age Flying Cat

Lunar Silver Star Story Playthrough
Playtime: 00:00-02:51

That's right kids, mixing it up a bit. This is a game that I've genuinely never played before, other than the first hour or so once. My initial thoughts about Lunar are, first of all, that it's a lot of fun, and secondly that it moves quickly. It's like a JRPG in the hurry-up offense. It has all the traditional elements of a JRPG, including a story, albeit a pretty simplistic one to this point, but doesn't really spend a lot of time dallying at all. A little under, I've been through the first three areas, and just felled the first boss: the weird gelatinous creature on the pirate ship. The game doesn't have any huge blocks of dialogue, the load times are minimal (given that it's a top down 2D game, this would seem to go without saying, but the load times on the PS1 Final Fantasy ports are putrid), and battles usually last less than a minute. When an RPG presents an interesting world to explore, it's fun to slow down and let yourself be immersed in it, but I'm finding this a nice change of pace after having played two FF games. Recall that in FF IX it took a good hour to really get into the game proper after a menagerie of cutscenes and battles of no real consequence.

Like pretty much every JRPG, Lunar is a coming of age story. Our protagonist is Alex, a teenager growing up in a quaint little town who, much like Link or Zidane or a thousand other RPG characters, is actually more than meets the eye. He has the same green eyes as Dyne: the legendary dragonmaster, Alex's hero. And so, after passing the trial of the legendary white dragon, awakened from his slumber, Alex sets off to find his destiny, accompanied with his loyal flying cat Nall, his friend of the fairer sex, Luna, with a renowned singing voice, and his loud, obnoxious, tubby friend, Ramus. Later you meet Nash, the requisite arrogant bastard character. Each character gets a little CGI cutscene to introduce them with some kind of dated looking, but still decent animation. The voice acting is hardly great, but given that this was made at around the same time as Symphony of the Night ("What is a man... a miserable little pile of secrets!!!") and Mega Man 8 ("But it cannot fall into Dr. Wah-wee's hands!"), it's hard to complain about. At times, there's actually voice acting over the regular top down pixelated graphics, which is just kind of bizarre more than anything and doesn't really add much. The game has a pretty good sense of humor, and some very Americanized humor. I'm not sure how much of that is the result of localization or if it was in the original Japanese. Talking to random people in towns will produce some pretty amusing little asides.

The battle system has some elements of Chrono Trigger (undoubtedly other games also, I just associate it with Chrono Trigger) in that enemies will move around during the battle and there are certain area-of-effect spells that will hit more enemies the more they're grouped. In Lunar, your characters also have to physically move to melee attack enemies, and can't fully traverse the screen in a single turn. This is a little bit frustrating, as it doesn't specifically define exactly how far you can move, and on a couple of occasions a character has basically burned a turn just moving toward an enemy that I thought he could get to. Additionally, if you tell a character to attack a nearby enemy that then dies at the hands of the character who went immediately before him, that character may select a much farther away enemy leading to the same result. Not really that big of a deal though. At the time, I don't have a lot of variety in abilities but that's slowly improving, especially now with the addition of Nash as a caster. In general, battle is usually fun and fast moving. It does seem a bit odd to me that it took this long to get to a genuine boss battle. Hoping the rate of those will pick up a bit.

Overall thus far, Lunar is a fun game that you can pick up and get into the meat of quickly, without a lot of stops and starts along the way. I don't know if it's really high art as much as some of the better Final Fantasys are. The story is very simplistic and there's a lot of just getting you from point A to point B without a lot of flavor added in. The humor is genuinely amusing though, and it holds your interest. More to come.

I Call Upon the Heart of the Cards

Final Fantasy IX Playthrough
18:58-30:38

I managed to win the Treno card tournament, which I don't believe I did on my first playthrough, which won me a Rebirth Ring. I mostly ignored the card game in general the first time through, but I'm actually having fun with it. I honestly don't know if it nets me any more prizes in the form of items, I haven't checked any FAQs regarding that. Maybe if I beat the "card guru" who lives in Lindblum I get something. I'm finding Quina hilarious this time through too. I don't really think I did the first time and I'm not really sure why. The way (s)he constantly seems to keep showing up randomly wherever you travel even though (s)he seemingly has only the most mild passing interest for what you're trying to accomplish is just gold. When Quina randomly shows up in Treno and then gets discovered washed up on the beach and presumed dead by Lindblum soldiers are two the funniest moments in the game so far.

In general, I like most of the characters, and lot of the inter-party banter that goes on, but the whole plot of the game, such as it is, just seems like kind of a mess. So much of it just kind of seems like a random confluence of events loosely pieced together. After heading back to Alexandria for Garnet's coronation, kind of a pivotal moment for the history of the country and for Zidane and Garnet as characters, and then as a party you just kind of up and decide that you want to go to Treno to enter a card tournament. Then you have to rush back from Treno because Kuja is attacking Alexandria, and all of a sudden, before we've really gotten to know much about Kuja--other than his kind of general dickishness--all of a sudden Garland interjects himself into the story with no real introduction. After you destroy the entity controlling the Iifa Tree, all the mist disappears from the world, and despite mist powering a bunch of the world's technology and despite it having existed for decades, no one seems to really be all that freaked out by it's sudden disappearance. The whole story seems to have sort of a haphazardness to it. The story of FF VII is really set from the same cloth in the sense that the gist of it is "you're the good guys, stop the bad guy from destroying the world," and while it has some asides thrown in with shenanigans involing mind control and false memories, the core of it is really only marginally more complex than IX's. VII's whole story seems to develop much more naturally, though, and seems to rely less on random coincidences to give everyone and everything a place in the story and tie everything together.

One other thing I kinda like, quickly, is the "chocograph" sidequests, where you can find items on the world map and dig 'em up with your chocobo. Unless you're really dying to skip the couple of random battles you'll run into walking to wherever you're going, riding chocobos is kind of pointless in most newer FFs. In FFVII they got around this by adding chocobo breeding/racing, but that just gets to be so much of a chore. This is a much simpler distraction.

Less Pew, Pew, More Stab, Stab

Final Fantasy IX Playthrough
10:13-18:58

Earlier, I praised FF9 for having distinct classes like the Final Fantasy I-VI (although even VI drifted away from this), instead of characters that were essentially identical until you started setting up their materia/junctioning/whatever, at which point you could basically make them into whatever you wanted. In IX, the character's class actually dictates how you can play them. You can't just mash Attack and have any kind of success if you don't have all melee characters in the party. The one problem with this, though, is that sometimes the story will dictate a certain combination of characters for your party which can be pretty annoying. Right now I'm going through the stuff on the Outer Continent (yeah, it's been a while since I've posted last), and for a pretty decent chunk of time my party has been Zidane/Vivi/Garnet/Eiko. Having two white mage/summoner class characters in the party at the same time is just goofy. It's fine for boss battles because you can have one heal or buff and the other summon on a given turn, but for random battles, summoning is usually just overkill and a waste of MP and time (luckily the summoning cinematics are pretty short in the this game), and if you don't have to heal you end up basically wasting a turn doing something like 68 damage hitting the giant troll with your little mage staff. Kind of makes battles drag on for unnecessarily long.

I had vague memories of going into the Iifa Tree from the first playthrough--mostly the screen just before the boss battle where there's like a cascading waterfall of mako... wait this isn't FF7, but it's basically still mako, isn't it? It's green glowly life-essence type stuff. I completely forgot about that boss battle though. I actually died once against him because it took me like three castings of it to realize that casting Fire triggers a counter attack that rapes you. When you cast it, a message comes up that says something like "The fire has started." Before he actually uses the counter-attack it's not really apparent whether that's good or bad. I'm still not quite sure what it's supposed to be, other than some really pissed off tree creature producing mist inside of a giant regular tree. I also forgot about completely absurd Armarant looks. When you go into the one-on-one battle between him and Zidane is pretty much the only time you get a clear shot of his face. Otherwise, he just kind of looks like a giant red mass with a body attached to it.

The Realm of Endless Rain

Final Fantasy IX Playthrough
04:48-10:13

Maybe Burmecians just have different opinion on nice weather, but personally I think that if your homeland is known as the "Realm of Endless Rain", it's time to get a new homeland. I dunno, maybe Burmecians would all want to live in Seattle if they existed in real world America. On the way there, I stopped off in the swamp, I picked up Quina, probably the oddest character since VI since Gogo, except that you get Quina way earlier in the game in IX and seems like an actual main character and not an afterthought "bonus character." I really have no idea what drug-induced haze inspired he/she/it as a character. The Eat ability is one of the more annoying Blue Magic systems. Obviously E. Skill materia was a lot easier in VII where you just had to get hit with whatever ability it was. Here, it seems like the enemy has to be at a fairly low percentage for it to be successful. There's some pretty cool Blue Magic abilities in the game though, like Pumpkin Head, which was the first one I picked up, and which deals damage equal to whatever the difference between your current and max HP is. Steiner has the same thing in his Sword Art abilities only it's called Minus Strike. Kind of an interesting high risk/high reward thing.

The Trance system kind of annoys me as well. It takes much longer for your trance bar to fill up than your limit bar took to fill up in VII, which I don't necessarily think is a problem except that, unlike in VII, if you get someone's trance to full in a battle but then it doesn't get around to that character's turn again it doesn't carry over until the next battle. Seems kind of lame that you can spend all that time getting it filled and then not getting to use it (that sentence sounds vaguely dirty). I'm also completely confused by the "Trouble" status effect, which doesn't exist in any other Final Fantasy that I remember, is the only status effect that doesn't go away automatically after battle [update: this actually isn't true at all. I guess I was just lucky up until this point.] (remember back in the day when you actually had to be sure to carry around all the various status healing items?), and can only be healed with an "Anointment" and not a Remedy. Just a completely bizarre addition to the game in my opinion.

FF has had some pretty ridiculous costumes throughout it's history, but whatever the hell Kuja's wearing has to be right near the top. I think IX also has to represent the height of the ultra-effeminate male in FF. Sure it continued a big in X and XII with Tidus, Seymour (speaking of weird outfits...) and Vahn, but there you had Auron and his five o'clock shadow and Basch with the big-ass scar on his face to mitigate that somewhat. I'm glad that as you get to this point in the game though, you have an actual villain on screen, instead of just autonomous black mage puppets and the unsubstantiated hunch that Queen Brahne might be kind of up to something evil. I suppose you could say that in VII you don't see Sephiroth until you reach Kalm Town, and then only in flashback until you acutally encounter him for the first time on the boat leaving Junon Town. In VII though, I think there was enough sufficient dickishness from President Shinra and his lackys to provide enough conflict for the first few hours of the game. As I said in my first post, I think IX gets off to a bit too lackadaisical of a start.

I guess I complained a lot in this post, but I really am enjoying this playthrough. I've completely forgotten huge swaths of the game since the first time I played it, and I'm having fun rediscovering it. The environments are unquestionably one of the game's big strengths. I talked about Lindblum last time, and Burmecia is pretty spectacular as well, even if it does look like it'd be really depressing to live there. Moving on to Clerya next, which is one place that I do remember well and remember being a really cool concept for an RPG town.

RPG Music Part II: Town Themes

This is going to be kind of a broad category that will basically encompass any kind of a theme that plays where you're in an area with people whom you're not trying to kill. This is going to be pretty Mitsuda heavy, I think. He has a knack for making music that evokes a certain tranquility.

II. Town Themes

Arni Village (Chrono Cross)



I feel like this should be in one of those Corona commercials with the people sitting on the beach.

Peaceful Days (Chrono Trigger)



Mitsuda again, with SNES technology this time, with a peaceful, somber melody.

Termina (Chrono Cross)



Cross again, but this time a livelier piece for a livelier town.

Mushroom Kingdom (Super Mario RPG)



Just fun to hum along to.

Lon Lon Ranch (The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time)



It sounds kind of weird on the 64 hardware, but I like the melody and the lazy, western sounding guitar accompaniment.

A Brief Interlude: My Favorite RPG Music

I mention the soundtracks a lot in my FF posts, and it occurs to me that through the magic of embedding it would be pretty easy to throw together a post dedicated to some of my favorite tracks. This is going to be very Square heavy, if not Square exclusive (there might be a Zelda or two thrown in, which I'm considering an RPG series for purposes of this), because my RPG experience is very Square heavy. I don't think there's any question that Uematsu's music in the FF series and Mitsuda's music in the Chrono series are both central to why both series are so beloved (okay, I guess people are a bit up in the air about Chrono Cross), and I don't think it's merely the popularity of the FF series that's led to a world tour of concerts of FF music with prestigious orchestras. That a lot of Uematsu and Mitsuda's stuff was done on pretty primitive music hardware and still sounds good also says a whole lot.

I. Main Themes/Overtures

The Prelude (Entire FF Series)



The sort of strange, ethereal harp music is a perfect way for you to be greeted as you turn your system on. Instantly recognizable, but something you never get sick of.

Prologue (Final Fantasy IV and others)



A nice, epic sounding overture. A pretty early example of how the soundtrack gave the FF series a cinematic quality.

Terra's Theme (Final Fantasy VI)



Amazing. The opening credit's sequence with the mechas stomping their way to Narshe in the show with this playing the background was all you needed to draw you into the game.

Main Theme (Final Fantasy VII)



Pretty sure I already professed by love for this in my Final Fantasy posts. It's used mainly as a theme for the world map in the game, but listening to it it's almost sort of it's own mini self-contained story, starting off kind of somber, building up in intensity, turning dark and ominous, and then there's sort of a cathartic release at the end. This sounds incredible with a live orchestra.

Zanarkand (Final Fantasy X)



I wasn't quite sure what to make of this when I first played Final Fantasy X because the simple piano melody sounded like so much of a departure from what Uematsu did in other games, but I grew to like it. I think it suits Final Fantasy X, which I think is a really enjoyable game, even though it seems to get a pretty bad rap sometimes. The difficulty left something to be desired, but I thought it was as well produced and well conceived as any other game in the series.

Scars of Time (Chrono Cross)



Gorgeous. The kind of Eastern feel to it reminds me a bit of Joe Hisaishi's scores for Miyasaki movies.

This is the Age of Steam

Final Fantasy IX Playthrough
Playtime: 01:51-04:48

One thing that I really like about FF IX is that they brought back the concept of distinct classes. In VII you can use materia to kind of mold each character into whatever you want, but independent of that everyone is pretty much identical in battle. And magic actually matters. After a while in VII, with a couple of rare exceptions, you're usually just as effective just kind of pounding away with physical attacks with maybe the occasional summon thrown in. In IX, your mages actually have to cast spells on pretty much every turn if they're going to be effective. I like the ability system for the most part as well. While you can't really get as creative as with materia, it is kind of nice to not have to micromanage it as much, and since abilities are tied to items, it gives you incentive to horde as much equipment as possible, even if you might not actually get a stat increase from what you pick up. I like the synthesis system as well, another easily understandable but engaging game mechanic.

Five hours into the game, it's occurred to me that I've retained pretty much none of the game's plot points from the first time I played it. Every locale I've been to thus far, though, has had me saying "Oh yeah, I kinda remember this." From the first time I played it, I always though the game's environments--a combination of the painted backgrounds Square relied on in VII and VIII--along with some more advanced honest-to-goodness real-time rendered scenery (allowing the camera to shift)--were one of it's strongest points. Especially after having reached Lindblum, my second playthrough has confirmed that I knew what I was talking about, and I know that some of the cooler areas are still to come. I love the steampunk-esque veneer that's built over the world's medieval fantasy base, and the sprawling city of Lindblum, with it's air trams and city gates that open with big clock tower style gears, is a great display of this.

More to come.

Are You a Bad Enough Dude to Kidnap and/or Rescue the Princess?

Final Fantasy IX Playthrough
Playtime: 00:00-01:51

I have to say that Final Fantasy IX doesn't really do as good a job selling itself in it's opening minutes as VII did. At the outset of VII, you weren't really sure who you were or what the hell you were doing, but within minutes you were jumping off a train and stabbing dudes in the face on the way to blowing up a reactor. In the opening moments of IX you get a compelling mystery as you see a cloaked figure on a raft violently tossing and turning in a storm on the sea. We cut away from this though, and join up with Zidane and his band of rogues, setting up their plot to kidnap the princess. This is as good a place as any for a fantasy story to start, but it's way too slow developing to serve as a way to draw the player in. Before we get to the actual kidnapping, we cut away for some brief misadventures with Vivi, who I really like as a character, but Vivi getting harassed by an ill-tempered "rat kid" trying to get into a concert isn't really the best way to keep me glued to the action in the first hour of the game.

The concert itself leads to a scene that evokes the beloved opera scene from VI, but that scene was roughly halfway through the game, once you had familiarized yourself with all the characters and the game's basic premise. VI started off a lot like VII did, by throwing you right into actual battles as you controlled a hypnotized Terra as she's led into Narshe to raise hell and steal the frozen esper. In IX, there are a few "battles" to familiarize yourself with the system, but they're either stage acting during the play or sparring amongst Zidane's crew. There's not much immediate conflict. VIII had kind of a similar problem, as, if I recall correctly, before you set off to find your first GF in that cave, you had to kind of wonder around the Garden for a while, but VIII at least at the fairly epic Liberi Fatali CGI at the beginning. Where I am now, 1:51 into the game, there's not really any sense of the larger story at all yet. Thus far, the plot points have been "Garnet gets kidnapped" and "Garnet gets rescued" and that's about it. I'm not saying that I found the first two hours totally unenjoyable, because I didn't, but I think it could've been set up better.

I do think the "Active Time Events," that you can activate with Select to watch a cutscene, were a pretty inspired idea. I like the idea of giving the player control over how much or how little of the minutia (didn't think I'd pull out a word like minutia, did you?) of everything that's going on with every character. I also really like IX's world map music. Doesn't quite have the sweeping movie score style epicness that VII's did, but it's nice. I just got out to the world map now after running out of the Evil Forest (not one of Square's most inspired place names) before it turned to stone. More to come.

Fuck it, I'm Just Gonna Beat It

Final Fantasy Playthrough
'Till the End

Yeah, I couldn't bring myself to be an absolute completionist on this. This had already taken forever, and I wanted to expedite this and get it out of the way, because I just purchased Final Fantasy IX off of the Playstation Store, which I think I'm going to blog about next. I think that'll probably prove more interesting, as I've never owned it before this, and only beaten it once on a friend's copy some years ago. I really only have very vague memories as to the specifics of the story and, well, most of the gameplay for that matter, so my writing on that will probably be a lot different than this, which was me playing a game that was old hat. As I started to say in the last post, I don't really think there's enough of a bridge to get you to where you can realistically fight Ruby and Emerald Weapon (which were tacked on for the American release of the game, which I'm sure is mostly to blame for this) from where you can beat Ultimate Weapon. The Ancient Forest gives you a few new high-level enemies to fight, but for the most part, if you're going to get everything you need for those two fights, like your Final Attack-Phoenix combination and maybe your W-Summon/Mime, it's really just a complete grind to do.

Being at around level 65 with a lot of good materia (no W-Summon, KotR, or Mime though), the final battles were a bit of a joke, though I managed to beat the game with something of a dramatic flair anyway, as immediately after Sephiroth used "Heartless Angel" to bring everyone to 1 HP, then used Omnislash to kill Sephiroth without having healed anyone in between. Poetic, I know. The game ends exactly where it began, which Aries's face surrounded in a field of stars, as she summons Holy to destroy Meteor. I kind of like that they ended it there and didn't feel the need to continue on with an extended coda, where there's like a "Where Are They Now??" segment for each of the main characters. In fact, were it not for Advent Children, however many years later, you can make the argument that the humans don't even survive the events of the ending. As Bugenhagen said when you took him to the City of the Ancients, it was going to be up to the planet as to whether or not humankind was going to be saved. The quick after-the-credits sequence with Red XIII leading his kids to see the wreckage of the old Shinra complex, now covered in thick plant-life could be interpreted as evidence that the planet said "You know what? You guys still suck, humans. It's the firey-tailed furries that shall inherit the earth!!" But then Square realized that "everybody's dead!" doesn't make for a lucrative sequel and went ahead and made Advent Children. A lot of people seem to be in love with it, and while it was kind of fun from a purely fan-service perspective, as a movie it didn't really do much for me. I haven't played any of the prequel stuff either. Maybe I will eventually, but for right now, as far as I'm concerned, Final Fantasy VII is still a self-contained thing.

Next up: Final Fantasy IX!

Why Save the World When You Can Breed Chocobos

Final Fantasy VII Playthrough
Playtime 28:56-36:41

I played through the Midgar sequence ending in the boss fight with Hojo, thus ending disc 2, and of course declined to go right into saving the world in favor of doing more sidequests. Obviously, the nature of video games is such that suspension of disbelief is much more difficult than with movies, but there's something particularly amusing about the idea of flying your airship to the edge of a big hole in the earth that you're going to have to descend to the bottom of within a week in order to save the earth, only to decide to up and fly away to instead race some chocobos at an amusement park. I do, of course, appreciate that there's a lot more to do above and beyond the main storyline, although one thing I will say is that there's not really enough new areas where you can just level up and get more GP (chocobo breeding is expensive) without it being complete mind-numbing tedium. Once you kill Ultimate Weapon--which is one of the last things I did before writing this--you can access the Ancient Forest which helps, but other than that you pretty much have to go to the Sunken Gelnika or otherwise retread areas you've already visited as part of the main story, unless I'm really forgetting something.

I've made a couple of attempts at going for Omnislash and/or W-Summon at the Battle Arena, which is genuinely challenging. The most expensive thing I was able to commandeer was the "Stardust" at 8,000 BP, which if I was online at the time I wouldn't have bought because it's just a one use item that casts Comet 2. Somewhat confoundingly, it's more expensive than Speed Source Materia at 4,000, and Preemptive Materia at 1,000. I did get the Speed Shoes for winning 8 battles at least once, which are kind of awesome in and of themselves (automatic haste). To win all 8 battles with any sort of consistency, you're pretty much required to be at a high level with excellent materia, and even still you need a lot of luck. Going into it with a Ribbon can help tremendously, but of course one of the penalties is "accessory broken," which I got after the first round on more than one occasion. One of the possible 2nd round fight is a group of five little insect creatures which can all put you in berserk, so if your Ribbon is broken after the first fight, that pretty much screws you right there, unless you're overpowered enough to be able to muscle through the next 7 fights without ever having to heal. One of the possible first round fights is also a group with two little caterpillar enemies, who will always use Silk on you on their first turn, which slows you down and which your Ribbon doesn't protect against. Having a leveled-up Counter Attack helps, so does sticking an Added Effect-Hades pair on your weapon, as very few of the Battle Square enemies seem to be immune to much. Materia equipped Really, to get through all 8 battles, at least at level 58 which is where I have Cloud at, you need a pretty perfect confluence of events to happen. I suppose having First Attack materia would mitigate against some of this, but I don't have that at the moment, nor do I remember off hand how you get it. May have to check a FAQ after this.

I've been doing some chocobo breeding as well. Right now I have two that can win in the ultra prestigious Class C--where you can win such fabulous prizes as Potions--but that's it. I'm not sure if I'm going to bother getting a gold chocobo. I don't even remember all the details of how to get one, except that you have to steal the nut to breed one from the goblins on one of the isolated islands on the map. Gonna play that one by ear.

Square-Enix's Plot to Destroy America

"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.

Can Has Huge Materia?

Final Fantasy VII Playthrough
Playtime: 21:26-27:23

Yeah, it's been a good chunk of time since I've posted. In the meantime, I've done the Corel, Ft. Condor, and Underwater Reactor huge materia quests, as well as the Wutai sidequest where Yuffie steals your materia (what a bitch). Wutai is a fun little distraction. I kind of wish there was more of it. I can go back later of course to do the quest to get the Leviathan materia. Running into the Turks on vacation is amusing, as is the confrontation with Don Coreno when he does his little bit where he asks you a question and then gets it turned around on him as he's hanging off a cliff.

Fort Condor is just completely obnoxious, another mini-game that I could completely do without. I've never actually won it without having to fight the boss, and I don't really care enough to try. The sub minigame after the underwater reactor is less annoying, but it's really damn easy. You don't really have to do much sub hunting. The red sub spawns right in front of you and usually you can catch up to it in a couple seconds and start mashing square. I actually got killed by the Carry Armor boss in the Underwater Reactor. That goofy-ass looking lanky robot is one of the tougher boss fights in the game. His lapis laser attack does something like 1500 damage to everybody, and he can keep a party member held in each arm to take them out of battle. So you have to destroy the arms fast. I managed to use Morph on the ghost ship enemy (and by the way, why are you fighting a floating pirate ship with a skeleton on it in a hallway anyway), so I have the Guide Book for the Underwater Materia later on.

On a related note, last weekend I went to the Final Fantasy Distant Worlds concert at the Rosemont theater. It was excellent. Nobuo Uematsu was in attendance and performed on an amazing rock version of "One Winged Angel" at the end of the concert. In terms of FF7, they also played Aerith's Theme and the Opening/Bombing Mission track. They're going to be back in Chicago again on August 1st, 2010 with the CSO. I looking forward to going again.

Please Insert Disc 2

Final Fantasy VII Playthrough
Playtime 18:24-21:26

One of the reasons why I think FF7 is one of the easier FF games is how easy they go on you with respect to status effects. Except for the two that effect your limit breaks, Fury and Sadness, all of the others only effect you for a single battle. Poison can be absolutely brutal in some of the SNES games, while here, I usually don't even bother to cure it since I can most assuredly end the fight before it kills the character and it'll then be gone. The start of disc 2 throws marlboros at you as one of the possibilities in random battles. They're the bane of every FF players' extistence, but they're really not all that difficult to deal with here compared to a lot of the other games. It also helps that I already have a Ribbon on one character at this point. While its nice not having to sift through menus after battles to try and find whatever cure item matches up with the status affliction you need to take off, I wish there was a bit more challenge in this regard.

A lot of the snow area at the start of disc 2 just annoys me. The snowboarding minigame is nigh impossible to control, long, frustrating, and just generally weird. It also makes me want to play Snowboard Kids on N64, a snowboarding game that's actually fun to play from the same era. The whole Great Glacier area where you have a map with different landmarks and spend a lot of time running along paths between them, is uninteresting and tedious to me. Then there's the whole "climb up the side of this mountain and stop at every overhang and mash square to warm yourself up again" thing. Fairly mind-numbing. The two-headed monster thing you fight at the end is genuinely a pretty tough fight though. It can mess you up pretty good with its final attack. I'm saved at the first save point down in the Great Crater, glad to be out of the snow, and anxious to get on with the main story again.

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.

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.

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.

The Man in the Black Cape

Final Fantasy VII Playthrough
Playtime: 06:00-08:02

"Am I... human?"
"He continued to read, as if he was possessed by something, and not once did the light in the basement go out."
"I challenged Sephiroth and lived. Why didn't he kill me?"

I completely forgot about all the silly minigames in Junon Town. First, there's having to do CPR on Priscilla, a girl whose entire purpose in the game seems to go no farther than to exist you can save her and get the Shiva materia as a reward. Then there's the part where you have to have the dolphin boost you up to the top of the high voltage tower, which I never seem to get right the first twelve times. Then there's the marching scene, where you basically just have to march in line (I won 6 potions, I don't know if that's good or not, nor remember what I usually get). Now I'm saved on my way to the docks to do drill for Rufus's send off.

Before getting to Junon was the big flashback to Nibelheim with Sephiroth going insane and burning the town. I'm still not entirely sure I get the entirety of the story with Jenova, and the Cetra, and how Sephiroth came to be. You get bits and pieces of it here. The Cetra were the original inhabitants of the planet, but came from elsewhere. Mako is like the physical manifestation of the Cetra's wisdom. Jenova is something that fell from the skies during the time of the ancients and sat in the ground for about 2,000 years before it was pulled out by the Shinra. I know on Disc 2 there's an optional scene where you can find a recording that Professor Galt made going into some of this. Going to have to do that and pay attention. I'm sure there's more explained in the game than I can really recall right now, but even so, I don't think they do as good a job painting the complete picture that they could have. Some of the telling of the background feels incomplete.

Cloud's at level 17 right now as I'm sitting in Junon. I got my first two summoning materias in the form of Shiva and Choco/Mog (the animation for which never fails to make me laugh). Now that I'm starting to accrue some materia, at some point in the near future I'm going to make a post talking about the system, which I think is one of the best magic systems in the series.

Sephiroth is Alive?

Final Fantasy VII Playthrough
Playtime: 04:28-06:00

"Where's its fucking head? The whole thing's stupid."
"I'll talk as much as you want later, miss."
"Speak with the planet? What does the planet say?"
"Who you callin' Mr. Barret? That don't sound right!"

FF7's overworld theme is the best in the series. Felt the need to get that out of the way.

One of things that I think is pretty brilliant about the way the first act of FF7 is set up is the misdirection that's put into it. If you're someone who played the NES/SNES games and figured that eventually, in spite of the fancy new futuristic setting, FF7 would eventually start conforming to previous conventions, then maybe eventually getting out of Midgar and roaming around the overworld wasn't that much of a surprise. Its easy to imagine, though, someone going into the game completely blind finding it completely plausible that the game takes place entirely within the city of Midgar. The city would certainly be big enough. Similarly, even though every once in a while you get vague mentions of some guy named Sephiroth, the beginning of the game seemingly makes it perfectly clear that the object of the game is to thwart the schemes of the Shinra corporation within their own reactors and their own headquarters, and that the game's main antagonist is President Shinra and his gawdy red suit. All of this gets turned on its head, when, surprise, President Shinra gets killed, not by anyone in your party, but by Sephiroth. Rufus, the President's son, and the rest of Shinra certainly hang around for the rest of the game, but the main focus of the story shifts tremendously after you get out of Midgar. In some ways, Final Fantasy VII is a pretty simplistic "good saves the world from evil" story, but on another level, its pretty unique in the way it keeps the player guessing in where its going.

Right now I'm saved on the world map right outside of Kalm. Going to save the big long exposition setting up all of Sephiroth's backstory until next time. I ran into a little bit of an issue fighting whatever the hell the boss is that chases you down after the motorcycle pursuit minigame. Not thinking, I had an Elemental-Poison materia combination on Cloud's weapon (with no other attack magic), thus making him unable to hit the (non-living) tank type of thing. So he was completely useless for the entire battle. Still managed to win though. Crisis averted. Elemental-Poision isn't even that good of a combination, I realize now. I was confusing Elemental with Added Effect, which you get much later in the game. With Elemental, the enemy has to have a vulnerability to the Poison element in order for it to do anything, something that I don't believe applies to a lot of enemies in the game. With Added Effect, on the other hand, anything that isn't specifically immune to the Poison status effect (where their HP drains every turn) has a chance to have Poison inflicted on it every hit.

Oh yeah, and this section of the game has my absolute favorite line from Barrett. Cloud realizes that Jenova is being stored in the Shinra building, which pretty much induces a seizure in him. We the player can only imagine what the hell is going on with this grotesque creature and what Cloud's connection is to it. Meanwhile, Barrett just looks in and says, "Where's its @#&@# head? The whole thing's stupid!"

A Golden Shiny Wire of Hope

Final Fantasy VII Playthrough
Playtime: 03:05-04:28

"In my veins courses the blood of the Ancients. I am one of the rightful heirs to this planet!"

I played through the pillar section, climbed the wire, and worked my way up to floor 64 of the Shinra building. Ran into another addition to the bizarre enemies list for this game (see the previous post) in the form of the enemy called "Sword Dance", which roams the halls of the Shinra building and appears to be a giant floating fish type creature. I believe they're the first enemy of the game to put my characters in Fury status--the status effect that there's no reason to ever get rid of. Fury increases the rate that your limit bar fills up, supposedly at the cost of weapon accuracy, but any sort of decline that actually exists really isn't noticeable at all. Throughout the game you get Tranquilizer items that take you out of fury, but there's no really why anyone would ever want to. I really don't think they tested that thoroughly enough if it was supposed to have any sort of real determent to your characters such that it would possibly outweigh the benefit of more limit breaks.

On the 62nd floor you meet the mayor, a very minor character, but an amusing one. I love the idea that Shinra has so completely taken over Midgar that they've literally stuffed the mayor into a tiny room in the library and he spends all day making up odd little riddles. They really go to great lengths establishing Shinra as being completely, cartoonishly evil throughout the game. I guessed The Mayor's password right on the first try in the little minigame where you have to find the misplaced books in the library and get a letter for the password from their titles. That got me an Elemental materia. Not all that useful to me right now, but I can start leveling it up. I also picked up all three item coupons on floor 63, although I screwed it up a couple of times to begin with. That got me a Star Pendant (immunity to poison), Four Slots (armor), and an All materia. You can never have too much All materia.

Up next I fight to the top of Shinra tower, meet Red XIII--the favorite of furries "anthros" everywhere, and get the first glimpse of Jenova as the game's plot starts to shift from an anti-giant corporation, death to tyrants sort of thing, towards something much more operatic and heavy on fantasy. That, and the bizarre Road Rash-like driving minigame.