Final Fantasy VII Part #16 - Obligatory Puzzle Dungeon

Part 16: Obligatory Puzzle Dungeon

Chapter 16 - Obligatory Puzzle Dungeon

As eatingapples pointed, this music plays during the majority of this update. Standard spoilers caution in the related videos.

Seriously, what kind of model is that? It reminds me of Lilith from Darkstalkers.

Our mission here is to run between the statues while the guards are not looking.

If you run while they're switching between statues they don't see you. Shinra security would be improved by infinity% if they just sat down in front of the statues.

All in all a pretty boring, easy and worthless mini-game. Floor 60, you've brought us great shame.

It makes sense that floor 60 is just a guarded hall though, since the upper floors are supposed to be all important and stuff.

Floor 61th is the lobby.

Where everyone is completely oblivious to our existence, you'd think they'd be showing Cloud and co. faces on the news.

Man I wish people flirted with me like that. Oh wait, they do

This really makes no sense though.

Thanks... I guess?

You have no idea.

It's like the entire world of FF7 is populated by idiots except for Cloud and Aeris.

Hey I'm here to fix the elevator, thanks for handing me this super-specious top-security card that only a few very select people are supposed to have.

I'm pretty sure this entire place is some sort of social commentary.

Anyway we go to the 61th Floor.

The 61th floor is the library and the mayor's office.

Yes, there are 9 floors above the mayor's office. He doesn't mean shit.

'It's no big deal really, I just... yeah it's no big deal

So here's the mini-game, you have to guess the mayor's password. The deputy can give you tips if you pay him.

The puzzle is like this - you need to go out to the library and take a look at the books.

Every book has a number before. You need to take note of the equivalent letter in the book name, counting from left. So in this case, G, which is the fourth character in the name.

The password has four letters and there are four sectors in this library, so we need to find the only possibilities that match the password.

Creepy things.

Most book names are plot-related somehow, it's the kind of thing that makes more sense the second time you're playing, though some are obvious like this one.

The password is random, there are some different possibilities.

Anyway, the password for us is BEST.

Whatever you say, Mr. President.

We get the Keycard 65. That means we now have 3 floors available to us. HOORAY!

And because we got the answer right on the first try, we also get a bonus - the [Elemental] Materia. This is a very interesting item. It's a support (blue) materia that has two different uses - if you equip it on weapon, the physical damage you deal now uses the element attached to it (so Elemental-Bolt makes your physical attack super-effective against robots, etc).

On the armor, however, it protects you against the linked element. At the first level the materia halves the damage, at second it nulls the damage and at third level it absorbs the damage. Neat uh?

Anyway, a very good addition to our repertoire.

Proud to serve, sir.

Just showing off our neat new materia. I equip it as Elemental-Lightning on Cloud's weapon.

Floor 63 is a bizarre optional puzzle in which there are three coupons spread around and a lot of doors between us as them.

We can open up to three doors before having to go back to redeem the coupons. Our goal is of course picking up as many coupons as we can.

Once we exchange them, we can no longer open the doors, so we need to get the three coupons in one go.

Taking the upper route we can get to the leftmost room in two doors, get the coupon, and go up the air duct.

The air duct is a shortcut to the exchange room and another coupon room.

So we pick up the coupon in this room and the room next door, and get back to exchange.

The [All] Materia is obvious, the other two are interesting items.

[Star Pendant] is an accessory, not an armor. It protects the user from Poison effects.

[Four Slots] is an armor with, as the name implies, four separate slots. Four Slots, however, has extremely low defense compared to other armors we have access to.

This is great because it allow us to reach our limit bar faster, while not sacrificing Materia slots.

We exchange our items and put our Star Pendant on Cloud. It's our first accessory!

Four Slots obviously goes on Tifa.

Anyway let's move to the next floor.

Floor 64 is the gym. We can always use a gym.

That's right, you can actually... take a nap.

Fuck you I want to pee.

We can take all sorts of items from the locker room.

Even a megaphone, although Cloud sees no reason to take it and just leaves it there.

I like how it says "only" 250 gil.

Fuck yooou.

The guy is right, this place IS falling apart.

Anyway there's nothing else to do here so let's go to the floor 65.

Floor 65 is another weird puzzle room. There are lots of these locked chests and a model of Midgar in the middle.

The puzzle is pretty stupid, you just have to open the chests in the correct order...

...to get parts to put into the model. This floor makes no sense.

The "challenge" comes from the fact that, unlike the previous floors, this floor features random encounters.

Whenever you put a part of the model, a chest opens up somewhere else in the room.

Here's an item that we can farm in this room. Remember those robots that put confusion in you? They drop [Loco weeds], an item that casts Confusion in your opponents. Confusion makes them hit each other.

Anyway, we finish the puzzle and get another Keycard, this time we have floor 66 and 67 open.

Welp. They're having a meeting. We need to find a way to listen to it.

I'm not sure Cloud is the best person to ask this. He hears whispers everywhere.

You keep doing a great job of controlling the world while missing the fact the most wanted criminals are talking to you.

The guy talking about the bathroom is a hint that there's a duct linking the bathroom and the meeting room.

Hell yeah we're gonna listen to that stuff.

Couldn't they have, I don't know, did something less suicidal?

Oh snap.

What a very creative, original, brilliant name!

I dunno, if you guys invested in the space program maybe you could get satellites up and running to you could actually find the promised land instead of counting on a random girl to do it.

The guy is pretty much a caricature of the greedy evil businessman stereotype.

"After all, we're the ones who saved Sector 7 from AVALANCHE!"

Remember, Heidegger is the fat guy in green. He's the one we've seen in the previous flashback. He's a mega asshole.

Hojo: "As a specimen, she is inferior to her mother. I'm still in the process of comparing her to her mother, Ifalna, but for now the difference is 18%."

President Shinra: "How long will the research take?"

Hojo: "Probably 120 years. It's probably impossible to finish in our lifetime. Or in the lifetime of the specimen for that matter."

What the heeeeeeeell

Also god damn you're an incompetent scientist, Hojo. 120 years to do a research?

Well, thank God.

I don't think any of the characters have showered yet.

As a bunch of ugly misplaced gray polygons.

The 67th floor, we're nearing the top... and we have yet to find Aeris.

We stop to walk around this floor, as there are once again random encounters here. This time we're putting our [Steal] Materia to good use against Moth Slashers.

They give us Carbon Bangles which are WAAAY out of our league. And you thought stealing was only useful in FF9!

We steal one for each character.

Sometimes you fight these... stop boards. Seriously, what the hell?

More importantly, you can fight these motherfuckers.

These are SOLDIER enemies, SOLDIER 3rd Class to be exact. They're not particularly hard being 3rd Class and all, but they do some peculiar things - they cast Bolt 2 and also cast Sleep on your characters.

These can be tough if you're underleveled, which we're not.

They also drop Loco Weeds.

Enduring the horrible beating however and we can steal [Hardedge] which is the best weapon Cloud can use, again, for a long while.

The Hardedge is similar to the Striking Staff of Aeris. It has almost twice as much Attack as ours do and more Materia slots too. Thanks to Steal, Cloud is wearing the best equipment possible at this point.