Part 3: Who's Bad?

Holy carp, another update!

Chapter 3 - Who's Bad?



We get a nice look at the meeting place. Why is there TEXAS written in it? It's ruining my immersion!!



The Sector 7 Slums. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.



The cool thing about Cloud is that you can pretty much answer almost every interaction in the game as a complete asshole.

Anyway, she just goes on and rambles about what we already know, that the reactor blew up.



They do as much as they can to make you well aware of that.

Enough chit-chat, let's go to the meeting place.



The Seventh Heaven Bar.



Home of the worst criminals this world has ever seen.



A dreaded place.



A wicked place.



So this young lady with high-budget polygon breasts welcomes us to "home". I'm not sure Cloud agrees with that.





Tee-hee.



We meet Tifa. Tifa is Cloud's childhood friend, that's all we know for now.

Tifa: "When you were little you used to get into fights at the drop of a hat."



Tifa: "You almost never see them here in the slums. A flower for me? Oh Cloud, you shouldn't have..."



I told you, you can be an asshole about everything.



But I'm a nice guy and give the flowers to Tifa.



Biggs: "Why don't you have one too?"
Cloud: "Yeah, why not?"
Biggs: "Oh!! That's more like it!!"







They could have named him Porkins instead.





And with that Barret leaves.





That's the best pinball machine ever.





I'm making Cloud a drunk in our LP and I ain't taking nos for an answer.



And we go down.



What is this on the TV? Some ad for LucasArts' game Afterlife?





Cloud: "None. I'm positive."

Barret: "You sound pretty sure."

Cloud: "If there was anyone from SOLDIER you wouldn't be standing here now."

Barret: "Don't go thinking you so bad jes cuz you was in SOLDIER."



Barret: "But don't forget that your skinny ass's workin' for AVALANCHE now!"











Cloud: "I don't care about Shinra or SOLDIER. But don't get me wrong."

Cloud: "I don't care about AVALANCHE or the Planet for that matter!"

Anyway I decide to talk a bit to the other members before going up.





Wedge: "You say you don't care but you came to talk to me."



Wedge really, really reminds me of the Anime Roommate series.



I mean, he really does.



In this scene I learn that bars, drinks, beer and cowboys are all related to TEXAS. Back to the normal show:



Tifa: "The Planet is dying. Slowly but surely it's dying."

Tifa: "Someone has to do something."

Cloud: "So let Barret and his buddies do something about it."



Tifa: "You forgot the promise, too. Remember... Cloud. It was seven years ago."













Yeah that seems to have worked out really well.





Fracking fangirls.



"Umm, if you get really famous and I'm ever in a bind... you come save me, all right?"

"Whenever I'm in trouble, my hero will come and rescue me."



Cloud proceeds to call Tifa a misogynist and leaves.



"All right... I promise."





If this was made today he would say "I could care less" and I would be pissed off because saying that wrong has become the norm in TV shows nowadays.



Holy shit he's climbing that.

"Wait a sec big-time SOLDIER!"





Cloud: "This is my pay? Don't make me laugh. You got the next mission lined up? I'll do it for 3000."

As you can see, Cloud is an asshole about everything.

Anyway, reluctantly they accept to pay you 2000 for it and all is good.



This is the one of the few games where these irrelevant questions have actually a purpose later on.





The more the merrier.

"Before the next mission, I got somethin' I wanna ask you!"

"I, uh... I don't really know how to use Materia! I'll give you that Materia you found. Just teach me how to use it!"



If you choose to explain it then the game will offer you a tutorial.

The cool thing about FF7 is that all tutorials are actually explained by Cloud. This is because Cloud is a badass McBadass. It's just like how in Vagrant Story your character is so badass he doesn't really level up or learn something new, he merely remembers it.

Anyway we decide to not explain it to Barret because I'll do it for you (and also because I can't stand tutorials anymore).



Materia in the world of FF7 is how "Magic" works, although it's only seen as magic by the commonfolk. The scientists study it and, well, like to call it science.

The concept is that Materia are these crystals of energy that can be absorbed and controlled. Much like everything else found in nature, the thing is commercialized.



If you look at Cloud's concept art or at his sword model, you'll see that his sword has two holes in it. These are two holes for Materia. That's also why he starts the game with precisely two spells - Lightning and Ice.

Materia has its own Level which is calculated using AP instead of Exp. You only gain AP to the Materia you have equipped.

The cool thing about Materia is that you can combine some of them. See how the two slots in Buster Sword have a link between them? That means these two Materia are combined.

Unfortunately mixing two green (magic) Materia don't do anything. Materia is part of the game world and not just a random mechanic. Some materia are very common, while others are exceedingly rare.

Equipping Green Materia also makes you physically weaker, as you can see.



There seems to be a commotion in the town.





Johnny: "...I'll be a better man! This is goodbye!"



Johnny is Tifa and Cloud's childhood friend. As you may have guessed, he's decided to leave Midgar for good.





Aww



I mean, seriously, look at that Jacket.



Just beat it.

The cool thing about Cloud is that it's justified in Game Mechanics why he's a badass - He's the most rounded up character of all, with high values in every attribute. There's a backstory for that too, but the point is his Magic attribute is far ahead of every other character we have now.

Each Materia gives you +1 Magic so I put all of them on Cloud to maximize his Magic.

Normally this would be far from optimal because Barret and Tifa's (specially Tifa's) physical damage sucks hard. But this is a 80's Gang, they ain't taking no materia anywhere, no sir.



They are taking...



GRENADES.

Hell yes look at them sweet grenades.



We buy some Iron Bangles, which are armor pieces. There's virtually no difference between them and the Bronze Bangles but they give us one additional Materia slot.

Remember that thing we found on the ground of the first reactor? That was a [Restore] Materia. Restore gives us the "Cure" Spell.



We also bought a Fire and another Lightning Materia because seems like we'll be dealing with more robots in the near future.

Anyway we go to the bottom-right building in the slums because Barret mentioned something there for us.



We find our first blue (Support) Materia. Cool!

Blue Materias exist to be combined with others. For example, when you combine [All] with, let's say, Lightning, your Bolt will strike every enemy on the screen. Neat uh?







Like I told you, Cloud is the one who teaches stuff.



SPOILER ALERT LADY!!



These guys just sit there flexing their muscles chillaxing like good bros.

I think we're done here, so we just move to the take the train.





And with that AVALANCHE members are off to their next mission.



NEXT TIME:

Reactors, for real! Drama! Cliffhangers! Awesome music!



Chapter 3 - Bugs & Bytes:

Tifa's Limits

Tifa has a cool mechanic with her limits. Every time you gain a new limit with her and use it, she will also attack with ALL of the previous limits. Also when you use any of her limits you get a slot machine with Miss, Hit and YEAH where YEAH is a critical strike. It's fairly easy to get the timing on YEAHs once you get used to it.

Because you can get criticals at will and because the damage adds up, early on you have the highest damage potential from Tifa unless you do some serious Luck Manipulation.

Tifa's first limit set is also the one with lowest damage requirement needed to perform - about 40%. Later on we get an item called Hyper - Hyper reduces our chance to hit, but doubles the rate at which our limit bar fills up, so with Hyper this goes down to 20%.

Because of this (and other reasons later) Tifa is an excellent character to do some custom challenges with.

[All] Materia

The [All] Materia has a bug or debug leftover - if you reach its maximum level, you'll be able to sell it for 1,500,000 Gil.

While it's not a bug that Materia with higher AP sell for more, nothing really compares to that. 1.5M Gil is enough to make you rich for the whole entire game, even spend it frivolously.

And the best thing? The All Materia is one of the easiest Materia to level up.


Cool Music we listened to in this Chapter:

In case you couldn't guess.

Also this.