Part 117: Famicom Part 6 - Geographical Improbabilities

Let's Play Final Fantasy 7, Famicom Edition

Part 6: Geographical improbabilities



Well, at least that's done with. We're on our way down to Costa Del Sol.



Rather than the sunny tourist location of the original game, the new Costa Del Sol is pretty sparsely populated. Interestingly enough, though...



There are NPCs with dialogue inside the various shops and inns. It's all just stuff that the various beachgoers and barflies say. No actual beachgoers here, though, and that means no Hojo.



Rufus and Heidegger still get their little lovers' spat, though.



Upon entering and leaving...



Traveling west brings us to North Corel. No climbing Mt. Corel, so no roller-coaster minigames, no reactor, and no random nest of birds. Again, the game outdoes itself in terms of slumminess. The odd thing is that even though all the houses have doors, which has been up to this point a sign that you can go into places, none of them are accessible. One or two NPCs float around town and blame Barrett. One neat thing is that all important plot dialogue runs regardless of whether or not the character is in your party, which means you get all plot related dialogue without having to actually bring along characters that you don't use.



When I played through FFVII, I never picked up Yuffie, so her absence is not felt by me as a huge loss. This question triggers a flashback to Barrett's younger days.




Whatever it is, I'm against it!

Sadly, we never get a good enough view of Barrett to conclude that he does not have a gun for an arm. As far as we know, he was born that way. Given that this game features robotic houses, when all the enemies in the game are supposedly the result of Mako exposure, leads me to believe that being born with a gun hand is neither unreasonable nor particularly rare.



Taking the shuttle to the Gold saucer presents us with absolutely nothing of interest. There are no games, no chocobo races, no rides, no minigames with exploding alien ships, or halloween-themed hotels. It's a little boring.



Young actors sharing a tender moment on the stage. It's worth noting that traveling north and then south again will not necessarily take you to the same room in the Gold Saucer.



In what is ostensibly Dio's office, we encounter Cait Sith. What're we lookin' so down for indeed. It looks like Cait Sith is a black blob riding on top of a Viking's (the actual class from FFIII) head. No, it doesn't really look like a Moogle, no.



Dio's really not used to rejection from young men. I suspect this is why he frames Cloud and the rest of the party. Perhaps his idea is that Cloud will respond to his advances if it'll get him out of prison.



The fact that Dyne is the one who killed these soldiers makes even less sense than it does in the original game, for one very important reason, which I'll bring up at the end.



Barrett killed Sephiroth! The game is over! We no not really, although I can't think of any other NPCs that use the same sprite as Sephiroth. Oh well.



So,Cait Sith is in our party now. He comes equipped with the Dark Materia, not to be confused with the Black Materia, and comes with one of the highest magical attack levels in the game. Cait Sith is, at this point, the strongest caster in the entire party. You might actually want to use Cait Sith while playing this game. That's enough of a difference for me.

Furthermore, Cait Sith's battle sprite?



Why yes, Mister Coates. We would love to go up. FF7F streamlines the process by which you get out of the Corel Prisonope.



Just so you know.





Again with the non-flashbacks. Barrett fails English class for his tell, don't show, policy.



The desert is a little smaller than it used to be. No cars, no giant worms, no mysterious chocobo wagon.



Just a Dyne.



Dyne makes anime scary. Imagine for just a second, a person that had eyes as large as their open mouths, with pupils only taking up a tiny fraction of that massive white space.



He's a little less frightening as a battle sprite. I guess he opted for the shield arm after the one store that sold arm-gun ammunition went out of business. Seriously, who stocks all the ammo that Barrett fires?



This is too silly to take seriously. This is all too silly. The deadpan expressions of Cloud and Barrett's sprites, coupled with the gentle upside-down falling of Dyne's body. It reads like a parody of RPG dialogue, like Willy Wonka's "No. Stop. Don't".



Presumably at some point we get our hands on Dyne's jewelry, which we take back to the elevator. This brings us to the end of our journey in the desert, and leaves us free to move onto bigger and better things.

Next Time: Entering a car does not, at any point, require standing on top of it


Also, I mentioned that there was something wonky that made Dyne's murder of the security guards even more goofy than before? There is a small geographical problem with the Gold Saucer and the Corel Prison.

From the world map,



Considering that these two places are supposed to be right on top of each other, this means that Dyne was not only free to leave the Corel Prison and get into the Gold Saucer, but apparently free to leave the region entirely, and go essentially anywhere else on the continent. It doesn't bear too much thinking about, but I just found it funny that when I left the Corel Prison I had to travel such a ways to get back to the Gold Saucer.

Of course, at this point, I'm up to Elentor with respect to point in the plot. I regret to say that after a certain point, there is going to be a long hiatus, owing to the fact that there are some very large gaps in FF7F. Rest assured, we'll get through the whole thing together.