Part 6: Mods and the Shinra Mafia
Chapter 6 - Mods and the Shinra Mafia
We run to the back of the Church where, just like the rest of the slums, everything is destroyed.
Only one thing comes to my mind. I recommend you play that during the next few images.
Wait what
Wait come back here, what do they mean by "Ancient"?
Anyway, this starts the second lamest Puzzle in the game. The incompetent henchman go after Aeris...
And we have to toss barrels over them. Keep in mind the barrets all roll over random things so you simply go and pick up the barrel farthest away from where you want to hit.
Ashton would be proud of us.
Ocasionally you'll find a random battle between the barrels. Why are monsters inside a church and why Aeris attends a monster-infested church we will never know.
Regardless the enemies are these fat creeps called Hedgehog Pies, they're pretty much irrelevant so we'll not talk about them
Actually this might be the most I've said about a random battle yet so screw me.
Weeee.
See, they're weak to Ice.
Why am I still talking about them? Why did I even take so many screenshots of them?
Anyway we throw down the 4 barrels on the 4 guards and leave Reno to think about his next excuse about how he failed to capture a flower seller who spends her day in the church not hiding.
Man, look at that Power Bill.
We finally get to take a look at our newest member.
Aeris has the highest Magic growth in the game, but she's still some levels behind, plus Cloud has three Green Materia equipped on him.
We equip a Titan Bangle in her, wee.
We put Ice-All in Cloud, as we need to put some green stuff in Aeris to get her Magic attribute up.
Like this.
We're almost 1/10th of the way to get the second-tier spells. What this means is that we're not gonna get them anytime soon.
It's well possible to get them before leaving Midgar but this is so not gonna happen to us here.
Aeris starts in the back row. I take her off of it for a simple reason:
Aeris' Limits
Healing Wind is Aeris' first limit. As its name implies, it heals. Everyone in your party.
Healing Wind is an odd duck. First, it takes 2/3 of Aeris' health to activate, which is considerably higher than the limits of any other characters we have available at the moment (Tifa is closer to 1/3) but not that big of a deal since her health pool is low.
However, Healing Wind heals 50% of the maximum HP of everyone. So you can see how good that is. The problem is that there's an item called 'Hyper' that inflicts Fury status. While under Fury, limit bars fill twice as fast.
That means the limit will cost 1/3 of Aeris' health but heal 1/2. This makes any party with her pretty much immortal if you're paying attention.
New players usually don't realize this because you eventually get the later limits with her, and until her two final limits none of them really heal.
Her later Limits are even more ridiculous though, once you get to them. Don't worry, we will. But not now.
Yeah yeah now I'd like you to explain this whole "Ancient" thing, lady. You don't look like a MILF to me.
Wow Cloud your grasp of the Engrish language is impressive.
I love that scene. It's completely SD. The game is never really paying a huge amount of attention to proportion but this scene looks like it came out of a Warcraft game.
The good ones.
Also, it's written CHARCH in the Church.
Stop being xenophobic Clooud.
This is the "Hmmmm" we make when we already know what the other person just said but it's too early to show off how much we know so we just pretend to be dumb/don't bother.
Actually, I once considered that a LP of WoW would be possible.
It'd need mods to make the shitty textboxes more readable, but classic WoW had actually a plot that could be worked into an LP/Single-Player.
I'm talking about the Defias/Onyxia plot, of course. If you start as a human in WoW there's actually a plot that follows from the very beginning to the very end.
Of course all of this is impossible now that Cataclysm is out.
If I were Cloud I'd be damn curious about this whole Ancient thing.
That in the background is the central plate, where the train runs through.
Seriously, what is there not to love about Cloud?
They just start laughing after that. See, this is the charm of Text instead of VA. If this was made today, we'd be forced to listen to this.
How to flirt with guys in Midgar:
Option 1: "Hey wanna take a a train ride with me? We can stare at monitors... all night long."
Option 2: "So I heard you have two big balls... attached to your big, thick sword. Can I see them?"
Option 3: "Were you in SOLDIER or do you just work out?"
Yeeeeah ok
Signs you should run away while you can:
1) Looks like in the 20s and is being called an Ancient by the Mafia.
2) Is actually being pursued by the Mafia and they try to shoot you down for hanging with her.
3) Knows military secrets.
Counter-Point: Cloud is a terrorist.
Yeah, not suspicious at all Aeris.
That's it for today, I got stuff to code and 3D to model and my work will not finish itself. Next update should be coming sooner than later though.
Chapter 6 - Bugs & Bytes
A Brief History on Modding
The Qhimm Forums is where modding happens. It's where it started and most likely where it'll end. These forums are old and have been going for over a decade now.
I'm gonna tell you a secret: I was one of the first people to actually mod FF7, and I think I was actually the very first to do a gameplay mod of FF7.
Back then it was a pretty horrifying experience. There were tools to edit Music and Character attributes and even field script already, but nothing to edit materia, spells, enemies, stuff like that.
By then a dude named TFergusson who had completely raped FF7 from top to bottom released some documents explaining, well, almost everything. We had the structure of the enemy files though, but no tools, so I loaded a hexadecimal editor and started toying around with them.
I did a Hard-Mode version of FF7 up to Junon. One of the programmers on the Qhimm forums, M4v3R, saw potential for a future in the FF7 modding scene and designed a tool to allow easier editing of the enemy attributes. A bug in the tool however resetted all the drops and steals in my enemies to Potions
Afterwards things were slow for a few months, but then a bunch of tools were finally complete and things exploded. Today you have hundreds of Mods that are awesome. FF7's engine has been pretty much built upon and enhanced to make some wonders possible.
Something I'd like to mention is that each scene in the game has a LOT of script variations that are not used. Most are pretty minor like Barret saying "yeah" in one, and "sure" in another instead. The whole thing is crazy and there's a lot of leftovers.
Mods as we know started around 05-06, although the "scene" has existed since 00-01 and older than that in Japan. Most mods are made for PC because it's just easier to edit the PC files, while in a PSX it's a bit more complicated. Still, there are mods that work for both.
Hot Stuff
gjoerulv's Hardcore Mod:
This is the current hot Hard-Mode mod. It's a huge revamp including new bosses and complete awesome shit.
Felix's Battle-Scene/World-Map Enhancement
I'l let the images speak for themselves here:
Seriously what can I say? Dude is awesome.
FF7 2D Remake
Although not technically a mod, I feel like this deserves some credit:
There are TOO many cool Mods to mention but much like Sonic 2 HD, most will never be completed because the devs may not have the time to. However, I'd like to point that there's already a shitload of mods done or in a near-done status.
So what are the mods YOU like or want to talk about? Give us a link, a pic if appliable. I may do a special edition video in the near future with some mods, just for the fun of it.
Awesome music we've been listening to:
The Turks' Theme - There's nothing not to like about it and it only makes Reno cooler.
Boss Fight - This was the music played in the Air Buster. It's different from the one played in the first boss, which is just the bombing mission theme. In my opinion this is one of the best boss fight themes there is.
