Part 34: Of Side and Games
Chapter 34 - Of Side and GamesThe moment you get the buggy, the game opens up a lot of stuff for you to do.
First thing we're doing is getting back to Gold Saucer.
Let's visit Dio's Show Room...
Dio's Show Room is home of some really bizarre and completely insane crap. I mean, just look at that painting of him.
Hella creepy mask.
Basically, Dio is a very weird guy.
There's a joke to be made here, but it will also make me lose my dignity.
This is the Battle Arena.
The Battle Arena is an endurance series of fights against otherwise normal encounters. There are two gimmicks, however:
1 - The monsters are stronger than usual.
2 - Every time you win you can either quit (and leave with the points you got) or keep going. If you keep going, you run a slots machine (similar to Tifa's limit) to get a random handicap.
These handicaps can be quite brutal. For example, they can range from something like "No Summon Materia" to "No Materia". Or remove your equipped weapon. Or disable the Item command.
Winning awards you Battle Points (BPs). BPs are different from GPs or Gils, in which they can only be used while you're still in the Battle Square (they reset when you leave) and they award you some unique (and costy) items. The list of items you can buy with BPs change twice in the game.
The amount of points you get depend on how many battles you fought, and which handcaps you got. You only really get a decent amount of points if you go all the way to the last fight and get the best (or worst, depending on your PoV) handicap.
What we're looking for here is the [Champion Belt].
The [Champion Belt] is one of the best items we can get right now. It increases our Attack by 30!
The [Champion Belt] costs 40960 BPs. This is around 5 complete victories in the Battle Arena. Quite frankly, at this point in the game the fights there are not hard at all (it gets MUCH worse later on), so it's a worthy investment, as the usefulness of the [Champion Belt] obviously goes down as the game goes by.
You might be asking why we need it. We don't. But this gets us close to the point where normal physical attacks deal more damage than spells, and best of all - it allows us to start doing some crazy insane shit.
In the beaches around Costa Del Sol you can find Beach Plugs. Normally, they'd be an incredibly unremarkable enemy. However, once you acquire Cait Sith you can [Manipulate] them to get yourself a new Enemy Skill.
[Big Guard] is the ultimate support spell in this game - it casts simultaneously Barrier, Magic Barrier AND Haste on EVERYONE in the party! Barrier and Magic Barrier reduce the physical and magical damage you taken by half, respectively.
The Harpies in the desert around Gold Saucer cast [Aqualung]. Aqualung is one of the very few Water-Elemental spells you can cast. Otherwise, it is a poor man's Beta - it costs 1 less MP but deals less proportional damage.
You can stowaway your way back to Junon with the Buggy, which right now is what we're going to do.
It's good to have all the time in the world to hunt Sephiroth.
The first thing to notice in Junon is that you can grab a Helicopter Taxi that can take you outside. It's not a huge time-saver given the city's size, but it's definitely welcome.
Aand we leave the city in the buggy. Wonderful!
Manipulating those huge fat birds around Junon allow us to cast [White Wind] upon ourselves.
White Wind is the ultimate healing spell we can find right now. It costs as much as Aqualung (34 MP) and heals every status ailment we can find on everyone in our party. But it's greatest strength is how the heal works - it heals for exactly as much HP as the caster has at the time of the casting. This makes equipping one Enemy Skill Materia in a character like Cait Sith, Barret or Red XIII extremely effective.
North of the forest we found Yuffie there's a river patch that we can now cross with the buggy.
In which we find a mysterious cave...
The very odd sleeping man in it will tell us how many times we've escaped and how many times we've fought.
Of course there's an use in that. If we talk to him when the amount of battles we've fought ends in two equal numbers (11,22, etc) then he gives us a reward. If the numbers are even and different than 0...
We get the [Bolt Ring]. It's the same as the [Fire Ring], only different element - it nullifies lightning attacks.
It also has a really cool official artwork:
Otherwise, if the numbers are odd, we get this:
It's a Key Item, and we don't know what for yet.
STOP GIVING ME CRAP, FORT CONDOR! THE PEOPLE DEMAND WEAPONS!
Back to Junon, there are two things that opened up in the city...
The first is the backdoor in the tunnel that passes under the cannon.
Going in leads us to an elevator that takes us underwater.
In the underwater passage there's a door being guard by a man and a dog. This door is interesting in the sense that there's no way in heaven to get through it. It's a mystery ~never revealed~.
Perhaps the most important and game-breaking secret that becomes available when you get the buggy is this red alarm.
Triggering this red alarm sets off an event where random enemies become available in this tunnel. Why is this important? Simple - these enemies aren't supposed to be available until later on in the second CD.
Your level should be ranging from 40 to 50 when you first come here. There are two enemies - Slaloms (these Smoggers we're fighting) and Death Machines.
Because their level is so much higher, it's possible to grind EXP like a motherfucker here. Here's me some levels higher than I am right now in the game, and still getting insane experience.
Death Machines are harder and can come in groups of two. Two Death Machines CAN screw you up and result in a Game Over, but there's a Save in a nearby shop. These fights take a lot of MP too since Death Machines can last up to three Betas.
Ultimately it doesn't matter since you can soon outlevel them. It's possible to grind to level 40-50 here in no time, plus the money you get is great. Nevertheless we don't do that, I rolled back to before visiting here.
Dio said that Sephiroth went to a city called Gongaga to the south, but ultimately Gongaga is also optional. It's perfectly possible to just skip it to the next town.
To the northeast of Gongaga there's a relatively secret house that isn't shown on the minimap.
Unfortunately there's really nothing to see there right now. With that we're set, this is all that we can see at this point.
Another town looking in great shape!
What
Wait what
WHAT
This can't be right
What is the name for reverse stockholm syndrome?
CREEPY?
Whaaaaat
Imagine that Unreal guy voice going M-M-M-MONSTER CREEPY.
Cloud's arms here convey an emotion that no HD Graphics could ever convey.
It's the "WHAT THE HELL" feeling.
For those of you who were wondering why the Turks are comic relief in the EU, it's not like there isn't precedent, you know. They ARE comic relief in FF7.
You know a game is dark when the comic relief is a guy whose job is kidnapping and mass-murdering.
I mean, can you imagine how confused Cloud must be feeling right now?
You just happen to stumble upon the horrible horrible agents who are trying to kidnap and/or kill you.
And they are talking about how they "like" the girls in your group.
Boss fight!
Reno and Rude are a unique fight. For starters, we just learned that Rude likes Tifa, and the AI reflects that - if you have her in your group, he will not attack Tifa unless she's the only member left, and even then he will sometimes skip his turn.
I decided to take this opportunity to showcase our Summons as well as Cait Sith's limit in the end. An interesting tidbit about this fight is that Rude and Reno each drop different items (as well as EXP and Gil) and if you kill one of them, the other will run away in the next turn, not dropping anything.
Rude can be stopped from the Choco/Mog (or any other Stop/Paralysis effects) to give you time to finish him off before he escapes.
And, of course, for those of you who just want to see things exploding:
Reno and Rude are the third (out of five) boss fights in the game that can be ambushed. Remember, the other two are Aps (in Midgar sewers) and Jenova-BIRTH (in the boat).
Although doing some back-attack crits would be fun, I take this opportunity to show off how overpowered [Right Arms] are, as I told you before. Their Beta-like damage isn't level-dependent, and they hit everyone, and chances are that they are doing more damage than your limits at this point.
Anyway, moving on.
[Fairly Tale] drops from Reno and is a weapon for Aeris. It's a fairly exotic weapon - it has 7 Materia Slots, but no links.
Oh, gee, I WONDER WHO THAT IS.
WHO COULD IT BE?
HE'S SAYING THAT NEXT TO A REMOTE-CONTROLLED ROBOT WHO FORCED HIMSELF INTO OUR PARTY ARGHH CLOUD.
NEXT TIME:
Love Triangles! More useless Summon materia! The place with the coolest music in the game!
A Message from your host:
This may sound unusual, but I'd like to thank you guys for keeping this a relatively clean, stupidity-free thread. When I sandboxed the thread people told me I'd be in for a world of hurt and sure, while there's been silly discussions and a crapload of probations in the first pages I believe the thread ended up extremely well. Much better than I thought a FF7 thread could end up.
So again, thank you for keeping the thread clean. We're about 1/3 of the game here, so I think there's still a lot of ground to cover, but I like to believe that for the past months this has been one of the cleanest, most bullshit-free Final Fantasy thread I've seen. I'm specially surprised how none of the big spoilers have been spoiled yet and two people I know who read the thread picked up the game and beat it spoiler-free.
With that said, have another horrible image to conclude the update.
