As a quick question: There's a couple optional things in VII that can be relatively obscure / easy to miss, but do provide additional [albeit not plot relevant / mandatory] lore. If you miss them in an update would you prefer having them pointed out then, near the end of- / post-VII playthrough near the retrospective, or just go with a raw "What I find I find, if it comes up after completing it and I'm interested I'll just look for it on Youtube"?
By default I'm not planning on any spinoffs for the Let's Play itself. I might play them on my own time, though. Maybe write a one-time review and put it up on Patreon when I'm done.
What, no Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon or FF Themed Monster Hunter Knockoff or FFXV: The Chibi Recap For Cell Phones or any of the literal half dozen predatory gacha games? How surprising.
What, no Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon or FF Themed Monster Hunter Knockoff or FFXV: The Chibi Recap For Cell Phones or any of the literal half dozen predatory gacha games? How surprising.
Nah, that's thinking too small. Cloud, Yuffie, Sephiroth and Aerith all show up in Kingdom Hearts - ergo, Omi needs to play alllllll the Kingdom Hearts games for this thread, and give us a full plot and themes breakdown of the series as a whole.
Welcome back to Final Fantasy VII, the game where I am free, free at last, thank God Almighty I am free at last.
Well, in a little while, anyway.
Having purged my frustration about minigames last time, and resigned myself to the money-less life in the here and now, I can now more serenely explore New Junon.
It's a shame that frustration hangs over the whole experience, and it's a shame that Junon is an infiltration mission that we're going to quickly leave, because the devs splurged here. In terms of unique environments, NPC dialogues, Junon is going the extra mile in a way we haven't seen since Midgar. Which all combines to make me think that the devs thought they had something there - that the minigames were meant to compliment a big high-production value moment as part of the appeal, of the flurry of quirky new ways to engage with the game, as opposed to a stain on the whole experience.
For instance, while Rude is off drinking with random citizens, we can find the rest of the Turks in this bar:
Tseng, Reno and Elena are there together, complimenting themselves on how they keep the President safe while we're sneaking under their very noses, which is genuinely kind of incredible.
Hey, protip to all prospective evil overlords out there: all of this is only possible because Shinra insist on faceless mook uniforms. If the basic Shinra trooper didn't have that goggled helmet that only shows the mouth, none of this would work, because someone would have recognized Cloud by now. I know the faceless mook aesthetic is cool and appropriately dehumanizing and all, but like, we humans evolved facial recognition for a reason, y'know?
There's also just, like, random apartments we can enter and explore:
This thing is labeled "1/35 Soldier," and appears to be a collectible replica of a Shinra officer. I assume this will related to some kind of sidequest down the line. This apartment is also full of 'Source' Items - Mind Source, Luck Source, Guard Source. These are items which permanently enhance the stats of a given character. I… haven't been using them, since I don't have a clear idea who I mean to be my 'endgame' party, if such a thing applies to this game, so they're just piling up in my inventory.
This guy is a Shinra trooper who is skipping the parade to study for his SOLDIER exam; interestingly that suggests that there is a pathway from 'standard troops' to 'SOLDIER'.
…
You know it's weird that Cloud made SOLDIER at 16, right? Like, there have been a lot of subtle implications here and there that SOLDIER candidates are one of two things - non-Shinra individuals with particular potential who've been scouted (and potentially abducted?) by the Turks, and standard Shinra troopers who've trained/graduated to take part in the SOLDIER program. But Cloud can't really be either of those things. First, he's the one who went to Midgar and sought out Shinra, he wasn't scouted by the Turks or identified as having a particular potential. Second, he was sixteen when we saw his flashback with Sephiroth, and while there have been many times in history when armies did recruit 16-years old, this isn't really a feature we associate with modern volunteer armies, so it would be really weird if Cloud had become, like, standard soldier at 14 or 15 and then got all the way to the SOLDIER program through a graduation procedure.
It doesn't quite add up. We'll see if anything comes out of it.
Well, I'm sure this won't have any relevance to our adventures later in the game.
This store above is staffed by several women who act cutesy, call Cloud 'cutie' and say flirtatious stuff to him; the guy behind the counter explains that this is the only way he can compete with the other stores in Junon, but that he's bothered because the girls actually make more than him.
I mean. My guy. I get 'trying to entice clients' but are you paying wages to three employees whose sole purpose is, like, advertising? Your profit margins have got to be abysmal. Although the way he's saying it sort of implies that the girls are getting money from the clients, which suggests either there is sex work involved or they just get money from the clients they're flirting with (which is kind of sex work, I guess?) in which case he is literally employing three women to stand around and redirect money to themselves instead of to his shop.
Basically he's the world's least effective pimp, is what I'm saying.
"But to tell you the truth, I'd rather be at the shop downstairs." [He means the one with the pretty girls.]
…okay, this line of dialogue is fascinating.
I was about to say it's the first time we met an 'ex-SOLDIER,' which is kind of funny given that it's literally Cloud's entire concept, but what I mean is that, this is the first time we meet an old person who retired from SOLDIER. Someone who just grew old and ended their military service in the super-soldier unit in the normal way.
Like, if you'd asked me, before this one NPC, I would have assumed that the SOLDIER program is only as old as… Sephiroth himself, I want to say? 20, 30 years old? Recent enough that the oldest SOLDIER you'd ever meet would be in his 40s and still on active duty, basically. But clearly I was wrong! It's part of a general trend where Shina keeps being older than I assume - for some reason my brain refuses to accept that they're older than, say, one generation, and I keep running into stuff that suggests the company is like over a century old or something. Which makes sense, considering Midgar's size, that thing didn't build itself in a day, but…
It's also surprising because in the Remake, President Shinra, upon seeing Cloud, has a line about how most SOLDIER die not in combat, but from "accelerated cellular degradation" - an open secret within Shinra that every SOLDIER knows on some level, suggesting that SOLDIERs don't make it to retirement age, one way or another. This guy stands as evidence that such is not true of the original game, and that Shinra is fine with her elite Mako-mutated warriors retiring to open a shop, which is… Intriguing. How many people are wandering around with Mako superpowers? It can't be that many.
Or this dude's lying to make himself look cooler. Either/or.
Also, there's another Shinra soldier hanging out in an apartment building; upon talking to him, he leads us down a ladder, which leads to a very peculiar room.
This is the "Beginner's Hall (Intermediate)." Continuing the joke from the original Beginner's Hall as well as the trend of Shinra soldiers thinking Cloud is the coolest motherfucker alive even when he's in disguise, it presents additional tutorials about Materia and Limit Breaks. But, that's not all. As a matter of functionality, it also contains all the previous tutorial dialogue in case we need a refresher. And in what form is all that dialogue retained? Well…
That's the gym bro guys from Sector 7.
You know.
The guys who died in the Sector collapse along with everyone else.
And stuck around as ghosts because our tutorial explanations were too complicated.
This is simultaneously an incredibly funny silly gag and also such dark humour. Wait, shit, does that mean the little girl who was learning how to Limit Break died as well? Great, now I'm sad. Anyway, I'm going to consider this room to be 'non-canon' because if our first-ever sight of a ghost is Tutorial Guy who stayed behind to Tutorial Harder I'm just. I don't want to integrated that into my analysis of the setting. This is a bridge too far.
Anyway there's more stuff. A Shinra manager complaining Shinra promised him five-star hotels and he's staying in a shitty hole in the wall, more stores (I end up selling just enough stuff to grab the Revive Materia), more Shinra soldiers slacking on duty…
There's just a lot of humanity in Junon. A lot of people, a lot of places to visit just for the sake of visiting them. And its architectural style is interestingly different from anything we've seen before - not a ramshackle slum like the Sectors, not traditional architecture with tech bolted in like Kalm and Nibelheim, but its own modern-industrial architecture style.
And now, it's time to follow after Rufus (for some reason I keep typing his name as Julius and having to correct myself, no idea why).
And there it is. Our last minigame. I am ready to throw my keyboard at the wall in frustration. Let's do this. Our goal: perform a choreographed routine as a send-off to Rufus.
It's…
…fine?
The whole thing is just a rhythm game. The officer gives a command prompt, and you answer that command prompt. The fact that the game insists on referring to command prompts by meaning rather than key (ie it says [MENU] or [SWITCH] instead of "Tab" or "Del" which are the actual keys for these commands) makes the whole process onerous and my timing awful, but the timing windows are incredibly generous, and by the end:
I've hit 110 points on the "President's Mood Gauge," which is enough to get the best reward: Force Stealer, a sword which is better than Cloud's previous weapons and appear to have the hidden functionality of providing double AP growth.
Of course 'best' is relative. It's what the game considers 'best', but if we'd merely had 'medium' success, our reward would have been the first HP+ Materia in the game, which as its name says, increases maximum HP. I might have preferred that instead of a weapon that will eventually become obsolete. Ah, well. FF7 minigames: even when you win, you lose.
Heidegger you are literally staring at a wanted terrorist.
I love dramatic irony.
Rufus orders Heidegger to find and crush the protagonists, Heidegger agrees with booming laughter, Rufus tells him he already told him to knock it off, Heidegger punches a soldier in frustration, it looks like these two have fully settled into a particular comedy routine. In the followup, the soldiers talk about how Heidegger has been on edge lately after Hojo disappeared, leaving only a letter of resignation.
Okay. That cannot be good. The only safe thing for Hojo to be doing at any given time is 'nothing.' Whatever he's up to, it's going to bite us in the ass later. Unfortunately, there's nothing we can do about it. The soldiers are dismissed, the officer orders us to do clean-up duty, but of course, this is where our paths split - we are not going back to the base, we are going into that thing:
Which is a ship! As in an actual ship that goes into the water, not an airship. We enter this cargo bay, and off the ship goes.
"...even if we are wearing Shinra's uniforms…"
Huh. "The new continent." Is this meant to suggest that humanity in this world only discovered/reached the continent we're heading to recently, despite their modern technology and society? Or that Shinra specifically did (to the misfortune of whoever lived there before)?
That's very intriguing if true, although for the time being I'm going to assume that it's just weirdly worded and Cloud means a new continent (for us), ie a part of the world he's never been to.
We are now inside the ship.
And not just us! The whole crew's on board!
Yuffie, seen here in a sailor's uniform, is sea-sick.
Now, I know what you're thinking: How?
Cloud went up that tower alone. The entire infiltration was Cloud's solo work. He put on a Shinra uniform, he snuck through multiple layers of security, until he got to the heart of Junon Harbour and boarded Rufus Shinra's personal ship, which immediately departed. At which point did he find any way to sneak the other party members onto the ship?
There's no answer. This doesn't make sense, and cannot have happened. It is a pure plot contrivance. You simply have to ignore it and roll with it.
Anyway, the setup is fun - the party is all in disguise doing various things around the ship, and we have to find them all. Yuffie is being sick; she asks us for a Tranquilizer to help with the nausea, which we have and can give her. Aerith is also nearby and in a sailor uniform, musing about how she knew the airship back in Junon was big, but not that big - then asks Cloud if he thinks she'll ever get to ride it.
Well, I'm pretty sure this isn't going to be the first game in the series to skip the airship, so yeah, Aerith, I'm sure you will. Actually, we haven't met a Cid yet, have we?
Those NPCs who aren't Avalanche infiltrators all share the same concern - having Rufus Shina on board means both greater opportunity (they'll be rewarded if they do well) and more stress (everyone has to work double time). Taking advantage of it, there's one sailor who is selling energy drinks/stimulants under the mantle (for 250 gil, it refills HP/MP in full; it's not any use because there haven't been combat encounters since the last time we rested).
The upper deck of the ship is where we can find the rest of our team members; Tifa is, hm, having a perfectly normal day.
Tifa: "Uniforms, soldiers, war, I hate 'em all. They take away all the things and people you love… I wish they'd all disappear. Right, Cloud?"
You know, there's nothing unusual about wishing for an end to war or for there to be no armies, but it's not usually voiced from such a bitter, angry place. As has been noted repeatedly before, Original Flavor Aerith and Tifa have kind of the opposite of the traits they've come to have in later spinoffs, with Aerith being the savvy, sassy one and Tifa being the sweet, soft one, but there is an underlying core of genuine anger to Tifa which shines through in scenes like this or Nibelheim. Also the fact that she follows this up with "Uh, yes sir, I'll continue my watch sir! Hee hee…" feels vaguely disturbing somehow.
Meanwhile, over near the bridge, there's a soldier that's looking really weird. Like, he's standing very stiffly, but also not standing in place, but kind of hopping from side to side like he's got something itching in his pants…
OH MY GOD
They put the catdog in a Shinra soldier uniform and told him 'do your best human impression' so he's just… Standing on his hind legs wobbling back and forth because his body was not meant for that kind of balance? That's hilarious but also, what the fuck, guy.
We know the Shinra troops have coeurl as guard dogs! You could have found literally anything else other than that! Poor Red.
That guard you can see at the bottom left of the pictures above is blocking the way to the head of the ship (and also telling us where we're headed; a place called Costa del Sol, which seems as sunny and vacation-spot-like as its name seems to imply). There's not really anywhere else to go, so I go back down belowdecks. Talking to Aerith again prompts her to ask us if we've seen Barret, and to say she's worried he might do something reckless. When we go back up again, the guard blocking the way is gone, and we can find Barret.
…
…okay, no, a stereotypical sailor's uniform on a guy as massive as Barret is inherently comical. Fuck, he's even got the little hat. This is peak. We need this as a permanent outfit we can swap Barret into.
Barret: "Look, Cloud. It's Rufus and Heidegger. They're this close but we can't do a thing to 'em…"
…you know, how is Barret even disguising himself? You know, on account of the arm-mounted machine gun? Does he just swap it for a pirate hook and people just roll with it because that's just how navy people are? That's it, isn't it.
Anyway, I guess Barret could try shooting through the window to get at Rufus, but then we'd be cornered by Shinra troops in the middle of the sea with nowhere to go, so best to play it safe from now. We leave him be and…
…
…I have no idea what to do next.
I genuinely cannot figure out the next step of the plot.
I keep running around, looking for new things to do, talking to everyone, but nothing is happening, everyone is stuck on the same dialogue. Even looking up a guide online is completely unhelpful; they all seem to assume that after talking to Barret, the plot will move on to its next step, but it's… not.
Eventually I figure it out. We have to talk to Barret twice. But not, like, 'twice total'; twice in a row, without changing screens. So while I am running frantically around the ship talking to everyone a dozen times, I move on after talking to Barret every time, the dialogue resets, and I end up wasting a good fifteen minutes of my life on this.
But eventually I figure it out and we move on.
Hmm. Barret is ranting about "How can he be laughing like that" and talking about Biggs, Wedge and Jessie - so the one he's so angry at right now isn't Rufus, who wasn't even in Midgar when that happened; it has to be Heidegger. It's actually interesting - Rufus can't have been responsible for the Sector 7 collapse (though I'm sure he would have given the order without blinking if he'd been the one in charge then), and President Shinra was killed by Sephiroth. Which makes Heidegger the last person Barret might hope to take personal revenge on for the deaths of Avalanche.
…you know, Barret kind of has the same thing going on as Cyan, where he is simultaneously the designated comic relief among party members while also being the one with the most visible on-screen tragedy and the game is sometimes awkward in its handling of these two contrasting aspects; but even so he's massively above Cyan in terms of how well-handled the interplay of the two is. Barret as a character is sometimes undermined by the comedy aspects of how his angry temper is used to make fun of him, but that anger is also something that sells the continued impact of his grief - he doesn't transmogrify into a Funny Grandpa from moment to moment.
Barret is just about to snap and 'settle things here and now' when, before he can do anything, a security alert is broadcast across the ship; a 'stowaway' has been found and everyone who's not currently on detail needs to search the ship. Barret is immediately worried that Tifa and the others were found and tells Cloud to hurry up and check on the other, and the group meets up in the center of the ship.
Also, at this point Trails of Blood starts playing instead of the previous background music. You know. The music we first heard in the Shinra Building after Jenova's escape.
Once Barret realizes that everyone is accounted for and there are no Shinra soldiers gunning for them, in fact there are almost no Shinra soldiers left on the deck (aside from the guy who sells potions and energy drinks), and asks: Could the stowaway be… Sephiroth?
Cloud: "Let's find out." Red XIII: "It's the most logical thing to do. Then, who's going to go?" Yuffie: "N, not me… I don't even like Sephiroth anyway… And besid…ugh…uk…"
…yeah, I think the game is deliberately going for a "Spock" vibe with Red XIII, where he's very formal in speech and talks about logic and doesn't put his emotions forward, which is interesting for the game's "animal-looking" party member. Probably in the same way as Spock there's actually strong feelings underneath that we'll get at eventually.
Yuffie saying "I don't even like Sephiroth" is funny because, like, nobody in the group does, girl, that's kind of the point - but I think this is referring to the fact that Yuffie is the tagalong kid here; even Red at least has the thin connection of 'having been a captive of Hojo and Shinra and escaped during the Jenova breakout' to tenuously connect him to Sephiroth, whereas Yuffie is literally just There. We actually have to assume a fair degree of off-screen group discussions for her to even know what a Sephiroth is. And also, she's sea-sick. Literally the worst possible person to bring to a potential confrontation with Sephiroth.
So I almost do it for the funny points, but ultimately no (and I checked, she doesn't have unique dialogue for the coming scene). Let's go with something more sensible.
Red XIII and Cloud can both equip double AP equipment that's stronger than any weapon the other characters have, and Tifa is my favorite, so let's go with that.
Once we head downstairs in the cargo bay, we are met with a familiar spectacle.
"No… there's no way… that… not a human… That thing's not human."
Dead and dying soldiers and seamen, just like in the Shinra Building.
(Also since Yuffie is no longer blocking the path to that Materia stranded between the crates we can collect another All Materia, which is cool.)
They're not all dead, though. The ship is on a heightened security status, and as a result, we can no longer go about as we please - soldiers attack us on sight, meaning random encounters are now active.
…okay, the Force Stealer is… Wrong. No. That over-the-top fantasy design, the purple blade, the overwrought hilt, the blade with weird protrusions… No. The Mithril Sword was at least only boring; this is tacky.
God, but I long for the simplicity and purity of the Buster Sword. Such an elegant design.
Anyway, this is, at long last, our opportunity to test out our reward from an hour ago - the Shiva Summon!
…okay, they really went all out. Chocobo has traditionally be kind of a joke summon, a 'bare minimum functionality' summon at best, and VII has leaned into the comedy aspect of its presentation even as it splurged on making its summoning cutscene really characterful and funny, but Shiva is our first 'proper' summon, our first divinity, and they had her play the part. A white light shining from above amidst a flurry of snowflakes, Shiva slowly descending, gathering light and power in her hand and unleashing it in a wave of ice which freezes every enemy before shattering… This is cool as hell.
It's not perfect; the 3D model is fairly stiff in its movement, we're still early in the game's history of cutscenes, but it's a massive jump from "static sprite appears while an icy wind animation plays," and it's not played for comedy like Choco/Mog at all, it's really trying to wow the player, and succeeding.
Incidentally, while Shiva's etymology has always been kinda weird (Shiva is a male god and not related to ice, 'Shiva' is how you would pronounce 'Shiver' in Japanese, it's not clear which side was more important to Shiva's original naming) I… think there may have been an actual effort at making her features look kind of Desi, within the limitations of the engine?
Let's not beat around the bush, though, it's also the horniest Shiva design we've ever seen. Now, FFVI Shiva was naked except for a shawl tastefully wrapped around her Venus of Botticelli style, but she was a tiny sprite viewed from afar; this Shiva is in a bikini with the camera lovingly panning over her body. The Playstation's perception as a "teen" console really unleashed the devs' baser instincts, for better and for worse.
We enter the engine room, where a guard is suspiciously standing staring at the machinery. Unfortunately, the cutscene that follows isn't triggered by talking to the guard but by approaching him, which means it triggers before I use healing items and ethers to replenish my resources in preparation for a boss fight, which is going to be annoying.
The guard turns around… And collapses to the ground from some injury or another. So far, so horror movie.
Trails of Blood is still playing, by the way. It's really fascinating to me how whenever Sephiroth is directly involved in the plot, the game changes genres. Like, FFVII isn't a horror game! (Nor are its 'horror sections' particularly scary, but I attribute this mostly to the game's tech being 25 years old, its primary audience being young teens, and my standard horror fare these days being Alien: Isolation; I'm sure it's plenty scary to a 12-year old in 1997). But whenever Sephiroth arrives, it becomes one. The soundscape, the tone, the presentation, they all change.
It takes a real special villain to carry a genre-warping field around him like that. I respect it.
What happens next takes me somewhat by surprise. First, there is the spooky dialogue from an unseen voice.
Cloud: "No… Not Sephiroth!" Voice: "...After a long sleep… the time… time has… come…" Red XIII: "Over there, Cloud."
Cloud: "Don't you remember me!? I'm Cloud! Sephiroth: "Cloud…" Cloud: "Sephiroth! What are you thinking!? What are you doing!?" Sephiroth: "The time… is now…"
…ooookay.
This is the first appearance of Sephiroth in the present-day narrative. After only seeing him through a flashback to five years ago, this is our first glimpse of who Sephiroth has become.
And it only leaves us with more questions.
Our man here just levitated up through the floor. He rose through the ship, hovered in place for a second, and then landed down on the ground.
Levitation I can explain easily. Our dude probably has the Float Materia. Being able to hover dramatically a few feet above the ground is a crucial supervillain skill, and he wouldn't be caught dead without it.
But phasing through floors? Is Sephiroth a ghost? I mean, that would explain some things - the reports of his death were not so exaggerated after all, and he merely stuck around after death. It would be an interesting twist, considering that 'lingering as a spirit to impact the plot' has so far mostly been a Good Guy feature in FF history - we have plenty of undead foes across the series, but their shtick doesn't tend to be 'what if Galuf's ghost was evil.'
But that sword in President Shinra's back looked very much physical. And all the reports we've had of Sephiroth since then have hinted as a man who is extremely powerful, but still bound by the physical limitations of human existence. He goes places, he is seen by people, he engages guards in combat (whom he trivially kills, but he has to fight them), he can be tracked in his movements…
This here is a lot weirder and more disturbing.
As is the fact that he doesn't recognize Cloud. Could Sephiroth suffer from his own bout of trauma-induced memory holes? As he erased part of the memory of Nibelheim? Is he just not entirely there, his sanity having degraded with time, his "death," and Jenova's continued influence? Considering his creepy repeated word and lack of acknowledgement of people talking to him, I think he might have gone entirely off the deep end, or be possessed by Jenova in some way.
Then he flies away.
I couldn't capture the screenshot because it happened to fast, but Sephiroth literally just flies Superman-style through the party, knocking down everyone, and then up and towards the camera, then presumably through the ship and into the sky.
We're in the middle of the ocean.
Again: So far, Sephiroth has abided by the restrictions a super-powerful human being would have. Whatever he plans on doing on the new continent, he had to actually go through the trouble of hiking to Junon Harbour on his own two legs, killing guards when spotted, then going into hiding, avoiding constant searches by the local troops, and then finally sneaking onto the cargo ship as a stowaway.
This, right here, indicates a sudden and massive expansion in capabilities on Sephiroth's part. The only way he's making it to shore if he's capable of either trans-continental flight, or teleportation. And if these were capabilities he had all along, then he wouldn't have needed all the cloak and dagger stuff to get onto the ship.
But I get the feeling he didn't. I can't really explain why but I feel like being found out on the ship triggered something in Sephiroth somehow, probably because he's acting so loopy.
Anyway, we have other priorities. Because while flying away from the scene, Sephiroth dropped something… A tentacle? And combat immediately starts.
Well.
A lot going on today.
That thing is labeled "Jenova-BIRTH." Just in case it wasn't obvious that it was part of the body of Jenova that Sephiroth retrieved in Midgar and has presumably been carrying around this whole time somehow.
But… part of that body. Like, that thing wriggling on the floor? That's not a whole body. But then again, neither does that combat model look like the thing in the tank; you could sort of squint and see it as the Jenova torso without the head, but, well, there is a head, tiny and skull-like, sticking out of its chest, and it is notably free of boob-eyes, thank God. No, it's deformed, inhuman, very Resident Evil-like, and it's also enormous, far bigger than the thing in the tank was.
It's like Sephiroth dropped behind a Jenova tentacle, and that tentacle immediately mutated into an autonomous body with full combat capabilities.
Is that what Jenova is? A being that propagates by mitosis? By dividing its body and growing into full halves from it? Or, no - more like a starfish, a being who responds to mutilation by having the detached limb sprout and grow into its own, physically autonomous Jenova entity, as more of a defense mechanism than an intentional reproduction tactic.
That would certainly explain why the headless Jenova body in the containment tank was still biologically alive and capable of some degree of action. Jenova's individual body parts are each a thread, capable of taking on a life of their own.
This Jenova entity does not appear particularly smart, or even sentient. It has no dialogue lines, merely attacking us on sight with laser attacks.
The 'laser sweeps the ground and then everything explodes a fraction of a second later' aesthetic, my favorite.
Jenova-BIRTH is a moderate challenge, but mostly because I didn't take the time to heal up beforehand. It has powerful laser-based attacks which rapidly fill up my Limit gauge, so we have plenty of powerful moves of our own to respond with. Notably, with the Force Stealer, Cloud has finally reached the point where his standard attacks are competitive with Magic for damage; it took a while, but I'm glad we got there.
(Incidentally it's gonna be time for an upgrade on spells soon, I should check my Materia for how far they are from advancing).
Jenova-BIRTH has 4,000 HP, as much as the Midgar Zolom; its attacks aren't as powerful, though, so we're free to be more relaxed about things. A full turn to use Ethers and Hi-Potions on everyone, and most of the damage it dealt in its opening strikes as been negated, we're up to Limit Breaks, and we've got firepower to spare.
Shiva and Choco/Mog hit for a total of about 600 damage between the two of them, which is a fair chunk of Jenova's health. Individual spells and attacks by Cloud or Red (Tifa sadly hasn't had an upgrade in weapons yet) deal in the 150-200 range of damage, so that HP goes down fairly fast. Also I'm starting to get better at getting the slots on Tifa's Limit Break - the slots are timing-based and while I don't think I'll ever get a 100% hit rate, you can learn the timings and get them off fairly reliably.
Attagirl.
As for its own moves, Jenova-BIRTH's only real noteworthy attack is Stop, which inflicts the Stop status: a character's time stops, meaning their ATB gauge stops and they can't take action (with the slight upside that buffs also don't advance towards their end point). We can't cure Stop at this point, so when Jenova decides to use it on Red, the only thing we can do is accept that we're down one party member until the effect wears off on its own, and Tifa and Cloud manage well enough on their own. Other than that, its laser beams and toxic gas (which doesn't actually inflict Poison).
Once Jenova-BIRTH is down to within a single attack's worth of HP, I decide to crown the fight with a proper final move.
We nuke Jenova.
With 698 damage, Beta obliterates what's left of Jenova-BIRTH's health, and the fight is over.
An impressive boss and a very good horror-themed sequence, though not altogether too much of a mechanical challenge.
We return to the engine room, where Cloud kneels to examine the fleshy bit on the ground."
Cloud: "I've seen this somewhere... before."
The arm of Jenova. Huh.
Sephiroth carries Jenova's body. A piece of that body drops behind it, either deliberately to delay us or because its integrity is compromised. The arm manifests a fully autonomous combat form. We kill it, and it returns to a simple arm, no larger than any of the human protagonists.
The arm blinks out of existence, like all Final Fantasy monsters when they die, and Cloud muses about the confirmation he's just received of what was only a theory, however likely, before - Sephiroth truly is alive and active.
Also Red XIII prompts Cloud to summarize 'the story so far', which is a neat way of providing the player with a chance to review all the stuff that's happened so far, since by comparison to previous games it's been a lot. It's no new information, though, he's just reviewing what we've learned about Sephiroth, the Promised Land and Jenova.
Then a voice comes on the speakers, warning the dock workers that we will be docking in Costa del Sol in 5 minutes.
…okay, so I guess we were much closer to the other shore than I had anticipated. So Sephiroth wouldn't have needed to have transatlantic flight capability, 'merely' sustained flight over a few miles, like a bird. A lot more reasonable but, still, the image of Sephiroth just flying overland DBZ style is pretty funny. Doesn't explain the ghost stuff, though.
Oh, and that red materia on the ground behind us, where that officer died? That's the Ifrit Materia. I'm guessing he carried it with him when he died. Another branch of the Elemental Trio is complete.
And with this, the ship boards the docks in Costa del Sol.
The ship actually plays a full animation of reversing itself to enter the dock with the bow facing the sea, which I thought was pretty neat.
No words on how our heroes managed to stay hidden long enough for the ship to dock but, considering the slaughterhouse Sephiroth made of the lower decks, I can absolutely believe that it would have been easy to hide while everyone was panicking and/or dealing with the dead bodies. They only needed to stay hidden long enough for the docking procedure, anyway.
Also, look at that couple in the bottom left - they're sunbathing on a seaplane. I feel like I see these things in fiction a lot less often than I did as a kid, like they used to be really cool and popular but not so much anymore.
There's a fun exchange where Barret says he's glad to be out of his sailor uniform and both Aerith and Tifa say he looked cute in it and should keep it and use it as pajamas, which makes Barret flustered; Cloud is offered to chime in and, if choosing to agree with the girls, does so in typical backhanded fashion, describing Sailor Barret as a 'bear wearing a marshmallow.'
I love these guys. They're fun.
Red, who is panting heavily (indicated both in his dialogue and his model vibrating at high speed) complains that the heat is drying up his nose and Yuffie says "Yeah, mine too!" (is she secretly a catgirl??) and Cloud declares that everyone should feel free to take a break before heading off again. Barret complains about Cloud acting like the boss and heads off, Yuffie shouts "Don't bother looking for me!" and ninja-runs out of the screen, and Aerith considers going sunbathing to get a tan and asks Cloud if he likes "a fair complexion" or "a healthy tan" better.
This feels like a deadly trap question whichever way I answer it. The only viable answer is a smoke bomb and takeover behind the cutoff point for this update.
Man though, I love all these interactions between the group, the way every character is bouncing off every other character - Yuffie and Red are the most 'hangers-on' by far, to be sure, but even so the game finds them something to do, like Yuffie being sea-sick and having no interest in the Sephiroth business, or Red being a sourpuss because catdogs don't do well in the heat. But the 'core four' of Cloud/Tifa/Aerith/Barret have a consistently fun dynamic.
(It does make me really want to see the continuation of the Remake, because its Barret is just, like… Better. He's a fun character here, but he lacks the raw charisma of the Remake one, probably partly as a result of the translation taking the 'Mr T.' angle with him, although it's not all text; a lot of it is also just in his body language.)
And hey. First present-day confrontation with Sephiroth. Which… Really raised more questions than it answered.
Excited to see where this is going, although for the time being, we'll be taking a break by a seaside resort.
I mean. My guy. I get 'trying to entice clients' but are you paying wages to three employees whose sole purpose is, like, advertising? Your profit margins have got to be abysmal. Although the way he's saying it sort of implies that the girls are getting money from the clients, which suggests either there is sex work involved or they just get money from the clients they're flirting with (which is kind of sex work, I guess?) in which case he is literally employing three women to stand around and redirect money to themselves instead of to his shop.
This one's a translation issue, really. In the original and Reunion he says that their wages are costing more than he's actually making from the store overall. Still a kind of nonsensical joke, given he could just fire them... or maybe it's a joke about him falling for his own eye-candy scheme and thus losing his own business sense and keeping them on regardless?
Huh. "The new continent." Is this meant to suggest that humanity in this world only discovered/reached the continent we're heading to recently, despite their modern technology and society? Or that Shinra specifically did (to the misfortune of whoever lived there before)?
That's very intriguing if true, although for the time being I'm going to assume that it's just weirdly worded and Cloud means a new continent (for us), ie a part of the world he's never been to.
Once again, a translation issue. The Reunion changes the wording to a new continent. Which makes more sense since... well, there's a whole lot of established civilization over there.
Yuffie: "N, not me… I don't even like Sephiroth anyway… And besid…ugh…uk…"
…yeah, I think the game is deliberately going for a "Spock" vibe with Red XIII, where he's very formal in speech and talks about logic and doesn't put his emotions forward, which is interesting for the game's "animal-looking" party member. Probably in the same way as Spock there's actually strong feelings underneath that we'll get at eventually.
Yuffie saying "I don't even like Sephiroth" is funny because, like, nobody in the group does, girl, that's kind of the point - but I think this is referring to the fact that Yuffie is the tagalong kid here; even Red at least has the thin connection of 'having been a captive of Hojo and Shinra and escaped during the Jenova breakout' to tenuously connect him to Sephiroth, whereas Yuffie is literally just There. We actually have to assume a fair degree of off-screen group discussions for her to even know what a Sephiroth is. And also, she's sea-sick. Literally the worst possible person to bring to a potential confrontation with Sephiroth.
And another one... Reunion changes the wording to "I'm not even interested in Sephiroth", which to me reads as better matching the vibe of her as an uninterested tagalong teenager with severe "Chuuni" vibes.
What, no Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon or FF Themed Monster Hunter Knockoff or FFXV: The Chibi Recap For Cell Phones or any of the literal half dozen predatory gacha games? How surprising.
The old SOLDIER guy could also be a third option - he's from before the Mad Scientists (TM) started doing Wacky Bullshit to the Shinra elites and so was just, y'know, basically a SEAL without any of the magic glowing eyes stuff. Not sure if that's a thing that was ever true - I don't know how old SOLDIER is, for example - but it could be an interesting angle.
Also eldritch Jenova vibes are only increasing. Was that even Sephiroth, or did he get The Thing'd and so he's now a horrible flesh monstrosity that's turned itself inside out to present the 'innocuous' outer shell of Totally Just Sephiroth, Guys, No Need To Put Red-Hot Wires Into A Sample Of My Blood? The dude did just... shed a tentacle arm that morphed into a boss monster.
There actually is an explanation for how the party also snuck onto the ship…
Red XIII is hiding behind a crate in the scene where Cloud does a fancy salute for Rufus. He occasionally pokes his head out. You can talk to him after Rufus and Heidegger leave.
Red XIII
Hey, hurry. You're the last one.
Cloud
How did you get here?
Red XIII
A dolphin gave me a ride.
Priscilla remembered the dolphin after you climbed the pole. But, you mustn't be mad at her.
It's unfortunately not the clearest explanation because of 7's bad translation, but it is an explanation and I think it might be implying that the whole pole-climbing sequence was totally unnecessary, Cloud just suffered because he's Cloud.
They didn't have an explanation? I thought the way TFS handled it was kind weak in the parody and now I see why. They had literally nothing to work with! Also up to episode 14 without spoilers now if anyone is watching along.
I know offhand Chocobo's mysterious dungeon is real.
(in fact, there's quite a few... mysterious dungeon or whatever the series was properly called games, many of which are crossovers, this being where eg Pokemon Mystery Dungeon comes from ultimately)
They are. I can at least vouch for Chocobo Mystery Dungeon, the chibi recap of XV, and the half-dozen predatory gachas. It's kind of impressive how many they have, really.
It's unfortunately not the clearest explanation because of 7's bad translation, but it is an explanation and I think it might be implying that the whole pole-climbing sequence was totally unnecessary, Cloud just suffered because he's Cloud.
Reunion's more literal translation can't save you here. There's a slight wording difference in that it doesn't say Priscilla remembered the dolphin, and instead says she came up with the idea to have it sneak the party onto the dock, but the content is still the same.
Cloud went up that tower alone. The entire infiltration was Cloud's solo work. He put on a Shinra uniform, he snuck through multiple layers of security, until he got to the heart of Junon Harbour and boarded Rufus Shinra's personal ship, which immediately departed. At which point did he find any way to sneak the other party members onto the ship?
There's no answer. This doesn't make sense, and cannot have happened. It is a pure plot contrivance. You simply have to ignore it and roll with it.
We can see Red XIII poking his head up in the cargo bay during the sendoff minigame, so they (somehow) got to the ship before you. How? Who knows. IIRC the party does say "we'll follow after you" before you do the dolphin thing, but how they evaded security is a mystery. Best guess: the Junon Army was so busy with the parade there was only a minimal security detachment left behind so they snuck around it. Were it not for plot-convenient timing for Cloud to run into that one officer, he probably would have as well.
They put the catdog in a Shinra soldier uniform and told him 'do your best human impression' so he's just… Standing on his hind legs wobbling back and forth because his body was not meant for that kind of balance? That's hilarious but also, what the fuck, guy.
…okay, the Force Stealer is… Wrong. No. That over-the-top fantasy design, the purple blade, the overwrought hilt, the blade with weird protrusions… No. The Mithril Sword was at least only boring; this is tacky.
On the other hand, how uncommon is it really to have a child prodigy character, and do you really think Shinra would care over much about whether or not someone has reached the age of majority before doing something unethical?
I actually assumed the SOLDIER program had changed as time had gone on; performing more invasive treatments and modifications to further boost the SOLDIERs at the cost of lifespan. Again, wouldn't be out of character for Shinra.
I'm going to be making a note of this, because I have a sort of headcanon-y answer, but I feel it'll be more appropriate after the next update.
For people curious, here's a spoiler box:
I assume they just bribed the lift guards. If you turn around and go back to Junon after finishing the Costa Del Sol segment, the lift guard will let you back in for 10gil.
I don't blame the kid for not thinking of that, but I strongly suspect the old man just wanted to see if he could convince someone to do the dolphin jump and held off informing the group how laughably bribeable the guard was.
Okay. That cannot be good. The only safe thing for Hojo to be doing at any given time is 'nothing.' Whatever he's up to, it's going to bite us in the ass later.
Oh come on Omicron, you broke into his perfectly legal (because Shinra makes the rules) research lab, assaulted him, and his most valuable research specimen has gone missing. Is it really so unreasonable to believe he might want to re-examine his life, maybe start a new career?
I mean, the answer should be yes, it is unreasonable to believe that. But it could be true!
…you know, how is Barret even disguising himself? You know, on account of the arm-mounted machine gun? Does he just swap it for a pirate hook and people just roll with it because that's just how navy people are? That's it, isn't it.
I was going to make a joke about Barret infiltrates by rolling for intimidation, not stealth, but honestly if you'd bought the atomic scissor weapon for him he would pretty much have a pirate hook. So, well done there Omicron for stumping me with an explanation I can't actually refute.
I know the faceless mook aesthetic is cool and appropriately dehumanizing and all, but like, we humans evolved facial recognition for a reason, y'know?
Like, if you'd asked me, before this one NPC, I would have assumed that the SOLDIER program is only as old as… Sephiroth himself, I want to say? 20, 30 years old? Recent enough that the oldest SOLDIER you'd ever meet would be in his 40s and still on active duty, basically. But clearly I was wrong! It's part of a general trend where Shina keeps being older than I assume - for some reason my brain refuses to accept that they're older than, say, one generation, and I keep running into stuff that suggests the company is like over a century old or something. Which makes sense, considering Midgar's size, that thing didn't build itself in a day, but…
It's also surprising because in the Remake, President Shinra, upon seeing Cloud, has a line about how most SOLDIER die not in combat, but from "accelerated cellular degradation" - an open secret within Shinra that every SOLDIER knows on some level, suggesting that SOLDIERs don't make it to retirement age, one way or another. This guy stands as evidence that such is not true of the original game, and that Shinra is fine with her elite Mako-mutated warriors retiring to open a shop, which is… Intriguing. How many people are wandering around with Mako superpowers? It can't be that many.
Kadmus posted his take LITERALLY as I'm getting to this part of my responses, but yeah it's also an option that much like Shinra, SOLDIER has just been around a long time as their military specialist arm or even an independent group eventually snapped up. So, old retired SOLDIER man can easily just be from before they started pumping up all the new kids with mako juice.
Anyway, I'm going to consider this room to be 'non-canon' because if our first-ever sight of a ghost is Tutorial Guy who stayed behind to Tutorial Harder I'm just. I don't want to integrated that into my analysis of the setting. This is a bridge too far.
Of course 'best' is relative. It's what the game considers 'best', but if we'd merely had 'medium' success, our reward would have been the first HP+ Materia in the game, which as its name says, increases maximum HP. I might have preferred that instead of a weapon that will eventually become obsolete. Ah, well. FF7 minigames: even when you win, you lose.
It's debatable, but personally I'd probably go with the sword. Can't complain about a better weapon on the Most Mandatory Party Member, and even if it gets outclassed for damage in an hour or two being able to pull it out when travelling or grinding for double AP is pretty nice. Meanwhile, materia can probably just be mass purchased eventually... and have you really NEEDED more HP so far, other than for Midgar Zolom?
They put the catdog in a Shinra soldier uniform and told him 'do your best human impression' so he's just… Standing on his hind legs wobbling back and forth because his body was not meant for that kind of balance? That's hilarious but also, what the fuck, guy.
We know the Shinra troops have coeurl as guard dogs! You could have found literally anything else other than that! Poor Red.
…okay, no, a stereotypical sailor's uniform on a guy as massive as Barret is inherently comical. Fuck, he's even got the little hat. This is peak. We need this as a permanent outfit we can swap Barret into.
Sadly, FFVII is before the age of free swapping costumes on your characters being a major feature. Just imagine if you could have cowgirl Tifa all game long - it's a power not meant for mortal man.
…you know, Barret kind of has the same thing going on as Cyan, where he is simultaneously the designated comic relief among party members while also being the one with the most visible on-screen tragedy and the game is sometimes awkward in its handling of these two contrasting aspects; but even so he's massively above Cyan in terms of how well-handled the interplay of the two is. Barret as a character is sometimes undermined by the comedy aspects of how his angry temper is used to make fun of him, but that anger is also something that sells the continued impact of his grief - he doesn't transmogrify into a Funny Grandpa from moment to moment.
It's not a comparison I thought of before now... but yeah, it all checks out. Barret is Better Cyan, managing to actually balance the comedy aspects with his character.
Also, at this point Trails of Blood starts playing instead of the previous background music. You know. The music we first heard in the Shinra Building after Jenova's escape.
It's not perfect; the 3D model is fairly stiff in its movement, we're still early in the game's history of cutscenes, but it's a massive jump from "static sprite appears while an icy wind animation plays," and it's not played for comedy like Choco/Mog at all, it's really trying to wow the player, and succeeding.
Tbh I rarely used summons in FFVII, the need to slot them in, limited uses and fact that normal attacks and magic were much cheaper meant I mostly cast them once to go "yo cool animation."
It really is some cool animations, though. Can'twait for some of the REALLY big boys like Bahamut.
Oh, and that red materia on the ground behind us, where that officer died? That's the Ifrit Materia. I'm guessing he carried it with him when he died. Another branch of the Elemental Trio is complete.
There's a fun exchange where Barret says he's glad to be out of his sailor uniform and both Aerith and Tifa say he looked cute in it and should keep it and use it as pajamas, which makes Barret flustered; Cloud is offered to chime in and, if choosing to agree with the girls, does so in typical backhanded fashion, describing Sailor Barret as a 'bear wearing a marshmallow.'
It says a lot in terms of improvements over FFVI that despite party swap being a thing for a while now, eveeyone still does a decent job of getting lines and characterization. Granted, you also have 5 + 1 party members instead of the more and more of FFVI, so less need to divide screentime.
I know offhand Chocobo's mysterious dungeon is real.
(in fact, there's quite a few... mysterious dungeon or whatever the series was properly called games, many of which are crossovers, this being where eg Pokemon Mystery Dungeon comes from ultimately)
Mystery Dungeon is effectively its own little genre, with how many crossovers/games in itd style there are. Pokemon, Dragon Quest, Chocobo... there's even OTHER dungeon crawlers crossing over like Etrian Mystery Dungeon 1 and 2.
Anyways everyone go play Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Explorers of Sky.
I can confirm that these horror sequences are in fact pretty scary if you're a 12-year-old in 1997 (actually, I think I was like 9 or 10 when I played FF7? I don't fully recall).
Also, the Jenova boss theme is yet another incredible banger, and a great way to get that godawful Shinra parade music out of your head.
Of note, I don't know if you managed to find it, but the second Enemy Skill Materia was in the Junon Inn. This is significant because it means that the game still lets you have one if you missed that in Hojo lab, but obviously getting it in Junon means you can't get Beta on it until a lot later.
Notably, the third (out of four) Enemy Skill Materia, unlike these first two, is not well hidden and actually relatively easy to find... but it will show up only very near the end of Disk 1. So, if you hadn't gotten yours when you had and missed the one in Junon, then no Blue Magic for you.
Honestly, that won't be for a while. I'll put this in spoiler, but since it's just weapon availability, I don't think it's actually spoiler content - somebody else can provide their opinion over whether Omicron should read or not.
The next Cloud sword you can buy will have only 3 points of attack over the Force Stealer, but it will lack the "double AP Growth" feature, and after that, if you miss a certain optional location which has a shop, the only other Cloud swords are findable, but not buyable - which means you could miss them - for a very long time, in which case the Force Stealer will last you for about as many updates as the Buster Sword did, if not more. Of course, you'll likely find one of the others, or you might decide 3 points of attack would be better than double AP Growth, but if not, then it'll take a while before the Force Stealer gets obsoleted.
Of course, the Force Stealer is buyable eventually, and sooner than the HP Plus Materia, so in that sense it's still probably the inferior reward, but given your current situation, I don't think it's too bad, and if nothing else it's saving you money from having to buy it later. When it will finally be buyable, the Force Stealer costs 2200 gil. For reference, the 39 atk sword costs 2800 gil, while the next not-optional-town buyable sword costs 12k, so you figure out how much game there is in between those.
So, overall, I think the Force Stealer is a decent reward - it could well be the weapon you use for the longest stretch of game, if you're very bad at finding hidden treasures.
The old SOLDIER guy could also be a third option - he's from before the Mad Scientists (TM) started doing Wacky Bullshit to the Shinra elites and so was just, y'know, basically a SEAL without any of the magic glowing eyes stuff. Not sure if that's a thing that was ever true - I don't know how old SOLDIER is, for example - but it could be an interesting angle.
Yeah, absent of more info I would guess that this guy is like the early Spartans in Halo - elite soldiers, but not yet the augmented human wrecking machines that the project would later produce.
Also happens in Wild Arms 2! Of course, I wouldn't blame anyone for not knowing that, since WA2's translation is...well, we can only hope someone actually makes a retranslation. It's genuinely one of the worst translations I've ever seen; I wouldn't be surprised if it put off more than a few people, even at the time.
