Honestly I kinda need to struggle to even empathise with the 'Bad' part. I live in a bilingual area. Once you add in English my (dead)name gets pronounced at least three different ways during an average workday, sometimes even by the same person if we switch languages between conversations.
Pronunciation just kinda seems like a very monolingual thing to care about.
JRPGs have been butchering the pronunciation of any language whose associated mythology can be found in common encyclopedias for decades at this point. I don't really share the sudden passion about this specific case.
They literally pronounce it correctly in the Japanese track though, "ketto shi". This is factually just them doing it wrong on purpose to appease Anglophones that got too used to pronouncing it wrong and would get stubborn and defensive about it being changed, like they are right now.
Gee I wonder why people might be upset about the English localisation choosing to be wrong on purpose about a name that is Scots Gaelic, an indigenous language driven to the brink of extinction by English cultural pressure.
This just isn't a debate, they did a really dumb thing that's the equivalent of "well we might as well keep calling her Aeris even though they don't in the Japanese track because insufferable people might get really stubborn and upset about it" and I'm glad it kicked up a stink because it's thoughtless and stupid.
Pretty much exactly that. There is no pronunciation guide in the game and no one in my peer group was aware of the intricacies of Gaelic pronunciation so I just pronounced it how it was spelt.
Also, side note, we got a picture of Young Sephiroth by Nomura.
Welcome back to Final Fantasy VII, the game where I learn to hate snow.
Last time: Tragedy. Aerith died, we have no idea what she was trying to accomplish, Sephiroth escaped, and Cloud is still not free of Sephiroth's influence on his mind. Things are looking grim.
Vincent asks where Sephiroth headed, and Cloud has a brief moment of migraine, during which he sees a vision of Sephiroth heading north of the Forgotten City.
Hmm. If Cloud were to start being able to use his connection to Sephiroth as a two-way street, allowing him to spy on Sephiroth just as Sephiroth spies on him, that could be… useful? Maybe.
Anyway, he doesn't need the vision, because he remembers that while Cloud was cradling Aerith's lifeless body, Sephiroth rambled about going north past the Snow Fields, so that's where we're headed.
Oh, but first, we're doubling back through the city to grab that Materia we missed in the Sleeping Forest.
It turns out there's a reason I missed it the first time around - not only is the red Summon Materia hard to see under the trees, but it's also rolling, moving from one spot to another and disappearing in between. It's hard to spot, and hard to catch. Our reward for it is Kujata, a newcomer to the Final Fantasy series, looking like a demonic bull with many horns and eyes; mechanically, it reprises Valigarmanda's concept in VI, being a summon that deals fire, lightning, and ice damage all at once. Unusually, this is a rare summon which deals its main attack before appearing on screen, an onslaught of lightning, ice and flame devastating the field before the bull emerges and sends a rippling shockwave through the earth with a stomp (which does not actually inflict Earth damage).
I don't know how much use this is. The way the 'tri-elemental damage' works under the hood is that the attack checks if the enemy is weak/resistant/nullifies/absorbs any of the three elemental damage types; if the enemy is weak to one and neutral to the other, the whole attack is treated as hitting a weakness. Weak and resistant I think cancel each other. But if the enemy nullifies or absorbs any of the damage types, it cancels the whole attack. So, a tri-elemental attack against a character who is weak to fire but absorbs ice is worse than useless, as it will heal them as if we'd used an ice spell.
Not sure this is worth risking most of the time, honestly.
Now, we have to leave the Forgotten City behind.
This screen is incredibly annoying. It has a chest on the side, but in order to access it, we have to find the right way around, and this is where the game's relatively non-obvious collision gets a right pain, because even just vaguely touching the bottom of those spiky 'stairs' causes Cloud to play out the entire climbing animation to the top, and then we have to backtrack. I end up having to look up video of where to go to get that chest.
This excerpt brought to you to illustrate that even in its moments of narrative excellence FFVII is still a clunk-ass game to actually play.
Then we have to climb a facade for a while. It's a relatively straightforward puzzle where we have to figure out whether to go left, right, up or down at various intersections and try to optimize our path to grab all the loot in the crevices and make our way up.
I dig that one of the random encounters is a lobster-snake chimera. That's a great silly monster design.
And then we're out, and into the snowy wastes of the far north!
We battle our way up, yada yada, and then eventually find a small town - most likely the northernmost and most remote settlement in the world, though it looks like a normal touristy mountain town.
Despite ostensibly being a complete town, with houses for the locals, this place is known as 'Icicle Inn'; I imagine that the Inn came first, as a kind of either skiing resort, or place to rest and stock up for arctic explorers, and then as it provided jobs and the seed of an economy, the rest of the town formed around it.
Icicle Inn is a fairly sleepy town, with children making a snowman, snowboarding tourists who are moping at the bar because the local hills have been closed off from sports use, and a boy who seems to have caused this by getting hurt on his own snowboard.
You may notice a running theme here, and it's "snowboarding."
If we attempt to leave the town, a local warns us that it's too dangerous, and gives us the rules for snowboarding, just in case we'd missed the hints. We can't get the snowboard immediately, though; first, the parents of the wounded boy tell us that if we plan to explore the 'Northern limits' we won't be able to do it without a map, and allows us to take theirs to go.
Also…
One of the locals at the pub tells us that a Cetra called 'Ilfana' used to to live in this town years ago, which seems a pretty significant thing to investigate, and I briefly think 'oh, I need to have Aerith around for that conversation to see her reaction,' before remembering that, well.
Anyway.
We go back to the guy blocking the way, tell him we'd like to go through, and before we get a chance to move ahead, someone arrives.
Elena of the Turks is here!
Could it be that she's finally getting her own boss fight?
I'm not going to be very hopeful for this, girl seems to mostly be comic relief. She spots Cloud, and rushes along with her Shinra soldiers to intercept him, panting from exertion.
Elena: "Cloud… huff… wheeze. I won't let you go any further!" Cloud: "What's down there?" Elena: "It's a SE-CR-ET. It really doesn't matter! You really got guts messin' my boss up like that!" Cloud: "You mean Boss… Tseng? That wasn't us. Sephiroth did it." Elena: "No! Liar! Don't think you can fool me!" Cloud: "I'm not lying… it was Sephiroth." Elenad: "Don't try to act innocent. I'll never forget it!!" Cloud: "Oh, man…" Elena: "Looks like just talking won't do. You're going to have to feel some pain! Just you… And me!!" Elena: [Turning to her goons] "No, I can handle him! There's no way he can avoid my punch."
Yeah so the punch is a 'minigame' that completely flies past me. The game is asking me to press any of these buttons, but I'm too busy trying to figure out 'wait, which button in response to which input?' and then I have already been punched. Cloud, hilariously, goes down in a single hit, falling down to his knees and then head first in the snow.
Fucking outstanding. I guess Elena was stronger than Reno and Rude combined this whole time.
Also, what's this about Tseng? The language 'messin' my boss up' seems to suggest Tseng was seriously injured but alive, but the fact that she thinks Cloud did it suggests he couldn't tell her that it was Sephiroth, so is he dead? Just in a coma? Speaking of that - wasn't Tseng too injured to move while in the temple, moments before it got crushed?
Ah! But we had to call Cait Sith to join us. So Cait Sith, a known agent of Shinra, had to go through the main entrance to the Temple, where he most likely found Tseng, pulled him out of the Temple and called Shinra to pick him up, and he's been unconscious ever since.
Yeah, I can work with that.
Cloud wakes up in that weird attic full of computer equipment; we can no longer leave, as the Shinra soldiers have taken over and declared the village to be under 'martial law.' In order to leave, we must visit the injured kid again; since he can't use his snowboard anymore, he's offering to give it to us, and now we can finally head for that big glacier place and do some sick 1080°s.
It's time.
For another minigame.
Good lord, the snowboard minigame.
…
The first snowboarding video game was Heavy Shreddin' for the NES, published in 1990. Two further games, Tommy Moe's Winter Extreme: Skiing and Snowboarding and Val d'Isère Skiing and Snowboarding, both in 1994, before a wave of snowboarding hit the shelves in '96 and '97 - 1080° Snowboarding, Cool Boarders, Winter Gold, Steep Slope Sliders, Snowboarding Kids, Cool Boarders 2… The capabilities of the new 3D consoles like the SEGA Saturn, Nintendo 64, and of course the Playstation, allowed for a new kind of 'view from behind' 3D snowboarding game, while in the real world, 'extreme sports' became one of the characteristic features of 90s culture, with a colorful, jockish aesthetic, KOOL LETTERZ style marketing, of which snowboarding had the cultural connotation and aesthetic, if not necessarily the same associated risk. In 1998, a year after FFVII, snowboarding would be added to the list of the Olympic Sports.
As such, FFVII's snowboarding minigame isn't just a random idea thrown in; it's tied to a particular milieu, hit as snowboarding is breaking into the mainstream and becoming strongly associated with 90s culture, and gaining increased legitimacy as a sport.
It's a cultural artifact, is what I'm saying. That popularity seems to have eroded over the next twenty years; while there are still snowboarding games coming out every few years, they're no longer a feature of XTREME COOL culture that gets multiple games a year and have huge cultural cachet.
…thank god I had something to say about the cultural aspects of snowboarding for this, because God knows the game as a game only brings me pain.
They clearly put in a lot of effort into this one! The snowboarding minigame takes us through a succession of mountain areas, each one with its own hazards, starting at 'just turns', ramping up to "snowmen,' then to 'forest where every tree is a tripping hazard and to 'frozen lake with boulders rolling across it,' and I just… Most of what I spend my time doing is falling. Over. And over. And over.
The controls are clunky, the speed isn't intuitive, I keep hitting the edges of the arena every time I try to dodge an obstacle, and so on. There are a number of colored balloons scattered across the trail that pop when we hit them, the kind that would grant some kind of points in a game with a score system but don't appear to do anything here; most likely this is because they're meant for the Wonder Square version playable at Gold Saucer, not here.
And I just.
Keep.
Falling.
Thankfully, the game can't be lost, you can only perform terribly. You get up every time you fall, and you keep advancing a little. Eventually, the camera sweeps back for a dramatic shot, then follows Cloud as he sails off a platform into the great white unknown and everyone wakes up having been knocked over in the fall.
Unfortunately this is only the beginning of our woe.
Cloud gets up, checks that everyone is alright (Yuffie is characteristically grumpy, Vincent stoic), and then Cloud indicates that we can and should use the map to orient ourselves and that we should be wary of spending too long in the cold or we'll risk freezing, which is probably indicative of some kind of ticking clock mechanic for how long we can stay outside. So, let's check this map, shall we?
Why do I even expect anything.
No, this - this is fine. Ish. Sort of. You can actually use this map as an effective tool to orient yourself, as long as you already know in advance how it works. It's not necessarily super obvious though?
The big problem is having no idea where we start which makes it hard to correctly use the map to orient ourselves. In this particular case, we landed near a lone pine tree; we are meant to infer from this that we are located in the spot next to the central lake where a pine tree stands with three roads leading out from it. This corresponds to three directions we can leave the current screen from. Say we were to head south: First, we would see this screen:
Then, at the end of this linear corridor, this screen:
Referring again to the map above, we are now at the intersection on the southern shore of the lake, with three roads leading out, and one path leading north across the frozen lake. The long corridor is a 'transition' screen that comes in about three variants and are repeated between basically every screen that matters, with sometimes several coming in a row to confuse us; what matters is every spot on the map that corresponds to an intersection of roads. Every single one corresponds to one, and exactly one, 'true' screen with a unique backdrop and potential events or loots, with a number of transition screens connecting them. As long as you keep that in mind, then it's not too difficult to orient yourself using the map, which ends up effectively looking like this:
With each numbered point corresponding to a unique screen.
So it's not so bad!
(I hate it.)
This means a lot of walking around, many transition screens, and several ways to screw ourselves and have to redo it all over again. Here's an example: After grabbing a potion from that frozen lake shore, Point 5 on the map, I head into this icy cave place.
Misunderstanding "We're outta here" as meaning "Cloud backs down from the weird frozen loop-dee-doo," whereas what it means is in fact "Cloud jumps head first into it," we are sent for several literal spins and then thrown away… Back onto the world map.
Wheeeee!
Which, in turn, means we now have to walk back to Icicle Inn, talk to the old guy again, and do the snowboard minigame again.
I'm not happy about this! Every snowboard run takes me 4 to 5 minutes! It's a huge chore even if I'm better at it the second time than the first! At least this time I managed to pull off some cool jumps during which Cloud plays a sick animation (Cloud performs snowboard tricks that have no purpose other than to look cool because Sephiroth is completely wrong about his psychology and personality; he's a dork).
…here's a thing though.
At two points during the snowboarding level, we have the option to take one of two routes. This means we can land on any one of four spots in the Glacier, depending on whether we went left-left, left-right, right-left, or right-right. I went right-left the first time, which meant we went through that prismatic cavern with crystals, and led us to the lone tree. This time, I went right-right on a whim, and…
…so you remember how many updates ago I mused about whether in the setting of VII, Moogles were still an extent magical animal, or if they were purely a folkloric creature that had been turned into a popular mascot? And talked about the commercialization angle and all that and how the mascot-ified moogles started changing their looks until they looked weird like the plushy Cait Sith is riding bearing little resemblance to the classic FF critter?
Yeah so it turns out moogles are real in FFVII. They're real and they're here. They live in a secret igloo village within a giant frozen hellscape that humans struggle venture in.
And the only way you would find out is by taking the right combination of directions out of four in this snowboard minigame, and you only see them briefly as you zoom past and they waddle across the screen to knock you over if you run into them.
I went to the wiki just to check, and this is indeed the only time we'll met real moogles in the entire game.
I… do not know what to make of this.
This time we land in this kinda formless spot between rocks. It corresponds to point 2 on the map and would be one of the harder ones to translate into our actual location if it were the first place we fell to. From there, we go through the same frozen lake we got a potion from earlier, head to 3, the snowy forest, and nab a Source Item there.
Not easy to spot between those trees.
Of course, while we're doing this, we're fighting monsters, which is a neat opportunity to take a look at the new weapons I got in Icicle Inn.
Cloud has one of these gnarly fantasy swords that are honestly a little too ridiculous for me; its name is 'Organics,' which combined with its strange shape suggests some kind of weapon that was grown, rather than forged, but that's all the lore we'll get on this one. Yuffie has a boomerang, which I find kind of funny, but if I'm honest I think she suffers from the same kind of deal as Cloud where none of her later weapons beats the elegant simplicity and coolness of the giant shuriken big enough to both throw or use as a melee weapon that she started off with. Vincent, though, is one-handing a straight-up shotgun, and I can find no fault with this. As a matter of fact, the animators went the extra mile and gave him a special animation where, instead of twirling his gun, he pumps the barrel before firing. Outstanding.
With our Mind Source in hand, we head back to the frozen lake's southern shore, then up north across the lake, where we find this neat puzzle. The way it works is, to cross we have to jump between icebergs. However, we can only land on the 'big' icebergs, and when we jump onto a new iceberg, the ripple in the water cause the four icebergs around it to invert, big turning up their small end and small turning up their big end. This means that in the screen shot above, after completing this jump, once I jump onto the iceberg directly above, the icebergs both behind, above, and to Cloud's right will turn small, leaving only the one on the left, which turned from small to big, as a path forward. If we manage to land ourselves in a position where the iceberg we're on is now surrounded by only small iceberg, then we sink and our sent to the start!
From these parameters, you can plan a perfect route ahead of time, but honestly it's not necessary. Just jumping in and adjusting based on how the icebergs react to you and muddling a way through will see you to the other side fine.
On said other side is the island in the lake, and within the cave at its center, an old tattered tent left behind by some explorer of bygone years - along with the Safety Bit! This accessory makes a character immune to Instant Death/Petrification/Slow Petrification, which I'm sure will come in handy.
Then we walk back out… And out… And out…
Here's the thing about the Great Glacier: Those 'transition' screens I mentioned, that repeat between every unique location on the glacier? They repeat. Over. And over. Just long treks through the same corridor screen battling the same enemies.
And sometimes there's a Materia hidden on one of those screens!
In case you're wondering, yes, this is technically a separate screen from the one above.
The "Added Cut" Materia is a really neat concept. It's very simple in idea: when it is linked with another Materia, performing that Materia's command will also result in the character performing a physical attack. So if you pair it with Fire, then you cast Fira then attack. With Steal, you attempt to steal and also attack. It even works with summons!
It's a neat way of making some Materias no longer be 'wasted turns' for the purposes of damage - now even a base Steal is equivalent to a Mug, and a Mug hits twice! If you have a favorite spell, now it deals even more damage!
I'm not sure how much use I'll actually get out of it, because I don't use that many Command Materias and right now Magic Materias are lagging behind on damage compared to physical attacks, and a Materia Slot is a big cost, but it's nice to have.
With the Materia in hand, though, we finally run into one of the Glacier's hidden mechanics, hinted at earlier:
Cold.
In essence, we have a limited number of steps to perform while on the Glacier. Once we've exhausted your steps, the cold catches up to us, Cloud passes out, and he only survives thanks to being rescued by a kindly stranger who lives in a cabin at the top of the glacier. As Cloud wakes up, he is greeted by an old man, who tells him it's a miracle we're alive, and offers some advice in case we mean to head north (which we do) if we'll listen to his tale.
That's Holzoff, the old man of the mountain, who's been living here for 20 years now. Long ago, he says, legend says 'something fell from the sky', forming an intractable circular cliff around its point of impact. Twenty years ago, he and his friend Yamski tried to brave the cliff to find out what was on the other side, but neither of them where prepared for how the wind would heighten the cold. With the two climbers threatened with death, Yamski cut his own rope to allow Holzoff to survive. Now Holzoff lives there as a living warning of the dangers ahead for any would-be explorers.
I like this little vignette of arctic explorers challenging the extremes of the world and paying a dear price. One thing that's interesting about VII's modern setting that kinda connects to how small the world feels is that, for all that it is modern, the world is not yet fully explored and mastered; even in a world with cars and trains and airships and cargo ships, there are remote corners of the earth bordered only by small villagers, where none have yet managed to tread into the secrets beyond.
Incidentally… "Something fell from the sky long ago"? At this point the only reason I'm not 100% certain this is referring to Jenova coming from the stars as an alien riding a meteor is because Shinra dug Jenova out of a geological stratum 2000 years old, which means they had to have dug her out, which means they would need to have reached this point of impact, and that doesn't seem to jive with the fact that the place beyond the cliff seems otherwise unexplored and untouched. Then again, 20 years ago was before Jenova was found, I think, so Shinra could have found her, extracted her, left, and Holzoff would never even know?
It annoys me because it fits almost perfectly but not quite.
Gameplay-wise, this serves as a tutorial on the 'heat' mechanic we'll need to deal with coming next, though it's fairly straightforward and not much of a problem. We say thank you Holzoff, and head out.
Surprisingly, the whole group is waiting for us outside. This should probably be a sign that this is the last stop before some kind of major story event, but that mostly flies past me for the time being because my mind is entirely focused with 'uuurgh I have to go back and do the other half of the Glacier uuurgh.'
Barret: "You know, I've been thinkin'..." Barret: "...Seein' a place like this, makes you realize how awesome nature is." Barret: "But, if anyone told me to live here, I'd tell them to… Well, you know…" Barret: "I tell you one thing though, if I did have to live here I'd change things around 'n' make it better." Barret: "I guess Midgar is the total opposite of this place." Barret: "When you think of it that way, the Shinra don't seem so bad…" Barret: "Uuuuurgh!! What the hell am I sayin'!? The Shinra, not bad!?"
[Barret's automatic dialogue ends here, but if interacting with him again, he continues:] Barret: "Y'know… Standing here like this… Kinda makes you feel like the Planet's not really with us, y'know?" Barret: "Of course we can't compete. I mean… The Planet don't even notice us humans…"
…
This is probably one of the most important pieces of dialogue in the game? (Well at least when it comes to its environmental themes, there's plenty of coming dialogue more directly relevant to the plot lmao.)
It's like…
The world Barret knows, the world he's grown up with, is a world in which every disaster is caused either by direct human intervention, or the indirect consequences of the injuries dealt to the world. Shinra sets up a Mako Reactor and burns down his town; the Mako Wastes bury the ruins. Shinra builds Midgar, the earth around it turns cracked and barren. Shinra builds a naval base, all the fish die to a combination of pollution and electricity running through the water. What does Barret think of as a 'natural disaster'? A dust storm? An earthquake caused by the weakened ground?
Has Barret ever seen a thunderstorm, let alone a hurricane? I say 'Barret' because he's the one to which these themes are most immediately relevant, but - have any of these characters ever experienced nature unleashed in all its destructive power? Blizzards, hurricanes, sea-storms. Mako extraction makes the world weaker, lesser. It kills by lack, by want. A mountain may crumble because it no longer has the structural integrity to stand, not because of the terrifying power of tectonic plates grinding against one another.
Here, at the Great Glacier, they face 'nature' not in its nurturing, but destructive aspect. A place where life is in a constant struggle to exist against the world. A place where humans are not welcome. A blizzard doesn't feed the hungry, it doesn't shelter the sick. In a place like this, life exists at the Planet's sufferance. This nature is not kind.
And, faced with that grim, hostile reality, Barret shares the same instinct as so many humans before him - that we can change this. That we can make this place more welcoming to human life. Forcibly reshape this environment to suit us, rather than acclimate ourselves to it. But the difference is, he has seen the end point of that logic, the logic of Shinra - he knows the eventual consequences of that kind of thinking, and he knows to hold himself back. To not follow it to its conclusion. Yet… it still leaves him with the thinking that maybe the Planet isn't Mother Nature after all. That it doesn't exist to shelter and protect us. That it just… is, and we who are upon it need to accept that our existence within the Planet does not necessarily mean that it loves and protects us.
…
It's not like the harshness of an arctic clime is inherently a negative to life. Rather, it is an obstacle to some life. But here on the Glacier are woods, coniferous trees that, even ladden with snow, will handle the winter just fine. There are wolves, giant bugs, aggressive bunnies, water-dwelling reptiles in the frozen lake, minotaurs and other strange beasts. There is life, and we know what happens when the climate warms and the 'frozen wastes' leave room to 'temperate climate' - species die, deprived of the life they've adapted to, in which they've learned to scrounge for food and shelter in ways invaders from warmer place cannot compete with.
To make the Great Glacier 'more hospitable' to human life would be to condemn all this life that is already here.
Cut for image count.
Final Fantasy VII, Part 24: Hell Frozen Rain, Part B
Cait Sith is feeding us secret Shinra intel now, which I think is supposed to tie into the redemption arc the game is pretending that he had.
Anyway, we're not heading up that cliff just yet. For now, we're heading back to the Glacier to grab some stuff we left behind.
On this screen, 13 on the map, we find ourselves in an endless flat frozen plain which uses the same presentation as the world map. Every now and then, the wind 'turns us around,' which is to say spins the camera; without any landmark to go off of, this makes it impossible to know which direction we end up going in. Thankfully, we have a supply of markers, which we can plant in the ground as we walk; using a straight line from the markers, we can reorient ourselves after being spun around, allowing us to control where we end up after leaving the snowy plain.
There's this cave, in which we find this robed person who tells us not to worry about them and to just leave them be, despite being ostensibly stranded in a cave without any survival tools or anything, and who if pressed tells us they don't want to hurt us and to please leave them alone and not come back.
This strange encounter ties into a rumor we heard back in Icicle Inn; that there is a 'snow woman' in the Glacier who hates hot springs. In one of the more impressive dick moves in the whole game so far, what we're meant to infer from this is to find the 'hot springs' screen in the Glacier, visit it…
…then come back, talk to the robed person again, whereupon they fly into a fury and engage battle, saying "You've got a lot of nerves trying to touch me with the same dirty hands that touched that filthy hot spring! I'll never forgive you!"
This 'Snow' opponent, however, is not a boss, and despite having a Charm effect and me spending several turns on failed Steal attempts for an item she's supposed to carry, eventually folds without trouble.
…am I… am I the bad guy here? Did I just commit murder? Like, I just chased a yuki-onna that was trying not to hurt us, deliberately triggered her hatred of hot springs, and then murdered her so that I could loot a Materia from her dead body? God, they even threw in a pleading "Why?" at the end before she disappears, like what the fuck.
That's messed up, man.
I… guess Alexander is worth it, though? Back from VI, it still features the same 'recycled Amano's concept art from the Giant of Babil from IV,' only now in glorious 3D. The game's low res 4:3 camera work actually kind of struggles to convey its full glory, but it's still sick as hell.
Hell yeah.
Okay, well. That about covers everything we want from the Great Glacier.
Time to head for the Cliff. For this, of course, we first need to get back to Holzoff's shack, which the road to proves annoying enough that I end up resorting to simply exhausting my steps count, passing out and being teleported there.
I'm kinda getting tired of this whole place, and it's not going to get better any time soon.
Once back at the shack, we exit, find everyone waiting again, and then head north and there…
Welcome to the Cliff. It is, according to what I've been told, officially known as "Gaea's Cliff," though if this name is referenced in-game I have missed it. I'll still use the name for clarity's sake.
Climbing the cliff is an extended affair which revisits the climbing mechanics previewed at the end of the City of the Ancients: We press [OK] for Cloud to hang onto the facade, then advance in a linear direction, until we reach an intersection where we are prompted to go up/down/left/right. Here, though, we have the ticking clock of temperature; Cloud's temp starts at 37 degrees and goes down rapidly, with his model starting to turn white if it goes below 35°. I assume reaching too low a temp results in either being teleported back at Holzoff's or a Game Over, but we won't be finding out today, as dealing with it is rather easy. Basically, when Cloud is standing on a ledge, we can press [SWITCH] repeatedly for him to rub his arms rapidly, raising his body temp up to a max of 38°C before going ahead.
Gaea's Cliff is split up between two types of section: the outside, where we deal with the climbing mechanics, and the inside, where we are safe from the cold but have to deal with standard dungeon stuff like puzzles and random encounters.
These caves sure are pretty but also my goooood I'm tired of this. I took Vincent and Yuffie in hopes of grinding their Limit Breaks, I even gave Yuffie instead of Cloud the Cover Materia so she could suffer more damage and get off more LBs (Vincent only needs to kill enemies, not trigger LBs) but it's just. Not. Fucking. Happening. Vincent is still stuck on his LB1 despite having Odin and Yuffie has gotten like three Landscapers in this entire time and please. Set me free. Pleaaaase.
These enemies are so laughably weak they can't even cause LB gauges to fill up, let alone pose any kind of challenge. Did you know that at one point, I took off Yuffie and Vincent's armor, and you know what that did? Jack shit. They were still taking like 150 damage per special attack from enemies.
The scenery is pretty but this has morphed into pure tedium, and it is taking forever. For as much of an annoying gimmick the Great Glacier had, the exploration angle was at least kind of interesting, most unique tiles had something making it stand out to look at, but this is. Nothing. It's just the same pretty caves going on and on and on.
Here I shoved an ice boulder down a series of winding paths to smash some crystals and clear the way, then went on through, and then back to the outside cliff with the climbing mechanics.
Okay, I'll say something nice: those red flags are a nice diegetic touch. Not only do they serve to make the next step of our progress clear on screen, but also they indicate where Holzoff and Yamzi have been before, and how far they went; once the flags stop showing up, this implicitly means we've moved past the furthest point they were able to reach, and are into the great unknown where no man has trod before.
And we're doing it without any climbing equipment or even so much as a thick coat. Pays to be superhuman, I guess.
This here is a cave where the bottom floor has multiple holes in it, with a watery pool with a 'path' of ice floes that is currently too low for us to move across. In order to cross, we must go the long path around the mountain to reach a bunch of icicles that we need to drop down into the room below.
It's pretty I GUESS.
Also on the way we fight Malboro.
Now, Malboro in this game, as ever, has Bad Breath, but here, Bad Breath is an acquirable Enemy Skill! So obviously I want it, even if I'm not sure I'll make any use of it. So I just… Wait. For Malboro to use it. And wait. And wait. After a while I figure it needs to be below half HP. So I deal damage. And then I wait. And wait. Every turn, Malboro uses Frozen Beam, and only Frozen Beam.
Finally, after ten minutes waiting and dying on the inside, Malboro finally fires the skill when I wasn't looking.
Oops! Well thankfully Cloud had a Ribbon equipped so I still manage to murder the thing before it can kill my poor Toad/Mini/Sleep/Poison/Confuse/Silence-afflicted characters. And we've acquired Bad Breath!
Speaking of Ribbons: I am informed that there is a Ribbon in Gaea's Cliff. You don't need to tell me. I know. I didn't find it, and frankly, I don't care. I'm not replaying this. I don't care. I'll use Morph or something, I couldn't care less about the missed Ribbon.
And on this screen, we find four giant icicles. As we advance, we run into each icicle, triggering a battle in which the icicle is present on the field, and we need to kill it along with the other opponents so that it will fall.
Once this is done, we jump down below and cross the ice floes.
Oh thank god I'll have at least gained one LB out of this nonsense.
As we enter a long, straight corridor inside the cave, what do we see but one of the Copies standing in our way? God knows how the hell it even got there (this is an issue that'll come up later and the only answer that makes any sense is that they have special travel magic on par with Sephiroth's). As we approach, however, it topples and fades, killed by the beast guarding the cavern, and a boss fight is triggered!
Neat design! A monster called Schizo with two heads that are separate gameplay entities with different weaknesses, kinda like Ying/Yang but elevated to true boss! Each one has 18,000 HP, although that amounts to somewhat less than the boss having twice that amount, because many of my attacks hit both at the same time.
Anyway, Big Guard + Haste All + Regen All + Alexander + Leviathan + Trine + Thundaga, gg no re.
Look, here's the deal: Vincent enters this battle with his Limit Gauge full. So of course, I immediately turn him into the Gallian Beast. This turns out to be a mistake on paper; Schizo's right head absorbs fire (the left one absorbs ice), which means Vincent's Berserk Flare heals the enemy, rather than kill it.
Even with Vincent being stuck attacking a single target per turn or using a double attack that heals one of the target and me being unable to use any of his command, I still bulldoze through that encounter in a few turns and shrug off its surprise revenge attack on death.
Something that's becoming increasingly apparent is that the fact that Cloud is a permanent leader is starting to have a seriously outsized impact on gameplay. Even having stuck with Yuffie and Vincent for way too long compared to how often I usually swap characters to spread XP in a futile effort at getting those LBs, Cloud still towers at lv 49 vs their lv 45, and is even higher than everyone else in the game.
I wonder if the game could possibly be planning something sneaky to deal with that discrepancy! Surely not and Cloud will just end the game with 10 levels over everyone else, the game wouldn't take him out of the party or anything like that.
But also seriously please tell me that the Materia that negates random encounters is coming soon because if I have to keep spending actual hours plowing through trivial encounters I will die of boredom. Like - it's worse than any previous game because of how long disposing of trash encounters takes. Summoning Leviathan or Alexander means sitting through their entire animation, every time. Physical attacks are much faster, but you only get one attack per opponent per character so clearing an entire encounter still takes forever. A Tier 3 All spell would be a good solution but I only have a single Materia with Tier 3 spells unlocked. And all of this in the context of like -
I've literally just sat there in an encounter browsing SV, come back minutes later, and found that my characters weren't anywhere near death and were, in fact, not even at a full Limit Gauge.
Please free me from this torment.
Anyway. We've made it.
Cloud exits the last cave, and climbs the face of the cliff, finally reaching the top. As he does, the camera moves in, zooming into an FMV, showing the sky above lit by aurora borealis, and beyond it, the center of the crater formed by the cliffs, and within it…
…a gigantic geyser of Mako, reaching into the sky. Active, alive with energy, coming as both a spiraling whirlwind of mako and the edges and a surging spray in the center - at the heart of the… wound?
What we see here doesn't look like a real life crater so much as… A welt, a scab, corners of earth and ice closing up over the initial injury. Although… I can't tell if the circular, ruined shape in the center is an actual (Ancient?) construct that was severely damaged, or just a damaged geological formation that kinda looks like architecture. Either way…
A place surging with so much Mako you could most likely see it from space, surrounded by impregnable walls of ice that no humans has crossed before, can only be one thing.
The Promised Land.
Perhaps not as the Ancients conceptualized it - not if this is the impact crater that destroyed their civilization - but it is certainly the Promised Land of which President Shinra dreamed.
Well. We're done with this part, at least. I'm not gonna lie, this was tedious. I appreciate that a story needs emotional plains to contrast with its peaks, following the dramatic death of Aerith with something calmer, more low-key, with even hints of comedy at times, makes narrative sense, but… There was basically no plot or characterization involved in this entire sequence, the emotional fallout of last time hasn't come up even once, this was a purely utilitarian 'Get from point A to point B' with some traversal gimmicks and minigames thrown in, and it was so dull I wanted to give up.
It's not all bad. The moogles were a swerve, Barret had a good moment, I guess snowboarding can be an acquired taste, but overall, thank God it's over.
But hey, we're through, and the next bit is going to be pretty intense!
Vincent asks where Sephiroth headed, and Cloud has a brief moment of migraine, during which he sees a vision of Sephiroth heading north of the Forgotten City.
Hmm. If Cloud were to start being able to use his connection to Sephiroth as a two-way street, allowing him to spy on Sephiroth just as Sephiroth spies on him, that could be… useful? Maybe.
…so you remember how many updates ago I mused about whether in the setting of VII, Moogles were still an extent magical animal, or if they were purely a folkloric creature that had been turned into a popular mascot? And talked about the commercialization angle and all that and how the mascot-ified moogles started changing their looks until they looked weird like the plushy Cait Sith is riding bearing little resemblance to the classic FF critter?
Yeah so it turns out moogles are real in FFVII. They're real and they're here. They live in a secret igloo village within a giant frozen hellscape that humans struggle venture in.
And the only way you would find out is by taking the right combination of directions out of four in this snowboard minigame, and you only see them briefly as you zoom past and they waddle across the screen to knock you over if you run into them.
I went to the wiki just to check, and this is indeed the only time we'll met real moogles in the entire game.
God. The mental image of Cloud boarding down the slopes at a 50 ks an hour, only half paying attention because he's still cut up about Aerith, and then he happens to barrel through a hidden village of the fucking Keebler Elves and goes "wait WHAT" so hard he bails and nearly snaps his own neck from whiplash.
Speaking of Ribbons: I am informed that there is a Ribbon in Gaea's Cliff. You don't need to tell me. I know. I didn't find it, and frankly, I don't care. I'm not replaying this. I don't care. I'll use Morph or something, I couldn't care less about the missed Ribbon.
Speaking of Ribbons: I am informed that there is a Ribbon in Gaea's Cliff. You don't need to tell me. I know. I didn't find it, and frankly, I don't care. I'm not replaying this. I don't care. I'll use Morph or something, I couldn't care less about the missed Ribbon.
You did, in fact, miss what is, in my opinion, the most important piece of optional lore in the game - I'm sure plenty of people will disagree and say that another piece of optional information is more important than this one, but I personally think this is it, although it is just my opinion. It's a tricky piece of lore to investigate, since the way to go about it is not very obvious, but it's definitely worth looking for it. Icicle Inn doesn't have that many things to do in it, either, so you should be able to figure it out eventually.
I wonder if the game could possibly be planning something sneaky to deal with that discrepancy! Surely not and Cloud will just end the game with 10 levels over everyone else, the game wouldn't take him out of the party or anything like that.
This seems like a strange question to ask - the protagonist being an obligated character and thus levels above everybody else is a well known phenomenon in a lot of RPGs. Cecil was like this in FFIV as well, wasn't he? So... what brought this question about?
I went to every house and talked to every character. If the devs hid some major plot behind some promptless interactible chunk of wall they can eat my ass.
I went to every house and talked to every character. If the devs hid some major plot behind some promptless interactible chunk of wall they can eat my ass.
I feel like at this point if Omi has missed something there's basically no point in nudging him to go back, given how agonizing it was to do in the first place, which is completely fair. If the lore is that well hidden, then it's understandable to have missed it.
This seems like a strange question to ask - the protagonist being an obligated character and thus levels above everybody else is a well known phenomenon in a lot of RPGs. Cecil was like this in FFIV as well, wasn't he? So... what brought this question about?
Well, first of all, that's not true; as of the final fight in FFIV, Cecil was lv 60 and Edge was lv 58; the level gap was minimal, with the game using different XP scales in order to make lower-level XP chatacters 'catch up' by the end of the game. The level discrepancy between Cloud and the rest of the party is different from any game we've had before and, if the trend were to continue, would only grow to continue until it completely wraps the gameplay.
Ironically, your assumption that I hold special knowledge of what's to come is biasing you against what is a pretty natural conclusion to draw from the facts as they're laid out, and something I've been thinking for a while even before this update. With that said, I went past the next Save Point and as a result had to eat the next hour of plot development in a single sitting, so what you're reading is effectively the first half of "Update 25-26," and this sentence here is what we call "foreshadowing"
the extra levels are clearly excellent ludonarrative integration between story and game design, as our resident special boy who kept up with all his mako shots is by far the best
I feel like at this point if Omi has missed something there's basically no point in nudging him to go back, given how agonizing it was to do in the first place, which is completely fair. If the lore is that well hidden, then it's understandable to have missed it.
