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.
Well damn, that's a pain in the ass way to do multi-element attacks. Pretty sure in some of the other games like FFV a summon like that would auto-hit whatever does the most damage to the enemy, instead of them going "yeah I know I'm on fire as a guy made of ice, but since I'm immune to ice I'll just ignore that".
I dig that one of the random encounters is a lobster-snake chimera. That's a great silly monster design.
Final Fantasy has always had some wacky enemy design, but it's pretty fun seeing how it can just
pop with making the jump from 2D to 3D.
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.
Oof, that cuts deep. Real deep.
Fucking outstanding. I guess Elena was stronger than Reno and Rude combined this whole time.
Smh Omi, underestimating GURL POWER
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.
Damn, can't believe Omi fell on his ass so much snowboarding they made an extra plot beat for it
…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.
I mean, the answer is obvious, just look at what happened to the moogles who played a plot role in the last two games: First FFV shoves them all in the Void, then FFVI they get straight up genocided.
So this time around, moogles decided "no actually we'll just fuck off to a glacier and not deal with any of that nonsense".
This is probably one of the most important pieces of dialogue in the game?
Barret Chads Stay Winning
Seriously, even if he's not quite a
main main character at times, I love that Barret still gets plenty of characterization and story going for him throughout the entire game.
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.
Yeah, Cait Sith is definitely supposed to be considered redeemed/on the path to redemption at this point. At least the game is actually doing
something extra with it via the feeding information, instead of just his fake big sacrifice and going right back to being Robocat Spyman.
…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.
Yeah but Alexander tho
I'd totally murder innocents for Alexander, wouldn't you?
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.
Man, I'm just now realizing this is just Junon 2: Electric Boogaloo with how many minigames were shoved into a short period of time. We got Elena Fistfighting, we got Snowboarding, we got Limited Steps Glacier, we got Icicle Hops, we got Freezing Mountain Climbing... I'm probably missing one or two in all that, as well.
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.
So first, the Bad News! There is no "zero encounters" materia, ability, or accessory in FFVII.
But! The Good News! There
is a materia that lowers enemy encounter rates, up to 1/8th as many encounters when it levels up!
Buuuuuut the More Bad News! You can only get it by doing Chocobo Races in Gold Saucer lmao
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.
Goddamn just look at all that
Oil Mako, we're gonna be rich!
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.
I'm
moderately certain that Omi rotates saves so if it really is exclusively Lore he's missing, could reload a save at Icicle Inn.
Otherwise, there's always coming back later in the game... hopefully.
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.
Cecil also has the level scaling advantage of, despite being in the party the entire game, he
resets back to Level 1 when he switches from Dark Knight to Paladin. So using that as a baseline along with the fact that FFIV has pre-determined parties makes it a lot easier for the devs to ensure that nobody is too far out of line with the rest of the party. Meanwhile, FFVII lets you freely shuffle characters in and out other than Cloud, who
already starts as one of the highest level characters in comparison to others, so it's easier for him to snowball.
