So, in this instance, when Hojo was, according to rumors which now we know were false (and likely spread by him on purpose as a way for him to encounter the group without being murdered by them on sight), no longer working for Shinra, he took care to inform Cloud that he had to head west, past mount Corel - meaning, to Nibelheim. And, of course, his dialogue here also contains a lot of other comments that can now be seen in a very different light. So... what do you think of this all? I feel like this is something worth commenting on, after the information we got in the latest update.
I mean, I guess he was lying?
I don't know that there is much more to draw from this scene than "Hojo was lying so he could be in the group's path and ask a couple of probing questions to Cloud to confirm he's a Sephiroth Copy, then point him to Sephiroth to hasten the Reunion."
It seems like as good a time as any to bring it up, but why ribbon? It's been a fairly consistent element throughout the games to this point that there is this accessory called "Ribbon" that will provide an immense slate of immunities, and I don't know if I'm missing a joke or something, but it seems like such a triviality for something to be named after.
I have
no idea.
The Final Fantasy wiki usually has some speculation on the origin of various weird name choices for items and monsters, but not this one. There's no explanation for the Ribbon that I can find everywhere online.
In the very first game, the Ribbon granted resistance to all elemental damage and immunity to Death, so I guess maybe the idea was that the Ribbon was a 'blessed' item that granted some kind of benediction or holy protection, and then over the course of the next games this transformed into this recurring idea of immunity to nearly all status effects?
I don't know.
That Omi can just spam Neo-Bahamut at the problems feels like something is broken in MP cost/availability of ether/rest or something.
It's a bit more complicated than that.
Magic costs have escalated pretty harshly in VII. Neo Bahamut costs 140 MP to cast; at this stage of the game, my characters have around 500 MP (using a lv 2 MP+ Materia). That means a character can, at the most, cast Neo Bahamut four times (most only three times) before they're fully out of MP. An Ether restores 100 MP, which means I need
more than one Ether per NB cast. The only way I can 'spam' NB is by using Turbo Ether, but I have gotten about a dozen of those across the course of the entire game so far; they're too valuable to spend on random encounters. That means, for the most part, one character can cast Neo Bahamut and
nothing else up to three times between saving spots. Meanwhile, in a boss fight, NB deals massive damage
once, but I can't cast it again (yet), so it's a steep 140 MP cost to spend once and then I use the rest of that character's MP on something else.
So in theory the balance is sound. But, that's not the full picture. For one thing, I have three characters; so while Yuffie can only summon Neo Bahamut three times, Cloud can summon Leviathan four to five times, and Tifa can summon Regular Bahamut four times. Between the three of them, purely in terms of summoning from base MP without healing items, they can clear about twelve encounters. And except for some very annoying dungeons like the entire Snow Sequence, the game typically isn't
that dense in encounters. So often, that's enough!
Still, if I wanted to be more efficient and make sure I don't find myself MP-starved mid-dungeon, the best approach isn't summons, it's Beta/Trine/Aqualung. They're
usually enough to clear an encounter for a quarter of the cost of Neo Bahamut. There are a couple of issues with this, though: I only have one Enemy Skill Materia with these spells learned, for one. If combat starts and Yuffie is the first to go, sue, I can blast the whole encounter with Beta. But if Cloud is up first, then I have to waste his turn on something else, then wait for Yuffie to come up and cast Beta...
Or I could just have Cloud summon Leviathan and the encounter is over without me having to bother with that. Additionally, some enemies absorb fire or lightning; sometimes I cast Beta and it doesn't kill everything because a couple of enemies heal from fire damage, and Trine has lower base damage and sometimes fails to properly kill everything. Which means I have to actually
pay attention, stay and watch my screen, see if my spell killed every enemy, and then pick out the survivors with individual spells or attacks.
Or, I can summon Neo Bahamut, go up to make some tea or scroll Twitter or something, and come back to a solved encounter.
That's the key factor that is being ignored in discussions about overlong summon animation: A summon animation takes more time to play than Beta or Firaga-All or five physical attacks... But all these require me to stay at my keyboard and watch the game and adapt to consequences. Summon animations take care of themselves while I do something else.
The most efficient approach to any random encounter in the game is to use physical attacks to kill everything, because enemies are too weak to threaten my characters and the damage they do inflict only builds up Limit which makes wiping the next encounter easier. My main approach to combat isn't based on effectiveness or efficiency, it's based on
reducing tedium.
