- Location
- Texas
Well, I meant as a love interest, but now you're just making me regret the Leader Tifa bait-and-switch all the more.
Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Let's Play
This is probably the low point for writing in a very jagged game on that front. As the thread has discussed you can see how Cid-as-leader makes sense on paper (military and command experience) but it's not sold at all, and they barely even try to sell you on your attempt to interfere with Shinra's anti-Meteor plan. I think this is where one of my playthroughs ended lol
Nachtprophet
Registered Lurker
- Location
- Germany
It probably would have worked better if they had made Cid the leader directly after the Junon sequence as part of the "you got an airship now" deal. That's were it makes the most sense, with him being the captain and in charge of your new main mode of traveling.
Tifa being in charge first just makes it awkward, especially with no depiction of them really discussing that.
Tifa being in charge first just makes it awkward, especially with no depiction of them really discussing that.
FourthWall
Love & Destroy
- Location
- Chiraq
Put that shit on r/malelivingspaces
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I'm currently writing the next update, which is taking a little more time because I dithered getting to it for various reasons, but in the meantime I'd like to ask the thread a question, because I think I know the answer but I need to double check my external memory drives (ie readers):
Can any of you think of a time in FF7 where a character unambiguously used Materia-based magic in a cutscene?
I don't mean Sephiroth's wide array of weird supernatural bullshit, I mean stuff like Rydia using Fire to melt the ice barrier in IV, or Bartz and the gang trying (in vain) to use Cure spells on a dying Galuf; times when we see a character clearly "casting a spell" as part of the narrative.
There is, obviously, the summoning of Meteor, which is fairly unambiguous and involves a (Black) Materia, but, like, besides that
Can any of you think of a time in FF7 where a character unambiguously used Materia-based magic in a cutscene?
I don't mean Sephiroth's wide array of weird supernatural bullshit, I mean stuff like Rydia using Fire to melt the ice barrier in IV, or Bartz and the gang trying (in vain) to use Cure spells on a dying Galuf; times when we see a character clearly "casting a spell" as part of the narrative.
There is, obviously, the summoning of Meteor, which is fairly unambiguous and involves a (Black) Materia, but, like, besides that
Egleris
Vagrant Dragon
- Location
- Italy
When Aerys was killed, she had the useless Materia in her hands, so it's not unreasonable to think she was trying to use that, somehow. And of course, as you mentioned, Cloud handed off the Black Materia to Sephiroth in a cutscene, so Materia are definitely a physical thing that exists.
Other than that, I can't remember a single instance where anybody used Materia in a FMV, and while I'm not 100% sure about it, I don't recall any time that a materia was used in any in-game-engine cutscene. They are shown and handed over, but never actually used, as far as I can remember.
The same goes for magic - I'm pretty sure we never see any of it be cast outside of battle, at least as far as FFVII itself is concerned. Plenty in the various spin-offs, of course, but never in FFVII itself.
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Kuja
I'M A SQUIIIID
- Location
- AZ
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Ultimately not that surprising, since the team couldn't guarantee what character would be holding what materia or what sets of materia the player would find. Apart from Yuffie's kleptomania, materia is rather orthogonal to the arc of the FF7 characters, used more to inform the background and setting and allow greater variety of options in a fight.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I think that there was a fear that a materia that the player didn't have equipped would be used. Even the remake doesn't really show PCs using materia during cutscenes with combat in them, even if the game uses in-game models that have the player chosen materia correctly slotted.I'm currently writing the next update, which is taking a little more time because I dithered getting to it for various reasons, but in the meantime I'd like to ask the thread a question, because I think I know the answer but I need to double check my external memory drives (ie readers):
Can any of you think of a time in FF7 where a character unambiguously used Materia-based magic in a cutscene?
I don't mean Sephiroth's wide array of weird supernatural bullshit, I mean stuff like Rydia using Fire to melt the ice barrier in IV, or Bartz and the gang trying (in vain) to use Cure spells on a dying Galuf; times when we see a character clearly "casting a spell" as part of the narrative.
There is, obviously, the summoning of Meteor, which is fairly unambiguous and involves a (Black) Materia, but, like, besides that
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Yeah, on the PC angle it makes a certain amount of sense due to the ability-agnostic game system, but there are NPCs around - VI has two instances of a random townspeople using Cure for minor plot reasons, for instance. If you wanted to have some Shinra soldier or an executive hurling a fireball, you could.
Well, Scarlet did shoot bullets without a rifle, maybe it was the gunfire materia?
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That, and also there is a bunch of flashbacks where it would be trivial to define what materia a given character has. Barret may not have Fire materia or whatever at present, but in his backstory nothing would prevent him from firing it if the devs wanted.
Ultimately, it's a pretty common RPG convention. There is a lot of fantasy RPGs that have enchanted items of some kind that are not legendary artifacts but still come with useful properties. Often, there would be numerous references to them in dialogue, so they are "present" in the world and aren't just a game abstraction like your inability to take more than five people with you, but they would also be mostly absent in the actual plot. The villain is going to search for a legendary artifact capable of controlling dragons, not for a stash of +1 flaming swords numerous enough to outfit an army.
Egleris
Vagrant Dragon
- Location
- Italy
Yeah, but as mentioned by @Omicron, in previous entries (FFIV being the big example), sometimes abilities were shown being used in cutscenes. I think for FFVII in particular it's a matter of maintaining the game world's "feel", for lack of a better world - magic might be commonplace (indeed, a bought-and-sold commodity), but they went very hard on the cyberpunk aesthetic, despite it not being actually true to the game or story (which, as typical of the series, is very much sci-fantasy), and a cyberpunk aesthetic doesn't really work if people are trowing healing spells around.
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
True - the enemies most likely to use materia in a cutscene are probably the Turks (the executives being more likely to save their offense for battles and be quietly menacing in the field scenes and cutscenes), but that'd ruin their whole "Yakuza enforcers" schtick underlying every aspect of their designs.
- Location
- Drachyench on Discord
There's Barret asking Cloud how to use Materia. I think a line of dialogue in Guard Scorpion's fight. Then. Uh. I guess Sephiroth when given the Materia?
- Pronouns
- He/Him
There's two occasions I can think of where we see an actual spell in cutscenes, one being Meteor. There's a couple of references to specific spells or Materia in the script -- e.g. Chocobo Bill talks about the Chocobo Lure materia -- but it's much more commonly referred to just as 'Materia' as a general term (e.g. Yuffie steals 'our materia', there's Red's line about 'our smaller materia', etc).
Kuja
I'M A SQUIIIID
- Location
- AZ
- Pronouns
- He/Him
As early as FF2 Squaresoft and later Square Enix has had an at-times weird insistence on reinventing the wheel and innovating their game systems on levels that essentially overhaul the entire package. In some ways that's helped keep Final Fantasy fresh over its 40 year history, casting a wide net for fans. Sometimes, though, it results in departments not communicating with each other, skewed expectations, and of course, the famed Squenix Snowball where a product iterates over and over for an extended development period and then gets hurled out the door by an irate executive office that wants a fucking product to ship already.
It wouldn't surprise me if materia was iterated on multiple times until late in development of FF7 and as a result most of the story had to be written without taking it into account because it wasn't clear what shape it would fully take.
It wouldn't surprise me if materia was iterated on multiple times until late in development of FF7 and as a result most of the story had to be written without taking it into account because it wasn't clear what shape it would fully take.
Final Fantasy VII, Part 28: Return to Corel & Fort Condor
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Welcome back to Final Fantasy VII, the game where CID. CID!? FUCKING CID!
Ahem.
We resume the game as Cid takes over leadership duties for the party.
Vincent: "It appears my feelings vanished into thin air ever since my long slumber…"
Vincent has a fascinating bit of missable dialogue in which he casually mentions that his transformation appears to have muted his emotions, which brings a whole new light to his 'silent and brooding' affect and could really have used being put… Somewhere in the story.
I'll say this about the Cid switch - I was playing up my sheer outrage a bit at the end of the last update, but it did genuinely make me stop playing the game for a few days, not because it's That Bad a story development, but because, well… I spent long, precious minutes of my life curating the perfect arrangement of Materia for Tifa, Yuffie, and Vincent. And then that group didn't see any action at all and then Tifa got kicked out and swapped for Cid, and I realized I was going to have to redo all my Materia, and I said 'fuck this' and went to bed.
As far as low points in writing go, 'Cid becomes party leader!' is nowhere near Kefka single-handedly annihilating the entire Esper population. But frequent party swaps are incredibly annoying in the Materia system.
For now, though, we at least have a clear window of gameplay ahead of us, so it's time to build up what I like to call…
The C-Team.
Look, it's not like I have anything against Barret and Nanaki, in fact I love them, but their last plot significant plot beat for both of them was back in Cosmo Canyon and I haven't been using them much in main story stuff since, so they're lv 41 and 42, compared to Cloud being 50 at time of leaving the party.
Also, Cid's current best weapon is… A little wacky.
The Dragoon Lance directly echoes back to older games, as Cid himself continues the tradition of the Dragoon without directly calling out the name (in character, I mean, since the spear obviously uses it). Mechanically, it's an odd duck; it has what appears to be the maximum possible amount of Materia slots way earlier than other characters get them, but none of them are linked. This means Cid can equip as many individual Materia as we want, granting him a vast array of spells, summons and support skills, but he can't do any combos, no Restore + All, no Time + Added Effect, which leaves him unable to really leverage the versatility of the system. This could be somewhat mitigated by giving him an Armor item with joined slots, but I figure might as well just double down and give him the Edincoat, which is the same thing but as Armor, so Cid has like half of my Materia library equipped on him and he sucks at using them.
And now we're off!
By which I mean we immediately double back to Mideel to finish visiting the village, since the cutscene interrupted us last time.
It quickly becomes apparent that, slightly odd phrasing from last update aside, no, the Mideelians are not so disconnected from the world as to have missed the giant angry flaming eyeball in the sky, they're merely safe from the human side of the conflict, ie they've never really had to worry about Shinra or war, but they do worry about Meteor, the Lifestream surging to the surface and causing earthquakes (this is foreshadowing btw), and the Planet's anger at humans for having abused her for so long, which is, I think, the first time someone directly says 'the Planet is probably mad at us' as a completely separate issue from Jenova/Sephiroth.
This old man is at peace with the possibility of death, but worries about his son and his family living in 'that far-off town,' wherever that is. The item on his bed is an Elixir; if we take it, he is, shockingly, the first NPC in the game to actually call us out on it! It's funny, but it's more amusing than anything; Cid has the opportunity to try to deny or to admit it, in which case he brazenly shows no remorse for his thievery and tells the old man he'll make better use of it anyway, whereupon the old man laughs and lets us keep the item.
Fun fact: That woman with the pet white chocobo chick is in every shop in town, seemingly simultaneously, trying to grab and hoard anything and everything she can in preparation for the apocalypse, and being rude to us because she's worried we're going to buy stuff because she has a chance to hoard it all herself.
Like I said: A broad showcase of human reactions to the possibility of the end of the world.
The weapon store has some new weapons for everyone, including, as always, for characters I just bought weaker weapons for at the previous town I visited and who haven't seen a single fight in that time, and of course I don't have enough gil to upgrade everyone. Sigh.
If we visit Cloud and Tifa, the doctor and nurse tell us that his condition hasn't changed and that we need to wait as 'these things take time,' and that Tifa has been steadfastly watching over him. If we talk to Cloud, he actually has one coherent line, even if it's mumbled from far away - he's asking "What number am I?"
Oh, Cloud.
Alright. With all this sorted and out of the way, it's time to head to our two destinations: Corel and Fort Condor, to stop Shinra from acquiring the Huge Materia for… some… reason?
We're heading for Corel first, since the thought of dealing with Fort Condor's minigame kills me on the inside. Not much to tell, the town's the same aside from minor dialogue from the locals telling us Shinra soldiers went up to Mt Corel saying they're collecting Huge Materia to blow up Meteor, so we head across that rope bridge that inexplicably has rails set into it, and then reach the Reactor.
These are standard soldier goons and they are promptly annihilated.
I don't know if I brought this up before, seeing as I used Cid for all of five minutes, but his Limit Breaks are where the old Dragoon Jump stuff lives. I don't know if we'll get a chance to see his full kit in this playthrough, which would be a shame because Dragoon was my first class in FFXIV and several of its moves are named after Cid's moves specifically, since he's the first dragoon in the series to have the concept of Jump be expanded into several moves and tiers as opposed to just 'Jump.'
For now, all he has is Boost Jump, which is effectively just the Dragoon's Jump from previous games and which you can (sort of) see above: Cid leaps into the air, then comes down on the opponent with a descending thrust. It's fine; it's a lv 1 Limit Break, it does single-target damage, it does its job.
Once the guards are out of the way, the party senses something coming, and throw themselves out of the way of the Reactor's door, and out comes…
…a train!
Cid: "Looks like they're takin' off with the Huge Materia in that train!"
Barret: "NO! You damn boneheads!"
Red: "Did the Shinra beat us?"
Cid: "Hey, do you know who I am? I'm Cid - that's who the hell I am! Now let me just handle it!"
Having said this, Cid backs up and heads into the Reactor, where he somehow finds a second train, starts it, and the group piles into the locomotive as they head down the tracks.
It turns out nobody on board knows how to actually drive the damned thing. Incredible. Cid's best guess is that it has something to do with the levers in front of him, which leads us into, sigh, another minigame. At least this one is simple… For now; we just have to press [Directional Button Up] and [MENU] rapidly alternating. On a PSX controller, this would have been the Up Arrow and the Triangle Button respectively, each button being placed at the top of their respective pad, so it makes intuitive sense (you're moving two levers that are side by side), but that is lost in translation. Once we've sped up the train enough, it lines up with the enemy train, and we jump from one onto the other (presumably leaving the first train to crash horribly).
At the beginning of the minigame, Cid has the incredibly ominous sentence "Judging from the enemy's speed, I'd say it'll take about 10 minutes," which sounds like the game is saying that I'm going to have to play the dumb lever-pushing game for ten minutes, but that's just bad translation/bad script; he means that we will have 10 minutes to complete the train sequence. This is… Ample time, in theory, but… You'll see.
Once we've landed on the train, we start a gauntlet of fights against Shinra machines; each individual cart along the train has its own encounter.
This guy, 'Wolfmeister,' is my highlight of the day because he goes into that folder of enemies that FFXIV used by pretty much copying their original appearance 1:1 in a new engine, and I always like finding these, like little easter eggs I didn't know would be easter eggs until I ran into them. In FFXIV, this is the model for a generic category of enemies labeled some variant of 'Magitek Colossus,' which are the Garlean Empire's most powerful non-unique war machines. Here, Wolfmeister serves as a miniboss on the way to the train's true boss, EAGLE GUN.
Insert hawk shriek set against the star-spangled banner.
This breathes new life into my theory that humanity were originally a NATO space colony expedition.
Anyway, I don't have much to say about this on a gameplay level other than considering how the stakes of this stage of the game are all about the giant meteorite headed towards the Planet to kill us all, it's endlessly funny to me to solve encounters with a MP Turbo-boosted Comet.
A taste of things to come.
Even using the C-Team, and even fighting through a gauntlet of increasingly tougher opponents leading up to a flying death robot bird, I'm not in much danger. I get four turns a round, and whether it's summons, MP Turbo Comet, Beta/Trine/Aqualung, or the odd Limit Break, I can easily deal over two thousand damage per character per round, so even Eagle Gun's 17,000 HP evaporate in three turns max. Once it's out of the way, we're free to confront the conductor.
In a frankly misplaced display of loyalty, this soldier which just saw us carve through a horde of elite Shinra machines decides to make a stand alone against Avalanche, which is played as a standard combat encounter against a lone soldier without any power-ups. The mismatch in power does a pretty good job at narratively selling how pointless this act of defiance is; still, I respect this man's bravery and commitment to his duty, which is why I choose to take him out the way Shinra would have wanted:
By casting Warcrimeaga.
After our victory, Cid actually says he'll "never forget" that lone soldier for having the guts to come after him.
With this man's horrible death, the Huge Materia is in our hands… Provided we can actually stop the train, which is currently heading for a catastrophic collision with North Corel. Which, hm.
Okay.
So, the idea here is, on a controller, you would be either pushing Arrow Up + Triangle or Arrow Down + X, which intuitively corresponds to 'pulling' both levers up and down. The fact that these keys are all over my keyboard makes it slightly more awkward, but I have three minutes, it should be fine, right?
Except… It doesn't work? I have no idea what's going on here. I try every combination of the keys I've been given, and they don't seem to… do… anything. Except sometimes they do! The normal flow of this scene is that the first times you do the requested input, the train goes faster, but that's not actually due to player error, it's just how the scene is scripted, and with the third time you input the command, the train comes to a halt. But for whatever reason, this script seems to just be completely unrelated to the increasingly frantic and random inputs I am giving to the game.
…
I'm gonna be real, part of me wonders if this 'minigame' isn't actually a total bluff, the script goes on unrelated to player action, and the only thing the minigame is meant to do is induce precisely that state of frantic button-mashing in hope of something happening followed by relief when it does. But, like.
At one point during this sequence, I ran out of button combinations to try to I just tabbed down (with the countdown ticking down) to Google if there was something I was missing because I was facing the prospect of somehow getting a non-standard game over and having to redo everything?
I mean, it's not. Looking it up, it's very clearly possible to succeed at the minigame with minutes to spare, as well as to fail completely and have the train crash into the town, which actually gets you a new backdrop for the town and special dialogue including Barret lamenting that he keeps failing his own town. Thankfully, that won't be a problem for us, as eventually frantic button mashing wins the day.
Specifically, Cid gives up on using the levers, shouts 'SHIT!' and slams his fist onto the 'dashboad,' and the train pulls to a stop just short of the town limit.
You know, it's interesting that this train is an old-timey steam locomotive - we've seen modern Shinra trains, and they're, I think, consciously designed after the mid-20th century Mercury trains, which means they might or might not be steam trains themselves? But this one is clearly older and, judging from its wagons all being open-air carts, I think it's pretty safe to say that it's… A coal-powered coal-carrying train. Which is now threatening to blow up what remains of Corel, a coal-mining town that Shinra convinced to abandon coal mining, and whose coal-powered train it is now using.
There's some layered irony there.
Anyway, we stop the train just in time and save the day!
Soon enough, two of the townsfolk who I'm pretty sure are the same who stopped Barret the first time we came through town are here to talk to us.
NPC: "Aren't you the ones that stopped the Shinra train?"
NPC: "The Shinra was just about to destroy our lives again…"
NPC: "It might be full of junk, but this is the only home we got, Barret!!"
Barret: "Of… Of course! We're all born and raised in the coal mines! No matter how tough it gets, our hearts burn bright red like coal!"
NPC: "To hell with Meteor! We're Coal Miners, aren't we? We'll dig a deep tunnel and hide from Meteor!"
NPC: [Turns to a child.] "Hey, kid! How about givin' somethin' to these guys fighting the Shinra?"
Child: [Approaches.] "I got it out of a well. Isn't it an amazing rock!!"
[Received 'Ultima' Materia!]
…
First off, the whole "pride of a coal miner" angle never stops being weird. I… They're going right back to being coal miners when we finally defeat Sephiroth and the Shinra threat, aren't they? That said, the idea of them building tunnels to protect themselves from Meteor is nice for showing us random people deciding to be proactive in making concrete, actionable plans for how to survive the disaster, rather than just wallowing in despair or embracing denial.
But also.
Little Timmy just went and dug Ultima out of a well.
I need a moment to process that. It's foreshadowed, sort of, in that the kid told us there was something shiny inside the well that he wanted to find and sell in earlier visits to North Corel, but it's still…
Even VI, with its weird treatment of Espers, had more respect for high-end magic than VII does. You actually had to defeat Deathgaze to get Bahamut, and the weapon shop keeper gave Ragnarok as a legendary treasure he'd kept for himself. VII had a baby chocobo cough up (possibly literally) the Flare Materia after we gave him scritches, and now has a child in the poorest town in the game just happen upon Ultima in a well, and the last Summon Materia we found was literally just lying on the ground. Part of it genuinely feels like the devs are doing it on purpose as like… I don't know, either "the most powerful magic isn't truly necessary to finish the game so we put it behind silly, optional gag moments" or "the greatest prizes are found in the unlikeliest places," or something?
(Of note, Ultima is like FullCure: It does nothing at first, and we'll need it at lv 2 before it actually unlocks Ultima, so for now as far as anyone's concerned it is little more than a shiny rock.)
…
My Problem With Materia
I feel like Materia exists on two separate layers of narrative and gameplay in a way that bothers me. It's not the same as the Esper/Magicite problem, but it is like the Esper/Magicite problem, for different reasons.
On Layer One, we have the general presentation of Materia as part of the world. Unlike in some other games where the source of magic is an afterthought, Materia is thoroughly integrated into VII's setting and story. We know how Materia is produced (gathering and compressing great quantities of Mako, or such amounts naturally coalescing together over time), we know what it's made of (the memories of the Ancients imbued in the energy of the Lifestream), we know what impact it has on society and the world (magic has been commodified and is put on sale in towns shop, soldiers have access to Materia as part of their equipment, industrial production of Materia is crucial to modern warfare and gives an overwhelming advantage to countries that produce it against countries that don't, like Wutai). Major plot events revolve both around the Black Materia, which is an ancient, mystical creation of the Cetra, and the Huge Materia, which is a modern product of an industrial, militarized society.
On Layer Two, we have the specific presentation of Materia as part of the combat system. Materia comes in the form of shiny rocks that are inserted into worn equipment and carried weapons, and provides physical and mental enhancements, the ability to heal injuries, the power to call lightning bolts, cast fireballs, and to temporarily summon powerful magical constructs with god-like names and appearances. This is what Materia does, practically speaking, what it is useful for.
These two layers do not ever intersect.
Materia as a strategic concern of the FF7 universe and Materia as a tactical tool used by the characters in combat have zero overlap. No character ever uses Fire to melt an ice barrier (as in IV), attempts successfully or not to heal a wounded character's injury with Cure (as in V), or uses a spell in the background to show 'oh btw magic is happening here' (as in VI). Materia is a major resource and interest of nation like Midgar, but as far as the story is concerned, Cloud and his friends are all mildly superhuman weaponmasters who punch, kick and cut their way to victory, and their opponents can be divided into 'humans with guns', 'big robots with bigger guns', and 'magical monster who don't require Materia as a justification to do magic stuff.'
As funny as it is to theorize, we are not actually given any indication that Cait Sith is using the Manipulate Materia to mind-control people into letting him tag along, or that Yuffie is using the ancient mystical stored wisdoms of the Ancients on how to rob people as opposed to just robbing them the mundane way.
And, in turn, the fact that we just found the Flare Materia on a random baby chocobo doesn't matter to the plot. There is no question of whether the Ultima Materia is a power so rare and great that Shinra might actually want to seize it as a strategic weapon. Scarlet has that scene where she looks at the Titan Materia, scoffs at it being worthless and tosses it away, but that Materia could be anything, none of it is about Titan or tells us anything about what, if anything, Scarlet thinks of Summon Materia. I mean, there's been zero indication of what a Summon is, or how summoning works - it's just here because it's a Final Fantasy staple, I guess, the least explanation it's ever had in the series, even way back in III; no character ever mentions summoning in-character, at all.
Finding the Huge Materia is a major plot beat but, as far as we know, the Huge Materia functions basically as just… A big explosive to blow up Meteor with?
What I'm saying is that, if you cut footage of the combat scenes and shop screens from the game, you could watch the whole game so far and have no idea what Materia does, only that it is valuable in the sense that artillery shells and mass-produced body armor are. They still function perfectly well in their role as a strategic resource sought out by armies and nations, but in fact they could exist purely in that role and nothing would change; no Shinra executive will find themselves wanting for a Thundara to throw at our protagonist, no PC will find themselves deprived of Cure during a critical cutscene.
And that, from a presentation and narrative standpoint, frustrates me. Because to put it bluntly, the combat gameplay is telling me one thing, and the story is telling me another. One, that magic is real in this world, is part of daily life, and is an integral part of modern combat, and modern soldiers and armies fight with Fire and Shiva and HP while ordinary civilians can buy Cure at the local shop. The other, that this is a world in which magic, while real, mostly only manifests in the form of spirits, monsters, the concept of the Lifestream and the occasional biblical disaster invoked upon the world, while ordinary people are just like in our world and our main character is, at best, particularly good at wielding a very heavy sword and using it to slay monsters.
And there's one of these worlds that I like more than the other.
So there you go. That was my big rant about why the presentation of magic as a whole in the FF7 setting frustrates me. Do with it as you will, and let's get back to the plot.
And that means, to my woe and pain, dealing with Fort Condor. According to the locals, Shinra's new plan is to just blow up the Reactor and then take the Huge Materia from the ashes. I'm not sure how that changes anything from their previous strategy of seizing the reactor, considering the end result is the same, "if they win the battle the Reactor is lost," but well, the stakes have been raised, this is the final battle for Fort Condor, and all that.
We talk to the monk-looking guy in the shack upstairs who tells us Shinra is on the move and this time we can't just pay them to deal with it, we have to actually deal with the threat first-hand. So it's time. We must, at long last, engage with the system.
We have forty thousand gil. Units cost around 400 gil an item. The enemy will be coming at us with as many as 45 units in total; just to match their strength, we'll be putting in over 20k, half of our remaining wealth, and the enemy has a multitude of separate unit types - Beasts, Wyverns and Barbarians, plus the powerful commander type. For safety, we'll need a solid spread of counter-units and to bank on having more total units than the enemy so as to secure an advantage and gang up on the commander. It's going to cost a lot of money, and take a long, long time.
…
Or we just let them through unopposed.
The wiki says up to 45 enemy units, but only 17 have had time to spawn before reaching the objective.
This was mentioned in the thread by readers, but not everybody reads the thread, so let me explain: Failing the Condor War minigame does not necessarily result in failing the Condor War. In every instance of the minigame, if the enemy does manage to push through the mercenary forces gathered by Cloud and his friends, what happens instead is that we are given a chance to run out as a 'last line of defense' to try and hold back the enemy by fighting their Commander, and only if we lose that fight do we lose this sequence of the Condor War minigame.
Which means that if we don't engage with the Condor War RTS at all, if we literally buy no units, set the speed to max and wait for the enemy to reach us, then all that happens is we get a normal boss fight.
To rephrase, the game's only "penalty" for refusing to engage with its poorly-designed, awful-looking RTS minigame that costs tens of thousands of gil to win and takes hours to resolve… is that we get to engage with the well-designed, fun standard encounter design that supports the entire rest of the game.
This feels like some kind of metaphor.
It's interesting that Shinra's "commander" unit is, like… a huge monster with horns. Is it part of their line of experimental modified humans, is it a 'commander' in name only that's really more like Sauron sending in the trolls against Minas Tirith, or is it actually a fully sapient general? I guess we'll never know. The Grand Horn has a few notable attacks like Poison Breath or Grand Attack, which does a big light show and explodes the earth, but ultimately it's not much of a threat and is quickly dealt with.
I did get pretty close to the line with Cid here, but I felt fairly confident in the timing of my damage to not bother with healing.
And that's the final battle for the fate of Fort Condor sealed. Shinra pulls back, the locals are triumphant and thankful and say they doubt Shinra will attack again… But this celebration is interrupted by a surprising and momentous event.
I will take guesses on what happens next from anyone who feels like gambling. Personally, I've seen it coming since pretty much the first 'giant mythical bird that is the only one of its species sits on a peak to hatch its egg,' because, well, that's a pretty well-established myth.
The egg cracks, and a great light surges from it, then fire, engulfing the Condor in a great fiery blast in which appears the shadow of a great bird, and when it is gone, the Condor falls from its perch and the egg is broken.
Yeah, this is literally the myth about the Phoenix immolating itself to birth the egg of its rebirth.
The guy in the shack is pretty bewildered, though, having no idea what happens, and asks us to go check it out.
As expected, we find a giant chick, and at its feet, the Phoenix Materia - one of the few summon Materias to kinda make sense narratively as something to receive at this moment, the memory of the adult Condor (I don't know why they called it that other than just try to obfuscate the 'phoenix' association from the player) crystalized in Materia to summon. The baby bird then flies away.
Going back to the guy in the shack, he asks us to report to his father (...I really thought that was an old lady, sometimes those early 3D models are hard to parse).
Although that 'there isn't anything we can give you' thing is a lie, as he then promptly gives us…
…another piece of Huge Materia.
The group expresses confusion, to which the old man replies that they retrieved the Huge Materia from the reactor a while back; Cid asks what the hell we've been fighting for, then, and the old man says the Fort Condor resistance was never about protecting the reactor, but protecting the Condor.
I… thought that was established the very first time we visited this place? That all this was about the one-of-a-kind bird in the middle of its unique reproductive cycle?
Old Man: "When that reactor was built, they forced us to help. That's how we knew what was inside the reactor. I knew this day would come, so after the Shinra left, I sneaked in and took the Materia. I didn't mean to fool you, but I guess that's how it ended up. I'm really sorry."
I'm genuinely confused. We were told 'this is about protecting the Condor and its egg' the first time we showed up here, everyone had a dialogue bit about 'new life is important and a metaphor for cultivating new things out of a dying world, we agree to do this' back then. I guess the 'trick' was that they'd already removed the Huge Materia so they could have just given it to us and we could have left them to fend for themselves? But, again, in the story everyone already agreed to protect the Condor hours ago.
From the Condor guys' point of view it's a bit less explicable, since if what they care about is the Condor, and what Shinra wants is the Huge Materia, they could have just given them the Huge Materia in exchange for Shinra leaving them alone, but this would require trusting Shinra to honor an agreement, which would be foolish. Really, the game is trying to introduce a twist about well-meaning deceit here where one just… isn't necessary and doesn't make sense.
Anyway, that's two Huge Materias packed. Cid says the last Huge Materia will be at the Underwater Reactor in Junon, and Barret says we should head there straightaway, but Cid counters that Shinra will probably be on high alert since we keep messing with them so we might as well take a break and check on Cloud and Tifa. I'm not sure that logic makes sense, but it signals where we're supposed to go next, so back to Mideel it is.
Cloud's condition is unchanged, but Tifa's isn't. Girl's been wearing herself ragged caring for Cloud (considering how he's unresponsive to everything and there are other professionals around I assume that mostly means she hasn't slept at all).
When we talk to Tifa, she's starting to seriously look the worse for wear.
Sometimes when someone is sick, they'll never get better, and you have to decide whether you can face the prospect of staying by their side as they just never improve and get worse and eventually die, and it's not an easy thing to accept.
Obviously though, this isn't where the story is taking us. Instead, as Tifa wonders if there is truly any hope for Cloud, a great tremor shakes the ground, knocking her to the ground, and Cloud looks up and warns, "They're coming!!"
Cid runs outside, where the screen rumbles and flashes with light to signify the earthquake tearing through Mideel. Cid then… Pulls an explanation for it entirely out of his ass?
Cid: "What's this? The Lifestream is gushing up from below the surface of the earth! Damn, that's… This is bad!!"
[Tifa comes out.]
Tifa: "Cid!? What's wrong?"
Cid: "N, nothin'!! You and Cloud get inside quick!!"
Tifa: "But I…"
Cid: "Hey, don't worry about a thing. I ain't about to die that easily."
Tifa: "Be careful!"
Cid: "Okay, here I go! Watch this!"
I don't know what baffles me more about this scene. The expository line about how this earthquake is specifically caused by Lifestream surges like Cid has any way of seeing it happen, the classic sexism angle about telling Tifa to stay inside while Cid Deals With It (granted, Tifa in this scene seems to be running on fumes), or the idea that Cid might… deal with… an earthquake? Somehow? What is he hoping to do? Stab falling boulders with his spear?
Thankfully, a giant monster spares us all this embarrassment by showing up to fight us as a stabbable stand-in for the threat of nature's destruction. We'd be proper fucked if this was any ordinary earthquake, but as long as it's keyed to a monster we can stab, everything will be fine.
HOLY SHIT, IT'S THE ULTIMA WEAPON!? I RETRACT ALL MY SARCASM, THIS IS THE BEST THING TO HAPPEN ALL SESSION
I mean, it's labeled 'Ultimate Weapon,' and in context of the old no-context translation that didn't have established localization canon to draw on, it's understandable why the translator erred on the side of translating '(アルテマウェポン, Arutema Wepon?)' using words that are actually English words, so Ultimate. But no; this the Ultima Weapon, our friend from FFVI come back in greater shape than ever as a centaur-dragon kaiju-mecha thing.
Which incidentally answers some of my earlier comments about the scale of the [Sapphire] Weapon by just being way smaller.
But this, at last… is an exciting fight.
The Ultima Weapon starts the fight by casting Quara, dealing massive Earth damage to the whole party, easily cutting their HP in half. I am, at this point, pretty rusty on fighting opponents who actually matter, so my smooth buff routine is totally out of practice. It doesn't help that, when I fire Sense at the UW, it returns… No result. I may have mentioned this before when talking about the inexplicably tough dinosaur near Bone Village, but Sense automatically fails on enemies with over 30k HP, which means… Probably most of the endgame bosses, unfortunately. I don't like this mechanic, but it is what it is. I quickly buff everyone with a round of Regen All, but by the time I remember Big Guard exists, the UW has already delivered a Claw attack to Cid, who hasn't had time to heal the damage and is immediately KO.
The situation seems dire, and the Ultima Weapon follows up withHyperbeam Ultima Beam, which hits everyone hard enough to send them into critical damage… And to trigger Red and Barret's Limit Breaks. I immediately throw in quick succession Life at Cid and Cura All to get everyone up to speed and in a position to survive the next attack, then I can finally get Big Guard up…
…and this motherfucker just up and leaves.
I'M SORRY!? WAS I NOT GOOD ENOUGH FOR YOU?? WAS I NOT WORTH YOUR TIME? IT'S NOT MY FAULT MOST OF THE GAME IS SO EASY I FORGOT MY BASIC COMBAT ROTATION!
I have never felt so insulted.
Anyway I guess Mideel is blowing up.
Cid: "It looks like the Lifestream has settled as well."
[A new tremor immediately shows that Cid was just spouting total bullshit.]
Cid: "Damn, you gotta be kiddin'!! Th, this is bad! The main stream is kickin' up! Somethin' way bigger than that last one is on its way!! No good!! Get outta here!!"
Red: "But what about Tifa and Cloud!?"
Cid: "Goddammit!! Don't have time to worry about anyone other than yourself! Don't know when that stream'll blow…"
[A greater tremor and a flash of light.]
Cid: "Whoa!! There's no time, hurry!"
[Everyone runs off screen, Cid pausing only briefly to look back.]
Cid: "Tifa!! Cloud!! Get outta here!!"
I'm… conflicted on this scene. On the one hand, it's true that in crisis scenarios like natural disasters, sometimes the 'heroic' or 'protagonist' thing to do just ends up adding more bodies to the pile, the classic example being an untrained swimmer jumping after a drowning person, and sometimes it's good for stories to actually address and show that even a protagonist sometimes has to pull back and hope others make it out on their own because their help would just put themselves in danger for no gain. On the other hand, I'm… not sure… this situation justifies it? Part of it is that the whole Lifestream Earthquake really struggles with the limitations of the PSX to sell the big Roland Emmerich disaster scene (at least until we reach the FMV sequence, which is much better about it), so it's hard to take in how bad the situation is, or why Cid is even attributing it to Lifestream-related causes (let alone sensing how individual streams behave).
He also doesn't even bother trying to properly warn Tifa; back in the infirmary, she's just standing around musing that the tremors are getting worse, then calmly asking Cloud to wait a minute and asking the doctor for more advice; she clearly has no idea of how bad Cid thinks the situation is, and neither does the doctor initially. She asks if Cloud shouldn't be moved to a safer area, the doctor hesitates but agrees, and Tifa goes to move Cloud's wheelchair - then all of a sudden the doctor shouts that the house is coming down, Tifa rushes out of the house pushing the wheelchair, and we move into a proper FMV just as the earthquake reaches its peak and the town of Mideel all of a sudden starts to come apart.
It's not fucking around. All of a sudden, the town splits into chunks, turning upside down and being swallowed by the earth, into the churning green waters of the Lifestream. The clinic is the first to go, almost certainly dooming the doctor and norse, and any of the other citizens who didn't flee ahead of time are certainly doomed. It's a really good disaster scene for my money, with some impressive work done with the very limited facial expressions on these models (for whatever reason, this FMV is using a more high-resolution version of the Playmobil models, rather than the full, 'realistic' 3D renders the characters have in some of the other FMVs).
Tifa and Cloud fall together into the raging Lifestream, and disappear from view.
…
And that's where we'll leave off for today!
The following sequence is pure narrative, and pretty significant narrative at that, so it's going to get its own update written later this week. This will also help me cope with the frustration that one of the theories I kept for myself and didn't put in one of my updates turned out to have been completely right, and I would have looked really smart if I had said it out loud ahead of time; I didn't because it tied together everything so neatly that it felt like stretching things a little too far. Turns out that was because it was actually simply just correct. Ah well.
So! How did the Cid sequence fare as a part of the game?
Eeeeh, it did okay. It was, essentially, a breather episode. And don't get me wrong, breather episodes are necessary; it's actually a good move in my mind to put in a more low-key, episode-of-the-week adventure here between the emotional heavy-hitters of 'North Pole to Junon' and 'the Lifestream.' We get Wacky Chain-Smoking Swearsalot Grandpa as team leader, and we run about beating up Shinra goons and Shinra robots to steal their Materia like it's early Part 1 in Midgar all over again!
The Execution is mid at best. Cid's takeover of leadership is poorly written and poorly justified, the minigames are annoying (and one of them most notable in that losing it on purpose is the objectively best approach), the bosses are nothing, the Ultima Weapon blue-balled me. And ultimately, the game didn't do anything particularly interesting with Cid on a narrative level, even if it was fun hanging out with Barret and Nanaki for a change of pace. The rewards are pretty amazing except they won't pay off until hours from now when we actually unlock Flare, Curaja or Ultima (although, to be fair, the other spells on the Flare/Contain Materia are genuinely good, so it's not worthless).
With all that said, things are looking up, as we're about to hit some Major Leagues narrative content.
Thank you for reading.
Next Time: The Lifestream!
Ahem.
We resume the game as Cid takes over leadership duties for the party.
Vincent: "It appears my feelings vanished into thin air ever since my long slumber…"
Vincent has a fascinating bit of missable dialogue in which he casually mentions that his transformation appears to have muted his emotions, which brings a whole new light to his 'silent and brooding' affect and could really have used being put… Somewhere in the story.
I'll say this about the Cid switch - I was playing up my sheer outrage a bit at the end of the last update, but it did genuinely make me stop playing the game for a few days, not because it's That Bad a story development, but because, well… I spent long, precious minutes of my life curating the perfect arrangement of Materia for Tifa, Yuffie, and Vincent. And then that group didn't see any action at all and then Tifa got kicked out and swapped for Cid, and I realized I was going to have to redo all my Materia, and I said 'fuck this' and went to bed.
As far as low points in writing go, 'Cid becomes party leader!' is nowhere near Kefka single-handedly annihilating the entire Esper population. But frequent party swaps are incredibly annoying in the Materia system.
For now, though, we at least have a clear window of gameplay ahead of us, so it's time to build up what I like to call…
The C-Team.
Look, it's not like I have anything against Barret and Nanaki, in fact I love them, but their last plot significant plot beat for both of them was back in Cosmo Canyon and I haven't been using them much in main story stuff since, so they're lv 41 and 42, compared to Cloud being 50 at time of leaving the party.
Also, Cid's current best weapon is… A little wacky.
The Dragoon Lance directly echoes back to older games, as Cid himself continues the tradition of the Dragoon without directly calling out the name (in character, I mean, since the spear obviously uses it). Mechanically, it's an odd duck; it has what appears to be the maximum possible amount of Materia slots way earlier than other characters get them, but none of them are linked. This means Cid can equip as many individual Materia as we want, granting him a vast array of spells, summons and support skills, but he can't do any combos, no Restore + All, no Time + Added Effect, which leaves him unable to really leverage the versatility of the system. This could be somewhat mitigated by giving him an Armor item with joined slots, but I figure might as well just double down and give him the Edincoat, which is the same thing but as Armor, so Cid has like half of my Materia library equipped on him and he sucks at using them.
And now we're off!
By which I mean we immediately double back to Mideel to finish visiting the village, since the cutscene interrupted us last time.
It quickly becomes apparent that, slightly odd phrasing from last update aside, no, the Mideelians are not so disconnected from the world as to have missed the giant angry flaming eyeball in the sky, they're merely safe from the human side of the conflict, ie they've never really had to worry about Shinra or war, but they do worry about Meteor, the Lifestream surging to the surface and causing earthquakes (this is foreshadowing btw), and the Planet's anger at humans for having abused her for so long, which is, I think, the first time someone directly says 'the Planet is probably mad at us' as a completely separate issue from Jenova/Sephiroth.
This old man is at peace with the possibility of death, but worries about his son and his family living in 'that far-off town,' wherever that is. The item on his bed is an Elixir; if we take it, he is, shockingly, the first NPC in the game to actually call us out on it! It's funny, but it's more amusing than anything; Cid has the opportunity to try to deny or to admit it, in which case he brazenly shows no remorse for his thievery and tells the old man he'll make better use of it anyway, whereupon the old man laughs and lets us keep the item.
Fun fact: That woman with the pet white chocobo chick is in every shop in town, seemingly simultaneously, trying to grab and hoard anything and everything she can in preparation for the apocalypse, and being rude to us because she's worried we're going to buy stuff because she has a chance to hoard it all herself.
Like I said: A broad showcase of human reactions to the possibility of the end of the world.
The weapon store has some new weapons for everyone, including, as always, for characters I just bought weaker weapons for at the previous town I visited and who haven't seen a single fight in that time, and of course I don't have enough gil to upgrade everyone. Sigh.
If we visit Cloud and Tifa, the doctor and nurse tell us that his condition hasn't changed and that we need to wait as 'these things take time,' and that Tifa has been steadfastly watching over him. If we talk to Cloud, he actually has one coherent line, even if it's mumbled from far away - he's asking "What number am I?"
Oh, Cloud.
Alright. With all this sorted and out of the way, it's time to head to our two destinations: Corel and Fort Condor, to stop Shinra from acquiring the Huge Materia for… some… reason?
We're heading for Corel first, since the thought of dealing with Fort Condor's minigame kills me on the inside. Not much to tell, the town's the same aside from minor dialogue from the locals telling us Shinra soldiers went up to Mt Corel saying they're collecting Huge Materia to blow up Meteor, so we head across that rope bridge that inexplicably has rails set into it, and then reach the Reactor.
These are standard soldier goons and they are promptly annihilated.
I don't know if I brought this up before, seeing as I used Cid for all of five minutes, but his Limit Breaks are where the old Dragoon Jump stuff lives. I don't know if we'll get a chance to see his full kit in this playthrough, which would be a shame because Dragoon was my first class in FFXIV and several of its moves are named after Cid's moves specifically, since he's the first dragoon in the series to have the concept of Jump be expanded into several moves and tiers as opposed to just 'Jump.'
For now, all he has is Boost Jump, which is effectively just the Dragoon's Jump from previous games and which you can (sort of) see above: Cid leaps into the air, then comes down on the opponent with a descending thrust. It's fine; it's a lv 1 Limit Break, it does single-target damage, it does its job.
Once the guards are out of the way, the party senses something coming, and throw themselves out of the way of the Reactor's door, and out comes…
…a train!
Cid: "Looks like they're takin' off with the Huge Materia in that train!"
Barret: "NO! You damn boneheads!"
Red: "Did the Shinra beat us?"
Cid: "Hey, do you know who I am? I'm Cid - that's who the hell I am! Now let me just handle it!"
Having said this, Cid backs up and heads into the Reactor, where he somehow finds a second train, starts it, and the group piles into the locomotive as they head down the tracks.
It turns out nobody on board knows how to actually drive the damned thing. Incredible. Cid's best guess is that it has something to do with the levers in front of him, which leads us into, sigh, another minigame. At least this one is simple… For now; we just have to press [Directional Button Up] and [MENU] rapidly alternating. On a PSX controller, this would have been the Up Arrow and the Triangle Button respectively, each button being placed at the top of their respective pad, so it makes intuitive sense (you're moving two levers that are side by side), but that is lost in translation. Once we've sped up the train enough, it lines up with the enemy train, and we jump from one onto the other (presumably leaving the first train to crash horribly).
At the beginning of the minigame, Cid has the incredibly ominous sentence "Judging from the enemy's speed, I'd say it'll take about 10 minutes," which sounds like the game is saying that I'm going to have to play the dumb lever-pushing game for ten minutes, but that's just bad translation/bad script; he means that we will have 10 minutes to complete the train sequence. This is… Ample time, in theory, but… You'll see.
Once we've landed on the train, we start a gauntlet of fights against Shinra machines; each individual cart along the train has its own encounter.
This guy, 'Wolfmeister,' is my highlight of the day because he goes into that folder of enemies that FFXIV used by pretty much copying their original appearance 1:1 in a new engine, and I always like finding these, like little easter eggs I didn't know would be easter eggs until I ran into them. In FFXIV, this is the model for a generic category of enemies labeled some variant of 'Magitek Colossus,' which are the Garlean Empire's most powerful non-unique war machines. Here, Wolfmeister serves as a miniboss on the way to the train's true boss, EAGLE GUN.
Insert hawk shriek set against the star-spangled banner.
This breathes new life into my theory that humanity were originally a NATO space colony expedition.
Anyway, I don't have much to say about this on a gameplay level other than considering how the stakes of this stage of the game are all about the giant meteorite headed towards the Planet to kill us all, it's endlessly funny to me to solve encounters with a MP Turbo-boosted Comet.
A taste of things to come.
Even using the C-Team, and even fighting through a gauntlet of increasingly tougher opponents leading up to a flying death robot bird, I'm not in much danger. I get four turns a round, and whether it's summons, MP Turbo Comet, Beta/Trine/Aqualung, or the odd Limit Break, I can easily deal over two thousand damage per character per round, so even Eagle Gun's 17,000 HP evaporate in three turns max. Once it's out of the way, we're free to confront the conductor.
In a frankly misplaced display of loyalty, this soldier which just saw us carve through a horde of elite Shinra machines decides to make a stand alone against Avalanche, which is played as a standard combat encounter against a lone soldier without any power-ups. The mismatch in power does a pretty good job at narratively selling how pointless this act of defiance is; still, I respect this man's bravery and commitment to his duty, which is why I choose to take him out the way Shinra would have wanted:
By casting Warcrimeaga.
After our victory, Cid actually says he'll "never forget" that lone soldier for having the guts to come after him.
With this man's horrible death, the Huge Materia is in our hands… Provided we can actually stop the train, which is currently heading for a catastrophic collision with North Corel. Which, hm.
Okay.
So, the idea here is, on a controller, you would be either pushing Arrow Up + Triangle or Arrow Down + X, which intuitively corresponds to 'pulling' both levers up and down. The fact that these keys are all over my keyboard makes it slightly more awkward, but I have three minutes, it should be fine, right?
Except… It doesn't work? I have no idea what's going on here. I try every combination of the keys I've been given, and they don't seem to… do… anything. Except sometimes they do! The normal flow of this scene is that the first times you do the requested input, the train goes faster, but that's not actually due to player error, it's just how the scene is scripted, and with the third time you input the command, the train comes to a halt. But for whatever reason, this script seems to just be completely unrelated to the increasingly frantic and random inputs I am giving to the game.
…
I'm gonna be real, part of me wonders if this 'minigame' isn't actually a total bluff, the script goes on unrelated to player action, and the only thing the minigame is meant to do is induce precisely that state of frantic button-mashing in hope of something happening followed by relief when it does. But, like.
At one point during this sequence, I ran out of button combinations to try to I just tabbed down (with the countdown ticking down) to Google if there was something I was missing because I was facing the prospect of somehow getting a non-standard game over and having to redo everything?
I mean, it's not. Looking it up, it's very clearly possible to succeed at the minigame with minutes to spare, as well as to fail completely and have the train crash into the town, which actually gets you a new backdrop for the town and special dialogue including Barret lamenting that he keeps failing his own town. Thankfully, that won't be a problem for us, as eventually frantic button mashing wins the day.
Specifically, Cid gives up on using the levers, shouts 'SHIT!' and slams his fist onto the 'dashboad,' and the train pulls to a stop just short of the town limit.
You know, it's interesting that this train is an old-timey steam locomotive - we've seen modern Shinra trains, and they're, I think, consciously designed after the mid-20th century Mercury trains, which means they might or might not be steam trains themselves? But this one is clearly older and, judging from its wagons all being open-air carts, I think it's pretty safe to say that it's… A coal-powered coal-carrying train. Which is now threatening to blow up what remains of Corel, a coal-mining town that Shinra convinced to abandon coal mining, and whose coal-powered train it is now using.
There's some layered irony there.
Anyway, we stop the train just in time and save the day!
Soon enough, two of the townsfolk who I'm pretty sure are the same who stopped Barret the first time we came through town are here to talk to us.
NPC: "Aren't you the ones that stopped the Shinra train?"
NPC: "The Shinra was just about to destroy our lives again…"
NPC: "It might be full of junk, but this is the only home we got, Barret!!"
Barret: "Of… Of course! We're all born and raised in the coal mines! No matter how tough it gets, our hearts burn bright red like coal!"
NPC: "To hell with Meteor! We're Coal Miners, aren't we? We'll dig a deep tunnel and hide from Meteor!"
NPC: [Turns to a child.] "Hey, kid! How about givin' somethin' to these guys fighting the Shinra?"
Child: [Approaches.] "I got it out of a well. Isn't it an amazing rock!!"
[Received 'Ultima' Materia!]
…
First off, the whole "pride of a coal miner" angle never stops being weird. I… They're going right back to being coal miners when we finally defeat Sephiroth and the Shinra threat, aren't they? That said, the idea of them building tunnels to protect themselves from Meteor is nice for showing us random people deciding to be proactive in making concrete, actionable plans for how to survive the disaster, rather than just wallowing in despair or embracing denial.
But also.
Little Timmy just went and dug Ultima out of a well.
I need a moment to process that. It's foreshadowed, sort of, in that the kid told us there was something shiny inside the well that he wanted to find and sell in earlier visits to North Corel, but it's still…
Even VI, with its weird treatment of Espers, had more respect for high-end magic than VII does. You actually had to defeat Deathgaze to get Bahamut, and the weapon shop keeper gave Ragnarok as a legendary treasure he'd kept for himself. VII had a baby chocobo cough up (possibly literally) the Flare Materia after we gave him scritches, and now has a child in the poorest town in the game just happen upon Ultima in a well, and the last Summon Materia we found was literally just lying on the ground. Part of it genuinely feels like the devs are doing it on purpose as like… I don't know, either "the most powerful magic isn't truly necessary to finish the game so we put it behind silly, optional gag moments" or "the greatest prizes are found in the unlikeliest places," or something?
(Of note, Ultima is like FullCure: It does nothing at first, and we'll need it at lv 2 before it actually unlocks Ultima, so for now as far as anyone's concerned it is little more than a shiny rock.)
…
My Problem With Materia
I feel like Materia exists on two separate layers of narrative and gameplay in a way that bothers me. It's not the same as the Esper/Magicite problem, but it is like the Esper/Magicite problem, for different reasons.
On Layer One, we have the general presentation of Materia as part of the world. Unlike in some other games where the source of magic is an afterthought, Materia is thoroughly integrated into VII's setting and story. We know how Materia is produced (gathering and compressing great quantities of Mako, or such amounts naturally coalescing together over time), we know what it's made of (the memories of the Ancients imbued in the energy of the Lifestream), we know what impact it has on society and the world (magic has been commodified and is put on sale in towns shop, soldiers have access to Materia as part of their equipment, industrial production of Materia is crucial to modern warfare and gives an overwhelming advantage to countries that produce it against countries that don't, like Wutai). Major plot events revolve both around the Black Materia, which is an ancient, mystical creation of the Cetra, and the Huge Materia, which is a modern product of an industrial, militarized society.
On Layer Two, we have the specific presentation of Materia as part of the combat system. Materia comes in the form of shiny rocks that are inserted into worn equipment and carried weapons, and provides physical and mental enhancements, the ability to heal injuries, the power to call lightning bolts, cast fireballs, and to temporarily summon powerful magical constructs with god-like names and appearances. This is what Materia does, practically speaking, what it is useful for.
These two layers do not ever intersect.
Materia as a strategic concern of the FF7 universe and Materia as a tactical tool used by the characters in combat have zero overlap. No character ever uses Fire to melt an ice barrier (as in IV), attempts successfully or not to heal a wounded character's injury with Cure (as in V), or uses a spell in the background to show 'oh btw magic is happening here' (as in VI). Materia is a major resource and interest of nation like Midgar, but as far as the story is concerned, Cloud and his friends are all mildly superhuman weaponmasters who punch, kick and cut their way to victory, and their opponents can be divided into 'humans with guns', 'big robots with bigger guns', and 'magical monster who don't require Materia as a justification to do magic stuff.'
As funny as it is to theorize, we are not actually given any indication that Cait Sith is using the Manipulate Materia to mind-control people into letting him tag along, or that Yuffie is using the ancient mystical stored wisdoms of the Ancients on how to rob people as opposed to just robbing them the mundane way.
And, in turn, the fact that we just found the Flare Materia on a random baby chocobo doesn't matter to the plot. There is no question of whether the Ultima Materia is a power so rare and great that Shinra might actually want to seize it as a strategic weapon. Scarlet has that scene where she looks at the Titan Materia, scoffs at it being worthless and tosses it away, but that Materia could be anything, none of it is about Titan or tells us anything about what, if anything, Scarlet thinks of Summon Materia. I mean, there's been zero indication of what a Summon is, or how summoning works - it's just here because it's a Final Fantasy staple, I guess, the least explanation it's ever had in the series, even way back in III; no character ever mentions summoning in-character, at all.
Finding the Huge Materia is a major plot beat but, as far as we know, the Huge Materia functions basically as just… A big explosive to blow up Meteor with?
What I'm saying is that, if you cut footage of the combat scenes and shop screens from the game, you could watch the whole game so far and have no idea what Materia does, only that it is valuable in the sense that artillery shells and mass-produced body armor are. They still function perfectly well in their role as a strategic resource sought out by armies and nations, but in fact they could exist purely in that role and nothing would change; no Shinra executive will find themselves wanting for a Thundara to throw at our protagonist, no PC will find themselves deprived of Cure during a critical cutscene.
And that, from a presentation and narrative standpoint, frustrates me. Because to put it bluntly, the combat gameplay is telling me one thing, and the story is telling me another. One, that magic is real in this world, is part of daily life, and is an integral part of modern combat, and modern soldiers and armies fight with Fire and Shiva and HP while ordinary civilians can buy Cure at the local shop. The other, that this is a world in which magic, while real, mostly only manifests in the form of spirits, monsters, the concept of the Lifestream and the occasional biblical disaster invoked upon the world, while ordinary people are just like in our world and our main character is, at best, particularly good at wielding a very heavy sword and using it to slay monsters.
And there's one of these worlds that I like more than the other.
So there you go. That was my big rant about why the presentation of magic as a whole in the FF7 setting frustrates me. Do with it as you will, and let's get back to the plot.
And that means, to my woe and pain, dealing with Fort Condor. According to the locals, Shinra's new plan is to just blow up the Reactor and then take the Huge Materia from the ashes. I'm not sure how that changes anything from their previous strategy of seizing the reactor, considering the end result is the same, "if they win the battle the Reactor is lost," but well, the stakes have been raised, this is the final battle for Fort Condor, and all that.
We talk to the monk-looking guy in the shack upstairs who tells us Shinra is on the move and this time we can't just pay them to deal with it, we have to actually deal with the threat first-hand. So it's time. We must, at long last, engage with the system.
We have forty thousand gil. Units cost around 400 gil an item. The enemy will be coming at us with as many as 45 units in total; just to match their strength, we'll be putting in over 20k, half of our remaining wealth, and the enemy has a multitude of separate unit types - Beasts, Wyverns and Barbarians, plus the powerful commander type. For safety, we'll need a solid spread of counter-units and to bank on having more total units than the enemy so as to secure an advantage and gang up on the commander. It's going to cost a lot of money, and take a long, long time.
…
Or we just let them through unopposed.
The wiki says up to 45 enemy units, but only 17 have had time to spawn before reaching the objective.
This was mentioned in the thread by readers, but not everybody reads the thread, so let me explain: Failing the Condor War minigame does not necessarily result in failing the Condor War. In every instance of the minigame, if the enemy does manage to push through the mercenary forces gathered by Cloud and his friends, what happens instead is that we are given a chance to run out as a 'last line of defense' to try and hold back the enemy by fighting their Commander, and only if we lose that fight do we lose this sequence of the Condor War minigame.
Which means that if we don't engage with the Condor War RTS at all, if we literally buy no units, set the speed to max and wait for the enemy to reach us, then all that happens is we get a normal boss fight.
To rephrase, the game's only "penalty" for refusing to engage with its poorly-designed, awful-looking RTS minigame that costs tens of thousands of gil to win and takes hours to resolve… is that we get to engage with the well-designed, fun standard encounter design that supports the entire rest of the game.
This feels like some kind of metaphor.
It's interesting that Shinra's "commander" unit is, like… a huge monster with horns. Is it part of their line of experimental modified humans, is it a 'commander' in name only that's really more like Sauron sending in the trolls against Minas Tirith, or is it actually a fully sapient general? I guess we'll never know. The Grand Horn has a few notable attacks like Poison Breath or Grand Attack, which does a big light show and explodes the earth, but ultimately it's not much of a threat and is quickly dealt with.
I did get pretty close to the line with Cid here, but I felt fairly confident in the timing of my damage to not bother with healing.
And that's the final battle for the fate of Fort Condor sealed. Shinra pulls back, the locals are triumphant and thankful and say they doubt Shinra will attack again… But this celebration is interrupted by a surprising and momentous event.
I will take guesses on what happens next from anyone who feels like gambling. Personally, I've seen it coming since pretty much the first 'giant mythical bird that is the only one of its species sits on a peak to hatch its egg,' because, well, that's a pretty well-established myth.
The egg cracks, and a great light surges from it, then fire, engulfing the Condor in a great fiery blast in which appears the shadow of a great bird, and when it is gone, the Condor falls from its perch and the egg is broken.
Yeah, this is literally the myth about the Phoenix immolating itself to birth the egg of its rebirth.
The guy in the shack is pretty bewildered, though, having no idea what happens, and asks us to go check it out.
As expected, we find a giant chick, and at its feet, the Phoenix Materia - one of the few summon Materias to kinda make sense narratively as something to receive at this moment, the memory of the adult Condor (I don't know why they called it that other than just try to obfuscate the 'phoenix' association from the player) crystalized in Materia to summon. The baby bird then flies away.
Going back to the guy in the shack, he asks us to report to his father (...I really thought that was an old lady, sometimes those early 3D models are hard to parse).
Although that 'there isn't anything we can give you' thing is a lie, as he then promptly gives us…
…another piece of Huge Materia.
The group expresses confusion, to which the old man replies that they retrieved the Huge Materia from the reactor a while back; Cid asks what the hell we've been fighting for, then, and the old man says the Fort Condor resistance was never about protecting the reactor, but protecting the Condor.
I… thought that was established the very first time we visited this place? That all this was about the one-of-a-kind bird in the middle of its unique reproductive cycle?
Old Man: "When that reactor was built, they forced us to help. That's how we knew what was inside the reactor. I knew this day would come, so after the Shinra left, I sneaked in and took the Materia. I didn't mean to fool you, but I guess that's how it ended up. I'm really sorry."
I'm genuinely confused. We were told 'this is about protecting the Condor and its egg' the first time we showed up here, everyone had a dialogue bit about 'new life is important and a metaphor for cultivating new things out of a dying world, we agree to do this' back then. I guess the 'trick' was that they'd already removed the Huge Materia so they could have just given it to us and we could have left them to fend for themselves? But, again, in the story everyone already agreed to protect the Condor hours ago.
From the Condor guys' point of view it's a bit less explicable, since if what they care about is the Condor, and what Shinra wants is the Huge Materia, they could have just given them the Huge Materia in exchange for Shinra leaving them alone, but this would require trusting Shinra to honor an agreement, which would be foolish. Really, the game is trying to introduce a twist about well-meaning deceit here where one just… isn't necessary and doesn't make sense.
Anyway, that's two Huge Materias packed. Cid says the last Huge Materia will be at the Underwater Reactor in Junon, and Barret says we should head there straightaway, but Cid counters that Shinra will probably be on high alert since we keep messing with them so we might as well take a break and check on Cloud and Tifa. I'm not sure that logic makes sense, but it signals where we're supposed to go next, so back to Mideel it is.
Cloud's condition is unchanged, but Tifa's isn't. Girl's been wearing herself ragged caring for Cloud (considering how he's unresponsive to everything and there are other professionals around I assume that mostly means she hasn't slept at all).
When we talk to Tifa, she's starting to seriously look the worse for wear.
Sometimes when someone is sick, they'll never get better, and you have to decide whether you can face the prospect of staying by their side as they just never improve and get worse and eventually die, and it's not an easy thing to accept.
Obviously though, this isn't where the story is taking us. Instead, as Tifa wonders if there is truly any hope for Cloud, a great tremor shakes the ground, knocking her to the ground, and Cloud looks up and warns, "They're coming!!"
Cid runs outside, where the screen rumbles and flashes with light to signify the earthquake tearing through Mideel. Cid then… Pulls an explanation for it entirely out of his ass?
Cid: "What's this? The Lifestream is gushing up from below the surface of the earth! Damn, that's… This is bad!!"
[Tifa comes out.]
Tifa: "Cid!? What's wrong?"
Cid: "N, nothin'!! You and Cloud get inside quick!!"
Tifa: "But I…"
Cid: "Hey, don't worry about a thing. I ain't about to die that easily."
Tifa: "Be careful!"
Cid: "Okay, here I go! Watch this!"
I don't know what baffles me more about this scene. The expository line about how this earthquake is specifically caused by Lifestream surges like Cid has any way of seeing it happen, the classic sexism angle about telling Tifa to stay inside while Cid Deals With It (granted, Tifa in this scene seems to be running on fumes), or the idea that Cid might… deal with… an earthquake? Somehow? What is he hoping to do? Stab falling boulders with his spear?
Thankfully, a giant monster spares us all this embarrassment by showing up to fight us as a stabbable stand-in for the threat of nature's destruction. We'd be proper fucked if this was any ordinary earthquake, but as long as it's keyed to a monster we can stab, everything will be fine.
HOLY SHIT, IT'S THE ULTIMA WEAPON!? I RETRACT ALL MY SARCASM, THIS IS THE BEST THING TO HAPPEN ALL SESSION
I mean, it's labeled 'Ultimate Weapon,' and in context of the old no-context translation that didn't have established localization canon to draw on, it's understandable why the translator erred on the side of translating '(アルテマウェポン, Arutema Wepon?)' using words that are actually English words, so Ultimate. But no; this the Ultima Weapon, our friend from FFVI come back in greater shape than ever as a centaur-dragon kaiju-mecha thing.
Which incidentally answers some of my earlier comments about the scale of the [Sapphire] Weapon by just being way smaller.
But this, at last… is an exciting fight.
The Ultima Weapon starts the fight by casting Quara, dealing massive Earth damage to the whole party, easily cutting their HP in half. I am, at this point, pretty rusty on fighting opponents who actually matter, so my smooth buff routine is totally out of practice. It doesn't help that, when I fire Sense at the UW, it returns… No result. I may have mentioned this before when talking about the inexplicably tough dinosaur near Bone Village, but Sense automatically fails on enemies with over 30k HP, which means… Probably most of the endgame bosses, unfortunately. I don't like this mechanic, but it is what it is. I quickly buff everyone with a round of Regen All, but by the time I remember Big Guard exists, the UW has already delivered a Claw attack to Cid, who hasn't had time to heal the damage and is immediately KO.
The situation seems dire, and the Ultima Weapon follows up with
…and this motherfucker just up and leaves.
I'M SORRY!? WAS I NOT GOOD ENOUGH FOR YOU?? WAS I NOT WORTH YOUR TIME? IT'S NOT MY FAULT MOST OF THE GAME IS SO EASY I FORGOT MY BASIC COMBAT ROTATION!
I have never felt so insulted.
Anyway I guess Mideel is blowing up.
Cid: "It looks like the Lifestream has settled as well."
[A new tremor immediately shows that Cid was just spouting total bullshit.]
Cid: "Damn, you gotta be kiddin'!! Th, this is bad! The main stream is kickin' up! Somethin' way bigger than that last one is on its way!! No good!! Get outta here!!"
Red: "But what about Tifa and Cloud!?"
Cid: "Goddammit!! Don't have time to worry about anyone other than yourself! Don't know when that stream'll blow…"
[A greater tremor and a flash of light.]
Cid: "Whoa!! There's no time, hurry!"
[Everyone runs off screen, Cid pausing only briefly to look back.]
Cid: "Tifa!! Cloud!! Get outta here!!"
I'm… conflicted on this scene. On the one hand, it's true that in crisis scenarios like natural disasters, sometimes the 'heroic' or 'protagonist' thing to do just ends up adding more bodies to the pile, the classic example being an untrained swimmer jumping after a drowning person, and sometimes it's good for stories to actually address and show that even a protagonist sometimes has to pull back and hope others make it out on their own because their help would just put themselves in danger for no gain. On the other hand, I'm… not sure… this situation justifies it? Part of it is that the whole Lifestream Earthquake really struggles with the limitations of the PSX to sell the big Roland Emmerich disaster scene (at least until we reach the FMV sequence, which is much better about it), so it's hard to take in how bad the situation is, or why Cid is even attributing it to Lifestream-related causes (let alone sensing how individual streams behave).
He also doesn't even bother trying to properly warn Tifa; back in the infirmary, she's just standing around musing that the tremors are getting worse, then calmly asking Cloud to wait a minute and asking the doctor for more advice; she clearly has no idea of how bad Cid thinks the situation is, and neither does the doctor initially. She asks if Cloud shouldn't be moved to a safer area, the doctor hesitates but agrees, and Tifa goes to move Cloud's wheelchair - then all of a sudden the doctor shouts that the house is coming down, Tifa rushes out of the house pushing the wheelchair, and we move into a proper FMV just as the earthquake reaches its peak and the town of Mideel all of a sudden starts to come apart.
It's not fucking around. All of a sudden, the town splits into chunks, turning upside down and being swallowed by the earth, into the churning green waters of the Lifestream. The clinic is the first to go, almost certainly dooming the doctor and norse, and any of the other citizens who didn't flee ahead of time are certainly doomed. It's a really good disaster scene for my money, with some impressive work done with the very limited facial expressions on these models (for whatever reason, this FMV is using a more high-resolution version of the Playmobil models, rather than the full, 'realistic' 3D renders the characters have in some of the other FMVs).
Tifa and Cloud fall together into the raging Lifestream, and disappear from view.
…
And that's where we'll leave off for today!
The following sequence is pure narrative, and pretty significant narrative at that, so it's going to get its own update written later this week. This will also help me cope with the frustration that one of the theories I kept for myself and didn't put in one of my updates turned out to have been completely right, and I would have looked really smart if I had said it out loud ahead of time; I didn't because it tied together everything so neatly that it felt like stretching things a little too far. Turns out that was because it was actually simply just correct. Ah well.
So! How did the Cid sequence fare as a part of the game?
Eeeeh, it did okay. It was, essentially, a breather episode. And don't get me wrong, breather episodes are necessary; it's actually a good move in my mind to put in a more low-key, episode-of-the-week adventure here between the emotional heavy-hitters of 'North Pole to Junon' and 'the Lifestream.' We get Wacky Chain-Smoking Swearsalot Grandpa as team leader, and we run about beating up Shinra goons and Shinra robots to steal their Materia like it's early Part 1 in Midgar all over again!
The Execution is mid at best. Cid's takeover of leadership is poorly written and poorly justified, the minigames are annoying (and one of them most notable in that losing it on purpose is the objectively best approach), the bosses are nothing, the Ultima Weapon blue-balled me. And ultimately, the game didn't do anything particularly interesting with Cid on a narrative level, even if it was fun hanging out with Barret and Nanaki for a change of pace. The rewards are pretty amazing except they won't pay off until hours from now when we actually unlock Flare, Curaja or Ultima (although, to be fair, the other spells on the Flare/Contain Materia are genuinely good, so it's not worthless).
With all that said, things are looking up, as we're about to hit some Major Leagues narrative content.
Thank you for reading.
Next Time: The Lifestream!
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- Location
- the Republic
- Pronouns
- He/They
Meanwhile back in the day I rolled into the Ultima Weapon fight totally unprepared and breathed a huge sigh of relief when it fucked off mid-battle just before I wiped.
Great update! I legitimately cannot wait for the next sequence.
Great update! I legitimately cannot wait for the next sequence.
My unsupported headcanon is that there's some kind of "Will of the Lifestream" thing going on and events are being guided so the group most likely to save the Planet will run across the key Materia to do so.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
It's interesting to see 6's mid game plot beat of Terra's identity coma being reused here in the late game of 7 with cloud. It will be interesting to see how the resolution changes in the telling
- Location
- Texas
Actually…that brings up a good point. Previous games had genuine puzzle bosses. Using Reflect volleyball to deal with the three sisters, fighting a sentient black hole gate thing; they made you think, made you strategize. I think the closest FF7 gets is "don't hit the scorpion tank when it's tail is up" and maybe that Yin-Yang physical/magical split monster.
Yeesh, that was pretty cold of Cid. I guess he learned the wrong lesson from aborting the launch.
Guile
Having a really great time right now
Scarlett is actually incredibly jacked, she throws the bullets like Garp does cannonballs
I suppose the randomness is the point?Omicron said:
These remnants of knowledge, the bequest of the Ancients, are entirely random. All are one in the Lifestream. The magnum opus of the greatest archwizard and the knowledge that fire burns are worthy of exactly the same solemnity and deference:
None.
Those people are dead, and the only ones who could speak to them, likewise. With Aerith's death, the past is finally buried, just like ShinRa likes it.