Also a "pair the spares", I imagine. Aerith's, well, dead and she's got Zack anyways. Tifa's the usual Cloud hookup. Barrett is a dad and thus doesn't matter. Cid's got his... weird relationship with his assistant. Nananki's... yeah, not touching that with a 10-foot pole.
As a reminder (probably preaching to the choir here), Yuffie is 16 while Vincent is old enough to be Sephiroth's dad.
And then there's Shelke the Transparent, who's supposed to be a grown up, but.... well... this is how she looks like.
Yeah, Yuffie doesn't really have couple dynamic with Cloud (or Tifa or Aerith, for that matter), but more of a "bratty younger sister" vibe. And the rest of the cast is too old - Cid and Barret are nearing 40, Vincent is Hojo's age, Red is not human, and Cait Sith is Cait Sith - to truly have a couple dynamic with her. Of course, as mentioned, it hasn't stopped people from trying, but that's just the way fanon goes.
FFVII actually has probably the older cast in Final Fantasy history, doesn't it? With everybody but Yuffie and Nanaki being over 20, and three people above 35? FFIV had Tellah, Cid and Yang, FFV had Galuf and FFVI had Strago and Cyan, sure, but all of those had a number of child characters to compensate, and overall the cast tend to skew way younger. Or at least, that's my impression. What's everybody else's take on that?
Outside of one character's design, I'd argue it's a case of internet dwellers reading romantic intentions into Vincent's interactions more than any intended messaging on Square's part. Remember, characters don't even have to interact, just stand next to each other and you'll have people calling them an OTP.
I'd argue anything close to a romance for Vincent in Dirge of Cerberus was between Vincent and Shelke's older sister. It's just she has much less screen presence and is put into a coma about halfway through the game. That does explain where people reading romance between Shelke and Vincent come from though imo, because that's why Vincent gets protective of Shelke.
FFVII actually has probably the older cast in Final Fantasy history, doesn't it? With everybody but Yuffie and Nanaki being over 20, and three people above 35? FFIV had Tellah, Cid and Yang, FFV had Galuf and FFVI had Strago and Cyan, sure, but all of those had a number of child characters to compensate, and overall the cast tend to skew way younger. Or at least, that's my impression. What's everybody else's take on that?
FFVI comes closest with a surprisingly old cast in a lot of places (many of the core members like Locke and the Figaro brothers are in their late 20s at least), but yeah it's also counterbalanced by Terra and Celes being iirc 18, then Gau and Relm being literal children.
Otherwise, every other game trends younger. FFV has one old man but otherwise maxes at 20 for Faris and Bartz, FFIV has more literal children and the core cast are like 19-20 (except Edge who is apparently 26??? Bro please stay away from Rydia), FFIII is a group of orphans who are probably 14-15 at best, FFII's main trio are again orphans, and FFI is... however old you want them to be, honestly, the Light Warriors there don't really qualify as characters.
It's funny because FFVII was always one of those games that came to mind for me for whatever reason as "oh look buncha anime teenagers" and it turns out that's just blatantly untrue. FFVII might honestly have the highest average ages in the entire series (though we have more entries to go which may or may not influence things otherwise).
This was discussed back when Omicron was playing FFIV, and the common sentiment was to ignore the awful sequel and recognize that Edge is a teenager while Cecil and Rosa are in their early-to-mid twenties. The characterization makes way more sense in that way.
I'd argue that if a character is above 100, and doesn't have a Nanaki "reverse dog-years" thing going on, then any years past 100 don't matter. If you count FuSoYa that way, I doubt he'll bring up the average too much - certainly a bit, but considering how large the FFIV cast is and that it features three characters under 10, it'll probably balance out.
Honestly, we should bully Omi into playing FFT next. It's essentially 7.5, considering it was made by the teams that would work on Vagrant Story then 12 then 14 2.0.
To be fair, and not be spoiler-y, it tends to hold up for the most part until about 2/3 through. The back third will sometimes force you to stop and try just what they were attempting to say.
WotL is much better about consistency, but you get much more flowery language and lose out on some amazing spritework cutscenes.
Putting it out there in case Omi intends to do it sooner rather than later in the FF playlist and wants to know differences between versions.
Welcome back to Final Fantasy VII, the game where glub glub glub glub glub.
Last time, we went through the Lifestream, recovered Cloud's memories and sense of self, and found our next objective: the Underwater Reactor in Junon, where we'll find the third Huge Materia.
But first, let's rewind time just a little bit.
In Mideel, before it's destroyed, we can find this mysterious locked door at the back of the weapons store. If we explore the village, we can find, fallen between two creaky planks, a 'beat-up, useless old key.' If we then go back and try to unlock the door with the key…
…nothing happens and Cid breaks the key. At which point, the weapons store owner asks us what the heck we're doing, and if we confess the truth, that we were trying to sneak at the back of his shop and broke the key, he laughs at us. Of course that beat up old key wasn't the key to the back door! There is no key to the back door… Because there is no back door. It's just painted on the wall. A fake door that serves as a symbol for their dreams, passing into another world where anything is possible. It's a strange beat, I gotta say, but as a way of apologies (...for what), the man offers us one item: The Curse Ring.
The Curse Ring is the best enhancement item in the game, granting an astounding +35 Strength and Magic, +15 Vitality, Spirit and Dexterity, and +10 Luck. However, it comes at the cost of the Doom effect - the character wearing it starts the game with a 60 seconds countdown, and at 0, they die. A steep side-effect, and one that can't be canceled by a Safety Bit or Ribbon, seeing as we only have one Accessory slot and the Curse Ring is using it…
…however, there are other ways of granting Death Immunity. For instance, the Odin Materia is tied to the 'instant death' status effect. This means that if we equip Odin + Added Effect on a weapon, that weapon has a 20% chance of inflicting instant death on attack, while if we equip it on armor… Then the character is immune to instant death.
Are the Curse Ring's stat bonuses worth spending two Materia slots to negate? At this stage, the answer is clearly yes, especially because Odin is still a decent attack summon. Perhaps that will change in the future, but for now Tifa will be rocking the Doom Combo.
This does mean we have to do the whole Mideel and Lifestream sequence over again, so, it's podcast time.
Incidentally we can obtain a second Curse Ring by stealing it from the Ultima Weapon. Unfortunately, the Steal command still seems to have as abysmal a chance of success as it ever has, and the fight only lasts long enough for a character to Steal three times even with Haste before the Weapon flees. I don't succeed in getting the second Curse Ring on any of these three attempts, and I will not be wasting an extra hour going through cutscenes to try again; just the one will have to be enough.
These two are, incidentally, the only Curse Rings in the game, both only available in this one town and this one fight that are then permanently missed. Baffling game design.
Next up, let's revisit Nibelheim. We've got two things to take care of there - one is a fairly major plot beat, the other is, well, also important, but more mechanically.
This is Tifa's piano with the instructions on how to play it. As ever, you can see it's a pain in the ass, listing inputs instead of keys and having several inputs that require multiple keys, but that's not the main problem. The main problem is that a major gameplay and story element is hidden behind a dialogue option from thirty hours ago. Apparently, during the first Nibelheim flashback, if we pick the 'Just a little…' option when looking at the piano and being asked by Tifa if we played it, we get a melody written out as notes. I did not do that, so I did not see it, which means without external advice, the whole thing would have been completely impossible for me to get. Because now, when go back to Nibelheim with Tifa in the party, we are supposed to input that melody (which is the Final Fantasy VII Main Theme) into the piano, which then unlocks to reveal a reward.
Which still takes several attempts because of a quirk of how the combined two-key inputs work.
It's a letter.
Letter: Tifa
What's happened to our town? Was it an illusion, or just a dream? No, it was neither. I remember trying to get people out of the flames, but not having the strength… Burning with anger, I went to the reactor to kill Sephiroth.
But he was nowhere to be found. Instead, I found you, collapsed inside. I felt saving you was far more important than going after Sephiroth. There were several others that were still alive inside, but I was only able to save you.
As I was coming out of the reactor, Shinra troops were just arriving. I recall a scientist named Hojo was in charge. He ordered the troops to gather up everyone still alive for the experiment. I didn't know what kind of experiment he was talking about, but I wasn't about to let them have my dearest student.
Putting you on my back, I headed down the mountain to the village. I used the Cure spell on you many times. And started to head for Midgar to look for a doctor for you. I didn't like that city, and my Cure spells weren't helping.
I decided to go to Midgar to find a doctor I could trust. I'm worried about you, but I can't settle down in one place for very long. Have you recovered fully? Are you well?
I wonder how many years have passed since then? I just got into town again, but I can't believe it… The whole town is back to normal, except for the strange people with black clothes all around. The town reeks of Shinra, but I won't go after them. You may think I'm running from them, but it's just that I don't want anything to do with Shinra anymore. Feels like time is running out.
I'm sure you'll find this letter. And this gift for you. It should come in handy. I can't even jump anymore. But I hope you continue to sharpen your skills and remember what I taught you.
To my most precious student,
From Zangan.
Man, Zangan. What a chad. He really just went 'Sephiroth just wiped out this village, I am going to head to the Reactor and 1v1 him IRL. More than that, though… Out of everyone in this flashback, Cloud, Zack, and Tifa herself, Zangan is the one who made the decision to save, rather than to kill. Even after Cloud put Tifa into a safe-ish place out of the way, his overriding concern was killing Sephiroth. Zack didn't even pause to look at her. Tifa had revenge on her mind first thing. But Zangan saw Tifa, and his first instinct was, 'I should prioritize saving my student's life instead of looking for a bad guy to punish.' There's some kind of message in there.
This letter is weird; part of it is written as if it were written directly after the events of the Nibelheim Incident, part of it as if it were written later, and while it clarifies some aspects of Tifa's survival, not all. Zangan… Rescued her from the reactor, stabilized her with Cure (hey, magic used in the narrative! At last!), then left to Midgar to find a doctor, and then… What? Tifa woke up, he wasn't there, so she just… Left? Also to Midgar? And Zangan came back to Nibelheim and couldn't find Tifa anywhere? What's the time frame here? He says "several years have passed." I'm honestly more confused than I was before reading this. My best guess is that the letter was written on two separate occasions - one after the Nibelheim Incident, left behind as an explanation to Tifa in case she woke up and Zangan was gone, and another years later when he came back to Nibelheim and decided to add an addendum to the old letter that had never been found in case Tifa came around again.
I wonder what happened to old AU!Sabin after he wrote that letter and disappeared; he writes about getting old and no longer being as strong as he was. He seems like he was a cool dude, I wish we could have known him.
What a bullshit puzzle to put this behind, though. Without guidebooks or the Internet, if we don't pick the right dialogue option a couple dozen hours before this moment, there's no way you would ever figure it out, or even know it's there to be found at all. Keep this in mind; this'll happen again in a little bit - although this time, unintentionally on the devs' parts, rather than intentionally. You'll see.
With the letter is packaged "Final Heaven," Tifa's LB4. She unlocked her first LB3 a while ago, but I only have had the chance to use it once, so we need to spam it five or six more times somehow before Final Heaven does anything for us. To celebrate her gain of a finishing move, Tifa does some punches and kicks at the air, it's cool.
Now, let's head back to the Shinra Mansion.
Not much has changed here… At least until we get to the basement. Then we are immediately introduced to a flashback as Cloud steps into the room.
…Cloud and Zack, floating in vats full of glowing green fluid I can only imagine is Mako.
So yeah, those scratches on the walls were left by them, I guess, although I just… I think this is the first piece of fiction I see in which a character is portrayed as being kept floating in a vat but also having someone go around and like, feed them and interact with them? It's a weird combo. A Shinra employee approaches them, carrying food, and… opens the vats? I know Hojo takes the concept of a 'security protocol' fairly lightly but this is still such an incredibly easy escape. The employee opens the door, Zack knocks him out, and then he opens Cloud's vat.
Zack picks up the Buster Sword that was seemingly left lying around next to his vat, and our two boys run away, with Zack carrying a limp Cloud unopposed through the gates of Nibelheim. There's a fade to black, and an exchange where Zack tells Cloud to 'put this on - it smells a little, but don't complain,' then tells him he actually 'looks pretty good;' I think Zack just put one of his old SOLDIER uniforms on Cloud, maybe? And then, our two friends find a friendly truck driver, and make their escape.
I think they're in Cosmo Canyon, which is this world's closest equivalent to Grand Canyon/Monument Valley.
Zack found a ride, and asked him to take them to Midgar. Which should be impossible, given that those cities are on two separate continents, but Final Fantasy isn't really concerned with the logistics of travel. Maybe they already crossed the entire ocean on their own and they're currently on the Eastern Continent, who cares.
Point is, that scene is sweet. It's the Zack characterization I'd hoped for last update.
Zack: "Yo! Old guy! We at Midgar yet?" Driver: "Shaddap! You're lucky I even gave you a ride!" Zack: [Sits down and turns to Cloud.] "What're you gonna do once we get to Midgar?" Cloud: "..." Zack: [He gets up again.] "I know what I'm gonna do. I got a place I can crash at for a while…" Zack: "No wait, the mother lives there too. Guess that's out." Cloud: "..." Zack: "Yep… gotta change my plan!" Zack: "Hmm… No matter what I do, I need some money first… Hey, wanna start a business? Nop what could we do?" Zack: "Hey, Cloud. Think there's anything I'd be good at?" Zack: "Hey old guy! What do you think I'd be good at?" Driver: "What're you yappin' about? You're still young ain't ya? Young folks should try everything! You gotta pay your dues while you're young. Go out and look for what you really want." Zack: "Try everything… That's easy for him to say."
[Zack starts doing squats.] Zack: "HEY! Of course! I got more brains and skill than most other guys! That settles it! I'm gonna become a mercenary! Yeah! Thanks Pops!" Driver: [Shaking his head.] "Hey… did you even hear a word I just said?" Zack: "Listen, I'm gonna become a mercenary and that's that. Boring stuff, dangerous stuff, anything for money. I'm gonna be rich! So, Cloud? What are YOU gonna do?" Driver: "No, wait… You got it all wrong…" Cloud: [Moaning and shaking his head] "U… uhhh…" Zack: "Just kidding… I won't leave you hanging like that. We're friends, right?" Zack: "Mercenaries, Cloud. That's what you an' me are gonna be. Understand, Cloud?"
It's interesting how in such a short space, Zack is characterized as incredibly restless. Part of it is, of course, that he just spent [UNDISCLOSED TIME] locked in a vat, but also it's just a particular vibe to his character - he can only sit down for a few seconds, he'll pace around the bed of a truck even if there's nothing else to do, he'll do squats mid-conversation. As much as it becomes apparent that Cloud is mirroring him, this is something that's different from them - Cloud is a very physically still person who's more comfortable sitting in a corner than pacing around the room.
Also it's kinda funny how despite the setting's modern aesthetic, 'mercenaries' is used with the same connotation as 'adventurer' in fantasy, as some kind of jack-of-all-trade who does useful jobs for people, rather than its real world meaning of 'I wanted to do more war crimes in the developing world than my national military would allow so I had to go private,' lmao. I guess the existence of monsters shapes that kind of expectation.
Unfortunately, that beautiful future is about to be cut short.
Note how Cloud is now sporting a slightly differently-colored SOLDIER uniform, instead of his old grunt uniform.
We move to the barrent earth surrounding the Midgar region, small spots of ferns and lichen growing out of dry earth. Zack is dragging Cloud over his shoulder, visibly limping, probably severely injured. Hearing or seeing something, he puts Cloud down and, leaning on one knee, turns to face incoming enemies with his sword - only to be knocked back in a hail of gunfire.
A group of Shinra soldiers, led by an officer, arrive on the scene. They surround Zack, and…
…execute him.
I was genuinely taken aback by the suddenness and brutality of the scene. There's no defiant last stand, there are no last words, there's no order given. There's just a common Shinra soldier approaching a dying Zack and shooting a burst of gunfire into his body, causing his body to spasm, and then he's dead. The simple graphics keep it PG-13, but it's so callous. In some ways, it feels like VII is making a deliberate effort to move away from the typically dramatic heroic sacrifices of its predecessors, with character deaths that are sudden and ruthless. And it makes me wonder if they could play this death the same way in a later, more realistic-looking game, where Zack is meant to be a protagonist.
Then the soldiers approach Cloud, who is moaning helplessly on the ground, and… This is the part where the scene kinda breaks for me.
Soldier: "What do you want to do with him?" Cloud: "...Ah… ughhhh…" Commander: "Forget it. Just leave him."
[They leave.]
I… don't buy that? Like, why would they go to the trouble of executing Zack and then decide to just leave Cloud be? Even if they think he's dying, they just finished off the other guy. Even if they think he's basically braindead, he's still a body full of active Jenova cells. Does Hojo not want his escaped experiment? I could buy that he's already dismissed Cloud as a failure, but it's not like they have to go to any extra lengths to catch him, he's right there. Cloud is a total freebie and they leave him just… Because.
I think the thing that makes the most sense, ish, is if Hojo specifically told them not to bother with Cloud because he'd dismissed him as a failure, and the fact that he did that is why at the Northern Crater he's so mad about Cloud being a 'failed experiment,' because it meant that he had the opportunity to get Cloud back at no cost to himself and he willingly forwent it because he'd written him off as a failure, so now he's extremely mad that Cloud went and proved him wrong. It's still kinda weird.
Cloud, however, proves himself livelier than expected. For the first time since he and Zack's escape, he manages to move of his own will, dragging himself over to Zack's dead body; there, he picks up the Buster Sword, and lifting his head to the raining sky, cries out in anguish, as the camera pans up and gives us the best shot of Midgar in the game.
One of the best perspectives we get on the city, the top plates, the slums, the scrapyards below, the wastes around it, the reactors…
Man, what a scene.
…I'm a bit confused as to whether we're supposed to parse the chain of events as "Zack and Cloud escaped some weeks/months after capture, and Cloud somehow spent five years working his way to the Sector 7 Train Station," or as "Zack and Cloud spend five years in vats as science experiments, then escape like a week before the start of the game." It seems the latter is most likely, but it feels like such a long time to be floating in a tank. I mean, I assume other things happened to them, of course, but still, like - Cloud was still wearing the same Shinra uniform he wore on the day of his capture. That's an explicit plot point with Zack finding him a change of clothes! And sure, Hojo is not big on hygiene, but it just feels kind of excessive.
Also, the fact that the chain of possession of the Buster Sword is such an important thing, played for pathos, embodying the connection between Cloud and Zack and reflecting the way Cloud basically appropriated/imprinted/stole Zack's identities and memories, makes it even funnier when gameplay conventions kick in and we ditch it never to use it again.
And yet again, that scene is COMPLETELY MISSABLE. If you don't think of going back to Nibelheim and going to the deepest point of the Shinra Mansion just in case, you'll never find it!
It's really clear to me that FF7's writing is optimized for replayability and playground rumors. It's designed so that a young, first-time player will miss stuff, and then hear about that stuff, and then go back and replay the game to find out the pieces you missed, which is almost… Sabotaging your game's writing in favor of its social context, and I'm not here for that. As far as I'm concerned that kind of extremely important hidden lore is not how you should design your game.
But, well, I didn't make Global Blockbuster Icon Final Fantasy VII, widely considered one of the best RPGs of all time, did I?
So yeah, I guess Cloud started sort of putting himself together following Zack's death, dragged himself to the Sector 7 Train Station carrying the Buster Sword, and there met Tifa and started slowly coming together. Which means the game probably kicks off mere days after the above scene, with a Cloud who isn't aware that he literally only emerged from a five-years total personality breakdown.
With this, what next…
A brief détour by North Corel has a widow give us a memento of her husband in hope we'll fight Meteor, which turns out to be Catastrophe, Barret's LB4. Barret is still on LB1s so, slim hope we actually use this by the end of the game.
Next up, a nostalgia tour.
Side note: The Battle Square employees who survived Dyne's attack eloped to spend their last moments together. The remaining employee is single and has decided to instead throw herself into her work and she's maybe a little mad about that.
I take a brief shot at Battle Square, but unfortunately the post-reunion fights are way, way tougher than the ones from the previous iteration, and I can't wipe them out with one summon cast, which makes it much, much harder to make it through eight battles in sequence. Even if I swapped Tifa's Curse Ring build onto Cloud, I don't think I could reliably make it right now. And 'reliability' is the name of the game; the thing I want most from the Battle Square is Omnislash, Cloud's LB4, and that will require 50k+ Battle Points, so multiple victories.
And that, in turn, means I need enough GP to be able to pay for multiple Battle Square entrances in a row. Right now, I have 29 GP, only enough for two runs. For the Omnislash, I'm going to need to shill out significantly more money on minigame or the rare 'GP trader' who spawns at the entrance sometimes and sells GP for outrageous gil sums.
So let's shelve this for now, and head back to Bone Village.
Well, this is one of those things where a comprehensible hint in the world does actually exist but I never had the opportunity to stumble on it because multiple well-meaning souls had already pointed me to this anyway; there's a young man in front of the locked Midgar door who complains that he lost 'the key to this gate' (are Midgar doors literally operated by key fobs handed to individuals? Wild) on an 'excavation tour.' This is meant to imply we can find the Key to Midgar in an archeological dig, such as Bone Village!
Of course it's still pretty much impossible to find without either prior knowledge of the mechanics or spamming digging research over and over for thousands of gil. It turns out we need to completely disregard everything about the 'set researchers to point at places' and just cause a seismic explosion in a specific location on the field to find the key.
And there it is!
The Key to Sector 5.
After all this time, after over thirty hours of gameplay, after most of the story is behind us, after all these developments, it's time to go back… To Midgar.
Oh no.
The very first thing we see, right as we enter Sector 5 (whose gate is still, inexplicably, labeled 07), is Aerith's church. And if we enter, the children are there, still tending to the flowers like she asked them to, and asking us where the flower lady is. After all this time, they're still tending to her flowers.
…
There's a pretty legendary event in this church known as 'Aerith's ghost.' It… might have been a glitch? Or an intentional event? It seems that the devs never came forward with an official statement on the matter, but it seems the consensus that there exist both an intentional event and a glitch with the glitch being such that it blurs the lines to players. The first time Cloud steps into this church, there is meant to be a deliberate glimpse of Aerith, tending to flowers, and disappearing as we approach; and additionally, there are a number of glitches that have to do with characters loading when they shouldn't or being in the wrong position that can lead to additional brief sightings of Aerith never intended to occur.
This is my best understanding of Aerith's Ghost, anyway. The fact is, I've never seen that ghost. What I have seen is almost definitely a glitch; the first time I enter the church (reloading saves if necessary to trigger additional 'first times'), there is a model standing at the entrance of the church that exists for the blink of an eye. It's genuinely gone too quickly for me to even tell anything about it other than it looks vaguely pinkish-red, and forget screenshotting it. This could be Aerith. Leaving the Church and entering it again causes more 'ghost flickers,' which this time last slightly longer, less than a second but enough for me to tell which model it is, and those aren't Aerith, they are just the girl tending to the flower in the above screenshot, rendered twice because of a glitch.
Unless… Wait.
I don't have to trust my fallible human eyes. I can just turn on the Geforce overlay, record footage of me playing through the entrance to the church, and then replay it in a media player advancing frame by frame for that elusive model gone in literally less than a blink!
It actually disappears before the contrast shifts to normal, hence the unusually dark image.
…it was just the little girl's model being displaced at the entrance into the church, with an additional bug showing Reno at the entrance as well.
So, sorry. If you were expecting a heartbreaking moment of coming back to the church and seeing a glimpse of Aerith, the best I have for you is this glitch. No ghost of Aerith in this playthrough.
…
I've looked it up, and it turns out this whole thing was sealed in months ago. There is a glitch in the game which makes it so that, if during the Nibelheim flashback, you ask the Innkeeper certain questions and a certain order, the intended Aerith Ghost scene never triggers. There is zero intended connection between the two events, this is pure 'a butterfly flapping in Brazil creates a tornado in Texas' effect from haphazard 1997 coding. What an insane glitch to have, and to still have today, in the game. Frankly at this point I've spent enough time trying to figure out what is meant to happen here and why it's not that any emotional value it might have is long lost, so let's move on.
The missing ghost scene, in turn, means there isn't all that much to be found in Midgar. It's slightly nostalgic, the last time I was there was a few IRL months ago after all, but there's not that much to find. The random encounters are identical, the people are displaying a broad range of human reactions to the end of the world, but ultimately… Everyone's gone. Elmyra and Marlene aren't at their house, Sector 7 is still destroyed, the Honey Bee Inn has been taken over by Shinra and can't be entered, even Don Corneo's house sits empty. And the rope leading up to the top plate is gone. The closest we have to memorable NPCs are all the friendly weirdos of Wall Market, and for the most part, their dialogue hasn't updated at all. That's the strangest thing of all: Random citizens will talk about their despair at the looming end of the world, while the tailor will still have the same dialogue to Cloud as last time we visited and Big Bro will still be asking us how we feel about the wig they got us. The only characters who interacted with our plot have remained frozen in time.
There's only a couple of things of note in all this, although one is relatively significant. Do you remember ages ago that weird booth in Wall Market that had computers and a wall-mounted machine gun that shot us if we approached? Well, it's still there, and the machine gun is down, and exploring the room gives us…
…the Premium Heart.
Tifa's ultimate weapon. And I do mean ultimate. That goddamned thing has maxed out Materia rings, all of them in joined pairs, and its attacking power is 99. This is higher by far than any weapon possessed by any character in the party. It is a game-changer. There's just one small detail:
Its Materia Growth rating is "Nothing." That is to say, the Materia set into it gain no AP. Which means, right now, that weapon is worthless to me. I might equip it for a fight against a particularly tough boss if such a thing existed, but right now Tifa is equipped with a smattering of lv 3-4 Materia, none of them mastered and several of them falling shy of their just-below mastered 'get the full benefit' rating, and I'm hoping I might master at least one Materia at some point, so… In the drawer it goes.
The old man at the weapon shop who keeps scrounging through the rubble also has a mystery item that he won't reveal but will sell to us for over 100k gil. I don't have that money even if I wanted to spend it, and after looking it up, the item in question is the Sneak Gloves, which doubles the success rate of the Steal Command. I… Don't care, to be frank. I might nab it if I'm ever so wealthy as to be able to throw around 100k on nothing, I guess.
So, yeah. That was the return to Midgar. What a disappointment. I don't feel like throwing myself into Chocobo Breeding today, so let's just move on.
Well! That was a bit of a peaks and valley update, wasn't it? Some really interesting character stuff and flashbacks, locked behind some truly baffling prerequisites, and some good old fashioned "the game was broken and nobody ever fixed it because that's not how we did things back then," mixed in with some disappointments with the return to Midgar just amounting to not all that much in the end. But with this tour of the world complete (minus some locations I'm sure I missed revisiting or need to unlock a Gold-Black Electrum-Plated Chocobo to find), it's time to get back to the plot and head for Junon!
And a good opportunity to cut for image count.
Final Fantasy VII, Part 30: Missable Content Hell & The Underwater Reactor, Part B
We go through the Junon elevator and base, where we occasionally run into SOLDIER 2nd A encounters, and make it to the outside of the fortress, the civilian fortress where we once went through with the parade. There's an interesting new feature, though, or rather lack thereof…
YEAH, CLOUD, THE LARGEST GUN IN THE WORLD WAS RIPPED OFF ITS HINGES.
God. Did they literally just pull that whole thing off with its mount into the sky? Well, I suppose we'll run into it again at some point.
Some of the soldiers (those that don't attack us) reveal that the plan is to take the Junon Huge Materia and then carry it on the 'Gelnika' across the ocean to Rocket Town, where I assume Cid's busted all rocket will finally gets its first flight… As a giant missile pointed at Meteor. Again, a fair enough plan that we're stopping for some reason!
The trooper who was studying for SOLDIER is happy because everyone else who was planning to get is fucking dead. What a go-getter.
Junon was basically crippled by the [Sapphire] Weapon attack; most of the soldiers are dead, and most of the civilians as well, it seems. The various shopkeepers are all facing the prospect of business drying out in some fashion or another, some of them saying they will be resilient, others planning to close the place down, and one of them going, huh…
…the guy who was trying to entice clients by hiring pretty girls has hired even more girls, and is now crumbling under debt from having to pay their wages. I… get the feeling that this is now less about attracting clients, and more about just paying girls to hang out with him before the end of the world.
There's also this really interesting line by a random soldier slacking off on duty:
"All the real soldiers died fighting Weapon. Kind of ironic that losers like me are still alive. But that's the reality of it." The guy next to him tells us that he's deliberately trying to be a bad soldier, but he just 'can't get the hang of it,' whatever that means.
The vibe is clear: Shinra in general, and Junon specifically, have lost most of their quality troops. Troops who have the potential to join SOLDIER were decimated, officer cops have been crippled, surviving soldiers are both incompetent and poorly motivated.
This is going to matter. Spoiler alert: The last time we fought Shinra was a frantic action sequence on the back of a train under a narrow timeline trying to avoid a deadly crash and after losing the two leaders of the party and relying on our C-team. The time before that was a desperate escape by a haphazardly put together sample of Avalanche who had to break out of captivity in the middle of a Weapon attack. Before that, we'd only fought Shinra sporadically in brief encounters.
With the Underwater Reactor raid, we're about to see where we stand now, with a combination of 'our group is at full power with no external pressure or time limit' and 'Shinra has suffered considerable losses from Weapon attacks.'
Spoiler alert: It's not pretty. For them.
We head to the tunnels that leads to the underwater reactor, and there we find a whole formation of Shinra troops drilling. The officer sees us approach, faces us, and orders the charge, while Cloud takes on a combat stance…
The soldiers immediately turn around and retreat at speed before exchanging a single blow.
Amazing stuff.
We follow the troops into an elevator, where two of the soldiers turn around to face us and make the worst decision of their soon-to-be-short lives.
They're talking about the elevator operator, in case that wasn't obvious.
The two soldiers decide to make a bet of which of them survives (not 'beats us', 'stays alive'), gets to ask out the elevator operating woman; the other says "but what if both of us…" and the first one freaks out and attacks.
They're standard Shinra troopers. We annihilate them within moments. The elevator operator is actually still there (I mean, how could she leave) as the elevator finishes going down. If we talk to her, she does her best to not acknowledge us while clearly mourning these two poor morons.
Tifa punching someone's ribs out.
Two more soldiers charge us as we arrive, and we wipe the floor with them, moving on through a new section of underground tunnels, then reach another elevator identical to the one leading from Old Junon to New Junon, which takes us down, down, down to the seafloor. And there…
Oh this is lovely. What a fantastic decor. Look at the swimming dolphin outside! The fishes! The sunlight refracted through the surface of the water! I love that. This is a fairly short segment, although it has its own encounter backdrop and opponents, including this baffling thing.
A ghost ship. As in a literal ship that is a ghost. A zombie ship with a skeletal figurehead that is actively moving and attacking us. Amazing. And it's an early modern era sailship. What even is that thing? Where is coming from? How did it get inside the underwater tunnel? Who cares! It's silly but it's fun.
Apparently I'm supposed to Morph that enemy for a unique Key Item, but I don't know that yet, so we'll have to come back again later.
We take a turn, and the Underwater Reactor looms enormous in the distance.
I'm getting very strong flashbacks to the climax of Underwater, the Kirsten Stewart movie, which had a similar 'approaching a massive underwater structure from a seafloor path' moment.
We enter the Reactor, ride down an elevator, and land in a submarine bay.
It looks like FF7 is actually going to give us a submarine, huh. I was sort of expecting it since a character mentioned 'BY THE WAY THERE IS AN UNDERWATER LOCATION AND SUBMARINES EXIST' all the way back in our first Junon visit, but after getting the Highwind and all that it'd sorta slipped my mind as a possibility that we might have a whole underwater layer of exploration.
We pass two different submarines, one black and one red, signposting what's about to happen. Random encounters here are, for the most part, classic Shinra mobs with a new paint job; the Grunts (as in the enemy name referring to the weird gimp-suit cyborgs) are back, as are spiky robots of various kinds, but those aren't the ones that interest me. Instead, I'm more interested in these:
God, look at that poor guy alone.
Also, the reason Tifa is kneeling in this shot is because of the Doom effect brought on by the Curse Ring; it's meant to be 'kneeling because she's afflicted by a status effect' but for my money, it honestly looks like she's in a 'ready' position at the start of a race, ready to kick off and impact the opponent at Mach 5.
Each step, we breach a new door, a new set of guards make a bold declaration and charge us, and we cut through them like chaff. In a way, this is highly reminiscent of the original Mako Reactor raids back in Midgar, only everything's changed. Mechanically, as an allowance for gameplay necessities, the Shinra troops are 'more powerful' than they were then, because level has to scale, but comparatively they, who weren't the most threatening foes to begin with (but we still had to use Potions to compensate for damage on our very short HP pool then) have become utterly trivial, and the narrative is emphasizing this. There are random encounters in the form of a variety of palette-swapped robots and cyborgs from earlier in the game, but narratively what Shinra is throwing at us is more and more groups of desperate soldiers who have nothing more than rifles, batons and grenades, and Avalanche is plowing through them like an eighteen-wheeler.
We left Midgar a group of wanted terrorists who needed to use stealth and infiltration to break into high-security places, who needed timed train escapes and dramatic bridge jumping to avoid being cornered, who had to drive out of the window of the Shinra Building to escape Heidegger's forces.
Weeks later, we came back a group capable of walking straight through the entrance to Junon Harbour and just waltz through all opposition, in plain view, shattering any opposition. Shinra troops either see us and run in fear, or they bravely come at us and they die.
Cloud and Tifa may not have received some explicit powerup from the Lifestream, but the post-Midgar journey has served as one long training arc from everyone in the group, and the game is cognizant of the fact that we are nothing like we used to be, and is using presentation to convey that.
Some ways in, we find this furnace, which turns out to be a Rector (Red Mako? Is that a thing?) and a crane pulls out a red Huge Materia and moves it towards one of the submarines. We rush to get there before the sub can take off, watch the crane put the Materia in the hold, but unfortunately before we can board the vessel, someone stands in our way.
Ren: [Thinking workers are approaching] "What are you doing? Help load." [He turns around.] "Cloud!?" Tifa: "Looks like we barely made it." Yuffie: "I'm SURE! You want me to do manual labur?" Cloud: "Either give it to us or else. …which is it gonna be?" Reno: "Unfortunately, I don't have time to deal with you."
[The loading robot behind him turns around and begins to approach.] Reno: "My priority is the Huge Materia!"
I take it someone's been watching James Cameron's Aliens.
The idea of using a power loader robot as a combat machine is a fun one. The Carry Armor is a multi-target opponent, with each individual arm being a target, its core having 24k HP and each arm having 10k HP, and it has a unique mechanic; each arm can grab one character, immobilizing them and dealing damage over time until either the character is dead, or the arm is destroyed.
Unfortunately for it, I walk into this fight with two Limit Breaks loaded and summons are screen-wide damage without falloff from enemy numbers. Speaking of which…
I totally forgot to use Phoenix before, but there it is and it looks sick as hell. Anyway, the point is, while the Carry Armor does use its arm grab, the spread of summons among my characters means that by the time it does, each arm has already suffered enough damage that the non-immobilized character can just finish them off with an Alexander cast, blowing up both the armors' limbs, freeing everyone, and allowing them to turn the power loading mech to scrap metal.
The particulars of FF7's combat interface makes it extremely hard to capture well and to see on a screenshot, but if you look closely, you can see that the reason the Carry Armor is upside-down in this shot is because Tifa finishes it off with a Tombstone Piledriver.
It is fitting that a Tifa wrestling move is what destroys the armor, as the reward for defeating it is a weapon intended for her, loftily titled God's Hand. God's Hand doesn't quite reach the stratospheric heights of the Premium Heart, having 'merely' 86 Attack and a painful 4 Materia Slots, but normal Materia Growth and an accuracy stat of 255. This means that, by equipping Tifa with the Deathblow in addition to the Curse Ring combo, we have completed her transition into the most powerful physical attacker in the game.
Slightly curtailed by the fact that she's still 5 levels below Cloud, which I don't see us fixing without deliberate 'KO the rest of the party to grind Tifa alone' shenanigans.
Unfortunately the Carry Armor did its job - the point wasn't to defeat us, but to delay us; while we were busy, the red submarine finished loading and sailed off. Fortunately, there is a second submarine right there for the taking.
We do take a brief detour to pick up some unique items.
Those soldiers above make a brave, if doomed last stand, stammering "Y-you!" and shouting "You will not take this ship!" and are promptly annihilated.
Like, the dialogue is clearly emphasizing that these guys are terrified of us and fighting us against their better judgment.
We carve through these guys as well, and finally reach the command room of the subs, where we find… Well, more Shinra troops, of course, but, well.
We know these guys.
Commander: "NO, NO!! This is terrible!" Soldier #1: "We don't have much time left! I don't want to die!" Soldier #2: "There's still so much more I've got to do! I never even got to do my special victory dance!" Commander: "All right!! Then make this our first victory!! Go on, show' em!!" Soldiers #1 and #2: [Raising their rifles.] "Yes, sir!!" Commander: "Remember your last training. Begin!!" Soldiers #1 and #2: [They perform a parade routine whirling their rifles.] "Yes, sir!!" Commander: [Turns around to face the party.] "I'm back! An' I got no regrets!"
[Behind, both soldiers continue their parade routine, including Cloud's victory pose rifle-twirl that he taught them, while shouting 'ATT-ACK!!!']
…
God, I actually don't want to kill these goofballs. Their enthusiastic incompetence is how we snuck into Junon Harbour in the first place all these hours ago! I mean, they're literally doing the flourish that Cloud taught them!
…and as it turns out, we actually can spare these guys. When they face us terrified, we're actually given the option to "Fight them" or "Take them prisoner."
You absolute dorks. You're lucky I felt bad for you.
I mean, if the last twenty Shinra goons didn't stop us, what were they gonna do? I appreciate an enemy that knows when it's beaten.
And this completes the 'standard' part of the submarine sequence, with the fighting and stuff.
I genuinely think that it's really good and important as part of the overall FF7 narrative: In the midst of all the chaos and confusion and mind-bending twists, in the midst of all the setbacks, Sephiroth's victories, Shinra's treachery, Meteor's summoning, Cloud's coma, Tifa's despair, the fantastic but emotionally taxing memory journey revealing so much buried shame and pain, having this scene where the protagonists show up and utterly floss on Shinra is a really welcome upbeat, a reminder that, oh yeah, we're fucking badasses.
And now of course it's time to ruin that with a minigame-
I kid, I kid. The submarine minigame is actually shocking acceptable. First though, a neat character beat. As Cloud takes commands of the sub… He starts feeling sick.
Cloud: "Someone… please. I'm sorry I can't take it anymore. The lack of space, the shaking, the roar of the engine…" Tifa: "What are we going to do? We stole a submarine but we can't pilot it."
At this point, Yuffie approaches the controls and starts messing with them; immediately red lights go off, and the submarine starts to stir.
Yuffie: "HEY-! It's movin'!" [At this point, Yuffie tries to start something like a celebratory dance, only to immediately be overtaken by sea sickness and sway on her feet obviously in distress.] "Oh man, this sucks!! Cloud, do something!" Cloud: "Hey, you're right… I DO feel a little better driving."
Huh.
This scene is kind of hard to parse, but… I think what's happening here is that - Cloud has never had motion sickness before, as long as he thought of himself as the cool SOLDIER from his memory who did squats in a running truck. Mind over matter. But now that he knows himself as Cloud, the young grunt from the Nibelheim Incident who was sick in the drive to Nibelheim, this old self briefly asserts itself - the submarine is like the cramped interior of the Shinra metal truck with its shitty suspensions over the rocky Nibel roads. Then Yuffie punches the commands, the sub launches forward, and it passes, he's in the moment, focused on the controls, on piloting this rumbling war machine, and the sickness passes.
It's a cool moment. If I'm reading it correctly. Slightly undermined by the physical acting - Cloud's motion cycle while he's being overwhelmed doesn't look like he's sick or swaying on his feet or anything, it looks like he's awkwardly dancing. It's very funny that Yuffie is the one to find the controls and start the sub only to be immediately overcome by her own sea sickness, though.
Yuffie swears she'll 'hold her breath' but begs Cloud to hurry up while stepping frantically in place, and then we're given commands of the sub.
I'm not going to spend weeks on this. Basically, we're piloting the blue submarine using more awkward pre-analog stick controls (for instance, left and right change our direction, but up and down tilt the nose up and down while [SWITCH] accelerates, which - WAIT FUCK THAT'S JUST ACE COMBAT CONTROLS). Our goal is to shoot down the red submarine using torpedos, of which we have, I think, an infinite number. The tower with polygons at the top are underwater mines; we have to avoid collision with them or take damage. From time to time, extra submarines arrive to annoy us, though our only target is the red one carrying the Huge Materia. Landing the torpedoes can be tricky (we are locked onto the enemy submarine but the torpedo have a travel distance and so can miss, I think?) but ultimately we nail it and win the minigame.
Completing this minigame unlocks the submarine as a new vehicle we can take anywhere! The red Huge Materia has sunk to the ocean floor with its sub, and our protagonist decide to just… Leave it there.
Anything as long as Shinra doesn't get it, I guess. The implication is that we can use the submarine to search for the Huge Materia, but it's not mandatory? Instead, for the next plot beat, Shinra mission control calls out to Submarine n°2, which Tifa spotted as our number while on the dock, and Cloud pretends to be the crew of the submarine; we are ordered to report to the Junon docks, where the fourth and final Huge Materia is being loaded onto an airship to transport to Rocket Town.
We climb to the surface, and pressure changes hurt poor Yuffie, who is the most miserable person I could have possibly taken on this mission.
So we have a submarine! Cool! The next step of the plot as indicated by the dialogue is of course to head for the Junon Airport, but why would we do that when we have a perfectly good submarine right there waiting to take us to bold new horizons undreamed of before? Why, we can just save, immediately turn around, and explore underwater!
Look! The Underwater Reactor is right there! God, but this is a cool vibe - the darkness in the distance, the deep blue surroundings, the massive cliffs on all side. This is really cool. And I expect that, as in previous games, there'll be optional locations on the seafloor - first of all being, of course, being that sunken submarine and its Huge Materia, which I assume we will need for something eventually.
Let's explore!
…what the fuck is that.
No, scratch that. Of course I know what it is. It's a Weapon. It had a blink-and-you'll-miss-it appearance in the Weapons Awaken cinematic. And even though I would have expected the blue weapon to be the one fought underwater, this green weapon is roaming there instead.
And if it's roaming… It means we can attack it.
CHAAAARGE!
THE EMERALD WEAPON. Our party can only hold their breath for 20 minutes. Sense is useless as this enemy has more than 30k HP and so it will return no information. LET'S DO THIS. BIG GUARD, REGEN ALL, LET'S GO
…ah.
The Emerald Weapon uses one attack, Emerald Shoot, which hits characters for over 6k damage, killing them instantly, and acts multiple times per round, outpacing any attempt I might make at putting up defenses by killing my characters before they act.
Omicron: "The time has come to take on WEAPON!"
*beat*
Omicron: "Damn, weapon got hands."
I suppose it is fitting that the planets ultimate protectors, designed to stop such things as JENOVA at full strength or other higher powered insanity are a little bit beyond the party at the moment. Cloud is only just back, after all, and narratively it's not been that long since Northern Crater, has it?
The particulars of FF7's combat interface makes it extremely hard to capture well and to see on a screenshot, but if you look closely, you can see that the reason the Carry Armor is upside-down in this shot is because Tifa finishes it off with a Tombstone Piledriver.
Destroying large machinery with a suplex. Evidence mounting that Zangan is indeed an old Sabin that fell through a portal. Tifa learned her lessons well.
It's time for yet another thing that scared the bejesus out of tiny Etranger: the underwater sequence! Emerald Weapon freaked me the hell out and going deep underwater was a phobia I didn't conquer until adulthood, so I simply never used the submarine after the minigame.
... I think I'll mention a particular game mechanic/Easter egg, because it happens to be extremely useful for the Emerald Weapon fight, and I sincerely doubt Omi knows about it, since I don't believe it's mentioned anywhere in the game. (I'll spoiler it, though, just in case Omi wants to make their own strategy.)
If a character happens to hit exactly 7,777 health, they will automatically start spamming a special move called "Lucky 7s", which does 7777 damage... 62 times. This is enough damage to kill basically any enemy in the game, including Emerald Weapon.
Also it's kinda funny how despite the setting's modern aesthetic, 'mercenaries' is used with the same connotation as 'adventurer' in fantasy, as some kind of jack-of-all-trade who does useful jobs for people, rather than its real world meaning of 'I wanted to do more war crimes in the developing world than my national military would allow so I had to go private,' lmao. I guess the existence of monsters shapes that kind of expectation.
In some ways, it feels like VII is making a deliberate effort to move away from the typically dramatic heroic sacrifices of its predecessors, with character deaths that are sudden and ruthless. And it makes me wonder if they could play this death the same way in a later, more realistic-looking game, where Zack is meant to be a protagonist.
Absolutely. per the ff wiki:
"In the real world things are very different. You just need to look around you. Nobody wants to die that way. People die of disease and accident. Death comes suddenly and there is no notion of good or bad. It leaves, not a dramatic feeling but great emptiness. When you lose someone you loved very much you feel this big empty space and think, 'If I had known this was coming I would have done things differently. These are the feelings I wanted to arouse in the players with Aerith's death relatively early in the game. Feelings of reality and not Hollywood"
"While reflecting on the game, Tetsuya Nomura comments that "Death should be something sudden and unexpected, and Aeris's death seemed more natural and realistic. When I reflect on Final Fantasy VII, the fact that fans were so offended by her sudden death probably means that we were successful with her character. If fans had simply accepted her death, that would have meant she wasn't an effective character"."
While this is talking about Aerith, it does apply to Zack as well.
Damn, posted this while at work and on phone so I can't make a proper post.
The side content is a bit of a stinker so hopefully that'll be something adjusted. Of note though, Crisis Core does significantly rework Zack's last stand. There is discourse on whether it's an improvement or not though.
What else... Tifa's Premium Heart, and all ultimate weapons, has a unique quirk that effects its damage. Specifically, it changes the damage value based on how full the limit gauge is. There are apparently strategies that make use of this, but it was probably my least favourite ultimate weapon because of this. I think the scaling is reduced damage at no gauge, to 4x at max.
Didn't know all that stuff about Aerith's ghost. One of those things I had happen every time so never actually thought about.
Finally, Emerald WEAPON. One of 7's superbosses, and arguably the easy one if you know the mechs. It does however have a major dick move that you may or may not experience. I'll only explain it if you manage to avoid it.
Oh, and you can go back and pick up the Huge materia from the sub, it's not necessary, but it does lead to some completionist stuff.
Much later. Emerald is an optional superboss and if Sense had worked you would've been extremely depressed: It has one million hit points.
Just so you know the scale of what you're getting into there.
A few things open up with access to the submarine though: There's an optional dungeon loaded with endgame gear (and what are going to be effectively boss fights as random encounters for you, plus a boss fight with excellent steals) and a lore dump you can get if you bring Vincent to a specific place.
And yet again, that scene is COMPLETELY MISSABLE. If you don't think of going back to Nibelheim and going to the deepest point of the Shinra Mansion just in case, you'll never find it!
It's really clear to me that FF7's writing is optimized for replayability and playground rumors. It's designed so that a young, first-time player will miss stuff, and then hear about that stuff, and then go back and replay the game to find out the pieces you missed, which is almost… Sabotaging your game's writing in favor of its social context, and I'm not here for that. As far as I'm concerned that kind of extremely important hidden lore is not how you should design your game.
FF7 is largely predicated on a philosophy of game design -- and the generation of game players that learned this from it and other games of the era -- that you always talk to everyone (twice, and more if the second time was different than the first) and go everywhere on a map after every plot point. It explains a lot about the game.
Tifa's ultimate weapon. And I do mean ultimate. That goddamned thing has maxed out Materia rings, all of them in joined pairs, and its attacking power is 99. This is higher by far than any weapon possessed by any character in the party. It is a game-changer. There's just one small detail:
Its Materia Growth rating is "Nothing." That is to say, the Materia set into it gain no AP. Which means, right now, that weapon is worthless to me. I might equip it for a fight against a particularly tough boss if such a thing existed, but right now Tifa is equipped with a smattering of lv 3-4 Materia, none of them mastered and several of them falling shy of their just-below mastered 'get the full benefit' rating, and I'm hoping I might master at least one Materia at some point, so… In the drawer it goes.
This is true of all the ultimates (excepting Aerith's, which still had normal AP growth). However, what's also true of all the ultimates is that each one has unique damage calculations.
Tifa's, for example, does more damage the higher her limit gauge is, and the higher the limit level that's set, so it does the maximum with a fully charged L4 break but is almost useless with an empty gauge. Deathblow and Mug are therefore really solid choices if you do equip this since you can do simple attacks without draining your gauge once its charged. Both of those can be paired with Added Cut for a second attack to boot.
Essentially what you're going to find here is that endgame gear starts to break the rules you've gotten familiar with over the course of the game so far. The ultimate weapons (though in some cases, the non-ultimates are better for various reasons) are one example, but there's also a lot of materia that start changing how combat works. Some are available from Chocobo Racing, some from just exploring with Chocobos, some are quest rewards, some are found in the final dungeon.
The old man at the weapon shop who keeps scrounging through the rubble also has a mystery item that he won't reveal but will sell to us for over 100k gil. I don't have that money even if I wanted to spend it, and after looking it up, the item in question is the Sneak Gloves, which doubles the success rate of the Steal Command. I… Don't care, to be frank. I might nab it if I'm ever so wealthy as to be able to throw around 100k on nothing, I guess.
Steal success is basically strictly determined by level difference and whether or not you have Sneak Gloves equipped. There are some extremely good steals coming up from boss fights that you might want them for to reduce how much you need to fish. Alternatively, you could go buy a couple of spare steal materias so that each character has one and try for three steals per round. There is also a support materia out there, Steal as Well, that, when linked, will attempt to steal every time the linked spell or command hits. It is available to you at this point in time if you go exploring.
However, to really solve your cash woes, the simplest, fastest way to do this would be to load people up with double AP gear (my preference aside from the party leader is Cid and Vincent because their double AP weapons are fairly strong and have linked slots (Javelin & Buntline)), slot in every All materia you can, park Fury Rings (purchaseable in Gongaga) on all three people, and then fly to the Mideel forest.
Every enemy in there yields 80AP, the only status they inflict is Sleep (and only some of them do that), and they come in groups of 3-4, which means you're clearing 240-320AP per fight (also some gil but that's irrelevant for reasons that will be clear shortly) and with everyone in Berserk they're gonna be doing piles of damage. Heal up out of battle as necessary.
Mastering an All materia takes 35k AP. With double AP growth, that's 17.5k AP in enemies, which is 220 enemies, which should be around 65 encounters. Shouldn't take more than an hour, from zero, and your Alls should have some levels on them already. You can speed it up even further with an Enemy Lure materia to trigger encounters faster.
EDIT: If you're willing to spend more time on it you can put the Alls in the normal slots and put rarer, harder-to-level stuff (Contain, Comet, Ultima, summons, etc) in the double slots, but either way...
Mastered All materia sell for 1.4million gil a shot. Even just one will essentially set you for life.
No, scratch that. Of course I know what it is. It's a Weapon. It had a blink-and-you'll-miss-it appearance in the Weapons Awaken cinematic. And even though I would have expected the blue weapon to be the one fought underwater, this green weapon is roaming there instead.
There is, indeed, plenty. You just need to avoid the Emerald Weapon as you travel the sea floor - if you keep away from it, it won't attack you on its own. It's perfectly doable, just be careful and save before heading underwater, just to be safe.
