At this point the thread has convinced me that Cid and Shera are basically like the leads in one of those old time radio mystery thrillers, where each one is trying to convince a third party that the other is insane.
Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Let's Play
Final Fantasy VII, Part 32: The Coffin of Choco and Boco, Part A
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Welcome back to Final Fantasy VII, the game where we take a break from impending global doom at the hands of the Meteor even now falling towards us in order to enjoy a successful career as a farmer.
Kweh!
I was genuinely unsure if I wanted to bother with this side quest, which is less a 'minigame' than it is a small management sim in its own right and is intended to be done in parallel with the second half of the game rather than in one big chunk, for reasons that will be clear soon. Let me be clear: as far as I know, Chocobo Raising is totally optional. I've said before that I didn't intend to play these games as a completionist, and I still don't. The Chocobo quest only rewards us with extra unique rewards we wouldn't have found otherwise, none of which we need to beat the game, although I'm sure they'll be helpful for any harder challenges in the endgame. Ultimately, I decided to at least give it a shot and see how far this would take us. The answer is… Pretty far!
There are, as far as I can tell, two (well, three) ways to approach Chocobo Raising (which I am using as a term to cover both chocobo breeding and chocobo racing, which are two separate, if connected, subsystems). One of them is "cheating it with RNG manipulation" which is possible thanks to the peculiarities of the game's code and which isn't interesting to me. Rather, our two options are to try and just play it out using the tips and instructions the game gives us, and the other is to look up a guide to figure out the most optimal route to Chocobo Raising.
I'm gonna be real: I did the guide thing. And, for a number of reasons, I think you should as well, unless you're specifically looking to invest weeks of daily play into figuring out the exact mechanics through trial and error, or in doing a long series of "talk to the Chocobo Sage, fight random encounters, talk to Chole at the Chocobo Farm, rinse, repeat for ages." And all of it ultimately just gives us the same basic information as you'd find by looking it up, only missing some specificity that will mean you still have to do a bunch of trial and error or grinding.
So.
Let's start on this Great Chocobo Adventure, shall we?
First off, I know you may be asking: What is the point of engaging in Chocobo Raising? What purpose does it serve?
The answer is that, even with the Highwind, our airship, and even with the Submarine, there are locations in the game which we can't access - locations such as this cave:
I've been trying to get into these remote spots of the map, but the thing is, the Highwind can only land on a grassy plain. And while there is a grassy plain close to this cave, there is also a cliff face which blocks Cloud from accessing the rocky ground leading up to it.
We cannot reach these places with our current means of transportation. Our only hope… is a chocobo.
But not any chocobo. The standard, generic chocobo caught in the wild has no particular movement abilities beyond its natural speed and immunity to random encounters. It's useless to us - but vital to our goals nonetheless.
In order to begin our Chocobo Journey, we must first capture two Chocobos so we can make them make a baby chocobo.
Okay but actually it's way more complicated than that. You see, our goal is to breed a truly elite chocobo. A chocobo distinguished by its color. And for that, we're going to have to engage in…
[Heavy sigh.]
Chocobo eugenics.
You see, each chocobo we can run into on the map has a "quality." It can be Terrible, Poor, Bad, Average, Good, Great, or Wonderful. For our purposes here, we want a "Great" and a "Good" Chocobo. Or two Great or two Good or a Wonderful and a Good but this is the simplest.
So, we have to once again equip the whole Chocobo apparatus - purchase "Greens" which will stop the chocobo for a limited number of turns, equip the Chocobo Lure, and go hunting for chocobo tracks on the overworld.
Now, there's no way of telling what grade of Chocobo we've just run into when a battle starts…
…except of course there is. It's just not in-game knowledge. As far as the game shows us, we just get a chocobo as part of some combat encounter, and we have to capture that chocobo, then go to the farm and get a quality assessment. But actually, chocobo quality is tied to each individual encounter set, and is thus tied to both location and enemy spread. That is to say, the only chocobo we will ever find in the Grasslands Area around the chocobo farm are "Bad" or "Terrible." In order to find a "Great" Chocobo, we must first head to the grassy patches around the Mideel Area, which is where we found that chocobo in the screenshot above. So, job done, right?
Well, no. Secretly, this chocobo is the wrong one. It is accompanied by two head hunter enemies. This means that its quality is "Poor." Instead, we need to find a chocobo which is accompanied by the flat bug-like spiral enemies, like so:
That means this chocobo is "Great." Now that we've done this, we throw some Greens at him to keep him occupied, then dispatch the Spiral enemy.
And there we have the first brick of our Chocobo Empire.
Do you see what I mean about Trial & Error vs Using a Guide? Provided you milk enough information out of the Chocobo Sage (which takes time and grinding), you can get the information that "Great chocobos are found on an island in the southeast." It will not tell you that the Great quality is specifically tied to encountering the Spiral-Chocobo team. Without that knowledge, you will capture low-quality birds repeatedly until you finally land on one of the correct quality.
Anyway, now that we have our very first bird, it's time to send it to the Farm (this is as simple as dismounting and sending it on) and head back there.
Upon doing so, we are informed that this is a great Chocobo, that it is female, and we are prompted to give it a name; I elect to call her Thyme. She is "Class C" - the game doesn't explain what that means. Class C means that, if we take her to the Chocobo Race in Gold Saucer, she will compete in C-Rank races, the easiest ones, until she's accumulated enough victories to graduate to a higher rank. All chocobos, regardless of their initial 'power level,' are Rank C at first until they've proven themselves in the races. While this makes getting to the high-reward races take a while running in bottom-tier races with bottom-tier rewards, this is actually good for us for reasons I'll explain later.
Now, it's time to catch Thyme's partner - a "Good" Chocobo. For this, we need to head to the grasslands surrounding the Mideel Jungle.
Also, while I'm here…
Why not compound all this with a little bit of murder-suicide?
At this stage of the game, Cloud is lv 53, Yuffie is lv 50, and Tifa is lv 48. While I don't mind some degree of discrepancy, Tifa being so underleveled is annoying. Since the rewards for the battles we're going to undergo are low and wouldn't amount to much spread three ways across the whole group anyway, I figure I might as well get some benefit out of the whole affair by putting Cloud and Yuffie on a time-out and having Tifa solo these fights so she can catch up to Yuffie. Plus, it'll help her grind those Limit Breaks for her LB4.
Oh, and in this process, we have unlocked ULTIMA, THE ULTIMATE MAGIC.
Unfortunately it looks like shit.
While Ultima deals enormous damage to all enemies without the need for an All Materia, making it highly useful, it's also just… A vague green spark of light that moves slowly across the screen then feels the screen with blurry green particle effects and then fades. Nowhere is the sheer oomph factor of FFVI's Ultima to be found here, that dome of pure energy that scoured the earth. This is limp.
Ah, well. It's still the most powerful spell in the game. It's just… The fact that it is the most powerful spell in the game and looks like this somehow compounds my disappointment.
Okay, back to Chocobos.
We find our next Chocobo next to Mideel, watching for the flying drake encounter that signals that this is a "Good" Chocobo and not one of the "Bad" Chocobo in this area surrounded by different reptile monsters.
Then we head back to the Farm to name him.
Or… Him..?
Our "Good" Chocobo immediately has a problem.
It's a female. Thyme is also a female. We can't mate two female chocobos.
Now, if I were playing the game 'naively,' the answer would be simple. I would release that Chocobo back into the wild, buy more Greens, head back to Mideel and hunt for one, and then repeat the procedure until I have secured a male "Good" Chocobo. This could take a while, involving a lot of back and forth. It's more of the process that would make Chocobo Raising a long-term effort meant to be undertaken while playing the rest of the game, a little every day, for dozens of hours of overall gameplay. The kind of thing that would be dead in the water in this Let's Play.
However, I happen to know that the gender of the Chocobo isn't determined upon catching and "revealed" at the Farm. Instead, the gender is determined when the Chocobo is transferred from the outside pen to the stables.
Which means we can just sit outside the Farm and reload over and over before heading in until we get a male Chocobo.
…I just lied to you.
You can't actually just 'reload' and try again. Incomplete online information will say that you can, but this didn't work for me and I rolled "female" for fifteen minutes in a row (FF7 Steam does not have a 'go back to intro menu' function that I can see, so every time I want to reload a save I have to hard quit and reboot the game, which takes time). Looking it up online, many people faced the same problem.
The reason is due to the peculiar way FF7's Random Generator Work. For reasons I couldn't begin to imagine explaining, when you reload and don't do anything 'significant,' the game will have already generated and saved a random number from before you saved and quit, and that number will be used on the next… thing that requires a randomly generated number, whatever. In order to change the result of the Chocobo Gender Reveal Party, you need to do something. Trigger a random encounter. Feed another Chocobo stat-raising food. Whatever. That'll prompt the game to issue a new number and you can then try your chance at the gender lottery again.
Simple, right?
So now, we have a female "Great" Chocobo and a male "Good" Chocobo, Sage, which means it's time for… Heavy sigh… Chocobo Breeding.
This is going places.
In order to mate chocobos, we need to talk to them, and then feed them a Nut to encourage them to mate. We feed the Chocobos… A Nut… To get them to… Let's just ignore this and move on.
Nuts are items that can be obtained from battle or bought from the Farm or the Chocobo Sage. Nuts are used exclusively in breeding, and there are a wide array with different effects!
All but two of them are useless.
Pepio Nut, Luchile Nut, Saraha Nut, Lasan Nut, Pram Nut, Porov Nut, nuts that go into the thousands of gil - all worthless. Some have no noticeable effect, some produce offspring with lower 'stats' (more on this later) than their parents. The only Nuts we care about are the Carob and Zeio Nuts, which cannot be bought and drop from rare monsters found only in special locations. Luckily, we happen to have a Carob Nut in our backpack, so we don't have to worry about that right now; instead, we are free to pair Thyme and Sage and give them a Carob Nut, and then with a victorious music the game reveals their offspring…
…another standard Chocobo.
Well, this is useless to us.
You see, we don't get anything from having another yellow Chocobo offspring. I mean, maybe it inherited good stats from its parents or something and will be mildly better at racing? That doesn't matter, because a yellow Chocobo doesn't help us jump onto the next tier into the genetic 'ladder' of Chocobos towards the Uber-Chocobo.
Like I said. Chocobo Eugenics.
So, reload, switch up the RNG, try again, land another yellow Chocobo, try again.
This takes a bit, but eventually, we land on the right result…
A Green Chocobo! (Blue would have worked just as well.) We will call her… Garlic.
This Green Chocobo, or "Mountain Chocobo," can cross mountains - more on that later. As it stands, we could potentially already access new locations we've never seen before just by taking that Chocobo to the right places!
But since we don't want just some areas, we're not stopping there. Our next objective is to obtain Garlic's counterpart, a Blue, or 'River' Chocobo. How do we do that?
Well, if I were playing the game naively, I would release Garlic's parents (there are only six Chocobo Stables so we need to make space as we go), catch a new couple and repeat the process until we get her a new friend. Of course, this would take time and money.
So instead we'll resort to incest.
LISTEN. I DIDN'T DESIGN THE GAME. I DIDN'T MAKE THE RULES. IT'S JUST FASTER AND EASIER THAT WAY.
As a Green Chocobo, if Garlic is mated with an ordinary Good/Great Yellow Chocobo, she will produce her counterpart, a Blue Chocobo. And as it so happens, her father, Sage, is right there.
…he can't mate yet, though. Chocobos who have just mated or are newborn cannot be paired. How does the game define 'newborn'? Well, in the best resources it has to determine 'time spent' through player agency rather than just letting the clock running: random encounters. We have to go out and fight, like, a dozen encounters for time to progress and the Chocobo to be recovered/grown up and ready to mate.
Like I said: With Meteor hanging overhead, we're taking several weeks off to raise Chocobos.
In this case, though, it so happens that this isn't too much of a problem because we need something from random encounters anyway: A second Carob Nut. For that, we will need to go all the way to the Northern Continent, in the rare grassland areas around the frozen wastes and Bone Village, in order to find this opponent:
Vlakorados, a dinosaur with an enormous 33,333 HP despite its unremarkable attacks and offensive moves. We're going to equip the Steal Materia and spend five minutes in battle, rolling to steal until it finally succeeds and we get the Carob Nut, only carried by this one enemy in the whole game.
Then we kill it, and luck into a second Carob Nut drop from its death, so we don't have to hunt down a second one.
Incidentally, check out this weird message:
"Restore was born." What does that mean?
Here's what happened: We have mastered our first Materia. We unlocked Curaga, the highest-level spell on that Materia, a while ago; but there was still one unchecked star on that Restore Materia. That was a star for Mastery. Now that we have obtained the AP required to Master it, we obtain the benefits of Mastery, which is that the Materia undergoes mitosis and spawns off a new lv 0 Materia.
….
Okay. I see where this is going.
I have no need for another Restore Materia. I already have three, maybe even four Restore Materia at lv 3+. But what I do have, on the other hand, is a smattering of incredibly powerful, unique Materia. I only have one Ultima. One Contain. One Bahamut-ZERO. One MP Turbo. I have been allocating these Materia as precious commodities, trying to spread them as usefully as possible across my party.
But if I master Ultima, I get a second Ultima Materia. A second Bahamut-ZERO! All that incredibly powerful magic will be freely available for me to make a killer party!
…
Or not. The Ultima Materia unlocks the Ultima spell at 5,000 AP. It is mastered at 100,000 AP. This Restore Materia, my first-ever mastered Materia, 36 hours into the game, cost me a total of 40,000 MP. Over the entire game. Having had it slotted in since day 1.
Of course, as AP rewards for battling opponents increase with encounter levels, reaching high AP numbers will be made easier… But 100,000 AP? I mean, if it happens on its own, it happens on its own. But I'm doubtful. And we're not gonna be grinding for it unless it turns out to somehow be fast and easy. So ultimately the Materia mastery system is like, whatever.
Maybe we will turn out to unlock Double Ultima. As things are, it seems more likely we'll end up with a chest full of duplicate Alls and Restores in excess of what I actually have use for.
Anyway, back to our horrible crimes against nature.
Say hello to Onion, a male Blue Chocobo.
(We still have to reload and manipulate the RNG several times to get a male one.)
A Blue Chocobo can cross rivers same as the Buggy could, so it could potentially get us to the same place the Buggy could, if we still needed that. Maybe even places it couldn't, by strategically dropping it from the Highwind?
(Side note: Both the Buggy and the Tiny Bronco disappeared after the post-crater timeskip and the acquisition of the Highwind. Sure, we don't need them anymore, but it's noticeable that there was no explanation or story event that destroyed them or anything, they just vanished.)
We don't care about that, because our goal is to obtain a Chocobo with the traits of both the Green and Blue Chocobo: A Black Chocobo, or "River-and-Mountain" Chocobo. Once we have it, we won't have to worry about the specifics of which Chocobo to take to reach which location, and we'll be able to reach locations accessible to neither. So how do we do that?
Come on.
Like you need to ask.
Red Mage had it right all along.
We are of course meant to mate a Blue and Green Chocobo to combine their traits into their offspring. So we have to mate Garlic and Onion together. The sister-mother and the brother-son. Well, first off, we need to go out, do some more random encounters, get some Limit Breaks out of Tifa, and so on. Once we're back and have committed further horrible crimes against nature done, we get…
…another blue Chocobo.
Hrm.
Okay, so, reloading and reloading until we luck into the Black Chocobo isn't working. The chance of getting a Black Chocobo offspring off two 'fresh' colored Chocobos exists, but it's far too low. We could be at this for over an hour just reloading and trying again and again.
But there is another way. Here's the thing: Our odds for chocobo to get the best possible offspring for their mating pair is based on their performance in the races. That is to say, highly competitive Chocobos with multiple wins under their belt have higher odds of producing a better grade of Chocobo baby. Which is why our career as Chocobo Breeder must take a brief pause, as we head for…
…Gold Saucer, where we find Ester, the eccentrically-dressed Chocobo Jockey manager, who offers to register us into the next race.
You know the drill! Line up of colored Chocobo Jockey opponents, circuit with multiple areas, item or GP rewards on a scoreboard I can't parse at all!
So, Chocobo Racing.
As you can see above, Garlic has two visible stats: Top Speed and Stamina. These aren't actually her only stats, but they're the ones prominently displayed. We can also check the opponents' stats; it turns out that 45 km/h is painfully low; most competitors are in the 60 to 80 range. Garlic does enjoy higher Stamina than her competitors, but unfortunately not enough to matter. Left to run on her own, she eventually exhausts her entire Stamina bar without breaking out from last place.
So, unfortunately, this race is a failure, and it doesn't look like we'll do better on repeat try. I make an attempt at running in "Manual" to compensate for Garlic's low stats by making her run better, but that turns out to be counterproductive; among Garlic's unmarked stats are Intelligence, which reflects how difficult she is to steer. With low Intelligence, Garlic actually resists every command Cloud inputs, banking randomly to the side when I accelerate, bucking under the rains when I try to get her to one particular side, and so on.
No, it looks like the only way we'll win races is by improving Garlic's stats. Now, how do we do that, you ask?
Well, it turns out Chocobo Greens have a secondary function other than helping catch Chocobos in battle: If fed to a Chocobo, they will increase its stats by a random amount based on the type of Greens. Gysahl Greens, the cheapest variant, increase Speed and Stamina by a small amount. The most expensive variant sold at the Chocobo Farm, Mimett Greens, increase both Speed and Stamina by a larger amount. And it just so happens I bought a handful of Mimett Greens a while back as a 'just in case' measure! So let's feed Garlic those expensive veggies and see what happens.
…those Greens improved Garlic's Top Speed by 1kmh and her Stamina by Not At All.
Obviously I immediately proceed to lose the next race.
SO. Spending two, three, five thousand gil on Greens isn't going to cut it. The Chocobo Farm itself doesn't have what we need.
Remember this guy?
Slight note: The Chocobo in the Sage's house, which is completely surrounded by mountains, is a Green Chocobo, that is to say, the ones that can cross mountains. That's a nice touch of environmental storytelling.
The Chocobo Sage sells a small number of very expensive Nuts and Greens. We don't care about the Nuts, but his highest-priced Greens, the Sylkis Greens, are what we're here for. In order to make absolutely sure to win these races, we grab ten of them.
At 5k a piece, that's fifty thousand gil, nearly half of my stash. Selling a mastered All Materia for a cool million so I never have to worry about this again is looking pretty appealing right now. (But only somewhat; I don't want to have to level up another one to replace it, we'll only do that if we have to).
There we go.
With 10 Sylkis Greens, Garlic's Top Speed has doubled to an impressive 90kmh. This is not that high in the grand scheme of things, besting the best C-rank NPC Chocobo by 'only' 10kmh, but she also enjoys an advantage of over 150 Stamina. Having both higher top speed and much better stamina, Garlic proceeds to utterly crush the competition.
This is our first of many victories in the races. The reward list includes some highly desirable items like a Megalixir, but the reward items are randomized and I never land on those, so instead we start building up a stock of GP that we'll need later - not to trade for items, but for entrance into Battle Square to unlock Omnislash.
In order to guarantee a 100% rate of breeding a Black Chocobo, we need nine victories in total spread any which way between both parents. Since I would rather not spend another 50k on getting Onion up to par, I'll see how far Garlic can go. As it turns out, the answer is "at least into B-rank races" - after three victories in the bottom tier, she is automatically graduated to B Class.
The race track itself is identical as far as I can tell, but all the competitors now have much better stats - in fact, they are faster than Garlic; many B Class competitors have Top Speeds in the 100 kmh. However, their Stamina is only in the 300s, which means Garlic has a significant lead in durability; and indeed, we observe repeatedly Garlic starting the race in the middle or back of the pack, then pulling ahead by the end. With two wins, Garlic breaks into the A Class…
Which is where her winning streak sadly ends. A Class competitors have 120+ kmh top speed and their stamina, while still lower than Garlic's, is still high enough that overtaking them isn't feasible. A Rank is where Garlic's racing career sadly ends.
Five wins should increase the odds of Garlic and Onion producing a Black Chocobo, but unfortunately it doesn't do so enough and I'm not able to get the desired offspring. So I decide to try Onion's luck at the races anyway, entering him without any stat upgrades.
…huh.
It turns out that I'm an idiot.
I forgot to factor in the fact that Chocobos breed stronger Chocobos with each generation. Because Onion is Garlic's son (as well as her brother), he inherited stronger stats than hers. His starting top speed is 68kmh, which, while not huge (he won't make it into the A Class) and lower than the highest C Class Competitors, is combined with his massive Stamina lead plenty enough to easily clear the C Class three times in a row - and, while victory in the B Class is anything but guaranteed, luck can still result in the occasional win, which is all we need to get a combined 9 wins out of Garlic's 5 and Onion's 4.
With these wins in our pocket, we head back to the Farm, where we can finally do the unspeakable and mate Garlic and Onion using a Carob Nut to produce…
…Basil, our first Black Chocobo!
Also known as "Mountain-and-River" Chocobo, Basil can cross any terrain that isn't ocean. This is huge; it means Basil can essentially access the entire map barring one location. We take him out, enter the Highwind (it's as easily as literally just walking into the airship while riding him), and then we fly around the map to scout out locations we can't access from the airship; we put the Highwind down in the nearest available grassy plain, then ride the world's most inbred steed across mounds and valleys.
The three places most immediately of interest to us are three small 'Materia caves' in the Nibel, Wutai and Corel areas. Each one contains a luminous Materia of a different type, each one a unique Materia of at least potentially considerable power: Quadra Magic, HP <-> MP, and Mime.
Quadra Magic is basically dualcast. When linked to a Magic or Summon Materia, it halves damage but casts the linked spell four times in a row - sort of like Rapid Fire did in FFV. This results in doubled overall damage - although if we get our magic power high enough that we would run into the 9,999 HP limit by default, this could potentially more than double.
The Red Mage dream is alive once more.
ABSOLUUUUUUTE POWAAAAAAAH!
The other two are weirder. Mime is, well, Mime; you know the deal by now, it perfectly copies the last action taken in combat without paying costs. There are probably multiple ways of breaking the game using it but it feels like a lot of headache to me so I might not bother. As for HP <-> MP, it… does exactly what it says: It inverts HP and MP scores. Any character using this would fall within one-shot range of any enemy, with sub-1k HP, but would also multiply their MP score by 5 to 10. There are probably some ridiculous combos this enables if I can set up some means of protecting the fragile caster, but for now I'm good.
Cut for image count.
Kweh!
I was genuinely unsure if I wanted to bother with this side quest, which is less a 'minigame' than it is a small management sim in its own right and is intended to be done in parallel with the second half of the game rather than in one big chunk, for reasons that will be clear soon. Let me be clear: as far as I know, Chocobo Raising is totally optional. I've said before that I didn't intend to play these games as a completionist, and I still don't. The Chocobo quest only rewards us with extra unique rewards we wouldn't have found otherwise, none of which we need to beat the game, although I'm sure they'll be helpful for any harder challenges in the endgame. Ultimately, I decided to at least give it a shot and see how far this would take us. The answer is… Pretty far!
There are, as far as I can tell, two (well, three) ways to approach Chocobo Raising (which I am using as a term to cover both chocobo breeding and chocobo racing, which are two separate, if connected, subsystems). One of them is "cheating it with RNG manipulation" which is possible thanks to the peculiarities of the game's code and which isn't interesting to me. Rather, our two options are to try and just play it out using the tips and instructions the game gives us, and the other is to look up a guide to figure out the most optimal route to Chocobo Raising.
I'm gonna be real: I did the guide thing. And, for a number of reasons, I think you should as well, unless you're specifically looking to invest weeks of daily play into figuring out the exact mechanics through trial and error, or in doing a long series of "talk to the Chocobo Sage, fight random encounters, talk to Chole at the Chocobo Farm, rinse, repeat for ages." And all of it ultimately just gives us the same basic information as you'd find by looking it up, only missing some specificity that will mean you still have to do a bunch of trial and error or grinding.
So.
Let's start on this Great Chocobo Adventure, shall we?
First off, I know you may be asking: What is the point of engaging in Chocobo Raising? What purpose does it serve?
The answer is that, even with the Highwind, our airship, and even with the Submarine, there are locations in the game which we can't access - locations such as this cave:
I've been trying to get into these remote spots of the map, but the thing is, the Highwind can only land on a grassy plain. And while there is a grassy plain close to this cave, there is also a cliff face which blocks Cloud from accessing the rocky ground leading up to it.
We cannot reach these places with our current means of transportation. Our only hope… is a chocobo.
But not any chocobo. The standard, generic chocobo caught in the wild has no particular movement abilities beyond its natural speed and immunity to random encounters. It's useless to us - but vital to our goals nonetheless.
In order to begin our Chocobo Journey, we must first capture two Chocobos so we can make them make a baby chocobo.
Okay but actually it's way more complicated than that. You see, our goal is to breed a truly elite chocobo. A chocobo distinguished by its color. And for that, we're going to have to engage in…
[Heavy sigh.]
Chocobo eugenics.
You see, each chocobo we can run into on the map has a "quality." It can be Terrible, Poor, Bad, Average, Good, Great, or Wonderful. For our purposes here, we want a "Great" and a "Good" Chocobo. Or two Great or two Good or a Wonderful and a Good but this is the simplest.
So, we have to once again equip the whole Chocobo apparatus - purchase "Greens" which will stop the chocobo for a limited number of turns, equip the Chocobo Lure, and go hunting for chocobo tracks on the overworld.
Now, there's no way of telling what grade of Chocobo we've just run into when a battle starts…
…except of course there is. It's just not in-game knowledge. As far as the game shows us, we just get a chocobo as part of some combat encounter, and we have to capture that chocobo, then go to the farm and get a quality assessment. But actually, chocobo quality is tied to each individual encounter set, and is thus tied to both location and enemy spread. That is to say, the only chocobo we will ever find in the Grasslands Area around the chocobo farm are "Bad" or "Terrible." In order to find a "Great" Chocobo, we must first head to the grassy patches around the Mideel Area, which is where we found that chocobo in the screenshot above. So, job done, right?
Well, no. Secretly, this chocobo is the wrong one. It is accompanied by two head hunter enemies. This means that its quality is "Poor." Instead, we need to find a chocobo which is accompanied by the flat bug-like spiral enemies, like so:
That means this chocobo is "Great." Now that we've done this, we throw some Greens at him to keep him occupied, then dispatch the Spiral enemy.
And there we have the first brick of our Chocobo Empire.
Do you see what I mean about Trial & Error vs Using a Guide? Provided you milk enough information out of the Chocobo Sage (which takes time and grinding), you can get the information that "Great chocobos are found on an island in the southeast." It will not tell you that the Great quality is specifically tied to encountering the Spiral-Chocobo team. Without that knowledge, you will capture low-quality birds repeatedly until you finally land on one of the correct quality.
Anyway, now that we have our very first bird, it's time to send it to the Farm (this is as simple as dismounting and sending it on) and head back there.
Upon doing so, we are informed that this is a great Chocobo, that it is female, and we are prompted to give it a name; I elect to call her Thyme. She is "Class C" - the game doesn't explain what that means. Class C means that, if we take her to the Chocobo Race in Gold Saucer, she will compete in C-Rank races, the easiest ones, until she's accumulated enough victories to graduate to a higher rank. All chocobos, regardless of their initial 'power level,' are Rank C at first until they've proven themselves in the races. While this makes getting to the high-reward races take a while running in bottom-tier races with bottom-tier rewards, this is actually good for us for reasons I'll explain later.
Now, it's time to catch Thyme's partner - a "Good" Chocobo. For this, we need to head to the grasslands surrounding the Mideel Jungle.
Also, while I'm here…
Why not compound all this with a little bit of murder-suicide?
At this stage of the game, Cloud is lv 53, Yuffie is lv 50, and Tifa is lv 48. While I don't mind some degree of discrepancy, Tifa being so underleveled is annoying. Since the rewards for the battles we're going to undergo are low and wouldn't amount to much spread three ways across the whole group anyway, I figure I might as well get some benefit out of the whole affair by putting Cloud and Yuffie on a time-out and having Tifa solo these fights so she can catch up to Yuffie. Plus, it'll help her grind those Limit Breaks for her LB4.
Oh, and in this process, we have unlocked ULTIMA, THE ULTIMATE MAGIC.
Unfortunately it looks like shit.
While Ultima deals enormous damage to all enemies without the need for an All Materia, making it highly useful, it's also just… A vague green spark of light that moves slowly across the screen then feels the screen with blurry green particle effects and then fades. Nowhere is the sheer oomph factor of FFVI's Ultima to be found here, that dome of pure energy that scoured the earth. This is limp.
Ah, well. It's still the most powerful spell in the game. It's just… The fact that it is the most powerful spell in the game and looks like this somehow compounds my disappointment.
Okay, back to Chocobos.
We find our next Chocobo next to Mideel, watching for the flying drake encounter that signals that this is a "Good" Chocobo and not one of the "Bad" Chocobo in this area surrounded by different reptile monsters.
Then we head back to the Farm to name him.
Or… Him..?
Our "Good" Chocobo immediately has a problem.
It's a female. Thyme is also a female. We can't mate two female chocobos.
Now, if I were playing the game 'naively,' the answer would be simple. I would release that Chocobo back into the wild, buy more Greens, head back to Mideel and hunt for one, and then repeat the procedure until I have secured a male "Good" Chocobo. This could take a while, involving a lot of back and forth. It's more of the process that would make Chocobo Raising a long-term effort meant to be undertaken while playing the rest of the game, a little every day, for dozens of hours of overall gameplay. The kind of thing that would be dead in the water in this Let's Play.
However, I happen to know that the gender of the Chocobo isn't determined upon catching and "revealed" at the Farm. Instead, the gender is determined when the Chocobo is transferred from the outside pen to the stables.
Which means we can just sit outside the Farm and reload over and over before heading in until we get a male Chocobo.
…I just lied to you.
You can't actually just 'reload' and try again. Incomplete online information will say that you can, but this didn't work for me and I rolled "female" for fifteen minutes in a row (FF7 Steam does not have a 'go back to intro menu' function that I can see, so every time I want to reload a save I have to hard quit and reboot the game, which takes time). Looking it up online, many people faced the same problem.
The reason is due to the peculiar way FF7's Random Generator Work. For reasons I couldn't begin to imagine explaining, when you reload and don't do anything 'significant,' the game will have already generated and saved a random number from before you saved and quit, and that number will be used on the next… thing that requires a randomly generated number, whatever. In order to change the result of the Chocobo Gender Reveal Party, you need to do something. Trigger a random encounter. Feed another Chocobo stat-raising food. Whatever. That'll prompt the game to issue a new number and you can then try your chance at the gender lottery again.
Simple, right?
So now, we have a female "Great" Chocobo and a male "Good" Chocobo, Sage, which means it's time for… Heavy sigh… Chocobo Breeding.
This is going places.
In order to mate chocobos, we need to talk to them, and then feed them a Nut to encourage them to mate. We feed the Chocobos… A Nut… To get them to… Let's just ignore this and move on.
Nuts are items that can be obtained from battle or bought from the Farm or the Chocobo Sage. Nuts are used exclusively in breeding, and there are a wide array with different effects!
All but two of them are useless.
Pepio Nut, Luchile Nut, Saraha Nut, Lasan Nut, Pram Nut, Porov Nut, nuts that go into the thousands of gil - all worthless. Some have no noticeable effect, some produce offspring with lower 'stats' (more on this later) than their parents. The only Nuts we care about are the Carob and Zeio Nuts, which cannot be bought and drop from rare monsters found only in special locations. Luckily, we happen to have a Carob Nut in our backpack, so we don't have to worry about that right now; instead, we are free to pair Thyme and Sage and give them a Carob Nut, and then with a victorious music the game reveals their offspring…
…another standard Chocobo.
Well, this is useless to us.
You see, we don't get anything from having another yellow Chocobo offspring. I mean, maybe it inherited good stats from its parents or something and will be mildly better at racing? That doesn't matter, because a yellow Chocobo doesn't help us jump onto the next tier into the genetic 'ladder' of Chocobos towards the Uber-Chocobo.
Like I said. Chocobo Eugenics.
So, reload, switch up the RNG, try again, land another yellow Chocobo, try again.
This takes a bit, but eventually, we land on the right result…
A Green Chocobo! (Blue would have worked just as well.) We will call her… Garlic.
This Green Chocobo, or "Mountain Chocobo," can cross mountains - more on that later. As it stands, we could potentially already access new locations we've never seen before just by taking that Chocobo to the right places!
But since we don't want just some areas, we're not stopping there. Our next objective is to obtain Garlic's counterpart, a Blue, or 'River' Chocobo. How do we do that?
Well, if I were playing the game naively, I would release Garlic's parents (there are only six Chocobo Stables so we need to make space as we go), catch a new couple and repeat the process until we get her a new friend. Of course, this would take time and money.
So instead we'll resort to incest.
LISTEN. I DIDN'T DESIGN THE GAME. I DIDN'T MAKE THE RULES. IT'S JUST FASTER AND EASIER THAT WAY.
As a Green Chocobo, if Garlic is mated with an ordinary Good/Great Yellow Chocobo, she will produce her counterpart, a Blue Chocobo. And as it so happens, her father, Sage, is right there.
…he can't mate yet, though. Chocobos who have just mated or are newborn cannot be paired. How does the game define 'newborn'? Well, in the best resources it has to determine 'time spent' through player agency rather than just letting the clock running: random encounters. We have to go out and fight, like, a dozen encounters for time to progress and the Chocobo to be recovered/grown up and ready to mate.
Like I said: With Meteor hanging overhead, we're taking several weeks off to raise Chocobos.
In this case, though, it so happens that this isn't too much of a problem because we need something from random encounters anyway: A second Carob Nut. For that, we will need to go all the way to the Northern Continent, in the rare grassland areas around the frozen wastes and Bone Village, in order to find this opponent:
Vlakorados, a dinosaur with an enormous 33,333 HP despite its unremarkable attacks and offensive moves. We're going to equip the Steal Materia and spend five minutes in battle, rolling to steal until it finally succeeds and we get the Carob Nut, only carried by this one enemy in the whole game.
Then we kill it, and luck into a second Carob Nut drop from its death, so we don't have to hunt down a second one.
Incidentally, check out this weird message:
"Restore was born." What does that mean?
Here's what happened: We have mastered our first Materia. We unlocked Curaga, the highest-level spell on that Materia, a while ago; but there was still one unchecked star on that Restore Materia. That was a star for Mastery. Now that we have obtained the AP required to Master it, we obtain the benefits of Mastery, which is that the Materia undergoes mitosis and spawns off a new lv 0 Materia.
….
Okay. I see where this is going.
I have no need for another Restore Materia. I already have three, maybe even four Restore Materia at lv 3+. But what I do have, on the other hand, is a smattering of incredibly powerful, unique Materia. I only have one Ultima. One Contain. One Bahamut-ZERO. One MP Turbo. I have been allocating these Materia as precious commodities, trying to spread them as usefully as possible across my party.
But if I master Ultima, I get a second Ultima Materia. A second Bahamut-ZERO! All that incredibly powerful magic will be freely available for me to make a killer party!
…
Or not. The Ultima Materia unlocks the Ultima spell at 5,000 AP. It is mastered at 100,000 AP. This Restore Materia, my first-ever mastered Materia, 36 hours into the game, cost me a total of 40,000 MP. Over the entire game. Having had it slotted in since day 1.
Of course, as AP rewards for battling opponents increase with encounter levels, reaching high AP numbers will be made easier… But 100,000 AP? I mean, if it happens on its own, it happens on its own. But I'm doubtful. And we're not gonna be grinding for it unless it turns out to somehow be fast and easy. So ultimately the Materia mastery system is like, whatever.
Maybe we will turn out to unlock Double Ultima. As things are, it seems more likely we'll end up with a chest full of duplicate Alls and Restores in excess of what I actually have use for.
Anyway, back to our horrible crimes against nature.
Say hello to Onion, a male Blue Chocobo.
(We still have to reload and manipulate the RNG several times to get a male one.)
A Blue Chocobo can cross rivers same as the Buggy could, so it could potentially get us to the same place the Buggy could, if we still needed that. Maybe even places it couldn't, by strategically dropping it from the Highwind?
(Side note: Both the Buggy and the Tiny Bronco disappeared after the post-crater timeskip and the acquisition of the Highwind. Sure, we don't need them anymore, but it's noticeable that there was no explanation or story event that destroyed them or anything, they just vanished.)
We don't care about that, because our goal is to obtain a Chocobo with the traits of both the Green and Blue Chocobo: A Black Chocobo, or "River-and-Mountain" Chocobo. Once we have it, we won't have to worry about the specifics of which Chocobo to take to reach which location, and we'll be able to reach locations accessible to neither. So how do we do that?
Come on.
Like you need to ask.
Red Mage had it right all along.
We are of course meant to mate a Blue and Green Chocobo to combine their traits into their offspring. So we have to mate Garlic and Onion together. The sister-mother and the brother-son. Well, first off, we need to go out, do some more random encounters, get some Limit Breaks out of Tifa, and so on. Once we're back and have committed further horrible crimes against nature done, we get…
…another blue Chocobo.
Hrm.
Okay, so, reloading and reloading until we luck into the Black Chocobo isn't working. The chance of getting a Black Chocobo offspring off two 'fresh' colored Chocobos exists, but it's far too low. We could be at this for over an hour just reloading and trying again and again.
But there is another way. Here's the thing: Our odds for chocobo to get the best possible offspring for their mating pair is based on their performance in the races. That is to say, highly competitive Chocobos with multiple wins under their belt have higher odds of producing a better grade of Chocobo baby. Which is why our career as Chocobo Breeder must take a brief pause, as we head for…
…Gold Saucer, where we find Ester, the eccentrically-dressed Chocobo Jockey manager, who offers to register us into the next race.
You know the drill! Line up of colored Chocobo Jockey opponents, circuit with multiple areas, item or GP rewards on a scoreboard I can't parse at all!
So, Chocobo Racing.
As you can see above, Garlic has two visible stats: Top Speed and Stamina. These aren't actually her only stats, but they're the ones prominently displayed. We can also check the opponents' stats; it turns out that 45 km/h is painfully low; most competitors are in the 60 to 80 range. Garlic does enjoy higher Stamina than her competitors, but unfortunately not enough to matter. Left to run on her own, she eventually exhausts her entire Stamina bar without breaking out from last place.
So, unfortunately, this race is a failure, and it doesn't look like we'll do better on repeat try. I make an attempt at running in "Manual" to compensate for Garlic's low stats by making her run better, but that turns out to be counterproductive; among Garlic's unmarked stats are Intelligence, which reflects how difficult she is to steer. With low Intelligence, Garlic actually resists every command Cloud inputs, banking randomly to the side when I accelerate, bucking under the rains when I try to get her to one particular side, and so on.
No, it looks like the only way we'll win races is by improving Garlic's stats. Now, how do we do that, you ask?
Well, it turns out Chocobo Greens have a secondary function other than helping catch Chocobos in battle: If fed to a Chocobo, they will increase its stats by a random amount based on the type of Greens. Gysahl Greens, the cheapest variant, increase Speed and Stamina by a small amount. The most expensive variant sold at the Chocobo Farm, Mimett Greens, increase both Speed and Stamina by a larger amount. And it just so happens I bought a handful of Mimett Greens a while back as a 'just in case' measure! So let's feed Garlic those expensive veggies and see what happens.
…those Greens improved Garlic's Top Speed by 1kmh and her Stamina by Not At All.
Obviously I immediately proceed to lose the next race.
SO. Spending two, three, five thousand gil on Greens isn't going to cut it. The Chocobo Farm itself doesn't have what we need.
Remember this guy?
Slight note: The Chocobo in the Sage's house, which is completely surrounded by mountains, is a Green Chocobo, that is to say, the ones that can cross mountains. That's a nice touch of environmental storytelling.
The Chocobo Sage sells a small number of very expensive Nuts and Greens. We don't care about the Nuts, but his highest-priced Greens, the Sylkis Greens, are what we're here for. In order to make absolutely sure to win these races, we grab ten of them.
At 5k a piece, that's fifty thousand gil, nearly half of my stash. Selling a mastered All Materia for a cool million so I never have to worry about this again is looking pretty appealing right now. (But only somewhat; I don't want to have to level up another one to replace it, we'll only do that if we have to).
There we go.
With 10 Sylkis Greens, Garlic's Top Speed has doubled to an impressive 90kmh. This is not that high in the grand scheme of things, besting the best C-rank NPC Chocobo by 'only' 10kmh, but she also enjoys an advantage of over 150 Stamina. Having both higher top speed and much better stamina, Garlic proceeds to utterly crush the competition.
This is our first of many victories in the races. The reward list includes some highly desirable items like a Megalixir, but the reward items are randomized and I never land on those, so instead we start building up a stock of GP that we'll need later - not to trade for items, but for entrance into Battle Square to unlock Omnislash.
In order to guarantee a 100% rate of breeding a Black Chocobo, we need nine victories in total spread any which way between both parents. Since I would rather not spend another 50k on getting Onion up to par, I'll see how far Garlic can go. As it turns out, the answer is "at least into B-rank races" - after three victories in the bottom tier, she is automatically graduated to B Class.
The race track itself is identical as far as I can tell, but all the competitors now have much better stats - in fact, they are faster than Garlic; many B Class competitors have Top Speeds in the 100 kmh. However, their Stamina is only in the 300s, which means Garlic has a significant lead in durability; and indeed, we observe repeatedly Garlic starting the race in the middle or back of the pack, then pulling ahead by the end. With two wins, Garlic breaks into the A Class…
Which is where her winning streak sadly ends. A Class competitors have 120+ kmh top speed and their stamina, while still lower than Garlic's, is still high enough that overtaking them isn't feasible. A Rank is where Garlic's racing career sadly ends.
Five wins should increase the odds of Garlic and Onion producing a Black Chocobo, but unfortunately it doesn't do so enough and I'm not able to get the desired offspring. So I decide to try Onion's luck at the races anyway, entering him without any stat upgrades.
…huh.
It turns out that I'm an idiot.
I forgot to factor in the fact that Chocobos breed stronger Chocobos with each generation. Because Onion is Garlic's son (as well as her brother), he inherited stronger stats than hers. His starting top speed is 68kmh, which, while not huge (he won't make it into the A Class) and lower than the highest C Class Competitors, is combined with his massive Stamina lead plenty enough to easily clear the C Class three times in a row - and, while victory in the B Class is anything but guaranteed, luck can still result in the occasional win, which is all we need to get a combined 9 wins out of Garlic's 5 and Onion's 4.
With these wins in our pocket, we head back to the Farm, where we can finally do the unspeakable and mate Garlic and Onion using a Carob Nut to produce…
…Basil, our first Black Chocobo!
Also known as "Mountain-and-River" Chocobo, Basil can cross any terrain that isn't ocean. This is huge; it means Basil can essentially access the entire map barring one location. We take him out, enter the Highwind (it's as easily as literally just walking into the airship while riding him), and then we fly around the map to scout out locations we can't access from the airship; we put the Highwind down in the nearest available grassy plain, then ride the world's most inbred steed across mounds and valleys.
The three places most immediately of interest to us are three small 'Materia caves' in the Nibel, Wutai and Corel areas. Each one contains a luminous Materia of a different type, each one a unique Materia of at least potentially considerable power: Quadra Magic, HP <-> MP, and Mime.
Quadra Magic is basically dualcast. When linked to a Magic or Summon Materia, it halves damage but casts the linked spell four times in a row - sort of like Rapid Fire did in FFV. This results in doubled overall damage - although if we get our magic power high enough that we would run into the 9,999 HP limit by default, this could potentially more than double.
The Red Mage dream is alive once more.
ABSOLUUUUUUTE POWAAAAAAAH!
The other two are weirder. Mime is, well, Mime; you know the deal by now, it perfectly copies the last action taken in combat without paying costs. There are probably multiple ways of breaking the game using it but it feels like a lot of headache to me so I might not bother. As for HP <-> MP, it… does exactly what it says: It inverts HP and MP scores. Any character using this would fall within one-shot range of any enemy, with sub-1k HP, but would also multiply their MP score by 5 to 10. There are probably some ridiculous combos this enables if I can set up some means of protecting the fragile caster, but for now I'm good.
Cut for image count.
Final Fantasy VII, Part 32: The Coffin of Choco and Boco, Part B
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
There's also another place we can explore - this jungle up in the mountains above Cosmo Canyon.
…it appears to have some kind of baffling mini-game based on the catching and releasing of frogs and insects to feed giant carnivorous plants? Trying to cross the forest results in that venus flytrap snapping shut and us being pushed back, so I assume we have to feed it something somehow? I make a couple of attempts but I don't think I understand how it's supposed to work and just dropping a frog or an insect onto the flytrap's mouth doesn't do anything. So I just nudge close enough to grab the item in the center (it's the Supershot ST, a shotgun and Vincent's ultimate weapon), then leave. We'll deal with this later.
There are a couple more places to visit, but they're a little more involved than just 'visit cave, get Materia.' So first off, I want to set up the groundwork for our final Chocobo. This time: No incest! In order to obtain the best Chocobo, we need to pair off Basil, our Black Chocobo, with the highest grade of standard/yellow Chocobo, the "Wonderful" Chocobo. And for this, we need to head for the far north, to find Chocobo tracks in the frozen wastes around Icicle Inn, and to run into a Chocobo accompanied by the bunny carrot swordsmen.
The rest of the party is allowed to live again now that Tifa is lv 50 like Yuffie.
It's quickly done. Because Basil is a male Chocobo, we'll need this "Wonderful" Chocobo to be female, but as said before gender is determined upon transfering the Chocobo to the stables, so we'll deal with it (and naming the new Chocobo) later. For now, we had a different need - in order for Basil and the "Wonderful" Chocobo to conceive the highest tier of Chocobo, we need a Zeio Nut. The only way to get Zeio Nut is to get them as steals or drops from goblins, and goblins are found in only two locations on the map, one of which is an otherwise unremarkable island we can access with the Highwind.
Bam, done. Like most steps in the Chocobo Raising Project, this only takes a few minutes with perfect knowledge and would be all but impossible without. Now that we're set, we can return to the Farm, save scum until our Wonderful Chocobo turns out to be female, whereupon we christen her Chili.
Now we have to go do a bunch of fights - we didn't really encounter many enemies so far, so Basil is still considered a newborn. This seems like a perfect opportunity to get on with the plot, and so we head to Rocket Town.
…yes, in case you hadn't already made the connection yourself, this whole update was told anachronistically. I went through the Chocobo Raising sidequest before Rocket Town, then headed there to get my encounter count, retrieved the Huge Materia, talked to Bugenhagen, and then paused at the point where the game told me to head back to the Forgotten Capital and resumed Chocobo Raising. I'm putting these things together the way I am so that the entire Chocobo Project is in a single update, because I think scattering it across several updates is more trouble than its worth.
So, we deal with Shinra, and now we're back!
…turns out this wasn't enough. Newborn Chocobos can mate after 3 to 18 battles, and it seems ours has decided to be on the bigger end. So Basil still won't mate with Chili. We need to get in some more random encounters. We could just wander around on the map blowing through underleveled battles, but I figure we might as well put this to use and go out to do some exploring - and this time, of a place our Chocobo can't get us to!
The Sunken Airship 'Gelnika' (Guernica), Shinra's military cargo ship, transporting highly valuable research material and weaponry, which went down for some unknown reason. Time to do some exploring!
…it's our old friends the Turks! Fancy seeing you here!
Reno: "We just seem to keep running into each other lately! There were weapons and Materia developed solely to destroy Sephiroth."
Rude: "But, it was attacked by Weapon and sunk to the bottom of the sea."
Reno: "I can't give you what's here. We'll take out Sephiroth. I guess this is our last meeting."
Rude: "I won't let you get in our way."
C'mon, guys. You think you can take Sephiroth? Even with all of Shinra's advanced weaponry at your disposal, have you won a single fight against us?
Well, they're certainly giving it their best shot. The Turks are significantly more powerful here than they were last time we fought them - Reno boasts 15k HP and Rude 20k, far in excess of what he had during the Rocket fight (funnily enough, it's possible to fight this version of Rude before meeting him on the Rocket, causing him to inexplicably lose all of his combat power in the meantime). Reno's Neo Turk Light is his new take on Pyramid, which instead of trapping a character causes Confusion, resulting in multiple friendly fire incidents from our party.
The Neo Turk Light in use, and an affected Cloud striking Tifa.
Even fighting with only two party members and the third one actively hurting us, it's not enough. Enemy Skills and Summons as well as Ultima and Freeze come out in force (although we don't get to use Bahamut-ZERO, as the character who had it equipped spends most of the fight confused), and the Turks are quickly sent packing.
With the Turks out of the way, we're free to explore the Gelnika and acquire all its high-value loot - and high-value it indeed is.
Among our finds: two Megalixirs (consumables that grant full HP and MP refills to the whole party), the Hades Summon Materia, the Double Cut Command Materia, Heaven's Cloud, a powerful sword for Cloud, and more!
Of particular note is the Double Cut Materia. It transforms the normal Attack command, causing the character with it equipped to hit twice with their normal attack. That seems incredibly potent on a primary physical attacker like Cloud or Tifa - I am not sure if it's more effective than Tifa's Deathblow + perfect accuracy weapon setup, but if I equip her with her ultimate weapon Premium Heart I am sure it will. It works fine on Cloud, though, who is finally getting a new weapon - I hadn't realized this until now, but he's still using the Enhance Sword, a weapon which has three pairs of linked Materia slots but whose damage fell behind the curve hours ago, just because it was too annoying to have him with fewer Materia. Heaven's Cloud also has six slots, although they're not linked, which isn't too much of a problem since Cloud is carrying mostly Support Materia and Summons, and with 93 Attack it's a considerable jump in power. Additionally, we find the Conformer, Yuffie's ultimate weapon - although we won't be using it yet, as like all ultimates it has no Materia growth.
As for the Hades Materia - it's an odd one. Its damage is low for this stage of the game, but summoning Hades has a 100% chance of inflicting every status effect known to man at once unless the enemy is totally immune. This could be very useful in clearing tough random encounter, but I think it might be even more useful as a "discount Ribbon" paired with the Added Effect Materia on armor granting immunity to Sleep/Poison/Confusion/Silence/Frog/Small/Slow/Paralyze…
If I had two Added Effect Materia, I could grant one character immunity to all the Battle Square status effect and equip them with the Curse Ring set-up, dammit. But unfortunately the only way to get another Added Effect is to master the first one, and that's another 100k AP time-eater. This'll have to stay a dream for now.
…
What's most interesting to me about Hades isn't its mechanical effect, though.
It's that it's almost certainly an unlikely reference to one of the least successful and darkest Disney animated movies of all time, one which almost buried the company's animation studio:
Like.
C'mon.
You see it too, right?
I guess the FF7 team had one of the world's only Black Cauldron fans on it… And honestly I wouldn't be surprised; it came out 12 years before FF7, just the right time for one of the developers to have seen it as a kid and thought it was sick. Final Fantasy has worn Western influence on its sleeves since the D&D-inspired mechanics of I and the Star Wars plot references of II, and FF7 is doing, with its story that takes a very melodramatic series and goes into some really serious, dark places, something like what Disney was trying to accomplish with The Dark Cauldron. I absolutely would believe Hades was someone's homage to the (underrated?) Disney not-classic.
…
There is one other reason the Gelnika is important. And it is, of all things, something I have constantly given the game shit about that I am about to speak of positively for once.
It's the random encounters.
Not only are all the Gelnika mobs fucked up horrors from John Carpenter's nightmares, every single one has over 10,000 HP (except the ones encountered in groups of four to six) and they hit like fucking trucks. Several of them have counterattack moves (the horrible corpse flower uses it to inflict Confuse, the horrid flesh stingray to inflict Sadness) and they hit for thousands of damage per attack.
I'm having the time of my life. At long last, I finally face opponent who hit hard enough to trigger Limit Breaks. Forget using Big Guard and Cover and protective strategy, I am going balls out into this fight, literally "COME AT ME BRO"-ing these assholes. It's not grinding when it involves actually engaging with the combat, you know?
BEHOLD: DOLPHIN BLOW!
Tifa's newest LB3, it's a jumping uppercut which involves a magical dolphin jumping as she punches. Fucking sweet. It takes a little effort, constant healing, several KOs, and enough methamphetamine to kill God (one of the enemies inflicts Sadness, which penalizes Limit gain, so I have to constantly re-up the team's Hyper), but in time, we do it: By the time we get out of the Gelnika, having hanged around for like half an hour after cleaning it of all its loot, both Tifa and Yuffie have fully unlocked their Limit Breaks.
We get a special message from each one when using their LB4 unlock items.
As well, the Gelnika encounters provide a significant amount of AP, and many of our Materias have now upgraded
This has been a highly productive session. And now, it's time to head back to Chocoboland.
Chili and Basil are ready to be paired to produce the ultimate offspring…
…in another hour or so.
Like all pairings before, untrained Chocobos only have a low percentage chance of actually producing a better offspring. And it is lower than any so far. All my attempts result in either Yellow or Black Chocobos.
No, we're going to actually have to race them if we want the legendary bird.
Fortunately, even without being fed any Greens, Basil is already a beast - he natively has 79kmh Top Speed and 430 Stamina, easily dominating the C Class competition. As with his mother Garlic, the B Class competition has much better Top Speed, but their Stamina sucks and they are bad at managing it, so he wins the competition through endurance.
This allows him to advance to the A Class… Where things get dicey.
You can see here the stats of an A Class competitor. 122kmh Top Speed is so much even Basil's Stamina can't make up the gap. Also, sometimes, Joe decides to participate.
Guy in the hat.
Remember Joe? The top Chocobo jockey we met in the Corel Prison arc? He is the only other guy in the whole racing circuit to have a Black Chocobo, and his stats are defined as 'better than you.' As in, the game will always give him better stats than we have no matter what. That doesn't mean winning is impossible, but we would have to manually control our Chocobo and play better, and I'm not bothering with that.
So, this seems to be where Basil's career caps out, as one of the worst Chocobos in the Class A circuit. In order to meet our quota of 14 racing wins to guarantee a successful offspring, we're going to have to take Chili out to the races - and Chili is, unfortunately, a baseline Chocobo without the benefits of generation of inbreeding and eugenics, so her stats are guaranteed to be worse.
…I beg your pardon?
Oh my god Chili has natively better stats across the whole board than even Basil, the legendary Black Chocobo from two generations of race-winning parents.
It's still not enough to beat the A Class, but it's certainly enough to get her there in a flash and add another five wins to the prospective parents' tally. Unfortunately, that is still not enough to raise the odds, and they keep producing only Black Chocobo offspring. So, with great regret, I head back to the Chocobo Sage's hut, and buy another 10 Sylkis Greens, and feed them to Basil.
This is it. 118kmh top speed. 526 Top Stamina. It's time to obliterate the A Class.
NYOOOOOOOM-
In actuality 118kmh is still lower than the best NPCs in the A Class, but Basil's Stamina is so far beyond them that he still overtakes them in short order and carries to a win, all the way to the S Class.
Unfortunately the S Class is beyond Basil's capabilities. I try to make it work with manual controls, but the gap in top speed is too much. Which is a shame, seeing as the item rewards include multiple Materia and rare Accessories. I suppose I'll have to wipe my tears with my giant pile of GP.
In any case, we only needed a couple more wins to tip the scales, so our goal is accomplished. Chili and Basil are ready to mate and produce THE ULTIMATE OFFSPRING.
No, not like that.
With the power of the Zeio Nut… An S Class Black Chocobo father… And a B Class Wonderful Chocobo mother…
…we have obtained the Gold Chocobo. (His name is Shalot. Yes it's misspelled because of the character limit.)
Yes, I know. It looks kinda like a yellow Chocobo. But the richer, shinier hue is unmistakeable. This is the apex of its species. The ultimate product of Chocobo Eugenics. A Chocobo to surpass Metal Gear.
The Highwind is now obsolete.
IT CAN RACE ACROSS THE OCEAN.
Every location in the game can be reached by a Gold Chocobo. This is what I meant by "the Highwind is obsolete" - the Black Chocobo could reach places the Highwind couldn't but it couldn't cross the ocean so world travel still required riding the Airship. But Shalot can get anywhere at all, at high speed. I might still use the Highwind because it's possible it is faster than Shalot, but for now, I'm enjoying riding it across the world.
Now, there is actually only one location that the Gold Chocobo can reach that the Black Chocobo couldn't. This one location is effectively the true reward for this entire Chocobo Raising miniquest, which took me several hours. But what a fucking reward it is.
You have to either luck onto it or already know it's there, though, because it's not marked on the map. It is a hidden island, in the far northeast of the world, in what seems from the map to be an empty stretch of sea.
It is an island.
That round island - I assume some kind of open caldera of what was once a volcano but blew up long ago, with a forest growing in its center - contains what just might be the most powerful treasure in the game. I go in expecting… I don't know. A dungeon? At least a boss fight? Some kind of opposition - but of course not. Our 'opposition' was the hours of obtuse breeding and racing minigame, and this? This is our reward.
It seems almost too easy.
A Summon Materia.
The "Knights of the Round" Summon.
This is a new entry in the Final Fantasy series. We've never had a summon referencing the Knights of the Round Table before. Like most summons in this game, it has no associated lore that I'm aware of at this stage, it just is itself.
But what an itself it is.
In FFVI, if I recall, I brought up the fact that, as power increases towards the endgame, the 9,999 damage limit shifts from aspirational to an obstacle - 9,999 damage is the highest possible damage you can deal in one attack even when you could deal more through raw stats and spell power, and as enemy HP starts climbing into the tens of thousands and can't be killed by a single 9k attack, you need to start looking for ways to break that limit. For FFVI, that's mostly just Dualcasting Ultima and that's about it. But with a boss with 1 million HP in the Emerald Weapon, I've been thinking about how to deal more than 9,999 damage per action - and the answer is always the same: First, reach as high a power on individual moves as possible, then, make multiple move per action. Quadra Magic + Ultima? Bahamut-ZERO with Added Cut? Attacking up to four times with a standard attack using the Dual Cut Materia? Abusing the shit out of Tifa's Limit Break, which can hit seven times in a row? All potential answers.
And now we have another one.
We have Knights of the Round.
Knights of the Round is a whole damn production. It's not any one monster; it's thirteen knights (or rather, I think, twelve knights and their king), each one appearing in succession to deliver their own attack - spear, lance, magic spell, and so on.
This is mechanically represented as a series of individual attacks, which ignore Magic Defense and deal, at this stage in the game, over 6,000 damage - for a staggering total of over 78,000 damage.
This is… obscene. It blows everything out of the water. Bahamut-ZERO is in the dust. No boss we've fought so far could resist a single cast of it. Jesus Motherfucking Christ.
Of course, the solution to Emerald Weapon can't be "cast Knights of the Round ten times." Like all Summons, it is limited in its number of casts per fight, and the AP growth for that Materia is ludicrous, requiring 50k just to get to level 2. But it's probably going to be part of any Emerald Weapon strategy.
As I type these words, I look dumbstruck at my own hands as if they were covered in blood. Did I… Did I do this? Did I break the game?
It was so… easy. All it took was a hundred thousand gil and maybe… Five, six hours of engaging in a weird and obtuse sidequest requiring multiple weird sub-systems but which was at least fun in its novelty?
Once upon a time, this whole endeavour would have been borderline impossible or at least taken much, much longer than it took me, through trial and error and multiple attempts at various steps of the process. But with modern information being precise to the point of 'telling you how the RNG works so as to manipulate gender and color outcomes', it's a deterministic process that is relatively easy and will merely take an entire afternoon out of your life.
And for your reward? The game is broken in half.
It was easy before (but the Gelnika was a nice surprise), what will it be now? What hath mine hubris wrought? I almost want to put Knights on the Round back on the shelf. Reload the last save from before I headed to that island.
Pretend this never happened.
Well, there will be time for such momentous decision. Let us end the Chocobo Raising adventure here for now.
There is one more place (that I know of) we haven't visited with the chocobos yet - one that actually was accessible with the submarine, I just happened to find it while riding Basil. But as it's rather more plot-important as this update generally has been, and is a lot to deal with, we'll see it next time.
So. Yeah. That was the Chocobo Raising sidequest.
It saw us engage with a variety of systems that only exists for the purposes of this quest, capture a bunch of wild animals, train and feed them, and then do horrible crimes against nature in order to engage in a bizarre game of color eugenics to produce the apex creature on the Planet. It took hours even with a guide, cost us a bunch of gil, but also happened to unlock the path to what amounts to an Infinite GP Hack if we feed our Gold Chocobo some Sylkis Greens to ensure it wins forever at the Gold Saucer races. And we were rewarded with a bunch of new Materia that have increasing levels of game-breaking power, and… I guess the satisfaction of having a Gold Chocobo to ride around on for the rest of the game? All in a process which requires us to completely divorce our understanding of the fictional reality of the game from its mechanics, because Cloud and Co just blew off the impending death of everything due to a Meteor that is literally hanging in the sky right now and approaching by the day in order to raise several successive generations of racing bird.
What is our lesson here? What is our takeaway from this? What can we learn from this, in which ways can this inform our analysis and critique of Final Fantasy VII, as both a game and a story?
…
I guess that's about it, yeah. Thank you, Red Mage.
And thank you for reading.
Next Time: The Cuck Arc.
…it appears to have some kind of baffling mini-game based on the catching and releasing of frogs and insects to feed giant carnivorous plants? Trying to cross the forest results in that venus flytrap snapping shut and us being pushed back, so I assume we have to feed it something somehow? I make a couple of attempts but I don't think I understand how it's supposed to work and just dropping a frog or an insect onto the flytrap's mouth doesn't do anything. So I just nudge close enough to grab the item in the center (it's the Supershot ST, a shotgun and Vincent's ultimate weapon), then leave. We'll deal with this later.
There are a couple more places to visit, but they're a little more involved than just 'visit cave, get Materia.' So first off, I want to set up the groundwork for our final Chocobo. This time: No incest! In order to obtain the best Chocobo, we need to pair off Basil, our Black Chocobo, with the highest grade of standard/yellow Chocobo, the "Wonderful" Chocobo. And for this, we need to head for the far north, to find Chocobo tracks in the frozen wastes around Icicle Inn, and to run into a Chocobo accompanied by the bunny carrot swordsmen.
The rest of the party is allowed to live again now that Tifa is lv 50 like Yuffie.
It's quickly done. Because Basil is a male Chocobo, we'll need this "Wonderful" Chocobo to be female, but as said before gender is determined upon transfering the Chocobo to the stables, so we'll deal with it (and naming the new Chocobo) later. For now, we had a different need - in order for Basil and the "Wonderful" Chocobo to conceive the highest tier of Chocobo, we need a Zeio Nut. The only way to get Zeio Nut is to get them as steals or drops from goblins, and goblins are found in only two locations on the map, one of which is an otherwise unremarkable island we can access with the Highwind.
Bam, done. Like most steps in the Chocobo Raising Project, this only takes a few minutes with perfect knowledge and would be all but impossible without. Now that we're set, we can return to the Farm, save scum until our Wonderful Chocobo turns out to be female, whereupon we christen her Chili.
Now we have to go do a bunch of fights - we didn't really encounter many enemies so far, so Basil is still considered a newborn. This seems like a perfect opportunity to get on with the plot, and so we head to Rocket Town.
…yes, in case you hadn't already made the connection yourself, this whole update was told anachronistically. I went through the Chocobo Raising sidequest before Rocket Town, then headed there to get my encounter count, retrieved the Huge Materia, talked to Bugenhagen, and then paused at the point where the game told me to head back to the Forgotten Capital and resumed Chocobo Raising. I'm putting these things together the way I am so that the entire Chocobo Project is in a single update, because I think scattering it across several updates is more trouble than its worth.
So, we deal with Shinra, and now we're back!
…turns out this wasn't enough. Newborn Chocobos can mate after 3 to 18 battles, and it seems ours has decided to be on the bigger end. So Basil still won't mate with Chili. We need to get in some more random encounters. We could just wander around on the map blowing through underleveled battles, but I figure we might as well put this to use and go out to do some exploring - and this time, of a place our Chocobo can't get us to!
The Sunken Airship 'Gelnika' (Guernica), Shinra's military cargo ship, transporting highly valuable research material and weaponry, which went down for some unknown reason. Time to do some exploring!
…it's our old friends the Turks! Fancy seeing you here!
Reno: "We just seem to keep running into each other lately! There were weapons and Materia developed solely to destroy Sephiroth."
Rude: "But, it was attacked by Weapon and sunk to the bottom of the sea."
Reno: "I can't give you what's here. We'll take out Sephiroth. I guess this is our last meeting."
Rude: "I won't let you get in our way."
C'mon, guys. You think you can take Sephiroth? Even with all of Shinra's advanced weaponry at your disposal, have you won a single fight against us?
Well, they're certainly giving it their best shot. The Turks are significantly more powerful here than they were last time we fought them - Reno boasts 15k HP and Rude 20k, far in excess of what he had during the Rocket fight (funnily enough, it's possible to fight this version of Rude before meeting him on the Rocket, causing him to inexplicably lose all of his combat power in the meantime). Reno's Neo Turk Light is his new take on Pyramid, which instead of trapping a character causes Confusion, resulting in multiple friendly fire incidents from our party.
The Neo Turk Light in use, and an affected Cloud striking Tifa.
Even fighting with only two party members and the third one actively hurting us, it's not enough. Enemy Skills and Summons as well as Ultima and Freeze come out in force (although we don't get to use Bahamut-ZERO, as the character who had it equipped spends most of the fight confused), and the Turks are quickly sent packing.
With the Turks out of the way, we're free to explore the Gelnika and acquire all its high-value loot - and high-value it indeed is.
Among our finds: two Megalixirs (consumables that grant full HP and MP refills to the whole party), the Hades Summon Materia, the Double Cut Command Materia, Heaven's Cloud, a powerful sword for Cloud, and more!
Of particular note is the Double Cut Materia. It transforms the normal Attack command, causing the character with it equipped to hit twice with their normal attack. That seems incredibly potent on a primary physical attacker like Cloud or Tifa - I am not sure if it's more effective than Tifa's Deathblow + perfect accuracy weapon setup, but if I equip her with her ultimate weapon Premium Heart I am sure it will. It works fine on Cloud, though, who is finally getting a new weapon - I hadn't realized this until now, but he's still using the Enhance Sword, a weapon which has three pairs of linked Materia slots but whose damage fell behind the curve hours ago, just because it was too annoying to have him with fewer Materia. Heaven's Cloud also has six slots, although they're not linked, which isn't too much of a problem since Cloud is carrying mostly Support Materia and Summons, and with 93 Attack it's a considerable jump in power. Additionally, we find the Conformer, Yuffie's ultimate weapon - although we won't be using it yet, as like all ultimates it has no Materia growth.
As for the Hades Materia - it's an odd one. Its damage is low for this stage of the game, but summoning Hades has a 100% chance of inflicting every status effect known to man at once unless the enemy is totally immune. This could be very useful in clearing tough random encounter, but I think it might be even more useful as a "discount Ribbon" paired with the Added Effect Materia on armor granting immunity to Sleep/Poison/Confusion/Silence/Frog/Small/Slow/Paralyze…
If I had two Added Effect Materia, I could grant one character immunity to all the Battle Square status effect and equip them with the Curse Ring set-up, dammit. But unfortunately the only way to get another Added Effect is to master the first one, and that's another 100k AP time-eater. This'll have to stay a dream for now.
…
What's most interesting to me about Hades isn't its mechanical effect, though.
It's that it's almost certainly an unlikely reference to one of the least successful and darkest Disney animated movies of all time, one which almost buried the company's animation studio:
Like.
C'mon.
You see it too, right?
I guess the FF7 team had one of the world's only Black Cauldron fans on it… And honestly I wouldn't be surprised; it came out 12 years before FF7, just the right time for one of the developers to have seen it as a kid and thought it was sick. Final Fantasy has worn Western influence on its sleeves since the D&D-inspired mechanics of I and the Star Wars plot references of II, and FF7 is doing, with its story that takes a very melodramatic series and goes into some really serious, dark places, something like what Disney was trying to accomplish with The Dark Cauldron. I absolutely would believe Hades was someone's homage to the (underrated?) Disney not-classic.
…
There is one other reason the Gelnika is important. And it is, of all things, something I have constantly given the game shit about that I am about to speak of positively for once.
It's the random encounters.
Not only are all the Gelnika mobs fucked up horrors from John Carpenter's nightmares, every single one has over 10,000 HP (except the ones encountered in groups of four to six) and they hit like fucking trucks. Several of them have counterattack moves (the horrible corpse flower uses it to inflict Confuse, the horrid flesh stingray to inflict Sadness) and they hit for thousands of damage per attack.
I'm having the time of my life. At long last, I finally face opponent who hit hard enough to trigger Limit Breaks. Forget using Big Guard and Cover and protective strategy, I am going balls out into this fight, literally "COME AT ME BRO"-ing these assholes. It's not grinding when it involves actually engaging with the combat, you know?
BEHOLD: DOLPHIN BLOW!
Tifa's newest LB3, it's a jumping uppercut which involves a magical dolphin jumping as she punches. Fucking sweet. It takes a little effort, constant healing, several KOs, and enough methamphetamine to kill God (one of the enemies inflicts Sadness, which penalizes Limit gain, so I have to constantly re-up the team's Hyper), but in time, we do it: By the time we get out of the Gelnika, having hanged around for like half an hour after cleaning it of all its loot, both Tifa and Yuffie have fully unlocked their Limit Breaks.
We get a special message from each one when using their LB4 unlock items.
As well, the Gelnika encounters provide a significant amount of AP, and many of our Materias have now upgraded
This has been a highly productive session. And now, it's time to head back to Chocoboland.
Chili and Basil are ready to be paired to produce the ultimate offspring…
…in another hour or so.
Like all pairings before, untrained Chocobos only have a low percentage chance of actually producing a better offspring. And it is lower than any so far. All my attempts result in either Yellow or Black Chocobos.
No, we're going to actually have to race them if we want the legendary bird.
Fortunately, even without being fed any Greens, Basil is already a beast - he natively has 79kmh Top Speed and 430 Stamina, easily dominating the C Class competition. As with his mother Garlic, the B Class competition has much better Top Speed, but their Stamina sucks and they are bad at managing it, so he wins the competition through endurance.
This allows him to advance to the A Class… Where things get dicey.
You can see here the stats of an A Class competitor. 122kmh Top Speed is so much even Basil's Stamina can't make up the gap. Also, sometimes, Joe decides to participate.
Guy in the hat.
Remember Joe? The top Chocobo jockey we met in the Corel Prison arc? He is the only other guy in the whole racing circuit to have a Black Chocobo, and his stats are defined as 'better than you.' As in, the game will always give him better stats than we have no matter what. That doesn't mean winning is impossible, but we would have to manually control our Chocobo and play better, and I'm not bothering with that.
So, this seems to be where Basil's career caps out, as one of the worst Chocobos in the Class A circuit. In order to meet our quota of 14 racing wins to guarantee a successful offspring, we're going to have to take Chili out to the races - and Chili is, unfortunately, a baseline Chocobo without the benefits of generation of inbreeding and eugenics, so her stats are guaranteed to be worse.
…I beg your pardon?
Oh my god Chili has natively better stats across the whole board than even Basil, the legendary Black Chocobo from two generations of race-winning parents.
It's still not enough to beat the A Class, but it's certainly enough to get her there in a flash and add another five wins to the prospective parents' tally. Unfortunately, that is still not enough to raise the odds, and they keep producing only Black Chocobo offspring. So, with great regret, I head back to the Chocobo Sage's hut, and buy another 10 Sylkis Greens, and feed them to Basil.
This is it. 118kmh top speed. 526 Top Stamina. It's time to obliterate the A Class.
NYOOOOOOOM-
In actuality 118kmh is still lower than the best NPCs in the A Class, but Basil's Stamina is so far beyond them that he still overtakes them in short order and carries to a win, all the way to the S Class.
In any case, we only needed a couple more wins to tip the scales, so our goal is accomplished. Chili and Basil are ready to mate and produce THE ULTIMATE OFFSPRING.
No, not like that.
With the power of the Zeio Nut… An S Class Black Chocobo father… And a B Class Wonderful Chocobo mother…
…we have obtained the Gold Chocobo. (His name is Shalot. Yes it's misspelled because of the character limit.)
Yes, I know. It looks kinda like a yellow Chocobo. But the richer, shinier hue is unmistakeable. This is the apex of its species. The ultimate product of Chocobo Eugenics. A Chocobo to surpass Metal Gear.
The Highwind is now obsolete.
IT CAN RACE ACROSS THE OCEAN.
Every location in the game can be reached by a Gold Chocobo. This is what I meant by "the Highwind is obsolete" - the Black Chocobo could reach places the Highwind couldn't but it couldn't cross the ocean so world travel still required riding the Airship. But Shalot can get anywhere at all, at high speed. I might still use the Highwind because it's possible it is faster than Shalot, but for now, I'm enjoying riding it across the world.
Now, there is actually only one location that the Gold Chocobo can reach that the Black Chocobo couldn't. This one location is effectively the true reward for this entire Chocobo Raising miniquest, which took me several hours. But what a fucking reward it is.
You have to either luck onto it or already know it's there, though, because it's not marked on the map. It is a hidden island, in the far northeast of the world, in what seems from the map to be an empty stretch of sea.
It is an island.
That round island - I assume some kind of open caldera of what was once a volcano but blew up long ago, with a forest growing in its center - contains what just might be the most powerful treasure in the game. I go in expecting… I don't know. A dungeon? At least a boss fight? Some kind of opposition - but of course not. Our 'opposition' was the hours of obtuse breeding and racing minigame, and this? This is our reward.
It seems almost too easy.
A Summon Materia.
The "Knights of the Round" Summon.
This is a new entry in the Final Fantasy series. We've never had a summon referencing the Knights of the Round Table before. Like most summons in this game, it has no associated lore that I'm aware of at this stage, it just is itself.
But what an itself it is.
In FFVI, if I recall, I brought up the fact that, as power increases towards the endgame, the 9,999 damage limit shifts from aspirational to an obstacle - 9,999 damage is the highest possible damage you can deal in one attack even when you could deal more through raw stats and spell power, and as enemy HP starts climbing into the tens of thousands and can't be killed by a single 9k attack, you need to start looking for ways to break that limit. For FFVI, that's mostly just Dualcasting Ultima and that's about it. But with a boss with 1 million HP in the Emerald Weapon, I've been thinking about how to deal more than 9,999 damage per action - and the answer is always the same: First, reach as high a power on individual moves as possible, then, make multiple move per action. Quadra Magic + Ultima? Bahamut-ZERO with Added Cut? Attacking up to four times with a standard attack using the Dual Cut Materia? Abusing the shit out of Tifa's Limit Break, which can hit seven times in a row? All potential answers.
And now we have another one.
We have Knights of the Round.
Knights of the Round is a whole damn production. It's not any one monster; it's thirteen knights (or rather, I think, twelve knights and their king), each one appearing in succession to deliver their own attack - spear, lance, magic spell, and so on.
This is mechanically represented as a series of individual attacks, which ignore Magic Defense and deal, at this stage in the game, over 6,000 damage - for a staggering total of over 78,000 damage.
This is… obscene. It blows everything out of the water. Bahamut-ZERO is in the dust. No boss we've fought so far could resist a single cast of it. Jesus Motherfucking Christ.
Of course, the solution to Emerald Weapon can't be "cast Knights of the Round ten times." Like all Summons, it is limited in its number of casts per fight, and the AP growth for that Materia is ludicrous, requiring 50k just to get to level 2. But it's probably going to be part of any Emerald Weapon strategy.
As I type these words, I look dumbstruck at my own hands as if they were covered in blood. Did I… Did I do this? Did I break the game?
It was so… easy. All it took was a hundred thousand gil and maybe… Five, six hours of engaging in a weird and obtuse sidequest requiring multiple weird sub-systems but which was at least fun in its novelty?
Once upon a time, this whole endeavour would have been borderline impossible or at least taken much, much longer than it took me, through trial and error and multiple attempts at various steps of the process. But with modern information being precise to the point of 'telling you how the RNG works so as to manipulate gender and color outcomes', it's a deterministic process that is relatively easy and will merely take an entire afternoon out of your life.
And for your reward? The game is broken in half.
It was easy before (but the Gelnika was a nice surprise), what will it be now? What hath mine hubris wrought? I almost want to put Knights on the Round back on the shelf. Reload the last save from before I headed to that island.
Pretend this never happened.
Well, there will be time for such momentous decision. Let us end the Chocobo Raising adventure here for now.
There is one more place (that I know of) we haven't visited with the chocobos yet - one that actually was accessible with the submarine, I just happened to find it while riding Basil. But as it's rather more plot-important as this update generally has been, and is a lot to deal with, we'll see it next time.
So. Yeah. That was the Chocobo Raising sidequest.
It saw us engage with a variety of systems that only exists for the purposes of this quest, capture a bunch of wild animals, train and feed them, and then do horrible crimes against nature in order to engage in a bizarre game of color eugenics to produce the apex creature on the Planet. It took hours even with a guide, cost us a bunch of gil, but also happened to unlock the path to what amounts to an Infinite GP Hack if we feed our Gold Chocobo some Sylkis Greens to ensure it wins forever at the Gold Saucer races. And we were rewarded with a bunch of new Materia that have increasing levels of game-breaking power, and… I guess the satisfaction of having a Gold Chocobo to ride around on for the rest of the game? All in a process which requires us to completely divorce our understanding of the fictional reality of the game from its mechanics, because Cloud and Co just blew off the impending death of everything due to a Meteor that is literally hanging in the sky right now and approaching by the day in order to raise several successive generations of racing bird.
What is our lesson here? What is our takeaway from this? What can we learn from this, in which ways can this inform our analysis and critique of Final Fantasy VII, as both a game and a story?
…
I guess that's about it, yeah. Thank you, Red Mage.
And thank you for reading.
Next Time: The Cuck Arc.
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somewhatLazy
Serial Procrastinator
- Location
- lurking
Mister Bad Guy
Mr Mercury to friends
- Location
- Bay Area
"Final Fantasy games give you a choice: you can either spend forty hours playing underwater foosball or watching chocobos screw or whatnot, which eventually gives you your ultimate weapon so that you can defeat the final boss pretty handily. Or, you can spend those forty hours actually fighting the final boss. It's up to you. You want a quick game, go play pinball."
- Lore Sjoberg
- Lore Sjoberg
Omi is a monster.
Basil's parents are Onion and Garlic.
Basil's grandparents are Garlic, Sage, Thyme, and Sage (again)
Basil's great grandparents are Thyme, Sage, and four unknown Chocobos who try not to talk to the press.
View: https://imgur.com/a/I193CwR
Basil's parents are Onion and Garlic.
Basil's grandparents are Garlic, Sage, Thyme, and Sage (again)
Basil's great grandparents are Thyme, Sage, and four unknown Chocobos who try not to talk to the press.
View: https://imgur.com/a/I193CwR
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Dybbukpossesed
Falling Somewhere
- Location
- California
...And now I want to reread 8-bit Theater.
- Location
- Wörms, the half continent
... Omicron, are you alright? Can you tell me what day it is? Can you tell me who the president is?
...
Omicron, Aerith's dead.
- Location
- Drachyench on Discord
Pretty much everything you can unlock with Chocobo's - even just the Greens & Blues - drastically alters the game's difficulty in your favor. They are, in every sense of the word, End Game content. I very much get your conflict as on one hand they're great prizes to have been working towards but also allow you to just. Not play the game?
- Location
- the Republic
- Pronouns
- He/They
Not so much a family tree as like a stunted little bush, really. Maybe like a family bonsai.
Also, as someone who used strategy guides and GameFAQs contemporaneously while playing this game and never found anything that helpful for Chocobo breeding, I'm pretty sure the guides you used aren't just like the product of multiple fans working on the subject, but multiple fans refining methods over multiple decades. Truly, this bird incest stands on the shoulders of giants.
Also, as someone who used strategy guides and GameFAQs contemporaneously while playing this game and never found anything that helpful for Chocobo breeding, I'm pretty sure the guides you used aren't just like the product of multiple fans working on the subject, but multiple fans refining methods over multiple decades. Truly, this bird incest stands on the shoulders of giants.
Nottheunmaker
Altman be praised
- Location
- USG Ishimura
What are you talking about, you just did the Red Mage dream. What else would you call all that chocobo sex?The Red Mage dream is alive once more.
ABSOLUUUUUUTE POWAAAAAAAH!
Manic Dogma
This, I can't deny.
- Location
- The far side of tired
- Pronouns
- Whatever
That family tree is not a tree, it is a pretzel.
In light of how phenomenally powerful it is here, it does make sense now that the Knights of the Round ended up having such an important role in FF14. Kind of feeling tempted to replay Heavensward now, actually.
In light of how phenomenally powerful it is here, it does make sense now that the Knights of the Round ended up having such an important role in FF14. Kind of feeling tempted to replay Heavensward now, actually.
ZerbanDaGreat
Daemon Noble of D E M O G R A P H I C S
- Pronouns
- They/them
*inhales*
Red Mage had it right all along.
god fucking dammit, you got there first
…Basil, our first Black Chocobo!
Also known as "Mountain-and-River" Chocobo, Basil can cross any terrain that isn't ocean. This is huge; it means Basil can essentially access the entire map barring one location. We take him out, enter the Highwind (it's as easily as literally just walking into the airship while riding him), and then we fly around the map to scout out locations we can't access from the airship; we put the Highwind down in the nearest available grassy plain, then ride the world's most inbred steed across mounds and valleys.
I initially quoted this intending to say 'but Omi that's not the world's most inbred steed is it" but no I guess you did end up introducing fresh genetic stock to Basil's racetrack of a family tree huh. Instead I will merely comment that 1) this bird looks scrungly as fuck and 2) it is in fact adorable you gave all the birds themed names.
What if it's canon that Cloud went to the Gelnicka first and shattered all of Rude's bones, and that's why he has halved health.
Also I guess that explains why that mod people were talking about changed the Rocket Town sequence so you fight Tseng instead.
Better start trawling for those quad-AP weapons, son, because it's not getting better anytime soon otherwise.
Bro is having his One Punch Man moment, his Grey Fox "MAKE ME FEEL IT, MAKE ME FEEL ALIVE AGAIN" arc.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Czw1XDkjTuY
He Will Rise
- Pronouns
- He
Ah nuts, I was going to post those! Also, better you than me, going through all that.
Hey now, it's the most important part of every JRPG: Sidequesting while the end of the world is on an immediate deadline!
Ah yes. It's time.
Goddamn, it really does just look like Tifa had some bad gas or something. Hell, even FFII Ultima had some epic look going for it even if the spell itself was shit for an ultimate spell.
AHAHAHA YES, OMI
FALL INTO THE INCEST PIT WITH ALL US LONGTIME POKEMON PLAYERS
So as you mention, part of the appeal of mastering materia is yeah, getting extra copies of particularly powerful and rare materia so you can spread the love. There's also the fact that most (though not all) mastered materia sell for absolutely obscene sums of money. All is most famous at around One and a Half Million Gil, but even that Mastered Restore materia sells for around 50k, a decent sum.
Though that said, there's also another use for mastered materia, that makes it rather appealing to hold on to Magic, Summon, and Command materia in particular...
Truly, a genius beyond our mortal ken.
Might as well start slapping extra All materias into your weapon now, honestly. While some other mastered materia do sell decently well, All is the one where you don't really always need all those maxed out uses, and selling one let alone multiple basically pays for everything the rest of the game over.
I can only imagine what a derpy inbred face Basil has as he flops around, running across rivers and mountains.
Mad respect to guide writers that figured all this nonsense out.
Well obviously he had to rush out of the hospital to fight you at the rocket, and that's why he was so weak, was still recovering!
Or you know, optional boss VS story mandatory boss or something I guess.
Alright, genuine question - the fuck are these Thing-esque, probably Jenova-Cell pumped horrors doing on a recently sunk Shinra vessel? Were these creatures just wandering underwater and saw the sunken wreck and went "dope new house"? Or does this imply that Shinra genuinely were stupid enough to look at Hojo regaling them with the info about Sephiroth being pumped full of Jenova, and an extension of Jenova, and all the clones with Jenova cells being attracted to obeying Sephiroth and went "fuck yeah MAKE MORE JENOVAS"???
...Yeah, I can believe they'd do it.
Damn, Aerith got hands.
Oh by the way, on top of everything else? IIRC the Gelnika encounters are also the best Morph fodder in the game, because they all turn into Source items.
You know, the permanent stat boosters.
Well yeah, what did you think that "Wonderful" status stood for? Chili is clearly the peak of the peak of yellow Chocobos!
And also Basil is inbred as all hell, so you know. Probably a factor.
And here it comes, one of the most overpowered summons in the entire series...
Congratulations, Omi, you've now effectively beaten the entire game barring Superbosses!
At least, I'm pretty sure there isn't really anything that can stand up to a Knights of the Round, doubly so if you throw in something like Quadra Magic.
Okay but to be fair, how long do you think this would have taken you without any guides? Sure, it's five to six hours with a step by step "this is how you Gold Bird Up", but without that?
Mad respect to whatever crazy players took the time to figure this nonsense out back in the day, that's for sure.
- Location
- Lake Wobegon
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Welp, see you in a week and a half.
- Location
- SV's Only Complete Persona Quest
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Re: Black Cauldron, reportedly it did better in Japan than in the West. I once heard that even the original Legend of Zelda was inspired by it, don't think they cited a source though.
Speaking of which, has Black Cauldron gotten a KH level yet?
Speaking of which, has Black Cauldron gotten a KH level yet?
- Location
- Lake Wobegon
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
It has not.
- Location
- Texas
From what I understand, the gelnika had all of Shinra's Anti-Sephiroth weapons, which I'm assuming includes bioweapons. Not sure who was supposed to use the equipment and Materia though.
It's Shinra, the minds behind Mako Reactors.
The answer is pretty obviously 'the bioweapons.'
GilliamYaeger
M'crazy.
There was actually a really cool thing in Tokyo Disneyland based on the Black Cauldron!
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6rnPqSrE40
It's gone now, but it was really damn cool when it was still there.
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- Location
- United States
- Pronouns
- They/Them
And once again, 8-Bit Theater shows just how timeless and on point it is in regards to the final fantasy series. Honestly I wish it got a sequel or something so that we'd see how the creator poked fun at the new FF games with the same (or new) band of roving psychopaths.
At least the game spares us from Chocobo Phrenology. Very interesting though that chocobos have gone being just being a useful and charismatic bit of megafauna, and are now some sort of Lamarckian nightmare beast with genetics so powerful and malleable that inbreeding just makes it exponentially stronger that any other living creature.
You're really going to make me out myself as one of the world's five legit Black Cauldron enjoyers, huh? It's not a great film by any means, but the Horned King and his army of undead rock, and that's more than enough for me to have loved it as a little kid. This summon actually has some of my favorite audio in the game; the spoOoOoky sound effects and sinister laugh are great. Fun fact that you may or not remember, but FFXIV's Emet Selch is more than just a casual reference to FFVII Hades, Black Cauldron is the name of his (rarely seen) raid-wide enrage attack.
I like that "deep sea monsters are fucked up nightmare bio-ghouls" is now a running theme in several games. Stuff like chocobos and moogles and Cid's and whatever are what people always point to as series tropes, but it's honestly the little things like that which I kind of appreciate more.
Don't think you can hide behind that edit; I saw that Freudian slip.
DYS AN SOHM IN
RHOS AN KYN ALA NA
EEHL AN SOHM IN
SAHL DJAS AFAH AN
Did you know it took me actual years until I realised that Thordan was literally just you fighting through the entire KoTR summon sequence?
Listen, you don't get the character development you *want*, you get the character development the devs give you.
Oh yeah, forgot to comment on Black Cauldron: Yeah, that is absolutely a reference to the Black Cauldron movie, which is... alright, I guess? But really I'm just going to shill the fact that it's badly based on a series of books, ripping the antagonist from the first and throwing in the macguffin from the second, and also doesn't even have some of the best content from the series like "the bard character eventually tames a housecat the size of an actual house because it likes his music and rides it into battle".