Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Let's Play
- Location
- Maryland
Hey, remember how in the final fight with the Whispers of Time in in FFVIIR the plot ghosts kept showing the party random flashes of weird imagery?
With your new knowledge, does any of it seem... familiar?
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
View: https://youtu.be/kGMuaXIlckU?si=M-Iy_3G7j9r2Jciz
Feels relevant somehow. from what little I've heard of the ending.
21stCentury
Let's get down to bismuth
- Location
- Canada
- Pronouns
- They/Them
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I mean, would you prefer it to end with Advent Children?
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I'll keep my thoughts on that until the actual update, which is probably several days away at this point; this'll be a... long write-up, and probably multipart.
Well... we'll get into detail whenever Omi posts the final update. Suffice to say it is... certainly an ending, especially considering it's for one of the most famous video games of the era and basically Final Fantasy's biggest flagship name in the series.
Kuja
I'M A SQUIIIID
- Location
- AZ
- Pronouns
- He/Him
IIRC, there's supposed to be smoke, as if from a chimney coming from
near the ruins of Midgar
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- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
No spoilers for my readers who haven't played the game 
No spoilers for my readers who haven't played the game
Amended. Sorry!
This is doing a pretty good job at building suspense, as a reader who hasn't played the game.
Dance Party Ending minigame?
Dance Party Ending minigame?
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Palmer final boss fight. Sorry if you were expecting something cool, like some kind of angel with an unconventional number of wings or whatever. Maybe one? It'll never catch on.
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I just remembered the Honey Bee dancing minigame in the Remake, so even if this one doesn't have a dance party ending, maybe the Remake will.
I have no clue about the ending yet, but maybe whatever it is was the best they could do while protecting us from having Marlene on-screen?
Because of the references to a religion they don't know much about?
Final Fantasy VII, Part 36: The Northern Cave
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Welcome back to Final Fantasy VII, where the end is approaching.
At this stage, we've effectively completed all story content but for the ending. There's some stuff out there in the world, but in terms of the main plot, it's a straight line from here to the endgame; one dungeon, a boss gauntlet, and it's over. But as mentioned in the last update, we're first taking some time off to check some stuff out.
First of all: There is one Weapon unaccounted for. [Sapphire] died in the Junon attack, Diamond was killed in the Midgar Raid, we personally slew Ultima, Emerald is at large in the ocean, which leaves only one out of the five Weapons that took flight from the northern crater: Ruby.
Finding it proves a little difficult at first, but someone hinted that it was 'enjoying some minigames', and accordingly, we find something in the Corel Desert around Gold Saucer.
A tiny kind of desert worm, bobbing along on the ground. Not much to look at, but it is red. So we run into it… And are blasted back, and the thing begins tearing its way out of the earth and standing to its full height.
That is rather much bigger.
Cue battle.
This is the Ruby Weapon, the second of the superbosses and the last of the Weapons. I know that it is considered in some ways more of a 'gimmick' opponent. I don't expect to win this fight, so let's just throw everything at the wall and see what sticks, opening with a full Limit Break from Tifa.
0 damage. 0 damage from each individual hit in the LB. Spoiler alert: It's the same for everything else I try. No attack deals damage.
Then, the Ruby Weapon casts Whirlsand, creating a giant sinkhole which removes a character from battle. This is the same rules as the Midgar Zolom: That character is gone, for the rest of the fight, no remedy or take back, no possible counter or immunity. Ruby's attacks deal massive damage, taking half the health of any character in one hit, but that's honestly beside the point since I can't fight it regardless.
At one point, it plants its claws in the ground, and they come out of the ground on the other side of the party, forming a wall of wiggling tentacles that bars all escape.
Not that I was really planning to escape in the first place. We see this through to the end, eating our first game over in a long time shortly thereafter.
So. That was confusing. We're going to need to try again and then ask some questions to figure out what we're dealing with here.
Okay. This is Omnislash, and it is dealing damage. A pitiful 230 damage per hit, amounting to ~3000 damage out of a 800,000 HP pool, so this won't win, but what is important is that damage is being dealt, not just the 0 of a perfect defense.
What's the key factor? Well, if you look at the above picture, you may note that Cloud is the only survivor. A picture is beginning to emerge.
The Ruby Weapon is invincible as long as its tentacles are retracted. Once two party members are KO, and it feels safe enough, it digs his claws into the ground and extends its tentacles to trap the last survivor, but in doing so, exposes itself, becoming vulnerable to damage for the rest of the fight.
Of course, this means all efforts taken during the first phase of the fight are useless. We cannot deal any damage, and not only that, but even buffing is largely useless as two of our party members need to be KO for Ruby to expose itself, and KO removes most buffs.
The 'correct' strategy is to walk into the fight with two characters already KO to trigger the tentacles, and then raise them as quickly as possible. Not that this means we have a winning strategy, of course, because…
Here, you can see Bahamut-ZERO deal 9,999 damage to Ruby, whereas Omnislash did a fraction of that. This reveals the solution to our predicament: We need Defense-ignoring attacks. They're the only way to punch through Ruby's staggering Defense and deal a meaningful chunk of its enormous health.
…you can also guess why this won't work. I can cast B-ZERO once, Knights of the Round once (to which it responds with Ultima for a team wipe), and I'll have dealt less than 100k damage total and will be down to moves that deal sub-thousand damage, against nearly a million HP.
The battle is essentially unwinnable as it stands. So let's move on.
I spend some time winning Chocobo Races. It turns out as a golden chocobo born of top competitor parents, Shalot's baseline speed and stamina are enough to take him to the top of the A-Class, and then feeding him a bunch of Sylkis Greens gets him to an astounding 175 kmh (that's about 100 mph for you Yankees), 669 Stamina, towering over his strongest competitors. Races are essentially automatically won without input on my part unless Joey and his black chocobo Teioh show up, so farming rewards is just a matter of time investment. This nets us some rewards including several sets of Sneak Attack Materia, which are a really neat concept where they are linked to a Magic or Command Materia and when you open a fight, there is a chance of the character preemptively using the linked materia before battle properly starts!
On the other hand like most Materia of its kind you need to sink a ton of AP into it to get it above a miserable 20% chance to trigger, so we're never going to use it.
Then, it's to Battle Square, to grind away the BP necessary to unlock the W-Summon Materia.
The slots occasionally get weird. Here, for instance, I only got Materia slots on the whole run.
I'll skip the details. The bottom line is: while the final iteration of Battle Square opponents was at one point pretty tough, we've powered up to the point that we can fairly reliably cruise through to the end. Ribbon grants immunity to status effects, a powerful sword takes most enemies out in a couple of attacks, Big Guard and Regen make Cloud more or less invincible. Disabled Materia can make things more problematic, but the only dangerous opponents are the final bosses in the 8th round, and by that time Cloud nearly always has a fully loaded Omnislash to one-shot them. We win like, five or six of these runs in a row until we have enough for W-Summon. It's time consuming and actually does require some attention and gameplay on my part, but that gameplay is very repetitive, it's the same strategy every time and not particularly hard.
Once we have acquired Omnislash, W-Summon, and carry the Ultima Weapon, the receptionist tells us we're pretty strong and can probably challenge Battle Square's strongest fighters in a special entrance round. This is a much harder fight than before: it still uses the handicap rules, but every fight is against an opponent that would be a boss in a normal battle square run, plus some exciting new ones thrown in. - Sandworm, Wolfmeister, Behemoth, oh my. And then, the final boss…
…Proud Clod???
Did they just… recover the scrap from the blown up mech in Midgar and put it back on solely to serve as a fighter in Battle Square matches? Is this some kind of prototype they bought off Shinra's hands after they built the real deal? I mean, Dio is wacky enough that I could see either, and especially him happily just using the world's most powerful mech to just… do gladiatorial death battles while the world is ending.
Oh my god. That's why Ruby Weapon is just hanging around the Corel Desert without actually attacking Gold Saucer. They're using the Proud Clod to repel it.
It turns out Scarlet's creation was worth something after all.
Impressive an opponent though this mech may be to fight alone, Proud Clod's damage is still lackluster, which means even its increased HP (all enemies in Battle Square have boosted HP) it's mostly there for me to beat up on until it dies (it does take an Elixir, a Limit Break, and a Summon, in fairness).
The fact that a boosted version of Proud Clod is a fair opponent to Cloud fighting alone should tell you a lot about just how easy the game is in general, as a less powerful version of this boss was fought by an entire party at roughly the same level during the main story. Which, speaking of…
Our reward for winning the special entry round at Battle Square is no small thing: We get the Final Attack Materia. This is a Support Materia which triggers the associated Materia when the character carrying it dies. So for instance, if I pair Final Attack and Ultima and equip them on Cloud, Cloud will respond to being KO'd by throwing out Ultima before he goes down.
Do you see the potential this has?
Oh, but to be a kid sifting through his collection of Materia and slowly put two and two together and realize that you can combine Phoenix and Final Attack so that when my last party member goes down they raise everyone to full health. It's obviously the best combo for Final Attack, but it's not signposted by the game - it's the kind of creative expression that comes from playing with these toys until you realize just what kind of absurd 'builds' you can put together with these blocks.
But, well.
In a way Final Attack is emblematic of my issue with the combat system.
Here's the thing: Just getting Final Attack isn't going to be enough on its own to make Emerald beatable. It is a level-based Materia, meaning that it will only trigger once in a given fight until leveled up with a ton of AP, gaining one use per level. It functions perfectly well as a safety even at lv 1 for anything that isn't a superboss fight, of course, but… Well, I don't really need it. Spoilers: there is never going to be a moment in the course of the game where I actually use Final Attack Phoenix, because I'm never going to face a party wipe from now until the final battle, except against the Weapons.
Still, conceptually, it's great.
Next up, we return to the Ancient Forest - that area of jungle with the carnivorous plants, frogs and toads. I didn't bother trying to figure out how this works on my own (there are random encounters in the forest so trial and error is literally punishing you with wasting your time), I looked it up, and basically it's a relatively intricate adventure game-style puzzle; if you drop a frog in a pitcher plant, the plant closes temporarily, so you can step across it. If you drop a frog in a pitcher plant, it will soon jump out, popping open the plant's lid and, if you are standing on it, launching you in the air, sometimes to land in an otherwise inaccessible location. If you drop a beehive on one of the venus flytraps, it will close, freeing the way it is blocking. There's a limited number of frogs and bugs, so you have to time and coordinate your path throughout.
Featuring multiple screens and hanging vines to jump from.
Doing it all perfectly rewards us with a number of items. These include high-end weapons, such as the "Spring Gun Clip" (Spriggan Clip) for XIII which has the highest magic stats of any of its weapons, or the Apocalypse for Cloud which has only three unlinked Materia slots but has triple Materia Growth, and some unique Materia like Slash-All, which changes a characters normal attack into an omni-hit attack, and Typhon, the last Summon Materia we were missing. And if you're wondering, yes, that would be our old buddy Typhon from FFV, Ultros's buddy, back in all his goofy, ugly glory:
Yes, you're no seeing things, that thing has a face on its butt and turns around to moon the opponent as part of its attack.
It's nearly as powerful as Bahamut-ZERO. That goofy motherfucker is a B-ZERO tier attack that also ignores Magic Defense. The main difference is that it is multi-elemental, so it can benefit from greater damage against vulnerable opponents but mostly risks running into resistance. Incredible.
We also grab the Minerva Band, which is this game's equivalent of the Minerva Bustier, a top-tier defensive 'armor' (it's a band because in this game 'armor' is actually bracelets) that can only be equipped by female party members.
That about sorts out the gear situation. But there's a fairly major scene that is, again, completely missable to check out before we move on.
Heading to Cosmo Canyon, we learn that Bugenhagen hasn't been at his best, and the villagers are worried about him.
If we visit Bugenhagen without Nanaki, he tells us he just tired himself out a bit, and asks us not to tell Nanaki, as he would only worry.
So, naturally, we do the exact opposite of that.
If we come back with Nanaki on the team, he hurries to his grandfather, clearly worried. Tifa moves to go with him but - showing a degree of emotional intelligence he didn't use to have - Cloud silently motions to her to stand back and to allow their friend to have a moment of privacy.
Bugenhagen: "...Nanaki? …you're still…here?"
Red: "I can't leave you like this, Grandfather! It's the duty of… Seto's son, to guard this canyon and her people…"
Bugenhagen: …listen, Nanaki. I think you may already know. If you have any mission in life, it is not to defend this valley."
Bugenhagen: "Look at the withering mountain grass. Listen to the warble of the new born chocobo's. Look always to the eternal flow of time which is far greater than the span of a human life. It will teach you more, than staying here in the valley… What you will see will eventually become a part of the Lifestream. For my children… And for your children…"
Bugenhagen: "So please, Nanaki… Go with Cloud… And use your eyes… your ears…"
Red: "..."
Bugenhagen: "Ho ho… Hooo… Now, now. Don't look like that. I'm all right. It's a big world and you must go out and see it… You may even find your life's mate. You never know."
Red: "Grandfather…"
Bugenhagen: "Oh yes… take this along. I think it will look good on you now. Ho Ho…"
[Bugenhagen's arm falls limp to the side of the couch; Nanaki lays his head on his chest and howls/weeps.]
Aaaaw. I really did think Bugenhagen might actually make it to the end of the story, with his heavily foreshadowed death being in the future/epilogue space. He didn't even die in a heroic sacrifice of some kind, but simply died of old age, in his home, kinda like… Yoda? Mark one more for Star Wars references, I guess.
Bugenhagen, throughout the game, was characterized chiefly by what I will call good-humoured pessimism. He's always been convinced that the Planet's days were numbered, that the end was coming, that even Shinra was only accelerating it, not causing it to begin with, that we were all doomed. He was pretty chill about it, he laughed and made jokes about mortality (his own and others'), about the end of the world, but I think he was, at his heart, depressed. That his good mood was a coping mechanism to deal with this looming fatality.
So Bugenhagen exchanging last words with Nanaki and verging both into mono no aware, the beauty of the transience of life and the worth in is impermanence, and a long-view reflection on the idea that life itself endures, will endure, and that this is not the end, is meaningful. It's his character arc, not just Nanaki's. It's not always that doomed mentor figure get an arc of their own, with progress and a resolution, but Bugenhagen did - he evolved, he changed, and he found peace in his last moments.
Of course, it's also the conclusion of Nanaki's arc; his grandfather gives him the validation he needed but couldn't ask for to look beyond just protecting one village, but to be the hope of renewal for his species, to be a witness for the Planet the world over.
I'm not sure how he's supposed to find this life mate when he is supposedly the last of his kind but I'm sure there's some Hidden Village of Catdogs in the Ancient Forest that he'll run into in the Epilogue or something.
…also, 'For my children, for your children'? Bugenhagen doesn't have any children that we know of, other than Nanaki, who is his adoptive grandson. Yet in this exchange, he draws a distinction, a difference between 'Bugenhagen's children' and 'Nanaki's children' as two separate inheritors of the future and this planet. Which doesn't make sense…
…unless he's secretly Gast, and the children he's talking about is-!
Wait, no. Aerith is dead.
Dammit, I really thought I had something there.
Red: "..."
Red: "Grandpa told me that he's going away again!"
Cloud: "Again?"
Red: "It seems like he really liked that airship. He told me he couldn't stay still and just zipped out of here! He even gave me a gift, look!"
[Received 'Limited Moon' (Red XIII's ultimate weapon)]
Red: "Wait a minute. Aren't you supposed to give gifts AFTER you come back? Ha ha… Grandpa sure is strange! Haa… Ha ha… ha…"
Cloud: "Hmm… Maybe we'll run into him again somewhere."
Red: "Yeah… Maybe… Thanks, Cloud…"
[The party folds back and we control Cloud again.]
I'm… Genuinely confused as to the purpose of this dialogue.
Don't get me wrong: A character choosing to hide someone's death from another character using what is, to the audience, a transparent excuse but which the other character either fails to see through, or decides to pretend to believe for both their sakes, is an old story trope and one that when leveraged well can be truly moving. Often that can be done for a good reason, but there's always an inherent deceit to it that makes it questionable. Indeed the most impactful example I can think of, to me, is Joel's lie to Ellie at the end of The Last of Us - a lie which he pretends to himself is the caring gesture of a surrogate father protecting his daughter but which is much more about protecting himself from the selfish motives behind his actions, and in doing so takes away Ellie's agency and abuses her trust in him, something she implicitly sees through and that will forever darken their relationship.
There just… Has to be a reason to do that. A mother trying to shield a child from grief by telling them their father is out there fighting for them. Someone who can't admit to their friends that they went back and murdered an enemy they'd left alive. Some kind of dramatic or emotional stake.
I have no idea why Nanaki would lie to Cloud and the others about Bugenhagen's death. Or why they would do a weird not-lie where Nanaki tells an obviously fake story and Cloud pretends to believe it for his friend's sake. They're friends with Bugen, but not close enough for that grief to devastate Cloud and the others. Is it just that Nanaki can't bring himself to admit Bugen's death out loud? He could just stay silent and it would speak volumes. Like - the others are going to know. They'll visit Cosmo Canyon at some point in the future, or one of the villagers will mention it casually, or something. Even if we take the tack that this isn't a 'lie' so much as the characters tacitly agreeing on a fake story that sounds nicer than Bugenhagen dying I can't understand the emotional logic of why Nanaki is doing this.
This is an utterly baffling move, and it's clearly meant to play as an emotional beat of the kind I just talked about, but it doesn't land because there is no reason for it to happen.
Well, that weirdness aside, we're done with everything now. Let's move on. I take another shot at Emerald, but even with that new Materia it wipes the floor with us again, so enough of that. Oh, and there's an old guy nostalgic for the rocket in Rocket Town who gives us Cid's ultimate weapon, whatever.
It's time to head back to the Northern Cave.
Alright.
Let's go.
Look at the way these shots use vertical angles to sell how small Cloud is and how vast the barren crater and airship are.
We touch down at the edge of the crater, walk over barren arctic stone, and very soon are greeted with a message that… I think suggests this may at one point have been intended as a point of no return; 'Looks like we can only slide down' sounds like the warning you'd get to sort all your stuff out before heading in because you can't walk back. This isn't actually the case, and even after the slide down, walking back to the airship is trivial, and can be done at any point up to the penultimate screen before the final battle (although it becomes much less trivial when you have to walk all the way back through the cave).
The very first item we find around the edge of the crater is a Save Crystal. This is a unique item with a very special function: It can create a Save Point anywhere in the North Cave, but can only be used once. The North Cave otherwise has no save points whatsoever. The game is empowering us to choose where we think we would make the best use of a save point, which plays into a general 'resource management' vibe the final dungeon tries for, since a save point is also a place we can rest at. Ultimately we'll just plop it down on the very last screen before the point of no return, there's no reason to do anything else.
The outside of the cave is a spiraling pathway down towards the glowing green light of a massive concentration of Mako, most likely a physical access point to the Lifestream itself. We meet our first opponents there, the toughest random encounters in the game; for the most part they'll be the same all the way through the cave. They include the Dark Dragon, Gargoyles, a bunch of suckerfish-like critters, and more.
The dark dragon is capable of dealing decent damage, but ultimately isn't resilient enough to stop us from plowing through. The Gargoyles are more annoying; they have a unique mechanic where they start the fight petrified, unable to act and taking 0 damage from attacks, until we attack and 'break' them, freeing them to attack us and take damage.
Once we reach the bottom of the spiraling pathway, we enter the cave proper, following a series of sidescroller-like levels with the minor gimmick that they split into two paths and there is loot on both sides, so in order to collect everything we have to go through it all three times: first to get the loot from Path 1, then back up around through Path 2 to get the loot there, and then over again through either of the now-lootless paths. If the game were harder, this would present something of a genuine threat of attrition as we have to choose whether to grab all the loot and risk multiple tough battles or go straight through to preserve resources, but that kind of resource management was never all that fun even in older FF games that did do it. As for the resources, they include multiple Source items and powerful previously-unique Materia like HP Absorb.
Then we have another side-scrolling screen with jump-based navigation and doorways that lead to a second screen that weaves between the doorways, presenting a minor navigation challenge. On the way, we run into a particular opponent:
Tonberry!
But not just Tonberry - Master Tonberry, as noted by the star above its head. Master Tonberry has an astounding 44,444 HP, an allusion to the Japanese shi being synonymous for both "four" and "death." Master Tonberry is mechanically kind of fascinating; in typical Tonberry fashion, it slowly inches its way across the screen, and if it gets to close range of a character, deals instant death. It can be attacked once between its movement turns without consequences, but if attacked more, it reacts with "Everybody's Grudge," a move that targets the attacking character with damage equal to the number of kills they've gathered all game, multiplied by 10. That makes it quite a powerful foe, although ultimately it only takes a few hits to blow through its HP and Cloud is the only character with a body count large enough to get one shot by Grudge.
…also, Master Tonberry has one particular feature: It can be Morphed into an item that can't otherwise be farmed. Which means, once I've run into it once, I equip Yuffie with the Conformer, her ultimate weapon which has the unique property of causing Morph to deal full damage.
BAM. INSTANT RIBBON. NOW I HAVE ENOUGH TO OUTFIT MY WHOLE TEAM.
Anyway, eventually we reach a fork in the path.
So. This bit.
I don't know what's ahead, and I don't like the idea of risking split party shenanigans in a place without a save point. This is kind of a silly concern given how easy the game is, but it's instinctive. I decide to look it up, and as it turns out, the game isn't actually going to force me to play with a party of washouts. Instead, the way this section works is that the characters who aren't in Cloud's party will be collecting items off-screen and giving them to us once we meet back up, and they'll do so based on a whole grid of who is sent where which is…
Look, I don't want to bother with this. I just follow the instructions I get so I don't risk missing a unique item or anything which means I'm grabbing the Midgar party of Barret and Vincent and sending Cid, Yuffie and Caith Sith away. Then, on the next screen, we're splitting again, this time sending away Cait Sith and Tifa.
Notably, each character has special dialogue when sent away, and that dialogue is heavily framed as the last words they might ever share with us, which is a weird degree of emphasis to put on it considering we end up meeting them again in like, ten minutes, tops.
Cloud: "Now don't any of you die on me… Gotta get through to Sephiroth!"
Cid: "I'll destroy that Sephiroth before anyone gets me!"
Yuffie: "Oh man… 'Materia Hunter Yuffie' sounds like the last chapter of 'Materia Forever.'"
Red: "All life on this Planet, indeed the very life of this Planet, is in our hands…"
Cait Sith: "I'm so happy to have met you all, really! …sniff…"
Tifa: "Let's all go back alive, okay?"
You get what I mean, right? This whole thing is like this emotional exchange as the group splits off to pursue their own quests to defeat the big bad where they won't meet up again until after this is done and they've either succeeded or failed and died, instead of what it actually is, which is 'the group randomly deciding to split up to explore a bunch of caves before meeting up again.'
The next couple of screens see us clamber atop rock arches in front of the biggest Mako waterfall we've seen so far, the Lifestream just pouring down towards the bottom of the earth. There, we find the unique Magic Counter Materia; combined with a magic command, it responds to attacks with the appropriate magic - meaning it's possible to set it up so a character reacts to an attack with Ultima or Knight of the Round.
This could be potentially very powerful but is held back by a couple of issues: First, this is yet another level-based Materia which starts with only a 30% chance of the counter actually triggering and costing tens of thousands of AP to level, and second, Summon Counters still depletes the limited number of summons per fight we get. Beyond that, more Sources and consumable items.
There is, however, an even more intriguing Materia set up on a rock which requires an incredibly annoying mid-jump timed interaction to acquire:
It is the Mega All Materia.
Mega All is an incredibly useful effect: It applies All to everything. Or almost everything. It acts as if we had an All Materia paired with every Magic Materia equipped. It makes physical attacks hit all enemies comparable to Slash-All. It causes Steal, Mug, or Morph to hit all enemies at once.
…we're not going to use it either. As useful as free up all the space spent on All Materia on one character' sounds like, Mega All is, say it with me now, a level-based Materia. Which means it has a maximum of five uses (for a cost of 160,000 AP total) across all uses, and as it disables the normal attack command, even normal attacks will consume it, and as it stands now, it merely has one use per fight, period. I just… Don't have any use fr it right now.
Then it's done, we've reached the bottom of the Crater, the hole above the Lifestream itself.
You see what I mean about this emotional separation being incredibly short, right? This, of course, is the actual moment of character reunion and swearing to each other to see this through before heading for the actual, for real final battle. Every character who wasn't in the party has a new item for us, stuff like high-end armor. This includes…
…Yuffie, who, true to herself to the end, tries to hold back on us and hide the item she found right before the final battle for the fate of the universe. I love her. That item, incidentally, is the Counter Materia - confusingly named, it's actually the more niche of the three Counter Materias; it is paired with a Command Materia, and reacts to attack by using that Command. So, for instance, if we pair it with Steal, the character will respond to attacks by using Steal on the attacker. Potentially useful but most of the time we want our counters to deal damage, not do other stuff, and again this is a level-based Materia acquired in the literal final hour of the game. We will never use it.
And now…
…we plop down the Save Crystal, turn back around and leave.
No, really. This is the actual point of no return, right there. So now that we got everything that wasn't nailed down from the North Cave, I just want to zip out quickly and check if this new arsenal is enough to score a weapon on our last true opponents.
It may seem excessive but there's a reason I want to go through the Cave anyway - you see, all these paths we sent our teammates on earlier? We actually can go there, explore them, and grab loot.
And the weird thing is, whereas the descent through the North Cave has for the most part been a huge let down as far as dungeon aesthetics go, being pretty much just an underground cave with 'Mako springs and waterfalls' as its one unique feature, these side-paths are actually where all the aesthetic lives! Check this out:
Giant inverted spire with the sky shining like an aurora borealis from the ceiling and Mako glowing from below like some vision of the Greek Underworld? Walking on the fossilized ribcage of some ancient leviathan? Fuck yes. That's just one path, here's another:
A swamp of strange weeds, the only vegetal life in the Cave at first, until it leads into a natural amphitheatre with vegetation overhead? This is nice! It's a break from the 'rocks rocks and more rocks' aesthetic, for sure.
And these places have some really good rewards: More Sources, Megalixir, the W-Magic Materia… Oh, so that's where the standard dualcast was. This whole time we've had Quadra Magic, which is a weird kind of 'Rapidfire but for magic,' and W-Summon, which is Dualcast but for summon, but now, at the 11th hour, we find W-Magic. That's nice.
These side areas are also where new and unique enemies dwell, as opposed to the path we used earlier which continues the standard North Cave encounter list. This includes Zombie Dragon:
A lovely horror monster design which evokes the later Gaping Dragon of Dark Souls fame. It uses Pandora's Box, a powerful Defense-ignoring magical attack which we learn as an enemy skill. The Magic Pots are also back, asking for Elixirs as usual:
They are invincible unless given an Elixir, whereupon they prove incredibly easy to defeat, and reward us with 1000 AP per Magic Pot. Is 1000 AP worth an Elixir? In the grand scheme of things probably not, but I have a dozen Elixirs and Megalixirs both and I'll never use them all, so I feed the little critter happily. Other enemies unique to the swamp area include the Mover, tiny floating balls that give out a shitton of AP and can also be Morphed for Protect Rings. Neat!
And that's about it.
So, how does the North Cave rate as a Final Dungeon compared to the rest of the series?
It's… complicated. Aesthetically, it's one of the most uninspired in the series. The Lunar Subterrane from FFIV is the closest we got to having a dungeon that is literally just 'a cave,' but the latter parts of it had these cool crystal platforms hanging over the radiant core of the moon-ship. There are some interesting notes with the central glow of the Lifestream we're heading to, but the only really interesting parts are these optional side-paths that you might completely miss depending on where you go.
On the other hand in terms of being interesting to navigate, it does fairly well. Between the side-scrolling areas, the jumping areas, the multiple paths, and the plethora of loot scattered throughout, I rarely felt like I was wasting my time. The enemy variety is… okay, at least once I realized I could abuse Morph and ran into the enemies with unique reward like a special Enemy Skill or huge AP payouts. It's a shame there are no bosses though - it's actually kind of a surprise; the final dungeon having bosses scattered throughout goes back as far as the very first game, with the Four Fiends making a comeback; II had demon lords, III had the World of Darkness crystal guardians, IV had the superweapon guardians, V had Exdeath's elite demons, VI had the Warring Triad. There's nothing here.
Ultimately it's the least interesting final dungeon design in the series, elevated hugely by the new 3D technology letting its very mid aesthetic shine as well as it could so it mostly gets away with it. Between this, the lack of mid-dungeon bosses, and the weird half-baked party split midway through, I feel like the dungeon might have suffered from time constraints and be an incomplete version of what it was originally supposed to be.
But enough about the dungeon. Let's see about putting those new levels and rewards to use, shall we?
We do a little better against Emerald this time. I feed my characters every Source item acquired in the game, load them up with HP and MP boosting Materia, use Final Attack Phoenix to ensure survivability, and we manage to stay in the game for longer this time… Enough for Emerald to reveal its most annoying attack, Aire Tam Storm. The fact that this attack deals 9,999 damage to everyone seems to me a little excessive, considering this guarantees that I can't survive it no matter what.
It turns out, "Aire Tam" is "Materia" spelled backwards, and Aire Tam Storm deals damage to each character equal to 1,111 times the number of Materia they have equipped. Meaning any character with 9+ Materia suffers 9,999 damage and dies.
So that's going to be incredibly annoying.
We're not dealing with Emerald today, or possibly ever. Ultimately, neither the levels gained going through the North Cave and out nor the Materia obtained therein were enough to bridge the gap. Those Materia might have some use, but we'd have to level them up fully first. Probably during the same process we'd level up our characters to lv 99 or something. I'm not doing that, which I guess makes this an appropriate stopping point.
…
Okay, no. Just one thing.
Let me break the timeline a little and bring in a vision from the future. From after I'd first finished the game.
Ruby Weapon. You know the deal. We have to deliberately KO two of our characters before we enter the fight, which causes Ruby Weapon to extend its tentacles and become vulnerable, which in turn also disables its Whirlsand attack. From there, the expected course of action would be to raise everyone and engage the monster in battle.
But I just don't have the damage potential to deal with its defenses. I can deal up to 160k to 200k damage from two casts of Knight of the Rounds (it's reached lv 2 in the North Cave - I never use KotR in main story battles but I figured I might as well get it some AP for the Weapons), then my second most damaging move is Bahamut Zero for an extra 10k damage, and then I've exhausted my supply of high-damage Defense-ignoring attacks. Ultima and Flare don't do shit, Omnislash barely breaks 3k damage.
Except.
This is not a strategy I would have figured out myself, I'll be straight with you about that. I pulled it off the Internet. It is based on two factors:
So.
Hades inflicts all status effects at once on Ruby, which is immune to all of them except Paralysis. KotR deals 80k a pop.
W-Summon allows us to combo two summons in a row. Mime allows us to repeat the last command issued in battle at no cost. Because Tifa and Yuffie are dead, Cloud is the only one taking actions.
This means that by W-Summoning Hades into KotR, we can paralyze Ruby then hit it for 80k damage, then repeat this process with Mime every turn, forever.
The process isn't perfect; the timing of ATB is such that Ruby will get turns where its paralysis wears off and it gets to act. However, by combining KotR with HP Absorb, we can make KotR heal Cloud for around 6k HP with every cast. None of Ruby's attacks, even Ultima (which is what it responds to KotR with if it's not paralyzed during casting), can one-shot Cloud, so Cloud will immediately heal up from the next KotR cast. Ruby's attacks include a powerful MP drain that also inflicts poison and slow petrification, but Ribbon takes care of status effects and Mime means MP drain is irrelevant.
The resulting process is essentially deterministic. As long as we follow the plan and use Mime every turn, we can't lose. It will take ten castings of KotR to wear down Ruby's HP, but it is utterly helpless against us during the whole process. Even with this theory of inevitable victory which sees us take the most damaging option every turn, Ruby still takes around twenty minutes to wear down, simply because Hades and KotR together take like, a minute and a half to two minutes to perform. The only input required from me is to time Mime correctly when Ruby's paralysis is about to wear off.
Well, almost the only input. Winning this battle still takes me over two hours and five or six attempts, because I throw in one last wrinkle: Since I have two KotR casts, I can 'break off' the Mime sequence on the ninth Mimed cast, when Ruby is one cast from death, and instead W-Summon Phoenix into KotR, resurrecting Tifa and Yuffie so they get the full XP and AP from the fight when KotR kills.
This is a lot trickier than it sounds. Ruby loves its tentacle MP drain attack, and it loves in particular to use it between the two summons from W-Summon, which can cause MP to drop below the level required to cast KotR, which causes Cloud to attempt to use the Knights and whiff, which still consumes the cast, and leaves my whole party alive thanks to Phoenix but utterly unable to harm Ruby. Getting the timing and order of actions right is tricky, but eventually I manage to get it down - Cloud W-Summons Phoenix into KotR, raises everyone, fails to kill Ruby because I miscalculated HP, Ruby retaliates with Ultima and kills everyone but Cloud, then I have Cloud Mime his last action, raising everyone a second time and killing Ruby with KotR.
Oh, thank god.
Tifa and Yuffie are traumatized for life, but it was all worth it. For…
Well, nothing, really. Ruby drops the Desert Rose, an item which can be traded to the old man looking for objects for his pilgrimage, but the reward for it is a golden chocobo, which we already have.
Ultimately the only reason was bragging rights. Not that I can brag all that much, considering the braindead strategy I employed, but a win is a win. Now I can know peace.
This… should be all. It's time to head back to the North Cave, and finish the game.
Thank you for reading.
Next Time: We confront Sephiroth for the last time.
At this stage, we've effectively completed all story content but for the ending. There's some stuff out there in the world, but in terms of the main plot, it's a straight line from here to the endgame; one dungeon, a boss gauntlet, and it's over. But as mentioned in the last update, we're first taking some time off to check some stuff out.
First of all: There is one Weapon unaccounted for. [Sapphire] died in the Junon attack, Diamond was killed in the Midgar Raid, we personally slew Ultima, Emerald is at large in the ocean, which leaves only one out of the five Weapons that took flight from the northern crater: Ruby.
Finding it proves a little difficult at first, but someone hinted that it was 'enjoying some minigames', and accordingly, we find something in the Corel Desert around Gold Saucer.
A tiny kind of desert worm, bobbing along on the ground. Not much to look at, but it is red. So we run into it… And are blasted back, and the thing begins tearing its way out of the earth and standing to its full height.
That is rather much bigger.
Cue battle.
This is the Ruby Weapon, the second of the superbosses and the last of the Weapons. I know that it is considered in some ways more of a 'gimmick' opponent. I don't expect to win this fight, so let's just throw everything at the wall and see what sticks, opening with a full Limit Break from Tifa.
0 damage. 0 damage from each individual hit in the LB. Spoiler alert: It's the same for everything else I try. No attack deals damage.
Then, the Ruby Weapon casts Whirlsand, creating a giant sinkhole which removes a character from battle. This is the same rules as the Midgar Zolom: That character is gone, for the rest of the fight, no remedy or take back, no possible counter or immunity. Ruby's attacks deal massive damage, taking half the health of any character in one hit, but that's honestly beside the point since I can't fight it regardless.
At one point, it plants its claws in the ground, and they come out of the ground on the other side of the party, forming a wall of wiggling tentacles that bars all escape.
Not that I was really planning to escape in the first place. We see this through to the end, eating our first game over in a long time shortly thereafter.
So. That was confusing. We're going to need to try again and then ask some questions to figure out what we're dealing with here.
Okay. This is Omnislash, and it is dealing damage. A pitiful 230 damage per hit, amounting to ~3000 damage out of a 800,000 HP pool, so this won't win, but what is important is that damage is being dealt, not just the 0 of a perfect defense.
What's the key factor? Well, if you look at the above picture, you may note that Cloud is the only survivor. A picture is beginning to emerge.
The Ruby Weapon is invincible as long as its tentacles are retracted. Once two party members are KO, and it feels safe enough, it digs his claws into the ground and extends its tentacles to trap the last survivor, but in doing so, exposes itself, becoming vulnerable to damage for the rest of the fight.
Of course, this means all efforts taken during the first phase of the fight are useless. We cannot deal any damage, and not only that, but even buffing is largely useless as two of our party members need to be KO for Ruby to expose itself, and KO removes most buffs.
The 'correct' strategy is to walk into the fight with two characters already KO to trigger the tentacles, and then raise them as quickly as possible. Not that this means we have a winning strategy, of course, because…
Here, you can see Bahamut-ZERO deal 9,999 damage to Ruby, whereas Omnislash did a fraction of that. This reveals the solution to our predicament: We need Defense-ignoring attacks. They're the only way to punch through Ruby's staggering Defense and deal a meaningful chunk of its enormous health.
…you can also guess why this won't work. I can cast B-ZERO once, Knights of the Round once (to which it responds with Ultima for a team wipe), and I'll have dealt less than 100k damage total and will be down to moves that deal sub-thousand damage, against nearly a million HP.
The battle is essentially unwinnable as it stands. So let's move on.
I spend some time winning Chocobo Races. It turns out as a golden chocobo born of top competitor parents, Shalot's baseline speed and stamina are enough to take him to the top of the A-Class, and then feeding him a bunch of Sylkis Greens gets him to an astounding 175 kmh (that's about 100 mph for you Yankees), 669 Stamina, towering over his strongest competitors. Races are essentially automatically won without input on my part unless Joey and his black chocobo Teioh show up, so farming rewards is just a matter of time investment. This nets us some rewards including several sets of Sneak Attack Materia, which are a really neat concept where they are linked to a Magic or Command Materia and when you open a fight, there is a chance of the character preemptively using the linked materia before battle properly starts!
On the other hand like most Materia of its kind you need to sink a ton of AP into it to get it above a miserable 20% chance to trigger, so we're never going to use it.
Then, it's to Battle Square, to grind away the BP necessary to unlock the W-Summon Materia.
The slots occasionally get weird. Here, for instance, I only got Materia slots on the whole run.
I'll skip the details. The bottom line is: while the final iteration of Battle Square opponents was at one point pretty tough, we've powered up to the point that we can fairly reliably cruise through to the end. Ribbon grants immunity to status effects, a powerful sword takes most enemies out in a couple of attacks, Big Guard and Regen make Cloud more or less invincible. Disabled Materia can make things more problematic, but the only dangerous opponents are the final bosses in the 8th round, and by that time Cloud nearly always has a fully loaded Omnislash to one-shot them. We win like, five or six of these runs in a row until we have enough for W-Summon. It's time consuming and actually does require some attention and gameplay on my part, but that gameplay is very repetitive, it's the same strategy every time and not particularly hard.
Once we have acquired Omnislash, W-Summon, and carry the Ultima Weapon, the receptionist tells us we're pretty strong and can probably challenge Battle Square's strongest fighters in a special entrance round. This is a much harder fight than before: it still uses the handicap rules, but every fight is against an opponent that would be a boss in a normal battle square run, plus some exciting new ones thrown in. - Sandworm, Wolfmeister, Behemoth, oh my. And then, the final boss…
…Proud Clod???
Did they just… recover the scrap from the blown up mech in Midgar and put it back on solely to serve as a fighter in Battle Square matches? Is this some kind of prototype they bought off Shinra's hands after they built the real deal? I mean, Dio is wacky enough that I could see either, and especially him happily just using the world's most powerful mech to just… do gladiatorial death battles while the world is ending.
Oh my god. That's why Ruby Weapon is just hanging around the Corel Desert without actually attacking Gold Saucer. They're using the Proud Clod to repel it.
It turns out Scarlet's creation was worth something after all.
Impressive an opponent though this mech may be to fight alone, Proud Clod's damage is still lackluster, which means even its increased HP (all enemies in Battle Square have boosted HP) it's mostly there for me to beat up on until it dies (it does take an Elixir, a Limit Break, and a Summon, in fairness).
The fact that a boosted version of Proud Clod is a fair opponent to Cloud fighting alone should tell you a lot about just how easy the game is in general, as a less powerful version of this boss was fought by an entire party at roughly the same level during the main story. Which, speaking of…
Our reward for winning the special entry round at Battle Square is no small thing: We get the Final Attack Materia. This is a Support Materia which triggers the associated Materia when the character carrying it dies. So for instance, if I pair Final Attack and Ultima and equip them on Cloud, Cloud will respond to being KO'd by throwing out Ultima before he goes down.
Do you see the potential this has?
Oh, but to be a kid sifting through his collection of Materia and slowly put two and two together and realize that you can combine Phoenix and Final Attack so that when my last party member goes down they raise everyone to full health. It's obviously the best combo for Final Attack, but it's not signposted by the game - it's the kind of creative expression that comes from playing with these toys until you realize just what kind of absurd 'builds' you can put together with these blocks.
But, well.
In a way Final Attack is emblematic of my issue with the combat system.
Here's the thing: Just getting Final Attack isn't going to be enough on its own to make Emerald beatable. It is a level-based Materia, meaning that it will only trigger once in a given fight until leveled up with a ton of AP, gaining one use per level. It functions perfectly well as a safety even at lv 1 for anything that isn't a superboss fight, of course, but… Well, I don't really need it. Spoilers: there is never going to be a moment in the course of the game where I actually use Final Attack Phoenix, because I'm never going to face a party wipe from now until the final battle, except against the Weapons.
Still, conceptually, it's great.
Next up, we return to the Ancient Forest - that area of jungle with the carnivorous plants, frogs and toads. I didn't bother trying to figure out how this works on my own (there are random encounters in the forest so trial and error is literally punishing you with wasting your time), I looked it up, and basically it's a relatively intricate adventure game-style puzzle; if you drop a frog in a pitcher plant, the plant closes temporarily, so you can step across it. If you drop a frog in a pitcher plant, it will soon jump out, popping open the plant's lid and, if you are standing on it, launching you in the air, sometimes to land in an otherwise inaccessible location. If you drop a beehive on one of the venus flytraps, it will close, freeing the way it is blocking. There's a limited number of frogs and bugs, so you have to time and coordinate your path throughout.
Featuring multiple screens and hanging vines to jump from.
Doing it all perfectly rewards us with a number of items. These include high-end weapons, such as the "Spring Gun Clip" (Spriggan Clip) for XIII which has the highest magic stats of any of its weapons, or the Apocalypse for Cloud which has only three unlinked Materia slots but has triple Materia Growth, and some unique Materia like Slash-All, which changes a characters normal attack into an omni-hit attack, and Typhon, the last Summon Materia we were missing. And if you're wondering, yes, that would be our old buddy Typhon from FFV, Ultros's buddy, back in all his goofy, ugly glory:
Yes, you're no seeing things, that thing has a face on its butt and turns around to moon the opponent as part of its attack.
It's nearly as powerful as Bahamut-ZERO. That goofy motherfucker is a B-ZERO tier attack that also ignores Magic Defense. The main difference is that it is multi-elemental, so it can benefit from greater damage against vulnerable opponents but mostly risks running into resistance. Incredible.
We also grab the Minerva Band, which is this game's equivalent of the Minerva Bustier, a top-tier defensive 'armor' (it's a band because in this game 'armor' is actually bracelets) that can only be equipped by female party members.
That about sorts out the gear situation. But there's a fairly major scene that is, again, completely missable to check out before we move on.
Heading to Cosmo Canyon, we learn that Bugenhagen hasn't been at his best, and the villagers are worried about him.
If we visit Bugenhagen without Nanaki, he tells us he just tired himself out a bit, and asks us not to tell Nanaki, as he would only worry.
So, naturally, we do the exact opposite of that.
If we come back with Nanaki on the team, he hurries to his grandfather, clearly worried. Tifa moves to go with him but - showing a degree of emotional intelligence he didn't use to have - Cloud silently motions to her to stand back and to allow their friend to have a moment of privacy.
Bugenhagen: "...Nanaki? …you're still…here?"
Red: "I can't leave you like this, Grandfather! It's the duty of… Seto's son, to guard this canyon and her people…"
Bugenhagen: …listen, Nanaki. I think you may already know. If you have any mission in life, it is not to defend this valley."
Bugenhagen: "Look at the withering mountain grass. Listen to the warble of the new born chocobo's. Look always to the eternal flow of time which is far greater than the span of a human life. It will teach you more, than staying here in the valley… What you will see will eventually become a part of the Lifestream. For my children… And for your children…"
Bugenhagen: "So please, Nanaki… Go with Cloud… And use your eyes… your ears…"
Red: "..."
Bugenhagen: "Ho ho… Hooo… Now, now. Don't look like that. I'm all right. It's a big world and you must go out and see it… You may even find your life's mate. You never know."
Red: "Grandfather…"
Bugenhagen: "Oh yes… take this along. I think it will look good on you now. Ho Ho…"
[Bugenhagen's arm falls limp to the side of the couch; Nanaki lays his head on his chest and howls/weeps.]
Aaaaw. I really did think Bugenhagen might actually make it to the end of the story, with his heavily foreshadowed death being in the future/epilogue space. He didn't even die in a heroic sacrifice of some kind, but simply died of old age, in his home, kinda like… Yoda? Mark one more for Star Wars references, I guess.
Bugenhagen, throughout the game, was characterized chiefly by what I will call good-humoured pessimism. He's always been convinced that the Planet's days were numbered, that the end was coming, that even Shinra was only accelerating it, not causing it to begin with, that we were all doomed. He was pretty chill about it, he laughed and made jokes about mortality (his own and others'), about the end of the world, but I think he was, at his heart, depressed. That his good mood was a coping mechanism to deal with this looming fatality.
So Bugenhagen exchanging last words with Nanaki and verging both into mono no aware, the beauty of the transience of life and the worth in is impermanence, and a long-view reflection on the idea that life itself endures, will endure, and that this is not the end, is meaningful. It's his character arc, not just Nanaki's. It's not always that doomed mentor figure get an arc of their own, with progress and a resolution, but Bugenhagen did - he evolved, he changed, and he found peace in his last moments.
Of course, it's also the conclusion of Nanaki's arc; his grandfather gives him the validation he needed but couldn't ask for to look beyond just protecting one village, but to be the hope of renewal for his species, to be a witness for the Planet the world over.
I'm not sure how he's supposed to find this life mate when he is supposedly the last of his kind but I'm sure there's some Hidden Village of Catdogs in the Ancient Forest that he'll run into in the Epilogue or something.
…also, 'For my children, for your children'? Bugenhagen doesn't have any children that we know of, other than Nanaki, who is his adoptive grandson. Yet in this exchange, he draws a distinction, a difference between 'Bugenhagen's children' and 'Nanaki's children' as two separate inheritors of the future and this planet. Which doesn't make sense…
…unless he's secretly Gast, and the children he's talking about is-!
Wait, no. Aerith is dead.
Dammit, I really thought I had something there.
Red: "..."
Red: "Grandpa told me that he's going away again!"
Cloud: "Again?"
Red: "It seems like he really liked that airship. He told me he couldn't stay still and just zipped out of here! He even gave me a gift, look!"
[Received 'Limited Moon' (Red XIII's ultimate weapon)]
Red: "Wait a minute. Aren't you supposed to give gifts AFTER you come back? Ha ha… Grandpa sure is strange! Haa… Ha ha… ha…"
Cloud: "Hmm… Maybe we'll run into him again somewhere."
Red: "Yeah… Maybe… Thanks, Cloud…"
[The party folds back and we control Cloud again.]
I'm… Genuinely confused as to the purpose of this dialogue.
Don't get me wrong: A character choosing to hide someone's death from another character using what is, to the audience, a transparent excuse but which the other character either fails to see through, or decides to pretend to believe for both their sakes, is an old story trope and one that when leveraged well can be truly moving. Often that can be done for a good reason, but there's always an inherent deceit to it that makes it questionable. Indeed the most impactful example I can think of, to me, is Joel's lie to Ellie at the end of The Last of Us - a lie which he pretends to himself is the caring gesture of a surrogate father protecting his daughter but which is much more about protecting himself from the selfish motives behind his actions, and in doing so takes away Ellie's agency and abuses her trust in him, something she implicitly sees through and that will forever darken their relationship.
There just… Has to be a reason to do that. A mother trying to shield a child from grief by telling them their father is out there fighting for them. Someone who can't admit to their friends that they went back and murdered an enemy they'd left alive. Some kind of dramatic or emotional stake.
I have no idea why Nanaki would lie to Cloud and the others about Bugenhagen's death. Or why they would do a weird not-lie where Nanaki tells an obviously fake story and Cloud pretends to believe it for his friend's sake. They're friends with Bugen, but not close enough for that grief to devastate Cloud and the others. Is it just that Nanaki can't bring himself to admit Bugen's death out loud? He could just stay silent and it would speak volumes. Like - the others are going to know. They'll visit Cosmo Canyon at some point in the future, or one of the villagers will mention it casually, or something. Even if we take the tack that this isn't a 'lie' so much as the characters tacitly agreeing on a fake story that sounds nicer than Bugenhagen dying I can't understand the emotional logic of why Nanaki is doing this.
This is an utterly baffling move, and it's clearly meant to play as an emotional beat of the kind I just talked about, but it doesn't land because there is no reason for it to happen.
Well, that weirdness aside, we're done with everything now. Let's move on. I take another shot at Emerald, but even with that new Materia it wipes the floor with us again, so enough of that. Oh, and there's an old guy nostalgic for the rocket in Rocket Town who gives us Cid's ultimate weapon, whatever.
It's time to head back to the Northern Cave.
Alright.
Let's go.
Look at the way these shots use vertical angles to sell how small Cloud is and how vast the barren crater and airship are.
We touch down at the edge of the crater, walk over barren arctic stone, and very soon are greeted with a message that… I think suggests this may at one point have been intended as a point of no return; 'Looks like we can only slide down' sounds like the warning you'd get to sort all your stuff out before heading in because you can't walk back. This isn't actually the case, and even after the slide down, walking back to the airship is trivial, and can be done at any point up to the penultimate screen before the final battle (although it becomes much less trivial when you have to walk all the way back through the cave).
The very first item we find around the edge of the crater is a Save Crystal. This is a unique item with a very special function: It can create a Save Point anywhere in the North Cave, but can only be used once. The North Cave otherwise has no save points whatsoever. The game is empowering us to choose where we think we would make the best use of a save point, which plays into a general 'resource management' vibe the final dungeon tries for, since a save point is also a place we can rest at. Ultimately we'll just plop it down on the very last screen before the point of no return, there's no reason to do anything else.
The outside of the cave is a spiraling pathway down towards the glowing green light of a massive concentration of Mako, most likely a physical access point to the Lifestream itself. We meet our first opponents there, the toughest random encounters in the game; for the most part they'll be the same all the way through the cave. They include the Dark Dragon, Gargoyles, a bunch of suckerfish-like critters, and more.
The dark dragon is capable of dealing decent damage, but ultimately isn't resilient enough to stop us from plowing through. The Gargoyles are more annoying; they have a unique mechanic where they start the fight petrified, unable to act and taking 0 damage from attacks, until we attack and 'break' them, freeing them to attack us and take damage.
Once we reach the bottom of the spiraling pathway, we enter the cave proper, following a series of sidescroller-like levels with the minor gimmick that they split into two paths and there is loot on both sides, so in order to collect everything we have to go through it all three times: first to get the loot from Path 1, then back up around through Path 2 to get the loot there, and then over again through either of the now-lootless paths. If the game were harder, this would present something of a genuine threat of attrition as we have to choose whether to grab all the loot and risk multiple tough battles or go straight through to preserve resources, but that kind of resource management was never all that fun even in older FF games that did do it. As for the resources, they include multiple Source items and powerful previously-unique Materia like HP Absorb.
Then we have another side-scrolling screen with jump-based navigation and doorways that lead to a second screen that weaves between the doorways, presenting a minor navigation challenge. On the way, we run into a particular opponent:
But not just Tonberry - Master Tonberry, as noted by the star above its head. Master Tonberry has an astounding 44,444 HP, an allusion to the Japanese shi being synonymous for both "four" and "death." Master Tonberry is mechanically kind of fascinating; in typical Tonberry fashion, it slowly inches its way across the screen, and if it gets to close range of a character, deals instant death. It can be attacked once between its movement turns without consequences, but if attacked more, it reacts with "Everybody's Grudge," a move that targets the attacking character with damage equal to the number of kills they've gathered all game, multiplied by 10. That makes it quite a powerful foe, although ultimately it only takes a few hits to blow through its HP and Cloud is the only character with a body count large enough to get one shot by Grudge.
…also, Master Tonberry has one particular feature: It can be Morphed into an item that can't otherwise be farmed. Which means, once I've run into it once, I equip Yuffie with the Conformer, her ultimate weapon which has the unique property of causing Morph to deal full damage.
BAM. INSTANT RIBBON. NOW I HAVE ENOUGH TO OUTFIT MY WHOLE TEAM.
Anyway, eventually we reach a fork in the path.
So. This bit.
I don't know what's ahead, and I don't like the idea of risking split party shenanigans in a place without a save point. This is kind of a silly concern given how easy the game is, but it's instinctive. I decide to look it up, and as it turns out, the game isn't actually going to force me to play with a party of washouts. Instead, the way this section works is that the characters who aren't in Cloud's party will be collecting items off-screen and giving them to us once we meet back up, and they'll do so based on a whole grid of who is sent where which is…
Look, I don't want to bother with this. I just follow the instructions I get so I don't risk missing a unique item or anything which means I'm grabbing the Midgar party of Barret and Vincent and sending Cid, Yuffie and Caith Sith away. Then, on the next screen, we're splitting again, this time sending away Cait Sith and Tifa.
Notably, each character has special dialogue when sent away, and that dialogue is heavily framed as the last words they might ever share with us, which is a weird degree of emphasis to put on it considering we end up meeting them again in like, ten minutes, tops.
Cloud: "Now don't any of you die on me… Gotta get through to Sephiroth!"
Cid: "I'll destroy that Sephiroth before anyone gets me!"
Yuffie: "Oh man… 'Materia Hunter Yuffie' sounds like the last chapter of 'Materia Forever.'"
Red: "All life on this Planet, indeed the very life of this Planet, is in our hands…"
Cait Sith: "I'm so happy to have met you all, really! …sniff…"
Tifa: "Let's all go back alive, okay?"
You get what I mean, right? This whole thing is like this emotional exchange as the group splits off to pursue their own quests to defeat the big bad where they won't meet up again until after this is done and they've either succeeded or failed and died, instead of what it actually is, which is 'the group randomly deciding to split up to explore a bunch of caves before meeting up again.'
The next couple of screens see us clamber atop rock arches in front of the biggest Mako waterfall we've seen so far, the Lifestream just pouring down towards the bottom of the earth. There, we find the unique Magic Counter Materia; combined with a magic command, it responds to attacks with the appropriate magic - meaning it's possible to set it up so a character reacts to an attack with Ultima or Knight of the Round.
This could be potentially very powerful but is held back by a couple of issues: First, this is yet another level-based Materia which starts with only a 30% chance of the counter actually triggering and costing tens of thousands of AP to level, and second, Summon Counters still depletes the limited number of summons per fight we get. Beyond that, more Sources and consumable items.
There is, however, an even more intriguing Materia set up on a rock which requires an incredibly annoying mid-jump timed interaction to acquire:
It is the Mega All Materia.
Mega All is an incredibly useful effect: It applies All to everything. Or almost everything. It acts as if we had an All Materia paired with every Magic Materia equipped. It makes physical attacks hit all enemies comparable to Slash-All. It causes Steal, Mug, or Morph to hit all enemies at once.
…we're not going to use it either. As useful as free up all the space spent on All Materia on one character' sounds like, Mega All is, say it with me now, a level-based Materia. Which means it has a maximum of five uses (for a cost of 160,000 AP total) across all uses, and as it disables the normal attack command, even normal attacks will consume it, and as it stands now, it merely has one use per fight, period. I just… Don't have any use fr it right now.
Then it's done, we've reached the bottom of the Crater, the hole above the Lifestream itself.
You see what I mean about this emotional separation being incredibly short, right? This, of course, is the actual moment of character reunion and swearing to each other to see this through before heading for the actual, for real final battle. Every character who wasn't in the party has a new item for us, stuff like high-end armor. This includes…
…Yuffie, who, true to herself to the end, tries to hold back on us and hide the item she found right before the final battle for the fate of the universe. I love her. That item, incidentally, is the Counter Materia - confusingly named, it's actually the more niche of the three Counter Materias; it is paired with a Command Materia, and reacts to attack by using that Command. So, for instance, if we pair it with Steal, the character will respond to attacks by using Steal on the attacker. Potentially useful but most of the time we want our counters to deal damage, not do other stuff, and again this is a level-based Materia acquired in the literal final hour of the game. We will never use it.
And now…
…we plop down the Save Crystal, turn back around and leave.
No, really. This is the actual point of no return, right there. So now that we got everything that wasn't nailed down from the North Cave, I just want to zip out quickly and check if this new arsenal is enough to score a weapon on our last true opponents.
It may seem excessive but there's a reason I want to go through the Cave anyway - you see, all these paths we sent our teammates on earlier? We actually can go there, explore them, and grab loot.
And the weird thing is, whereas the descent through the North Cave has for the most part been a huge let down as far as dungeon aesthetics go, being pretty much just an underground cave with 'Mako springs and waterfalls' as its one unique feature, these side-paths are actually where all the aesthetic lives! Check this out:
Giant inverted spire with the sky shining like an aurora borealis from the ceiling and Mako glowing from below like some vision of the Greek Underworld? Walking on the fossilized ribcage of some ancient leviathan? Fuck yes. That's just one path, here's another:
A swamp of strange weeds, the only vegetal life in the Cave at first, until it leads into a natural amphitheatre with vegetation overhead? This is nice! It's a break from the 'rocks rocks and more rocks' aesthetic, for sure.
And these places have some really good rewards: More Sources, Megalixir, the W-Magic Materia… Oh, so that's where the standard dualcast was. This whole time we've had Quadra Magic, which is a weird kind of 'Rapidfire but for magic,' and W-Summon, which is Dualcast but for summon, but now, at the 11th hour, we find W-Magic. That's nice.
These side areas are also where new and unique enemies dwell, as opposed to the path we used earlier which continues the standard North Cave encounter list. This includes Zombie Dragon:
A lovely horror monster design which evokes the later Gaping Dragon of Dark Souls fame. It uses Pandora's Box, a powerful Defense-ignoring magical attack which we learn as an enemy skill. The Magic Pots are also back, asking for Elixirs as usual:
They are invincible unless given an Elixir, whereupon they prove incredibly easy to defeat, and reward us with 1000 AP per Magic Pot. Is 1000 AP worth an Elixir? In the grand scheme of things probably not, but I have a dozen Elixirs and Megalixirs both and I'll never use them all, so I feed the little critter happily. Other enemies unique to the swamp area include the Mover, tiny floating balls that give out a shitton of AP and can also be Morphed for Protect Rings. Neat!
And that's about it.
So, how does the North Cave rate as a Final Dungeon compared to the rest of the series?
It's… complicated. Aesthetically, it's one of the most uninspired in the series. The Lunar Subterrane from FFIV is the closest we got to having a dungeon that is literally just 'a cave,' but the latter parts of it had these cool crystal platforms hanging over the radiant core of the moon-ship. There are some interesting notes with the central glow of the Lifestream we're heading to, but the only really interesting parts are these optional side-paths that you might completely miss depending on where you go.
On the other hand in terms of being interesting to navigate, it does fairly well. Between the side-scrolling areas, the jumping areas, the multiple paths, and the plethora of loot scattered throughout, I rarely felt like I was wasting my time. The enemy variety is… okay, at least once I realized I could abuse Morph and ran into the enemies with unique reward like a special Enemy Skill or huge AP payouts. It's a shame there are no bosses though - it's actually kind of a surprise; the final dungeon having bosses scattered throughout goes back as far as the very first game, with the Four Fiends making a comeback; II had demon lords, III had the World of Darkness crystal guardians, IV had the superweapon guardians, V had Exdeath's elite demons, VI had the Warring Triad. There's nothing here.
Ultimately it's the least interesting final dungeon design in the series, elevated hugely by the new 3D technology letting its very mid aesthetic shine as well as it could so it mostly gets away with it. Between this, the lack of mid-dungeon bosses, and the weird half-baked party split midway through, I feel like the dungeon might have suffered from time constraints and be an incomplete version of what it was originally supposed to be.
But enough about the dungeon. Let's see about putting those new levels and rewards to use, shall we?
We do a little better against Emerald this time. I feed my characters every Source item acquired in the game, load them up with HP and MP boosting Materia, use Final Attack Phoenix to ensure survivability, and we manage to stay in the game for longer this time… Enough for Emerald to reveal its most annoying attack, Aire Tam Storm. The fact that this attack deals 9,999 damage to everyone seems to me a little excessive, considering this guarantees that I can't survive it no matter what.
It turns out, "Aire Tam" is "Materia" spelled backwards, and Aire Tam Storm deals damage to each character equal to 1,111 times the number of Materia they have equipped. Meaning any character with 9+ Materia suffers 9,999 damage and dies.
So that's going to be incredibly annoying.
We're not dealing with Emerald today, or possibly ever. Ultimately, neither the levels gained going through the North Cave and out nor the Materia obtained therein were enough to bridge the gap. Those Materia might have some use, but we'd have to level them up fully first. Probably during the same process we'd level up our characters to lv 99 or something. I'm not doing that, which I guess makes this an appropriate stopping point.
…
Okay, no. Just one thing.
Let me break the timeline a little and bring in a vision from the future. From after I'd first finished the game.
Ruby Weapon. You know the deal. We have to deliberately KO two of our characters before we enter the fight, which causes Ruby Weapon to extend its tentacles and become vulnerable, which in turn also disables its Whirlsand attack. From there, the expected course of action would be to raise everyone and engage the monster in battle.
But I just don't have the damage potential to deal with its defenses. I can deal up to 160k to 200k damage from two casts of Knight of the Rounds (it's reached lv 2 in the North Cave - I never use KotR in main story battles but I figured I might as well get it some AP for the Weapons), then my second most damaging move is Bahamut Zero for an extra 10k damage, and then I've exhausted my supply of high-damage Defense-ignoring attacks. Ultima and Flare don't do shit, Omnislash barely breaks 3k damage.
Except.
This is not a strategy I would have figured out myself, I'll be straight with you about that. I pulled it off the Internet. It is based on two factors:
- Ruby Weapon is vulnerable to paralysis, although that paralysis wears off quickly.
- Miming a command does not consume resources, including Summon casts.
So.
Hades inflicts all status effects at once on Ruby, which is immune to all of them except Paralysis. KotR deals 80k a pop.
W-Summon allows us to combo two summons in a row. Mime allows us to repeat the last command issued in battle at no cost. Because Tifa and Yuffie are dead, Cloud is the only one taking actions.
This means that by W-Summoning Hades into KotR, we can paralyze Ruby then hit it for 80k damage, then repeat this process with Mime every turn, forever.
The process isn't perfect; the timing of ATB is such that Ruby will get turns where its paralysis wears off and it gets to act. However, by combining KotR with HP Absorb, we can make KotR heal Cloud for around 6k HP with every cast. None of Ruby's attacks, even Ultima (which is what it responds to KotR with if it's not paralyzed during casting), can one-shot Cloud, so Cloud will immediately heal up from the next KotR cast. Ruby's attacks include a powerful MP drain that also inflicts poison and slow petrification, but Ribbon takes care of status effects and Mime means MP drain is irrelevant.
The resulting process is essentially deterministic. As long as we follow the plan and use Mime every turn, we can't lose. It will take ten castings of KotR to wear down Ruby's HP, but it is utterly helpless against us during the whole process. Even with this theory of inevitable victory which sees us take the most damaging option every turn, Ruby still takes around twenty minutes to wear down, simply because Hades and KotR together take like, a minute and a half to two minutes to perform. The only input required from me is to time Mime correctly when Ruby's paralysis is about to wear off.
Well, almost the only input. Winning this battle still takes me over two hours and five or six attempts, because I throw in one last wrinkle: Since I have two KotR casts, I can 'break off' the Mime sequence on the ninth Mimed cast, when Ruby is one cast from death, and instead W-Summon Phoenix into KotR, resurrecting Tifa and Yuffie so they get the full XP and AP from the fight when KotR kills.
This is a lot trickier than it sounds. Ruby loves its tentacle MP drain attack, and it loves in particular to use it between the two summons from W-Summon, which can cause MP to drop below the level required to cast KotR, which causes Cloud to attempt to use the Knights and whiff, which still consumes the cast, and leaves my whole party alive thanks to Phoenix but utterly unable to harm Ruby. Getting the timing and order of actions right is tricky, but eventually I manage to get it down - Cloud W-Summons Phoenix into KotR, raises everyone, fails to kill Ruby because I miscalculated HP, Ruby retaliates with Ultima and kills everyone but Cloud, then I have Cloud Mime his last action, raising everyone a second time and killing Ruby with KotR.
Oh, thank god.
Tifa and Yuffie are traumatized for life, but it was all worth it. For…
Well, nothing, really. Ruby drops the Desert Rose, an item which can be traded to the old man looking for objects for his pilgrimage, but the reward for it is a golden chocobo, which we already have.
Ultimately the only reason was bragging rights. Not that I can brag all that much, considering the braindead strategy I employed, but a win is a win. Now I can know peace.
This… should be all. It's time to head back to the North Cave, and finish the game.
Thank you for reading.
Next Time: We confront Sephiroth for the last time.
Omegahugger
Inattentive Idiot
When I first scrolled through the post, there was a brief moment where I thought Cloud was hanging from a noose.
The 'wonders' of seeing still images rather than the proper animation.
ZerbanDaGreat
Daemon Noble of D E M O G R A P H I C S
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- They/them
I dunno, this seems pretty explicable to me. Red is a lot younger than he initially presented himself, right? He was putting on airs to sound mature and wise, then once the gang saw him cringeposting at Cosmo Canyon he reverted to his naturally boyish speech patterns - he's a just a kid, and Bugenhagen has clearly been his primary parental figure for as long as he can remember. Red is lying to the group because he's lying to himself. He's trying, poorly, to construct a fiction where Grandpa Bugenhagen actually went to a farm upstate with lots of other wise old mentors to say 'hoo-hoo' and spout cryptic advice with because it's too much for him to handle right now with Sephiroth and Meteor to deal with. If there's still a planet after all this is over he's got a lot of work ahead of him and a lot to measure up to, but for now he's trying hold onto what he knows.
…also, Master Tonberry has one particular feature: It can be Morphed into an item that can't otherwise be farmed. Which means, once I've run into it once, I equip Yuffie with the Conformer, her ultimate weapon which has the unique property of causing Morph to deal full damage.
BAM. INSTANT RIBBON. NOW I HAVE ENOUGH TO OUTFIT MY WHOLE TEAM.
You may have scrambled to find a replacement, but make no mistake Cloud - I still remember the Ribbon you forgot...
- Pronouns
- He/Him
@Omicron: The Counter materia from the North Cave can be linked with Mime. That's by far its strongest potential use.
Sneak Attack caps out at 80% per, but each Sneak Attack materia fires independently, so you can get multiple opening blows in. It's mostly of use IMO in speeding up grinding. In particular I stacked them and multiple Morphs (Sneak Attack can be linked to Command materia) on Yuffie in order to grab Sources from the Gelnika. For generic grinding you could link 'em to Deathblow on Tifa or Vincent.
Fun fact: The bad translation strikes again when Sneak Attack procs: The battle message says "[CHARACTER] was caught by surprise!" when they are in fact the one catching the enemy by surprise
Sneak Attack caps out at 80% per, but each Sneak Attack materia fires independently, so you can get multiple opening blows in. It's mostly of use IMO in speeding up grinding. In particular I stacked them and multiple Morphs (Sneak Attack can be linked to Command materia) on Yuffie in order to grab Sources from the Gelnika. For generic grinding you could link 'em to Deathblow on Tifa or Vincent.
Fun fact: The bad translation strikes again when Sneak Attack procs: The battle message says "[CHARACTER] was caught by surprise!" when they are in fact the one catching the enemy by surprise
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But... is it really the last time we confront Sephiroth?
Drowned him in lifestream, cut him to ribbons, jump to another dimension (four times!), dress up like Vincent and go fight a Disney villain, Sephiroth will be waiting.
The benefits of being popular.
Drowned him in lifestream, cut him to ribbons, jump to another dimension (four times!), dress up like Vincent and go fight a Disney villain, Sephiroth will be waiting.
The benefits of being popular.