Rufus Shinra is the closest thing this setting has to a prince and the Ruby Weapon shows no particular interest in killing him so an antlion inspiration is unlikely.
Unless maybe Yuffie has something he hasn't figured out yet.
Might be the last New Threat post, but it'll be a long one.
Arriving and then immediately leaving North Cave unlocks the ultimate Limit Break/weapon quests for most party members. IIRC, Only Vincent, and Cloud + Aerith can unlock theirs before the return to Midgar. Depends if you count Cid.
Now then, IIRC:
Yuffie has a rematch with her father, gets the scales to clear the fire cave, and has a match with Da Chao. Da Chao has two adds, which remove non-Yuffie party members as they are defeated to make it become a duel. After this she gains All Creation and the Conformer.
Red has another trip down in the Gi Cave, where he has a duel with Seto's ghost.
I don't think Tifa's quest differs from the original.
Cait Sith has his ultimate weapon in the Shinra building or at the Gold Saucer. IIRC he gets a third LB in New Threat, but I never used it. The party revisits the Temple of the Ancients, which is surrounded by babbling Cait Sith replicas chanting at a portal at the bottom of the hole. Jumping in, the party has a boss fight with the Arbiter of Caith.
Barret is a bit of a special case. See, throughout New Threat the Guard Scorpion is a recurring boss that you fight in, IIRC, the Shinra Building, the Corel Reactor, Gongaga, the Nibelheim Reactor, Junon Submarine dock, and (maybe) the return to Midgar. The model is changed after every couple of battles to show the damage adding up. After entering and leaving North Cave the player finds the guard scorpion having a standoff with Barret on the cliff overlooking the Corel Reactor. Once it is defeated it gets back up, transforming into a reskinned Proud Clod.
As for script changes, there is the final 'party hangs around in a town' sequence added by the mod. In New Threat Reeve specifies that he got Marlene and Elmyra out of Midgar to hide in Kalm. If the player goes there (maybe before the return to Midgar but definitively after entering and leaving North Cave) the player gets some scenes with them. While the rest of the part is doing their thing Barret is in the store with Marlene, buying her a bracelet before he goes off to fight Sephiroth. If she survives, Aerith will be sitting with Elmyra outside the store, telling her mother about the adventure since she left Midgar.
Rufus Shinra is the closest thing this setting has to a prince and the Ruby Weapon shows no particular interest in killing him so an antlion inspiration is unlikely.
Unless maybe Yuffie has something he hasn't figured out yet.
Yeah, antlions are a real thing, the larvae of a lacewing-like insect, not just a video game/fiction thing. The real things are pretty small, though. Ruby Weapon definitely has some level of antlion ispiration, though, primarily in the extendo-tendrils that look like a pair of antlion jaws. And the whole 'buried in sand' thing.
Oh for sure, it's a great freak pick. When I said "I'm not sure about this one," I didn't mean I wasn't sure if I liked the design, I meant I wasn't sure about that read of its influences.
Just so; as I said, Mime is the true most powerful Materia in the game, because it can copy anything, no matter what it is; not even Limit Breaks are immune to being Mimed. And!
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,
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.
Consider the following, however: out of the Materia you used, KotR could be replaced with Bahamut Zero. It'd make the fight longer, but still doable. Mime you could get with only a Green chocobo, the easiest one to obtain, and everything else you used would have been obtainable without need to engage with any chocobo eugenics or racing. So, if you do it that way, defeating the Ruby Weapon is what nets you the Knights of the Round.
So: is defeating Ruby with the strategy you used, which just requires you trying every summon on it until you discover that Hades paralyzes it, and realizing the true potential of Mime, more difficult to figure out than the process to obtain a Golden Chocobo, if you have no guide leading you to either?
But yes, if you already have the gold Chocobo, then the Ruby Weapon's prize is a middle finger the game is giving you. Not going to argue with that.
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.
See, what you're missing here is that they're two different Materia because they can be combined. Of limited meaning when using Summons, but with the right spells, that can be game changing.
Speaking of - the following are tips that could possibly help you clear Emerald Weapon in less than one hour. None of these will win you the Emerald Weapon fight on their own; they are just some elements that can be used to create a strategy that doesn't requires you to grind to hell and back to win, and might make the fight go fast enough you can afford to play it. However, you might feel cheated of figuring these out on your own, so I'll put them under spoiler and it's up to you to decide if it's worth it to have help defeating the only really challenging opponent FFVII has to offer.
Linking Counter Magic and Quadra Magic to the same Materia (so one you have two copies of) will cause a Quadra Counter. Similarly, you could get a Quadra Final Attack, and so on. This is something worth considering now that you have all of the most powerful support materia; even a lot of suggested strategies overlook the potential synergy of combining support Materia.
Emerald Weapon, the enemy with 1 million HP? It's vulnerable to gravity. Think that over for a moment, and see if you can't find a way to make it useful.
A lot of Emerald Weapon's attacks remove buffs, but different attacks remove different buffs, leaving others intact. And some of its attacks have conditions that can keep them from being used or trigger them automatically. You can strategize around that if you figure the patterns out.
It's possible that you retrieved the Shield Materia but haven't unlocked that spell yet. It's the most powerful defensive buff in the game - unlocking it can be a pain, but it adds a lot of durability once you have it up. If you somehow haven't obtained that Materia yet, the screen in which it can be found is glitched, in that if you don't press confirm to close the "materia obtained" message and leave the screen, the materia won't disappear and you'll be able to collect multiple copies. That'd be cheating, of course, but I still thought it worth mentioning when "not having to grind three copies out" is really only a difference in time spent grinding, which is what these tips are trying to address.
There is a unique, easter egg status effect in the game that is nearly impossible to trigger by chance; it's called Lucky 7. How you achieve it is by having a character reaching exactly 7777 HP in battle. Now that you've beaten Ruby, the best way to understand the utility of the status effect is to go up against it with Cloud (or whoever, but Omnislash makes for the best demonstration tool) having his limit stored and ready to use; paralyze Ruby, bring Cloud's HP to 7777 (this is easier to do if you heal up to it with items), and check out what happens. Then consider how you learned Aire Tam Attack works (by inflicting 1111 damage for equipped Materia), and see if that can help.
Additionally, Mime "only" (compared to stuff like W-Summon, Counter Magic or KotR) takes 100'000 AP to master, and if you kept it equipped since you obtained it, you should have a lot of those already from the Diamond and Ruby fights as well as the pots and the Apocalypse. I'm not the one to judge if having two of it is too big a time sink, but if you decide that it's not, two Mime could make almost any strategy work without needing to master a ton of others, more AP-intensive Materia.
And, while we're talking AP, since now you know the Ruby Weapon gives off 50k AP, you might want to also know that Bone Village sells Double AP armors; combined with the Apocalypse and the fact you don't plan on using the other two characters to attack so you can give them weapons with double AP growth, which you should have some of, that's 100k AP on several Materia and 150k AP on three of your choice, so when you've decided which Materia you need against Emerald, cheesing Ruby to prepare those Materia for the Emerald fight is a good idea.
Oh, FFVIII, hands down, no qualifications needed. It's not even close, despite a few of other final dungeons in the series having a strong vibe. Nothing can really compare to that one final dungeon, it's like a masterclass in how a final dungeon should be designed. We'll see why when the Let's Play gets there, but I am doubtful of anybody who claims otherwise.
Like other counter-attack materia, Counter can be equipped repeatedly and so respond with the linked materia multiple times.
Characters can have up to sixteen materia slots per.
W-Summon exists.
Therefore, you could, if you decided to go absolutely silly, have a party setup wherein one person has Knights and W-Summon and seven Mimes linked to seven Counters. And the other two party members have eight by eight.
Lead off with a W-Summoned Knights. Subsequent to that any enemy attack would trigger a minimum response of fourteen Knight casts. A group attack would trigger forty-four.
It's about 1:35 per cast, so slightly over an hour if all of them are needed, but nothing in the game has five million hitpoints. Emerald has one million and the strongest plot boss maxes out at 400,000.
The thing that gets me about the North Cave is how bland a name it has despite being the final dungeon. Looks like it's not a translation thing either, since it's called basically that in Japanese too, though it at least has the fancier sounding alternate title 'The Great Cavity'
Yeah, as mentioned before, Mime is the most powerful Materia in the game. Consider that it takes 100k AP to master Mime, and 500k to master KotR - so you could have four mastered Mimes before you mastered one KotR.
Anything you can do, Mime lets you do infinite times, no matter what it is or what sort of requirements using the ability would otherwise have. There's really nothing with equal application in the game - whatever you're trying to do, Mime lets you do more of it, faster.
Yeah, as mentioned before, Mime is the most powerful Materia in the game. Consider that it takes 100k AP to master Mime, and 500k to master KotR - so you could have four mastered Mimes before you mastered one KotR. Or the fact that Knight of the Round doesn't work with Counter Magic, when Mime works with Counter. Anything you can do, Mime let's you do infinite times, no matter what it is or what sort of requirements using the ability would otherwise have.
Right; I had those two in mind and got them switched around. I'll edit my post to avoid misleading people, but I'll leave this here as evidence of my mistake.
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.
"Most" is not "all", though; when you met one of those rare bosses that give you something you don't have and which is, if not strictly necessary, at least useful, that's always a great feeling. In the Final Fantasy series, I can count perhaps five Superbosses which do that... which, when you count the total number of superbosses, especially when the later titles start inflating said number, is really not a lot. But, better than nothing, right?
Even this far into the LP, I forget that the stat boosters are called Sources, and when I saw that screenshot I was thinking 'oh, is there some electrical generator puzzle in this cave for some reason?'
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.
FFVII really knows its audience, to the point it doesn't actually care about pushing all the end game spells to the very end with absurd growth requirements, safely smug about the average gamer delaying the final boss for 2 months to milk all the AP pots and chocobo racing elixir farming for them in the same 1-2 final cave screens with absolutely no narrative content in between.
Except the implied narrative content of sephiroth raising a eyebrow when looking up and seeing the explosions for a solid number of weeks.
The things that cemented my ideas about this was my forever last playthrough where I realized what the giant materias did and went 'aw man, you're just fucking with me now'.
Who are you to besmirch the Yakuzavery nice men protecting their IP?
But seriously, the whole "Yaks will go Heat Action on your ass if you draw horsefucker porn de Japon" thing is a meme. IIRC, Uma Musume, like certain other properties (notably Eva now) has a clause where selling derivative works without express corporate consent is explicitly illegal. Most derivative Japanese works are (pornographic) doujinshi.
IIRC, Uma Musume, like certain other properties (notably Eva now) has a clause where selling derivative works without express corporate consent is explicitly illegal.
I mean, a company doesn't get stronger IP rights just because they say they do. These are more like statements that they're going to be more aggressive about suing people, instead of accepting the sort of existing implicit agreement of looking the other way because doujins were thought to drive continuous engagement with the original title.
Octopath Traveler's gives you the Spurning Ribbon, the accessory that turns off random encounters. It might seem useless, but it lets you complete all the game's side quests without being slowed down by random fights.
Omi mentioning that so far the endzone so far is just a slightly disappointing cave has me wondering...what *is* everyone's favorite FF End Zone? Not necessarily boss, but the environment/level specifically?
I recall finding both VIII and IX's pretty good. Not sure which one wins out (though I think IX's a better game overall), though, and obviously giving details would be spoilers.
...Probably still IX's, I guess, but still fairly close, with VIII's just having such good [spoilers]. At least as far as I'm recalling.
Omicron said:
is that the one where if you draw porn of the characters the yakuza come to your house and break your legs
...
And I thought it already sounded weird enough. Silly me.
Zap Rowsdower said:
My understanding: The anime has anthropomorphic versions of real, often still active, racehorses for its girls. Racehorses in Japan are generally owned by the yakuza for control of gambling reasons. They want to be seen as respectable to protect their investments in the horse racing field and will respond with gusto to somebody who makes the cartoon girl version of their investment look disreputable.
Oh, FFVIII, hands down, no qualifications needed. It's not even close, despite a few of other final dungeons in the series having a strong vibe. Nothing can really compare to that one final dungeon, it's like a masterclass in how a final dungeon should be designed. We'll see why when the Let's Play gets there, but I am doubtful of anybody who claims otherwise.
It occurs to me, reading that, that my experience of VIII's final dungeon may have been worsened by me not actually being all that good at the game's combat system, and that part of the reason I was rating IX's as edging past it to the top spot may just be I was better at IX and so had a less frustrating time. Though the memories are years-old in both cases, given how good I remember VIII's being even with not being good at its combat and finding IX better overall...
But yes, I look forward to (eventually) seeing Omicron's reaction to it (though I'm excited for Omicron reaching VIII in general).
FourthWall said:
But seriously, the whole "Yaks will go Heat Action on your ass if you draw horsefucker porn de Japon" thing is a meme. IIRC, Uma Musume, like certain other properties (notably Eva now) has a clause where selling derivative works without express corporate consent is explicitly illegal. Most derivative Japanese works are (pornographic) doujinshi.
One of the playthroughs I'm looking forwards to the most has definitely got to be X. It's one I used to play a lot, though I never actually beat it lol. I liked restarting so I could play the opening over and over again.
