FFVII: The End!

I've finished Final Fantasy VII! In record time(for me): 47:39 at only Lvl 74(last time I was at 86). The end of the game wasn't much trouble I just used W-summon and with Knights, and Jenova was dead, then the same thing to Sephiroth's first form Bizzaro. Then I wasted Safer, with a Omni-Slash, 2 KotR's and 5 or six uses of 4x-Cut! And finally Sephiroth himself, although anyone who can press a button can win that fight :)

I think I got the ending a little better, but I still don't like that 500 years later thing... I really like FF7, sometimes though I wish I could play a version with FFX's graphics, heck even FF8's graphics, I think I could feel just a touch more for characters that look more "real" then the boxy polygon models that they use in FF7(even sprites can "emote" better). But other than that the game still holds it's own, and graphics aren't "all that". Heck, some of my favorite games ever, are 2-d games.

Well that's pretty much it for FFVII coverage, maybe I'll have a retrospective at the end of this. I'm going to put down FF7 for another year, and come back to it. With the same enthusiasim! Long Live Final Fantasy VII!

Final Fantasy VIII is Comin' Up!

FFVII: Ancient Forest and lots of Battles!

Hiya!

I didn't get to play much today and I didn't want to stay up so late playing the game this time, so I just managed to pull off a couple of things.

First I went through the Ancient Forest. Here you have to put frogs in plants to get across the screen to a cave with a really good sword for Cloud, by good I mean it has TRIPLE materia growth. That's really good for getting your Materia ready for the final battles, because cirtain monsters give massive AP (or EXP if that's what you are interested in).

The only other thing I did was head to the battle square in the gold saucer. I had plenty of GP to use from all the C'bo racing I did last night. I think it was about 1800, that's good enough for 180 battles in the battle square. Anyway I got to 32000 BP really quickly and got OmniSlash, man it's still awesome to watch! I also decided that I would get W-Summon too. That took MUCH longer, almost 2 hours. As for how the Battles went, I think my best round was 11530 BP.

I'm now ready to head to the Northern Crater and finish the game, I should be able to do that tomorrow.

FFVII: The Fall of Shinra, Ultimate Weapon and a Gold Chocobo!

Well there isn't going to be as much here as there may have been in the last few posts. One, because it's 4:13am and two, I only did a few things in the game.

First thing on my list was completing Disc 2. To do that the characters parachute in to Midgar. There isn't much of intrest here. W-Item materia is very cool, if you know (or want to) exploit the trick. You battle Scarlet and Hieddger in Proud Clod (what the hell is Clod?!). It's a really straight forward battle, as most of the battles are at this point of the game, just summon powerful monsters and use attacks and just beat the crap out of everything. Hojo was the next to get this treatment, that was after we find out he's actually Sephiroth's father! He injects himself with Jenova Cells and turns into this weird freaky thing. After the fight the team reflects on themselves. And the Highwind(airship) turns rocket powered!

At this point you can just go and finish the last couple of hours of the game and beat Sephiroth/Jenova and win the game... Or... You can finish up doing all the extra things. The first thing I did was chase around Ultimate Weapon. I beat him with ease. Then I set out to do one of the most annoying and time consuming things in FF7:

Chocobo Breeding

This is insane. But it's not all that hard, first you have to go around the world and collect a few select chocobos. Then you have to feed them greens to make them better. The best greens are Sylkis Greens, but they are very expensive, like 5000 gil each. So what you do is buy 2 of them and use the W-Item trick, and get 99(BTW this works for any consumable item, even Megalixers!!). After you feed you chocobo 90(which is way more then enough) you race it and WIN 9 chocobo races at the Golden Saucer. You do this for the other 2 chocobos you cought. Then you breed 2 of them, to get a green or a blue C'bo. Follow that up with the same parents creating a opposite one for the first one you got. Then the Blue and Green mate. Black one is made. Black with Wonderful MALE Chocobo = Golden Chocobo!

That sounds easy, but it's far from it. First there is the problem of the chocobo menus themselves. Some of them don't work unless you have the default controls on (O is select and X is cancel). So if you are like me and like the X button to select, then you have to change to the default controls everytime you want to use cirtain menus.

Second, the chocobo racing is a pain really, it's not exactly needed except for your Wonderful Male. But it helps to get the right color or gender that you need to keep going to gold. It's also good for getting GP to use in getting OmniSlash at the battle square. But the main problem is if you use the technique of 90 greens then your chocobo outclasses the others and you can win the race by a minute sometimes, that sounds good but you can't advance until ATLEAST ONE other rider crosses the line.

Thrid is the fact that you can't just quickly breed. You have to wait, because c'bos that just breeded or where just born can't mate. So that means you have to go off and from what I have found, raise at least one level of exp. So depending on what Level your on it could take awhile. Raising levels is the fastest way to get you c'bos ready to breed again. Don't believe the guides that tell you to "do stuff" to waste time cause it really doesn't seem to help.

And the final thing is that sometimes you do not get the gender or color that you need to get to the next step so you have to make sure you save before breeding so that you can reset and reload your game.

Well I got my Gold Chocobo, called him Goldy(bad name... I'm tired, it's 4am...). I got Knights of the Round and a bunch of the other hard to get materia and stopped for the night. Tonight I plan on finishing the game so check back sometime tonight and I'll hopefull have the game done!

FFVII: Huge Materia Pt3, Sea, Space, Diamond and a Huge Freaking Cannon!

Back for more? (That's good!)

First thing today was the Submarine Mini-game... HAHAHAHA!! This game is kind of a joke I think. You get 10minutes to stop the red sub from getting away with the huge materia. Except if you get the controls, it takes less than 30 seconds to win. It plays it out like it's such a tense moment. "OMG! The Sub is getting away!!" So.

After you stop the red sub you get to keep the sub that you "borrowed" and can explore the bottom of the seas. There's a couple of things that you can get there. The first thing is to get the Huge Materia from the  destroyed red sub. Then visit one of the scarest places in FF7 I think the sunken Gelinka plane. This place is filled with really wierd mutations that are at a very high level, for this point of the game. Some of them can do upwards of 2000HP of damage, to LV50+ characters. But there are quite a few really good items here that you should not miss. Except for the battle with Reno and Rude I ran away from every fight down there.

The other thing that you can do under the water is get the key to the ancients. It's not that hard to find, and it is need to move the plot. You could also find Emerald Weapon under the sea, but fighting it now would be suicide, for characters LVL'd pretty much normally over the course of the game.

The final quest is to get the final Huge Materia. This one is located in the Shinra no. 28 rocket. Getting the materia can be tricky if you don't know the passcode for the case it's in. Later on the Rocket (now in SPACE!!) Cid has a huge revelation, when the oxygen tank #8 explodes. Turns out Shera was right. He then proceeds to swear alot. It's almost funny, but it's nice to see grumpy old Cid realize his faults.

The next thing is to go to Cosmo Canyon and talk to Red's grandfather. You store away the Huge Materia, and if you have Bahamut and Neo Bahamut you can get Bahamut ZERO. Three Bahamuts... I thought he was the king of dragons, why are there three of them. Anyways... ZERO is even more powerful than Neo. You take bugenhagen to the City of Ancients and you see a little thing about Aeris and Holy(her materia, that does nothing). Cloud realizes that Sephiroth is stopping the release of Holy. And gets determind to not let Aeris down. After this point the plot really is starting to get to an end.

But before it does you must "try" and stop Diamond Weapon from taking out Midgar. The battle isn't that hard, you just can't do any physical attacks on him. The Bahamut's, Comet and some Lightning magic will sofen him up though. After that the plot stats to unfold in one long scene. I really like this part. Rufus orders the cannon fired and it sucks all the Mako energy from Midgar and lets rip with a huge Mako shot. But just before the Cannon can take out the looming weapon, it fires some shots at Midgar. The Mako shot goes right through the chest of Weapon and takes him out, it also takes out the force field surrounding the Northern Crater. The final scene is that of Diamond's shots blowing up the presidents office, incinerating him, heh, he had it coming.

The group takes the highwind to the crater to discover that the field is gone, but before they can go challenge Sephiroth, Cait Sith reports that Hojo is trying to fire the Mako Cannon again and that it will lead to disasterous results. That's the partys next goal, but while the city of Midgar is on the verge of blowing up, I went off and did a few things. One I got the Sector 5 key (which may or may not be important at this point). Two, I played the piano at Tifa's old house in Nibelhiem and got her final limit. I stopped at this point and will finish the 2nd disc tomorrow, I'm on record pace, the clock just hit 30 hours. And I'm almost done Disc 2, so unless it takes me 28 hours to breed chocobos(betcha you can wait to hear about that) and get OmniSlash then I'll finish in record time! Till tomorrow!

FFVII: Getting Huge Materia Pt2

I'm back with another post...

Today I did the Fort Condor mini-game and won the Huge Materia. Like I said in the last post, completing the game is much easier if you have a lot of gil. You just keep placing troops as you need them and it's a easy win. I also got the Phoenix Summon. You know, I don't think I've ever used it. I'll have to give it a shot.

After that you have to go check to see how Cloud is doing in Mideel. After a short scene of Cloud still messed up. You have to fight Ultima Weapon, he's not too hard, but I did end the fight with Cid KO'd. After this battle comes one of the most important story segments of the game. In this long scene Tifa helps Cloud find out about himself and the truth about his past. It's really important to follow this as closely as possible.

After Cloud clears his head and gets back to being his more 'real' self. One of the cool places to visit is Nibelhiem, there you can go back into the basement of the Shinra Mansion to see a optional but cool flash back about Zack and Cloud's escape from Hojo. And if you are still wondering why Nibelhiem is still standing and not burned down, you can talk to a guy in the back of the item shop, that mentions that he works for Shinra, to protect the 'secret' of Nibelhiem. I assume this means that Shinra rebuilt Nibelhiem and everyone that works there is paid by the Shinra to hide the fact that Sephiroth was there. Not perfectly sure on that one though.

After all that you next goal of the game is to get the 3rd huge materia from the Junon Underwater reactor. One of the things that you have to do here is morph a Ghost Ship into a Guide Book. I forget what it exactly does at this point, but I had a few frustrating moments trying to morph that ship. Because it has a move that can throw one of you party members out of the battle. Somehow he'd always pick the person that I had Morph equipped to.

Now once you get in there it 's pretty easy sailing (pun? You decide). But the worst thing that happened in the reactor was that I lost to the Boss that is there the Carry Armor. It was crappy luck was all, really, with a tiny mistake on my part. The first thing he did was grab my healer, Tifa who had the Restore with All. Then he happened to hit me with his Lapis Laser attack that does 1500+ damage. Unfortunately I was too slow at getting my healing items in to play and he bashed Cloud getting him below the 1500HP mark, making him killable by one hit of the Lapis Laser. To make matters worse the Armor grabbed Yuffie and then decided to use Lapis Laser. I was wiped out :(

The second time the thing was blown away. I blasted it with Bahamut and Neo Bahamut for 4500 damage to each of the three parts. Then after it grabbed both Tifa and Yuffie I had Cloud plaster it with multiple Meteor spells. And finished it off with Limit Breaks from Cloud and Yuffie. It was the first time that I have been wiped out in FF7 since I first played it.

I decided to save inside the submarine, just before the submarine mini-game. I'll have that for next time. And finish up the Huge Materia quests. 31:59 minutes in.

FFVII: Getting Huge Materia Pt1

I played for a bit tonight. First thing that happened was one of the weapons attacks Junon, the weapon just happens to help Tifa escape the gas chamber she is in. Just after that the Junon cannon "Sister Ray" blows the head clean off the weapon. The FMVs in this part of the game are some of the best. Any ways you take Tifa out of the gas room and down to the barrel of the Sister Ray. There she gets in a slapping fight with Scarlet. It's a pretty weird fight, but if you press O fast enough you slap Scarlet down.
 
After the slapping :P Tifa is rescued by the airship: Highwind and you get to keep it for the rest of the game. After a short sequence aboard the ship, you head to the town of Mideel which is in the south east part of the map and is surrounded by forest. It's a small town where the weapons are good, but they cost 30,000 gil each! Theres also this crazy person running around buying all the stuff from the stores. You can talk to her in all the stores so she can help you later on. It's really funny because the "yahooo!" Chocobo music is playing.
 
Anyway after you buy all the weapons for your characters, when you try to go deeper in to the town, you'll hear a conversation between a couple of Mideel residents. They are talking about a 'spiky-haired kid'. That just happens to be Cloud. He's pretty messed up and Tifa decides she better stay with him. Which kinda sucked for me first I lost Cloud, and now Tifa left the party for the time being, leaving with just Yuffie from my leveled characters. It doesn't matter that much because there isn't all that much fighting in this part of the game any way. That and my main characters where pushing level 50, making the other characters about 41.
 
After Tifa leaves the characters(okay, maybe just Barret does) decides that Cid should be the leader of the group. After that you can begin the quests for the 4 "Huge Materia". The first one I did was the Corel Reactor one. To get it you have to catch up to the Shinra train and then battle across the cars to get to the engine. Once you defeat the simple soldier, you have to try and stop the train from taking out North Corel. It's not all that hard you just keep pressing down+Triangle. It's almost humorus because Down+Triangle is technically the brake but the train keeps speeding up. And it's hard not to laugh at Cid's "Shhiiiii---!" And Red XIII telling him that the train is speeding up and not slowing down, thanks obvious man :P After you complete the mission you get the first of the Materia, and the town's people will reward you with powerful Ultima Materia.
 
Now I was going to do the second quest and get the Materia from Fort Condor, but completing that little mini-game is a lot easier with a ton of money. So I ran around outside of Mideel and earned enough AP to MASTER an All Materia. Luckly I still had a weapon that gave double growth and 3 All's at 4 stars so it didn't take quite as long as it could have. When you sell a Mastered All, you get.... 1,400,000, gil!!! That's right you just walk into any store and sell this thing for 1.4 million gil. Man these stores must really hoard money to be able to buy that from you XD
 
Anyway I'll play some more later or tomorrow. BTW I'm about 29 Hours in now. that means about 30 or so to go...

FFVII: 25 Hours In...

This is going to be really quick summary of some of the key points, thoughts, and other stuff in the 25 hours I played before I had the idea to do this log. So here we go!
 
The game started as it always does, with the Aeris scene in to the long view of Midgar City.  The first part of the game is fairly straight forward. You take Cloud and Barret through the Mako Reactor and fight a simple boss. There is one thing about the Robot Scorpion boss, is that when it raises its tail you aren't supposed to attack it because it will fire its tail laser, its most powerful attack... Except Cloud tells Barret: "Attack while its tail is up!" Then the message box changes, and says it "It'll attack with its tail laser!" the problem is that at first it sounds like you are supposed attack it. That's just one of the times the sometimes shoddy translation of this game causes problems. It's not that big of a deal if you've played the game before or manage to catch it.
 
For people who haven't played the game the next interesting part of not is Wall Market part 1. Here Cloud has to save Tifa from Don Corneo, but to get in to the Don's mansion, he has to dress up as a woman. It can be just as simple as getting the dress and wig and getting in. Or as complex as completing many mini-quests and getting the Don to pick Cloud. It's a little on the odd side, but it's one of the craziest things that has ever happened in a videogame.
 
In next 15 hours you get a chocobo, visit the gold saucer(which in like minigame central), meet 3 new party characters(2 are kind of hidden), get put in a desert prison, race a chocobo, visit a temple that becomes black materia, then you visit the City of Ancients where one of your party members is killed, it's kind of a downer. After that disc 2 begins.
 
Disc 2 starts off with quite a bang compared to Disc 1 which I find quite boring for the most part. Okay... It actually starts of with one of the longest and most annoying parts in the entire game. You end up in the north snowfields and after you vist the only town and do a few things (like find out a bit of info on Aeris's past). You play a snowboarding game, which is just mediocre. After this you must chart this really confusing snow area, where you must do too things, touch a hot spring and grab a materia called Added Cut. You have to be pretty quick in doing this because if you take too long your characters faint from the cold.
 
After that thought the disc really heats up. Climing the cliff is pretty fun, and there is a chance that you might bump into a deadly Malboro. I can't believe how frightning these things are. If you get into a  battle with one of these at this point of the game, without a ribbon on at least one character, it's probably going to be over. It's Bad Breath attack is insanely unbalenced, can turn you into a frog, poison you, and give you just about every status effect there is. I had one encounter and luckly I manage to get away.
 
After that you fight your way through the crater and watch a scene where Cloud gives Sephiroth the Black Materia (again!). This allows the real Sephiroth encased in materia to cast Meteor. Which also releases the Weapon(s). Ultima, Ruby, Diamond and Emerald. You wake up in Junon 7 days later as Tifa. Meteor is hanging in the sky and now that jerk Rufus Shinra wants to public execute you for realsing Meteor and causing all this to happen.
 
Well that's where I saved, just as you control Barret and are heading to the gas chamber. Sorry for just discribing the game progression, it's almost walkthrough like. I really want this to be a bit more personal, but because of the 25 hours I played it was hard to do anything but. But now this log is up to date, I'll be able to really do this how I want.
 
The next post will be later tonight before I go to bed. Sometime around mid-night PT.

FFVII: Intro to Final Fantasy VII

Final Fantasy VII, the RPG that started it all, well, for most people it seems. I'm old enough to have played Dragon Warrior 1 and Final Fantasy 1 on NES and many the RPG on SNES, so I've always had a bit of a soft spot for good RPGs before that point. But what FF7 does is make giant steps for RPGs in Graphics, and story telling and cinimatic presentation.
 
For those that don't know Final Fantasy VII was released in North America in 1997. So even though it's a PSone game I'm still playing something that is quite old. The game takes place over 3 discs, and clocks in at around 50+ hours if you don't take your time.
 
Before I get started with my FF7 coverage please read my impressions of finishing the game for the first time: http://www.flatface.net/~ebcentral/tff/ff7.html. They are no where near as detailed as this is likely to be (or become), but they are very honest impressions of the first time totally throught the game for me.
 
Another thing before I get started is that before I got this idea, I have already played about 25 hours in to FF7 and just started Disc 2. I'll try to summarize some of the key things from that 25 hours. And then continue from there. I'm planning on making one post a day, featuring my thoughts on that part of the game, what I did/accomplished, and anything else that might be important or of note.
 
Any way I hope you enjoy!

More About The Quest...

Welcome to Final Fantasy 7-9: A Second Time Through!
 
Like it says in the About side bar, I've played through FF 7-9 once before, having owned the games for a few years. That year was last year 2003, I started just a little bit before this, in fact on Wednesday, July 21, 2004 it'll be  exactly a year since I finished FFIX. I started FFVII on June 17, 2003 and finished FFIX on July 21, 2003 so I managed to complete Three 60+ hour RPG's in a little more than a months time. That was then, when I pretty much could stay home and play them all day, logging upwards of 12 hours each day. I don't have that luxury(or "problem") any longer, so I'm sure it'll take me a bit longer this time around.  
 
I you'd like to read my thoughts on Finishing the games for the first time, please check out the site I did: http://www.flatface.net/~ebcentral/tff/ that covered a mammoth task that I still haven't managed to pull off. It's called The Final Fantasy: Tom's RPG Completion Quest 2003, and it was my attempt to complete all the RPGs that I had bought and then never finished. When you go there you can read my thoughts on FFVII and FFVIII. I did finish FFIX, but never got around to writing a thoughts for it (I plan on doing that as my first post of my FFIX coverage).
 
As you can see it takes a bit of a time and effort to finish games like these. For those who didn't visit the link above, it took me "about" 58 hours and 34 Minutes to finish FFVII. 67 hours and 6 minutes to finish FFVIII. And took 70 hours and 14 minutes to finish FFIX. So you'll have a lot read here, over the upcoming months.
 
That concludes the introduction to this journal. Following is the first post about my FFVII playthrough. BTW this was inspired by a great blog called: Jack's Quest Through Final Fantasy, it's a great read, except he's playing through FF 1 - FF 10. Here's the link it's a great read: http://jackdyce.blogspot.com.
 
One last "Ado" and we are off!