So, when last we left, I was dealing with the coliseum. A little work cleared that out and managing the various side missions wasn't difficult. I actually really enjoyed the Behemoth-0 fight as, in what was becoming a pattern, he trashed me for the first fight and then knowing what to expect left me able to hit him hard and knock him down flat on the rematch. The ghosts that you fight while saving the kids were actually more of a bother.
The Sahagin Prince for Corneo's Stash was also plenty annoying, but I think that was more just due to him having a bunch of Sahagin backup and the fact that the map disguised his tell, as you fight one in the combat sims later and it's really easy to see where to dodge his Frog status cast. Absu's rematch was actually comically easy as I just basically managed to massacre him with Barret to provide constant pressure and crowd control while also being a great support/healer.
Going up the wall after wasn't a huge deal, though I managed to kill the Valkyrie on accident due to being tossed about by something it did that stunned me, so the thing
flew under its own death laser and finished itself off. I was laughing far too much at that bit.
Shinra Tower was where shit got real. There's one tricky fight in the garages with like, four riot troopers, some hounds, and a couple 3C Soldiers, that really came close to wiping me....except then they charged Barret's limit break and Catastrophe just....wiped out everyone.
I actually made a save here just to see both the stairs and the elevators. The elevator was hilarious both for the poor office lady that gets a sword in her face and the guy that just...doesn't notice them in it. But it had nothing on the hysterical comedy routine that was the team running up 60 floors worth of stairs. I think Barrett was literally starting to get a bit delusional by the end due to lack of oxygen, while Tifa just makes the boys look like punks, finishing with a good 4 floor lead. Other soldiers seeing Cloud and recognizing him was interesting, and the VR bits were actually a lot easier than the coliseum at the level I was at. That poor simulated Giant Bandit just gets...absolutely annihilated by everyone casually throwing fire at him. Also cleared Leviathan once I realized he does all magic damage and equipped everyone with magic defense armor instead of regular defense, allowing them to weather Tidal Wave without losses. Incidentally, a fully maxed out Prayer on Barrett is fucking broken given how fast he can generate ATB. Aerith generates it slower, but her heal is bigger due to her magic stat, I think, so it evens out. Absolutely the single most beneficial thing of that AP Up Materia was maxing that thing.
Lots of plot here that was interesting, and the automated exhibits made me laugh having gone to Disneyworld and feeling a definite jab at that sort of thing. Heidigger and Scarlet just couldn't be bothered, apparently, which makes it funnier when Hojo
could be bothered to record a statement and spent it being sarcastic as hell and they literally uploaded it to the exhibit.
Poor Reeve tryin his best to be an actual decent human being certainly shows up here in that the Urban Planning Division exhibit is actually on script and delivered correctly. Also, I missed Tifa's final weapon here because I never expected they'd put it in her Assassin's Creed segment in the lobby. Whoops. The mayor was amusing, and I chuckled at his assistant charging you for intel before giving you the EKG cannon as recompense. This ended up being Barret's gun for the rest of the game due to the sheer amount of materia you could cram into it. I saw some accessories late game that give higher stats in exchange for no materia slots and just can't see the appeal given how beneficial those slots are. However, it was funny buying top tier armor at the Shinra food court to go in and completely trash Leviathan compared to the previous curbstomps.
The Drum was... an experience. Hojo going fuuuuulllll crazy man with Aerith beforehand (though at least not suggesting she and Red XIII have babies, apparently?), but most of the bosses weren't terrible. The party swap mechanic was kind of obnoxious, though, given I had to redo my gear every time since I never really set up enough gear to have two full healers (so Barrett and Aerith had to trade materia every time). The Whack-A-Moles weren't so bad after I put on stop/slow immunity boots, but I got killed like, I don't know how many times by Tifa and Aerith getting slaughtered by poison gorillas. Eventually set Tifa with poison immunity and Aerith with a Warding/Poison combo materia and the ancient crystal to lower the duration of the poison effects and got through.
I about lost my shit with the Swordipede, mostly because the cutscene distracts you from the *TINY* prompt to access the menu when it swaps from Cloud and Barrett to Tifa and Aerith, meaning Aerith had.... a single Lightning materia and nothing else on round one. Looked up a guide, saw that mentioned, actually swapped my gear for round two, and Tifa and Aerith just absolutely annihilated it since it spends so much time setting up attacks where you can, say, quad fire Firagas from Aerith's mystic ward.
Move up to the top of the tower and lots and lots and lots of plot (including some trying to stay on rails and some very much not). I like the change with President Shinra compared to the original where you kinda miss out on everything, but a lot of this gets really head-trippy. Is Sephiroth there? Isn't he? I get the impression that it was a couple of the Reunion dudes, with one changing into Sephiroth given he's not very physical at the moment, while the other was projecting the boss illusion, but it gets all over the place (and I'm still not sure why he did a nose dive off the tower with Jenova). The boss fight was hectic, but aside from my first introduction to the black lasers of doom spam just...one-shotting poor Cloud, I managed to take out Dreamweaver in one attempt.
Rufus was another thing altogether, but I found that fight a lot more fun. Got killed a few times, but after realizing that Triple Slash hitting both of them at the same time broke their tether and opened up Darkstar to staggering, I was able to beat Darkstar down pretty easily. Rufus took a bit longer, but hilariously on the last attempt, things lined up so that I basically used Counterstance (which is a fucking GODSEND once you get it) to block him, opened him up to counterattacking, and my Limit Break came up at the same time, instantly staggerin Rufus and just letting him get flattened maybe a minute into the second phase. But everything about this fight from Rufus's overall delivery, the mechanics between him and Darkstar, and everything... I don't know why, but even getting thrashed, this was a great fight, possibly because it was a duel so I just had to focus on what Cloud could do on his own.
After that, the Arsenal was an interesting mix since it was the first time I'd ever gotten Barrett and Aerith in the same party. I had to laugh when the Particle Beam just kept one-shotting Barrett...so Aerith would raise him, allowing him to turn that 9999 damage into a limit break every time. I hit the thing THREE TIMES.
Also, them dealing with Heidigger was great. "AVALANCHE!" "LOCAL FLORIST!" "LAB RAT DOG!" The escape from the tower just...was showing off. Cloud thrashing everyone on the bike and the poor soldier that about pissed himself when Cloud put the sword through the window.
The first half of the bike ride was pretty cool, and you felt like a bit of a badass getting through it. But my luck with Roche repeated itself as I got trashed by the six-wheeler on the first try due to injuries taken fighting everything up to that point. A couple more wipes before I figured out the ranged attack can cleave all three tires at once and got more of a handle on the controls given the camera changes, though once I got stuck up against the front wheel and JUST missed taking off the last bit of his health before one of those blue lightning shit patches killed me.
The finale....whoo boy. There's a lot of plot to unpack here, but these were undoubtedly the roughest fights in the game to a degree, while also being the easiest. The trio I felt were really weird in that I never quite knew if I was doing things right before the Harbinger does some huge thing and the entire arena shifted again. The first time I got up to Whisper Bahamut, I got absolutely destroyed, but the second time, I got some manawalls up which lowered the damage a little bit, allowing my team to survive long enough to drop double limit breaks on it... and then the REAL fight began.
Again, Sephiroth was a little frustrating sometimes because of how much he can juggle if you fail to counter him, and also the occasional cinematic-mixed-fight moments where you're taking damage but you can't do anything to stop it because of the cinematic moment. I'm not sure I could've beaten him without Counterstance, which really opens him up to being Pressured. First run, I got as far as Heartless Angel, but ended up getting killed with his health bar literally too small to see. A few runs after I had trouble getting past the Cloud and Tifa phase, before finally cracking down and then having Tifa just go pure annihilation on his elemental phase by using discounted tier 3 spells (her Mythril Claws discounting combat casting meant she ended up kind of my nutcracker for elemental weaknesses). The final bit got some nasty bits with Heartless Angel reducing my AI party members to 1 and then me having to rez them and heal them before Sephiroth could pressure them further. Most of the time I spent just dueling him with Cloud and using ATB commands for the other two, but in the finale, Cloud's Ascension, Leviathan's Tidal Wave, and finally Tifa's Dolphin Strike finished him off.
As for the ending....
So, yeah, spoilers for anyone reading this. Like, ACTUAL spoilers.
That was a fucking trip. I'm not sure if Zack is alive in our timeline now or if it's just a sign that things set in stone CAN be changed now. Sephiroth's "seven seconds" line apparently lines up to how long it took him to stab Aerith in the original, and he almost seems to be taunting Cloud with the possibility of averting THAT. The Arbiters being dead means things can go seriously off the rails, and it's ambiguous whether the rest of Avalanche are alive or dead (Biggs seems to be alive, Jessie's glove and bandana are on his desk, and Wedge survived three close calls before that broken glass suggests the Whispers threw him out a window, but we never see a body, so who knows). Interestingly, in my post game dive into the articles and such I'd been avoiding, another bit that came up is basically impossible to translate in English. Sephiroth in the flashbacks/hallucinations uses the personal pronoun "watashi", but in the final confrontation and cutscene, he uses "ore". This swap happened in the original too, with Sephiroth using "ore" up until he sees Jenova and snaps, at which point he uses "watashi". What the hell this even means is entirely up for debate.
Also, while some indicators have suggested Aerith is aware of the consequences of fighting her fate, I'm not sure. She definitely knows more than anyone short of Sephiroth himself about what's going on, but I almost have to wonder if she's decided to try fighting her fate too. Sephiroth may have broken the predestination keeping him defeated at the end of the story, but that just means he won't lose the same way. I'm not sure if it's just going to be the taunting aspect of 'it could end differently, but in the end the characters realize some things have to happen', or if they're willing to go all the way off the rails bonkers and make significant changes to the plot. Aerith's death is pretty iconic, but so are the jokes about "pay 9.99 for the Aerith Lives DLC" and other jokes that it might be altered. Frankly, given how much I really like her in this game, I'm kind of up in the air about which way they go, but given how good this game was, I'm cautiously optimistic.
Other threads that seem to be hanging about, they mentioned that Wutai's planned to get expanded over VII vanilla, and Shinra using the Plate Drop to forment cause for another war would definitely back that up. Also, whatever caused Red XIII to abruptly develop Infodump powers about the Whispers after Aerith touched him. All in all, I can understand Nomura mentioning wanting to make shorter chapters that happen more frequently, because I sure as hell want to know what happens next.
