Played through the Air Buster, who apparently took 4 more hours to get to. Freakin ridiculous. It was a cool fight at least, and I liked the gimmick where you scrap his upgrades leading up to him, though the idea of Air Buster having 30k HP is just hilarious to me. I took the 3 M Pods and 3 AI Cores. I think I made the right choice prioritizing the AI Cores over the nukes. The stun attack was annoying when it hit and the nuke missiles were not actually that dangerous. I was able to tank them most of the time by using protect and just having HP topped off. Helps that I have Barret specced as a tanky healbot with magic and defensive stats pumped up so he just stands back and can revive as necessary and heals as necessary.
I feel like I actually prefer using Tifa to Cloud now that I've played around with them both (and Barret-- lots of time in the super long dungeon crawl). She's fast so she gets moves more often and her Unbridled Strength + finisher mechanic feels more interesting than Punisher mode (I don't really like blocking)-- also her basic combo feels better to use cause it's so fast. I gave her linked Elemental to Fire so now she's got big Ken Masters energy with flaming fists (love that there are graphical effects for the elemental links-- I need more of this materia). Lightning fists would have been better for Air Buster but it wasn't a hard fight anyway so no regrets. She chews up the soldiers at least. Her sonic fists weapon kinda encourages this too-- though I had started doing this before I got those. I do enjoy using Cloud too though so I'm not sure I'm gonna be a Tifa main or anything. If nothing else this feels encouraging that Yuffie will be good to use (Wutai, MORTAL ENEMY TO MIDGAR, that is so funny that they went so hard on that when Wutai was never even mentioned in Midgar in the original)
Honestly hardly any story in this part-- pacing feels messed up even worse than the sidequests at this point. I'm still enjoying the game-- there was fun banter during the dungeon crawling at least. Barret singing a song while I went and grabbed the Choco Mog materia was absurd even for him lol. He was definitely very needed though-- Cloud and Tifa are too serious in general (though Tifa did have a goofy moment imitating a Shinra ad, that was unexpected but in a good way)-- I guess the dynamic where Tifa was like, having doubts about whether eco terrorism was the right way added to things too. I will say if the party choices start opening up and you get this kinda dialogue going through dungeons with every combination that'd be incredible, though I'm not too hopeful of that.
Found the Heidegger stuff SUPER zzz. Game was trying very hard to make him out to be a thing and it just wasn't working for me. I did not need to see him watch the party on cameras and yell at Shinra grunts 3 times much less the 7 times he got.
So between her being fun to use in the game and her interactions in this segment I'm liking Tifa again (I did like her in FF7! My main party was Cloud Tifa Yuffie pretty much all the time), so hopefully she keeps getting better and that'll make me feel less bad when the Cloud x Jessie ship dream inevitably fails (no Jessie for this entire segment-- sad!)
Did see the very beginning of Chapter 8 while I waited to save after air buster. A teaser for a segment to look forward to that should be more story/character based than the crazy dungeon crawling I just did-- which was entertaining to play but not so entertaining to talk about. Did Cloud just have a vision of the Aerith death scene-- I saw that bouncing materia, what is going on here. Multiverse ghosts man I'm tellin ya. Hyped to get story stuff next time! The glacial pace of story things will thaw!
No problem!
This is a cute and pop genocide of love!