LogFAQs > #935991935

This entire mansion is a fantastic sequence of physical comedy. After getting admitted to Don Corneo's mansion, we surprise Tifa, who leaps up in shock after realizing she's been talking about her jealousy of Aeris right in front of Cloud himself. When she wants to discuss AVALANCHE activities without Aeris, she walks to the side and squats and puts her hand over her ears. Later, after Cloud dispatches the six dudes who want a piece of his action, we go back and find Aeris being chased by one dude, running in circles like a chicken with its head cut off. She winds up pushing him down the stairs and apologizing. And then when we go to Don Corneo's bedroom, he literally tries to jump on Tifa but does a belly-flop on his bed. We wrap this up with everyone, in turn, putting on leg up on the Don's bed to threaten him with slicing off, pulling off, or smashing "it."

After Don Corneo informs us that even scum like him isn't so eager to help good guys without having a trapdoor up his sleeve, we witness a short sequence in SHINRA headquarters. I absolutely love the aesthetic of the evil corporation here, complete with dramatic music, the malicious Heidegger, the amoral President Shinra, and the ineffectual Reed, who shows you that not everyone who works for Shinra is completely evil. Nonetheless, we must try to stop them from leveling Sector 7 in an effor to stamp out AVALANCHE (and also blame it on us.)

Back in our world, we're cast into the sewers and immediately beset by a boss who... well his main attack appears to be "Sludge," which... does a lot more damage to himself than to the party of Cloud/Tifa/Aeris. After dispatching him, we find ourselves on abandoned railroad tracks. Navigating them seems to take kind of a long time due to their taking multiple screens, and since (as with most dungeons) they look kind of monotonic, any interruptions in navigation (such as by temporarily taking a break from playing, or even just due to battle) set me back through some backtracking a few times. Nonetheless I enjoy the aesthetic here and also gain a materia that lets me use Steal, which I hand to Tifa. Tifa now mainly Steals, since she has no space for magical materia (lol) and her physical attack is kinda weak. Mostly she nets me Ethers, effectively Tents at this time since Cure works so well. In the best case, though, toward the very end, she actually snags a Combat Staff or something. I equip it to Aeris, and it boosts her attack from like 13 to 32??

That's actually the last I get to use Aeris, though. Once we reach the tower to climb Sector 7, she stays back to help Barett's daughter Marlene. Poor Wedge, Biggs, and Jessie. I suppose they never last long in FF, huh... I get stoked because I love the regular battle music, which plays the entire race up the tower. The best part of it is the end part of it, which rewards you for having longer battles that could otherwise be tedious - playing it straight through the entire sequence means you always get to hear it!

The sequence terminates at the top, where Barett is holding off choppers alone (lol). We accept him into the party and face off against Reno... who freezes Cloud first, then Tifa, and then kills Barett, handing me my first Game Over. Wut. I restart and this time actually equip people with some upgrades (Titan Bangles! Lightning Materia! Cure spell via Aeris!). It doesn't protect me against Reno, but this time I try attacking my own party members when they get pyramid'd, and that seems to work (without incurring friendly fire damage). Reno doesn't die but rather runs off, and someone named Tseng appears in his stead? He's got Aeris, and he reveals she's the last of the Ancients.

Sector 7 gets annihilated and we fall. Again. Is this a recurring joke in this game? I guess with its literal system of height representing social castes, it makes sense! Started from the bottom now we here again. In the striking ruins of Sector 7, Cloud has a flashback of Sephiroth's bragging about Ancient blood. We resolve to save Aeris and take out Shinra. This requires several runs of backtracking, during which we revisit Tifa's bar, and a little kid gives me some mega-ether. (Maybe we should've robbed him instead.) Aeris's mom reveals she has Marlene in her house, still a sanctuary compared to everywhere else. She also gives us a rather rote Aeris backstory flashback, involving a dead husband and an adopted kid. (This flashback does give us a great visual gag though - one soldier returns home and swings his wife; the next soldier comes off the train, big and fat, and his wife picks him up and swings him.)

We finally wind up trying to climb up Shinra's tower via a crazy wire, with the help of some batteries. The controls here are annoying and I waste time going up and down seeing if some events need to trigger before Cloud finally says "Hey, I can put a battery here." Glad for 3x speed here.

Looking forward to storming the tower!
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness