LogFAQs > #936128513

Into the Golden Saucer we go, and we discover that Barret's backstory on guilt is more survivor's guilt than anything active. Fine, whatever.

We're immediately price-gouged at the theme park; they want 3000 gil to enter immediately, which we're able to cough up. But we have zero GP so we're basically unable to attend any attraction. Cait Sith winds up joining our party - I actually really like his character design, though Manipulate seems kind of like a weird ability. After popping through a few of the doors, I wind up finding a trail of bodies riddled with bullet-holes and getting tossed into a desert prison.

The desert prison has Barret explain that the other dude with the gun-arm is Dyne. He also (shockingly) turns out to be the "boss" here, and after a beautiful walk through the desert (about four separate monotonous, walk-sideways screens) we run into the man himself. Barret beats him in a duel, and we learn the truth of Marlene's parentage. (Like in Apollo Justice with Trucy's age, no one commented on Marlene being white.) Feels bad about the broken man.

While Barret's story isn't exactly thrilling, Dyne's breaking down is a good encapsulation of the way Shinra seems to have broken down every town around. After an insanely unnotable Chocobo race (the second Automatic go just wins), we cruise south to another blighted town, this one devastated by a meltdown of a reactor core. An old woman and his daughter-in-law mourn a loss; two people ask about another SOLDIER recruit, Zack. Tifa is shaken, but she clams up. Cloud prods a little, gently - it's great how far

Before that, we see a hilarious conversation between Reno and Rude, where they gossip about which of the girls in Cloud's party they like. (Reno x Tifa OTP.) We also battle; targeting Reno exclusively works out pretty well, since he runs off and then I need to do nothing whatsoever to Rude. Eagerly awaiting further development in their love polygon.

We don't engage with Tseng and Scarlet, a weapons dev for Shinra, who appear at the Gagonga reactor's ruins. There seems to be... little point in coming to this place at all? No one actually tells me explicitly what to do next, but I eventually decide that I probably want to move on. Another river-crossing has me near some city, where the hovercraft breaks down. Seems a decent point to save for now.

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* In case anyone is interested in what killed me/what progress I lost: I lost the entire time in the desert, the battle with Dyne, and the Chocobo race. I died because three of these dinosaur things on the world map (facepalm) Petrified everyone. WHOOPS.

* Titan materia, DAMN.

* Can't help feeling like I missed something at Gongaga... but I can't go there for a while now.
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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