#23 - In Which Cloud Plays the Honky-Tonk Herpy-Derp
Welcome to the Final Fantasy VII blog, in which I'm playing in Iron Man Mode - that is, if I die even just once, I'm bound by the rules of the site to immediately stop playing and wrap up this blog. This is currently the longest-running series on the site... in fact, it's really long, so click here if you want to check out the full list of games on the site (you can click on the FFVII banner down the bottom to catch up on past entries of this series too.)But for now we're doing very well. Picking up from where we left off, it's high time to get out of Cosmo Canyon and press on towards the end of Disc One.
I don't know what rambling intro I'm going to affix to the top of this post yet, but I bet I end up saying something like 'it's high time to get out of Cosmo Canyon!'. But balls to that, I'm not ready to go just yet - when I first got here I wanted to buy an HP Plus materia. Sadly my hobo-ass couldn't afford such luxuries at the time.
Now that I've trawled through the GI Cave and defeated the boss here, I'm absolutely loaded. I'm sitting pretty at 15,270 Gil, so let's go shopping harder than those broads in Sex & the City.
If you've been following for a while, you'll know that I've been purposefully neglecting Aeris, mainly because A) She's of limited use so not really worth levelling up, and B) She's a bunny-boiling whore.
But her time to shine is almost upon us, and by that I mean the game is going to force her onto me like an overly-protective mom at a birthday party insisting her ugly ginger kid join in with Musical Chairs. I'm not sure when the last opportunity to give her a weapon öopgrad will be, so I treat her to the Prism Staff. The poor girl is so far behind that it gives her a whopping +28 to her attack skill... and she's still about as useless at fighting as a Polio survivor.
Everyone else is already geared up to the max, so we hit the Materia store with our remaining 12,670 Gil. Hopefully I'll have enough to buy both the HP Plus and the MP Plus materia?
No. They're 8,000 each. Gaaaahhh.
I choose the HP Plus materia, give it to Cloud, and lament our sudden drop in fortune.
Right, we're all set. We go to leave Cosmo Canyon and Nanaki decides he's going to join us after all, which is nice. Bugenhagen, in his continued failure to understand that his grandson is probably the most bad-ass member of the party so far, tells us to look after Nanaki. He also tells us to come back whenever we'd like to take advantage of his infinite knowledge, which is funny because all I remember getting from him during our time here was an unbearable level of pessimism. "Hoo hoo hooo, you'll never be able to save the planet," and all that crap.
I promise to come back as long as Bugenhagen promises to take an afternoon out to chill in his observatory, smoke a fat one and watch An Inconvenient Truth. That'll sort the miserable bugger out.
Anyway, let's press ever onwards to... actually, what's next? I'm a little bit hazy on what happens between here and the Temple of the Ancients (the end of this blog, I imagine.)
Ah, here we go. We need to make a brief stop off at Nibelheim, the ruined village which Sephiroth razed to the ground five years previously. The only thing is, it appears to be fully intact? Tifa and Barret turn to Cloud with a look that seems to suggest "hey, this looks nothing like a ruined village which Sephiroth razed to the ground five years previously."
Cloud takes the tried-and-tested approach of absolving oneself of guilt:
The other two aren't able to find any flaws in this cast-iron defence. Nevertheless, this is a confusing turn of events made even more weird by the fact that none of the villagers are willing to acknowledge the fire ever happened. Stranger still, a bunch of dudes in black capes are wandering around, muttering the words 'Sephiroth' and 'Reunion' over and over.
Cloud busts into his old house and confronts an unknown woman, demanding to know what her story is. She clams up. I feel Cloud could have handled that better.
Well, none of this makes any sense and the residents aren't giving us any answers, so we turn to inanimate objects for information. Cloud interrogates a wall, the paving slabs outside, a fan-assisted oven and then a piano:
I know you can get some neat stuff (including Tifa's ultimate Limit Break, Final Heaven) if you can figure out how to play the main Final Fantasy theme on the damn thing. Only problem is that I'm playing on a PC emulator, so the keys don't correspond. They don't even reflect what the walkthrough is telling me to play, so I have to work out the whole tune by hand...
I finally play the tune. Nothing happens, because if I'd read just a couple of more lines down in the walkthrough, I would have learned this trick only works in Disc Two. Oh well, at least Cloud can now confidently enter this year's Nibelheim Talent Contest ("Tonight I'll be playing the honky-tonk herpy-derp.")
We need to figure out what the hell is going on in this place. What Would Scooby Doo? He'd fire up the Mystery Wagon and go check out that haunted mansion at the edge of the village.
So that's exactly what I'm gonna do, because there is a gentleman in there whom I've been meaning to speak with for quite some time...
... and the fact that we've finally cornered our ol' pal Sephiroth is the icing on the cake.
