#6 - In Which Midgar's Hapless Residents are in Peril

Today's Final Fantasy instalment was brought to you by the charming folks at MMOABC, who kindly donated ten bucks to our Child's Play charity fundraiser! You know, that thing I keep harping on about. On to today's post!

Following the revelation that the Shinra corporation are trying to bring the city crashing down to the slums below (which will ruin real estate value, by the way), it seems that our intrepid heroes will have to take a break from idly milling around and blathering back-story at each other. The games is about to take off its kid's gloves and try more actively to kill me. And that's a good thing, right? No point playing in Iron Man Mode if the chances of dying are virtually nil. For all I know, it's the only reason you're reading for; to see how I inevitably screw up and lose my one and only life in the game. My guess is chip pan fire - despite public service announcements, there are still over 2,000 chip pan accidents in the home each year (not the same home, obviously.) So the plot is getting thicker by the minute. In addition, the enemies start getting significantly harder from here. I consider this to be the real start to the adventure, guys. The time for lollygagging is over.

With the team eager to get back to the slums and prevent the imminent catastrophe, I waste no time in doing a quick google to double check if I meant to use the word 'lollygagging' back there because it sure as hell doesn't look like a real word now. Satisfied that it means what I thought it meant, I then finish up our investigation with Don Corneo, who has just told us everything we need to know about the impending attack. What a nice and helpful guy!

But then he drops us down a secret trap door, so I take that back. What a dick! Does he not want us to save the inhabitants of the slums, given they probably generate most of his business? Moreover, what's the thought process which leads villains to spend good money on installing hidden trap doors? Exactly how long was he waiting for an enemy to stand in that exact spot in his bedroom? Villains, man. Crazy ideas. We unavoidably fall into the sewers directly beneath his bedroom hatch (again, silly design choice). This does do us a favour though since it's a shortcut to where we need to be. After all, we must rush to our objective with due despatchment, and not a second to lose! Oh we're stuck in a boss fight.

Boss #3: Aps, HP1800 This bad boy's main method of attack is to shower us in waves of sewage. Despite all of my talk earlier about enemies getting tougher, this guy doesn't do much damage at all. He just ruins my freshness factor. I take him down without much resistance. It doesn't even bother me that out of our three party members, only Cloud is able to fight properly - the lovely Tifa Lockheart is slightly limited because I forgot to arm her with materia, which is my fault, and Aeris Gainsborough is disadvantaged because she as dumb as a box of rocks, which is entirely her fault. Tifa gets some good punches in and belts him with the odd Limit Break. Cloud alternates between attacking normally, blasting him with fire (because he's a water elemental, see?) and using magic to heal everyone. Aeris reaches her Limit Break very quickly and can't attack until I let her use it, but all it does is give everyone a bit of health. Cloud has this fully covered, so she stands there like a lemon for the rest of the battle.

Naturally, Ursula would be played by Helena Bonham Carter and Sebastian the Crab would probably be played by Johnny Depp. The freakishly handsome bastard. We send him back to the shit pipes from whence he came! We then make our way through the sewers, and along the way get into a punch-up with a crab, two sea turtles with tridents, and some kind of weird seahorse thing. By the time I get into my third ruckus with a crustacean, I begin to wonder if I'm in Tim Burton's reimagining of A Little Mermaid. I see a shiny thing and, like the silly magpie I am, I go out of my way to get it. In the process I get into another battle with a sea creature perplexingly living in these sewers and lose 200 health. The shiny thing turns out to be a potion which restores 100 health. D'oh. Nothing here worth hanging around for, it seems. It's time to get out of he... ooh, another shiny thing! Aww, that turns out to be a Steal materia which is also a bit worthless. Naturally, Aeris can have that. Despite Don Corneo trying to hinder our escape, he's really helped out as we pop out of the sewer pretty close to the Sector 7 support column. All we have to do is race through the Train Graveyard, past the slums station and out to the foot of the support column, so that's what we do. Well, 'race' is a bit of a strong word - I bumble through the confusing maze of rusting carriages, get distracted by more shiny things which end up being not worth the detour, and punch a few ghosts. Ah, yes. The ghosts. These buggers are annoying - you hit them once, then they go invisible. I figure out that the best way to cause damage to them is to hit them with a Fire spell. This causes a good 200 points of damage... but... only some of the time? No, that's not right. Sometimes it does very little damage. Hmmm. Being ghosts, perhaps what hurts them most is related to how they died originally? Maybe the ones most wigged out by my fire attacks died in chip pan fires (over 2,000 a year, doncha know.) I try to test this by attacking with Cloud's car keys, hoping it'll inflict massive damage on any which happened to have died in an automobile accident. On the other side of the Train Graveyard, I bump once again into the station master, who is one of my favourite non-named characters in the game. He only has about five lines over the course of it, but each of them are very wistful and world-weary; he references the plot events going on around him in passing, but unlike everyone else, he doesn't seem to exist solely to talk about them. I like that in an NPC. Anyway, here he's saying that even if the top plate comes crashing down on the station and the rest of the slums, there's no point in him leaving his post after twenty-odd years of service so he'll just keep on waving in the trains until it's curtains for him. Awwww! But hey, you've received enough column inches from me, unnamed and non-important talky person! It's clear that everyone down here is now aware that the support column holding up the city above is in jeopardy. Time for the heroes to show up and save the d... ooh, a shiny thing! No, let's proceed straight to the support column and save the day. A whole host of slum residents, including a couple of Shinra guards, are standing around the column base and gawking at the fire fight going on above. Um... perhaps you guys should run away from the area about to get flattened? No? Fair enough, your funeral. My party mingle alongside the group and join in with the gawking, because apparently we're also complete morons.

That's Barret up there trying to fight off the Shinra, and alongside him are Biggs, Wedge and Jessie. Good on them for getting on the scene ahead of us. Although Wedge is now not up there fighting with Barret. He's not 'up there' by the very virtue of him now being 'down here', and the method with which he transferred between the two could be best described as 'falling off a walkway and breaking your back on the floor right next to the narrator'.

Poor Biggs! I mean, Wedge! Hang on, which were you again?

Poor Wedge! Right, to hell with this. It's time to make a decisive plan of action. Cloud tells Aeris to look after Wedge while he heads up to the top with Tifa. Tifa tells Aeris to go save Marlene from her bar while she heads up to the top with Cloud. Erm... that wasn't as decisive a plan as I'd hoped for, but I don't care whichever order Aeris follows so long as she stays down here and keeps the hell out of our way. In the mean time, Tifa yells at everyone to get away from Sector 7. A sensible recommendation, I think, but again everyone seems content to just hang out under the support column as if someone's going to turn up any minute now with a picnic blanket and big jug of Pimms. I see Mr. Masturbator, who is fretting about the imminent loss of his 'special place' (man, get away from me). A low-level Shinra guard is declaring that he won't leave his post. The woman he's talking to is lapping it up.

Hey lady, I think there's someone back there at the train station you'd love to meet.

I can see them being happy together for the rest of their lives. It will also be the shortest life partnership in the history of Midgar if I don't get my ass up that support column in the next five minutes.

CAN CLOUD SAVE THE PEOPLE IN SECTOR 7 SLUMS? CAN YOU OVERLOOK THE FACT YOU ALREADY KNOW THE ANSWER IF YOU'VE PLAYED FF7 BEFORE?

DO YOU EVEN CARE ABOUT THE PEOPLE OF SECTOR SEVEN? DO I CARE ABOUT THEM? DO YOU EVEN CARE IF I CARE?

TUNE IN NEXT WEEK TO FIND O... Ooh, a shiny thing!