Jecca Mehlota (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jecca_mehlota) wrote2009-08-27 01:07 pm
jecca_mehlota) wrote2009-08-27 01:07 pm
Entry tags:
So that thing about playing a happier game next? Yeah, that was a complete lie.
Dissidia came out Tuesday and I appear to have picked up a copy from somewhere, but I am not playing it yet because Crisis Core has eaten my soul i am not even joking.
This entry is a bit confusing because some of it was written as I went along and some of it was after I’d passed the part and was reflecting back and/or avoiding continuing in the game. So if I'm writing in present tense (and I definitely have a few places), that's why. It’s not entirely game rambling. It’s actually mostly me being distressed and using an unholy amount of italics.
Divided into sections for … my own entertainment, I guess, I don’t know.
BUT - I edit in several hours later - before I begin: I have no evidence to back this up (I can't even remember seeing anyone ever talk about this game), but considering the popularity of the other aspects of the FFVII compilation (I... just wrote "complication" there, which would also fit) stuff, I deeply suspect this is not a popular game. I don't care. I loved it. JUDGE ME AS YOU WILL. But this isn't going to be an entry complaining about it. So don't go in and then be surprised when I am saying good things about it.
The horrible, horrible thing about this game is that we already know how it ends. From the moment you start a new game, you know exactly what’s going to happen to these characters. Oh, sure, maybe not the dialogue or the camera angles or the other little specifics, maybe, but the basic details? Yeah. You know that. And it is hard.
I have never in my life played a game that has done nothing but break my heart right from the first scene.
It’s a fun game, and I’m really, really loving Zack (even if he is a colossal moron most of the time, but it’s not as though that wasn’t fairly well established already), but there’s that all-encompassing sense of doom, because we all know. They introduce characters and I cringe. They mention major plot points from FFVII in passing and I want to weep.
Actually, I just came back from trying, and ultimately failing, to not break down and cry. I’m not even at the end of the game yet (well, at least I made it as far as I did. I'm pretty sure this is over halfway), but the whole scenario - knowing what’s going to happen, seeing what’s happening now that we didn’t know about - is wearing me down. It’s all so damn futile.
The following are new to the game, but there are no real plot points, just things that amuse me. All of the following is from optional stuff. Still, if you don’t want to know anything, don’t keep reading…
So, all of the SOLDIER 1st class members have fan clubs. You can register with all of them (yes, that means you can be in your own fan club). The Silver Elite (which is the crazy selective one that I got into for knowing too much random trivia about fictional characters) apparently started 20 years ago. Basic arithmetic leads to the conclusion that there was a hardcore fanclub for Sephiroth by the time he was FIVE. There’s something kind of extremely creepy about that! Also, the founder is supposedly a woman, but no one’s ever seen her, and her initial is H, which does make me wonder some. Hojo, is that you?
Anyway, the first message I got from them was titled "The scent of silver winds" and read as follows:
Dear members of the Silver Elite:
In this update, we present another piece of Sephiroth trivia--the secrets to his beautiful hair. The hair products he uses are of the highest grade, made and supplied by the Shinra Company. He seems to use one whole bottle of both shampoo and conditioner every time he washes his hair. They are scented with thirteen kinds of perfumes, including Rose and Vanilla. Apparently, the scent in the air after Sephiroth tosses his hair changes daily!
I laughed until it hurt. Of course he does.
Don Corneo has a niece? … Really? I don’t know, for some reason that really surprises me. She seems to really love him. Which is also surprising. Maybe he is less creepy to his younger relatives… (I wouldn't bet on it, though.)
Yuffie was appallingly adorable when she was, I dunno, ten, eleven. After “beating up” Zack in Wutai, she starts mailing him and sending him on Treasure Hunts. As you can probably guess, she pops in at the end to steal the treasure, but it’s always a lame treasure, like a receipt or a magazine. Her messages are saved to the [Spam] folder, which is funny enough, but then Shinra sends you off to run her errands, anyway, with ridiculous reasons for it, which only adds to the hilarity.
And, you know, I am not sure how I’ve survived this long without having seen Zack dancing in synch with a cactuar.
And now I go on to actual plot points. SPOILERS! LOOK AWAY.
All the Shinra employees love the company. And I don’t mean the higher-ups. You get occasional messages from those folk, Scarlet and Reeve and Heidegger, etc, because those are company announcements that everyone gets, but that’s it. You never see them. No, you’re interacting with the Materia scientists (you get to save their lab from being shut down, and they're so grateful to you, it's cute) and the infantrymen and the other members of SOLDIER and, you know, all those people you were killing all throughout Final Fantasy VII? Yeah. Games that take the guards (or whatever) you basically have to kill and make them have personalities are just cruel. And this isn’t even the same game! I’ve already taken all these people out! Retroactive guilt. Ugh.
And throughout the game, they start talking about things, they don’t know what’s going on, they don’t know Shinra isn’t good. And you get to sort of watch Zack’s gradual disillusionment with Shinra, though it never gets enough for him to leave (Sephiroth says he might at one point WHY DIDN’T YOU), and you just keep wishing for there to be a way to chance how things are going to go.
…I should probably clarify here that I am a bit of a, I don't know, 'Sephiroth apologist' or something, in that I don’t subscribe to him being evil for evil’s sake, which I know is how some people interpret him. I don’t deny for a moment that he was completely out of his mind evil during the events of FFVII, but Crisis Core pretty much spells out that he … wouldn’t have done all of that if he hadn’t had that crisis-thing in Nibelheim. (The main bad guy, one of his friends, tries to recruit him, tries to tell him that he’s like them, and he pretty much tells the guy to piss off and die. For a variety of reasons, but it really did basically boil down to that.)
I started this game knowing it was going to hurt and oh god. Things will crack me up, and then what I’m playing catches up with me and I get all sad again. Still! I endured all of the cruel, cruel foreshadowing bits and the heartbreaking adorableness of things. I managed not to shout at the PSP while they found out about information that was, though they didn’t know it, highly relevant to Sephiroth and his little breakdown in Nibelheim. It was relating to a couple other people, but it was basically the same story, and that was pretty awful. HEY, SEPHIROTH, I GUESS YOU HAVE FRIENDS OR SOMETHING wait no they’ve gone mad and are trying to destroy the world. And he’s so sad about it, and he keeps shoving the assignments to go hunt them down onto Zack because he doesn’t want to have to kill them, man, that was depressing. ("You're handing this off to me again??" "... Sorry." And then he schemes to beat the ShinRa troops to them so they can save them and of course it fails miserably but ;_;. JUST ;_; OKAY?)
And Zack was friends with one of them, too, and he ends up having to kill him, and that was, I dunno, maybe the halfway point, a little more? After the fight, we both went on a bit of a crying jag, but I’m fairly proud of myself for having held back until then, at least.
And then I held off through all the scenes with Aerith until...
HEARTBREAK. HEARTBREAK. Zack makes a flower wagon for Aerith. She doesn’t entirely like it, but it can probably be left at that. I recognized that they were about to send me to Nibelheim and ran for the hills. Or the Sector 5 slums, anyway, it was way closer. Turns out I had materials to build two entirely other wagons, so they went and sold flowers together three times and were generally cute and adorable and the entire time my heart was breaking because I am about to take Zack off to what will eventually kill him, and mess Cloud up beyond belief, and nearly destroy the world. They agree to talk and meet up after he gets back. She’s afraid of the open sky, but will go to the top of the plate if Zack’s with her, so they make plans to go up when he gets back, and I teared up. After a couple scenes, Aerith tells you to get to work, and when you exit the church, it’s in a burst of white light, and I started crying again. It is, frankly, a bit embarrassing to be crying this much over a video game.
So then I delayed actually leaving for Nibelheim for… a while in other ways. I ran missions and then I turned the PSP off, because I knew if I had to stop and walk off for anything halfway through, I wouldn’t be able to start up again.
(Following section written down as I played that section. I kept having to pause because I just… did not want to advance. At all. Most of the above has been written while I’m standing on the threshold of the final boss, because, once again, I can’t do it.)
Nibelheim.
Mt. Nibel reactor.
They’ve added an extra scene in the reactor that only serves to make it worse.
This needs to not be happening. Right now. I do not think you grasp how badly this needs to not be happening.
DAMN. IT. Every time I turn around, something else breaks my heart a little more. Ugh. Ugh. Just stop, I am not going to survive the rest of this game, I’m not. Aerith, I’m so sorry. ;_;
I SAID STOP IT! That one just there was accompanied by a muffled shriek of OW MY HEART.
The Mansion… With the expanded basement, like in Dirge a bit. No, Zack, wake him up. Maybe – probably not, but maybe – Vincent could do something? It’s not exactly like he could hurt at this stage of things!
And on the seventh day…
That was cut straight out of Advent Children, wasn't it? It looked different than the other cutscenes so far have.
Actually, perhaps unsurprisingly, once Sephiroth goes – I mean, when he decides to torch the town, not while he’s freaking out in the library – it all becomes a whole lot easier. Like… that’s it. It’s done. It’s all inevitable now. Sephiroth and Nibelheim are gone, Hojo has Cloud and Zack, and Zack's just a dead man walking, anyway.
Not that this will stop me from stressing about the ending, but I’m feeling a whole lot more resigned to it at the moment.
Or maybe that’s not it. I was playing this game a lot before this point, but now I’m dragging my feet. Put it off…
Post-experiment time, I am actually a bit disappointed. I still have all my items, armor, material… I’m still getting mail! Though apparently it took them 4-5 years to declare us all dead, so perhaps this is just really old mail that I am only now seeing. Still, you’d think there’d have been a million messages on it, instead of them all appearing as I go along. I mean, sure, it’d’ve been supremely annoying to have lost everything, but it would make more sense! I am even getting new missions to go on.
Oh, Cloud. It's so sad.
Anyway, back to where I am now… I have the “Go forward or go back!” choice open for the final boss (not to be confused with the final battle, because of course that happens outside Midgar), and I… you know, as soon as I go there, Zack’s as good as dead, and that makes me really sad. I’ve always liked him (even before his name became common knowledge, haha. That was so long ago, wow), and I always thought it was too bad that he had to die, and I’ve always thought it awful Cloud had to go through all that he did, but now, having played the character (all the while knowing how it’ll end) and all, knowing I’m going to be the one who walks him out there to die… It’s hard.
Which, you know, part of me is going, “It’s a video game. God, you’re lame.”
Sorry. Maybe it is lame. (SUDDEN BOUT OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS.)
But I am pretty sure I am going to bawl during the final scenes.
Final boss was a bit of a pushover. Which is good, because leveling is a pain, so I’d have hated to have to go grind for potentially weeks to level up a bit.
Oh, god, he didn’t even know… Well, I’m not entirely sure he would have, but. The A-copy thing brings him Aerith’s final letter and – okay, yeah, this is a bad start to the end of the game. Cue eye-watering. He didn’t know it had been four years.
Tseng has the other 88, apparently. And, no, he sends the Turks out to find them and bring them back alive Zack, why did you have to evade the Turks. Did we know that?! I don't think we did, we knew the Turks were sent out in Last Order, but did we know it was with the intent of rescuing them? Damn it, Square.
I honestly cannot believe they are making me do this. oh god. I can't!
HEY SO there's this thing called the DMW. It's a reel that spins in the corner with faces and numbers and it controls when you level up and perform limit breaks and stuff, anyway, the faces are all people Zack knows - most of them start blacked out, but as you meet them, they fill in, and when you line up their faces, you see a little flash of Zack's memories with them, and if you get a limit break, you hear their voice. Basically, it's the people he knows and cares about and how he thinks about them all the time.
So, for those who haven’t played this and haven’t been scared off by either spoilers or my pathetic despair, and who hopefully have some knowledge of FFVII? You remember the flashback scene where we see Zack die? It’s the small group of Shinra soldiers with Zack against the drop off, with Midgar in the background, and they just riddle him with bullets.
You play that.
They set you up against pretty much every available gunner Shinra has, and you fight and fight, and occasionally (I don’t know if it’s time based or HP based or what) you flash to Zack remembering the people he’s known, just snatches of memories, and their faces fade out of the DMW (see explanation above, which I added in solely for this paragraph, and when I noticed that had happened, I recoiled.). Eventually, that fight stops for a cutscene of Zack, battered and bleeding and backed into a corner, so to speak. The trio approaches, and you reengage, and I’d been holding out fairly well until this point, but when the fight stops, he just staggers and lurches, and there’s nothing strong or powerful or fluid in it. He moves so slowly, and so obviously in pain, and you know you can’t win this, but you have to try, you have to try.
I took one swing at the closest enemy and, just from watching how Zack moved then, had to pause the game and put down the PSP, because I could not stop myself from crying. I sobbed for twenty minutes. Not, I cried a bit, or, tears fell from my eyes for a while, but I had my fist crammed in my mouth (so Aniko didn’t hear me and think something was actually wrong), glasses off, and a tissue stuffed under my nose to try to contain the tears and snot, sobbing. The only reason I unpaused and continued was because that was the only way to make it stop.
They just whittle away at your health – they don’t do much damage, so it takes a while – and you can’t even try to do anything but keep hitting and just hope and wish that you could at least take one of them down before they get you, because if you can get one, you can get two, and maybe then… But of course you can’t, so with memories of Aerith playing in the screen, you fail. And then they point the gun at the camera and shoot you.
It was the most difficult, horrible thing I think I have ever had to do in a video game. I honestly don’t know that I could beat this game again.
For the curious, here are some clips of Zack fighting normally
And here is how it goes at the end. Japanese with a lot of windows popping up, sorry, don't have time to find a better one.
… on the positive side, this meant that by the time the final scenes rolled around, I had all but exhausted my crying, so I was able to watch without too much trouble.
So, anyway.
Final Fantasy VII was a game that had a huge impact on me. I don't know why, part of it was, I'm sure, because it was my introduction to the series, and this game... It's not like Advent Children, which was, you know, a movie. (A very pretty one, at that, and by the way, I liked it, so feel free to tell me you hate it but I won't agree with you. Though I'll freely acknowledge it had some problems.) It's not Dirge of Gerbils, which was, I don't know, something else entirely. I'm not sure I liked Dirge.
Crisis Core was an amazing nostalgia trip. This wasn't the world post-FFVII, this was the one we know and ran around in. The areas you visit are the same, recreated, and it is ... something else to be able to walk around these places you remember and find that you still know them, but they're more detailed, and in some ways you have more freedom and in others less, but... wow. It was really incredible to me.
And the story itself was, I felt, a very good, albeit heartbreaking, one.
And now I need to run because I have to go to work. Whoops.
This entry is a bit confusing because some of it was written as I went along and some of it was after I’d passed the part and was reflecting back and/or avoiding continuing in the game. So if I'm writing in present tense (and I definitely have a few places), that's why. It’s not entirely game rambling. It’s actually mostly me being distressed and using an unholy amount of italics.
Divided into sections for … my own entertainment, I guess, I don’t know.
BUT - I edit in several hours later - before I begin: I have no evidence to back this up (I can't even remember seeing anyone ever talk about this game), but considering the popularity of the other aspects of the FFVII compilation (I... just wrote "complication" there, which would also fit) stuff, I deeply suspect this is not a popular game. I don't care. I loved it. JUDGE ME AS YOU WILL. But this isn't going to be an entry complaining about it. So don't go in and then be surprised when I am saying good things about it.
The horrible, horrible thing about this game is that we already know how it ends. From the moment you start a new game, you know exactly what’s going to happen to these characters. Oh, sure, maybe not the dialogue or the camera angles or the other little specifics, maybe, but the basic details? Yeah. You know that. And it is hard.
I have never in my life played a game that has done nothing but break my heart right from the first scene.
It’s a fun game, and I’m really, really loving Zack (even if he is a colossal moron most of the time, but it’s not as though that wasn’t fairly well established already), but there’s that all-encompassing sense of doom, because we all know. They introduce characters and I cringe. They mention major plot points from FFVII in passing and I want to weep.
Actually, I just came back from trying, and ultimately failing, to not break down and cry. I’m not even at the end of the game yet (well, at least I made it as far as I did. I'm pretty sure this is over halfway), but the whole scenario - knowing what’s going to happen, seeing what’s happening now that we didn’t know about - is wearing me down. It’s all so damn futile.
The following are new to the game, but there are no real plot points, just things that amuse me. All of the following is from optional stuff. Still, if you don’t want to know anything, don’t keep reading…
So, all of the SOLDIER 1st class members have fan clubs. You can register with all of them (yes, that means you can be in your own fan club). The Silver Elite (which is the crazy selective one that I got into for knowing too much random trivia about fictional characters) apparently started 20 years ago. Basic arithmetic leads to the conclusion that there was a hardcore fanclub for Sephiroth by the time he was FIVE. There’s something kind of extremely creepy about that! Also, the founder is supposedly a woman, but no one’s ever seen her, and her initial is H, which does make me wonder some. Hojo, is that you?
Anyway, the first message I got from them was titled "The scent of silver winds" and read as follows:
Dear members of the Silver Elite:
In this update, we present another piece of Sephiroth trivia--the secrets to his beautiful hair. The hair products he uses are of the highest grade, made and supplied by the Shinra Company. He seems to use one whole bottle of both shampoo and conditioner every time he washes his hair. They are scented with thirteen kinds of perfumes, including Rose and Vanilla. Apparently, the scent in the air after Sephiroth tosses his hair changes daily!
I laughed until it hurt. Of course he does.
Don Corneo has a niece? … Really? I don’t know, for some reason that really surprises me. She seems to really love him. Which is also surprising. Maybe he is less creepy to his younger relatives… (I wouldn't bet on it, though.)
Yuffie was appallingly adorable when she was, I dunno, ten, eleven. After “beating up” Zack in Wutai, she starts mailing him and sending him on Treasure Hunts. As you can probably guess, she pops in at the end to steal the treasure, but it’s always a lame treasure, like a receipt or a magazine. Her messages are saved to the [Spam] folder, which is funny enough, but then Shinra sends you off to run her errands, anyway, with ridiculous reasons for it, which only adds to the hilarity.
And, you know, I am not sure how I’ve survived this long without having seen Zack dancing in synch with a cactuar.
And now I go on to actual plot points. SPOILERS! LOOK AWAY.
All the Shinra employees love the company. And I don’t mean the higher-ups. You get occasional messages from those folk, Scarlet and Reeve and Heidegger, etc, because those are company announcements that everyone gets, but that’s it. You never see them. No, you’re interacting with the Materia scientists (you get to save their lab from being shut down, and they're so grateful to you, it's cute) and the infantrymen and the other members of SOLDIER and, you know, all those people you were killing all throughout Final Fantasy VII? Yeah. Games that take the guards (or whatever) you basically have to kill and make them have personalities are just cruel. And this isn’t even the same game! I’ve already taken all these people out! Retroactive guilt. Ugh.
And throughout the game, they start talking about things, they don’t know what’s going on, they don’t know Shinra isn’t good. And you get to sort of watch Zack’s gradual disillusionment with Shinra, though it never gets enough for him to leave (Sephiroth says he might at one point WHY DIDN’T YOU), and you just keep wishing for there to be a way to chance how things are going to go.
…I should probably clarify here that I am a bit of a, I don't know, 'Sephiroth apologist' or something, in that I don’t subscribe to him being evil for evil’s sake, which I know is how some people interpret him. I don’t deny for a moment that he was completely out of his mind evil during the events of FFVII, but Crisis Core pretty much spells out that he … wouldn’t have done all of that if he hadn’t had that crisis-thing in Nibelheim. (The main bad guy, one of his friends, tries to recruit him, tries to tell him that he’s like them, and he pretty much tells the guy to piss off and die. For a variety of reasons, but it really did basically boil down to that.)
I started this game knowing it was going to hurt and oh god. Things will crack me up, and then what I’m playing catches up with me and I get all sad again. Still! I endured all of the cruel, cruel foreshadowing bits and the heartbreaking adorableness of things. I managed not to shout at the PSP while they found out about information that was, though they didn’t know it, highly relevant to Sephiroth and his little breakdown in Nibelheim. It was relating to a couple other people, but it was basically the same story, and that was pretty awful. HEY, SEPHIROTH, I GUESS YOU HAVE FRIENDS OR SOMETHING wait no they’ve gone mad and are trying to destroy the world. And he’s so sad about it, and he keeps shoving the assignments to go hunt them down onto Zack because he doesn’t want to have to kill them, man, that was depressing. ("You're handing this off to me again??" "... Sorry." And then he schemes to beat the ShinRa troops to them so they can save them and of course it fails miserably but ;_;. JUST ;_; OKAY?)
And Zack was friends with one of them, too, and he ends up having to kill him, and that was, I dunno, maybe the halfway point, a little more? After the fight, we both went on a bit of a crying jag, but I’m fairly proud of myself for having held back until then, at least.
And then I held off through all the scenes with Aerith until...
HEARTBREAK. HEARTBREAK. Zack makes a flower wagon for Aerith. She doesn’t entirely like it, but it can probably be left at that. I recognized that they were about to send me to Nibelheim and ran for the hills. Or the Sector 5 slums, anyway, it was way closer. Turns out I had materials to build two entirely other wagons, so they went and sold flowers together three times and were generally cute and adorable and the entire time my heart was breaking because I am about to take Zack off to what will eventually kill him, and mess Cloud up beyond belief, and nearly destroy the world. They agree to talk and meet up after he gets back. She’s afraid of the open sky, but will go to the top of the plate if Zack’s with her, so they make plans to go up when he gets back, and I teared up. After a couple scenes, Aerith tells you to get to work, and when you exit the church, it’s in a burst of white light, and I started crying again. It is, frankly, a bit embarrassing to be crying this much over a video game.
So then I delayed actually leaving for Nibelheim for… a while in other ways. I ran missions and then I turned the PSP off, because I knew if I had to stop and walk off for anything halfway through, I wouldn’t be able to start up again.
(Following section written down as I played that section. I kept having to pause because I just… did not want to advance. At all. Most of the above has been written while I’m standing on the threshold of the final boss, because, once again, I can’t do it.)
Nibelheim.
Mt. Nibel reactor.
They’ve added an extra scene in the reactor that only serves to make it worse.
This needs to not be happening. Right now. I do not think you grasp how badly this needs to not be happening.
DAMN. IT. Every time I turn around, something else breaks my heart a little more. Ugh. Ugh. Just stop, I am not going to survive the rest of this game, I’m not. Aerith, I’m so sorry. ;_;
I SAID STOP IT! That one just there was accompanied by a muffled shriek of OW MY HEART.
The Mansion… With the expanded basement, like in Dirge a bit. No, Zack, wake him up. Maybe – probably not, but maybe – Vincent could do something? It’s not exactly like he could hurt at this stage of things!
And on the seventh day…
That was cut straight out of Advent Children, wasn't it? It looked different than the other cutscenes so far have.
Actually, perhaps unsurprisingly, once Sephiroth goes – I mean, when he decides to torch the town, not while he’s freaking out in the library – it all becomes a whole lot easier. Like… that’s it. It’s done. It’s all inevitable now. Sephiroth and Nibelheim are gone, Hojo has Cloud and Zack, and Zack's just a dead man walking, anyway.
Not that this will stop me from stressing about the ending, but I’m feeling a whole lot more resigned to it at the moment.
Or maybe that’s not it. I was playing this game a lot before this point, but now I’m dragging my feet. Put it off…
Post-experiment time, I am actually a bit disappointed. I still have all my items, armor, material… I’m still getting mail! Though apparently it took them 4-5 years to declare us all dead, so perhaps this is just really old mail that I am only now seeing. Still, you’d think there’d have been a million messages on it, instead of them all appearing as I go along. I mean, sure, it’d’ve been supremely annoying to have lost everything, but it would make more sense! I am even getting new missions to go on.
Oh, Cloud. It's so sad.
Anyway, back to where I am now… I have the “Go forward or go back!” choice open for the final boss (not to be confused with the final battle, because of course that happens outside Midgar), and I… you know, as soon as I go there, Zack’s as good as dead, and that makes me really sad. I’ve always liked him (even before his name became common knowledge, haha. That was so long ago, wow), and I always thought it was too bad that he had to die, and I’ve always thought it awful Cloud had to go through all that he did, but now, having played the character (all the while knowing how it’ll end) and all, knowing I’m going to be the one who walks him out there to die… It’s hard.
Which, you know, part of me is going, “It’s a video game. God, you’re lame.”
Sorry. Maybe it is lame. (SUDDEN BOUT OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS.)
But I am pretty sure I am going to bawl during the final scenes.
Final boss was a bit of a pushover. Which is good, because leveling is a pain, so I’d have hated to have to go grind for potentially weeks to level up a bit.
Oh, god, he didn’t even know… Well, I’m not entirely sure he would have, but. The A-copy thing brings him Aerith’s final letter and – okay, yeah, this is a bad start to the end of the game. Cue eye-watering. He didn’t know it had been four years.
Tseng has the other 88, apparently. And, no, he sends the Turks out to find them and bring them back alive Zack, why did you have to evade the Turks. Did we know that?! I don't think we did, we knew the Turks were sent out in Last Order, but did we know it was with the intent of rescuing them? Damn it, Square.
I honestly cannot believe they are making me do this. oh god. I can't!
HEY SO there's this thing called the DMW. It's a reel that spins in the corner with faces and numbers and it controls when you level up and perform limit breaks and stuff, anyway, the faces are all people Zack knows - most of them start blacked out, but as you meet them, they fill in, and when you line up their faces, you see a little flash of Zack's memories with them, and if you get a limit break, you hear their voice. Basically, it's the people he knows and cares about and how he thinks about them all the time.
So, for those who haven’t played this and haven’t been scared off by either spoilers or my pathetic despair, and who hopefully have some knowledge of FFVII? You remember the flashback scene where we see Zack die? It’s the small group of Shinra soldiers with Zack against the drop off, with Midgar in the background, and they just riddle him with bullets.
You play that.
They set you up against pretty much every available gunner Shinra has, and you fight and fight, and occasionally (I don’t know if it’s time based or HP based or what) you flash to Zack remembering the people he’s known, just snatches of memories, and their faces fade out of the DMW (see explanation above, which I added in solely for this paragraph, and when I noticed that had happened, I recoiled.). Eventually, that fight stops for a cutscene of Zack, battered and bleeding and backed into a corner, so to speak. The trio approaches, and you reengage, and I’d been holding out fairly well until this point, but when the fight stops, he just staggers and lurches, and there’s nothing strong or powerful or fluid in it. He moves so slowly, and so obviously in pain, and you know you can’t win this, but you have to try, you have to try.
I took one swing at the closest enemy and, just from watching how Zack moved then, had to pause the game and put down the PSP, because I could not stop myself from crying. I sobbed for twenty minutes. Not, I cried a bit, or, tears fell from my eyes for a while, but I had my fist crammed in my mouth (so Aniko didn’t hear me and think something was actually wrong), glasses off, and a tissue stuffed under my nose to try to contain the tears and snot, sobbing. The only reason I unpaused and continued was because that was the only way to make it stop.
They just whittle away at your health – they don’t do much damage, so it takes a while – and you can’t even try to do anything but keep hitting and just hope and wish that you could at least take one of them down before they get you, because if you can get one, you can get two, and maybe then… But of course you can’t, so with memories of Aerith playing in the screen, you fail. And then they point the gun at the camera and shoot you.
It was the most difficult, horrible thing I think I have ever had to do in a video game. I honestly don’t know that I could beat this game again.
For the curious, here are some clips of Zack fighting normally
And here is how it goes at the end. Japanese with a lot of windows popping up, sorry, don't have time to find a better one.
… on the positive side, this meant that by the time the final scenes rolled around, I had all but exhausted my crying, so I was able to watch without too much trouble.
So, anyway.
Final Fantasy VII was a game that had a huge impact on me. I don't know why, part of it was, I'm sure, because it was my introduction to the series, and this game... It's not like Advent Children, which was, you know, a movie. (A very pretty one, at that, and by the way, I liked it, so feel free to tell me you hate it but I won't agree with you. Though I'll freely acknowledge it had some problems.) It's not Dirge of Gerbils, which was, I don't know, something else entirely. I'm not sure I liked Dirge.
Crisis Core was an amazing nostalgia trip. This wasn't the world post-FFVII, this was the one we know and ran around in. The areas you visit are the same, recreated, and it is ... something else to be able to walk around these places you remember and find that you still know them, but they're more detailed, and in some ways you have more freedom and in others less, but... wow. It was really incredible to me.
And the story itself was, I felt, a very good, albeit heartbreaking, one.
And now I need to run because I have to go to work. Whoops.