PART 1 - **NEW** PART 1.1 - PART 1.2 - PART 1.3 - PART 2 - PART 3 - PART 4 - PART 5 - PART 6 - PART 7 - PART 8 - PART 9 - PART 10 - PART 11 - PART 12 - PART 13 - PART 14 - PART 15 - PART 16 - PART 17 - PART 18 - PART 19 FINALE

Some bad business is going down in Midgar and we'll have to eventually deal with it, but there's no particular rush. Chat now has access to just about everything left in the game and there's significant cleanup to do. First on the list is Vincent's ultimate weapon and final limit break. This is pretty painless and since Vince's limits have been carrying the run for ages, kitting him out makes a lot of sense. We hop in the sub and heads towards Lucrecia's cave for a bit of lore. While Vincent is an optional character this sidequest actually has a lot of potent implications for the main storyline, highlighting the tragic connections between Vince's beloved, Hojo's twisted experiments, and the Turks. It's a lot to dig into and unpack, so we won't. The event itself is simple, after talking to Lucrecia you fight ten or so battles then return. Vincent's weapon and skill will be waiting.

One wrinkle chat encountered was the docking area outside the cave, due to some submarine specific driving nuances. The same button used to dock, X, is also the dive resurface command. In other docking areas this isn't an issue since you can't descend while over them, but outside Lucrecia's cave is an atypical curved shoreline dock with deep water underneath, and the position necessary to actually disembark and not dive instead was rather exact. This highlights how the various transportation methods each brought individual quirks, and how easy it could be to lose minutes trying to complete what is normally a straightforward task.

Vincent is powered up now, but rather surprisingly his ultimate weapon is not. His final weapon's damage is based on the number of kills he's gotten over the game. Given how long Vince has been in the party and carrying fights, chat figures it would do decent damage by now, but his previous weapon still outclasses it. Regardless, his fourth limit is worth the trip by itself anyway. Chat stays aboard the hard earned submarine and proceeds to the next aquatic destination, one eye out for the terrifying jade monster lurking the seas.

Sunken Gelnika

Gelnika is an endgame mini dungeon, it isn't required to come here at all but the loot is fantastic. Also, by doing this now we get to have an optional showdown with the Turks, which becomes unavailable after the raid on Midgar. The boys are here and chat is gonna wail on them a bit for old time's sake. Their boss music has rightfully been restored and they aren't complete pushovers this time around, but the party still faces little difficulty with this fight. Vince does his usual carry and despite the worst intentions of malicious inputters, this fight is not a particular threat and the Turks suffer humiliating defeat yet again.

Chat proceeds to sweep out the sunken plane, crucially grabbing the double cut and Hades materias. Cloud gets the dual slash, his physical damage gets insane and it would be wasted on Vince anyway since it doesn't translate to his transformations. Hades is paired with added effect and slotted in Yuffie's weapon. This is a frankly game breaking combo, Hades will apply sleep, poison, confusion, silence, frog, mini, slow and most importantly stop to any enemy that is not immune. Added effect is not guaranteed to trigger, but when it does it's absolutely devastating as almost all mobs are vulnerable to at least a few debuffs.

There is a moment of panic about halfway through the smash and grab. Death Gigas Vince is still doing most of the heavy lifting when it is revealed one of his attacks has an element absorbed by Unknown 3, one of the creatively named enemies in the area. Similar to Materia Keeper and Red Dragon, this became an extreme liability, as he was healing the mob for more than his regular attack did in damage. This forced chat into a long loop where the party essentially had to out DPS their berserker partner. His final limit Chaos was assigned immediately after the fight, to prevent this terrible and lengthy scenario from ever happening again.

Chat isn't done with frightening encounters, as immediately upon leaving the dungeon we are face to face with Emerald Weapon, who can choose to hang out in front of the Gelnika just to violently startle everyone. Resurface is frantically spammed and chat avoids yet another dangerous encounter. Emmy seems anxious to meet his fate, but we're not quite ready for him yet, so he'll just have to continue terrorizing the seas for now.

Wutai Cleanup

Needing to get out of the water, like right now, seriously, chat now opts for a brief detour to Wutai for some more looting. The scales key item acquired before the sub minigame unlocks several powerful items here, and after a bit of wandering the maze enveloping the impressively carved mountain face, chat beats the heat and grabs the steal as well materia and Oritsuru, Yuffie's second strongest weapon. Somehow her ultimate weapon was missed during the Gelnika visit so we'll have to swing back for it sometime, but that's not a pressing issue. While we're here we might as well complete the pagoda sidequest, it's not required but there's no harm in doing it. After some brief setup to equip our new toys and a save to lock it all in, chat heads to the other end of town and begins yet another climb.

The pagoda sidequest can be done anytime after you finish the initial stolen materia event, but the only real reward is leviathan and summons are again rarely utilized fully in the run, so it was never a priority. This event is a solo gauntlet for Yuffie with a boss at the end, so chat is slightly anxious not having the full crew to rely on. The fights leading to the top are fairly trivial, little more than random encounters with fancy set dressing, but the last boss of the event still proves intimidating. Godo can self heal and dishes out crippling gravity based attacks as well as your last chance at acquiring the trine eskill, but our reliable third slot member has more than proven her worth before, and with careful management the tower is swiftly cleared.

Chat receives the mostly useless shiny red rock along with a bit of Yuffie story, but the true prize is being treated to a repeat of her criminally underused theme song. Before leaving, we finally overwrite all the former disc backup saves, a task left incomplete for far too long. One exception is made, card 2 slot 2 has a save from just before Temple of the Ancients and the last time Aeris was in the party, so it's decided to maintain it as a sort of memorial. It's highly unlikely even with determined maliciousness it could get loaded anyway. We're now done with Wutai forever and have handled much of the busywork on the world map. Chat needs a break and there's still an old foe we have yet to properly conquer.

We make a brief stop along the way to pick up Cid's ultimate weapon from Rocket Town. The old man who used to enjoy staring at the rusty boosters is understandably bummed that Shinra blew it all up, and simply talking to him a few times will relinquish the prize. While Cid is never really used, this is along the path so we might as well grab it anyway. Chat is starting to properly consider the superbosses, and we want to keep all strategy options open. Beating Emerald and Ruby was truly considered impossible by almost everyone, but I was among the few pushing hard to at least try. After all, there were few expectations left to defy, and in our current state the party could already finish the game handily. We needed more challenges.

Chat attempts to resume the journey when a particularly obnoxious troll arrives. Someone claiming to hold the world record speedrun in the PC version of FF7 has decided to represent his community by being a disgusting excuse for a human, stalling progress for quite some time. Their game knowledge would have certainly been valuable to chat, but this one had instead decided to simply be a selfish jerk for his own petty amusement. As someone who follows and watches many speedrunners of this game and others, it was a particularly disheartening episode. I've said all along I want to generally avoid giving trolls spotlights and while I think someone like this deserves a harsh one, I absolutely do not encourage any sort of retaliation or further consequences. It's not hard to find out who this person is, but leave them alone. I told them exactly how I feel already, and they can live with the knowledge they had no redeeming qualities to bring to this experience. Enough of all that, it's time to GAMBLE.

Golden Saucer Revenge

We have returned at last. Chat heads directly to the wonder square and prepares for a rematch against our eternal nemesis, minigames. The objective this time is simple, just win any game at least once. Money is no longer an object, there's not much left in the world to buy anyway, so the only obstacle this time is chat itself. Two more events have also unlocked since we were last here so we hit one of the new ones first, snowboarding. The controls haven't improved since last time though, and worse there is a barrier blocking the alternate course that chat spins in circles against for several painful minutes. Free at last of the infernal wall, our performance is still unimpressive, only able to achieve the worst possible ranking after multiple attempts. This minigame also features a menuboss at the end, defaulting to Try Again with no confirmation prompt and X for the first time functions to make selections here, so chat ends up doing a bit more shredding than maybe intended.

Navigating the frankly infuriating layout of the minigame chamber, chat tackles the next fresh offering, sub hunt. This is just for fun, so no hacks this time. Our performance is predictably poor, but some unintentional hilarity occurs as chat crew rotated in from the previous night, shocked and aghast we were somehow still stuck here fourteen hours later. I had slept through the submarine event and really underappreciated the traumatizing impact it had on some members of chat, but fortunately it was just a matter of waiting ten minutes for the timer to expire and we could fail out safely.

No victories yet under our belt, chat continues the loop. An attempt is made to play 3D Battler, but the interaction point to start the game is incredibly difficult to pin down, so we elect to skip it and hit up bikes instead. This round goes worse than usual, chat unable to even beat the previously established high score of 500 points, failing to dispatch even a single enemy bike.

Defeated once more, chat retreats to the chocobo square to drown our sorrows placing bets on the track. Democracy is required for the start input necessary to begin watching the race anyway so this was folded into the chance for chat to collectively decide on which birds to throw our gil at. We don't win anything here either sadly, but it was still nice for chat to kick back and just have some fun for a bit.

Before leaving the Saucer broken and ashamed, chat attempts to peek into the battle arena and is confronted with an unexpected speedbump. The fight entrance fee is 10 GP, the Golden Saucer exclusive currency received from winning minigames. We would definitely want to come back here, there are several extremely powerful items available only from the arena, but our complete inability to reliably beat even a single minigame presented a slight funding issue. There's a relatively easy solution to this though, a scalper can appear at the station entrance allowing you to exchange up to 10,000 gil for 100 GP at a time. He has a random chance of showing himself though, so we only force him to spawn once, giving us enough GP to at least check out the arena briefly. No particular setup is engaged for this, Cloud is just sent in as is to gauge the difficulty, but chat still makes it to the seventh round before succumbing, confirming the event should not prove especially difficult with some actual preparation.

We've spent enough time and gil in this hive of scum and villainy, so it is time to move on. We're just shy of 120 hours into the run now, almost five total days. Next time, we take the dive into Midgar and the final dramatic sequences of Disc 2. The grand finale is rapidly approaching and by now the team is strong enough to handle just about anything the game can throw at us with a few notable, superboss sized exceptions. This update is probably a little chunkier than most, but there was kind of a lot of relatively boring cleanup to chew through. The action will pick back up again soon. Thanks as always for reading!

PART 1 - **NEW** PART 1.1 - PART 1.2 - PART 1.3 - PART 2 - PART 3 - PART 4 - PART 5 - PART 6 - PART 7 - PART 8 - PART 9 - PART 10 - PART 11 - PART 12 - PART 13 - PART 14 - PART 15 - PART 16 - PART 17 - PART 18 - PART 19 FINALE