I’ll admit, at the start, to feeling a bit of Final Fantasy fatigue this week. Which is a bit odd if only because I finally feel like I’m starting to make progress.
You suck, emo man
But still, just disc 1! I find myself coming up with reasons that I might be further along than it really feels. Discs 2 and 3 must be shorter, I say, because they each have to contain a good portion of the basic coding for the world maps and various locations that make up disc 1. “Yeah, that’s it,” I say, “since discs 2 and 3 let you revisit (almost) all of the areas from disc 1, plus all the minigames you get access to later in the game, I’ll be able to just blow through them.”
Sure.
I’m totally with you, though, Daniel. I don’t love Vincent Valentine. I took him into battle with the Materia Keeper, and when he went into his limit break transformation, his fire-based attacks healed more damage than Cloud and Aeris were able to inflict. I had to actually kill him and bring him back to life in order for him to be of any use. And then his limit break bar filled up again. In keeping with my habit of constantly comparing FFVII to FFX, let me say that I’m not fond of the fact that once a character’s limit break gauge fills, you can’t use that character’s regular attacks until you use a limit break. It was nice in FFX to be able to let a character’s overdrive bar fill, and then be a bit more strategic about when I wanted to use it.
I don’t want to complain too much about the pace of the story, because there have been some really interesting side business. In Cosmo Canyon, for example, it’s nice that you get some really substantive information about the planet, the lifestream, and mako energy, all in a very visually cool sequence in Bugenhagen’s lab, AND you get this great little side story about Red XIII and his dad (who looks pretty awesome when you finally find him). I wouldn’t want to give up all of that, but at the same time, I felt like I should have gotten more from Nibelheim. Sure, the sense of WTF is cool, but it’s a lot of time for not much information, especially when you include the climb up Mt. Nibel. I was expecting big revelations at the materia reactor, or at least I would have been if the strategy guide didn’t make it clear that I wasn’t going to find out anything.
I’m trying not to read ahead, but I am getting just a bit impatient.
