Friday: 24:08 (1 Google)

So or the past month, I've been grinding Final Fantasy VII into a fine powder once again. The Steam version has some achievement medals you can unlock for nothing but bragging rights. Most of them are just progressing to a certain point in the game or beating a required boss, so you'll get all those automatically. Then there's ones for defeating the Weapons, collecting ultimate weapons. I had all those too, but there was one called "Materia Overlord." It requires you master all the Materia. ALL OF IT. Now, since I usually grind really hard, I DO master most of the materia. All the Magic, all the summons, and all the commands I need to synth master materia with the Huge Materia in Cosmo Canyon. But ALL the materia means commands you don't need to master for master Command, like W-Summon and W-Item, which take forever to level up. It also means hideously BAD materia like HP<->MP, which switches your HP and MP, a dangerous proposition when you're fighting in the Northern Cave. I eventually got it all, but I don't recommend, would not do again.

And then there's Enemy Skill. I had never tried to master Enemy Skill, and I barely ever used it (I always have my eyes on the master materia prize, and E. Skill isn't needed for that). Blue Magic is something Square loves to use, but it never seems to work quite right. FF6 and FF7 typify almost everything wrong. If you're going to let any character use any magic, blue magic will quickly get outclassed by other other spells and summons. There are always some decent skills, like the recurring Mighty Guard, which puts Shell and Protect on the whole party (also Haste in FF6, though Miracle Shoes do all that plus Regen for free). FF9's Quina is better, since FF9 is class-based, though I only ever use White Wind a little during Cleyra, and Lvl5 Death later to sweep up Dragons. Maybe next time I'll go for learning them all, though there are some terrible ones like Limit Glove (deals 9999... if you're at 1. Nothing otherwise).

So anyway, Enemy Skill in FF7 is kinda lame though you can get some good spells. There are a couple you can miss, though. Trine is only cast by 3 enemies, and they're all one-time boss encounters. The really annoying thing is that you can find 4 E. Skill Materia in the game. One of these is picked up extremely late (after you get the airship), and if you did the Pagoda sidequest at Wutai earlier, you will not be getting Trine on that one (which sucks, since it's one of the better skills). The other one you can miss is Pandora's Box. Only a Zombie Dragon casts this, and only once in a game for some reason. If you fight one of these, they cast it, and you didn't have the materia equipped, that's that. I didn't know about this, but thankfully, when I started going for it, I hadn't encountered it yet (it only appears in one part of the Northern Cave). Beta is another annoying one. You can only learn it from the Midgar Zolom. When I decided to go for all the Enemy Skills, I was already level 99, post Weapons and everything. Zolom goes down like a prom dress. I can equip Cloud with the Buster Sword, and it won't be one-hit, but even then, I had a hell of a time getting it to cast the spell, and it will also randomly eject a character from battle, and you don't want it to be the guy with the materia. Apparently, if you're hardcore, you can fight the Zolom the first time you meet it (this is very early, and the game expects you to get a chocobo to bypass it) and pick up Beta at that point if you can survive, and it's a wicked spell that early, but I do OK. The other hassle is Chocobuckle. It's not hard to get with a trick, but its obscene that it's even included since I think you can ONLY get it with the trick. So, when you meet a Chocobo in battle, it will run away if you don't feed it or otherwise kill the enemies around it very quickly. If you attack the chocobo, it will peck at you and then run. But, if you run into a level 16 chocobo (you can tell by which enemies you encounter with it), feed it some good greens so it will stick around, then use the Enemy Skill Lvl4 Suicide, it will counter with Chocobuckle, which deals damage equal to the number of times you've run from battle. That is horrible, even if you run from every battle. The Japanese version was much better, where it multiplied that by the caster's level. Considering how hard it is to get, the least you can do is make it worth it.

And yet there are 2 achievements I haven't met. One is the Max Gil which I might have been able to do if I'd sold my last set of mastered Magics instead of synthing them. The other, I cannot do on this file. It's teaching Aeris her final limit break, and that is no picnic. First of all, you have to grind her pretty hard. To get the second limit, you have to use the first one 8 times. To get to the next, you have to kill 80 enemies (with her dealing the killing blow), then use that limit 6 times, then kill 60 more guys, then use that limit 5 times, and THEN you can use Great Gospel to teach her the final one. Other characters have similar thresholds for their breaks, and outside of Cloud, I usually grind this stuff in the Northern Cave. That's not an option for Aeris of course, and killing enemies with her is infrequent, to say the least, and difficult to game. Not to mention getting Great Gospel is a giant pain too. You have to take the boat back from Costa Del Sol to Junon to run into a guy who will only talk to you if the last 2 digits in the number of battles you've fought match (shades of Super Mario Bros.) and he'll give you some Mythril. Take it to a guy outside Gongaga, and you can get Great Gospel from him. Every time after my first time through, I generally neglect Aeris. Why bother? Aeris is weak, and I prefer the date with Tifa anyways. Maybe one more time through, just for that? FWIW, Great Gospel is amazing, and wouldn't be so bad for some of those tough Dragon fights in the Temple of the Ancients, since you're required to bring Aeris anyway.