I feel like maybe it's because I did a fair bit of detouring and took longer than I probably should doing the Cosmo Canyon and Wutai storylines, the pacing for the primary Shinra/Sephiroth/Cloud storyline felt like it was kinda abrupt? And I know we all complain about modern games being a bit too hand-holdy, but I sure would've gotten a lot of trouble figuring out that the Keystone was in one specific area of the Gold Saucer and where the Temple of the Ancients is placed in the overworld.
The exposition dialogue also needs work, but that's mostly a product of its time because of the year that this game was localized and the limitations of the hardware in general. Still, I'm having a lot of fun! And that's from someone who has actually been spoiled about a lot of the big twists in the game, including Cait Sith's huge moment at this point (which does honestly come out of nowhere) and what's about to happen to Aerith soon in the game. It's also a real long game, isn't it? I know that the remake barely scratches the first half of the CD, but man, they do pack a lot of content into this game.
Toxic Frog & Ancient Dragon
The Kelzmelzer and Under lizard from outside the temple also show up inside of the temple proper, but the rest of enemies are an interesting mixture of new ones and repaint enemies! As usual, we'll be grouping the repaints and covering them quickly. Toxic Frog is a purple version of "Touch Me" from one of the overworld areas, and, just like Touch Me, the Toxic Frog is able to turn your party members into frogs.
The Ancient Dragon is a green version of the 'Ark Dragon' from Mythril Mine. It's already one of my favourite monster concepts in this game due to being a mantis dragon, so I'm certainly happy to see a stronger version of it show up. Two of them show up, specifically, if you screw up in a clock-themed room, and they hang out around a giant mural of a T-rex. Neat!
Doorbull
With a name that, in the original Japanese version, a pun on double (daburu) and bull (buru), this guy's pun-name really isn't going to be something that survives the translation, particularly since it's not particularly two bulls and more like a giant panther with a demon dude jutting out of it like a weird Nuckelavee-style monster or something. Not particularly thematic for the Temple of the Ancients, I feel, which had a more 'true inheritors of the planet' vibe instead of this guy, which feels more at home in a more 'hell' themed dungeon. Still, a pretty alright design.
Jemnezmy & Snow
Jemnezmy is a bizarre one. All the monsters in the Temple of the Ancients have all been animals, or simply just plain weird like the Doorbull. But then you've got Jemnezmy, who's just a blonde lady in a swimsuit. She always spawns with Toxic Frogs, and Jemnezmy's behaviour will change depending on the gender of your party members. She'll cast 'Fascination', a spell that confuses male party members, but against females (or others that are turned into frogs by her buddies) she'll use the icy "Cold Breath". And for no real reason, she also has an insane weakness to Poison spells, something that I had no idea about until reading the wiki. She's also able to cast the 'Toad' spell.
So I guess she's sort of like a combination of Circe (turns people into animals) and something like the Sirens? Very bizarre, and the location you find her in is also pretty bizarre. She could have been a pretty simple, repetitive trope of being a seductress, but I do like the bit of random context clues that really make Jemnezmy be so bizarre.
We'll cover the other monsters of the Glacier later on, but one of them is a repaint of Jemnezmy and actually acts as sort of a mini-boss! She uses exclusively ice spells, and you actually meet her seemingly as a traveler in a cave that gets mad if you touch her after touching a hot springs, revealing herself to be a Snow. While Jemnezmy is a bit more ambiguous, Snow here is clearly meant to be some sort of a Yuki-onna. Cool!
8 Eye / Hecteyes
Only encountered in a very specific room in the Temple of the Ancients, 8 Eye (a.k.a. Hecteyes, his Japanese name and the name of a recurring monster in the franchise) has way more than 8 eyes. I like this. I like that it's just literally a giant chunk of flesh with a bunch of eyes on it. This one looks a lot more uncomfortable-looking than a lot of the other, cooler-looking Hecteyes in the franchise, though. This guy just looks so lumpy and misshapen! He's also a huge pain in the ass to fight, with his attacks either doing massive health-percentage damage, countering your magic spells by burning your MP or countering your physical spells by casting debuffs on you. I like eyeball monsters, but I kinda wished that the Hecteyes had a bigger presence in the Temple of the Ancients.
Red Dragon
Lots of revelations and monologues in the Temple of the Ancients, and at one point you fight a mini-boss. After all the bizarreness of the monsters in this temple it's actually a bit distracting to fight just the most vanilla dragon ever. Red Dragon is just a red repaint of the Dragon we fight in Mt. Nibel, and it breathes fire. Neat, but actually kinda boring and doesn't even offer much of a challenge.
Demons Gate
This guy, on the other hand, is far more entertaining. The actual final boss of the Temple of the Ancients, Demons Gate (or is it meant to be Demon's Gate?) emerges from the wall above the exit of the temple in an overworld cutscene. Only Gi Nattak ever got something like that! Apparently a homage to the Demon Wall enemies in previous games, Demons Gate is very cool. It's just a flat surface, like a portal or a segment of the wall that has just detached, while this massive Xenomorph-demon-dragon-man fusion just partially emerges out of it. Demons Gate isn't actually attached to the architecture behind it, and while it certainly could simply be PS1 graphical limitations, I like the idea that the flat, shadowy portal is just simply part of this creature's anatomy, or if it's just partially summoned and has to lug around the weird flat surface around.
A pretty cool demon boss, too, even if it is admittedly pretty evocative of Alien. I do like the ridges and the ribcage-like details, and the fact that he's partially emerging from a flat surface does add a lot of personality to this thing. A very, very cool boss fight, and one that I will certainly remember a lot more than "just a generic fire dragon" up above!
Vlakorados
I actually met the residents of "Icicle Area" on the north continent, shortly after getting the Tiny Bronco so that I can claim the Kjata materia. Icicle Area has a giant dinosaur kaiju skeleton as a town! But there's a severe lack of actual dinosaur enemies there, except for this guy.
This motherfucker, I have a lot to say about. 33,333 health, when all its contemporaries in the same area have barely more than 1,500? Absolutely annoying to bring down if you happen to not bring your 'Demi' spells! Its Japanese name is actually Brachioraidos, a recurring dinosaur-themed enemy. FFVII's version is far, far more like a spiky theropod with a particularly developed rear end compared to a brachio-anything, though. And it's just a huge, huge health bar that is a gigantic pain to murder. It sure is a giant dinosaur monster, I like how it looks but I have PTSD just copying that picture from the Wiki.
Trickplay, Malldancer & Boundfat
One of the creatures that show up in Icicle Area and the subsequent series of areas that's the Lost Woods Sleeping Forest, Coral Valley and Forgotten Capital. This guy is a stronger version of the Mu, called "Trickplay". Not much to say here, it's basically the same thing. I like the underground squirrel, I just don't necessarily have anything to say about him. Honestly, the areas in the whole northern continent feels like it's far more interesting than a lot of the monsters you encounter there initially.
We've got two 'repaint' enemies from way earlier in the game, both showing up in the Corel Forest. Judging by the surroundings, though, which are giant marine coral, it's probably meant to be Coral Forest (Correl is a different part of the game!), so it makes a bit more sense for these quasi-aquatic creatures to show up. The Malldancer (whose name is just bizarre and doesn't make sense) is a repaint of the weird Chuse Tanks from Midgar's subway, while the spiky goblin-ogre Boundfat is a repaint of the Hedgehog Pie from Aerith's church. Neither one really leaves much for me to say that I haven't said about them before... but the Malldancer does attack by summoning a storm of leaves. Did the Chuse Tanks do that too? Why is a floating seahorse monster able to control leaves? The mind boggles.
Hungry
This is a bizarre but cute one! I think he's a ghost? He's coloured like a ghost, has a tail and has a somewhat ghostly head-antennae. He's got cute legs and hands, though, and two bizarre eyes that just pop out of his eyes like little drills. I think they might be meant to resemble a slug's eyestalks? Or maybe those are just two bee abdomen sticking out of his eyes or something. And, of course, his head just hinges open like goddamn Pac-Man. The gimmick here with Hungry is that it will try to cast 'Mini', a spell that turns your characters small, and then subsequently eat you, removing that shrunken character from battle. Bizarre and very flavourful, if you'll pardon the pun!
The final boss of the first disc, and after a sequence of cutscenes that anyone who knows anything about Final Fantasy VII knows all about -- it's The Big Moment (tm), one that you most certainly already know about, and it happens after a series of revelations and potentially time-consuming dungeon puzzles. And then after The Big Spoiler Moment happens, Sephiroth leaves off a little orb that transforms into Jenova LIFE. It's literally just a repaint of Jenova Birth from earlier, although the impact of this fight is an interesting one considering that it plays a certain very significant theme in lieu of the usual boss fight. Jenova LIFE herself is actually relatively simple -- a ton of HP and a ton of area attacks, but honestly either I over-leveled a bit in the Temple of the Ancients (I had to backtrack a lot because the layout was confusing) or Jenova LIFE just simply doesn't have enough tricks to deal enough damage. She deals primarily water-based attacks and reflects some damaging magic, but after figuring that out she's actually a much simpler boss fight.
Mobius Final Fantasy, in its card arts, at least tried to make Jenova LIFE and Jenova Birth look different; the anatomy is retained but the shape of the wings and the way that tail-like tentacle coils around her body does admittedly make Jenova LIFE look more like some elder god sealed deep beneath the ocean. Honestly, a lot of people note that maybe this fight isn't necessary and breaks the pacing of the story, and I 100% agree. Still, I kind of get what the designers were going for; they wanted "Disc One" to end with a final boss. It's just that the end of Disc One and the beginning of Disc Two are so heavily tied together in story beats that instead Jenova LIFE feels as much a distraction as the damn archaeology mini-game.
Acrophies
Insert disc two to explore more of the dungeon! And as you enter the (very short) Coral Valley Cave with many of the similar vaguely aquatic-themed enemies from earlier, you'll meet this bizarre motherfucker. I love this guy! Even more so than the actual Chimera enemy or the Kimara Bug, Acrophies does look like some sort hideous combination of various sea creatures. It looks like a giant coral reef with an anemone growing out of the side, a purple starfish stuck on it, a giant snake (or is it an eel) jutting out of one end and a random assortment of crab limbs on the other; and a bizarre bug-face, Acrophies looks like it's either some sort of fusion of aquatic creatures... or maybe these guys are a colony organism? Similar things have happened in real life, although certainly not to the extent of Acrophies. Apparently its name is drawn from Acropora, a genus of polyp corals. The whole Forgotten City and Coral Valley Area does look like our characters are walking around an entire city made up of giant marine coral, so it is very much appropriate to have a creature like this running around. I guess the Ancients just really like marine life?
Grimguard
Not everything in Coral Valley Cave are aquatic-themed, and these guys show up! Grimguards are... I'm not sure what they are! The Ancients that actually show up and are vaguely helpful look like generic old men, so are these... golems? Magical familiars? Whatever they are, they kind of look like Dobby the elf from Harry Potter. It's hard to see if they're actually creatures of flesh or some sort of golem, puppet or doll. Especially since they're guarding this location that's clearly been sealed deep behind a mystical coral city surrounded by a make-you-lost forest in an icy continent. They sure have a cute expression, a fun little elf-ear and the most adorable little club. The Grimguard actually does have a gimmick, that shield rotates a bit between a 'physical defense' and 'magical defense' form like some of the enemies from the Nibel Shinra Mansion. Pretty neat! Such a shame that Coral Valley Cave is so short...
Bandersnatch, Frozen Nail & Ice Golem
...because the next area, the pretty long Icicle Area and Glacier Area, are all kind of very samey. It's all snow, and a huge theme is just how easily you get lost and how so many screens look similar. I get it, it's pretty close to what real hiking into snowy mountains is like, but man, I did not enjoy this leg of the game, and the obnoxious snowboard minigame and the 'fatigue' mechanics really didn't help either.
The most common enemies in the very easy-to-get-lost mountain area are these two, the Bandersnatch and the Frozen Nail. Bandersnatch is apparently a name Final Fantasy likes to reuse, but this is just literally a wolf with no real abilities to speak of. Frozen Nail is cool, it's a repaint of the Kelzmelzer... which we just saw not too long ago in the Temple of the Ancients, so as much as I enjoyed the model, it does feel somewhat repetitive.
Not much to say about the Ice Golem either, although I do want to note that this guy is tiny. Like, around half the size of Cloud's model. And unlike the other two 'repaint' enemies here, at least it's been a while since we've seen the regular Golem, and that one was a pretty rare encounter.
Shred
Not all the enemies in the Great Glacier are repaints, but the ones that have a high appearance rate seems to be the wolf and the bug. "Shred" here is an interesting one, though, and not a creature I'd expect to see in an icy region. It's a bizarre lizard-man with fins for lower legs and a long tapering tail that makes it look like it would belong more in an underwater area, like it's a more traditional D&D Sahuagin or something. Was it meant to appear in the vaguely underwater-themed Coral Area instead of the ice one? Honestly, the Coral Area and the Forgotten City felt like it was such a breeze to get through considering the long slog that the Temple of the Ancients and now the Icicle Area are, I wouldn't be surprised if some of the monsters that were designed there were shuffled off elsewhere.
Jumping
Ha, the bunny enemy is called 'Jumping'. This is actually a pretty cool rabbit fantasy monster, it's standing upright with clearly exaggerated features, but you don't go full-on Bugs Bunny or... well, Fran, if we're going to use an example from Final Fantasy. It's got more humanoid hands, but I love just how rodent-like that face still is, and how bunny-like the legs are. And of course it's holding a carrot like a god damn shiv. A wonderfully charming enemy.
Magnade
Another thing that made the Great Glacier so frustrating to go through other than combining all the 'let's make this area a fucker to navigate' tropes that this game has is that all the enemies are just... they're just boring but they spawn so often, and not even the more interesting guys like Magnade here offer anything unique. No new skills to steal, no unique drops, not even any sort of mechanics. It's just "this thing does physical attacks". Magnade is a minotaur man. He looks pretty cool, but I just can't muster any enthusiasm about him.
Lessaloploth
Apparently meant to be "Lesser Ropross" in homage to a mecha from the manga Babel II, I actually do like the translation's "Lessaloploth", which does make it sound like some sort of scientific genus or something. How many dragon models does a game need? Quite a bit, apparently. Lessaloploth shares its scorpion-tailed 'wyvern' model with the Rapps mini-boss that we fought a while back in Wutai. It's kinda cool, but like the Magnade this enemy doesn't really offer much in terms of memorability.
And that's about it for the Great Glacier. I'm sorry, I really enjoyed the story moments of this whole sequence. The Sephiroth, Aerith and Cait Sith stuff are great, but the middle-segment exploration of the Temple of the Ancients with the puzzles was a bit irritating; the archaeology bit to reach the Forgotten Capital was frustratingly dumb; that whole Forgotten City/Capital stuff could've actually used a bit more buildup; Jenova-Life kinda ruined the pacing a bit; and then I just got utterly frustrated at everything past Icicle Inn. Oh well, eventually broke down and got a guide.
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Bahamut
Beating up the Red Dragon in the Temple of the Ancients nets you the Bahamut materia. He sure is a platinum dragon, and I honestly wonder why they didn't use Bahamut's model as the boss fight,m or at least a repainted version of him. As my Digimon reviews have clued you guys in, these sort of 'vaguely-humanoid dragon' enemies aren't really my thing, but I can still very much appreciate just how cool they are. Original FFVII goes for a pretty simple dragon with a slightly more humanoid pose and extra claws on the tip of the wings. A bit more boring, perhaps, but very cool. Remake Bahamut goes for a far more humanoid figure, looking more like a human with dragon parts grafted onto him. Both are pretty cool, I have to say, although I'm going to have to also say that I sort of get a bit more appreciation for FFXIII's weird Transformer Bahamut.
Alexander
It's still really bizarre that among the borrowed deity names like Bahamut, Leviathan, Odin or Shiva, we've got Alexander the Great. Always as a giant castle-robot that deals holy damage. And here we are, FFVII's incarnation of Alexander, showing in the most common appearance that Alexanders show up as -- half of a giant robotic body with two pillar-like arms that seem to fuse to the ground, and details that indicate that this is a giant palace or fortress with spires and awnings and stuff. It's honestly pretty damn great, and looks just so bizarre next to the otherwise pretty organic-looking summons of this franchise. The graphics are a limitation, perhaps, but the fact that you actually have to go a bit out of your way to get him (it's the aforementioned obscure Snow quest) and the fact that he's a god damn giant holy robot makes him extra-awesome.
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Anyway, see you guys next time!
While personally I've always loved the Jenova LIFE fight, I can definitely see why some would look at it as an unwanted intrusion.
ReplyDeleteI've always looked at it as a letting out point, as said spoiler moment was pretty emotional for me the first time despite being spoiled. Considering it's said characters theme playing in the background, I treat this fight as a way to begin Cloud and Co's payback to Sephiroth.
About the Hectaeyes, you can also find them in a rather simple manner as the Battle Square in The Golden Saucer spawns some of the games rarer foes at times.
Also about Alexander despite his first Canon appearances being in FFVI and his first plot relevant appearance being in FFIX, I've always felt his design was heavily based on Amano's notes for a certain location design in FFIV. They have far too many similarities for it to be a simple coincidence.
I do feel like that the Jenova Life fight could be argued either way. Like you said, as a 'letting out point' and as a way to *really* hammer home what just happened... the fact that we're forced into a fight with that melancholic music in the background does work. And I can also definitely see that the designers of the video game wanted the first disc to end with, well, a final boss. That's what RPG video games do, they end with boss fights! Although I've seen equal arguments how the Jenova Life fight could've happened beforehand, and that the huge climactic cutscene ends up becoming the post-fight event? Either way works, I feel.
DeleteAnd I absolutely agree. Despite being spoiled, despite it being a decade-old spoiler, they still managed to get me with the spoiler moment.
At some point I might have to enter the Golden Saucer, although I really, really don't like the idea of doing minigames. I have a couple of guides that my friends had sent me to basically get through it quickly and efficiently, if nothing else...
FFIX was the one with Zidane, wasn't it? Where the entire castle turned out to transform into Alexander? I don't know much about that game beyond the first act, but I did really like that it actually treated summoning Odin and Alexander as basically something world-ending. Comparing it to how they were treated almost as an afterthought in FFVII, I remembered being pretty impressed.