Reviewing Monsters - Final Fantasy VII, Part 11

My final segment in reviewing the monsters for Final Fantasy VII! It has been a blast, and it took me quite a while to actually complete the previous batch of gameplay. This one basically covers the final dungeon and a couple of ersatz monsters from the Battle Square -- sort of a repeatable battle gauntlet to farm for resources in Gold Saucer, and a way to get Cloud's final limit break Omnislash. 

I spent quite a bit of time getting everyone else's final limit breaks and final weapons, but let's just say that Cloud's... requires a fair bit of work. In order to get Omnislash, I have to be able to win 32,000 points in the Battle Square of Gold Saucer. I've got the 'battle' part well pat, especially at this point in the game and knowing to equip a Ribbon. But to participate in the Battle Square, I needed a lot of GP since I can't take BP out of the Battle Square. And to get a lot of GP reliably, the fastest way is through Chocobo Races. And to reliably farm Chocobo Races, I need to get a Gold Chocobo. And to get that, well... let's just say that even with a guide, it took me quite a while to get the very specific order of events, random battles, breeding items, feeding items, Chocobos that spawn with an exact enemy in an exact location... yeah, it's not something I'm ever looking forward to doing ever again. 

But hey, I got all the ultimate limit breaks and that's the principle of it. And finally it's the final confrontation in Disc 3, the crew of the Highwind against some super-soldier child and a space alien god-being trying to destroy the world with a meteor! The story is honestly pretty damn neat even if it's admittedly not the most innovative compared to a lot of other anime and manga, but I really, really did enjoy the game. Even if some of the biggest moments of the game have been basically spoiled to the world, I'm actually only spoiled about one specific moment, and experiencing the story firsthand -- polygon graphics and questionable translations notwithstanding -- does really make me realize just why everyone and their mother hypes up Final Fantasy VII as one of the best games ever.

Anyway, I'm not here to complain about convoluted side-quests, or to gush about the game. On with the monsters!

Tonberry

So two unique enemies show up only exclusively in the Battle Square, and they are two of Final Fantasy's most recurring enemies! The Tonberry looks exactly as it does in most other Final Fantasy games other than XI -- a little mouthless reptile/fish guy with glowing eyes, baggy robes, a fish tail, and carrying a lantern and a knife. Good ol' Tonberry will only slowly walk towards your character and it's basically a race against time, since if the Tonberry reaches you it'll stab you with its knife and instantly kill you. Slowly it approaches. Not too much to say here, it sure is a classic-looking monster. The Tonberry, alongside the Bomb, are among the Final Fantasy classic staples to make it into the FFVII Remake way earlier than when they actually show up in the original FFVII. 

Ho-chu

One of the four possible final battle for the Battle Square (and you better believe you will need to repeat the Battle Square over and over and over to get enough BP to get your super-duper-awesome loot) alongside the Serpent, Sea Worm and Ghost Ship is the Ho-Chu. Thanks to the mechanics of the Battle Square -- only one character, and you slowly accumulate handicaps at the end of each battle -- the Ho-Chu is a simple enemy with a large HP pool, a decently powerful attack and the ability to cast status effects that ended up being so much more dangerous than it would otherwise be since it's more likely than not that you've lost a huge chunk of your health and might have half your equipment or materia disabled. 

Ho-chu, if you know your Final Fantasy monsters, is Ochu! Or, as I noted during my coverage of FFXIII monsters, the Otyugh from Dungeons & Dragons, which has basically been interpreted and reimagined as a series of giant plant monsters in the Final Fantasy franchise. You can still see the squad body shape, the tentacle arms (now vine-arms) and yawning mouth, but Ho-chu here is very clearly a plant monster. The vine-arms ending in spiky clubs, the leaf-like legs... but, of course, the most charming part of the Ho-chu is that this incarnation has a massive ballerina skirt made up of flower petals. This is apparently the first Ochu in the franchise since the original, and I find it hilarious that they basically took the 'flower monster' of the original Final Fantasy and turned it into a chubby ballerina screaming plant monster. I approve. 

Ruby Weapon

Alongside Emerald Weapon, this guy acts as the game's two 'Superbosses', i.e. enemies you can encounter in the course of the game, but you need some extensive post-game grinding and strategies to beat them. You can encounter Ruby Weapon at around this point in the game, which is the third disc, where there's a suspiciously odd-looking red protrusion in the quicksand-desert around Gold Saucer, appearing only after you've blown up Ultimate Weapon. 

I tried to fight it and, just like Emerald Weapon, got absolutely fucked. He's a pretty cool looking giant robot, though, like some sort of Zoids or Gundam or Evangelion or something. I think they did a pretty good job at making the various Weapons -- especially those with in-game battle models -- look distinct from each other. I do like the Ruby Weapon's long, elongated arms that end in chunky fingers, which is something that I did find pretty charming. This guy's apparently a homage to the Hygogg from Gundam. Not from one of the series I've watched, but I certainly do love Gundam's wacky aquatic suits! The fact that this guy has a long, serpentine head also makes it look kind of different compared to the other Weapons. Throughout the battle the Ruby Weapon will slam his long arms onto the sand and have them emerge behind the party as giant tentacles. Pretty neat. Apparently it's fight is pretty troublesome, and most of the guides I've skimmed noted how it's easiest to do the Ruby Weapon fight with only one character in your party or something? Eh, okay. 

Gargoyle

And, with all the optional enemies and bosses out of the way, it's about high time to talk about the bulk of Disc 3, the final segment of Final Fantasy VII, which primarily takes place in the massive dungeon called the Northern Cave. One of the earliest enemies are gargoyles, which are actually relatively simple adaptations of how they usually are in fantasy. Interestingly, all Gargoyles you meet will be completely still, crouched in their 'stone' form, and are completely immune to most attacks. Anything will trigger its transformation as it 'breaks free' of its stone form, and it flies around as an angry devil. Honestly, not the most interesting enemy in the Northern Cave, but a pretty neat one with a gimmick. 

Dark Dragon & Armored Golem

Y'know what? Let's get the 'repaint' enemies out of the way first. Northern Cave is a pretty large dungeon and there's a lot of enemies found in only specific areas. There are also a lot of repeats, and... and it's very cool to see some of these models again, but I really don't have much to say about Dark Dragon (it's the 'big dragon' model, but black and can cast Ultima) and Armored Golem (a black golem with the same move-towards-the-party gimmick as the Tonberry). 

What is the theme of this dungeon? I'm honestly not sure. Jenova-Sephiroth is resting at its center and it's connected to the Lifestream, but you've got natural-looking animals, demonic-looking guys, as well as artificial robots like the armored golem. 

Pollensalta, Death Dealer & King Behemoth

Likewise, I don't have a whole ton to say about either one of these three. Pollensalta is a repaint of the Jemnezy and Snow "evil ambiguously-human seductress" enemy, but unlike the other two we don't get any real theme behind her; she just casts generic fire and status spells. You can learn the skill 'Angel Whisper' by manipulating her, but it's not like she's got an angel or holy-magic theme to her. Boring! King Behemoth is a golden version of the Behemoth we met at the Return to Midgar sequence. Not much to say about this one, either, although it sure is cool. 

Death Dealer is a lot more interesting. A repaint of the Joker enemy, this guy uses Tarot cards instead of playing cards! The five cards he can toss at you are Emperor, Death, Star, Sun and World; and he can also cast a random 'Roulette' skill that, well, kills anyone it hits... except it's random, and might hit the Death Dealer or its allies.

Iron Man

More accurately translated as "Iron Giant", based on his katakana. Turns out that the Wolfmeister isn't just a one-off model in that Junon train mission. Iron Man here is still cool, with his ridiculously large upper arms and knife, but otherwise you might only meet Iron Man in a specific area of the dungeon, where you jump down from the proper dungeon towards where Sephiroth is, making him sort of a quasi-miniboss. Not much to say here, but he's cool.

Master Tonberry

My bane. Okay, this guy is a right asshole. Design-wise it's just a Tonberry with a different skin and a star over his head, but the Master Tonberry fucked me over hard in this dungeon. I actually didn't even realize that there's a run option on this game (something that's even more difficult for me because the buttons for escaping is mapped to two keys I have no reason to use ever). Master Tonberry basically just walks towards your party from his side of the screen, slowly it approached, and when it gets in front of a party member it just instantly shanks him or her to death with his very mundane-looking kitchen knife. 

The gimmick here -- which I didn't realize after wasting huge chunks of recovery items -- is that you can only attack the Master Tonberry once between each movement. Trying to be greedy and attack more than once will have the Master Tonberry retaliate with the best move ever, the unblockable "Everyone's Grudge". Which deals damage equal to the amount of kills the specific character has done throughout the game. Since you're likely to bring your best party into this dungeon, this is basically a death sentence. Appropriately terrifying. 

Mover

The actual in-game model has two eyes, but for some reason the picture on the wiki only depicts the orange orb? Eh. I'll get this one out of the way quickly, it's a weird super-rare enemy in a specific room of the dungeon, and provides a large amount of experience points despite being weak. The idea is solid, but I dunno... maybe do something more interesting than literally just an orb with simple eyes? 

Parasite

Oh, what a weirdo! Yeah, whether this is just a weird creature or some sort of Jenova-mutant, I'm not sure. These guys appear like floating, flat tadpoles, but with a mass of weird green... hair? Horns? Cilia? They've got those on their 'head' and 'tail', and a bunch of red... mandibles? Feelers? Underneath its 'head', of course, is a massive green eyeball. Despite its pretty cool name, the Parasite is a pretty standard enemy and doesn't try to parasitize you at all, just being a simple status-effect-centric enemy. For an enemy that is named a 'parasite' and looks like a bizarre giant mutant critter, I can't lie, this is kind of a letdown. 

Scissors

When I first saw Scissors, I really didn't think too much of it. Oh, it's a Zaku-esque robot thing, but it's got two huge knives for fingers and toes. It's kind of cool, and judging by its face, this might be a person in a suit of armour or something, covering his face with a helmet and a piece of cloth. I thought that, yeah, okay, a neat killer robot. Weird to find in the final dungeon, but, like, sure, why not? 

Then I didn't kill one in a single attack... and Scissors immediately and instantly kills that character, before splitting into two. That's awesome. This thing is neither robot nor human, and I absolutely love it! The upper body is just suspended by a nasty, Parasyte-style meat tentacle-feet that's impossibly thin to hold up something so big, whereas a mass of claws around an eye pokes out of the lower half. They split into two! That's a pretty damn cool enemy concept. 

Allemagne / Ahriman

Mistranslated and mangled into "Allemagne", we get the return of the commonly-reoccurring Ahriman enemies! I like this version, a giant eyeball and mouth on a fleshy body, with a tail, giant bat wings and bird legs. Not a particularly over-the-top fantasy monster, perhaps, but certainly one that's memorably weird. It's got a couple of nasty attacks, but they are level-dependent so it's not going to really bother most parties. Not too much to say here, but I did really like the Allemagne, it's a very cool and simple monster design. 

Christopher & Gighee

Another rare encounter that can only really be found in a specific room are these two weirdos, who always show up together. Christopher is a weird human (?) that dresses up like a bad Hisoka cosplay, wears a mask, and the sides of the hair taper off into this huge weird two-sided blade. Gighee (or "Ziggy", in the original Japanese) is a weird horse-dog thing with super thin legs, Super Saiyan hair, a guitar jutting out of its butt, and... is that head stitched on to that body? Apparently the enemy is a pun to Ziggy Stardust, which leads me to go 'buh-wha'. Gighee basically uses weird status effects, while Christopher's attacks change depending on whether Gighee is alive or dead. It's honestly really kind of weird and, honestly, the two slightly feel out of place. Or maybe I'm just freaked out at the clown costume.

Magic Pot

A weirdo. This guy is a bizarre bearded purple imp with long elf ears that peeks out of a golden pot decorated with Yu-Gi-Oh hieroglyphics, and basically demands your party give him an Elixir, an item that, while not super-duper hard to find, is also kind of valuable. It is completely immune to anything you can do until it gets fed an Elixir, which, again, is another reason why I eventually had to learn how to simply just run away from battles instead of wasting my elixirs on these guys. The Magic Pot is another huge-yield enemy, although I'd rather have my elixirs. 

Dragon Zombie

OH SHIT, this is awesome. Screw you, Dark Dragon, this is a proper dragon monster! Look at how utterly nastily wretched this guy looks. It's standing in a bipedal form, but instead of regular dragon wings, the Dragon Zombie has a massive set of spidery legs bursting out of his sides like spider legs. I love just how that chest looks like it's just a bunch of ribcages bursting out of a chest, how the flesh just terminates to give way to the knobbly leg bones and the tail-bones. Slightly over the top but such a badass-looking monster undead dragon! This is so, so much more creative than just throwing a pile of bones shaped like a dragon to us. A bit of a rarer enemy, in the dungeon proper.

Alongside the Ahriman and Iron Man, the Dragon Zombie is one of the possible encounters as you get through the final stretch of the dungeon. It's got a bizarrely special (and learnable) skill, Pandora's Box, which the Dragon Zombie will unleash exactly once in your entire save file, and if you don't manage to learn it... whoops? It only does this when it dies the first time. Such a bizarre, weird thing that people probably have to go out of their way to even know about how the skill is triggered, and I simultaneously love and hate this aspect of older games. Not a whole ton to say beyond that, it sure is a cool-looking monster!

Jenova SYNTHESIS

One thing about this game's finale is that... for a game that hinges so much on me falling in love and being invested in the characters and the plotline, the actual final battle feels pretty... hollow. Mostly because we're missing one last huge, grandiose Sephiroth taunting speech, and what we got felt pretty short compared to what Sephiroth has mostly talked about before. Even Jenova's battle feels like it comes out of nowhere... although it certainly is cool. I guess this is Jenova's original body as it reconstructs itself? We've got a naked woman's torso and head, plus two giant tentacles, attached to that giant... dung ball? It's got flower petals, at least. Apparently it's just a mass of flesh, and when the camera pans around to show you Jenova Synthesis's back you see a heart suspended mid-air and attached to the ball by sinew. And that detail really does help elevate Synthesis just a bit.

Apparently, the original concept of Jenova is that she is really pulling the strings, and that the original idea was that Jenova will continually cut off pieces of herself (which would be the previous Jenova bosses) before the final piece, the heart, would shed its hood and fight you in a super form. Very interesting, although honestly at this point in the game poor Jenova just got most of her relevance essentially subsumed by her son, doesn't he? 

Bizarro Sephiroth

Mind you, not that Sephiroth actually got much to talk or do in this final dungeon compared to how huge of a presence he had in the bulk of the first one-and-a-half discs. Honestly, other than a relatively simple and short little monologue, you just jump straight into a battle with Bizarro over here. What a hilariously dorky name, too. Bizarro Sephiroth? Not helping is that I associate the name 'Bizarro' so much with that upside-down clone of Superman from DC comics. This form's actual name in Japanese is "Rebirth Sephiroth", with the katakana for 'rebirth' (ribasu) being valid for "Reverse" as well. I get that the pun is impossible to replicate in English, but then going on to call this guy 'Bizarro' is... bizarre. 

Anyway, I fought this guy with two teams, splitting my party into two parties of three. That's awesome! One of my complaints about Final Fantasy games in general is that for the most part only three out of a far larger party ever get to do anything, and to actually have the group stand on Bizarro's two flanks and attack him is pretty damn neat. Apparently this battle is different on how well you did in the game, too; if you had too hard a time fighting Jenova Synthesis the game takes pity on you and lets you fight Bizarro Sephiroth with one party -- so you don't have to juggle two regenerating sides of a multi-part boss fight. Boss-wise he's honestly just a huge HP sink, and you have to kill him fast enough before the core regenerates the health pools of the other parts, while the core itself is invulnerable while the other parts are up. 

Design wise, this is a pretty neat boss! It's the start of Sephiroth's angel theme, I suppose, since he's just some long-haired supersoldier with an oversized nodachi for the rest of the game. What a weirdo angel he is! He's got a smaller him growing out of the top of his head, and I've always been distracted by how bizarrely muscular his shoulders are before they end up in wings. Kinda neat, I guess it combines Sephiroth's angel theme with Jenova's flesh-aberration theme? Not the weirdest final boss I've seen, but certainly an appropriate look for Sephiroth's mutant form. 

Safer Sephiroth

As with all J-RPG final bosses, of course Sephiroth has an even more humanoid-looking final form after you go through the pretty grueling task of beating down Bizarro. You get transported into a heavenly-looking realm, and you fight Safer Sephiroth. Or, rather, probably intended to be Sefer or Sepher Sephiroth, meaning 'Book of Sephiroth'. It's also got one of the most iconic pieces of music in gaming history, which, no joke, is how I found out about this franchise in the first place. I'd be remiss not to mention just how utterly badass this one musical tract with ominous Latin chanting is. Estuans interius, ira vehementi.  Estuans interius, ira vehement. SEPHIROTH! Honestly, that musical tract is easily one of the best things about this game. 

Also, this form is well, well known for the time-consuming, two-minute long Supernova attack. Where after filling the screen with Ptolemy's diagram of the celestial spheres and some Physics equations, Sephiroth summons a meteor from beyond the galaxy, which vaporizes, in order (and the planets are explicitly named), Pluto, Jupiter and the asteroid belt before slamming into the sun, causing it to bubble, erupt, consume Mercury and Venus, before arriving as a fiery ball of death to consume the party. A far, far worse cataclysm than the actual 'drop a meteor on the planet'. Also, apparently FFVII is set on Earth? Okay?

Safer Sephiroth's design is a pretty cool angelic abomination. Most modern portrayals of Sephiroth post-FFVII basically tend to just have him in his human form with a single black angel wing -- a form he never actually assumes in FFVII. Here he's got a single black angel wing replacing one arm, but he's got a mass of six wings growing out from under his waist like a mass of bug legs, except they're, of course, angelic wings. Actually pretty cool, and far, far cooler than if Sephiroth was just a boring angel man. 

Sephiroth

The final 'battle', if you can call it that, is a battle in Cloud's mindscape as Sephiroth tries to take him over, I think. You fight Sephiroth in his high-def (for the game's standards) form, just a shirtless dude with long hair and an oversized sword. It's also impossible to lose this fight, as you're programmed to one-shot Sephiroth with an Omnislash. It's essentially a cutscene battle, but you get to click stuff! Again... they could've added a bunch of extra dialogue here to really hammer home the Cloud/Sephiroth rivalry, and I have some opinions about the ambiguous ending cutscene... but that's what the extended universe and that one movie is for, I suppose.

And with that... wow, that took me longer than I thought I would! Both playing the game and reviewing the monsters and enemies inside! It's been a massive, massive blast. See you guys for the next one!