Well, after a bit of unexpected thrashing around, I decided to go ahead and break out my venerable copy of Final Fantasy VII and finish the playthrough.
It actually took some doing; the place I stopped at is not itself a particular problem, but then I realized why I stopped. I had just started the big sidequest of the game, getting the Golden Chocobo. For the uninitiated, the Golden Chocobo is the ultimate, go-anywhere vehicle in the game. This alone warrants attention, but the real reward is using the Golden Chocobo to collect the ultimate summon, Knights of The Round. This particular summon is far and away the most powerful spell in the game, and can be combined with other Materia (the game's magic and customization options all rolled into shiny orbs of concentrated awesome) for some very broken stuff, up to and including wiping the final boss in one turn.
Anyway, this power has a commensurate price tag. The 'traditional' way to earn a Golden Chocobo is by racing and breeding certain common birds to get special birds (there is a second legit method, but that means fighting a nasty superboss) until you breed the Golden Chocobo. It sounds alright on paper, and is straightforward enough if you have a walkthrough (it can be done blind, but even with in-game hints its not all that intuitive), but in practice you have to drop the storyline and race six separate Chocobos to twelve victories each, stopping along to way to feed them start-boosting greens.
Not impressed? Well chocobo racing tends to come in two flavors: utter snoozefests where you sit at the finish line waiting for terrible AI racers to catch up, or frustrating traffic jams where you wind up stuck in dead last while the few competent AIs become impossible to catch. You can find a happy medium, where the races actually become challenging and tense without feeling grossly unfair, but it tends to be fairly rare. To add to all this confusion, there is a 'boss' racer running around in the higher ranks. Despite general wisdom, he's not impossible to beat, and might actually be one of the more pleasurable elements involved; races involving Teogh (whether that's supposed to be his name or a mangled translation of Joe, the only named jockey you're introduced to in the story) become tense and rewarding duels against a chocobo-riding Dale Earnhardt (the color scheme even fits).
Even then, doing this means you're doing a minimum of 72 races (and odds are very good you'll really need to do 100 or more, especially if you skimp on the greens) , during which you get a choice of two slightly different racetracks, making things even more repetitive. But it's not all bad news; leaving Knights of The Round out of the bargain, chocobo racing is far and way the most effective way to collect GP, the special currency for the Gold Saucer. And that's not all! Victories in the higher ranks can draw some really nifty rewards, including equipment and Materia that can only be gained through racing. Even the common prizes have some value, since forgoing them in how you get that wonderful GP generation.
Now if we could just find a way to do all this without watching a polygonal bird butt front-and-center for hours on end. The Harvest carries a fearsome price.
No comments:
Post a Comment