FFVII - A Masterpiece

Normally with the other games in this series, I’m not really going for any type of game completion, except for the summons. However, this game is special to me, the characters are special to me, so I’m going to spend a bit more time getting final weapons and final limit breaks for the final six to fight Sephiroth. They deserve it.

I started my clean up phase by going to Wutai to find out what was behind that wall of flames in the caves. I quenched the flames with the Leviathan Scales I got just before the submarine, and I got a Steal as Well materia. Interesting, don’t think I got that on my original play through.

The next thing I did was head into that waterfall I couldn’t get to before. Now here I got some real interesting info. With Vincent in my party, I passed under the waterfall to find Lucrecia. Vincent had mentioned her as the mother of Sephiroth when I first got him but I had forgotten about it. Here we get a cool little flash back. Apparently Vincent was a Turk back in the day and when Hojo, Gast and Lucrecia were working together, Vincent had a thing with Lucrecia. Well that all ended when Gast and Hojo decided to do experiments on humans with Jenova cells. Lucrecia volunteered and was injected with the cells. She became pregnant and gave birth to a child named Sephiroth. Vincent believed she died shortly after birth and blamed Hojo. When he went to attack Hojo, he was knocked out and Hojo did experiments on Vincent as well, turning him into this undead werewolf type beast. Until this point Vincent had always thought Lucrecia was dead. But she’s really only been hiding from her sin of abandoning her child. She asks Vincent if Sephiroth still lives, and he tells her he’s dead... I’ll return later for Vincent’s final limit break.

There were a few more things to do, but first I needed to get onto Disc 3, so I decided to finish up the Midgar portion. But not before I knocked about 15k off of Ultimate Weapon on our first encounter. I had picked up the key to sector 5 from the dig site in Bone Village and when I entered Midgar I was right next to Aerith’s old Church place where she grew flowers. As I entered, there was Aerith among her flowers for a second before she flickered out... Very cool.

Before heading to the top of Shinra Inc., I went below into the city to pick up Cysra’s ultimate weapon, Premium Heart. Afterward I went back outside and took the airship in. The party parachuted in and we used some tunnels to make our way deeper. Along the way we ran into Rude, Reno and Elena of the Turks and handed them a quick defeat. Man those guys never stop, never die... After that we were confronted with Heidger and Scarlet in some huge robot anti-weapon monstrosity. That went down easily enough though, glad they’re finally dead. Next up, Hojo.

When we finally reached the top, we found Hojo still at work to gather mako energy for Sephiroth. When asked why he was doing that he finally admitted the truth. He is the one that impregnated Lucrecia, then injected the fetus with Jenova cells. Hojo. Is Sephiroth’s father... Why did I not remember this little tidbit of info. Kind of significant. Well after I was thoroughly shocked, I proceeded to kick his Jenova infused ass. With Midgar safe for the time, we headed off toward Northern Crater, but first Cloud gave a nice speech about everyone seeing their loved ones one last time. Also he said he’d understand if they didn’t return, but of course everyone did. Prior to that Cloud got to spend some quality time alone with Cysra for the first time. With Aerith dead, she’s a nice rebound. =P Shortly after this I ran into Ultimate weapon again and got him to roughly 33k damage, 67k to go!

I headed next to Nibelheim for more final clean up and picked up Cysra’s final limit break. Of course she’s still only at level 2 so I have to grind a little bit. While in Nibelheim, I also visited Shinra mansion and Gast’s laboratory once more. When I arrived I got an interesting cut scene I’d never seen before of Cloud and Zack in Gast’s laboratory after the Nibelheim incident. They were in stasis chambers together and broke out. Who knows how long they’d been there like guinea pigs but my guess is.. five years. Zack drags the groggy Rhek around for a bit and they hitch a ride out of town on a little beat up pickup truck. Zack talks to Rhek about the future and becoming a mercenary in Midgar, but before they get there they are run down by Shinra military. Zack is gunned down on a cliff overlooking Midgar city. They leave Rhek for dead. Afterward Rhek awakens and crawls up to Zack’s corpse. Upset, he relieves Zack of the Buster sword and looks down upon his next destination, Midgar city, where he’s first seen by Cysra, groggy, slumped over at the train station. That’s pretty much it for story line. All the gaps have been filled now and the story is complete. A masterpiece...

Next I headed to Cosmo Canyon for a final time and picked up a very good materia, Full Cure. I also watched Nanaki’s grandfather pass on, parting Ichorid with Limited Moon, his ultimate weapon. After that I made a quick stop over in Rocket town to get Cid’s ultimate weapon Venus’ Gospel. Then I went back to the waterfall where I met Lucrecia and she was gone but left behind were Vincent’s ultimate weapon Death Penalty and his final limit break Chaos. I already had gotten Yuffie’s weapon, Conformer from the downed airplane earlier. So now I had the best weapons and the final limit breaks for my 5 main party characters. All that was left was Rhek’s, gotta find Ultimate Weapon, he has my weapon and the key to opening the Ancient forest. Omnislash will just have to wait until Sephiroth unlocks it because I’m not going to go get 32,000 battle point at gold saucer...

Still a bit of grinding to go, I want to unlock all the limit breaks, which means killing a whole lot of enemies.