There was an announced power outage throughout most of the day today, so I had to fall by to my trusty PSP and my slightly lest trusty DS Lite for my gaming needs.
The thing is, my whole “no more piracy” thing kind off makes me not want to play most of the pirated games I have on my PSP, simply because I know I could fall back to one of the PSX games I actually own and be “legit” like that, at least in my mind. I’m still technically pirating the game, since I haven’t bought it on the PSN, but owning the old physical copy makes it OK in my book, and I don’t care what anyone has to say about it.
Anyway, I’ve been playing the game a couple of months ago, but didn’t write anything here back then, so I didn’t go all the way from the beginning today. I started out in Midgard, quite early, at the point where Shinra destroys a sector and blames it on the Avalanche. Aeris (NOT Aerith) gets taken by the Turks the rest of the team is stuck not knowing where to go next.
The Shinra building is the central point of the early game.
The Turks have also shown interest in Aeris ever since they tracked her down. She managed to avoid them until today, though. Today, she had Marlene with her, so she was forced to go with the Turks in exchange for Marlene’s safety. Upon hearing this, the gang decides to rescue Aeris, but not before Barret asks Elmyra to take care of Marlene for a while longer.Since Aeris was taking care of Marlene, Cloud, Barret and Tifa decide to visit Aeris’ mother, Elmyra. Things aren’t the way they seem though. Elmyra tells them she’s not really Aeris’ mother. She found her as a little girl next to the dead body of her real mother on a train station and took her as her own. It was obvious from the start that Aeris wasn’t normal. She would hear voices and talk about how the planet whispers to her. She even knew Elmyra’s husband died in Wutai before the official news arrived.
Since there’s no official route to the top plate and the Shinra headquarters, the gang decides to go to the Wall Market and see if they can find an alternative route. Sure enough, the collapse of the sector set a huge power cable loose, creating a possibility to climb to the top plate. A set of batteries was required to make the route completely passable, but the local weapons shop owner provided those.
Poor Barret. Always the comedic relief.
In any case, the gang reached floor 59 and now needed to get access to the rest of the floors. The problem was, the leadership was located on floors 60 to 65, making it extremely difficult to navigate through the security. Barret wanted to barge in through the lobby of the Shinra building directly, but Cloud and Tifa were smarter than that and decided they should take the stairs through the maintenance wing of the building. It’s an extremely tall building, though, so Barret had issues with climbing it to the top, but they eventually managed to get there. This part of the game was extremely memorable to me as a kid, even though, what with playing the game in German back then, I couldn’t understand most of it.