Game:

Final Fantasy VII (1997)

Duration: 7:22

703 views

15

This segment was blatant horror.

Usually, there is any one thing that can go wrong in a segment, for example failing to steal a certain item in one try, being unable to skip a random battle, screwing up a minigame, getting into (too many) world map encounters, wasting too much time menuing or getting stuck while walking around.

But not so in this segment. In this segment just about everything can go wrong.

First of all, one has to make it to Icicle Inn without a random battle. As simple as that may sound, it was horribly aggravating due to how world map encounters work. Apparently, they are triggered depending on (among others) one's movement on the world map.
While this may suggest that one can exploit this by finding an encounter-free route and then simply taking this route in all following attempts, which seems to be indeed possible, one has to replicate that route very accurately for this to work, which proved to be almost impossible.

I did not keep track of it, but it feels like I had to spend on average at least 10 attempts in order only to arrive at Icicle Inn in the first place.

Icicle Inn is a beautifully shabby place. Not only do its residents deem growing trees an architectural highlight, in particular when they are growing through their living room floor, but even worse they rejoice in decorating their nice little dumpster town with cats and dogs, which they just have to put by their doors and snowboards, so that the poor weird, spikey-haired stranger has a hard time breaking into their houses, stealing their winter sport tools and running away afterwards. Thanks for the hospitality!

Seriously, I got stuck on the cat or the dog countless times.
I grabbed the Vaccine because I will use it in a wicked boss battle in a later segment. Besides, it takes only one second to pick it up.

The next obstacle in this segment was the snowboarding.
I got quite consistent at it after practicing it for twelve hours without interruption (Did I mention I hate most minigames?). Still, I only continued here when I made it to the end sub 2'30 and crashless, which was the case half of the time.

After the snowboarding, more fun in the snow shall commence.
Like the Cave of the Gi, Great Glacier can be completed without freestyling. In fact, it is even easier to find a suitable route.
Still, the last battle skip on that nearly pitch white snow field screen was rather difficult to execute.

The source of greatest pain was without a doubt the Snow battle. Stealing that Circlet in one attempt is a rare occurrence, even though it is much more likely (around 8%) than stealing two Right Arms in two attempts was (around 1%).
However, the two Right Arm stealing segments were composed almost exclusively of stealing these two Right Arms. This segment on the other hand is not at all. Getting to this very battle in one out of dozens attempts only to reset here because Countess Snow the Ugly does not endorse a quick theft is very infuriating.

But that's not even all.
As I said, there is still a rather difficult random battle skip after Snow and the entire snowfield passage.

Now, that snowfield is regarded as part of the world map, which means that encounters are almost impossible to manipulate there. Sometimes I passed that area without any random encounter at all, sometimes I got three.

Initially, I was going to accept only an attempt without a random battle in the snowfield but that seemed just too frustrating, and I decided to accept up to one random encounter if I would escape from it very quickly.

Finally, there is Mr. Holzoff's hut, home to one of the most annoying savepoints so far and to a short menu sequence. Unfortunately, my menuing was far from perfect but I was not in the right mood to spend another month on a 3-second improvement at best.

04:13:46

Sorry for the framerate overlay that pops up a few times. I turned it on to see how much the snowboard minigame was lagging (I had to reset twice because it slowed down so much I crashed into a wall) but forgot to turn it off again.

Other Statistics