Game:

Final Fantasy VII (1997)

Duration: 1:45

298 views

5

This was intense.

And annoying...

Once in a while, hitting you like a cold, hard, used snowboard, a segment is hard not because of its randomness but exclusively because of the technical perfection required.

This is exactly what can be said about this segment.
As a a matter of fact, there is no randomness at all involved. As long as I am able to skip the first 2 and the last 2 battles, everything is fine.
I manipulated the third battle in between those skips to always be a Side Attack as skipping that battle as well would not have been efficient (I ended up having to skip another battle just seconds afterwards).

Even though skipping random battles is generally not THAT hard when abstaining from freestyling, it most certainly was here, and that first wooden bridge screen is why.

Normally, when I make up a route for skipping random battles, I start by finding a non-freestyle route before consequently optimizing and memorizing it. Afterwards, I take that route for the first time and run until the first random battle occurs. I escape from it and make a screenshot of the exact position Cloud/Tifa/Cid is at after the battle in order to open the menu on that same position the next time. From then on, I simply iterate that procedure until I have tracked down all random battles on that route.
Finally, when I know of all the spots to skip random battles on, I start practicing the skips until I can consistently execute them at least half of the time.

Unfortunately, this was much easier said than done this time because the wooden bridge screen is so terribly zoomed out that merely finding the right spots turned out to be basically looking for pixels. Even worse, knowing the right spots is only the easy part, for being able to open the menu on these spots with such a horrendous camera position was more or less just based on guessing. Even after hours of practicing the wooden bridge screen, I could skip the first two random battles in only one out of five times or so.

Unfortunately, even still worse, in order to force a side attack in the third battle, I had to make sure the battle count since the last hard reset was equal to a certain number. What this means is that I could not simply get another attempt in just 20 seconds after a failed one. Instead, after every failed attempt, I first had to do a hard reset, load my file, get into 5 random encounters and trigger a soft reset by dying in the fifth random battle before I could try this segment again.
Yeah, it took me twice as long to set up the segment as the actual segment lasts...

For good measure, two more random battles had to be skipped and a rather difficult menuing sequence was yet to be performed at the very end.

05:06:06

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