Well, that was harder than it needed to
be...
My inclination is to say it's because
of the way the game's programmed, but it's probably just as fair to
say that I suck at it. After all, if memory serves, I have admitted
to being horrible at button-mashing games. That's one of the bigger
reasons why I took a liking to RPGs over platformers and fighting
games once I started playing them.
I know for sure there's at least one
sequence kind of like this in Square's SNES title Crono Trigger,
where Crono has to win a soup-eating contest with a future party
member in order to get an item required to advance the plot. At
least in CT, the game
will just let you have the item after a half-dozen tries, saying that
the hero wins for staying in the contest long enough.
In
this case, though, we're required to just keep trying until Laguna
knocks the Ruby Dragon out because he was too dumb to run the hell
away with the director and co-star. It wouldn't have been so bad if
this part of the game didn't seem so cheap. Not only can the dragon
take out Laguna in three hits, at most, while Laguna needs at least
nine to do in the dragon, the game's programmed in such a way that
Laguna seems like he's really not much better with that sword than I
am with my shotgun when I'm hunting. At least I can claim that my
reflexes are on the slow side even on a good day. Half or two-thirds
of the time, hitting the attack button just leaves Laguna standing
there, posing with his sword, acting like that'll be enough to scare
the dragon into submission when it's really just going to bite him
and take his health meter down by a third. At least the defense
button can just be held down to work, which really comes in handy.
I
don't know how many tries it took me to finish that part of the
fight. If I'd realized that it really was going to be that much of a
pain in the ass, I might have tried to count, just so I'd know. But
hey, at least I beat the damed thing finally, and Laguna manages to
run away. Kiros shows up a moment later to toss him his gun and join
the fight against what I'm assuming is the same red dragon, though
there's an implication that there's actually more than one around
where this movie scene is being shot.
When
Laguna and Kiros kill their red dragon in a normal fight sequence and
escape, Squall tries to wake back up in the game's present day, but
Ellone breaks in and says she needs to keep him as Laguna for a
little while longer. Her reasoning is that she wants to make Laguna
go back to Winhill so he can be with Raine, who's going to die from
complications of having a second child. Instead, we see Laguna at
the orphanage, talking to Edea about some missing kid, presumably
Ellone. When Laguna and Edea talk about how they think the Eshtar
military took Ellone because they think she's the new Sorceress,
Squall wakes up and somehow connects wanting to hear Rinoa's voice
again to talking to Edea about where the White SeeD Ship is because
they'd been dumb enough to put her on it in the course of Disk Two.
Yeah,
there's a heavy time-travel element to the plot of this game. Ellone
telepathically tells Squall that she just learned the hard way that
they can't change the past and then fades back to wherever it is
she's at right now. Squall calls out to Ellone, begging her to send
him back the couple days or however long it's been since their fight
with Edea so he can keep Rinoa from going into her coma. How exactly
that's going to work, I don't know, but I guess that finding Ellone
is the key to that. How Squall expects Edea to have the scoop on
Ellone's whereabouts is beyond me. From what I can tell, the
connection between the White SeeDs and Edea was broken when Squall
and the others knocked the Sorceress out of her, but maybe that's
just me making stupid guesses. These are things we'll have to find
out next time, though, because this part of the game caused me enough
confusion that I wanted to get it written about before I gave myself
too much to remember.
The
thing I'm wondering about this time is just why the hell Laguna and
Kiros are running around and out of money anyway. I mean, yeah, they
weren't exactly the most popular guys in Winhill while they were
there, but at least they had something like steady jobs while they
were there. One would have thought that there'd have been some
compromise that allowed them to stay and defend the town while until
enough of the local militia had come back and healed up from the war
to take over. And what the hell happened to that travel writer thing
Laguna wanted to do when he got out of the military? I know first
hand that things don't always go as planned, but since he's on the
road anyway, and one would think they've got the ability to file
reports remotely, I must wonder why there's nobody willing to give
him a couple hundred gold per article for that.
Anyway,
I'm hoping some of this confusion will get sorted out before too much
longer. Or that I at least get more things posted. I can't believe
I went almost two whole weeks without posting anything, video game
related or not. Kinda gotta work on that again, I think.
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