PART 1 - **NEW** PART 1.1 - PART 1.2 - PART 1.3 - PART 2 - PART 3 - PART 4 - PART 5 - PART 6 - PART 7 - PART 8 - PART 9 - PART 10 - PART 11 - PART 12 - PART 13 - PART 14 - PART 15 - PART 16 - PART 17 - PART 18 - PART 19 FINALE

Chat has arrived at the foot of Gaea's Cliff and our next imminent challenge, reaching the top. As warned by the kindly old man in the rest hut, the conditions during the climb are brutally dangerous. Time spent outside exposed to the elements will steadily reduce Cloud's body temperature, and if it falls below 27 degrees he will collapse and be sent back to the shack, erasing all progress. Heat can only be restored by mashing square on the flat platforms, and would continue to drop during climbs. There is a relatively difficult dungeon weaved between the multiple ascents, with one save point about halfway up and another right before the boss. Failing any climbing section kicks us clear off the mountain to start all over.

This is a daunting task for chat. While boulderboss proved our ability to come together and mash to victory, it became clear that even flooding the queue with inputs could at best keep Cloud's warmth static, or only slightly dropping. Democracy as usual was far too slow, it allowed more repeat inputs but the vote delay nullified any benefit. And of course, any amount of trolling rendered this act completely impossible. After five failed attempts without even reaching the first cave of the dungeon, the decision was made to enact Turbo mode. We haven't used it in a while, so to recap briefly, turbo functions similar to anarchy except the inputs are repeated at a high rate. It will randomly jump between the last few inputs received, spamming them constantly. This would definitely get us through the freezing sections, but introduced its own separate wrinkles.

Turbo mode is a channel operator command that cannot be turned on or off at will by chat. We need to flag down someone toggle it for us, so part of the caveat is that we would have to leave it on until no longer needed. This meant doing the vast majority of the dungeon and its encounters with turbo enabled as well, significantly more hindrance than help. Fortunately, democracy still functions normally in turbo mode, allowing us to at least get critical menuing done. We absolutely cannot do turbo menus under any circumstances, the damage would be catastrophic and completely uncontrollable. This seemed like a fair tradeoff though and certainly doable with some cooperation. After a few failed attempts adjusting to the unique nuances of turbo input, chat has finally reached the first cave of the dungeon itself.

Gaea's Cliff Caves

There's some good loot in this area, including our crucial second ribbon, but cautious play would still be required to even get that far. Navigation in turbo is quite difficult to do accurately even solo, resulting in many wasted steps and exposing us to additional deadly encounters. Most enemies in the caves themselves aren't too frightening but with one notable exception. Our second fight against Stilva, a mini Materia Keeper palette swap, has him quickly cast Magic Breath and effortlessly one shot the party. Chat is unceremoniously booted back to the save point at the bottom of the cliff. We could be here a while.

We also faced an unexpected problem as a side effect of the recent disc swap. All our backup saves are still on disc 1, and any accidental or malicious directional inputs during the game over sequence could result in attempting to load one. Turbo exacerbates this danger significantly. Sure enough, after our first game over in the caves, an old save is loaded and chat becomes soft locked on the disc swap screen, requiring op intervention to reset. As soon as feasible these saves would need to be overwritten to prevent this from happening. Game overs and reloads were always an anxious event, but since causing op intervention is a bannable offense, this wasn't a huge issue throughout the run.

Manually reset and properly loaded, chat tackles the dangerous slopes again, only to promptly fall once more to another devastating Magic Breath. Clearly some setup will be required to mitigate this, so the slow painful process of democracy menus is properly confronted before setting out again. Cloud receives the Dragon Armlet, allowing him to partially negate the deadly elemental attack, and slides his now unnecessary elemental fire combo over to Vincent's armor instead. Vince has been neglected far too long and finally receives the equipment upgrades we've been carrying for him, as well as a dose of fury to juice his limit. Better prepared, we save and begin yet trip up the mountain.

Chat clears the opening cave and can finally approach the next climbing segment, but this time menus are set within the climb for path selection and temperature continues to drop while choosing these options, further increasing the difficulty. Before long, the all too familiar warmth of the rest hut awaits chat, but critically we have completed the first cave and retrieved its valuable items. This is progress we can save, and we do so diligently, allowing us to dash through the next attempt and proceed directly to the second climb. It still takes multiple attempts to reach the next cave, but chat perseveres and the midway save point is finally reached. We are now permanently past the first two climbing sections and can just intentionally wipe to load this save if we're chucked off the mountain again. It's been several hours but the worst was seemingly behind us now. At least, until we got hosted.

Panic set in as chat watched the viewer count skyrocket, leaping to over 12,000 before settling down at around 3000. We had been hosted by a prominent streamer and it really couldn't have come at a worse time, multiple hours into one of our most challenging tasks yet. That said the vast majority of these newcomers did not transition over to our main chat, content amongst themselves in the host's. These extra viewers would slowly bleed away over time and overall the impact was minimal, but it added even more stress to an already grueling sequence.

A lot of time is lost here, particularly since failing the upcoming climb requires an intentional wipe and it turns out we're getting pretty hard to kill these days. Several attempts later, we overcome the vicious freezing elements and reach the last save point. Chat can now breathe a heavy sigh of relief. Only the dungeon boss remains, and with cliff scaling done we can finally disable turbo and proceed as accustomed. Schizo can be a pretty tough battle, but we've done a fair amount of unintentional grinding getting up here and we're well equipped, so ultimately this encounter presents little difficulty and Death Gigas Vince simply carries the fight. It has been over five hours since our first climbing attempt, but finally the hunt for Sephiroth can continue.

North Crater

Vowing next time to bring a coat, for real, chat has conquered repeatedly freezing to death. The following section is a bit of a mini dungeon of its own, but the encounters are relatively trivial. Tifa is forced into the party at this point and slots over Yuffie since Vincent is quickly becoming our new carry anyway. She requires some light setup since she hasn't been touched in days, but once done we proceed swiftly to our next objective. The only real challenge of this area lies in the walls of wind barring our path. Crossing these sections requires timed inputs to dash across while the currents are calm, failing and smacking the wind wall forces the party into a battle. There are three of these barriers to overcome in total, each one adding an extra component to dodge.

As could be expected, actually timing the inputs properly proves effectively impossible, but next to boulders this was nothing. It would just take time, and the forced fights for failing were not at all threatening and provided a bit of free XP, especially for Tifa. She would soon be leading the party and powering her up a bit wouldn't hurt anyway. Between the second and third walls lies a boss fight with yet another incarnation of Sephiroth's mom, Jenova-DEATH. This fight presents no major issues, between our ribbons and Tifa's Fire Armlet granting absorb, all the boss attacks are effectively nullified and much like the previous Jenova we just spam her down.

After the fight, chat reclaims the Black Materia and makes the wise decision to entrust it to anybody who isn't Cloud. Red is chosen to bear this burden, mostly because he's nearby. We're thankfully given a chance to save before confronting the third and final wall. There are three different elements to dodge this time, but compared to the hellish frozen nightmare chat had just escaped this segment is almost refreshing in comparison. About an hour after entering the crater, chat clears yet another ornery force of nature and can finally claim their prize, massive lore dumps and sweet FMVs.

We see another version of the Nibelheim flashback experienced days ago back in Kalm. This time featuring a black hair but similarly spiky fellow taking Cloud's expected place within the visions. This proceeds to completely break poor Cloud's brain, unable to reconcile the differing versions of events. We next see Sephiroth's final resting place, nestled precariously above a chamber housing the WEAPONs. The Shinra crew are already here being useless, again begging the question as to why Rufus needed Cid's plane anyway when he had a perfectly good airship just sitting there. Red is tricked into rejoining the crew and relinquishes the Black Materia to Cloud, an objectively terrible idea, and sure enough our hero proceeds to hand the destructive mcguffin directly to Sephiroth for the second time in a row. The planet defending kaiju are roused by the pending calamity, Cloud is dumped into the lifestream, and the rest of the party have been captured by Shinra to be put to death. Coming here was maybe not the best idea.

We're around 95 hours in now, just shy of four days total. Next time, we escape Shinra captivity yet again and can finally take flight, fully released to the world map. But those same skies herald an ominous fate. I had intended to cover more ground this update but the cliff sequence was more involved than I remembered, probably some repressed trauma there.

As a side note, I plan to go back and redo Part 1 of these updates sometime soon. It suffers from my ill conceived notion of fitting all this into one post, and isn't up to the same level of quality the following updates established. It'll likely be split in half, partially rewritten and expanded. I'll leave the original up for posterity's sake anyway. And as always, thanks for reading!

PART 1 - **NEW** PART 1.1 - PART 1.2 - PART 1.3 - PART 2 - PART 3 - PART 4 - PART 5 - PART 6 - PART 7 - PART 8 - PART 9 - PART 10 - PART 11 - PART 12 - PART 13 - PART 14 - PART 15 - PART 16 - PART 17 - PART 18 - PART 19 FINALE