Of Grinding and Revisitation

Over the weekend, my wife and I have played a metric truckload of Final Fantasy VII, although we have done very little to move the game's plot along its sweeping path. We are now pretty much past the point of massive spoilers, and the road to the conclusion is more or less straightforward. However, like any game made by Square (with or without Enix), hours upon hours upon hours remain to be spent tying up the loose ends of side quests. Sandi has really gotten into Chocobo breeding, which can be a rather time-intensive process if you want high-caliber racing champions. I always wondered why the developers chose to place mandatory wait times on breeding with newborn Chocobos; for some reason, one bird we bred was not yet ready for breeding herself, whereas another born minutes earlier was. Perhaps the idea was for players to go do something else in the meantime -- like, say, grinding out the zettaton of AP required to unlock all the game's spells and abilities. Fortunately, my wife is even more gung-ho for this sort of thing than I am, so we have more mastered Materia than I ever did in my previous two runs at the title.

Once I am the only one left awake in the house, I have been diving back into the world of Rapture (or playing BioShock, for the uninitiated). I am still not a huge fan of first-person shooters, but the atmosphere of Ken Levine's last brainchild is tough to top. I put aside the game last autumn in favor of Mass Effect, unaware at the time that I would spend the better part of six months playing through that title using various character classes. Unfortunately, BioShock may suffer the same fate a second time if I fail to complete it in the next couple of weeks, since I hope to finagle myself a copy of Too Human on its release date such that I can finally activate this free month of Xbox Live I got with my replaced console and dive into some cooperative play. Well, that, and classes start back later this month.

Enjoy the coming week, and may your laser lenses stay clean.