I had a right old laugh when I loaded up Lex's save. This is where I started:
Since the location was rather unusual, I decided to open the menu to see what other tricks he had played. This was the most obvious one:
Healing wasn't easy either - this was the state of our inventory, notably lacking any Phoenix Down:
How about Restore materia? Not here (notice that Lex trashed all three copies of our All materia):
But what's this? Sneaky, Lex, but not sneaky enough!
With Cloud healed up I headed back to Kalm, since the inn there is only 20 gil compared to 100 gil at the Chocobo Farm (our cash supply was running quite low as well). With all three characters on their feet again, I headed outside to learn Matra Magic and scrape a few gil together in the process.
One thing I've learnt about Custom Sweepers is that they never appear when you're looking for them. I must have escaped from a dozen battles before they showed up, while Lex's first encounter on the world map yesterday was with a pair of them. At least I managed to steal a pair of Atomic Scissors, which I sold for 700 gil. I bought one Phoenix Down and a few potions as emergency supplies for my journey to Fort Condor.
I stopped off at the Chocobo farm, not to catch a Chocobo but just to get the Choco/Mog materia. You know how I've said that I learn something new about the game every time I play? Today I learned you can run here:
Small pleasures.
Anyway, I got over the marshes on foot, as always, but then I had to - gasp - do a bit of grinding for gil in the Mythril Mines, since I wanted to visit Fort Condor. I continued in the forests on the other side of the mine, and I managed to find
Yuffie Force in my second encounter, which must be a record for me.
I visited Fort Condor a total of three times in this chapter, completing
all the battles available to me. I had to sell some more things to pay for it. I can't make everyone else carry on the sidequest when it's their turn to play, but at least I won't be the one who gave up our chance of completing it 100%.
Some of the battles have ridiculously short windows: I had to leave Junon twice with Cloud as my only party member, and that's not even the worst example (that would be battle 7).
Bottomswell was super easy with Choco/Mog and Flamethrower. Afterwards I bought three Tranquilizers just in case someone gets stuck on a boss later in the playthrough and needs to give everyone sadness. Or Force can use one of them to make Force feel better on the cargo ship.
Since there's no fighting at the beginning of the next chapter, I didn't think there was much point in trying to leave things in a precarious situation like Lex did for me. I did put in a couple of 'easter eggs', though.
I'll PM you the memory card file shortly, Force.
I had fun, but it was too short. I'm looking forward to (hopefully) having another chapter later on.
