Mog’s Fantastic Journey: All of the Towns and Cities of FFVII And What I Think of Them Part 3

Hey dudes, remember me? I’m that dude who was doing that commentary on towns but he forgot and didn’t do it since forever! Real talk though, I was sort of under the impression that nobody cared about this, so I slacked on it as well. In a way to try to make up for it though, I’ll ramp this up to an update every day or two days at the most, to keep your eyes glued and to those with short attention spans, keep you interested. After this, I’d love to extend my commentary to other things like characters or even something else, but please, show your love! I need appreciation, ya know? Also, I want to emphasize that I encourage DISCUSSION on this. Please by all means, discuss, discuss, discuss! I always bring forth interesting questions for you guys to ponder and discuss among yourselves! Anywho, let’s get started.

Fort Condor

I could only find one decent image of Fort Condor. Oh well.

Yeah, so Fort Condor. It’s a pretty interesting place, I guess. From a gameplay perspective, the only reason this place exists is for the Fort Condor minigame, which in itself is pretty decent. It costs quite a bit of money, and you have to keep going back and forth to it to get decent prizes, but hey, it’s one of the more overlooked minigame experiences of FF7 because of how costly, finite, and out of the way it is. Luckily though, it becomes a crucial plot point for the Huge Materia further in the game, and you get the awesome Phoenix Materia for winning!

I have to wonder though, why does the Shinra Army have trouble (or rather why are they taking so long) to capture this place? They don’t have the Wutai Army nor Old AVALANCHE to distract their distribution of power anymore, so by the time FF7 rolls around, there should be nothing stopping Shinra from stomping all those dudes out. Never really thought about it up until now. I’m doing Junon next. As in, right now. Stay tuned.

Junon

Earlier I said Midgar was my favorite town in the game. Junon is very, very close. If Midgar is the rich older businessman with the hot wife that runs shit, Junon is the good looking playboy underwear model that’s banging the businessman’s wife on the side. Junon is fucking swagger overload. Rufus resided over this city during his tenure as Vice President, and if you ask me, he got the better deal (and he seems to think so too, it seems that throughout FF7, Rufus operates from Junon).

The first thing that stands out about this city is its giant cannon. If any of you remember, Square capitalized this in it’s advertising of FF7 by having the above two page rendering of Junon featured invideo game magazines with just the text ‘Final Fantasy VII’. I am absolutely positive this alone influenced scores of FFVII sales. The final nail that made me absolutely fall in love with the city is this scene

Yo seriously what the fuck!? If you don’t like this scene you have no soul. It’s pretty powerful, because this is one of the only instances of the game where I was actually rooting for Shinra. “GO SHINRA, KICK HIS ASS, DON’T LET WEAPON PUNK YOU OUT”. I also got a lot of respect for Rufus as well, who’s so badass he just watched the entire fight from his giant ass office window. It’s pretty awesome, man.

The whole thing made me think, WTF does Junon need all of that artillery for? Yes, during FF7, one of the townspeople mention the city was built during the Wutai War, so I suppose Wutai, or at least it’s navy, must have been absolutely monstrous to necessitate a giant artillery city. I just wish that was more elaborated upon, every time SE gets the chance to elaborate more about the Wutai War and the capabilities of Wutai they always punk out. Bah!

NEXT, COSTA DEL SOL! Keep your eyes open, everyone.