Airhead wants to be fair and hear Mr. T’s side of the story, but Gay Lion chimes in with what everyone is thinking: “I heard that the murders at the Battle Arena were done by a man with a gun-arm. …Was that you?” This is the part where I would normally say, “No, it was that other guy with the gun-arm, dumbass.” But in this case, it just so happens that there is another man with a gun-arm. Everyone sticks around to hear Mr. T regale them with yet another flashback sequence, undaunted by the dead body lying several feet away or the fact that Mr. T shot the guy for seemingly no reason.
Four years ago, Mr. T was on his way back from his sexy getaway with Dyne. Supposedly, he was “visiting a Mako Reactor being built,” but we know that’s just a cover story. Mr. T and Dyne are strolling along an old mine cart bridge in the flashback, and I recognize this as the screen right after the Corel reactor. Suddenly the Village Headman comes running out to inform them of the attack. This news makes Mr. T and Dyne jump off the bridge, something that characters can only do in cut scenes, apparently. Miraculously surviving this fall, they run to a nearby overlook and stare at the flaming village in the distance. I think Mr. T is supposed to be shaking his fists at the sky as the camera pans dramatically upward, but it looks like he’s having a seizure. A moment later, he collapses on his knees, clearly giving everyone up for dead. But Dyne rubs his shoulder soothingly, telling him that the town isn’t fully burned down yet, “Everyone’s waiting! Let’s go back to the village!” Dyne says as if expecting a happy homecoming instead of charred corpses.
I’d also like to note that it’s very clear from this view that the town of Corel is surrounded by mountains. If, in fact, Corel transformed into Corel Prison, this means that the entire surrounding mountain range turned into desert in just four years. But the shack with the ornamental cabinet is still there. I’m not sure what to say about this.
It’s below zero in my neck of the woods right now — this doesn’t seem so bad.
The urgency of Dyne’s words combined with a white screen fool me into thinking I’m about to be teleported to the village. Instead, the scene fades back in with Mr. T and Dyne still standing below the bridge. This is so we don’t miss the tragic shooting of the Village Headman by a Shinra soldier, right after he begs the two lovebirds to save the village. Yeah, I think it’s a little late for that. Dyne quickly runs under the bridge toward the back of the screen. Mr. T does not immediately follow him because three more Shinra soldiers arrive and shoot at him from the bridge. He does a little mincing dance in place, somehow causing all the bullets to miss him. It’s like there are four Yunas in this game. Finally, Mr. T decides that maybe he should run for it, and follows Dyne to the edge of the screen. The bullets continue to miss the two of them.
But oh noes! At this very instant, the evil whore Scarlet shows up, bitching out the soldiers for their shitty aim. She grabs a gun from one of the guys and knocks him off the bridge. We don’t know what’s about to happen here — on one hand, Scarlet is not an unnamed NPC, so she is much more likely to have decent aim. On the other hand, she’s a chick, and chicks suck at shooting. Ordering the remaining three soldiers to cover her — like Mr. T and Dyne have any weapons at this point — she starts blasting away at the pair. Since they’re standing next to a huge drop-off, this means that one of them has to fall off the edge. In this case, it’s Dyne, and Mr. T catches him with one hand just in time.
Rather than doing something like pulling Dyne to safety, Mr. T chooses to have a conversation with the guy. It’s your typical “Hold on, you’re going to make it and not die horribly” fare. “Eleanor…and Marlene… They all waitin’ on us…” Mr. T namedrops. Eleanor is, presumably, Dyne’s beard wife and look — our first mention of Marlene! The camera switches to a close-up of Scarlet and the soldiers, and this would be a lot more effective if Scarlet’s face didn’t consist of a flesh-toned block with a pair of eyes painted on it. Or if she were actually holding a gun.
Fantastic.
The view immediately switches to Mr. T and Dyne. Mr. T is holding Dyne’s left hand with his right hand, and the trail of bullets passes directly through their linked hands, blasting them to smithereens and forcing Mr. T to let go. Dyne falls into the bottomless chasm and the screen goes black in his memory.
Back in the present, Mr. T explains that since his arm was shot off, he eventually decided to get a handy dandy gun attachment. If he’d chosen a vibrator attachment, he probably would have been a bit more popular with the ladies (or the men). I’m just sayin’. His intention was to use the gun to get revenge against the evil Shinra corporation. Little did he know that he’d also be using it to destroy spider motorcycles and Terrence and Philip heads as well.
‘The first time I used the bathroom, I blew my dick clean off.’
“Back then, I heard the doc say there was another man who got the same operation as me,” Mr. T continues. “But, his was the left arm.” The correct conclusion is that Dyne is the other guy. So let me get this straight — two guys independently decided to get the same bizarre operation. And these guys just happened to be two best friends who received their injuries at the exact same moment. There are a lot of convenient coincidences here. The only way this would make the slightest bit of sense is if Mr. T and Dyne made some kind of agreement in the past about how they should totally get super duper custom gun attachments if their arms ever got shot off. And that doesn’t make sense either, so it’s kind of a moot point.
Also, I love how Mr. T just knows that Dyne has to be the other guy, like no one else in the universe could possibly have an injury that would require an artificial arm of some sort. Regardless of the eye-rolling contrivances here, Mr. T is right and it is Dyne, who somehow survived both the fall and the blood loss from his terrible wound. Now I’m wondering how the both of them managed to get to a doctor in time — Dyne because he was down a hole somewhere and Mr. T because Scarlet and the others were shooting at him.
I have to stop this before my brain explodes. Tita assumes that since Dyne also suffered the exact same losses as Mr. T that he’ll want to fight alongside them against Shinra. Not so fast, says Mr. T, without elaborating. “I gotta ‘pologize to Dyne before I can rest in peace,” he decides, and that’s why the others just need to stay the fuck out of his bidness (as the localization team would say).
Bitch follows this with an emotional outburst: “Do whatever you want… Is that what you want to hear? Well, I can’t let you do it. Because, if you die on me, I’m gonna have nightmares.” For Bitch, this seemingly insensitive comment is the equivalent of saying, “Although Sephiroth is definitely the hottest man on the planet, I sure wouldn’t mind having you as a backup boyfriend.” How heartwarming.
Some extremely confusing dialogue ensues — it sounds like they’re trying to talk Mr. T out of committing suicide, but then Tita says something about being just like Mr. T and I’m not really sure what’s going on here. The result of all this is that Bitch and one other character will be going along to help Mr. T confront Dyne, who is apparently hanging around somewhere and is probably the one responsible for all the carnage. Except for the one guy we saw Mr. T kill. I’m sure it will all be explained why Dyne suddenly showed up after all these years and decided to go on a rampage. I’m looking forward to that, since everything else has made so much sense in this recap.
Oh, and I think you can guess who I choose as the third character. Who better to witness an epic showdown between best friends with phallic arm missiles than a fortune-telling machine who uses a megaphone in battle?
The trio wanders all over the God damn prison yard before finally tracking down Dyne at — what else? — the edge of a giant chasm. You’d think the guy would learn to stay away from those. There are also two homemade grave markers right at the edge, too, which doesn’t seem like the best idea. The burned out house nearby lends a nice atmosphere as well, but I’m focusing on the Ring-style well located almost directly between the two men. With all the vengeful souls lurking around this place, I really would not want to go anywhere near that shit.
“…Dyne …Is that you?” Mr. T wonders. No, it’s some other guy who looks just like Dyne, dresses exactly like Dyne, and has a gun attachment on his arm. Just to be annoying, Dyne keeps shooting the damn gun into the air. There’s some standard uncomfortable reunion dialogue as Dyne limps toward Mr. T. “I always hoped I’d be able to see you again someday…” Mr. T tries to get romantic. “I knew you were alive somewhere…we had the same operation.” How much better would this game be if it were a sex change operation? Just as Mr. T is about to suggest that the two of them run off together and purchase some new, sexier prosthetics, Dyne fires at Mr. T, and I don’t mean that in a euphemistic way. Mr. T doesn’t even flinch, so Dyne either missed, or Mr. T has an extremely high pain threshold. Since he’s in this game, the latter is a definite possibility.
“What’s that? ……I hear her voice,” Dyne says, demonstrating that he’s gone absolutely batshit insane. Like the random Gold Saucer massacre didn’t tell us that already. Mr. T emits a string of ellipses followed by a question mark, which can only mean, “Why do I always have to deal with fuckers who hear voices?” “I hear her voice, Eleanor’s voice. Begging me…not to hate your rotten guts,” Dyne continues. Well, at least he ended up with a non-violent voice, which is a nice change. I’d just like to point out that my friend’s rabbit is named Eleanor, so during this scene, I’m totally picturing Dyne’s wife as a fat black bunny. Dyne explains that the reason he didn’t stalk and kill Mr. T long ago is because of the influence of his lagomorph wife.
“…I know I was stupid. I’m not asking you to forgive me,” Mr. T grovels. He just wants to know why Dyne suddenly decided to go on a murder spree. “Are the people killed going to understand ‘why’? Are the people of Corel going to understand just hearing Shinra’s excuses?” Dyne raves. “I don’t CARE what the reason is! All they give us are artillery and stupid excuses… What’s left is a world of despair and emptiness…” So…Dyne doesn’t want to explain his motives for murder because Shinra sucks? Am I the only confused one here?
After all that, Dyne is all, “Well, okay, I guess I’ll tell you” making that other nonsensical outburst pretty much pointless. While Mr. T has focused his anger on Shinra, Dyne, on the other hand, has gone off the deep end and wants to “destroy everything.” He punctuates his list of things he wants to destroy (like “everything” didn’t quite explain it for us) by shooting off his gun. The last several shots are fired directly into Mr. T, who does flinch this time. Unlike all the other people Dyne riddled with bullets, Mr. T doesn’t die. Which is probably the least bullshitty thing about this entire scene, sadly.
“I got nothing left in this world. Corel, Eleanor…… Marlene……” Dyne sobs. Now before any of you start to think that Dyne has some sick pedophilic obsession with Mr. T’s daughter, it turns out that Marlene is actually Dyne’s daughter. Marlene has two daddies. Mr. T’s all, “Um, dude, Marlene’s alive.” Although he doesn’t bother to apologize for not tracking Dyne down and letting him know that fact earlier. Seriously, the guy’s been sitting around for the last four years thinking his kid is dead, which is part of the reason he’s totally fucked up. Assuming that Dyne’s been in Corel Prison — formerly Corel — this entire time, he couldn’t be that tough to find. Mr. T is kind of a butthole.
But even this happy news can’t bring Dyne back from madness. Which I could kind of understand if Marlene was one of those really annoying, bratty kids, but she’s not all that bad. Probably because she doesn’t have many lines. Rather than accompany Mr. T back to Midgar to see his daughter, Dyne decides that the only logical course of action is to fight Mr. T. His reasoning? Because his dead wife is “alone all by herself” — as opposed to being all alone with other people — and Dyne needs to kill Marlene so that Eleanor will have company. Well, at least he’s up front about it unlike all those parents who kill their children and then claim it’s an accident. “Dyne…are you insane!?” Mr. T shrieks, as if Dyne has said anything in the last two minutes that wasn’t 100% fucked up.
Probably not, since she’s probably all rotted and stuff.
Cue more bullet wounds for Mr. T. “Stop, Dyne! I can’t die yet!” he begs the guy who just threatened to murder his own kid. It should come as no surprise that Dyne doesn’t listen, no matter how hard Mr. T pleads with him. Bitch tries to step in, just to remind us that he’s still there with Jesus, probably munching on popcorn to pass the time. But no, Mr. T reminds him once again that this is his own problem to handle. So fucking handle it already.
He does, via a one-on-one “boss” battle. There’s nothing particularly noteworthy about the battle — as you would expect, it’s just two guys taking turns shooting their guns at each other, with loads of phallic imagery. Because the best way to fight with guns is to stand face-to-face and alternate shots. This extremely natural fight sequence finally ends with a groan from Dyne, who makes a jacking off motion with his hand before falling to one knee.
This fight is just what Dyne needed to trigger some self-reflection. “…it wasn’t just my arm…… back then……” he wheezes. “I lost something irreplaceable. I don’t know where I went wrong…” What we’re supposed to get from this scene is that both men’s lives were royally fucked up when the village burned down and their wives died. But while Mr. T became an angry person who kills Shinra soldiers and random guys in prisons but wants to save the Planet, Dyne became an angry person who kills Shinra soldiers and random guys in prisons but wants to destroy the Planet. See the rich parallels?