Poor, sweet Jeanne. She returned, the prodigal daughter, to recapping YRP’s adventures in the land of Spira, her heart bursting with light and hope. (No, not really.) And what did Spira give to her as thanks? The Sphere Break tournament, the words “climactic passion” emerging from Tobli’s beak, and Exposition!Man casually tossing off to Yuna that Tightass doesn’t have to stay dead forever. Hey, game, stop trying to scare off my recapping partner. I can’t handle you alone.

I pick up exactly where Jeanne left our girls, in the Thunder Plains. But I’m not looking forward to the remainder of their business here, and therefore have them climb back aboard El Celsioso and get the hell out of there. Instead, I opt to spend 40 minutes or so tracking down a couple missing Blue Bullets from the Mi’ihen Highroad and Lesbianc’s basement, leveling up, and generally reacquainting myself with the gameplay in a low-stakes environment in which I can easily gloss over dying to something stupid. (Which I manage to ruin by telling you about it. Nice!) This would be boring footage for me to sit through, but watching it on double speed has a delightful side effect: chipmunk voices. Normally, Yuna derping, “Hi there!” like she’s trying to get a Queen Coeurl to buy her a mojito would just make me hate her (more), but chipmunk mode has an almost supernatural ability to make me laugh. And Paine nearly sounds like she’s enjoying herself when she squeaks, “This is the part where you get [scissored].” Well, I suppose she would be.

Once I’ve put off my homework for long enough, the ladies return to the Thunder Plains, blowing past Shinra as he plops down a commsphere in a random crater by the save point. An Al Bhed guy asks if they’re back to calibrate the lightning rod towers, and tells them he’ll be at the Travel Agency if they need any help. He could help by doing it his own damn self and not asking three untrained teenagers to do it, but a man who is pawning off his job at least has one to pawn off, and that’s a rare and precious gift in post-Sin Spira. But that brings us to these towers. Jeanne very wisely said nah to this exercise back in chapter 2, so why am I not following suit? Well, cool story: I misread my guide and briefly thought I needed to at least attempt to calibrate every tower for a tiny sliver of percentage points. I quickly realized my error, but too late! A paranoia had already blossomed inside my mind, and it screamed, NO, THE GUIDE IS WRONG, IT’S WRONG ALL THE GODDAMN TIME. What if I failed to appease the mini-game gods, and all our striving for the glory of the Almighty One Hundred Percent were for naught? So I fucking did it anyway. You really don’t have to do it. Don’t be me.

Now that I’ve both whined about calibration and confirmed that it’s totally unnecessary, what does it actually entail? One gal takes charge at each tower, where she is tasked with a different variety of timed button-mashing. Rikku, at this first tower by the save point, must rapid-fire enter the buttons she’s shown. Yuna, at hers, has to play a Simon-style memory game to correctly input her commands in the correct order. And Paine’s towers require her to select the correct flashing button out of three symbols that fall toward the ground. They do this by stabbing, shooting, and slicing vaguely in the direction of the tower with their signature weapons until they’ve “hit” 30 of these targets, missing no more than twice, and the tower is somehow working again. Look, I don’t know. This is the same universe where people can breathe indefinitely in a magically suspended ball of water just to play rugby, and a woman considered Tightass cool and desirable. Clearly the normal rules don’t apply on Spira.

OOH, CAN I?

While I loathe, from the outset, Paine’s towers and my requirement to make split-second decisions, I grow to hate all three of these methods–each successive tower ramps up the difficulty of these super-“fun” games, both by adding the direction buttons and the triggers and by speeding it up, so by the final towers I feel like I don’t even understand what I’m being asked to do, let alone can I do it. Adding insult to injury is the way the other two girls cringe, mortified, every time the girl doing the calibrating fucks up. Like, Yuna has her buttcheeks hanging out for the world to see every hour of the day, Rikku wants to bang her cousin, and Paine can’t stop talking publicly about scissoring everyone, but this is where you all decide the line for embarrassment lies? THIS ENTIRE GAME IS EMBARRASSING. FUCK YOU FOR JUDGING ME.

I think the Purge was enacted specifically to murder the people who created this game.

By the time I’ve gone through all 10 towers, I’ve managed to calibrate six. Yeah, barely a passing grade feels about right. Let’s never speak of it again. Moving on! To keep this Thunder Plains visit from being a complete waste of time, the ladies grab a couple more Blue Bullets from the fiends here, namely Bad Breath from a Marlboro (and in the year of our lord 2016, I just got that joke) and Heaven’s Cataract from a basilisk with the hilarious name Gucumatz. That thing had to be named after the babbling of one of the game designers’ babies, and I will accept no other explanation. Acquiring this one, by the way, was only necessary because I completely pooched my attempt at it underneath Bevelle. Hooray for fixing my own fuckups, two recaps later!

Finally, it’s time to head into Macalania Woods for the ladies’ first real mission of the day. As I noted at the beginning of the chapter, O’aka bailed out of El Celsioso and made for the travel agency he lost to Al Bhed repo men. With one last pang of paranoia in my heart, I steer Yuna through the forest to the lakeside travel agency. But when the Dullwings arrive, they don’t find O’aka pleading to get his thumbs unbroken; instead, they find fiends surrounding the agency. “Fiends? Here?” Yuna derps. You just fought like a billion fiends in the forest on the way here, airhead. Paine, probably sad that she has to explain this, replies, “Must be from Macalania Temple. The fact that it’s underwater doesn’t seem to matter.” And why would it? As we learned at the hot springs, holes that are underwater are still open for business.

Falling asleep on the monster-naming job, are we?

Well, I’ve lost the will to go on, but Rikku is ready to murder some fiends and save her people. Yet she appeals to Yuna to give the go-ahead. Oh, right, the Friendly Neighborhood Gullwings, killing fiends for minimum wage and congratulatory pats on the butt. The camera zooms in dramatically on Yuna as she decides, “We have to help them!” Paine strokes her chin like she’s vogueing for the camera. “And our fee?” she asks. Rikku snaps back, “I’ll pay you myself. How’s that?” Not that I’m advocating the girls turning their backs on people in actual danger, but this Friendly Neighborhood Gullwings business plan is going great, isn’t it?

After the Mission Time! screen, which I don’t bother to read, our heroines are met with wave after wave of fiends, including chimera, eyeballs with bat wings, and freezer-burnt flans. After each battle, I am offered a choice to fight or to flee. Clearly the girls must fight–how are they going to get paid by Rikku if they leave before the job is done? Also, killing fiends is the only thing these three are good at. Even they seem to have accepted that they are not exactly sphere-hunting virtuosos. The battles do ramp up somewhat in difficulty, mostly as the fiends start to oversoul and the chimera start using Thundaga as often as they breathe, but this is nothing two Dark Knights and an Alchemist can’t handle. Which should just be the tagline for this entire game post-chapter 2.

After six waves, it looks like the outpouring of fiends has trickled to a stop. That’s…not that many fiends. Just saying. The girls head inside to check on the civilians, you know, other than the dead Al Bhed Rikku is casually standing over in the snow. But they’re not dressed for the cold, so I can’t blame them for being hasty here. Unfortunately, the situation is not much better inside the travel agency–one last Al Bhed, of several, collapses to the floor just as they enter, groaning in his native language, “What was it?” Uh, pretty sure it was fiends. There are even dead fiends on the floor in here, which doesn’t make much sense since they should all be pyreflies, but let’s not dwell on that. The dying man is still mumbling in Al Bhed, “That huge shape, deep within the lake. A fiend…machina?” I know he’s probably talking about Greyskull, but it makes me worry that there’s some abomination of Seymour’s under Macalania Temple. One last iteration of his boss form that’s pointy wang fingers all the way down. Rikku tries to tell this obviously dying man to shut up and save his strength, but he uses his last words to tell her he found a present for her by the lake, and hands over the Berserker dressphere. To the end, this man knew what was important in life: helping supposed sphere hunters find spheres, and ensuring that though you may die, they will survive, to dress up in sexy fur bikinis with leopard print leg warmers and horned headbands. Your memory will live on forever in Yuna coyly batting her kitty paws while I punch myself in the face, unnamed Al Bhed guy!

Warmer than you?

The second the poor man noisily expires, O’aka runs through the door. “Ah! What’s happened to me shop?” he cries. Oh no, all this blood is going to ruin the rugs, and O’aka had to pawn his shopvac! But he at least kneels down to address the dead/dying (?) man: “Come on, lad, I’ve come to give back the money I owe ye! Ye can’t die before I pay ye back! Think of me reputation! I’m beggin’ ye!” Rikku is kneeling right next to O’aka and somehow fails to elbow him in the back of the head. When it becomes clear to O’aka that this man has gone beyond the reach of gil, he wails in agony. “Now look what ye’ve done! Disgrace! Disgrace on the O’aka name!” Well, I won’t pretend to be an expert on Al Bhed sociology and economics, but couldn’t he pay back some other Al Bhed? They seem to more or less operate communally when it comes to their business interests and holdings. But no, O’aka, you’re right: clearly the correct response is to performatively wail about the damage done to your family name and your masculinity, while keeping all “your” money.

Is it possible O’aka is the one who released Greyskull and caused this fiend crisis, just to get his debtors murdered so he could get his business back and pocket that swell little nest egg Yuna incubated for him? Maybe! I have been a truther over dumber shit.

Deaf to my pleas that she should shake down this little turd until his pockets don’t jingle with her gil anymore, Yuna walks back outside, ready to consider the matter settled. But O’aka emerges right behind her, looking serious. I guess the idea is that he’s a changed man after the deaths of his precious loan sharks, to forces that were beyond their or his control. The camera comes in tight on his face for his speech, which only makes me wonder if he always looked like he’d been beaten about the face with a frying pan. I’m sure he did, because he’s not an underage girl and wasn’t about to get an updated model. “Mark me words,” he says while dramatic music strains to make him sound sincere, “I’ll stand by this shop, whatever may come.” Does “whatever may come” include other Al Bhed who would like him to actually pay off his debt? Just wondering. Paine tells him he’ll probably get more fiends than customers, and this is after the girls supposedly took care of the fiends, so that’s a burn. “Then I’ll just have to start sellin’ to fiends, won’t I?” O’aka retorts. “I owe it to those lads who died defending me shop, and I’ll not be letting ’em down.” Let’s just look past his assertion that they died for “his” shop, because I think we’ve established what kind of person O’aka is: he should really do that. I mean, yeah, those “lads” died defending “his” shop FROM FIENDS, but still. Fiends are an untapped retail market!

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Once I’ve seen to it that Shinra has dropped a commsphere outside the agency–heaven fucking forbid we can’t keep in touch with O’aka later–the ladies return to El Celsioso for their next crucial mission. Buddy’s all over the hot intel coming out of Bikanel Island: “We got a request for help from Nhadala at the excavation camp. Doesn’t seem to be any rush, though. Guess we can put it off?” Oh. Well, that won’t do at all–Yuna can’t just do the Spira Reminiscence Tour out of order! Just to stick it to “Friendly Neighborhood Buddy,” she selects Bikanel as their destination anyway.

Nhadala stalks right up to Yuna and gets down to business: “Boy, am I glad to see you!” she lies. “I need your help with something.” That’s what Yuna is here for! Helping! For free! But Nhadala’s problem is not fiends. She explains, “Marnela of the Cactuar Nation has asked to see us. We’ve been too busy here to spare anybody. If it’s not a problem, I’d like you to represent us.” Sure, Nhadala. You’re so busy that you can’t venture to a spot on your own island, but Yuna can fly across the world to do it for you. Just admit you don’t feel like talking to a blowjob face cactus.

Yuna, though, has never heard of the Cactuar Nation, and Rikku just “Hmm”s like she’s pretending to recall it but really has no clue. “Don’t worry if you haven’t heard of it before,” Nhadala says. “We’ve only recently established diplomatic ties.” Nice job making your new neighbors feel important–meet with them once to acknowledge their existence, and then ignore them until Yuna has an opening in her schedule! But I don’t know why I’m surprised about this. By far, Yuna’s biggest macro task has been diplomatic work–she’s been a go-between for the Ronso and the Guado, New Yevon and the Youth League, the Besaid Aurochs and Beclem, Clasko and his chocobo lovers, and now the Machine Faction and their saguaro neighbors. The Friendly Neighborhood Gullwings are basically Spira’s United Nations peacekeeping force, and now that I’ve put a name on what they’re doing I’m actually fine with this.

Nhadala calls over Benzo, an Al Bhed child who looks identical to Shinra except that his goggles strap goes directly over the top of his head and bifurcates his hoodie, so it looks like he has kitty ears. Benzo will be their interpreter. What, you thought a plant would speak…English? Spiran? How silly. “Very nice to meet you,” Benzo says in a weirdly adult, clear-sinused, not-at-all-Shinra-like voice. Nhadala bails, as Paine sighs to Yuna, “When will you ever learn to say no?” Listen, Paine, she said yes to Tightass. If she didn’t learn then, it’s never happening.

Benzo tells Yuna, “I’m the only one who can understand Marnela.” Nhadala sure is putting a lot of trust in this kid, just taking it on faith that the cactuar can talk, that they are saying anything of importance, and that he can understand them. It’s possible, isn’t it, that he just made up this entire thing so he could have a cushy job as an interpreter and get out of digging for scrap metal in the hot sun all day? Who would know? “Oh, Marnela says she requires her illustrious interpreter to travel to her in comfort. I’ll need to requisition a new airboat with satellite radio, power seats with cooling and lumbar support, and gilded fan blades. Diplomacy, right?” But Yuna agreed to this nonsense, so she lets Benzo guide her to the ancestral seat of Cactuar Nation.

When they arrive, Rikku bounces around looking at all the large, phallic cacti like she’s never seen one before. Right. The girls all wonder where this Marnela is, since they see no cactuar, only cacti. But Benzo points to a large cactus in front of them and says, “Right here.” A moment later, the cactus burbles out something in Cactuar, causing Rikku to again fall over on her bony ass. “It talked?” she yelps. The camera zooms way out, as if distancing itself from this shocking revelation. Oh, and Nhadala is now here for some reason. I thought she was too busy for this! And if Benzo has to interpret anyway, why don’t they just make him their representative instead of Yuna? Did the United Spira Security Council decree that Yuna must be present for all inter-nation summits?

No, you should have taken that left turn at Albuquerque.

Anyway. As the cactus wobbles and glows with a blue aura, Benzo introduces her as Marnela, and translates for her as she waves her appendages like a crazy, uh, person. “Marnela’s greeting us. ‘Hello, Benzo,'” Benzo says. “You are looking tall and handsome and cool, as always,” he somehow doesn’t add. “She says, ‘Hello to you, too, sphere hunters.'” I am going to assume that she heard some gossip from a palm tree about the girls fighting Laurel for the Machina Maw dressphere. Or Benzo has been talking them up in advance to a fucking plant, which is too sad to consider further.

No, she is not.

Marnela answers YRP’s unasked question: she and her cacti buddies in this gully were all once cactuars. “As the cacti that sprout in the desert grow, they become cactuars…” she says through Benzo. “When the cactuars mature, they once again become cacti…their roots digging deep into the earth.” I’m pretty sure this was pulled wholesale from someone’s fanfic, in which the reader endures 4000 words of exhaustive world-building just to lay out why Shelinda is in an intimate, loving relationship with a sentient prickly pear dildo. I’m just kidding. No one would write a fanfic about Shelinda. Marnela wonders if they believe what she has told them, or maybe that’s Benzo asking if his fanfic backstory is plausible. Yuna gets to choose from, “It’s a little far-fetched…” or, “That makes perfect sense!” She chooses the latter, on the maybe one percent chance that this cactus can actually understand speech and is not a Fight Club-style figment of Benzo’s sunstroke-addled imagination.