After witnessing the hover operator get chewed out for his mishap, the girls find their mission mark standing at the edge of the cliff near the Travel Agency. The girl, about as tall as Yuna, is wearing what amounts to a bikini top and a loincloth over her tall, tanned body. She asks in a God-awful kiddie voice, which I believe belongs to Susie from Rugrats and any number of other little girls in kids’ shows, if this cowgirl bimbo before her is Lady Yuna. Yuna replies in the affirmative, leading ???? to ask, “I don’t suppose you remember me, do you?” Yuna racks her tiny brain for this teenage girl’s face, and can’t come up with a name. Nevertheless, she can’t disappoint this girl, so she chooses, “I think I remember…” But when Yuna actually speaks, she pulls a name out of her ass: “You can’t be…Calli?” I completely agree. She can’t be Calli. Because Calli was a little girl two years ago. And you guys can feed me all the bullshit you want about girls hitting their growth spurt early and blooming faster than boys. But that still does not explain how Pacce looks exactly the same but Calli suddenly has boobies. I believe this calls for a poll.
Loading ...Okay, I’ve gotten rankled over this more than is really necessary, so I’ll just accept that she’s sprouted and we can move on. Move on to Wankese, that is. Yay. Remember Calli? Yuna durrs. We met her two years ago, on the Mi’ihen Highroad. The little girl that was so looking forward to the Calm. Way to call attention to this total inconsistency, writers. Yuna asks Calli what she’s doing here on the Highroad. Calli squeaks back, “I came to ride a chocobo! I’ve wanted to ride one for as long as I can remember!” Oh, isn’t that…lame. It’s lame. Really, really lame. Your dream sucks, kid. Rikku rains on her parade by pointing out what we already know–chocobos are now a rarity on the Highroad because of all the hovers. “On top of that,” Calli pouts, “I hear there’s a chocobo-hunting fiend prowling around. This isn’t a very good place for poor little chocobos anymore.” I’m sure you can guess that Calli says this with syrupy, nauseating sentiment for the feathery little fuckers in her voice, and that this makes me vaguely ill.
Rikku wonders if perhaps the chocobos have been wiped out, even though she’s seen several barging into random battles since YRP’s lesbian adventures began. Shut up, Rikku. As if this point weren’t enough for us to see Rikku’s ignorance, a chocobo chooses this moment to canter toward them and stare with dead, beady black eyes. I should point out that I’m not really a bird person, just so we’re all on the same page. In turn, Yuna, Rikku and Paine blurt out “Cho” with varying degrees of excitement, and then Calli shrieks, “It’s a chocobo!” Obviously this is the best thing to do when dealing with a skittish bird. It streaks off. “Want to help Calli catch the chocobo?” a text box asks me. I am dying–DYING–to select “You can’t be serious,” but The Almighty One Hundred Percent rears its ugly, ugly head again, and I am forced to go along with this farce.
The Mission Time! screen is accompanied by a chocobo-themed horns riff that will no doubt serve to annoy the crap out of me after I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to complete this mission. And I will, make no mistake. “Your mission: catch the chocobo for Calli!” I’m told–like, I thought I was supposed to barbecue it! “Follow Captain Rikku’s instructions and bring that winged whirlwind to justice!” The ridiculous could have stopped there, but no: “It’s the kwest of a lifetime!” I really hope some editor got fired for allowing that line to see the light of day.
Captain Rikku takes off south down the Highroad, and Yuna and Paine take their leave of Calli, who is excitedly flopping around like a dying flounder. On the next screen, the first leg of the mission begins. Yuna and Paine must follow Rikku down the Highroad in pursuit of the chocobo, and grab chocobo feathers along the way, for no other reason than hey, free feathers. Several times on this trek Rikku thinks she knows which way the chocobo has gone, and it is up to Yuna to take her at her word or not. Rikku, as a woman, has a shitty sense of direction, but Yuna is also a woman, so this is basically a crapshoot. Oh, and if Yuna dares stray from right behind Rikku and in front of Paine, she has a couple seconds to get back to being the meat in the YRP sandwich. This goes on until Rikku spots the chocobo for a third time and Yuna chooses to trust her. Yuna “scores” two chocobo feathers for her trouble, though she picked up about five hundred of the things. Stingy fucking game designers.
Now the real fun of this mission begins. On the next screen, the girls decide to use a little strategery and trap the chocobo between them. Paine watches the north end of the road while Rikku goes south. Not like that. “And that leaves me to catch it,” Yuna einsteins. Oh, this is going to be good. It goes like this: Yuna runs into the chocobo munching carpet grass on the side of the road, and tries to apprehend it. The game calls this “The Chocobo Rodeo,” like I didn’t hate the writers enough. Yuna must choose to go right, left or up the middle, and if she chooses correctly she catches the chocobo. Only not really, because this must be done several times and even then the chocobo is not actually caught. In other words, this is pointless. And it gets better!
To complete this “kwest” in the way that facilitates The Almighty One Hundred Percent, everything has to be done juuuuuuuuuust right. First, Yuna must fuck up a few times in trying to catch the chocobo. If she is a perfect chocobo roper or whatever, the Gods of FFX-2 would be angered by her audacity. And the strat guide and GameFAQs are pretty insistent about this. There are all-caps warnings, like “BE SURE YOU MESS UP A FEW TIMES!!!!” and everything. I would laugh at this, because it’s not like I’ll have a problem failing at a task in a videogame, but Murphy’s Law kicks in, and as soon as I know it’s okay, nay, preferable, to fuck up, of course I become the best fucking chocobo roper ever and can’t pick the wrong direction even when I go the wrong way on purpose.
You’re one to talk.
Okay, so after some resetting and screaming and controller-throwing, Yuna whiffs on the chocobo just the right number of times and the mission can continue. The chocobo Yuna technically “caught” three times leapfrogs over Rikku’s head and onto the next screen. “Maybe it’s just me…” she says, “but this is starting to chap my hide.” I’m trying not to think of all the fanboys who would love to chap Rikku’s hide themselves. Let’s just keep going. For part three of this ludicrous mission, Yuna and Paine walk along and eat popcorn and make out or something while Rikku climbs tall structures in an attempt to spot the chocobo. On the second such structure, Rikku amusingly falls on her bony ass while she’s climbing down. It pains me to say this, but this tiny bit of physical comedy is somehow key to getting the full completion points for Mi’ihen Highroad. The progression goes something like this:
Mission to catch chocobo + sucking ass at catching chocobo + Rikku bruising her ass = easy path to Episode Complete in chapter 5 = OMG 100% YAY!!!!
Getting The Almighty One Hundred Percent wouldn’t bother me so much if it were a matter of doing all the important story stuff and getting all the dresspheres and otherwise doing all the stuff there is to do. But the only way to achieve that mark is to do asinine and random things that there is no way you would know to do without consulting a strategy guide, and in many cases, consulting the exact right strategy guide and certainly not the official strategy guide, because it sucks. The events throughout the game here on the Mi’ihen Highroad are a perfect illustration of this problem: you may be doing the mission you’re supposed to, but if you do it too well, you won’t see Rikku fall on her butt and that elusive extra scene at the end of the game will be even further from your grasp! It’s like touching the fucking Moogle all over again.
After chasing down the chocobo some more, the girls are all exhausted and decide to come up with an alternative way of corraling it. The option “Make Calli capture her own fucking chocobo” never really enters the discussion. Just sayin’. At the south end of the Highroad Yuna speaks with one of the hover operators, who is willing to help them with their little problem. A cut later, Paine and Rikku take their positions, and Rikku runs up to the chocobo to flush it out of its hiding place. It then runs into Paine, is all, “Yikes, a lesbian!” and runs the opposite direction, where it manages to avoid colliding with Yuna by jumping over her. The little bitch thinks it’s all clever, too, until it’s cut off by a hover in the middle of the road. The fatigued chocobo stands trapped between the hover and the girls, and Yuna celebrates their awesomness, failing to realize that they only caught it because the game designers didn’t want to animate the chocobo running off the designated Highroad path. So there.
A random NPC comes running up to the girls to cut short their victory celebration: “Hey, your friend’s in hot water,” he reports. But Yuna has friends at every corner of the globe! Which one could he possibly mean?
Obviously it’s Calli, and we see a short scene where Calli jumps seemingly a hundred feet in the air in pursuit of another chocobo, only to fall on her face on the roof of some ruins down on the Oldroad. Seriously, did her magic puberty powers turn her into Wonder Woman, too? Nearby the Chocobo Eater is ready to accept some nutritious underage girl into his normally chocobo-only diet. The girls watch from the bridge as it nears Calli, and Yuna’s about to pull a Tightass and try to jump over there, before Paine stops her with the Power of Common Sense. “But there isn’t time!” Yuna whines. This is an RPG. Of course there’s time.
Sure enough, with a wanky “Hyaa!” fucking Wank Knight Clasko shows up with a couple chocobos to distract the fiend. Clasko apparently buys the girls exactly two and a half minutes to get from their current position to the screen where all this excitement is going on. Of course, that’s an eternity when random battles don’t count, but I’m still annoyed that I had to go through all that chocobo-wrangling garbage and now on top of that I have a timed mission. What the fuck, game designers.
This one’s for you, Seymour.
Down at the ruins, the Chocobo Eater is on its back, slavering with frustration at its defeat by two tasty yellow morsels. The chocobos–which, I just noticed, are inexplicably in the Chocobo Knight armor–take off with Clasko as Calli cheers and waves. And there’s nothing left to do but fight the boss. The guide suggests a Black Mage’s Fira spell to use on the Chocobo Eater, but little does it know that I’ve been building the hell out of Black Mage!Rikku. One focused Firaga (and one salad toss by Paine) later the Chocobo Eater is dead. No, really. Christ, I would have liked to steal from it first.
It eats chocobo?!?!
My reward for all this hard work? I get to watch Calli ride around on a chocobo. I’m sure if I were her mom I might come close to caring, but as it is I want to kill the irritating little bitch. Yuna and Paine start to leave, but Rikku hangs back for a while to stare off at nothing before she follows. Whatever. Don’t care. Mission fucking complete.
The girls are automatically warped back to El Celsioso, which seems to always happen when I have unfinished business down where I was at the end of the mission. That said, Yuna returns to the Travel Agency, where Calli and Clasko are standing together with a chocobo. There are fanfic connotations to that I don’t even want to think about. Clasko asks if he can get on the airship all over again, and again Yuna says he’s welcome aboard. Is this a punishment for something? Yuna has to make the conscious decision to share living space with Clasko…twice? Calli and the Chocobo also tag along. El Celsioso is starting to look like a flying homeless shelter.
Talking to them down in the Cabin also nets me the privilege of listening to Clasko baby-talk to the chocobo. Please kill me.
And that’s all she wrote for this recap! You’ll note that I went to four separate locations, and did two sanity-shattering missions, and how many spheres did the girls get? That’s right: zero. Wasn’t Rikku saying that sphere hunters hunt spheres? Fucking liar.
Next time Jeanne will continue the chapter two fun. And here it is: your moment of Zen.