Yuna finds St. Bevelle’s Holy Buttplugs.

When Yuna stops trying to get anything insightful out of her five companions, she walks to the edge of the platform they’re on and takes in the view of a robot’s rectal cavity surrounded by six glowing, mechanical buttplugs. For some extra kink, the flares in Robot Goatse’s anus are attached to the walls of the room by thick chains. But Yuna has no time to be horrified by Maester Mika’s secret basement rumpus room, because, for the second time this recap, an alarm sounds and the area glows with flashing red lights. But this time, they’re greeted by machina and not obnoxious wall-spike booby traps. Yuna yells back to Lesbianc, “Watch the exit!” and Lesbianc snits that she doesn’t take orders, like anyone gives a fuck right now. Sphere Recorder Bob pans up her back for a good ten seconds while everyone waits for Lesbianc to not be a tool, and finally she concedes, “But…I’ll make an exception this time. Leave it to us, love!” Thank goodness, because I know I am really concerned about some New Yevon redshirts jumping down that hole after them. They’re not protected by Main Character Superpowers, so they might be killed!

With that, Yuna…ugh. Yuna hops over the ledge and surfs down the fucking chain to Robot Goatse, in yet another callback to the Amazing Adventures of Tightass. Granted, nobody present is wearing the equivalent of Lulu’s outfit, and Yuna doesn’t do flips in the air like some showoff jock asshole, but it’s still way stupid. When Yuna lands–the game designers didn’t even bother to animate Rikku and Paine surfing, since This Is Yuna’s Story!–and the girls have disposed of the machina guards, they are up close and personal with one of the giant buttplugs, and a complete shitshow of a puzzle.

Silver lining: Tightass never wore this outfit.

Here’s the deal: Robot Goatse is comprised of a series of flower petal-like platforms that move in correspondence with the activation of each buttplug. The main goal is to open up a path using these platforms so the girls can keep looking for Baralai. But if they use the buttplugs to stimulate Robot Goatse juuuuuuuuust right, they can go even deeper and reach another door in the very depths of the rectum, which leads to a Ribbon. And we all know the Ribbon is just too fucking good for me to ignore this nonsense and give Robot Goatse just the tip.

It’s worth noting here that I blindly followed a guide to get through this, because the execution itself is enough of a pain without even trying to figure out what I’m doing, so I’m not sure I even know how this is supposed to work. I just know it involves turning on colored lights in the “right” order and fighting a lot of minibosses. Oh, did I mention that activating some of the buttplugs leads to boss fights? And that the minibosses in question squirt out of Robot Goatse? Anyway, while the GameFAQs walkthrough provides a simple, if tedious and lengthy, list of steps to follow, the Bradygames guide features Dan Birlew trying to walk me through it with a diagram of Robot Goatse that has no initial reference point. Guess which one gets me the Ribbon!

Also worth noting, since this is the first time I’m using it extensively: the Alchemist dressphere outfit is actually pretty cute, in a weird steampunk kind of way, and only Paine looks fucking weird and camel-toed in it, as usual. But Rikku’s gun in this getup strongly resembles a penis pump.

Look out, Baralai!

Once the Ribbon is safely in the girls’ inventory, they continue onward through some drab olive green hallways to another, slightly smaller chamber. As YRP and the Lesbianc Trio watch a large machina with phallic piston arms handjob its way in a circle around the room, Rikku scratches her chin and then points at it, mouth agape, and asks, “Hey! Yunie! That sphere with you-know-who in it. Wasn’t it recorded here?” I approve of equating Tightass and Voldemort, though Voldemort had better dress sense and markedly fewer daddy issues. But Lesbianc, sounding like she wants to give Rikku the heel, snarls, “Get your head out of the clouds and move it!” Paine and I agree: there is never an appropriate time to fantasize about Tightass. But Yuna doesn’t take this to heart. Worse still, as the others march toward the next doorway, she stares up at the pistons sensually gyrating up and down and lapses into Wankese. That’s a juxtaposition I did not need to think about. There’s a connection, Yuna insists. Everything is connected. I can feel it. If everything is connected, she should be able to feel everyone else in the room wanting to vomit.

So Lesbianc had her panties all in a bunch to get moving, but when I get control of Yuna again, her companions are standing around staring at the handjob ex machina. It’s actually called the Gaol, as this is supposedly the prison Doppelwanker was confined in, but I think I prefer Masturbating Machina Squid. Yuna takes a look around for herself and finds a huge switch in the floor across from Laurel and Hardy. Stepping on it stops the piston mechanism, so after watching for a minute she manages to stop one of the penis pistons as it is low enough to the ground to climb up on. Since nothing at all could go wrong from climbing atop the Masturbating Machina Squid, she climbs from the penis piston to the central body. But while she’s up there, it starts moving again, making Yuna cry out “Huh?” and inch a little closer to being beyond redemption. When Yuna’s done moaning wankily, she turns around to spot Rikku standing in the distance on top of the floor switch. “Okay,” she shouts. “I think I figured out how this works.” Um, you stand on it and stuff happens? What is there to figure out here? Yuna just shouts, “Careful!” at her because she was totally being careful when she clambered up there in the first place. Shut up, Yuna.

The point of all this is that Yuna can now move around on the Masturbating Machina Squid to reach treasure chests and other bullshit in the cells on the walls while Rikku operates the machina itself. Paine stands off to the side, wondering what she’s doing with her life. A text box with another horrible pun explains that, when Yuna is in what it laughably calls a “safe place,” I can press square to have her call to Rikku to get the pistons pumping. This is not as soul-deadening as the Robot Goatse puzzle, nor is there anything as good as the Ribbon at stake, but the game attempts to make up for this by including voice acting every single time Yuna and Rikku shout at each other. Yuna crying all too enthusiastically, “Rikku! Go ahead!” will be burned into my brain forever. And for what? So Paine can have even more leather accessories to wear? Next time she can just go to the mall like a normal person.

Rikku needs a gentle touch to operate the Freudbot 9000.

Once the girls have milked the Masturbating Machina Squid for all its valuables and it lies dormant and spent, it’s time to keep looking for Baralai. Yuna continues down another hallway, and is in the middle of completing a puzzle involving some more floating balconies, when she is attacked by an eyeball bat and a one-eyed, phallic-tentacled, golden dragon creature called a Kukulcan. The Cockulcock is notable not only because it employs a petrifying Stone Gaze and then shatters its victims with Heaven’s Cataract (pretentious!), and not only because it also can afflict them with slow, making it harder to clear said petrification, but because I forgot to put that hard-won Ribbon on any of the girls after receiving it. Oh, you mean there are monsters with dangerous status affliction abilities immediately following getting an item that prevents all statuses? That’s just silly talk.

Obviously the only reason I am mentioning this is that all three girls are eventually petrified and two of them get shattered into tiny pieces while Yuna is slowed and unable to do shit about it. Guess who gets to deal with Robot Goatse and the Masturbating Machina Squid all over again! YAY! Three cheers for this game that I don’t hate!

I’m sure the shards of her dead body are thrilled about this development.

Uuuuuuuuugh.

For the sake of my sanity and self-esteem, let’s skip right ahead to where Yuna left off, with the balcony puzzle. The short version is she has to ride a balcony up to a higher platform only to jump back down, which activates a switch that allows her to ride another balcony to a hidden ledge with another switch, only to come back and ride a third balcony up again to get to a fourth that moves to the next hallway. After I’ve lost track of what the hell I’m even doing and what balconies Yuna’s already been on, and I’ve watched some ledges rise out of the fog in a room the girls haven’t even visited yet, the Bradygames guide chirpily informs me that I am “well on [my] way” to getting a new dressphere. And I’m so sure it will be worth it.

Well, I’m an asshole, because it really, actually is. Down the next hallway, Yuna hops down the path she created to a chest containing the Dark Knight dressphere. Oh my God, y’all. It is so great. Not only is it crazy overpowered, to the point that it seems absurd to use anything other than two Dark Knights and an Alchemist for the rest of the game, but when the girls don their goth Cecilia armor, there is nary a buttcheek nor camel toe to be found! Well, actually, wait–I just checked the official artwork and Yuna and Paine totally have visible camel toes from the bikinis (?????) under the plate. But I had to go out of my way to notice this, which I will count as a victory.

Side note: not only does this dressphere continue to tie Yuna to Tightass, this time with her wielding his celestial weapon, Dark Knight Rikku carries Auron’s Masamune. This is viewed, with equal amounts of idiocy on both sides, as 1) everything that is wrong with this game because AURON WAS THE BEST AND RIKKU IS A WHORE, and 2) definitive, incontrovertible evidence that Rikku and Auron were fucking.

Admittedly, I find the camel toe less troubling than the leg warmers.

Okay, that’s enough analysis of one of the girls’ many fucking outfits for now, because on the other end of this hallway, past a truly welcome save sphere, they finally catch up with Baralai. He rounds the corner toward them in unnecessary slow motion, Sphere Recorder Bob lingering on his over-the-pants thong. “The Gullwings?” he says by way of greeting. “I was wondering who was there.” Yuna stares at him with open sexual longing and can’t manage to squeak out a response. “You don’t have to tell me,” he goes on, since she isn’t. “I know why you’ve come. You’re here to destroy the weapon that threatens all Spira: [Greyskull]. Am I right?” The camera flips around to show the three of them still staring silently like Baralai is a sea witch who stole their voices. So he keeps talking. As men do. “If it could be destroyed we would have done so long ago,” he insists. “But [Greyskull] must not be touched. Neither you nor Nooj seem to understand that.” I like how he’s completely projected Nooj’s plan onto our heroines. Not that they’re doing anything to articulate what they want to do. Not that we even know. Not that they even know. Finally, Paine remembers she has a working mouth, and she uses it to ask the most important question here: “You talked to Nooj?” He totally did, Paine! They went for coffee and talked about you the whole time!