A quick save and a quick examination of the amusingly tiny Phil Cup trophy later, Junior and the others are ready to begin their conquest of the Pegasus Cup. For whatever reason, the game designers whipped out the nighttime backdrop for this tournament. I’m pretty sure that Pegasus doesn’t have any mythological connection to the night or the darkness, but I could be wrong. On the other hand, I’m quite confident even my layman’s knowledge of Greek mythology dwarfs what the game designers could possibly retain in their pot-addled brains.

The ninth seed is “Ghost Bandits,” a group that contains ghosts, and a bandit, but no ghost bandits. They, like their seed nine counterparts from the Phil Cup, go down with one hit from @%$#!!!’s lightning. The most entertaining thing about these quick victories is how there’s a brief few seconds between the end of the battle and Character X’s stupid victory dance in which all three of them stand around with their weapons out, looking around suspiciously, like some Level Oh Shit Heartless is going to swoop down from the sky and fuck them up.

The theme of the Pegasus Cup seems to be “Remind Sam of How Much She Hates Agrabah,” as most of the Heartless teams include various monsters from the penis tower planet, and the next three seeds specifically feature my favorite Heartless ever, the pot spider (and its cousin, the barrel spider). My one comfort in having to fight through three rounds of these horrible abominations is that their bandy little spider legs are poking out of the clay/wood from the start, so there isn’t the unpleasant “surprise” of the legs popping out in the middle of the fight. It’s a small thing, but significant when you consider that I am one of those people who’s afraid of that pop Pillsbury cans make when they open.

And just when I thought I was out of the woods, the third seed is “Pots and Barrels.” Sigh.

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The second seed is Giant Impact Team Atkins, a group of Fridges and one Arabic!Fridge, which, boring, so how about we ignore that fight and meet the number one seed of the Pegasus Cup?

You don’t want to know where @%$#!!! is standing.

Well, talk about uncreative: the top seed is called “[Squally] and Yuffie,” and is composed of–surprise!–Squally and Yuffie. Their team dynamic is pretty simple–Squally uses his suddenly much more massive gunblade to beat the crap out of Junior while Yuffie does her gender proud and keeps Squally healed. Clearly, the healing is much more annoying than the emasculating of Junior, so Yuffie has gotta go first. While the party is busy beating on Yuffie like she just mouthed off and told them to go bake their own pies, Squally prances around gaily, showing off by making his gunblade magically glow with pretty purple light. I don’t remember Squally’s gunblade ever having magical sparkle effects in Final Fantasy VIII, but apparently that was the shittiest game ever conceived by humankind, so there’s no need to worry about pissing off any fans with inconsistency there. Plus, Disney’s involved, so every single surface must shine and glitter like Tinker Bell just shit on it. I’m sure Squally doesn’t mind, though, so why should I?

Once Yuffie’s out of the picture, the gang teams up on Squally. Um, so to speak. Squally’s favorite move is to violently thrust his pulsating purple gunblade downward, shouting “It’s over!” And only after a minute or so! Somewhere on a planet yet to be discovered by our heroes, Seifer’s teenage, AZN incarnation is snickering.

Squally and Yuffie defeated handily, we get a repeat of the “We’re the champs!” cutscene from earlier. And it is the exact same scene, complete with the sky still being bright blue and not dusky purple. They must have waited until the next morning to hold the trophy ceremony. Junior gets the Strike Raid ability for his trouble. I can’t be certain that I will never use this, since in the heat of button-mashing battle, I often have no idea what I’m doing and end up using things I have no intention of using.

Junior, @%$#!!!, and Goofy have successfully fought through another tournament, which means it’s time for more Words of Wisdom from Phil and Samcules. Junior starts us off with the phenomenally stupid question, “Is strength the most important part of a hero?” If you don’t know immediately what stock answer Phil is going to provide for this question, you obviously do not play RPGs and you do not belong at this site. Go away.

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…Okay, now that those rubes are gone, Phil answers, “Well, what you really need is a strong heart.” Phil goes on that if Junior needs to ask how he can get a strong heart, then he’s clearly still a lame little non-hero. Junior petulantly demands that Phil “stop talking in riddles,” even though Phil is actually speaking in clichés. Big difference, squirt. Then again, Junior’s so stupid that even the most commonly known clichés are probably completely indecipherable to him, like, say, Russian is to me.

And with that, it is time to take on the third and final tournament (for this recap, anyway), the Samcules Cup. The first several seeds mostly feature the Ass Pirate!Heartless of Neverland, foreshadowing that this might be Olympus Coliseum’s Gay Pride tournament. It’s not like Peter Pan is flying overhead, naked save for a studded thong, showering penis-shaped glitter confetti down on the combatants, but maybe they had to take that out to preserve the game’s E rating. Then again, @%$#!!! spends the whole game not wearing any pants, with all his duck junk hanging out. Suitable for all ages my ass.

As if to support my Gay Pride theory, Bitch shows up as the fourth seed. Where Squally enjoyed vertical thrusts of his gunblade, Bitch is more of a horizontal man (though his sword is also pulsing with purple light). I don’t know what that says about him, but it has to say something. He’s really no more difficult to defeat than he was the first time, no matter how menacing he thinks he looks gliding around on his single emo bat wing. After Bitch drops to his knees for Junior, he hands over a new keychain, the Metal Chocobo. Junior can’t equip it now, but I’ll tell you that it transforms the Keyblade into a chunky iron monstrosity with entirely too much girth–a fitting gift from Bitch.

Seed number three is another group of Ass Pirate Heartless with a mix of some other Heartless from Halloween Town. The fuck? Are we seriously supposed to believe that Bitch is lower in the rankings than a bunch of Heartless flunkies? How is this even determined? Was there some previous battle Junior missed in which all the other seeds fought each other, but Bitch showed up hung over and tanked it against the little fuckers with glider wings? Did he get disqualified because he was off writing emo poetry about Aeris Sephiroth?

Or–and this is almost too much of a shock for my mind to bear–have all those GameFAQs deathmatch polls been lying to me all along, and Bitch is not the GREATEST CHARACTER EVER???

I could faint from the very notion.

The second seed is more stupid pirates (Junior thrusts his crotch toward the camera with a “Macho Man” Randy Savage-like “OH YEAH” at their defeat), so let’s move it along to the top seed of the Samcules Cup. The fact that the final seed is Samcules should not be a shock to anyone, even dimwits like our heroes, so the game designers decided to throw in an extra curveball.