ERMAHGERD, GHOST PUPPEHS
Next! The gummi ship books it all the way over to Halloween Town, where Junior looks pretty well put together, albeit in an embarrassing baby goth way, thanks to having the Oblivion keychain on, but @%$#!!! and Goofy look absurd with their dark and dingy costumes and lurid, brightly colored weapons. @%$#!!! in particular looks like a demented, eager child carrying around his trick-or-treat candy. One chest of puppies is easy enough to get to–all Junior has to do is hop up a few ledges and glide across Guillotine Square into the waiting blowjob mouth of a creepy jack-o’-lantern-shaped tower. All very normal. The bad technique blowjob tower also has a chest with an Elixir inside, which automatically makes this excursion more worth it than the one to Wonderland. A quick and painless trip through the curlicue hill area (just kidding, there are endlessly spawning skeleton mummies and the Heartless equivalent of Jizzrobes) to one of the five hundred graveyards in this town frees three more adorable Dalmatians. It goes without saying that there are more shitty gummis, too. I guess I need to feed all these dogs something.
Careful Junior, he’s using his teeth!
Finally, in case I didn’t think I was being punished for something, the gummi shop warps to Agrabah. Pot spiders! I’m fucking excited. It actually doesn’t take long, from the starting point at Aladdin’s pad, to reach the penultimate puppy chest. I only have to kill, like, 20 pot spiders. The final missing puppies are in a chest in the first room of the Cave of Wonders. Thinking the fastest way to get there is to return to Aladdin’s and ride the Magic Carpet out there, I do exactly that, even though Carpet is hopping up and down like a dog that is going to poop on the floor any second. My setup here should make it clear that this is a big fucking mistake. Turns out, I completely forgot that riding Carpet across the desert at this point in the game would dump the Mouseketeers in the middle of an optional, and horrible, battle. As Carpet zooms across the sands, our heroes are suddenly attacked by a whirling dervish of six white sleeves with gold trim, two of the arms inside clutching silvery, crescent-shaped blades. Well, at least this fucker dresses well. From Junior’s point of view we see Carpet collide with an invisible forcefield that just appeared within a circle of columns in the middle of the desert. Carpet’s passengers are unceremoniously dumped on the sand while the well-dressed Heartless, in the background, looks ready to do all manner of unspeakable things to them with those six arms.
The kneepads add color and function.
So, I honestly had no intention whatsoever of bothering with this for the recap, but since I fucked up and landed here anyway, let’s make the best of it. This boss’s name, for a ridiculous reason that made me sad when I looked it up, is Kurt Zisa, and besides the fancy white-and-gold tunic, he’s also wearing orange tassels around his crotch region. Don’t look at me. K-Zizzle has three distinct phases: in the first, he bars all magic until Junior can fly around stabbing at him long enough to destroy the two balls he’s cradling in his hands; in the second, he basically lies prone on the ground while Junior has his way with him; and in the third, he shields himself, summons Tornado Alley on top of Junior’s head, and can only be damaged with magic. He repeats these three phases until his considerable number of fancy pastel life bars have been demolished. I can explain all this so succinctly because I get a pretty rude refresher course in the mechanics while failing to execute them on any level, because again, I wasn’t prepared for this. The first phase in particular is a total fiasco because I don’t have any healing items equipped. I muddle through as best I can–what choice do I have?–and after about 15 minutes of me bumblefucking my way through something I had no desire to even attempt, and managing to get KZ down to his yellow life bar, Junior dies. Not permanently, of course. I can’t have nice things.
Suffice it to say I just warp directly from the gummi ship to the Cave of Wonders this time, get the fucking puppies, and get the hell out of Dodge. I may attempt KZ again before we’re done, but we have more important fish to fry today. Anyway, back to Traverse Town. Junior is treated to a heartwarming scene with all 101 Dalmatians gathered in their home, frolicking on top of the piano, peeing on the sofa, yawning adorably, and humping each other. This all seems very sweet until I start to wonder what happened to Pongo and Perdita’s humans–you know, the plain but nice people who actually played that piano and cello sitting there. And now no amount of presents from the dogs (the fabulous Ribbon accessory, an upgrade to Aeroga, and, ugh, “the complete gummi collection”) can make me stop thinking about it. I wonder if they’re trying to buy Junior’s silence.
Loading ...With that taken care of, wouldn’t you know it, I’m still less than enthusiastic about taking on the Hades Cup, so Junior kills more time trying out item synthesis with the Moogles in the First District. There’s not much to say about it, especially since I still don’t have the materials to make much because I haven’t been farming Mystery Goo from the little mushroom dudes. But once Junior’s got some new bling for the party, like the Master(bator) Earring he sticks in his ear in the desperate hope that it’ll make him look cool, only then do I sack up and fly to Olympus Coliseum.
New festive violet banners have been thrown up on the walls to announce the seeding in the Hades Cup. Because the naming continues to make no sense, Hades is only the 10th seed in his own tournament. I mean, Phil and Pegasus weren’t even in theirs, but they’re protagonists and at I can at least fanwank that they were sponsoring it or some shit. Did Phil really ask the Lord of the Underworld if he’d consider attaching his name to a tournament of cartoonish gladiatorial combat that’s fun for the whole family? It is implied later that Hades actually set up this tournament himself as a “trap” for Junior, which is somehow even more ridiculous than the hypothetical scenario I invented.
After doing the Trinity Touch Wieners in front of Samcules, Zeus, and everybody–to get a new weapon for @%$#!!! with the stripper name of Violetta–Junior enters the lobby, takes a moment to bask in the glow of his lame little trophies in the case, and then talks to Phil. Phil’s available tournaments include the prior ones, the Hades Cup, and something called “?????” Oh, I bet that one won’t suck at all. Junior chooses the Hades Cup, and enters to fight the–gulp–49th seed.
Oh, go fuck yourself.
So, yeah, Junior and pals (this time he doesn’t spurn their help like a tool) have to fight through 49 battles, and that sucks. On the bright side, clearing 10 seeds saves Junior’s progress so he doesn’t have to do the entire thing over again if he dies or–possibly relevant–if I get overcome by tedium halfway through and have to stop to drink a bottle of chardonnay.
When the boys enter the arena, twilight has fallen, because this is the tournament where shit gets serious. (Not really.) Naturally, the first nine seeds are very easy, leaving me time to observe how Goofy’s life bar has gotten so long that it’s curled all the way around and is sticking out like an awkward boner, and is very close to poking @%$#!!!’s life bar in the ass. This may as well be canonical proof of their true love and what they’ve been doing in the back seat of the Gummi Ship of Recapper Annoyance while they “let” Junior fly. I guess this also means that Goofy’s erection deflates every time he takes damage.
By comparison, @%$#!!!’s life bar wang is NOT impressive.
The 44th seed is Yuffie, by her lonesome since her former combat partner, Squally, is otherwise occupied in this tournament. I guess we now have an accurate estimate of the worth of one of the only fighting women in this game, and that worth is “less powerful than three ass bandit and four ass pirate Heartless.” Sorry, Yuffie–the glass ceiling in this game is a bitch. After her sadly easy defeat, she forks over the Genji Shield for Goofy. Too bad I have to wait at least three more seeds to equip it!
A few more rounds of unremarkable Heartless separate Yuffie from the 40th seed, a copy of the Behemoth Junior and friends just fought. This tournament is just not recap-friendly at all, something you’d think I would have learned from the two other times I’ve had to cover this empty-calorie exercise. Other than the slight challenge increase that comes with having to fight nine other battles first without a save point, the second iteration of the Behemoth goes down just as easily as the first. At one point, @%$#!!! and Goofy even figure out how to stand on top of the Behemoth’s head with Junior! Miracles are real. For managing to kill the same boss that unlocked this stupid tournament in the first place, Phil and his bookie financial backers upgrade Junior’s ice magic to Blizzaga, and I get to return to the lobby to re-equip and wallow in the save point.
The next round of fights–under a clear blue daytime sky this time, for some reason–seem to have a loose theme–prior, weak-ass Heartless bosses. The 37th seed features the Purple-Helmeted Warrior yet again, and the 34th seed includes the Giant Technicolor Lizard, though he never actually becomes visible while I’m fighting him, nor does he have a dude with a dicknose riding him around the arena. That would have been amazing, too. Pity. It’s also a pity that the Dickmaster doesn’t show up, but I guess we had to make room for yet another color combination of tiny floating mages. It’s fitting, then, that the 30th seed is the prior boss of this very world, Cerberus, aka Not-Fluffy. Functionally the bestest doggie in the Underworld feels like a recolor of the Behemoth, and is about as troublesome. The good news is that this is making me feel like I am way better at this game than I am. I’m a superstar! Look at me only get hit by Not-Fluffy’s void zone attack a few times! Not-Fluffy nets Junior his Thundaga upgrade as well. I feel like kind of a dipshit for dreading this when, even if I weren’t going for the good ending, it would have been dumb to skip all these ballin’ magic rewards. Then again, the worst of the Hades Cup is yet to come.
Not ‘The Air Up There‘? For shame.
Back to dusky evening for the third tier of competition–I wonder if the game is trying to illustrate how this is taking whole days off my life. Seed #28, “Terrible Fist[ing]s,” pairs the gauntlets of the Purple-Helmeted Warrior with some flying Gargoyle Heartless. So, just to keep us up to speed, the power rankings of the Hades Cup put the gauntlets of the PHW ahead of the entire PHW. Sure, okay. The next battle, by my calculations, should be an epic showdown with Not-Fluffy’s wagging tail and Yuffie’s booty shorts.
The 26th seed, just to keep me on my toes in even the smallest way, is called Shadow Storm, and is simply a long barrage of the cute bug Heartless. Even at its worst I would not refer to it as a storm, because storms don’t usually have fifty pairs of adorable little yellow eyes. The only challenge is killing them fast enough to keep @%$#!!! from wasting all his magic points on this one round, a challenge that I fail miserably.