Just when you think you’re getting close to the end, Chapter 12 punches you in the face with well over 15 hours of additional content. This chapter is a behemoth. You can technically speed run right through the main portion of the chapter, which takes place entirely in the Gold Saucer, but if you’re trying to 100% the game, be ready to pour a lot of time into The Golden Key.
Now that you’ve got the Tiny Bronco in boat form, every region has some new quests available for your perusal:
- Grasslands: Hustle and Grind
- Junon: Tides of War and Worry, Beneath Still Waters
- Corel: Gold Cup or Bust, Trouble in Paradise, Stand and Circuses, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop
- Gongaga: Escape from Endless Writer’s Block, Woodland Vigil
- Cosmo Canyon: Victim of Circumstance
- Nibelheim: Lament of the Damned
- Meridian Ocean (Starts in Costa del Sol): The Pirate King’s Treasure
If you’re going for the 100%, you’ll also have more Queen’s Blood (you can complete the Queen’s Blood storyline in this chapter), more Gold Saucer minigames, more Chocobo races, more fights in Battle Square, more smacking boxes on a time limit, I used this time to complete the Cactuar battles… The list goes on. Everything you’ve already done, expect more of it to open up in Chapter 12.
As far as the storyline goes, we get an interesting flash sideways/forwards/backwards/somewhere scene with Zach and Marlene, where Aerith and Cloud are still asleep, and Marlene says Aerith will die if she wakes up, because Sephiroth is going to kill her. Again, I’m still not totally clear on the Zach timeline, but it’s a pretty devastating scene.
This also the chapter with the legendary date scene! Who you go on the date with depends on the choices you’ve made throughout the game in conversations and in quests. The play (Loveless) is incredible. It’s (spoiler alert) another minigame, but the controls for it are very easy to grasp. Aerith sings an absolutely beautiful song at the end. The Skywheel scene is also a lot of fun. Overall, this remains one of the more iconic parts of the game, and it’s a portion that lives up to the hype. To jump straight to the date, you’ll want to go to 5:58:42.
The Turks fights are great, as usual. The Rufus fight is brutal. Rufus will counter you with almost every attack. The only tip I can give you is to work up your ATB, and use the ATB attack while he’s reloading to get some un-countered damage in.
After doing everything in this chapter, I definitely felt the end fast approaching. The full playthrough of Chapter 12: The Golden Key can be viewed here:
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