28P. Bad Romance

Rah-rah-ah-ah-ah rom-mah-rom-mah-mah ga ga-ooh-la-la, Fuck you Cid.

I spent a week and a half fighting Cid Raines. Wait, let me backtrack. Just less than 3 weeks ago I got Final Fantasy XIII. It was magical. I was so stoked to get my hands on a new Final Fantasy game, since I'd been waiting for about 5-ish years since the last one. I am aware it came out wall before I purchased it. I had no money - what do you expect of me?

Anyways, I got the game and it was magical. The graphics were beautiful, the story rich in detail and the characters um... well they grew on me. If you played past Final Fantasy games, you probably share the same sentiment as me. Lightning is a strong leading character with excellent potential right from the start. You can almost smell the emo-ness she channels from Cloud. Snow is a loving man, with a certain penchant to play hero. Sazh is black and he has an adorable baby chocobo living in his fro. Rad. Anyways, whatever - you probably don't care about all the characters. Rightly so.

After about 26 hours of gameplay, I got to a place called The Fifth Ark. Now, there are some spoilers coming up. Well, technically, I already spoiled it. Whatever. You fight Cid Raines, and he's a total prick. For the next week and a half I was stuck fighting this guy. I almost gave up and was about to make the disc into one fierce beer coaster- like I did with a certain one of Amanda's CDs. Cid has power, speed and smart AI - everything a gamer doesn't want to see in a boss. Once you get him down to a certain amount of HP, he metamorphoses and becomes really hard to damage. At the 20 minute mark, he hits your party leader with Doom, which kills you after 2 minutes, no matter what. The trick is hitting him with a Stagger and do a ton of damage before he gets the chance to transform. Every guide online won't tell you this. They will give you detailed descriptions on how and when to change your Paradigms and where to use certain combinations. FUCK 'EM. There's an item called "Fortisol", and it is your best friend. I'd never used one before for fear of wasting them. In my rage, the shrouds became a complete oversight, and it took me almost 2 weeks to remember that they existed. Fortisol gives your characters Haste, Faith and Bravery. I decided to try it out for the first time.

1:54.

One minute and fifty-four seconds.