MrPopo wrote:Underwater is not required for Emerald, you just need to be beefy enough to plow through in less than 20 minutes.
Granted I was pretty young when I pulled this off, but I remember this being a legendary boss fight for me and an awesome challenge I tackled. The first time I played the game I said screw the Chocobo breeding, so I just did it this way. I remember planning out so much... doing like a Gravity x4 attack for 9999 damage 4 times, then had the Fury status on Cloud from the get go so he could easily build up to Omnislash, and yeah. Totally beat him and Ruby without KOTR.
First time I played the game I think I had 80 hours on it or something.
In my replays even with doing a lot of the sidequests and collecting, I think they were around 40-50. So yeah, 30-50 I'd say is the average probably.
FFVII is one of those games that can sometimes be painful to love due to the fanboys and all that, but I still think it's totally legit and awesome. I can even tear the game apart with the characters and crappy plot points sometimes, but still one of my favorite JRPG's for sure that I've replayed several times and will continue to do so.