FFVII - Walkthrough - 2.6 Where's Cloud & North Corel
| Items in This Area |
| Curse Ring, Elixir, Contain materia, Ultima materia, Catastrophe manual |
Get in the Highwind and fly to the Southern Continent. Look around until you spot a forest with a small village nearby. Land in the grass, and enter the village, Mideel. Look around, and be sure to do some shopping; the items here are expensive, but well worth your money. When you're done, go to the weapon shop and examine the door in the back of the room. You will try to knock on it. Go outside and climb up the stairs, then walk along the floorboards behind the house where you can buy accessories. You should hear a sound. If you press O to examine the floor, you'll receive a key. Return to the weapon shop and examine the door in the back again. When an option appears, select the top choice. You'll mess around with the door. When the shopkeeper asks what's going on, pick the bottom option, and he'll give you the Curse Ring accessory. (If you want to see your character act funny, pick the top option instead--works better with Tifa than with anyone else, IMO. Of course, you'll have to reset and try again if you want the Curse Ring.)
There's a hyperactive kid running around here, buying everything. Make sure you talk to the kid in every store (see the price listing for Mideel if you want to know why). If you have some Mimett Greens on you, you can feed the kid's white chocobo (your character says that it wants 'Samolen Greens', but they really mean 'Mimett Greens'. More fun from the Square translators, no doubt!) Feed the chocobo a Mimett Green, then choose to scratch behind it's ear and you'll get the Contain materia.
When you try to explore the north end of the town, Tifa automatically goes over to the cat in the middle of the screen. While playing with it she hears that a strange man has been brought to the hospital--inside is none other than Cloud, who survived the blast of energy back at the Crater. However, he's nothing more than a vegetable now. Tifa insists on staying by his side. Back at the Highwind, Cait Sith reveals that the Shinra are hunting for the four Huge Materia, which they plan to use in order to destroy the Meteor before it crashes into the Earth. Barret gets distressed when he learns that the Shinra plan to destroy to get the Huge Materia from North Corel then Cid becomes the new party leader! Despite his dorky running style, Cid makes a good front man. Once you're able to control him, go to the Operations room and make a new team.
Before you go anywhere else, land and return to Mideel. You can now check out the house in the middle of the town, where an old man sits betting his cat. There's a large green item on the man's bed (an Elixir). If you try to leave, the cat turns out to be a ferocious dog! When an option appears, pick the top one to admit that you took the Elixir. However, the man will let you keep it. On the other hand, if you pick the bottom option, Cid will feign innocence, until the old man tells him that the Elixir was rotten (it's not). Either way, you still get the item. There's nothing else to do here (at least for now, anyways), so leave the town behind and board the Highwind.
At this point in the game, two of the four Huge Materia sub-quests are available to you: you can either get the Huge Materia in North Corel, or get the one at Fort Condor. The choice is yours. If you want the one in North Corel first, keep reading. If you'd rather pick up the one at Fort Condor first, skip to section 4.7 below. Remember, you DON'T have to succeed at Huge Materia Quests; in fact, you can lose all four and still proceed with the game (if you decide to do this, just ignore any mention of Huge Materia for the remainder of the FAQ).
Please refer to Section 8 to discover which Materia you will get from which location before continuing, please!
Ready to go? The next thing you have to do is stop a train from moving the Huge Materia out of the Corel reactor. You can pilot the Highwind to two places; North Corel, and then work your way back through the old train tracks to the Makoro furnace, or you can land at the nearby cave-like entrance that leads to the furnace and take the train from there. Either way, you'll still have to do a bit of walking, so it's up to you (check out section 3.14 if you don't remember what I'm talking about). Anyway, once you reach the furnace, head to the center and you'll be attacked by some Shinra guards (easy to defeat). After you do them in, a train will leave the furnace. What you have to do is catch up with it before it leaves the Corel mountains. The next scene finds you and your companions on a train trying to catch up to the Shinra train.
Remember the digit-damaging fun you had back at Gaea's Cliff? Well, this time, it's worse. You have to press Up and the T button in a steady, yet extremely fast motion to make Cid pull the levers of the train so that you can catch up to the Shinra train. Even worse, there's a time limit--you have to reach the train, board it, kill the enemies on board, and stop it all within 10 minutes. If you practice, you should be able to catch up to the train in about 23-30 seconds, but remember that you'll need about 4 minutes, at best, to beat the enemies on board, so work quickly. You fight monsters each time you leap to a new train car, (five battles in all) and while they're relatively easy to win, they do take up your time (the enemies are: Gas Doctor, Gas Doctor x2, Wolfmeister, Eagle Gun, Attack Squad). If you have learned it by now, Remove can be used in the first two battles for a quick win. If you're low on time, don't use Summon Materia because the counter still decreases during the casting (which usually takes some time).
Assuming you get to the locomotive with time remaining, wait for the conversation between Cid and your other characters to stop. You can now do the following; press up + T to slow the train, or down + X to speed it up. Once Cid grabs the controls, press:
Up + Triangle, Down + X, Down + X
or: Down + X, Down + X, Down + X
or: Up + Triangle, Down + X, Down + Triangle
(if there are more commands then these, let me know, pls)
You can't enter either command while your buddies are talking to you, so skip through the conversations when they occur. The train will speed up, but will slow just as it reaches the town, if you've done it correctly.
There are three outcomes to this event:
- If you never made it onto the Shinra train, you'll arrive at Corel and will not get the Huge Materia, nor will you get the Ultima materia.
- If you made it onto the Shinra train, it goes out of control and crashes into North Corel. You won't get the Huge Materia, but you can buy the Ultima Materia from a little kid for 50000 gil.
- If you made it onto the Shinra train and stopped it, Corel won't be demolished. You'll get the Huge Materia and will be given the Ultima materia for free, as a reward from the kid.
In any case, go to the house below the inn and a lady in a hat will give you Barret's Level 4 Limit Break Manual. Remember, it's really in your best interest to save the town and get the Huge Materia.