It's a good place to put a nice, peaceful interlude. Both lets the pressure go down after the whole assassination plot, and also means you don't get an immediate answer to "wha happun is Squall un-alives".
Man, on replaying the game when this conversation came up I assumed it was a joke, an exaggeration.
Then, literally the first step I took out the door, Laguna gets jumped by monsters. Goddamn how does anyone live in this town if it's this overrun?
Just normal Sorceress Behavior, obviously.
BTW Ellone and Edea both start with the letter E, just wildly chucking that out there with zero other evidence of connections
The Ward bit was foreshadowed in the last bit of the previous flashback, to be fair. Pretty sure Kiros outright mentioned a throat injury on Ward.
Also since now it's not spoilers, someone in the thread mentioned that one of the other translations apparently makes an outright joke of it during that scene??? Like Ward just goes "screw you Laguna I'm gonna not talk for the rest of the game!" Absolute wild west of translations, I tell ya wat
Another one for the pile of "really interesting minor lore that I totally forgot about until replaying". The fact that by this point Laguna, Kiros and Ward are apparently aware of their magical maybe-timetraveling brain-riders is wild.
Oh hey, big main leitmotif title drop. There's quite a few remixes of Eyes On Me in the soundtrack.
Welcome to Final Fantasy VIII! We all have no idea what's going on, either!
Meanwhile, two screens later, Omi reaches a Chocobo Crossing sign and never finds the Chocobos that cross
Yeah, I guess it's a small nice thing to be able to stock up on a few extra healing items? But 3000 gil is genuinely next to nothing in FFVIII's economy, and without weapon and armor or accessory and magic purchases, you just don't spend enough money to ever care about your funds.
Well, I'm definitely more dim than Laguna because I absolutely didn't process that the old lady also actively wanted him to leave town and was just being less rude about it.
Sadly, most GF command abilities don't tend to be particularly useful, especially considering they're competing for menu space with things like basic magic and item access. Of what you have available Treatment is pretty decent, though.
I'm going to make a bet that at least one kid back in the day read this cutscene and went "oh my god I missed some unique rare enemies?" And proceeded to hunt around the Laguna Flashback for the next six hours, trying to find the one tile that apparently had these cool rare encounters.
FFVIII continuing to flex that FMV budget as early as much as it can. Really dope cutscenes as always, and generally well integrated into the actual gameplay.
Seifer really has gone full goober, hasn't he? Just a good little toy soldier for a murderous dictator, all the while waving his gunblade around like its his dick size going "whoowee look how cool I am now!"
Just makes it all the funnier to me that he went down in maybe two hits at the end of Disk 1.
Not gonna lie, my very first thought at Selphie casting Cure onscreen was "Oh hey Omi will be happy". While yes the gameplay/story integration of magic and summons and the like could be better in FFVIII... it's still certainly better than FFVII where Materia often feels like it might as well not exist beyond gameplay unless it's Black or White.
And suddenly, the "Fantasy" part of "Final Fantasy" pops in hard when we get wacky mascot character races showing up again. Been a bit, considering FFVII didn't have Moogles outside of a few minigames.
Look, Edna is a big gardening fanatic in her spare time, you know? And for someone like that it's just insulting to have these run-down SeeDs thrown at her from some shitty back-water Garden, obviously.
Maaaaan this is way cooler than the other scene, where Squall basically just goes "your breath stinks bro" and the guard cranks up the shock in response. Which is annoying, because "let me die" is the "right" answer in terms of getting a minor reward later (minor enough that it won't matter in the least to your playthrough so don't bother reloading if you don't want to, just that it is something which exists).
As always, Selphie has absolutely zero brain to mouth filter, and I am here for it.Back in the big cell, the party is brainstorming ways out of this. Zell asks if anyone has suggestions, and Selphie has this incredible line:
Holy shit, Selphie.
I love how there is absolutely zero connective tissue between what Selphie loves or finds cute and why she's fine gruesomely destroying for the sake of the mission. Train? Blow it up with a missile! Cute furry mascot? Skin him for a disguise! The mascot immediately backs away in fright and she insists she was kidding (while doing the hand-on-head 'eto bleh!' pose to boot!) and Zell thinks that no, she didn't sound like she was.
What a girl.
Legitimately
I spent the first ten minutes of prison cutscenes groaning at the screen because Zell didn't even think about the fact that hey, he's a Rock'em Sock'em Punch Boi. Totally granted that he didn't go punch happy from the start because guns were pointed at him and the girls, but you'd think he would at least consider "if you didn't have multiple guns trained on me I would literally punch your head off".
I am 100% certain that the game just plain shouldn't have let you have any random encounters before the guards with the weapons and locked out the magic command, considering they were only one floor away, and also a plot point that comes up in like the next two minutes after the end of this update.
Fun note while you're in the prison - the prison guards here are technically standard Galbadia Soldiers, but do have a different magic draw set and description from usual. Specifically, they have a bunch of status effect spells for shutting down prisoners, like Sleep, Silence and Blind, so if you've been looking to stock up on certain statuses for casting or junctioning, this is as good of a chance as any.
Also man Zell's solo sequence was disappointingly short. Though really, the entire prison's design... could be better. 2 stars out of 5 dungeon I could play Triple Triad while I was there.
New recurring dorky miniboss: The twelve dozen body doubles of President Deling.
Genuinely? I suspect it's some variation of the third one. Seifer sees himself as the "Hero" of the story, and becoming "The Sorceress's Knight" plays right into those fantasies of his, which makes Squall and the Garden now evil for being his opposition.
Jury's still out on how much of this is magical brainwashing at work, and how much of it is allllll Seifer.
