MiskWisk
Hoot
- Location
- Somewhere devoid of wit
- Pronouns
- He
If you need proof, here you go:
Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Let's Play
Sadly, despite Yuffie's amazing costume in this scene, I have to call her second best compared to random club guy I don't know somehow cutting through ropes with a blunt weapon. Though I suppose as the only girl in the scene... Yuffie, is still Best Girl
- Pronouns
- They/Them/She/Her
Yay!Omicron said:
And thanks for writing in general, Omicron.
Also, though, reading your account of the movie, particularly the end... it kind of seems like there might be a distant sequel in it? Like, say it's well over a thousand years later. Oil rose, peaked, and fell, and we're back in a more standard fantasy setting, but with still some fantastically durable (in that they're still there) ruins of the previous recognisable industrial civilization around. The biggest and most powerful organisation is the Church, which worships Aerith, holds Cloud up as a prophet and holy warrior, holds Sephiroth up as a recurring evil everyone must be on guard against, does miracles, etc. Or is supposed to, but in recent times (centuries?), things seem to have been going wrong, and the reasons are unclear. Has Aerith abandoned the world, perhaps put off by misbehavior on the part of the people, the rulers, members of the clergy, or some combination? Is this some new work of Sephiroth? It seems like there could be a lot of Plot in people's efforts to explain and fix the issues, whatever the actual causes are.
Oh, sounds like we were thinking along somewhat similar lines.Selias said:
Oh, overall best villain? Interesting.Egleris said:
Oh, I seem to have either missed or forgotten that, sorry.Egleris said:
...Unless the spoiler thread has already advanced a few pages since I last checked it, which I suppose is possible.
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
"Dad, why do bad things happen to good people?"
"Well, son, that's because The Goddess is a feral gremlin who enjoys watching us suffer in amusing ways."
- Location
- Lake Wobegon
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Solving theodicy by dropping the stipulation of all-goodness. A classic.
ZerbanDaGreat
Daemon Noble of D E M O G R A P H I C S
- Pronouns
- They/them
"Son, sometimes the goddess is on her Hot Girl Shit and it's our duty to let her cook."
SolipsistSerpent
Endlessly Devouring
Okay, so first, best girl confirmed. I especially like choking on her own smoke bomb.
Second... She's quoting someone with that intro but I'm not sure who. One of the old magical girl shows, though, like Sailor Moon or Cutie Honey.
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I THINK the "Some know me as w, others as x, others as y, but in truth I'm z" schpiel is a riff on Cutie Honey's end-of-every episode dramatic speech, which is always "sometimes I'm x, sometimes I'm y, sometimes I'm z, but in truth I'm Cutie Honey" intro (where, in Cutie Honey's case, x y and z are disguises she's used over the course of the episode in question).
Kuja
I'M A SQUIIIID
- Location
- AZ
- Pronouns
- He/Him
"Now make sure you have your dress packed, we're going to the show tonight after we hit the gym."
SolipsistSerpent
Endlessly Devouring
I've seen it in a bunch of shows and knew they were referencing something but not what. If Cutie Honey did it, then the others were probably riffing on that since Cutie Honey originated in the seventies and the others were more recent.
- Location
- East Coast
Cutie Honey is literally the ur-Magical Girl as Superhero show, and thus one of the most influential anime shows ever--even if said influence took decades to take root--and so yes, shout-outs are common.
NitroFumetsu
Blaze of Glory
This thread inspired me to actually sit down and complete a play-through of Final Fantasy 7. Complete with a run at the Super-bosses.
I only got to Costa Del Sol before I got distracted all those years ago.
In hindsight, I probably should have fought Sephiroth first, saw the ending, *then* made a run at the Super-bosses. Oh well. At least I finally got to put to rest a game from High School I just never finished.
I only got to Costa Del Sol before I got distracted all those years ago.
In hindsight, I probably should have fought Sephiroth first, saw the ending, *then* made a run at the Super-bosses. Oh well. At least I finally got to put to rest a game from High School I just never finished.
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Based Go Nagai. It'd be easier to list the Manga genres he hasn't had a direct hand fundamentally influencing.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
*stares at current draft*
So like... Expect the first update... In the next couple days, I think?
I'm not going to say that's a mess, because I think there is a lot of really interesting decisions here that I wanted to talk about and am glad I had all the room I wanted to do so, but man there is so much thrown at you in such a scattershot manner in the opening hour of this game that it's... chaotic. Easy to meander talking from one subject to another to another. Had to keep myself from putting in a thousand words or more about Triple Triad in-between two unrelated plot events just because that's when I happened to be playing it in the game, breaking up the flow, whereas it will fit better later; this whole thing is a challenge to my ability to make an organized outline, is what it is.
Really interesting to talk about, though.
So like... Expect the first update... In the next couple days, I think?
I'm not going to say that's a mess, because I think there is a lot of really interesting decisions here that I wanted to talk about and am glad I had all the room I wanted to do so, but man there is so much thrown at you in such a scattershot manner in the opening hour of this game that it's... chaotic. Easy to meander talking from one subject to another to another. Had to keep myself from putting in a thousand words or more about Triple Triad in-between two unrelated plot events just because that's when I happened to be playing it in the game, breaking up the flow, whereas it will fit better later; this whole thing is a challenge to my ability to make an organized outline, is what it is.
Really interesting to talk about, though.
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With how much people talk about Triple Triad you could probably go in depth on it and just gloss over the plot and people would still follow along.
Ah, the true FFVIII experience.
RogueIce
Noctis Æternæ
- Location
- New Lunar Republic, Equestria
All joking aside, does Triple Triad really consume the game in the way that so many people say it does? I mean, is it just that it's a surprisingly complex minigame that gives it so much attention, or does it actually interject itself into the gameplay and plot as one would assume from the memes?
Kuja
I'M A SQUIIIID
- Location
- AZ
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Yes. Triple Triad is a fun, engrossing game in its own right. It will also let you smash the game's balance over your knee in about an hour's playtime.
Egleris
Vagrant Dragon
- Location
- Italy
The plot, no; the gameplay, only if you want it to - but once you get the hang of it, it is a very addictive minigame, so you'll often find yourself playing it whenever a good occasion for doing so arises.
- Pronouns
- Him/He
TT has its own gameplay loop that makes it easy to get caught up playing too.
I hope that there's a count of 'games of TT played' that's in every update. No need for a play by play, but seeing the counter go up be leaps or inches would be fun.
I hope that there's a count of 'games of TT played' that's in every update. No need for a play by play, but seeing the counter go up be leaps or inches would be fun.
Final Fantasy VIII, Part 1.A: Balamb Garden
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Preamble
And here we are.
Back to the beginning.
A year and a half ago, I started this Let's Play by saying that I had once considered myself a Final Fantasy fan, but had never finished a single game in the series. At the time, I thought, 'I will probably never make it this far, but if I do, I am really looking forward to finally look at my very first Final Fantasy game with fresh eyes.'
That first game was Final Fantasy VIII.
I've told bits of this story before, but let me retell it again in one place, as a preamble:
The year is 1999. Or 2000. Or 2001. It's hard for me to remember exactly; much of my childhood is covered in fog. My stepfather, a computer graphics designer, owns a PlayStation, which I am allowed to play. We own dozens, perhaps hundreds of games, burned on CDRoms through the magic of the Internet in a time when I don't even know what 'piracy' even is. There are only a few games which we own in their proper packaging, purchased from a store. One of these games exerts an incredible pull on me, it is literally bigger than every other game in our collection, because in its fathomless ambition and cutting-edge graphics, it takes up four discs. It's the only game in our collection to stand out like this, at least until we get Final Fantasy IX (which I will play much more of than VIII).
I play Final Fantasy VIII, its opening cinematic searing itself into my mind. I am exposed, not just to my first Final Fantasy, but to my first RPG, period. I come at it with no notion of how an RPG 'should' work, no expectations of magic systems or MP or character classes. It's all novel, all bewildering, and all setting up the standard my mind will judge games by for years to come. It's a game of incredible complexity to my child brain, yet exciting to interact with, deep and rich, and with much of it completely flying over my head. But I'm a kid - I'm not careful with my things. Over weeks or months of moving CDRoms in and out of the PSX compartment, I scratch it. I don't know if the damage was cumulative or if I fucked up the CDRom once in a big way, but eventually, while the gameplay runs smoothly, the cinematics start to glitch and freeze.
Eventually, I hit a cinematic (which I've always assumed to be right at the end of the first CDRom because it makes for a good narrative, but I realize now I have no idea if that is actually the case) where the game just stops. No matter how many times I try. No matter what tricks I pull to try and skip the cinematic (and I'll try again and again for the whole time we own that PSX). The game is just frozen dead on that one still frame of the witch's face.
That's the end of my Final Fantasy VIII journey. My stepfather never burned a copy of the game, whether because he didn't care to or because I didn't think to ask, I'll never know. The game remains, a gnawing piece of unfinished business at the back of my mind, for years, but it eventually subsides. Final Fantasy IX did much to soothe this ache, although it introduced many things that confused and baffled me - why are all these characters stuck to one class instead of me being free to make Djidanne a Summoner if I want to? What is 'MP' and why can't I steal magic from enemies? That game I played near to the end and never finished for banal 'teenager gets bored/distracted/tired of thing he enjoys and never finishes it', possibly because I found the endgame too difficult. And then I got really into handheld consoles, and that's where I got most of my RPG intake for the rest of my teenage years.
By the time FFVIII was ported to Steam in 2013, I felt that brief pang of nostalgia, of 'I can finish that game now,' and purchased it - but my interests had changed. I got distracted very quickly, in fact I might have only played it once.
It's been sitting in my Steam list ever since, for over a decade, waiting for me to come back to it.
And today, we are doing it at last.
A Brief History of Console Time
Final Fantasy VIII was released in 1999.
I want to focus on this date for a moment. In my FF7 opening post, I got a little into technical upgrades and the march of technology, but I have never really mentioned development cycles or stuff like that because, quite frankly, there's nothing I could tell you on those issues that would be any deeper than what you'd get off skimming Wikipedia. But I'm going to make an exception to that today.
Final Fantasy XVI is the last numbered ('mainline') entry in the FF franchise as of writing. It began concept development in 2015, was rumored to be worked on in 2019, and was officially announced in 2020, before being released (with pandemic-induced delays) in 2023. That's 8 years of development, and 3 years from announcement to release. The previous mainline entry in the franchise, XV, had an infamously troubled development history and was released in 2016. That's 7 years between installments. This is long by modern standards, but not that long; God of War was released in 2018 and its sequel God of War: Ragnarok in 2022, for a gap between installments of four years. This is normal for modern AAA game development; this is the world we live in.
I want you to take a look at the timeline of turn-of-the-century Square.
Final Fantasy VII was released in 1997. Development of VIII began that year. It was released two years later, in '99. Then IX the next year in 2000. Then X, for the Playstation 2, a whole-ass new console, the following year in 2001. Then XI, the MMO, the following year in 2002.
Final Fantasy I was released in 1987. That's eleven Final Fantasy games in fifteen years. Pretty much every year you could go out and grab a new FF. Even in the PSX era, with its incredible leaps in graphics, and the following jump to sixth generation hardware, the trend did not merely continue but if anything, accelerated. One FF game a year for four years, '99 to '02.
What a world to live in
By contrast, this is the XII to XVI timeline:
Aside from XIII and XIV being released one year apart, we're looking at a gap of three years, then seven (with the trick of XIV being effectively re-released a second time as a different game between XIII and XV), then seven again.
Please don't misconstrue this as a value judgment on Square Enix's development practices, or as a 'things were better back then' argument Part of the point of this Let's Play is that I have never played Final Fantasy XII, XIII or XV, I have no idea what their respective qualities may be. Modern games are incredible. They do things with graphics and actor performance and gameplay that older games could only dream of. This, in turn, doesn't make them 'better' in an essential sense than older games, but it does mean that their production cycle expands in length and cost over time. It takes more people more money over more time to make an AAA game today than it did in the 90s. That's an unavoidable fact. The only way to avoid it would be to deliberately make retro games, and while that would be a fascinating decision in an artistic sense, that's not going to pay rent for Square Enix's 4,700 employees. It is what it is.
But it says something about time. If you're 12 years old in 2009 playing Final Fantasy XIII, and assuming MMOs aren't your thing, you'd be 19 when XV comes out. It's not like the series' regular release of mainline titles would define your teenage years.
But if you're 12 years old in 1997, then over the next four years, as a child entering teenagehood, going from 12 to 16, you might play Final Fantasy VII, VIII, IX and X, all as they are released.Four widely-acclaimed releases, at least two of which are often counted among the greatest games of all time, in four years, has a kind of formative power. It shapes a generation.
Final Fantasy VII kickstarted that generation. Launched it into its new era. Final Fantasy VIII, which unlike both its predecessors does not have a little 'widely considered to be one of the greatest video games of all time' aside on its Wikipedia page, continued it. But for me, it's where it started.
So let's begin.
Intro Movies
FF8's cinematic aspirations are obvious as soon as you launch the game. VII opened with a flat credit screen saying 'Final Fantasy' and the names of the staff appearing one by one. VIII opts for something more high concept -a military-sounding theme plays as the names of the staff appear on black screens interspersed with black and white shots of the game's characters, angled or cropped so that we don't see their faces. It all looks really modern and classy, and it's our first look at the fashion sense of our protagonist, seen here wearing a leather jacket and no less than two belts, plus a necklace with a lion's head and a fur collar (ie a mane).
We'll see if that lion theming amounts to anything. As well, we can maybe see the beginning of a joke in the making about Final Fantasy and belts.
The actual title screen is very boring, however.
While this does emphasize the 'lion' theme, this can't possibly hope to beat the Buster Sword planted in the ground like a gravestone against a background of darkness.
Already I'm having trouble with the controls. The key bindings seem pretty fucked; the confirm button is X? Not, like, the X button on my controller, literally the X key on my keyboard. I'm going to be wrestling with those for a while before landing on a solution.
But for now, it's time to actually start the game.
A shot of a beach, the waves coming in and out.
This shot holds for several seconds while the game hits us with what VII had kept for its very end - vocals. 'Fithos, lusec,' a feminine voice sings. Then as the instrumentals pick up and the camera starts tracking over the sea, words appear on the screen: 'I'll be here…' 'Why…?' 'I'll be 'waiting'... Here…' 'For what?' 'For you… So if you come… You'll find me. I promise.'
As this happens, the camera moves over a desert, a field of flowers, a young man's face flashes on the screen, and then a girl's back.
Pink petals blow in the wind; she catches one in her hand and, when she opens it again, it's a white down feather. It blows upwards, into the sky, where the clouds darken, and it seems to disappear, only to fall, only it's no longer a feather at all - it's a sword.
The choirs are going apeshit. One young man picks up the sword, and attacks another one who is challenging him with the most rancid possible vibes.
As white feathers blow, we see flashes of the girl in blue entering an eerie room occupied by a strange, witch-like woman, as the two boys do battle using improbable-looking swords (more of those in a bit).
This move is called 'fuck you, we can animate hair now.'
They actually fence, they do parries and ripostes, and Blondie (who is framed as the villain, smirking smugly the whole time) actually uses a Fire spell to blast Lion Guy backwards, opening him for a follow-up cut which actually cuts across his face and spills blood on the ground.
Damn.
Lion Guy retaliates furiously, and as his own strikes connect, black feathers blow across the screen, and the cinematic rises to a climax with a series of snapshots from what I can only assume is later in the game, all snapshots which emphasize one thing:
These two characters are connected. And just in case we could somehow miss it:
The logo of the game is literally them embracing.
…
This cinematic changed my life?
We owned the PlayStation before FF8 came out, and I myself owned a GameBoy first, then a GameBoy Color. I knew video games. I just had no idea they could look like this.
What FF8 is going for here is different from what FF7 was doing, and not quite trying to achieve the same goals. Both, in their own way, are displays of sheer power, of the graphics this new generation console affords them. But VII was going for a clear lead-in to the start of the game - emphasize the mysterious figure of the Flower Girl, then give the viewer a sweeping view of Midgar, its awesome metropolis where the first hours of the game will be set, show people, streetlights and cars to wow the player with the reveal that this is game is set in a modern, industrial setting, then directly show the exciting entrance of the train and flow seamlessly into the in-engine Avalanche attack.
FF8's opening is not so seamless. Instead, it's an anime opening. It has an incredible theme song, a montage that is partly narrative and partly thematic, introduces you to a handful of characters, teases cutscenes to come later in the narrative, and establishes the expectation of a specific focus for the story. It also depicts literal events that are occurring as we watch them (the duel is actually happening and the game proper will open on its immediate aftermath), but it blends this into a sweeping, cinematic montage that just…
This is the same console those FF7 cutscenes with the flat faces were animated on before. The same hardware. But the animation team's experience in wielding its power has gone through the roof.
I asked around a while ago; as far as people could think, there was no other game at the time of VIII's release whose cinematics looked as good as this one did. This was the peak of video game FMVs at time of release. And it's not hard to understand why. Not only do the characters look almost human (they have hair), are they capable of emoting, of expression, but they are capable of complex enough movements to animate a full-on action scene, trading blows and hurting each other.
But what do we actually learn from this intro? Well, a few things. We see four characters in it:
We also know that Lion Guy and Blondie fought a duel before the start of the game that left them both with dramatic facial scars, and the romance between Lion Guy and Blue Girl is likely going to be a core theme of the game.
…
Given Final Fantasy's spotty record with romance so far, that could be very good or very bad. Certainly the odds that we'll end in a Tifa-style 'we know they're together but we won't say it' situation seem dramatically lower. Also, given Final Fantasy's target audience at the time and the tendency for male teenagers to think romance is icky, a romantic focus could have played a role in it receiving a somewhat worse reception than previous games even if the romance is perfectly handled.
So. With all that out of the way.
Let's tackle the actual game, shall we?
The Game, At Last
We open the game on a white screen fading in to an infirmary room. Lion Guy is lying on a bed unconscious, and slowly wakes up; the doctor asks how he's feeling. As it turns out, his forehead is bandaged due to the injury he's received. Dr Kadowaki tells him to take it easy next time, then asks his name (notably not because she doesn't know him, but to check he's fully regained awareness).
Squall. His name is Squall.
Cloud, Squall… Kind of a weather theme we've had for those two, maybe? Is that anything? Terra was 'Tina' in JP but if we use her EN name as a basis for comparison, then we have an elemental, earth/wind/wind thing going for the past three games. Eh, I'm overthinking this.
Dr Karawaki and Squall's next exchange seems to set the tone for what might be his character arc for the time being: She tells him to take it easy in training or he'll get seriously hurt, he replies that he can't just let Seifer (Blondie, then) challenge him without responding, and she tells him that he might 'wanna be cool,' but he risks just getting hurt.
Okay. Right off the gate it feels like we're treading some similarities to Cloud, with a character who is trying to project cool and is afraid to back down from a challenge and looking like a wimp and other characters telling him to not be an idiot. We'll see if there is more to it than that. Then Karawaki leaves the room to call Squall's 'instructor,' one Quistis, to 'get her student.'
She's overheard on the phone saying, 'His injury's not serious. It'll probably leave a scar.'
…
Lady.
A permanently scarring injury is serious.
Like - obviously I, being a weeb, think a JRPG protagonist having a badass scar across his forehead looks rad as hell, but like, this is some serious life-impacting stuff we're dealing with. I get that Karawaki means 'not serious' as in it won't threaten Squall's life or functioning, but major facial scars seriously impact people's lives.
…
Actually.
This is Mensur, or Academic fencing, a kind of fencing practiced by university students in the Germanic world, historically in particular in the 19th century. As you can see, the duelists wear extensive protective equipment, including thick goggles to protect the eyes… But not masks. The result is that while injuries in first blood Mensur duels are rarely fatal or disabling, they frequently result in facial scarring that could be considered 'cosmetic.' So-called 'dueling scars' were considered desirable as a sign of daring and willingness to expose oneself to danger in the course of a duel.
If you've ever wondered why 19th century German aristocrats are always portrayed with facial scars, that's why. They actively sought out such injuries in duels as a badge of honor.
I think we might be looking at something similar here. Squall and Seifer are part of an institution of learning (let's say a university for now) which has a formal or informal culture of dueling, and the resulting scars are expected.
Well, anyway. Squall lies down in bed to catch a breather before his instructor arrives, and as he does…
I haven't futzed with the text settings so far so the slow unscroll speed means I keep missing the mark. Here, she's saying "Squall… so we meet again," emphasis mine.
The difference in resolution makes it tricky to tell, but this looks like Blue Girl from the FMV. She's being all mysterious and shit, looking at him and then leaving without him noticing her.
But who cares, because it's time to meet Quistis.
…
I'm not going to say anything. I'm just not. I'm not going to comment on the Hot Teacher character being introduced with a full CG FMV of her walking into the infirmary and looking at the protagonist with exasperated fondness. We're going to skip right over that.
Quistis leads Squall out of the infirmary. They have some entertaining banter that says Quistis knows about Squall's 'whatever, man' affect to the point of predicting his lines, it's pretty funny.
It really sells that these two have an established relationship and know each other. Then the camera pans out of this colonnade and into a full view of the establishment we're in…
Balamb Garden, a futuristic university. Like with VII, we're clearly in a modern setting. Unlike VII, the grit and grime of Midgar's industrial hellscape shrouded in the perpetual night of pollution smoke has been replaced by clean, smooth curves, soft colors, inexplicable contraptions floating over the whole place like an angelic halo.
This is an entirely different aesthetic, and I dig it. It looks like this, then, is our starting location. We don't know its purpose yet, beyond in some vague sense 'education,' but we're about to learn.
This is such a cool aesthetic. Again, it's modern - those are computers in those desks - but in a very fancy, classy way, with blue screen displays set in the middle of wooden paneling and cushioned furniture. This is an expensive place, we can say that much.
We can also say that there is an extreme case of Protagonist Appearance Syndrome at work here. Everyone in this room is wearing the same uniform except Squall and Seifer, who have fancy customized outfits with sweet coats.
…
Speaking of character aesthetic, though.
People look normal.
Like, they have full standing models with human proportions. Gone as the squashed Playmobil models of FF7. And as a result (and this is what kills every screenshot I've ever seen of an FF7 modded to have to full-sized character models), the world is sized for them. They sit on normal chairs. They interact with normal desks.
I think this might be the only FF game until the PS2 era to have character models of full-sized humans. Every game before was too limited, whether by sprite technology leading to chibified characters or by FF7's extremely sparse low-poly models, and FF9 will make a deliberate artistic choice to go for a cartoonish, 'Super Deformed' aesthetic even as its graphics quality improve over even its predecessor. This is the only game of its generation to have normal people hanging out in its environment. And I kind of love it for that. It changes the mood of everything so strongly.
Notably, both Seifer and Squall are attending class without getting into any kind of official trouble despite causing each other severe injuries, which is further indication that the whole 'dueling using training as a thin cover' is tacitly, if not officially, endorsed by the institution.
Quistis tells the class that the 'field exam for SeeD candidates,' whatever that is, will take place that afternoon. Not all students are taking part in the field exam, and qualifying for it required an earlier written test which Squall presumably passed. Quistis concludes with an admonishment to Seifer not to injure his training partners (okay, so he's at least getting some verbal criticism), which he reacts to with brief but visible frustration, and then class is adjourned.
This is pretty short, for a class session, but the main purpose here is to get us in touch with Squall's desk computer, which…
…
We'll come back to this in a little bit.
For now, Quistis ambushes Squall at the exit, asking him if he's gone to the 'Fire Cavern.' This is a prerequisite to the SeeD exam and he won't be able to participate if he doesn't do it.
Internally, Squall muses that he was going to do it this morning, but got sidetracked by his duel with Seifer. When Quistis asks him if he has a good excuse for not completing that task, though, he answers 'Not really.'
Which is interesting. It suggests, if nothing else, that Squall doesn't bother with poor excuses. He has enough self-awareness to realize that letting Seifer bait him into a duel instead of completing his assignment is on him, and he doesn't try to justify himself with it. Quistis tells him she'll assist with the Fire Cavern and will be waiting for him at the front gate.
Also, Quistis has her own fan club who are all incredibly jealous of Squall for hanging out with her.
So we head out of class, and it's time for a meet cute.
Well, I don't know if it's a 'meet cute' really, that girl doesn't even get a name. But she does run into Squall while wearing a school uniform and shouting about how she'll be late to class, which feels incredibly trope-y. Upon seeing that Squall came out of the classroom, she realizes that 'homeroom' is over and laments that this place is so much bigger that her last school and she got lost.
*A brief administrative period in Japanese school where a teacher assigned to a class checks in on them between actual classes, although I'm not sure anyone reading this on Ess Vee dot Com in 2024 would need me to explain this.
Which is the game's way of giving us a little direction tutorial, by choosing to have Squall show her around the place.
On the way, we run into this student who was gifted a bunch of trading cards that he has no interest in and asks us if we'd like them. I say yes. He casually mentions that we can challenge other people in the world to play cards by talking to them with the Square button, instead of the Cross button.
This is quietly the most important and devastating that will ever happen to us. Fully a quarter of this first session's playtime has been spent playing cards. Final Fantasy VIII is a card duel simulator with a JRPG attached on top. We'll get to that later.
This huge monitor in the center of the atrium (is that the word? I think it is) is the Directory, which serves as both a rough map and a crude fast travel system (which is incidentally also new to the series!). Radiating out of the central atrium are the Dormitory where most students live with few bothering to commute; the Cafeteria, where Squall tells us the hot dogs are especially popular and people must wait in a line; the parking lot, where we can borrow the school car (woooo! cars!); the 'quad', which is not a word I'm familiar with, where the Garden Festival is being prepared-
…really. We're having a school festival?
Okay, yes, this is definitely Final Fantasy: Anime High School Trope Edition. We'll see if that's a good or bad thing as we go forward. This is also somewhat off-putting to me for reasons we'll get into one update from now.
Rounding out Baland Garden are Dr Kadowaki's Infirmary, the Training Center which Squall hastens to emphasize has real monsters in it and should be taken very seriously, and finally the Library, although he dismissively says that the terminals in the classrooms are way more efficient than books.
Classic late 90s teenager behavior.
We also learn that Balamb Garden's Headmaster is named… Cid. So that's our first namecheck.
The girl asks Squall if he'll take the SeeD exam, then says she is, too - she finished the prerequisites at her previous Garden before transferring here, so we might see each other later, then she scooters off to her own business.
We regain control of Squall, and we get access to our first Save Point, which looks a lot fancier than the ones in previous games.
…
So. Let's take a short break here.
What have we learned so far?
Squall is a student at a special school called Balamb Garden, which allows its students to engage in sword fights (not that this means much, so did German universities in the 19th century), has training grounds full of monsters, and has a special exam of unknown purpose known as the 'SeeD exam.' That's honestly not much to go on, but we can draw a bunch of inferences ('this is probably a magic battle school', etc), and we don't need all that much more yet.
But here's the thing.
There is a ton more information available to us right now.
We just have to consult The Lore.
This is so nostalgic.
So yes! The Balamb Garden Network includes a ton of information, including a tutorial that we're going to skip because it comes up in the story anyway. But the very first thing that greets us on entry is this…
'GF Data.'
Due to Balamb Garden's strict rules surrounding student fraternization, students must register their relationships with the university. However, we can see that it's also a surprisingly progressive establishment, as it allows polyamory, and Squall has not one, but two registered GFs.
…
Okay, look, the GF/girlfriend joke has to be decades old at this point. I do not intend to drag it out over and over. The game's use of 'GF', as funny as it is, refers to Guardian Forces, which are, judging from the fact that Squall's are named Quezacotl and Shiva, its take on summons.
And weirdly enough, we can… Rename them?
That's 'Quezacotl' and Shiva, our starting summons, or GFs. Why this game, of all games, gives us the option to rename Summons, I'm not sure? Maybe because in a way summons are going to be the most important feature of the game going forward, the defining building block of its character building system, and so GFs are notionally more important than ever before. Mechanically at least that will hold true, but narratively? We'll have to see. We might or might not be looking at another FFVI situation here where Espers define the mechanical mid- and late-game but are also literally rocks made from dead people.
…
'Quezacotl,' as you might guess from the UI, is named such because of character limits. It should, of course, be Quetzalcoatl, but there aren't enough characters. Oddly enough, he's the first instance of something I distinctly recall from my childhood: the French localization of FF8 inexplicably changes a bunch of names. Quetzacotl, for instance, was named Golgotha. Yes, like the mountain where Jesus was crucified.
I suppose I'll have to resign myself to Quezacotl this time around.
So, Squall has acquired his two GFs, and now we can look through the various menus of the Balamb Garden Network. They're comprehensive and fairly in-character; they contain a lot of information that isn't relevant to us as players but serves purely to breathe life into the universe, like the fact that Balamb Garden has no mandatory dress code and it's uniform is only mandated when directly requested by superiors, like for a particular event, which explains Squall and Seifer's unique aesthetic. The motto of Balamb Garden is allegedly 'Work hard, study hard, play hard,' which is… Actually fairly close to a number of university-related quotes dating back all the way to the 19th century; I thought this was modern slang feeling out of place as a school motto, but it's actually a perfectly normal university motto.
A list of late books, an example of a flavor text screen.
So, summing up what we learn from the terminal:
There are three Gardens in the world, Balamb Garden, Galbadia Garden, and Trabia Garden. Balamb Garden was the first 'built in accordance to Master Cid's ideals and dreams,' while Galbadia is the largest. Each Garden trains students in skills, many of which are related to combat, and the elite of the students graduate as SeeDs, who are mercenaries working for the Garden, operating in small teams all over the world in response to requests by governments and civilians alike, aiding in military operations, rescue operations, and protecting civilians. After the age of 20 at most, SeeDs are released from the Garden and expected through various agreements to join the militaries of various nations across the world; they are expected never to use their skills for personal profit and to reflect on the Garden's honor with their actions, although they are paid a salary based on their rank.
SeeDs' power comes from bonding with Guardian Forces, which are 'independent energy forces' (spirits?), and using that bond to wield 'para-magic,' a form of direct manipulation of energy developed by scientists from their study of a 'sorceress,' a being capable of wielding true 'magic,' about whom very little is known. Para-magic can be learned by anyone with the right training, but it struggles to match the power of conventional weapons; it's the combination of Guardian Forces and para-magic that grants the SeeDs their unique strength. Also, the use of 'para-magic' is alleged to potentially cause memory loss, which seems kind of a huge plot thread to just dangle like that. I'm sure that won't be relevant ever.
The Network also has an actual message board that students are shitposting on.
This is beautiful. I truly feel like I have been launched through a portal back into the late 90s. I could almost cry. I bet every time you go to post on the Balamb Garden board you get the dial-up noise too.
So!
This is a magic battle school manga.
It's literally just that. Everyone here is a teenager (young adult?) being trained in Magic Combat Art and bonding with their cool unique spirits in order to wield pseudo-magic and cool weapons and to be sent on missions across the world for the sake of a mysterious headmaster. Also their magic system seems to have something shady behind it (whether that's how they developed it from the study of 'sorceresses' possibly unethically, or the memory loss issue), as does the fact that they're seemingly expected to join as children or teenagers and be on a permanent retainer for Balamb Garden once trained. Like some kind of… Wizard janissaries? Hmmm.
It's a cool premise, it is. It also feels like playing this game today is twenty-five years too late to find magic battle school mangas particularly original; I'll try not to hold that against the game. It can't be held accountable for the fact that since it's released, shit like The Irregular At Magic High School or The Asterisk War came out. Urgh.
…
Also holy shit. This game came out in 1999, right? I played it either that year or sometime in the following two. Which is incidentally around the same time as I got into Harry Potter, slightly later.
Which means that I read two stories in a row about a brown-haired teenager with a prominent forehead scar going to a magic school where he learns magic powers.
Given that FF8 is the one where the protagonist gets into sword fights on the regular, three guesses as to which one I thought was cooler.
…
This post has been kind of all over the place. Sorry about that.
Here's the thing:
FF7's opening was extremely straightforward and streamlined. It's an in medias res action sequence. There is less than three minutes from pressing 'New Game' to entering your first battle, and that's including the opening FMV; in fact, entering combat is the first gameplay action we take, before even moving around, aside from clicking through a handful of dialogue boxes. From there, we are quickly pulled into a simple plot - evil corporation sucking the planet's lifeblood, we're here to blow up its reactor, Cloud doesn't care, Barret is mad at him, we fight soldiers and robots. Things only let up once the Mako Reactor has been destroyed and we make our way to Sector 7.
FF8's opening is entirely different. It just… Invites us to a day in the life of Squall. An important day, but none of the important stuff is happening right this second; the duel was earlier this morning/yesterday night, the Fire Cavern exam is whenever we join up with Quistis, and in between we just… Hang out. We can wander around Balamb Garden, talk to students, read the Terminal…
There's a lot of optional text. FF7's most important tutorial was the Materia tutorial, and it waited until after the Mako Reactor #1 raid, because Cloud came equipped with enough Materia to use basic magic and the commands offered to us were all classic FF stuff. The tutorial was purely optional and in a somewhat out of the way location in the Slums, and I skipped most of it and didn't suffer from it. FF8 is instead going to throw tutorial after tutorial at us, staggered slightly, and on top of those tutorials it expects us to read the included documentation at our Terminal to learn what the fuck a 'Balamb Garden' is or who are 'SeeDs' and, while we're at it, find out the closing hours of the Library (an actual thing we can find out about!). It's a lot of text, most of it skippable but we probably shouldn't skip it if we want to understand what's going on.
We could spend an hour just hanging out before having our first combat encounter.
It's a really different way to introduce the game. A way I would have liked a lot better back when I was a teenager and I didn't mind reading setting documentation for hours on end; today I want to at least get a taste of gameplay within five to ten minutes of opening a game, just to know what I'm in for, or else I get annoyed. I don't know if I'd call it a flaw, but it's much less direct, much less dynamic than VII.
Like…
Here's the Balamb Garden Library. By interacting with a shelf, I can find the first issue of the magazine Occult Fan. While I'm sure the information contained within will eventually connect to gameplay or story, right now it's just fun, in-character flavor:
A Timber resident found a monster crashed from the sky. Mysterious! Quirky! Fun!
There's like, a voice to that presentation, very unhurried and very invested in making it feel like Squall is surrounded by the bustle and background noise you'd expect from a real university, with fan clubs, activity clubs, favorite foods at the cafeteria, and so on.
Like, I could join Quistis, but what if instead I paid a visit to Dr Karawaki and challenged her to a card duel?
I can do that! Look at my starting deck of cards! I'm not going to pause for an explanation of how Triple Triad works right now, but I could just spend two hours doing card duels instead of ever joining Quistis at the Front Gate.
I get my ass kicked, by the way.
We don't even know how the basic mechanics of combat in this game work yet.
This is such a fascinating change in direction for the opening of the game. And it makes me think it's no wonder I meandered and lost interest back in 2013, while also making it clear to me why I got so thoroughly lost in that universe back in 1999. Today… Well, it's a mix of both. First time playing, I visited two of the annexes of Balamb Garden, then got tired and went to see Quistis so I could sample the gameplay proper, rather than thoroughly exploring the starting location and talking to everyone as I usually would.
But also… Well, in FF7, the Sector 7 Slums are kind of one and done, right?
I mean, they're Tifa and Barret's home. They have the feel of a proper starting town, a place with various amenities and important characters you might revisit. And part of that is of course me projecting FF7R's handling of the Slums backwards onto FF7. Because it's a trick: You visit the Slums exactly once, then you head for the Mako Reactor #5 Raid, where Cloud falls down to the Church, meets Aerith, gets sidetracked chasing Tifa into Wall Market, learns about Shinra's plan to collapse the Plate, and then we get back and the Sector 7 Slums are annihilated before we reach them.
Meanwhile, Balamb Garden really gives the impression that it will stick around. Not necessarily forever, of course (Final Fantasy loves blowing up towns, we know that by now), but at least for a few hours. Maybe I don't need to visit every location before even meeting with Quistis and getting my combat tutorial, maybe I can just… Relax. And do that later.
Ah, who am I kidding, that probably means permanently missing content.
God but the place is gorgeous, though.
But alright, let's go meet with Quistis.
There are several screens on the way to the front gate. Like genuinely a 'why tho' number of screens.
Oh, hey, she changed into her field attire - I totally failed to notice at first but she had a blue Balamb Garden-themed uniform as homeroom teacher, but changed into an orange-and-black outfit that seems to more match her personal sensibilities to head out to the Fire Cavern. And that also has more belts. Of course.
…
What's that?
"Why did the character models in your screenshots get all crunchy?"
That's just your imagination. C'mon, let's go.
…
Okay, fine.
Let's cut this here for image count and then explain.
And here we are.
Back to the beginning.
A year and a half ago, I started this Let's Play by saying that I had once considered myself a Final Fantasy fan, but had never finished a single game in the series. At the time, I thought, 'I will probably never make it this far, but if I do, I am really looking forward to finally look at my very first Final Fantasy game with fresh eyes.'
That first game was Final Fantasy VIII.
I've told bits of this story before, but let me retell it again in one place, as a preamble:
The year is 1999. Or 2000. Or 2001. It's hard for me to remember exactly; much of my childhood is covered in fog. My stepfather, a computer graphics designer, owns a PlayStation, which I am allowed to play. We own dozens, perhaps hundreds of games, burned on CDRoms through the magic of the Internet in a time when I don't even know what 'piracy' even is. There are only a few games which we own in their proper packaging, purchased from a store. One of these games exerts an incredible pull on me, it is literally bigger than every other game in our collection, because in its fathomless ambition and cutting-edge graphics, it takes up four discs. It's the only game in our collection to stand out like this, at least until we get Final Fantasy IX (which I will play much more of than VIII).
I play Final Fantasy VIII, its opening cinematic searing itself into my mind. I am exposed, not just to my first Final Fantasy, but to my first RPG, period. I come at it with no notion of how an RPG 'should' work, no expectations of magic systems or MP or character classes. It's all novel, all bewildering, and all setting up the standard my mind will judge games by for years to come. It's a game of incredible complexity to my child brain, yet exciting to interact with, deep and rich, and with much of it completely flying over my head. But I'm a kid - I'm not careful with my things. Over weeks or months of moving CDRoms in and out of the PSX compartment, I scratch it. I don't know if the damage was cumulative or if I fucked up the CDRom once in a big way, but eventually, while the gameplay runs smoothly, the cinematics start to glitch and freeze.
Eventually, I hit a cinematic (which I've always assumed to be right at the end of the first CDRom because it makes for a good narrative, but I realize now I have no idea if that is actually the case) where the game just stops. No matter how many times I try. No matter what tricks I pull to try and skip the cinematic (and I'll try again and again for the whole time we own that PSX). The game is just frozen dead on that one still frame of the witch's face.
That's the end of my Final Fantasy VIII journey. My stepfather never burned a copy of the game, whether because he didn't care to or because I didn't think to ask, I'll never know. The game remains, a gnawing piece of unfinished business at the back of my mind, for years, but it eventually subsides. Final Fantasy IX did much to soothe this ache, although it introduced many things that confused and baffled me - why are all these characters stuck to one class instead of me being free to make Djidanne a Summoner if I want to? What is 'MP' and why can't I steal magic from enemies? That game I played near to the end and never finished for banal 'teenager gets bored/distracted/tired of thing he enjoys and never finishes it', possibly because I found the endgame too difficult. And then I got really into handheld consoles, and that's where I got most of my RPG intake for the rest of my teenage years.
By the time FFVIII was ported to Steam in 2013, I felt that brief pang of nostalgia, of 'I can finish that game now,' and purchased it - but my interests had changed. I got distracted very quickly, in fact I might have only played it once.
It's been sitting in my Steam list ever since, for over a decade, waiting for me to come back to it.
And today, we are doing it at last.
***
A Brief History of Console Time
Final Fantasy VIII was released in 1999.
I want to focus on this date for a moment. In my FF7 opening post, I got a little into technical upgrades and the march of technology, but I have never really mentioned development cycles or stuff like that because, quite frankly, there's nothing I could tell you on those issues that would be any deeper than what you'd get off skimming Wikipedia. But I'm going to make an exception to that today.
Final Fantasy XVI is the last numbered ('mainline') entry in the FF franchise as of writing. It began concept development in 2015, was rumored to be worked on in 2019, and was officially announced in 2020, before being released (with pandemic-induced delays) in 2023. That's 8 years of development, and 3 years from announcement to release. The previous mainline entry in the franchise, XV, had an infamously troubled development history and was released in 2016. That's 7 years between installments. This is long by modern standards, but not that long; God of War was released in 2018 and its sequel God of War: Ragnarok in 2022, for a gap between installments of four years. This is normal for modern AAA game development; this is the world we live in.
I want you to take a look at the timeline of turn-of-the-century Square.
Final Fantasy VII was released in 1997. Development of VIII began that year. It was released two years later, in '99. Then IX the next year in 2000. Then X, for the Playstation 2, a whole-ass new console, the following year in 2001. Then XI, the MMO, the following year in 2002.
Final Fantasy I was released in 1987. That's eleven Final Fantasy games in fifteen years. Pretty much every year you could go out and grab a new FF. Even in the PSX era, with its incredible leaps in graphics, and the following jump to sixth generation hardware, the trend did not merely continue but if anything, accelerated. One FF game a year for four years, '99 to '02.
What a world to live in
By contrast, this is the XII to XVI timeline:
Aside from XIII and XIV being released one year apart, we're looking at a gap of three years, then seven (with the trick of XIV being effectively re-released a second time as a different game between XIII and XV), then seven again.
Please don't misconstrue this as a value judgment on Square Enix's development practices, or as a 'things were better back then' argument Part of the point of this Let's Play is that I have never played Final Fantasy XII, XIII or XV, I have no idea what their respective qualities may be. Modern games are incredible. They do things with graphics and actor performance and gameplay that older games could only dream of. This, in turn, doesn't make them 'better' in an essential sense than older games, but it does mean that their production cycle expands in length and cost over time. It takes more people more money over more time to make an AAA game today than it did in the 90s. That's an unavoidable fact. The only way to avoid it would be to deliberately make retro games, and while that would be a fascinating decision in an artistic sense, that's not going to pay rent for Square Enix's 4,700 employees. It is what it is.
But it says something about time. If you're 12 years old in 2009 playing Final Fantasy XIII, and assuming MMOs aren't your thing, you'd be 19 when XV comes out. It's not like the series' regular release of mainline titles would define your teenage years.
But if you're 12 years old in 1997, then over the next four years, as a child entering teenagehood, going from 12 to 16, you might play Final Fantasy VII, VIII, IX and X, all as they are released.Four widely-acclaimed releases, at least two of which are often counted among the greatest games of all time, in four years, has a kind of formative power. It shapes a generation.
Final Fantasy VII kickstarted that generation. Launched it into its new era. Final Fantasy VIII, which unlike both its predecessors does not have a little 'widely considered to be one of the greatest video games of all time' aside on its Wikipedia page, continued it. But for me, it's where it started.
So let's begin.
Intro Movies
FF8's cinematic aspirations are obvious as soon as you launch the game. VII opened with a flat credit screen saying 'Final Fantasy' and the names of the staff appearing one by one. VIII opts for something more high concept -a military-sounding theme plays as the names of the staff appear on black screens interspersed with black and white shots of the game's characters, angled or cropped so that we don't see their faces. It all looks really modern and classy, and it's our first look at the fashion sense of our protagonist, seen here wearing a leather jacket and no less than two belts, plus a necklace with a lion's head and a fur collar (ie a mane).
We'll see if that lion theming amounts to anything. As well, we can maybe see the beginning of a joke in the making about Final Fantasy and belts.
The actual title screen is very boring, however.
While this does emphasize the 'lion' theme, this can't possibly hope to beat the Buster Sword planted in the ground like a gravestone against a background of darkness.
Already I'm having trouble with the controls. The key bindings seem pretty fucked; the confirm button is X? Not, like, the X button on my controller, literally the X key on my keyboard. I'm going to be wrestling with those for a while before landing on a solution.
But for now, it's time to actually start the game.
A shot of a beach, the waves coming in and out.
This shot holds for several seconds while the game hits us with what VII had kept for its very end - vocals. 'Fithos, lusec,' a feminine voice sings. Then as the instrumentals pick up and the camera starts tracking over the sea, words appear on the screen: 'I'll be here…' 'Why…?' 'I'll be 'waiting'... Here…' 'For what?' 'For you… So if you come… You'll find me. I promise.'
As this happens, the camera moves over a desert, a field of flowers, a young man's face flashes on the screen, and then a girl's back.
Pink petals blow in the wind; she catches one in her hand and, when she opens it again, it's a white down feather. It blows upwards, into the sky, where the clouds darken, and it seems to disappear, only to fall, only it's no longer a feather at all - it's a sword.
The choirs are going apeshit. One young man picks up the sword, and attacks another one who is challenging him with the most rancid possible vibes.
As white feathers blow, we see flashes of the girl in blue entering an eerie room occupied by a strange, witch-like woman, as the two boys do battle using improbable-looking swords (more of those in a bit).
This move is called 'fuck you, we can animate hair now.'
They actually fence, they do parries and ripostes, and Blondie (who is framed as the villain, smirking smugly the whole time) actually uses a Fire spell to blast Lion Guy backwards, opening him for a follow-up cut which actually cuts across his face and spills blood on the ground.
Damn.
Lion Guy retaliates furiously, and as his own strikes connect, black feathers blow across the screen, and the cinematic rises to a climax with a series of snapshots from what I can only assume is later in the game, all snapshots which emphasize one thing:
These two characters are connected. And just in case we could somehow miss it:
The logo of the game is literally them embracing.
…
This cinematic changed my life?
We owned the PlayStation before FF8 came out, and I myself owned a GameBoy first, then a GameBoy Color. I knew video games. I just had no idea they could look like this.
What FF8 is going for here is different from what FF7 was doing, and not quite trying to achieve the same goals. Both, in their own way, are displays of sheer power, of the graphics this new generation console affords them. But VII was going for a clear lead-in to the start of the game - emphasize the mysterious figure of the Flower Girl, then give the viewer a sweeping view of Midgar, its awesome metropolis where the first hours of the game will be set, show people, streetlights and cars to wow the player with the reveal that this is game is set in a modern, industrial setting, then directly show the exciting entrance of the train and flow seamlessly into the in-engine Avalanche attack.
FF8's opening is not so seamless. Instead, it's an anime opening. It has an incredible theme song, a montage that is partly narrative and partly thematic, introduces you to a handful of characters, teases cutscenes to come later in the narrative, and establishes the expectation of a specific focus for the story. It also depicts literal events that are occurring as we watch them (the duel is actually happening and the game proper will open on its immediate aftermath), but it blends this into a sweeping, cinematic montage that just…
This is the same console those FF7 cutscenes with the flat faces were animated on before. The same hardware. But the animation team's experience in wielding its power has gone through the roof.
I asked around a while ago; as far as people could think, there was no other game at the time of VIII's release whose cinematics looked as good as this one did. This was the peak of video game FMVs at time of release. And it's not hard to understand why. Not only do the characters look almost human (they have hair), are they capable of emoting, of expression, but they are capable of complex enough movements to animate a full-on action scene, trading blows and hurting each other.
But what do we actually learn from this intro? Well, a few things. We see four characters in it:
- Lion Guy, who seems to be our protagonist.
- Blondie, who appears to be an asshole rival figure.
- Blue Girl, who is clearly Lion Guy's love interest.
- Witch Woman, who is mysterious and ominous and probably our antagonist.
We also know that Lion Guy and Blondie fought a duel before the start of the game that left them both with dramatic facial scars, and the romance between Lion Guy and Blue Girl is likely going to be a core theme of the game.
…
Given Final Fantasy's spotty record with romance so far, that could be very good or very bad. Certainly the odds that we'll end in a Tifa-style 'we know they're together but we won't say it' situation seem dramatically lower. Also, given Final Fantasy's target audience at the time and the tendency for male teenagers to think romance is icky, a romantic focus could have played a role in it receiving a somewhat worse reception than previous games even if the romance is perfectly handled.
So. With all that out of the way.
Let's tackle the actual game, shall we?
The Game, At Last
We open the game on a white screen fading in to an infirmary room. Lion Guy is lying on a bed unconscious, and slowly wakes up; the doctor asks how he's feeling. As it turns out, his forehead is bandaged due to the injury he's received. Dr Kadowaki tells him to take it easy next time, then asks his name (notably not because she doesn't know him, but to check he's fully regained awareness).
Squall. His name is Squall.
Cloud, Squall… Kind of a weather theme we've had for those two, maybe? Is that anything? Terra was 'Tina' in JP but if we use her EN name as a basis for comparison, then we have an elemental, earth/wind/wind thing going for the past three games. Eh, I'm overthinking this.
Dr Karawaki and Squall's next exchange seems to set the tone for what might be his character arc for the time being: She tells him to take it easy in training or he'll get seriously hurt, he replies that he can't just let Seifer (Blondie, then) challenge him without responding, and she tells him that he might 'wanna be cool,' but he risks just getting hurt.
Okay. Right off the gate it feels like we're treading some similarities to Cloud, with a character who is trying to project cool and is afraid to back down from a challenge and looking like a wimp and other characters telling him to not be an idiot. We'll see if there is more to it than that. Then Karawaki leaves the room to call Squall's 'instructor,' one Quistis, to 'get her student.'
She's overheard on the phone saying, 'His injury's not serious. It'll probably leave a scar.'
…
Lady.
A permanently scarring injury is serious.
Like - obviously I, being a weeb, think a JRPG protagonist having a badass scar across his forehead looks rad as hell, but like, this is some serious life-impacting stuff we're dealing with. I get that Karawaki means 'not serious' as in it won't threaten Squall's life or functioning, but major facial scars seriously impact people's lives.
…
Actually.
This is Mensur, or Academic fencing, a kind of fencing practiced by university students in the Germanic world, historically in particular in the 19th century. As you can see, the duelists wear extensive protective equipment, including thick goggles to protect the eyes… But not masks. The result is that while injuries in first blood Mensur duels are rarely fatal or disabling, they frequently result in facial scarring that could be considered 'cosmetic.' So-called 'dueling scars' were considered desirable as a sign of daring and willingness to expose oneself to danger in the course of a duel.
If you've ever wondered why 19th century German aristocrats are always portrayed with facial scars, that's why. They actively sought out such injuries in duels as a badge of honor.
I think we might be looking at something similar here. Squall and Seifer are part of an institution of learning (let's say a university for now) which has a formal or informal culture of dueling, and the resulting scars are expected.
Well, anyway. Squall lies down in bed to catch a breather before his instructor arrives, and as he does…
I haven't futzed with the text settings so far so the slow unscroll speed means I keep missing the mark. Here, she's saying "Squall… so we meet again," emphasis mine.
The difference in resolution makes it tricky to tell, but this looks like Blue Girl from the FMV. She's being all mysterious and shit, looking at him and then leaving without him noticing her.
But who cares, because it's time to meet Quistis.
…
I'm not going to say anything. I'm just not. I'm not going to comment on the Hot Teacher character being introduced with a full CG FMV of her walking into the infirmary and looking at the protagonist with exasperated fondness. We're going to skip right over that.
Quistis leads Squall out of the infirmary. They have some entertaining banter that says Quistis knows about Squall's 'whatever, man' affect to the point of predicting his lines, it's pretty funny.
It really sells that these two have an established relationship and know each other. Then the camera pans out of this colonnade and into a full view of the establishment we're in…
Balamb Garden, a futuristic university. Like with VII, we're clearly in a modern setting. Unlike VII, the grit and grime of Midgar's industrial hellscape shrouded in the perpetual night of pollution smoke has been replaced by clean, smooth curves, soft colors, inexplicable contraptions floating over the whole place like an angelic halo.
This is an entirely different aesthetic, and I dig it. It looks like this, then, is our starting location. We don't know its purpose yet, beyond in some vague sense 'education,' but we're about to learn.
This is such a cool aesthetic. Again, it's modern - those are computers in those desks - but in a very fancy, classy way, with blue screen displays set in the middle of wooden paneling and cushioned furniture. This is an expensive place, we can say that much.
We can also say that there is an extreme case of Protagonist Appearance Syndrome at work here. Everyone in this room is wearing the same uniform except Squall and Seifer, who have fancy customized outfits with sweet coats.
…
Speaking of character aesthetic, though.
People look normal.
Like, they have full standing models with human proportions. Gone as the squashed Playmobil models of FF7. And as a result (and this is what kills every screenshot I've ever seen of an FF7 modded to have to full-sized character models), the world is sized for them. They sit on normal chairs. They interact with normal desks.
I think this might be the only FF game until the PS2 era to have character models of full-sized humans. Every game before was too limited, whether by sprite technology leading to chibified characters or by FF7's extremely sparse low-poly models, and FF9 will make a deliberate artistic choice to go for a cartoonish, 'Super Deformed' aesthetic even as its graphics quality improve over even its predecessor. This is the only game of its generation to have normal people hanging out in its environment. And I kind of love it for that. It changes the mood of everything so strongly.
Notably, both Seifer and Squall are attending class without getting into any kind of official trouble despite causing each other severe injuries, which is further indication that the whole 'dueling using training as a thin cover' is tacitly, if not officially, endorsed by the institution.
Quistis tells the class that the 'field exam for SeeD candidates,' whatever that is, will take place that afternoon. Not all students are taking part in the field exam, and qualifying for it required an earlier written test which Squall presumably passed. Quistis concludes with an admonishment to Seifer not to injure his training partners (okay, so he's at least getting some verbal criticism), which he reacts to with brief but visible frustration, and then class is adjourned.
This is pretty short, for a class session, but the main purpose here is to get us in touch with Squall's desk computer, which…
…
We'll come back to this in a little bit.
For now, Quistis ambushes Squall at the exit, asking him if he's gone to the 'Fire Cavern.' This is a prerequisite to the SeeD exam and he won't be able to participate if he doesn't do it.
Internally, Squall muses that he was going to do it this morning, but got sidetracked by his duel with Seifer. When Quistis asks him if he has a good excuse for not completing that task, though, he answers 'Not really.'
Which is interesting. It suggests, if nothing else, that Squall doesn't bother with poor excuses. He has enough self-awareness to realize that letting Seifer bait him into a duel instead of completing his assignment is on him, and he doesn't try to justify himself with it. Quistis tells him she'll assist with the Fire Cavern and will be waiting for him at the front gate.
Also, Quistis has her own fan club who are all incredibly jealous of Squall for hanging out with her.
So we head out of class, and it's time for a meet cute.
Well, I don't know if it's a 'meet cute' really, that girl doesn't even get a name. But she does run into Squall while wearing a school uniform and shouting about how she'll be late to class, which feels incredibly trope-y. Upon seeing that Squall came out of the classroom, she realizes that 'homeroom' is over and laments that this place is so much bigger that her last school and she got lost.
*A brief administrative period in Japanese school where a teacher assigned to a class checks in on them between actual classes, although I'm not sure anyone reading this on Ess Vee dot Com in 2024 would need me to explain this.
Which is the game's way of giving us a little direction tutorial, by choosing to have Squall show her around the place.
On the way, we run into this student who was gifted a bunch of trading cards that he has no interest in and asks us if we'd like them. I say yes. He casually mentions that we can challenge other people in the world to play cards by talking to them with the Square button, instead of the Cross button.
This is quietly the most important and devastating that will ever happen to us. Fully a quarter of this first session's playtime has been spent playing cards. Final Fantasy VIII is a card duel simulator with a JRPG attached on top. We'll get to that later.
This huge monitor in the center of the atrium (is that the word? I think it is) is the Directory, which serves as both a rough map and a crude fast travel system (which is incidentally also new to the series!). Radiating out of the central atrium are the Dormitory where most students live with few bothering to commute; the Cafeteria, where Squall tells us the hot dogs are especially popular and people must wait in a line; the parking lot, where we can borrow the school car (woooo! cars!); the 'quad', which is not a word I'm familiar with, where the Garden Festival is being prepared-
…really. We're having a school festival?
Okay, yes, this is definitely Final Fantasy: Anime High School Trope Edition. We'll see if that's a good or bad thing as we go forward. This is also somewhat off-putting to me for reasons we'll get into one update from now.
Rounding out Baland Garden are Dr Kadowaki's Infirmary, the Training Center which Squall hastens to emphasize has real monsters in it and should be taken very seriously, and finally the Library, although he dismissively says that the terminals in the classrooms are way more efficient than books.
Classic late 90s teenager behavior.
We also learn that Balamb Garden's Headmaster is named… Cid. So that's our first namecheck.
The girl asks Squall if he'll take the SeeD exam, then says she is, too - she finished the prerequisites at her previous Garden before transferring here, so we might see each other later, then she scooters off to her own business.
We regain control of Squall, and we get access to our first Save Point, which looks a lot fancier than the ones in previous games.
…
So. Let's take a short break here.
What have we learned so far?
Squall is a student at a special school called Balamb Garden, which allows its students to engage in sword fights (not that this means much, so did German universities in the 19th century), has training grounds full of monsters, and has a special exam of unknown purpose known as the 'SeeD exam.' That's honestly not much to go on, but we can draw a bunch of inferences ('this is probably a magic battle school', etc), and we don't need all that much more yet.
But here's the thing.
There is a ton more information available to us right now.
We just have to consult The Lore.
This is so nostalgic.
So yes! The Balamb Garden Network includes a ton of information, including a tutorial that we're going to skip because it comes up in the story anyway. But the very first thing that greets us on entry is this…
'GF Data.'
Due to Balamb Garden's strict rules surrounding student fraternization, students must register their relationships with the university. However, we can see that it's also a surprisingly progressive establishment, as it allows polyamory, and Squall has not one, but two registered GFs.
…
Okay, look, the GF/girlfriend joke has to be decades old at this point. I do not intend to drag it out over and over. The game's use of 'GF', as funny as it is, refers to Guardian Forces, which are, judging from the fact that Squall's are named Quezacotl and Shiva, its take on summons.
And weirdly enough, we can… Rename them?
That's 'Quezacotl' and Shiva, our starting summons, or GFs. Why this game, of all games, gives us the option to rename Summons, I'm not sure? Maybe because in a way summons are going to be the most important feature of the game going forward, the defining building block of its character building system, and so GFs are notionally more important than ever before. Mechanically at least that will hold true, but narratively? We'll have to see. We might or might not be looking at another FFVI situation here where Espers define the mechanical mid- and late-game but are also literally rocks made from dead people.
…
'Quezacotl,' as you might guess from the UI, is named such because of character limits. It should, of course, be Quetzalcoatl, but there aren't enough characters. Oddly enough, he's the first instance of something I distinctly recall from my childhood: the French localization of FF8 inexplicably changes a bunch of names. Quetzacotl, for instance, was named Golgotha. Yes, like the mountain where Jesus was crucified.
I suppose I'll have to resign myself to Quezacotl this time around.
So, Squall has acquired his two GFs, and now we can look through the various menus of the Balamb Garden Network. They're comprehensive and fairly in-character; they contain a lot of information that isn't relevant to us as players but serves purely to breathe life into the universe, like the fact that Balamb Garden has no mandatory dress code and it's uniform is only mandated when directly requested by superiors, like for a particular event, which explains Squall and Seifer's unique aesthetic. The motto of Balamb Garden is allegedly 'Work hard, study hard, play hard,' which is… Actually fairly close to a number of university-related quotes dating back all the way to the 19th century; I thought this was modern slang feeling out of place as a school motto, but it's actually a perfectly normal university motto.
A list of late books, an example of a flavor text screen.
So, summing up what we learn from the terminal:
There are three Gardens in the world, Balamb Garden, Galbadia Garden, and Trabia Garden. Balamb Garden was the first 'built in accordance to Master Cid's ideals and dreams,' while Galbadia is the largest. Each Garden trains students in skills, many of which are related to combat, and the elite of the students graduate as SeeDs, who are mercenaries working for the Garden, operating in small teams all over the world in response to requests by governments and civilians alike, aiding in military operations, rescue operations, and protecting civilians. After the age of 20 at most, SeeDs are released from the Garden and expected through various agreements to join the militaries of various nations across the world; they are expected never to use their skills for personal profit and to reflect on the Garden's honor with their actions, although they are paid a salary based on their rank.
SeeDs' power comes from bonding with Guardian Forces, which are 'independent energy forces' (spirits?), and using that bond to wield 'para-magic,' a form of direct manipulation of energy developed by scientists from their study of a 'sorceress,' a being capable of wielding true 'magic,' about whom very little is known. Para-magic can be learned by anyone with the right training, but it struggles to match the power of conventional weapons; it's the combination of Guardian Forces and para-magic that grants the SeeDs their unique strength. Also, the use of 'para-magic' is alleged to potentially cause memory loss, which seems kind of a huge plot thread to just dangle like that. I'm sure that won't be relevant ever.
The Network also has an actual message board that students are shitposting on.
This is beautiful. I truly feel like I have been launched through a portal back into the late 90s. I could almost cry. I bet every time you go to post on the Balamb Garden board you get the dial-up noise too.
So!
This is a magic battle school manga.
It's literally just that. Everyone here is a teenager (young adult?) being trained in Magic Combat Art and bonding with their cool unique spirits in order to wield pseudo-magic and cool weapons and to be sent on missions across the world for the sake of a mysterious headmaster. Also their magic system seems to have something shady behind it (whether that's how they developed it from the study of 'sorceresses' possibly unethically, or the memory loss issue), as does the fact that they're seemingly expected to join as children or teenagers and be on a permanent retainer for Balamb Garden once trained. Like some kind of… Wizard janissaries? Hmmm.
It's a cool premise, it is. It also feels like playing this game today is twenty-five years too late to find magic battle school mangas particularly original; I'll try not to hold that against the game. It can't be held accountable for the fact that since it's released, shit like The Irregular At Magic High School or The Asterisk War came out. Urgh.
…
Also holy shit. This game came out in 1999, right? I played it either that year or sometime in the following two. Which is incidentally around the same time as I got into Harry Potter, slightly later.
Which means that I read two stories in a row about a brown-haired teenager with a prominent forehead scar going to a magic school where he learns magic powers.
Given that FF8 is the one where the protagonist gets into sword fights on the regular, three guesses as to which one I thought was cooler.
…
This post has been kind of all over the place. Sorry about that.
Here's the thing:
FF7's opening was extremely straightforward and streamlined. It's an in medias res action sequence. There is less than three minutes from pressing 'New Game' to entering your first battle, and that's including the opening FMV; in fact, entering combat is the first gameplay action we take, before even moving around, aside from clicking through a handful of dialogue boxes. From there, we are quickly pulled into a simple plot - evil corporation sucking the planet's lifeblood, we're here to blow up its reactor, Cloud doesn't care, Barret is mad at him, we fight soldiers and robots. Things only let up once the Mako Reactor has been destroyed and we make our way to Sector 7.
FF8's opening is entirely different. It just… Invites us to a day in the life of Squall. An important day, but none of the important stuff is happening right this second; the duel was earlier this morning/yesterday night, the Fire Cavern exam is whenever we join up with Quistis, and in between we just… Hang out. We can wander around Balamb Garden, talk to students, read the Terminal…
There's a lot of optional text. FF7's most important tutorial was the Materia tutorial, and it waited until after the Mako Reactor #1 raid, because Cloud came equipped with enough Materia to use basic magic and the commands offered to us were all classic FF stuff. The tutorial was purely optional and in a somewhat out of the way location in the Slums, and I skipped most of it and didn't suffer from it. FF8 is instead going to throw tutorial after tutorial at us, staggered slightly, and on top of those tutorials it expects us to read the included documentation at our Terminal to learn what the fuck a 'Balamb Garden' is or who are 'SeeDs' and, while we're at it, find out the closing hours of the Library (an actual thing we can find out about!). It's a lot of text, most of it skippable but we probably shouldn't skip it if we want to understand what's going on.
We could spend an hour just hanging out before having our first combat encounter.
It's a really different way to introduce the game. A way I would have liked a lot better back when I was a teenager and I didn't mind reading setting documentation for hours on end; today I want to at least get a taste of gameplay within five to ten minutes of opening a game, just to know what I'm in for, or else I get annoyed. I don't know if I'd call it a flaw, but it's much less direct, much less dynamic than VII.
Like…
Here's the Balamb Garden Library. By interacting with a shelf, I can find the first issue of the magazine Occult Fan. While I'm sure the information contained within will eventually connect to gameplay or story, right now it's just fun, in-character flavor:
A Timber resident found a monster crashed from the sky. Mysterious! Quirky! Fun!
There's like, a voice to that presentation, very unhurried and very invested in making it feel like Squall is surrounded by the bustle and background noise you'd expect from a real university, with fan clubs, activity clubs, favorite foods at the cafeteria, and so on.
Like, I could join Quistis, but what if instead I paid a visit to Dr Karawaki and challenged her to a card duel?
I can do that! Look at my starting deck of cards! I'm not going to pause for an explanation of how Triple Triad works right now, but I could just spend two hours doing card duels instead of ever joining Quistis at the Front Gate.
I get my ass kicked, by the way.
We don't even know how the basic mechanics of combat in this game work yet.
This is such a fascinating change in direction for the opening of the game. And it makes me think it's no wonder I meandered and lost interest back in 2013, while also making it clear to me why I got so thoroughly lost in that universe back in 1999. Today… Well, it's a mix of both. First time playing, I visited two of the annexes of Balamb Garden, then got tired and went to see Quistis so I could sample the gameplay proper, rather than thoroughly exploring the starting location and talking to everyone as I usually would.
But also… Well, in FF7, the Sector 7 Slums are kind of one and done, right?
I mean, they're Tifa and Barret's home. They have the feel of a proper starting town, a place with various amenities and important characters you might revisit. And part of that is of course me projecting FF7R's handling of the Slums backwards onto FF7. Because it's a trick: You visit the Slums exactly once, then you head for the Mako Reactor #5 Raid, where Cloud falls down to the Church, meets Aerith, gets sidetracked chasing Tifa into Wall Market, learns about Shinra's plan to collapse the Plate, and then we get back and the Sector 7 Slums are annihilated before we reach them.
Meanwhile, Balamb Garden really gives the impression that it will stick around. Not necessarily forever, of course (Final Fantasy loves blowing up towns, we know that by now), but at least for a few hours. Maybe I don't need to visit every location before even meeting with Quistis and getting my combat tutorial, maybe I can just… Relax. And do that later.
Ah, who am I kidding, that probably means permanently missing content.
God but the place is gorgeous, though.
But alright, let's go meet with Quistis.
There are several screens on the way to the front gate. Like genuinely a 'why tho' number of screens.
Oh, hey, she changed into her field attire - I totally failed to notice at first but she had a blue Balamb Garden-themed uniform as homeroom teacher, but changed into an orange-and-black outfit that seems to more match her personal sensibilities to head out to the Fire Cavern. And that also has more belts. Of course.
…
What's that?
"Why did the character models in your screenshots get all crunchy?"
That's just your imagination. C'mon, let's go.
…
Okay, fine.
Let's cut this here for image count and then explain.
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Final Fantasy VIII, Part 1.B: Balamb Garden
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Let's Talk About Ports
So, here's the thing. When I started playing FF8 for this LP, I just picked up the Steam version in my Library that I bought a decade ago and had played all of maybe twice. I knew there were some tweaks needed, modding probably, or I would end up using the Remastered version or use an emulator, but I wanted to play it 'raw' for a bit to test it out. So I did!
The Steam version of FF8 has… issues. One of said issues is the soundtrack, and I'm not going through the One-Winged Angel thing a second time. FF8 Steam is also using a different version of the soundtrack originally made for the PC release in 2000. It's not as bad as the FF7 soundtrack, but, well, check out the difference for yourself:
View: %5BURL=%27https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSm6_VZuyok%5B/URL%27%5Dhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSm6_VZuyok%5B/URL]
The true version of the boss theme.
View: %5BURL=%27https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIPEiG_9bDY%5B/URL%27%5Dhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIPEiG_9bDY%5B/URL]
The PC version.
Still, this can be modded. And I did just that, modding in the correct version of the soundtrack.
Fixing inputs is trickier. I can, of course, just change the keyboard inputs to a sensible layout like I did with FF7, but frankly that still sucked; I want to use a controller. Now, Steam lets me use my PS4 DualShock for FF8 just fine, but the inputs are off. For instance, I confirm with Square and open the menu with X. I could edit that, but more than that, the game isn't 'aware' of my controller, so to speak; unlike FF7, which at least told me to press [MENU] or [OK] or [CANCEL], FF8 instead refers to a button nomenclature that is completely dissociated from anything I'm using. That is to say, it's telling me to press B1, B5, B12 or S, and I have no ideas what these inputs are even supposed to be and thus how to correctly remap them, and if the game throws a 'Press B11 quickly!' at me in a minigame later I will be totally lost. So I have to mod that as well.
This is quite a journey and ends up taking the next couple hours of my evening after finishing my first session that cut off at the first Save Point.
Around that time, I end up trying an emulator. After an initial cliff of complexity, this turns out to be surprisingly convenient. Playing through the game again in this new emulated version, I confirm a feeling I've had this whole time:
The character models aren't right. Or rather, they are too right. I had initially assumed upscaled character models were exclusive to FF8 Remastered, but that is not so. Here's a direct comparison between two pairs of screenshots:
I assume you can see it. The Steam pictures are slightly crispier overall, but more importantly, use new character models. Squall, Seifer, Quistis, and some of the students are using clean models which, while relatively low-poly by modern standards, aren't suffering from aliasing.
But also you can see them seated right next to students who are aliased as fuck. And that's because a handful of these students (the Trepies, specifically) have actual models that are going to get up and walk in the next shot, then stand around so you can talk to them and leave the room, while the other students are going to vanish between shots, having already left the room off-screen by the time the camera moves back to Squall.
They're not 'real' characters. They're part of the background texture. And the result is that, in the Steam version, Squall and Seifer and the Trepies exist right in the middle of these phantom characters with their crunchy PSX textures. I would be lying if I said I'd noticed it immediately… Until I started posting screenshots. On a static image, it's conspicuous. Squall and the others exist on a separate layer from the old 1999 backgrounds and models. But in the emulated version, they blend in; they're all facing the same limitations.
I wavered on which version of the graphics I wanted to use. In the end, I decided that, for all my love of the Pixel Remasters, this isn't a Pixel Remaster, a game reworked from the ground up for a cohesive aesthetic feel, this is some upgraded character models and a few upscaled textures dropped into the world. At the end of the day, I feel more at home with those old graphics. It's probably just the nostalgia talking, but they feel more right.
Junctioning
With that sorted out, it's time to actually talk to Quistis and prepare for this little outing. Before we head out, she has a few things to explain about how the powers of this universe work.
Which means, yes, it's time for the meme line:
Obvious jokes aside, the entire FF8 system is based on Guardian Forces. This is similar to the way VII had everything revolve around Materia, but it's even more complex.
By default, an FF8 character has only one command: Attack (not even Item). In order to give them abilities, they must be Junctioned with a G-Force. For instance, I junction Quezacotl to Squall, and Shiva to Quistis. Once that's done…
I can give Squall access to the Commands known by the GF. Quezacotl and Shiva both start knowing Draw, Magic, GF, and Item. We'll get to Draw later; GF is the Summon ability. However, characters only have three Command slots; that means I can only give them three out of those four abilities. I feel confident I won't need Items for now, so I give both Squall and Quistis Draw, Magic, and GF.
Additionally, each character can equip up to two passive abilities. This can be, for instance, Str+20% which will increase a character's Strength by, you guessed it, 20%.
So we've actually brought back some of Final Fantasy V's game concepts; characters similarly have active Commands and passive Abilities that can be equipped. Only the GF is the 'Job' and everyone is a Freelancer, sort of.
If our abilities are gained by junctioning GFs with those abilities, does that mean we need to hunt down new GFs for better abilities? Yes and now. Each GF has its own menu, where we can see a sheet that looks like this:
Here, you can see that Shiva starts out knowing a number of abilities outlined in white, and also has a number of grayed out Abilities with an AP count. Every time we win a battle, Shiva gains AP. I can have only one ability selected at a time, and AP goes towards that Ability.
So for instance, by selecting Spr+20%, Shiva starts gaining AP towards learning Spr+20%, which increases Spirit (Magic Defense) by 20%. Once she has learned it, I can equip it as a passive Ability on the character who is Junctioned to Shiva. It's like a Job where I decide which of the Job's list of abilities is learned in which order! Also a Job that can be passed around from character to character like an Esper or a Materia. We also don't see the GF's full list of abilities; for instance, if we learn SumMag+10%, which increases the power of Shiva's summoned attack by 10%, it will unveil SumMag+20%, which takes yet more AP to learn and will increase her power by 20% instead. Incremental progress!
*Should I refer to these abilities by their full names? They're abbreviated for character space reasons, I can just say 'Summon Magnitude +10%' so it'll be easier to follow for people new to the game.
So as you can see, the whole system is reliant on Guardian Forces. Without summons, no Commands, no Magic, no Abilities.
Those are the basics. There's more to learn. But for now…
We have accessed the world map.
Like in FF7 before, we can orient the camera to catch sight of the landmarks we're headed for. Here, that's the Fire Cavern to the East…
…and an unnamed town to the West.
…
Also, have you noticed?
This world has roads.
Actual, overland roads! That thing conspicuously missing from FF7's overworld! And, as far as I can tell, as long as we stick to the road, we do not trigger any random encounters. That might just be my mistake from happening not to run into any by mere chance, but it matches my memories of the game. Stick to the road, and you're safe. This suggest a world more thoroughly tamed by human civilization than VII's was.
Alright. I was thinking of making this first update go as far as completing the Fire Cavern, but we're hitting 8k words. Instead, let's at least have one random encounter.
Note how the transparency of the ATB menu means we see much more of the screen than we did in FF7's claustrophobic combat UI.
…
The hot older teacher that has a literal fanclub uses a whip as her weapon of choice.
She's also, as you might expect from her job description, higher level than Squall.
Some truly powerful creative choices are being made today.
This weird bug thing on the screen is the Bite Bug, so named because of its prominent jaw. It's a weak opponent, and since only one of them appeared, we can take our time with it.
So, we have Attack, Draw, Magic, and GF. Now you may be asking, what Magic? We started without spells, after all. A natural assumption might be that things work like they do in FFVI, and Magic is linked to Espers/GF, so by junctioning Shiva, Quistis now has access to Ice spells, and by junctioning Quezacotl, Squall can learn to cast Thunder.
That's not how it works.
Have you noticed that our characters don't have MP? The HP count is still there, the ATB gauge is right next to it, but no MP.
This is because Magic is tied into the Draw system. If we choose Draw, we then choose a target, and then this menu appears:
We get a Choice menu with two options labeled ????, and upon picking one of the two, we get the choice to Stock or Cast. Selecting Cast then causes a really cool animation to play out where orbs of light flow out of the Bite Bug and into Squall…
'Received 7 Fires.'
From there, the Fire option in the Bite Bug menu is revealed. Using Draw again on the next mystery option lets us Draw 7 Scans, and then we dispose of the monster. From then on, our Magic menu looks something like this:
Casting a spell.
Magic spells are listed next to a number. That number is based on the number we Drew from previous monsters, and any we spent since.
So.
Every character in FF8 is a Blue Mage.
The cornerstone of the magic system is Drawing. We go around, identifying which monsters know which spells, and then we steal those spells from them. Each use of the Draw function pulls a randomized number of spells out of the target monster, and then we spend those spells when casting them. For instance, having Drawn 7 Fires from this Bite Bug, we can now cast Fire a total of 7 times. If we cast Fire twice and then Draw another 5 Fire from a different Bite Bug, we'll have a total of 10 Fire casts stocked.
Find monsters. Draw magic. Spend magic. Draw more magic. That is the wildly original and truly weird system FF8 came up with.
But that's not all! Because you can also Junction Magic.
In fact this is extremely important!
Let's say I have a GF with Junction Strength. With that GF assigned, I can Junction a spell to Strength. This will directly raise Squall's Strength rating based both on the type of the spell and the number of it we have stocked. That is to say, Junctioning Firaga would increase Strength by more than Fire, and junctioning 100 Fires will increase Strength by more than junctioning 10. All basic stats can potentially be junctioned (you still need a GF with the right ability); HP, Strength, Vitality, Magic, Spirit, Speed, Evasion, Hit Chance, and Luck. But there's more!
This is the Elemental/Status menu. It lists all Elements (in this game, there are eight: Fire, Ice, Thunder, Earth, Poison, Wind, Water, Holy - I don't think any game previously had them so clearly labeled) and Status effects. Each one has a percentage of defense.
If I have a GF with the Junction Elemental Defense, I could Junction my 10 Fires to Elemental Defense, which would grant Squall a small percentage of damage reduction against Fire-elemental attack. If I Junctioned a Silence spell to Status Defense, I would gain a small chance of resisting Silence effects. With a GF that has Junction Elemental Attack, I can Junction Ice to my attack, and now all of Squall's attacks have… Well, the game is ambiguous as to whether his original damage stays the same but some percentage is now Ice damage instead of physical, or whether he gains an extra component of damage that is Ice-elemental. The Tutorial just does not explain this clearly.
Are you still with me? All of this is old news to FF8 veterans, I'm sure, but even for me it helps to lay it all out like this as it's been a long time since I had to remember exactly how this system works.
The bottom line is: Junction GF, who grant and learn abilities, to unlock both Commands, passive Abilities like straight stat boosts, and extra Junctions so you can link your Magic spells to various components of your character sheet. Go hunt for magic, Draw it from monsters, junction it to your stats, increasing your Strength or your Fire Defense or your Fire Attack as your GF abilities allow you and as fits your strategy. Cast spells as you have stocked and see fit as you would normally do damage, with notably characters not suffering any restriction on magic - as long as they Draw enough, Squall and Quistis are equally capable of using Fire/Ice/Thunder/Cure/Scan/Sleep and so on, regardless of GFs equipped.
Of course…
If having 100 Fires (the maximum amount you can Stock) increases Squall's strength more than having 10 Fires, then that means every time you cast Fire, you are making a small dent in your Strength. Which creates weird incentives as to whether or not to actually use those spells you Draw and Stock. And furthermore… Any opponent can have any spell Drawn from them any number of times.
It's possible to go from no Magic to 100 Fires and 100 Scans in that very first encounter with a Bite Bug I screenshotted above. Is that something you'd naturally do? Well, we'll see.
The game doesn't dump all of this on us at once. It actually staggers it over several explanations given by Quistis on the way to and after the Fire Cavern. But I really wanted to get it all in one place so it's all established as we go on with the gameplay. Sorry if I lost anyone.
So. With all these basics established (and it sure took a while), it's time to put it all together and tackle our first challenge, which incidentally is diegetically also meant to represent Squall putting all the skills he's learned to the test in a practical field exam, and tackle our first dungeon and boss fight.
Thank you for reading.
Next Time: The Fire Cavern, and me going insane over translation issues again.
So, here's the thing. When I started playing FF8 for this LP, I just picked up the Steam version in my Library that I bought a decade ago and had played all of maybe twice. I knew there were some tweaks needed, modding probably, or I would end up using the Remastered version or use an emulator, but I wanted to play it 'raw' for a bit to test it out. So I did!
The Steam version of FF8 has… issues. One of said issues is the soundtrack, and I'm not going through the One-Winged Angel thing a second time. FF8 Steam is also using a different version of the soundtrack originally made for the PC release in 2000. It's not as bad as the FF7 soundtrack, but, well, check out the difference for yourself:
View: %5BURL=%27https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSm6_VZuyok%5B/URL%27%5Dhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSm6_VZuyok%5B/URL]
The true version of the boss theme.
View: %5BURL=%27https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIPEiG_9bDY%5B/URL%27%5Dhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIPEiG_9bDY%5B/URL]
The PC version.
Still, this can be modded. And I did just that, modding in the correct version of the soundtrack.
Fixing inputs is trickier. I can, of course, just change the keyboard inputs to a sensible layout like I did with FF7, but frankly that still sucked; I want to use a controller. Now, Steam lets me use my PS4 DualShock for FF8 just fine, but the inputs are off. For instance, I confirm with Square and open the menu with X. I could edit that, but more than that, the game isn't 'aware' of my controller, so to speak; unlike FF7, which at least told me to press [MENU] or [OK] or [CANCEL], FF8 instead refers to a button nomenclature that is completely dissociated from anything I'm using. That is to say, it's telling me to press B1, B5, B12 or S, and I have no ideas what these inputs are even supposed to be and thus how to correctly remap them, and if the game throws a 'Press B11 quickly!' at me in a minigame later I will be totally lost. So I have to mod that as well.
This is quite a journey and ends up taking the next couple hours of my evening after finishing my first session that cut off at the first Save Point.
Around that time, I end up trying an emulator. After an initial cliff of complexity, this turns out to be surprisingly convenient. Playing through the game again in this new emulated version, I confirm a feeling I've had this whole time:
The character models aren't right. Or rather, they are too right. I had initially assumed upscaled character models were exclusive to FF8 Remastered, but that is not so. Here's a direct comparison between two pairs of screenshots:
I assume you can see it. The Steam pictures are slightly crispier overall, but more importantly, use new character models. Squall, Seifer, Quistis, and some of the students are using clean models which, while relatively low-poly by modern standards, aren't suffering from aliasing.
But also you can see them seated right next to students who are aliased as fuck. And that's because a handful of these students (the Trepies, specifically) have actual models that are going to get up and walk in the next shot, then stand around so you can talk to them and leave the room, while the other students are going to vanish between shots, having already left the room off-screen by the time the camera moves back to Squall.
They're not 'real' characters. They're part of the background texture. And the result is that, in the Steam version, Squall and Seifer and the Trepies exist right in the middle of these phantom characters with their crunchy PSX textures. I would be lying if I said I'd noticed it immediately… Until I started posting screenshots. On a static image, it's conspicuous. Squall and the others exist on a separate layer from the old 1999 backgrounds and models. But in the emulated version, they blend in; they're all facing the same limitations.
I wavered on which version of the graphics I wanted to use. In the end, I decided that, for all my love of the Pixel Remasters, this isn't a Pixel Remaster, a game reworked from the ground up for a cohesive aesthetic feel, this is some upgraded character models and a few upscaled textures dropped into the world. At the end of the day, I feel more at home with those old graphics. It's probably just the nostalgia talking, but they feel more right.
Junctioning
With that sorted out, it's time to actually talk to Quistis and prepare for this little outing. Before we head out, she has a few things to explain about how the powers of this universe work.
Which means, yes, it's time for the meme line:
Obvious jokes aside, the entire FF8 system is based on Guardian Forces. This is similar to the way VII had everything revolve around Materia, but it's even more complex.
By default, an FF8 character has only one command: Attack (not even Item). In order to give them abilities, they must be Junctioned with a G-Force. For instance, I junction Quezacotl to Squall, and Shiva to Quistis. Once that's done…
I can give Squall access to the Commands known by the GF. Quezacotl and Shiva both start knowing Draw, Magic, GF, and Item. We'll get to Draw later; GF is the Summon ability. However, characters only have three Command slots; that means I can only give them three out of those four abilities. I feel confident I won't need Items for now, so I give both Squall and Quistis Draw, Magic, and GF.
Additionally, each character can equip up to two passive abilities. This can be, for instance, Str+20% which will increase a character's Strength by, you guessed it, 20%.
So we've actually brought back some of Final Fantasy V's game concepts; characters similarly have active Commands and passive Abilities that can be equipped. Only the GF is the 'Job' and everyone is a Freelancer, sort of.
If our abilities are gained by junctioning GFs with those abilities, does that mean we need to hunt down new GFs for better abilities? Yes and now. Each GF has its own menu, where we can see a sheet that looks like this:
Here, you can see that Shiva starts out knowing a number of abilities outlined in white, and also has a number of grayed out Abilities with an AP count. Every time we win a battle, Shiva gains AP. I can have only one ability selected at a time, and AP goes towards that Ability.
So for instance, by selecting Spr+20%, Shiva starts gaining AP towards learning Spr+20%, which increases Spirit (Magic Defense) by 20%. Once she has learned it, I can equip it as a passive Ability on the character who is Junctioned to Shiva. It's like a Job where I decide which of the Job's list of abilities is learned in which order! Also a Job that can be passed around from character to character like an Esper or a Materia. We also don't see the GF's full list of abilities; for instance, if we learn SumMag+10%, which increases the power of Shiva's summoned attack by 10%, it will unveil SumMag+20%, which takes yet more AP to learn and will increase her power by 20% instead. Incremental progress!
*Should I refer to these abilities by their full names? They're abbreviated for character space reasons, I can just say 'Summon Magnitude +10%' so it'll be easier to follow for people new to the game.
So as you can see, the whole system is reliant on Guardian Forces. Without summons, no Commands, no Magic, no Abilities.
Those are the basics. There's more to learn. But for now…
We have accessed the world map.
Like in FF7 before, we can orient the camera to catch sight of the landmarks we're headed for. Here, that's the Fire Cavern to the East…
…and an unnamed town to the West.
…
Also, have you noticed?
This world has roads.
Actual, overland roads! That thing conspicuously missing from FF7's overworld! And, as far as I can tell, as long as we stick to the road, we do not trigger any random encounters. That might just be my mistake from happening not to run into any by mere chance, but it matches my memories of the game. Stick to the road, and you're safe. This suggest a world more thoroughly tamed by human civilization than VII's was.
Alright. I was thinking of making this first update go as far as completing the Fire Cavern, but we're hitting 8k words. Instead, let's at least have one random encounter.
Note how the transparency of the ATB menu means we see much more of the screen than we did in FF7's claustrophobic combat UI.
…
The hot older teacher that has a literal fanclub uses a whip as her weapon of choice.
She's also, as you might expect from her job description, higher level than Squall.
Some truly powerful creative choices are being made today.
This weird bug thing on the screen is the Bite Bug, so named because of its prominent jaw. It's a weak opponent, and since only one of them appeared, we can take our time with it.
So, we have Attack, Draw, Magic, and GF. Now you may be asking, what Magic? We started without spells, after all. A natural assumption might be that things work like they do in FFVI, and Magic is linked to Espers/GF, so by junctioning Shiva, Quistis now has access to Ice spells, and by junctioning Quezacotl, Squall can learn to cast Thunder.
That's not how it works.
Have you noticed that our characters don't have MP? The HP count is still there, the ATB gauge is right next to it, but no MP.
This is because Magic is tied into the Draw system. If we choose Draw, we then choose a target, and then this menu appears:
We get a Choice menu with two options labeled ????, and upon picking one of the two, we get the choice to Stock or Cast. Selecting Cast then causes a really cool animation to play out where orbs of light flow out of the Bite Bug and into Squall…
'Received 7 Fires.'
From there, the Fire option in the Bite Bug menu is revealed. Using Draw again on the next mystery option lets us Draw 7 Scans, and then we dispose of the monster. From then on, our Magic menu looks something like this:
Casting a spell.
Magic spells are listed next to a number. That number is based on the number we Drew from previous monsters, and any we spent since.
So.
Every character in FF8 is a Blue Mage.
The cornerstone of the magic system is Drawing. We go around, identifying which monsters know which spells, and then we steal those spells from them. Each use of the Draw function pulls a randomized number of spells out of the target monster, and then we spend those spells when casting them. For instance, having Drawn 7 Fires from this Bite Bug, we can now cast Fire a total of 7 times. If we cast Fire twice and then Draw another 5 Fire from a different Bite Bug, we'll have a total of 10 Fire casts stocked.
Find monsters. Draw magic. Spend magic. Draw more magic. That is the wildly original and truly weird system FF8 came up with.
But that's not all! Because you can also Junction Magic.
In fact this is extremely important!
Let's say I have a GF with Junction Strength. With that GF assigned, I can Junction a spell to Strength. This will directly raise Squall's Strength rating based both on the type of the spell and the number of it we have stocked. That is to say, Junctioning Firaga would increase Strength by more than Fire, and junctioning 100 Fires will increase Strength by more than junctioning 10. All basic stats can potentially be junctioned (you still need a GF with the right ability); HP, Strength, Vitality, Magic, Spirit, Speed, Evasion, Hit Chance, and Luck. But there's more!
This is the Elemental/Status menu. It lists all Elements (in this game, there are eight: Fire, Ice, Thunder, Earth, Poison, Wind, Water, Holy - I don't think any game previously had them so clearly labeled) and Status effects. Each one has a percentage of defense.
If I have a GF with the Junction Elemental Defense, I could Junction my 10 Fires to Elemental Defense, which would grant Squall a small percentage of damage reduction against Fire-elemental attack. If I Junctioned a Silence spell to Status Defense, I would gain a small chance of resisting Silence effects. With a GF that has Junction Elemental Attack, I can Junction Ice to my attack, and now all of Squall's attacks have… Well, the game is ambiguous as to whether his original damage stays the same but some percentage is now Ice damage instead of physical, or whether he gains an extra component of damage that is Ice-elemental. The Tutorial just does not explain this clearly.
Are you still with me? All of this is old news to FF8 veterans, I'm sure, but even for me it helps to lay it all out like this as it's been a long time since I had to remember exactly how this system works.
The bottom line is: Junction GF, who grant and learn abilities, to unlock both Commands, passive Abilities like straight stat boosts, and extra Junctions so you can link your Magic spells to various components of your character sheet. Go hunt for magic, Draw it from monsters, junction it to your stats, increasing your Strength or your Fire Defense or your Fire Attack as your GF abilities allow you and as fits your strategy. Cast spells as you have stocked and see fit as you would normally do damage, with notably characters not suffering any restriction on magic - as long as they Draw enough, Squall and Quistis are equally capable of using Fire/Ice/Thunder/Cure/Scan/Sleep and so on, regardless of GFs equipped.
Of course…
If having 100 Fires (the maximum amount you can Stock) increases Squall's strength more than having 10 Fires, then that means every time you cast Fire, you are making a small dent in your Strength. Which creates weird incentives as to whether or not to actually use those spells you Draw and Stock. And furthermore… Any opponent can have any spell Drawn from them any number of times.
It's possible to go from no Magic to 100 Fires and 100 Scans in that very first encounter with a Bite Bug I screenshotted above. Is that something you'd naturally do? Well, we'll see.
The game doesn't dump all of this on us at once. It actually staggers it over several explanations given by Quistis on the way to and after the Fire Cavern. But I really wanted to get it all in one place so it's all established as we go on with the gameplay. Sorry if I lost anyone.
So. With all these basics established (and it sure took a while), it's time to put it all together and tackle our first challenge, which incidentally is diegetically also meant to represent Squall putting all the skills he's learned to the test in a practical field exam, and tackle our first dungeon and boss fight.
Thank you for reading.
Next Time: The Fire Cavern, and me going insane over translation issues again.
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- Location
- the Republic
- Pronouns
- He/They
For all the yelling on internet forums I did as a teenager about how FF9 was obviously superior in every way to FF8, I realize now that FF8 is actually really ambitious. The extent to which it realizes that ambition is, uh, variable, but the degree to which it successfully evokes its chosen anime genre is sort of impressive.
Given the limited space on a CD-ROM sacrifices needed to be made for that scene, this is a serious resource expenditure on Hot for Teacher, Final Fantasy style.
I also recall due to having a level-up system that only a brilliant mind such as Godd Howard would have thought up of, the way you break the game's combat system in half (
Duckstation is good stuff. The hardest part of emulation is always initial setup, but modern tools are generally very robust and tend to guide you through getting them running.