21stCentury
Let's get down to bismuth
- Location
- Canada
- Pronouns
- They/Them
kingdom hearts happens after FF8
Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Let's Play
kingdom hearts happens after FF8
Xero Key
Flying high, spinning webs!
I said "later" in there for a reason. But the character is supposed to be the same age as in 8, but they chose a voice actor that made him seem almost ten years older and he acts older.
21stCentury
Let's get down to bismuth
- Location
- Canada
- Pronouns
- They/Them
i thought you meant later in our timeframe, not later in squall's.
- Location
- England, unfortunately.
- Pronouns
- She/They
I mean, it's weird because I'm playing along with the Remaster, and Squalls menu portrait and the rendition of him in the logo looks notably older than he does in the FMV.
In the FMV he looks like an older teen/ young adult. In other places he looks like... an adult, i guess.
's weird.
In the FMV he looks like an older teen/ young adult. In other places he looks like... an adult, i guess.
's weird.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
This is actually a very relevant post to the update I'm currently writing.
What you're missing is that anime people don't age gradually, they molt. The stages of their life are: toddler, little kid, teenager, gruff adult, ancient sage. There is no in-between. Once they hit 18, they go into hibernation until their skin breaks and they emerge as fully-formed veterans of thousands wars, complete with new facial scars/eyepatches/cigars/whatever signs of adulthood are common to their particular species (fun fact: they eat their old skin for nourishment to replenish the energy spent on metamorphosis).
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Xero Key
Flying high, spinning webs!
That gets into the cosmology of KH, but the version from KH is not the same one from FF. He's a parallel universe doppelganger with a similar past, but not exact. Certain characters from 8 are not people "Leon" (his chosen name in KH) he knows.
Huh, funny coincidence. I swear I'm not reading your mind.
- Location
- Lake Wobegon
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Certain FF8 characters are aged up in KH, others are aged down. Way down.
And then there's the chibi characters from World of Final Fantasy, who are supposed to be their FF8 ages, some of whom are in KH, others of whom are not.
Egleris
Vagrant Dragon
- Location
- Italy
I really think that it's better to treat the Final Fantasy character in Kingdom Hearts as expies - they have the look and some of the personality of their game selves, to a point, but they grew up in very different circumstances and location with a different circle of friends and under a very different ruler. Any attempt to pretend they are the same as their game characters will always lead only to confusion.
ZerbanDaGreat
Daemon Noble of D E M O G R A P H I C S
- Pronouns
- They/them
To elaborate a little further, Squall in KH has the looks and personality of Squall, though he chose to change his name by the time of the games (and the first time he's addressed onscreen it's Yuffie calling him Squall before he corrects her), but his backstory is that he came from a wholly original world in the KH cosmology that was conquered by Maleficent and now exists as her headquarters, corrupted by darkness. This world is where the main crop of FF characters were born (Squall/Leon now being the same age as Cloud, jury's out on if Yuffie's any older), while a smattering more are native to Sora's world and thus aged down to be a part of his friendgroup. It's firmly similar-but-different AU territory where they're adjusted to suit the needs of KH's mainplot.
Final Fantasy VIII, Part 2.A: Fire Cavern & Balamb
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Welcome back, class, to Final Fantasy VIII 101. Today's lesson:
The Fire Cavern
There is a short bit of forest before the cavern, where we run into giant caterpillars and other no-good beasts. This proves an opportunity to Draw more magic out of them, which is all good by me. We also get some XP out of it, as well as AP for our GFs. So far so normal.
The material rewards are weirder though. One thing I notice immediately is that encounters almost all drop the same item, 'M-Stone Piece,' described as 'a stone with a little magic power.' It can't be used in any way that I can see, and with a brief look online it seems like…
They're one component of a crafting system.
Oh boy. We are hitting so many dubious milestones today.
Also, I started the game with 5000 gil, which I thought was a pretty significant sum. And that's neat!
But what I came to realize multiple random encounters later is that… I still had 5000 gil.
Random encounters don't award gil. I wonder what that's about.
Quistis gives us the magic junctioning tutorial upon reaching the path to the Cave, then gives us another quick tutorial about how to utilize Squall's gunblade.
Right. There was so much to cover in this first update I barely touched upon how Squall is using the coolest, dumbest weapon of all time.
This is the Revolver, Squall's starter weapon.
As you can see, it is literally a gun with a fucking sword instead of a barrel.
It's amazing. This is visual design perfection. No weapon could ever be this cool, or this stupid.
The gunblade, perhaps surprisingly, actually has some degree of historical backing. Check out this beauty:
The Elgin pistol, produced for the US Navy in 1838; only 150 were made.
It's understandable why people have kept trying to make the pistol sword happen over the centuries. "What if sword, but also gun" is just an inherently badass concept. It's the two coolest, most iconic weapons designed by humans, fused together.
The problem is that it doesn't work. There is no way to make a pistol sword that doesn't sacrifice the performance of both the pistol and the sword: The pistol is too heavy for proper carrying and aiming, the sword is heavy and off-balance for proper fighting. Yet still, we try! We want to make this happen, with new prototypes all the way to WW2 and even today as novelty items not meant for real combat. The closest we got to a functional pistol sword is the humble bayonet, which is really more of a rifle spear, and is perfectly fine at its job, but doesn't really fulfill the fantasy of the gunblade, if you get what I mean.
FF8, however, has the benefit of not being set in reality. It can make whatever weapon it wants to work, work. Even so, the gunblade isn't quite what you'd expect.
Final Fantasy, as a series, has a few instances of what comes immediately to mind when hearing 'gunblade' - the pistol sword, a sword that can also shoot people. These include Yazoo's Velvet Nightmare guns in Advent Children:
They're guns, with the outer case having a blade mounted into it which he uses to parry Cloud's sword.
As well as the gunblades of the Garlean Empire in FFXIV:
You have to pay close attention, but Garlean NPCs' gunblades are actually entirely different weapons from Gunbreakers' gunblades.
But Squall's gunblade isn't really that. He never uses it to shoot people, at least not that I have seen so far. And this should be obvious if you pay close attention to the Revolver's design above - it does not have a barrel. Rather, his gunblade works the same way FFXIV's Gunbreakers' gunblades eventually would: he presses the trigger while delivering a sword blow, which causes the cylinder and 'firing mechanism' to detonate some kind of cartridge, which either causes the sword to 'vibrate' in the style of a Star Wars vibro-sword, or just propels the blade with greater strength like a rocket hammer.
Mechanically, this is represented by the fact that every time Squall attacks, if we time a R1 press right during his attack animation, we get a satisfying boom, a visual explosion animation, and, I assume, if vibrations are turned on, the PlayStation controller vibrating accordingly - and all of that accompanied by significantly increased damage.
…
I was ready to be irritated as hell by this because I am bad at rhythm minigames, and I am bad at getting the trigger on the gunblade, but I have to appreciate what it's doing here - the Attack action has always been the most boring part of Final Fantasy combat design, and this here is an actual effort to inject some player engagement and interaction with it with a simple mechanic that requires you to be paying attention. I respect it.
Squall and Quistis both do a military-style salute.
These hat-wearing guys who look weirdly like monks (I haven't seen their names here yet, but in FR they are 'Templars') ask us to choose a time limit 'suited to our abilities, challenging yet reasonable.' Our options are 10, 20, 30 or 40 minutes. Being at this point pretty confident in my Final Fantasy skills and assuming the reward will be greater for it, I opt for a breezy 10 minutes.
This will prove to be a mistake. But for now, the Templars let us enter, and it's time to tackle the Fire Cavern.
Hmm.
The Fire Cavern is your standard lava dungeon, just encountered a lot earlier than we usually do lava dungeons. Our goal here is to obtain a 'low-level GF,' so no prize for guessing we're here for Ifrit; the fact that GFs are categorized into levels and some are in-story recognized as stronger or weaker than others is interesting, though.
Squall and Quistis have some… Interesting dialogue here. It starts off professional, with Quistis saying she's here for battle support but it's his exam to pass or fail, but then things take a turn for the more… fraternizing.
Quistis: "You know, boys often choke on this test when I come with them."
Quistis: "I guess my charm makes them nervous."
Squall: (Pauses, turns around to look at her)
Squall, mentally: "(...Whatever)."
Quistis: "I'm just kidding! Trying to keep you relaxed is all."
…
Something about this scene is weird to me. And I don't mean the 'should a teacher be so obviously joke-flirting with her student' stuff. I mean in the 'this dialogue is wrong' sense, and I can't quite put my finger on it at this stage.
So let's set it aside for now and move on.
As befits her role as instructor, Quistis gives us helpful instructions when relevant. For instance, these Bombs are Fire-elemental, and so are vulnerable to Ice spells. Unfortunately, her instructions also take up some of our precious, precious time. Which also doesn't stop when ATB does. Still, this is our chance to Draw a ton of Fire spells, because at that point I am still foolishly confident that we'll make the time.
We also encounter our first (okay, second, I skipped over the first at the time) Draw Point: These are little springs of magic in the environment from which we can directly draw spells.
The Fire Cavern is very short and straightforward, effectively a single linear path with one Draw Point slightly out of the way. So we get to Ifrit fairly quickly, but before we do, I want to draw your attention to the best spell in the game.
This is Buel, a random encounter in the cave. It has low HP, but high magic resistance, and so is best defeated with physical attacks. We can also draw Ice from him, which I promptly do in anticipation of the Ifrit fight.
He's also where I test the Scan spell for the first time. And holy shit.
Scan showed up as early as FFIII, as the Scholar's job ability, then as a spell called Libra in FFIV, and then in every game afterwards. It has always been fairly straightforward: it identifies the target's HP and any elemental weaknesses it may have had. Sometimes it might do extra stuff like tell us about enemy level, or their MP count. That's all it does, its information is purely mechanical.
I have waited for seven games to get back to the FF8 Scan.
Look at it.
LOOK AT IT.
It's got a sci-fi looking reticle that homes in on the enemy and locks on, then moves to a briefing screen that gives you its combat data, including its level, HP, monster type, weaknesses, strengths, it even has a graph at the top of the screen showing you its stats, and most importantly of all, it has a text blurb talking about what kind of a monster it is!
You have no idea how long I have been waiting for the text blurb. This is so important. For Buel, the information is very practical and matter-of-fact, but for other monsters, it functions as flavor text. "This fish only appears with its fin above the sand, no one has ever seen its body;" "this plant monster is little more than a digestive sac with tentacles." IT'S A POKEDEX. WE HAVE A POKEDEX FOR OUR ENEMIES.
Every game is better with an enemy Pokédex, you guys. I'm almost tempted to actually make a 'Bestiary' post where I post screenshots of every enemy I Scan.
Anyway, time also passes while in the Scan Menu, so by the time we show up to the Ifrit showdown we're running way late.
Ifrit emerges from the molten basin at the end of the cave, and the battle is on.
With 1068 HP, Ifrit is a significantly tougher opponent than anything we've faced so far, and that HP (as well as his ridiculous Spirit rating) means our primary challenge isn't Ifrit's damage, but the time limit.
Put it bluntly, the animations in the game take too long. My ATB fills up pretty fast but it's just not enough to keep up with the timer. Especially because my most effective source of damage isn't actually the Ice spell (which does hit an elemental weakness but, well, very high Magic Defense means it's still only 70+ damage a hit, so we'd need 14 casts to win), it's…
Okay, so let's talk about summons.
You may recall that this game doesn't have MP. So then, how are summons casts limited, if they are at all?
In this screenshot, you can see that Quistis's name has been replaced with Shiva's, there is a gray box over her HP count with a different number, and her ATB gauge is blue.
When a character uses the GF action (the summon action), they enter a kind of 'trance' as they harmonize with the Guardian Force. In that state, their ATB gauge turns blue and goes down instead of up, representing the 'charging up time' for the summon. However, while charging up, their HP is also replaced with that of the GF. That's right; summons have HP counts, they can take damage, and they can get even get KO'd.
When Quistis is channeling Shiva, Shiva is fronting all damage Quistis takes. Quistis's HP is spared, but Shiva's HP goes down and, if she gets KO'd, we lose the summon until raised.
It's a quirky and interesting system, and I wonder how well it will pan out in reality, whether it makes Summons annoyingly fragile or, on the contrary, makes characters super-tanky due to having secondary HP pools to call upon.
When the summon time is done…
I'm starting to think this game just might be mildly horny.
It's a genuinely impressive animation - Shiva descending from the sky inn VII was great, but her emerging in an ice coffin, shattering it from within, and then the sheer dynamism given to the diamond dust blast is amazing. More weirdly, this Shiva looks less like a vague attempt was made at making her look like a Hindu goddess and more like a… sexy alien babe? What's up with that hair? And that… I hesitate to call it an 'outfit.'
Hrm.
Anyway, this summons prompts Ifrit to exclaim 'They have Shiva!?" which is really interesting, because it's our first sign that GFs are actual sentient beings capable of speech and of having relationships, rather than like, energy constructs you bind to yourself. Ifrit may be a low-level GF, but he's a person, and he also recognizes Shiva as a fellow GF.
Shiva deals the heaviest damage of all our options, but it's not enough. Although Ifrit seems impressed by our performance and pulls out his special move, a jumping downwards punch and says 'Not bad for a human,' in the end…
We reach almost the required damage to take him down, but not quite. The count hits 0:00, and while I was expecting the game to continue but Quistis to tell me I did a bad job and will have a low grade…
Instead we get a game over.
Fucked up and evil.
So, huh, I kinda forgot to save on the world map?
Which means my last save is back at Balamb Garden. With all of Quistis's tutorials in the way.
…LUCKILY, emulators have what Steam doesn't: Quicksave features! I can literally save the game any time I want! This, huh, will be relevant to my triumphs and losses in Triple Triad later on (spoiler: I lost 90% of my matches so far and I straight up wouldn't have a deck left if I had to play through it). So we reload our last (and only) quicksave, which unfortunately happens to be at the entrance to the cavern after fucking around a bit and only 8:30 minutes on the counter. So this time we don't waste time, no scan, draw only the necessary Blizzards, run through, hit Ifrit, and then test out our second starting summon.
Quezacotl's Thunder Storm (or PURIFYING FIRES in FR) has him emerge from the ground with a shower of lightning, spin around and open his wings, then fire a dome of lightning which cages the opponent, then fire a huge lightning bolt from the top of the dome that makes the whole thing explode. It's incredibly dramatic and does about as much damage as a normal Blizzard cast due to Ifrit's sky-high Magic Defense. This makes things a little hairy, but thankfully we manage to get it done just under the wire…
Oh.
It turns out during the dialogue animation where he concedes defeat, we hit 0:00.
TURNS OUT THAT'S ANOTHER GAME OVER. GOTTA WIN WITH ENOUGH TIME FOR THE DIALOGUE TO PLAY OUT.
Fuckass game design, man.
It's fine. Next time, pure efficiency: No Quezacotl, no healing, pure relentless offense with Squall spamming Blizzard and Quistis spamming Shiva. Turns out, 'no healing' was a great idea, because…
Well, noticed how this game doesn't have a Limit Gauge?
Instead of being triggered by the Limit Gauge filling up, Limit Breaks in this game are triggered by being at low HP.
This sounds insanely abusable. We'll see if that's the case later. For now, it's our chance.
Squall's Limit Break, Renzokuken, is like a mini-omnislash with a rhythm game included. Each hit of Squall's blade has the bar at the bottom flash and we must hit R1 on the right time to trigger an explosion from the gunblade and increase damage; there are several hits with which to do this, and then it terminates in a Climmhazard-style ascending blow and a massive explosion.
It is way, way cooler than I was expecting an LB1 to be, but… Well, I don't actually know if it's an LB1. It's completely possible that Renzokuken is Squall's Limit Break, and that it won't be upgraded by later gains or new weapons or anything.
This time, we win the fight with seconds to spare. Bracing, but satisfying.
…back from FFV, and which I did not miss, is the fact that we do not receive XP for boss battles. And since this game does not reward gil for battles either, the only thing we gain is AP. Granted, that is a pretty damn sizeable amount of AP, 40 in total, enough to get both GFs to almost gain their first rank of SumMag+10% (there are things I would prioritize over summon power, but at this point in my playthrough Quistis hasn't explained how GF abilities work yet and I don't remember it, so I didn't think to swap their abilities to something I'm more interested in).
And that's our win! We have obtained Ifrit, our third GF. Or should he be a BF?
Despite Quistis saying there isn't much time, the timer actually stops after beating Ifrit, so we don't have to watch agonizingly as the timer ticks down while she goes into a long explanation of how setting up Element affinities with Junction works.
I say this because I am informed that in the original JP release of the game, the timer only stopped once you reached the Templars at the entrance. Which means Quistis could kill you in the tutorial.
Thanks to the timer being down, we make our leisurely way back out, Drawing as much magic as is offered to us. It turns out it's actually really easy and not all that long to just pull 50+ casts from a given fight, it doesn't really feel like grinding. By the time we're back in Balamb Garden after fucking around on the beach and plains a little, we'll have 100 Fire and 100 Brazier.
And with this, we return to the world map, and have finished our test. Quistis doesn't grade us at this stage, so we'll just have to hope we did well.
…
There's more I want to talk about here, but I think it'll make for a better closing bit for this post as a whole, so we'll just keep going a little bit for now.
Cut for image count.
The Fire Cavern
There is a short bit of forest before the cavern, where we run into giant caterpillars and other no-good beasts. This proves an opportunity to Draw more magic out of them, which is all good by me. We also get some XP out of it, as well as AP for our GFs. So far so normal.
The material rewards are weirder though. One thing I notice immediately is that encounters almost all drop the same item, 'M-Stone Piece,' described as 'a stone with a little magic power.' It can't be used in any way that I can see, and with a brief look online it seems like…
They're one component of a crafting system.
Oh boy. We are hitting so many dubious milestones today.
Also, I started the game with 5000 gil, which I thought was a pretty significant sum. And that's neat!
But what I came to realize multiple random encounters later is that… I still had 5000 gil.
Random encounters don't award gil. I wonder what that's about.
Quistis gives us the magic junctioning tutorial upon reaching the path to the Cave, then gives us another quick tutorial about how to utilize Squall's gunblade.
Right. There was so much to cover in this first update I barely touched upon how Squall is using the coolest, dumbest weapon of all time.
This is the Revolver, Squall's starter weapon.
As you can see, it is literally a gun with a fucking sword instead of a barrel.
It's amazing. This is visual design perfection. No weapon could ever be this cool, or this stupid.
The gunblade, perhaps surprisingly, actually has some degree of historical backing. Check out this beauty:
The Elgin pistol, produced for the US Navy in 1838; only 150 were made.
It's understandable why people have kept trying to make the pistol sword happen over the centuries. "What if sword, but also gun" is just an inherently badass concept. It's the two coolest, most iconic weapons designed by humans, fused together.
The problem is that it doesn't work. There is no way to make a pistol sword that doesn't sacrifice the performance of both the pistol and the sword: The pistol is too heavy for proper carrying and aiming, the sword is heavy and off-balance for proper fighting. Yet still, we try! We want to make this happen, with new prototypes all the way to WW2 and even today as novelty items not meant for real combat. The closest we got to a functional pistol sword is the humble bayonet, which is really more of a rifle spear, and is perfectly fine at its job, but doesn't really fulfill the fantasy of the gunblade, if you get what I mean.
FF8, however, has the benefit of not being set in reality. It can make whatever weapon it wants to work, work. Even so, the gunblade isn't quite what you'd expect.
Final Fantasy, as a series, has a few instances of what comes immediately to mind when hearing 'gunblade' - the pistol sword, a sword that can also shoot people. These include Yazoo's Velvet Nightmare guns in Advent Children:
They're guns, with the outer case having a blade mounted into it which he uses to parry Cloud's sword.
As well as the gunblades of the Garlean Empire in FFXIV:
You have to pay close attention, but Garlean NPCs' gunblades are actually entirely different weapons from Gunbreakers' gunblades.
But Squall's gunblade isn't really that. He never uses it to shoot people, at least not that I have seen so far. And this should be obvious if you pay close attention to the Revolver's design above - it does not have a barrel. Rather, his gunblade works the same way FFXIV's Gunbreakers' gunblades eventually would: he presses the trigger while delivering a sword blow, which causes the cylinder and 'firing mechanism' to detonate some kind of cartridge, which either causes the sword to 'vibrate' in the style of a Star Wars vibro-sword, or just propels the blade with greater strength like a rocket hammer.
Mechanically, this is represented by the fact that every time Squall attacks, if we time a R1 press right during his attack animation, we get a satisfying boom, a visual explosion animation, and, I assume, if vibrations are turned on, the PlayStation controller vibrating accordingly - and all of that accompanied by significantly increased damage.
…
I was ready to be irritated as hell by this because I am bad at rhythm minigames, and I am bad at getting the trigger on the gunblade, but I have to appreciate what it's doing here - the Attack action has always been the most boring part of Final Fantasy combat design, and this here is an actual effort to inject some player engagement and interaction with it with a simple mechanic that requires you to be paying attention. I respect it.
Squall and Quistis both do a military-style salute.
These hat-wearing guys who look weirdly like monks (I haven't seen their names here yet, but in FR they are 'Templars') ask us to choose a time limit 'suited to our abilities, challenging yet reasonable.' Our options are 10, 20, 30 or 40 minutes. Being at this point pretty confident in my Final Fantasy skills and assuming the reward will be greater for it, I opt for a breezy 10 minutes.
This will prove to be a mistake. But for now, the Templars let us enter, and it's time to tackle the Fire Cavern.
Hmm.
The Fire Cavern is your standard lava dungeon, just encountered a lot earlier than we usually do lava dungeons. Our goal here is to obtain a 'low-level GF,' so no prize for guessing we're here for Ifrit; the fact that GFs are categorized into levels and some are in-story recognized as stronger or weaker than others is interesting, though.
Squall and Quistis have some… Interesting dialogue here. It starts off professional, with Quistis saying she's here for battle support but it's his exam to pass or fail, but then things take a turn for the more… fraternizing.
Quistis: "You know, boys often choke on this test when I come with them."
Quistis: "I guess my charm makes them nervous."
Squall: (Pauses, turns around to look at her)
Squall, mentally: "(...Whatever)."
Quistis: "I'm just kidding! Trying to keep you relaxed is all."
…
Something about this scene is weird to me. And I don't mean the 'should a teacher be so obviously joke-flirting with her student' stuff. I mean in the 'this dialogue is wrong' sense, and I can't quite put my finger on it at this stage.
So let's set it aside for now and move on.
As befits her role as instructor, Quistis gives us helpful instructions when relevant. For instance, these Bombs are Fire-elemental, and so are vulnerable to Ice spells. Unfortunately, her instructions also take up some of our precious, precious time. Which also doesn't stop when ATB does. Still, this is our chance to Draw a ton of Fire spells, because at that point I am still foolishly confident that we'll make the time.
We also encounter our first (okay, second, I skipped over the first at the time) Draw Point: These are little springs of magic in the environment from which we can directly draw spells.
The Fire Cavern is very short and straightforward, effectively a single linear path with one Draw Point slightly out of the way. So we get to Ifrit fairly quickly, but before we do, I want to draw your attention to the best spell in the game.
This is Buel, a random encounter in the cave. It has low HP, but high magic resistance, and so is best defeated with physical attacks. We can also draw Ice from him, which I promptly do in anticipation of the Ifrit fight.
He's also where I test the Scan spell for the first time. And holy shit.
Scan showed up as early as FFIII, as the Scholar's job ability, then as a spell called Libra in FFIV, and then in every game afterwards. It has always been fairly straightforward: it identifies the target's HP and any elemental weaknesses it may have had. Sometimes it might do extra stuff like tell us about enemy level, or their MP count. That's all it does, its information is purely mechanical.
I have waited for seven games to get back to the FF8 Scan.
Look at it.
LOOK AT IT.
It's got a sci-fi looking reticle that homes in on the enemy and locks on, then moves to a briefing screen that gives you its combat data, including its level, HP, monster type, weaknesses, strengths, it even has a graph at the top of the screen showing you its stats, and most importantly of all, it has a text blurb talking about what kind of a monster it is!
You have no idea how long I have been waiting for the text blurb. This is so important. For Buel, the information is very practical and matter-of-fact, but for other monsters, it functions as flavor text. "This fish only appears with its fin above the sand, no one has ever seen its body;" "this plant monster is little more than a digestive sac with tentacles." IT'S A POKEDEX. WE HAVE A POKEDEX FOR OUR ENEMIES.
Every game is better with an enemy Pokédex, you guys. I'm almost tempted to actually make a 'Bestiary' post where I post screenshots of every enemy I Scan.
Anyway, time also passes while in the Scan Menu, so by the time we show up to the Ifrit showdown we're running way late.
Ifrit emerges from the molten basin at the end of the cave, and the battle is on.
With 1068 HP, Ifrit is a significantly tougher opponent than anything we've faced so far, and that HP (as well as his ridiculous Spirit rating) means our primary challenge isn't Ifrit's damage, but the time limit.
Put it bluntly, the animations in the game take too long. My ATB fills up pretty fast but it's just not enough to keep up with the timer. Especially because my most effective source of damage isn't actually the Ice spell (which does hit an elemental weakness but, well, very high Magic Defense means it's still only 70+ damage a hit, so we'd need 14 casts to win), it's…
Okay, so let's talk about summons.
You may recall that this game doesn't have MP. So then, how are summons casts limited, if they are at all?
In this screenshot, you can see that Quistis's name has been replaced with Shiva's, there is a gray box over her HP count with a different number, and her ATB gauge is blue.
When a character uses the GF action (the summon action), they enter a kind of 'trance' as they harmonize with the Guardian Force. In that state, their ATB gauge turns blue and goes down instead of up, representing the 'charging up time' for the summon. However, while charging up, their HP is also replaced with that of the GF. That's right; summons have HP counts, they can take damage, and they can get even get KO'd.
When Quistis is channeling Shiva, Shiva is fronting all damage Quistis takes. Quistis's HP is spared, but Shiva's HP goes down and, if she gets KO'd, we lose the summon until raised.
It's a quirky and interesting system, and I wonder how well it will pan out in reality, whether it makes Summons annoyingly fragile or, on the contrary, makes characters super-tanky due to having secondary HP pools to call upon.
When the summon time is done…
I'm starting to think this game just might be mildly horny.
It's a genuinely impressive animation - Shiva descending from the sky inn VII was great, but her emerging in an ice coffin, shattering it from within, and then the sheer dynamism given to the diamond dust blast is amazing. More weirdly, this Shiva looks less like a vague attempt was made at making her look like a Hindu goddess and more like a… sexy alien babe? What's up with that hair? And that… I hesitate to call it an 'outfit.'
Hrm.
Anyway, this summons prompts Ifrit to exclaim 'They have Shiva!?" which is really interesting, because it's our first sign that GFs are actual sentient beings capable of speech and of having relationships, rather than like, energy constructs you bind to yourself. Ifrit may be a low-level GF, but he's a person, and he also recognizes Shiva as a fellow GF.
Shiva deals the heaviest damage of all our options, but it's not enough. Although Ifrit seems impressed by our performance and pulls out his special move, a jumping downwards punch and says 'Not bad for a human,' in the end…
We reach almost the required damage to take him down, but not quite. The count hits 0:00, and while I was expecting the game to continue but Quistis to tell me I did a bad job and will have a low grade…
Instead we get a game over.
Fucked up and evil.
So, huh, I kinda forgot to save on the world map?
Which means my last save is back at Balamb Garden. With all of Quistis's tutorials in the way.
…LUCKILY, emulators have what Steam doesn't: Quicksave features! I can literally save the game any time I want! This, huh, will be relevant to my triumphs and losses in Triple Triad later on (spoiler: I lost 90% of my matches so far and I straight up wouldn't have a deck left if I had to play through it). So we reload our last (and only) quicksave, which unfortunately happens to be at the entrance to the cavern after fucking around a bit and only 8:30 minutes on the counter. So this time we don't waste time, no scan, draw only the necessary Blizzards, run through, hit Ifrit, and then test out our second starting summon.
Quezacotl's Thunder Storm (or PURIFYING FIRES in FR) has him emerge from the ground with a shower of lightning, spin around and open his wings, then fire a dome of lightning which cages the opponent, then fire a huge lightning bolt from the top of the dome that makes the whole thing explode. It's incredibly dramatic and does about as much damage as a normal Blizzard cast due to Ifrit's sky-high Magic Defense. This makes things a little hairy, but thankfully we manage to get it done just under the wire…
Oh.
It turns out during the dialogue animation where he concedes defeat, we hit 0:00.
TURNS OUT THAT'S ANOTHER GAME OVER. GOTTA WIN WITH ENOUGH TIME FOR THE DIALOGUE TO PLAY OUT.
Fuckass game design, man.
It's fine. Next time, pure efficiency: No Quezacotl, no healing, pure relentless offense with Squall spamming Blizzard and Quistis spamming Shiva. Turns out, 'no healing' was a great idea, because…
Well, noticed how this game doesn't have a Limit Gauge?
Instead of being triggered by the Limit Gauge filling up, Limit Breaks in this game are triggered by being at low HP.
This sounds insanely abusable. We'll see if that's the case later. For now, it's our chance.
Squall's Limit Break, Renzokuken, is like a mini-omnislash with a rhythm game included. Each hit of Squall's blade has the bar at the bottom flash and we must hit R1 on the right time to trigger an explosion from the gunblade and increase damage; there are several hits with which to do this, and then it terminates in a Climmhazard-style ascending blow and a massive explosion.
It is way, way cooler than I was expecting an LB1 to be, but… Well, I don't actually know if it's an LB1. It's completely possible that Renzokuken is Squall's Limit Break, and that it won't be upgraded by later gains or new weapons or anything.
This time, we win the fight with seconds to spare. Bracing, but satisfying.
…back from FFV, and which I did not miss, is the fact that we do not receive XP for boss battles. And since this game does not reward gil for battles either, the only thing we gain is AP. Granted, that is a pretty damn sizeable amount of AP, 40 in total, enough to get both GFs to almost gain their first rank of SumMag+10% (there are things I would prioritize over summon power, but at this point in my playthrough Quistis hasn't explained how GF abilities work yet and I don't remember it, so I didn't think to swap their abilities to something I'm more interested in).
And that's our win! We have obtained Ifrit, our third GF. Or should he be a BF?
Despite Quistis saying there isn't much time, the timer actually stops after beating Ifrit, so we don't have to watch agonizingly as the timer ticks down while she goes into a long explanation of how setting up Element affinities with Junction works.
I say this because I am informed that in the original JP release of the game, the timer only stopped once you reached the Templars at the entrance. Which means Quistis could kill you in the tutorial.
Thanks to the timer being down, we make our leisurely way back out, Drawing as much magic as is offered to us. It turns out it's actually really easy and not all that long to just pull 50+ casts from a given fight, it doesn't really feel like grinding. By the time we're back in Balamb Garden after fucking around on the beach and plains a little, we'll have 100 Fire and 100 Brazier.
And with this, we return to the world map, and have finished our test. Quistis doesn't grade us at this stage, so we'll just have to hope we did well.
…
There's more I want to talk about here, but I think it'll make for a better closing bit for this post as a whole, so we'll just keep going a little bit for now.
Cut for image count.
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Final Fantasy VIII, Part 2.B: Fire Cavern & Balamb
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Balamb
This is the town that was visible from Balamb Garden. The overworld model for it is really well detailed, and it seems to have a railroad leading straight into a dyke wall, so I assume this is an undersea railroad linking to another continent.
Nothing tells us to go visit that town, but nothing keeps us from doing it either. We're free to go over there and explore.
This is… a town? The game doesn't appear to have given me its name upon entering. However, the writing on the threshold that Squall is standing on in this screenshot reads 'Balamb,' so I'm going to guess this is Balamb, and Balamb Garden is named due to its proximity to it.
Balamb is gorgeous. They really take full advantage of both the scenic coastal town setting and FF8's unique architectural sensibilities. VII would sometimes get weird with it like with Gongaga, but here right off the gate we have a town with cool, strangely shaped houses.
Also, instead of presenting Balamb as a single screen with a full, sideways view of the whole town ('Baldur's Gate' style), like most towns in VII, Balamb is instead divided into multiple screens with varying camera angles, which does a lot to make the town feel bigger and visually exciting to explore.
Like this!
Oh, also?
You've probably noticed by now but the party doesn't fold in this game. Quistis never runs into Squall and bodily fuse with him the way characters have in every FF game so far. Instead she follows after him, existing on the screen at all times! This means that, among other things, Quistis and Squall can exchange dialogue while we move through the world, instead of the group needing to pause and split up to hold a conversation. Just like the full-sized models, it's part of VIII's efforts at creating a more realistic, more natural vibe to its world and character. It's also something that I had no idea wasn't standard at the time I played it as a kid, so characters folding into one in other RPGs always struck me as weird when playing other games afterwards.
There's nothing plot-critical in Balamb at this stage. A couple are looking forward to Balamb Garden holding its Garden Festival where they hope to play music, a car rental receptionist explains how car rental works to us (you rent cars for single trips, they have a full tank of gas but you can buy extra to keep with you if you need to go further), and there are stores, although…
Remedy and Tent we're familiar with. G-Potion and G-Returner are new items, they're Potion and Phoenix Down that apply to a GF, due to the unique way GFs work with their own HP. We just learned about Fuel. Normal Ammo and Shotgun Ammo though… I have no idea what those are for, and the game doesn't explain. Hopefully it'll be explained later.
Seeing as I'm not making money off fights, I'm in no hurry to spend my starting 5k gil, so we buy nothing.
We also run into this very strange character. The 'Queen of Cards,' who travels the world to enforce card rules. She is capable of changing card rules for a fee and can inform us about how rules work in a given region.
…so let's talk about cards, since this is as good a point as any.
Many characters in the game play cards. We can challenge them by talking to them with Square instead of X. When we do, the amazing Triple Triad music plays, and we go to this screen.
Beating Ifrit unlocked his card, which is significantly more powerful than any in my base collection.
When we begin a Triple Triad game, we open on this menu, where we see our entire collection of cards (which starts with the 7 cards given to us by the BGU student, which are all incredibly weak), out of which we must pick five which will form our hand of cards for the game.
We have 5 cards, and our opponent has 5 cards, then a coin is tossed to decide who gets to go first. In some games the opponent's cards are revealed; in others they are hidden. This is a player-to-player difference, not everyone follows the same rules.
Each turn, we put down one card on one of the 9 spaces on the table. Each card has a diamond of four numbers from 1 to 10 (or rather from 1 to 9 with A standing above 9), representing the number associated with each side of the card. So for instance, that evil mushroom at the bottom of my hand has 1 (the weakest number) on his bottom side, and 5 (mediocre) on his top side, 3 on his left side and 1 on his right. This is terrible; that card is garbage and I hate it. Unfortunately I have few other options.
When a card is set down against another card whose number is smaller, the weaker card is flipped to the opponent's color. So for instance, if I were to set down my evil Mushroom just underneath the opponent's mummy that has a 4 on its bottom side, the mummy would be flipped to my color. At the end of a game, the player with the most cards of his color wins.
Simple, right? Basically, the reason all my cards are bad is that they're strong only on one or two sides, and extremely weak on their other sides, which leaves them wide open to attack. I need to play them in protective locations - for instance, the weird blue guy has 1s on his left and top side, so if I play him in the top left corner, his 1s will be facing the wall and only his 4 and 5 sides will be vulnerable. But this severely restricts my offensive option. Also, flipping only happens when you set down a stronger card next to a weaker card; cards are never flipped because you set them against a stronger card, which means I can't force an opponent to play a card into getting flipped, so playing defensively that way means never winning.
Here, I landed a crushing defeat, but also the opponent's cards are vastly stronger than mine so I had few good options (but still played like trash). Things get better once I have Ifrit, though.
Here, the opponent's caterpillar left itself wide open to Ifrit being placed underneath him, flipping him to blue while protecting Ifrit's weakest side, his bottom 2. If I played Ifrit on the left instead, Ifrit would still flip the caterpillar, but then the opponents Jelleye with a top-side 3 could be placed underneath, attacking Ifrit's 2 and flipping him. I don' want that.
Sweet victory, at long last.
It's a deceptively simple, very quick game that is easy to eat up like popcorn. It's also very easy to lose, and losing can be punishing: the winner of a match takes cards (how many depends on ruleset, but it's at least one) from the loser. That means any lost match could cost me Ifrit and my chances at ever winning again, so I do a lot of save-scumming.
Even save-scumming my odds aren't great and I lose the overwhelming majority of my fights. I am not clear what determines my opponent's deck and strategy, but some are stronger than others, and I think I need to build up my collection before I have decent odds against most players. Ifrit is good, but he can't hold up a whole strategy on his own.
Also, Triple Triad has multiple rulesets to keep it fresh. The one I just explained is simple, but there are other rulesets with complications like 'the wall has its own numbers' or 'the board has elemental-type slots.''
But that's the basics of Triple Triad! Not so complicated, is it? We win a couple matches to bolster our collection and then it's on with the rest of the Balamb exploration. There's other set-up dialogue - an older lady hits on Squall by telling him he has a 'nice physique' and asking him if he'd like to work with her, a photographer, on the 'big parade' that is planned to take place in Galbadia. A student who's out on the town also hits on Quistis, and she replies by asking him about the test he flunked the other day. It's funny.
Those docks are gorgeous. Look at that views of the sea.
The Balamb Hotel.
Exploring the hotel reveals something I need to keep an eye on from now on: Magazines are important somehow. I find this out by interacting with a random table with magazines on it and learning that this is an old issue of 'Timber Maniac.'
I have no idea what Timber Maniac is, or why it matters that Squall found it and read it, but we sure did find it!
There's a house we can enter that is home to the family of a guy named Zell, but we don't know who that is yet. And that about rounds up Balamb! It's fun that we can go there before anything in the plot actually happens, but nothing much, well, happens there. So let's head back to Balamb Garden!
This is where we get the 'how to set up which ability you want your GF to learn' tutorial.
Once she's gone through the tutorial, she tells us to go put on our uniform and assemble in the first floor lobby. Yes ma'am. This is our cue to head for the Dormitory and find out what Squall's room is like.
Small but personal room with a bed next to a small communal area with a table and perhaps a kitchenette area off to the side. It's not too bad. Not sure what this case with the lion logo (the same as the necklace Squall is wearing) is about, though.
Interacting with the bed prompts Squall to change into his uniform, but I just saved in the common room, so we're going to stop it here for today. I need to start a fresh save anyway to get that missable content from Balamb Garden.
It'll only be our fourth time playing through the opening of the game, it'll only take an hour or so, we'll be fine.
…
What's that? 'Why four'? Well, first we played the Steam version, then we started over with the emulated version, and now we'll have to start over again, which makes three, and the fourth…
Oh, right. I said I'd get to it.
Let's Talk Translation
Okay. Let's backtrack a little, all the way back to this exchange.
Even decades later, I had a moment playing through that bit where I went 'huh, that's not how it goes, is it?'
It bugged me.
So I did the only thing I could.
I swapped to my Steam copy of the game (which unlike my emulated copy has language options), and I replayed the entire opening of the game in French.
THAT'S RIGHT, MOTHERFUCKERS! WE'RE DOING SIMUL-PLAYTHROUGHS!
While I did not check for every bit of incidental dialogue, I did go through the big character interactions and lore stuff - the transfer student who's late, the Balamb Garden Network, the Fire Cavern. Here are my findings.
Some of the changes are minor, and easily filed as just small differences in translation choices that have only a slight impact on characterization; for instance, when Dr Karowaki* asks Squall why he doesn't just ignore Seifer, instead of 'I can't just run away,' Squall says 'It's a matter of honor.' Same idea, much more explicit and self-serious about it. Again, what a 19th century German academy student might say about his engaging in Mensur. Karowaki also tells him that he is 'prideful', rather than 'wanna be cool, huh?' Just slight word differences!
*Whom the French script insists on calling 'Mrs Karowaki, out of what I can only assume is patented 90s sexism
In the walk from the infirmary to class, Quistis and Squall's exchange is mostly identical, save for one thing: Instead of 'I feel like I'm beginning to understand my student a little, that's all.' // 'I'm more complex than you think.' // 'Then tell me,' their exchange goes:
Quistis: "I think I'm beginning to understand my little student…"
Squall: "Hey! I'm more complex than you think…"
Quistis: "You aren't complex, you have a complex!"
It's a funnier exchange, including Quistis directly poking fun at Squall clearly being a teenaged bundle of issues and complexes, with a pun that's absent from EN (and also annoying to translate, I had to tweak the wording a little to make it work).
In class, there's another minor difference: Quistis says that 'those who failed last week's written exams and those not participating' in the SeeD exam will be doing other stuff, while in FR there is no distinction - those not taking part in the SeeD exams are not taking part because they failed the written test, there are no non-SeeD-running students. Also the Fire Cavern is instead the Sulfur Mine.
Then we open the desktop computer and log onto the Balamb Garden Network, and that's where things get much more divergent.
First off: Some of you may have noticed that in my first update I kept hesitating between calling Balamb Garden a 'high school' or a 'university' or a more vague 'academy.' That's because the 'high school' vibe didn't match with my memories, and I've now found out why: In French, Balamb Garden is consistently referred to by the acronym BGU, which stands for Balamb Garden University.
In my memory all these characters are college students, not high schoolers. Which… I am now realizing… Are priors that may need adjusting. I thought these were 20-somethings, not teenagers.
More to the point: 'A GF is an independent energy force. By combining it with para-magic, it is possible to control tremendous energy. Memory loss is a possible side-effect, but this has not been proven yet.'
Becomes: "A G-Force is a diabolic entity, which submits to your will once vanquished. It would seem a repeated use of this occult power causes memory loss of variable severity.'
That is… A significantly different vibe, goddamn. Diabolic entity?
How about that Sorceress Lore?
EN:
FR:
Those are literally two different sentences. Which one is correct?? I have no earthly clue!
Oh hey, you know that motto, 'Work Hard, Study Hard, Play Hard?'
Yeah in FR it's 'Study, Fight, Obey.'
That is significantly more authoritarian and sinister! Someone took certain liberties with BGU's presentation and I am not sure which of the two translators it was!
The line in the original, 'Balamb Garden was the first Garden built in accordance with Headmaster Cid's ideals and dreams,' becomes:
'BGU associates the progressivism of a cutting edge university with the rigor of a military academy.'
No mention is made of Cid's ideals and dreams, but instead of leaving it as vague platitude, the blurb tells us what BGU's ideals are supposed to be, and they are, again, pretty authoritarian, even if the place clearly prides itself on also being top of the line in humanities and academic studies, not just martial pursuits. Very different vibes!
In the SeeD entry where it's said that candidates must be between 5 and 15 years old, the EN says: 'All hard working and confident youths are welcome. Ambitious overachievers are also welcome.'
FR: 'A sense of duty is necessary. A sense of sacrifice is recommended.'
Very blunt. Very militaristic.
And finally… The most dramatic of changes… The 'hot dogs' that students are coming to blows over with live weapons in the cafeteria…
Are instead pretzels.
I've had some good pretzels in my life but I wouldn't kill someone over this.
So that's the terminal. Little of it is character-defining information, but the vibe of Balamb Garden is significantly more militaristic and authoritarian, and the G-Forces are described in much more ominous terms, with the bond of Junction being explicitly a matter of conquest and dominance.
So let's meet with Quistis. Since most of her dialogue is tutorial, there's only two bits that I'm really interested in, and then we'll be done with this translation comparison.
First off, this line, where she says 'GF gives us strength. The stronger the GF, the stronger we become.'?
In FR, it reads:
Emphasis mine.
Right there, in the first tutorial dialogue about GFs, Quistis lays out that bonding with these supernatural beings may grant us power, but it may also literally change our personality.
That's huge. And either it's going to be a major plot point, in which case the EN translator dropped the ball in not including it, or it's not, in which case the FR translator just conjured a major point of character drama out of their ass that is never going to pay off.
And it's impossible for me to know which one fucked up until I've played more of the game.
But that pales in comparison to this one.
Let me quote that bit of dialogue in EN again for you:
Here is how it goes in FR instead.
Like.
So first off - when I was playing this while much younger, the vibe I got from 'some students fail because of me…' was that those students fucking died murdered by Ifrit, which I don't think is the vibe. The instructor is there to save their life if they, as she puts it, 'choke.' Also, she doesn't specify 'boys,' just 'students.
But more importantly…
In the EN dialogue, Quistis makes a joke about students getting performance anxiety from the Hot Teacher watching them, all on her own. It's clearly a half-joke, meant to tease Squall in a problematically flirtatious manner, that she then plays off as just kidding. But Squall is unfazed by it, reacting with an internal '...whatever' typical of a broody teenager being kind of an asshole to everyone. He clearly thinks the teacher being flirty is eyeroll worthy (really he should report her to administrative staff but at least it's not Persona 5-).
In the FR that connotation is completely reversed. Quistis doesn't seem aware that her attractiveness would be the source of her students' nervosity (and doesn't pinpoint it as being male students specifically); instead she attributes it to being an authority figure whose oversight is intimidating, or to the fact that as an instructor she is stronger/more experienced/more skilled than her students and this puts pressure on them which they can't handle.
It's Squall who introduces the idea in his own internal monologue that it might be her attractiveness that distracts her student. Which suggests that despite his outer appearance, he's not actually made of stone, and is vulnerable to Quistis's charms, even though she may not be aware of it. It's not the teacher being problematically flirtatious with her student; it's the student having a (frankly very ordinary) teacher crush which his aloof demeanor is trying to hide.
And that in turn means we aren't in a Cloud situation. Because we are privy to Squall's inner monologue, and so we know that his facade is a facade, instead of, like with Cloud, needing to piece it together from context cues because he won't let the player in.
That's… Huge. For literally four lines of dialogue, that is a massive gap in characterization between translations.
This is where I stopped - I wanted to hit that bit of dialogue, I didn't go through the whole Ifrit fight and visit Balamb, though I'm sure they will have their own subtle differences in translation.
So. What do we make of that?
I don't think I can play the game twice at the same time. It would probably get old real fast. There is probably a French YouTube walkthrough of FF8 out there on YouTube, but unlike with FF7, where I found a lot of translation issues because the dialogue already sounded wrong in English and so knew to go look for it, the FF8 dialogue (and lore text) is perfectly legible and coherent, it's just saying different things from the FR one, so I wouldn't know where to look aside from just going with 'watch the full thing'. And I have no idea which one, if any, is closer to the original JP script! For instance, it would appear that Quistis and Squall's dialogue in the Fire Cavern is closer to the original in FR than it is in EN, but deciding to call the Fire Cavern 'Sulfur Mine' and Quezacotl 'Golgotha' are decisions entirely original to the FR script.
I guess we'll see! I have to start a fresh playthrough to fully explore Balamb Guard before meeting with Quistis for that missable content anyway.
I'm not sure what I'll do, but I'm definitely interested in hearing people's own opinions on this whole translation kerfuffle, especially if you have pre-existing knowledge of the game's translation issues (that you can talk about without spoilers).
Next Time: The SeeD Exam, I think?
This is the town that was visible from Balamb Garden. The overworld model for it is really well detailed, and it seems to have a railroad leading straight into a dyke wall, so I assume this is an undersea railroad linking to another continent.
Nothing tells us to go visit that town, but nothing keeps us from doing it either. We're free to go over there and explore.
This is… a town? The game doesn't appear to have given me its name upon entering. However, the writing on the threshold that Squall is standing on in this screenshot reads 'Balamb,' so I'm going to guess this is Balamb, and Balamb Garden is named due to its proximity to it.
Balamb is gorgeous. They really take full advantage of both the scenic coastal town setting and FF8's unique architectural sensibilities. VII would sometimes get weird with it like with Gongaga, but here right off the gate we have a town with cool, strangely shaped houses.
Also, instead of presenting Balamb as a single screen with a full, sideways view of the whole town ('Baldur's Gate' style), like most towns in VII, Balamb is instead divided into multiple screens with varying camera angles, which does a lot to make the town feel bigger and visually exciting to explore.
Like this!
Oh, also?
You've probably noticed by now but the party doesn't fold in this game. Quistis never runs into Squall and bodily fuse with him the way characters have in every FF game so far. Instead she follows after him, existing on the screen at all times! This means that, among other things, Quistis and Squall can exchange dialogue while we move through the world, instead of the group needing to pause and split up to hold a conversation. Just like the full-sized models, it's part of VIII's efforts at creating a more realistic, more natural vibe to its world and character. It's also something that I had no idea wasn't standard at the time I played it as a kid, so characters folding into one in other RPGs always struck me as weird when playing other games afterwards.
There's nothing plot-critical in Balamb at this stage. A couple are looking forward to Balamb Garden holding its Garden Festival where they hope to play music, a car rental receptionist explains how car rental works to us (you rent cars for single trips, they have a full tank of gas but you can buy extra to keep with you if you need to go further), and there are stores, although…
Remedy and Tent we're familiar with. G-Potion and G-Returner are new items, they're Potion and Phoenix Down that apply to a GF, due to the unique way GFs work with their own HP. We just learned about Fuel. Normal Ammo and Shotgun Ammo though… I have no idea what those are for, and the game doesn't explain. Hopefully it'll be explained later.
Seeing as I'm not making money off fights, I'm in no hurry to spend my starting 5k gil, so we buy nothing.
We also run into this very strange character. The 'Queen of Cards,' who travels the world to enforce card rules. She is capable of changing card rules for a fee and can inform us about how rules work in a given region.
…so let's talk about cards, since this is as good a point as any.
Many characters in the game play cards. We can challenge them by talking to them with Square instead of X. When we do, the amazing Triple Triad music plays, and we go to this screen.
Beating Ifrit unlocked his card, which is significantly more powerful than any in my base collection.
When we begin a Triple Triad game, we open on this menu, where we see our entire collection of cards (which starts with the 7 cards given to us by the BGU student, which are all incredibly weak), out of which we must pick five which will form our hand of cards for the game.
We have 5 cards, and our opponent has 5 cards, then a coin is tossed to decide who gets to go first. In some games the opponent's cards are revealed; in others they are hidden. This is a player-to-player difference, not everyone follows the same rules.
Each turn, we put down one card on one of the 9 spaces on the table. Each card has a diamond of four numbers from 1 to 10 (or rather from 1 to 9 with A standing above 9), representing the number associated with each side of the card. So for instance, that evil mushroom at the bottom of my hand has 1 (the weakest number) on his bottom side, and 5 (mediocre) on his top side, 3 on his left side and 1 on his right. This is terrible; that card is garbage and I hate it. Unfortunately I have few other options.
When a card is set down against another card whose number is smaller, the weaker card is flipped to the opponent's color. So for instance, if I were to set down my evil Mushroom just underneath the opponent's mummy that has a 4 on its bottom side, the mummy would be flipped to my color. At the end of a game, the player with the most cards of his color wins.
Simple, right? Basically, the reason all my cards are bad is that they're strong only on one or two sides, and extremely weak on their other sides, which leaves them wide open to attack. I need to play them in protective locations - for instance, the weird blue guy has 1s on his left and top side, so if I play him in the top left corner, his 1s will be facing the wall and only his 4 and 5 sides will be vulnerable. But this severely restricts my offensive option. Also, flipping only happens when you set down a stronger card next to a weaker card; cards are never flipped because you set them against a stronger card, which means I can't force an opponent to play a card into getting flipped, so playing defensively that way means never winning.
Here, I landed a crushing defeat, but also the opponent's cards are vastly stronger than mine so I had few good options (but still played like trash). Things get better once I have Ifrit, though.
Here, the opponent's caterpillar left itself wide open to Ifrit being placed underneath him, flipping him to blue while protecting Ifrit's weakest side, his bottom 2. If I played Ifrit on the left instead, Ifrit would still flip the caterpillar, but then the opponents Jelleye with a top-side 3 could be placed underneath, attacking Ifrit's 2 and flipping him. I don' want that.
Sweet victory, at long last.
It's a deceptively simple, very quick game that is easy to eat up like popcorn. It's also very easy to lose, and losing can be punishing: the winner of a match takes cards (how many depends on ruleset, but it's at least one) from the loser. That means any lost match could cost me Ifrit and my chances at ever winning again, so I do a lot of save-scumming.
Even save-scumming my odds aren't great and I lose the overwhelming majority of my fights. I am not clear what determines my opponent's deck and strategy, but some are stronger than others, and I think I need to build up my collection before I have decent odds against most players. Ifrit is good, but he can't hold up a whole strategy on his own.
Also, Triple Triad has multiple rulesets to keep it fresh. The one I just explained is simple, but there are other rulesets with complications like 'the wall has its own numbers' or 'the board has elemental-type slots.''
But that's the basics of Triple Triad! Not so complicated, is it? We win a couple matches to bolster our collection and then it's on with the rest of the Balamb exploration. There's other set-up dialogue - an older lady hits on Squall by telling him he has a 'nice physique' and asking him if he'd like to work with her, a photographer, on the 'big parade' that is planned to take place in Galbadia. A student who's out on the town also hits on Quistis, and she replies by asking him about the test he flunked the other day. It's funny.
Those docks are gorgeous. Look at that views of the sea.
The Balamb Hotel.
Exploring the hotel reveals something I need to keep an eye on from now on: Magazines are important somehow. I find this out by interacting with a random table with magazines on it and learning that this is an old issue of 'Timber Maniac.'
I have no idea what Timber Maniac is, or why it matters that Squall found it and read it, but we sure did find it!
There's a house we can enter that is home to the family of a guy named Zell, but we don't know who that is yet. And that about rounds up Balamb! It's fun that we can go there before anything in the plot actually happens, but nothing much, well, happens there. So let's head back to Balamb Garden!
This is where we get the 'how to set up which ability you want your GF to learn' tutorial.
Once she's gone through the tutorial, she tells us to go put on our uniform and assemble in the first floor lobby. Yes ma'am. This is our cue to head for the Dormitory and find out what Squall's room is like.
Small but personal room with a bed next to a small communal area with a table and perhaps a kitchenette area off to the side. It's not too bad. Not sure what this case with the lion logo (the same as the necklace Squall is wearing) is about, though.
Interacting with the bed prompts Squall to change into his uniform, but I just saved in the common room, so we're going to stop it here for today. I need to start a fresh save anyway to get that missable content from Balamb Garden.
It'll only be our fourth time playing through the opening of the game, it'll only take an hour or so, we'll be fine.
…
What's that? 'Why four'? Well, first we played the Steam version, then we started over with the emulated version, and now we'll have to start over again, which makes three, and the fourth…
Oh, right. I said I'd get to it.
Let's Talk Translation
Okay. Let's backtrack a little, all the way back to this exchange.
Even decades later, I had a moment playing through that bit where I went 'huh, that's not how it goes, is it?'
It bugged me.
So I did the only thing I could.
I swapped to my Steam copy of the game (which unlike my emulated copy has language options), and I replayed the entire opening of the game in French.
THAT'S RIGHT, MOTHERFUCKERS! WE'RE DOING SIMUL-PLAYTHROUGHS!
While I did not check for every bit of incidental dialogue, I did go through the big character interactions and lore stuff - the transfer student who's late, the Balamb Garden Network, the Fire Cavern. Here are my findings.
Some of the changes are minor, and easily filed as just small differences in translation choices that have only a slight impact on characterization; for instance, when Dr Karowaki* asks Squall why he doesn't just ignore Seifer, instead of 'I can't just run away,' Squall says 'It's a matter of honor.' Same idea, much more explicit and self-serious about it. Again, what a 19th century German academy student might say about his engaging in Mensur. Karowaki also tells him that he is 'prideful', rather than 'wanna be cool, huh?' Just slight word differences!
*Whom the French script insists on calling 'Mrs Karowaki, out of what I can only assume is patented 90s sexism
In the walk from the infirmary to class, Quistis and Squall's exchange is mostly identical, save for one thing: Instead of 'I feel like I'm beginning to understand my student a little, that's all.' // 'I'm more complex than you think.' // 'Then tell me,' their exchange goes:
Quistis: "I think I'm beginning to understand my little student…"
Squall: "Hey! I'm more complex than you think…"
Quistis: "You aren't complex, you have a complex!"
It's a funnier exchange, including Quistis directly poking fun at Squall clearly being a teenaged bundle of issues and complexes, with a pun that's absent from EN (and also annoying to translate, I had to tweak the wording a little to make it work).
In class, there's another minor difference: Quistis says that 'those who failed last week's written exams and those not participating' in the SeeD exam will be doing other stuff, while in FR there is no distinction - those not taking part in the SeeD exams are not taking part because they failed the written test, there are no non-SeeD-running students. Also the Fire Cavern is instead the Sulfur Mine.
Then we open the desktop computer and log onto the Balamb Garden Network, and that's where things get much more divergent.
First off: Some of you may have noticed that in my first update I kept hesitating between calling Balamb Garden a 'high school' or a 'university' or a more vague 'academy.' That's because the 'high school' vibe didn't match with my memories, and I've now found out why: In French, Balamb Garden is consistently referred to by the acronym BGU, which stands for Balamb Garden University.
In my memory all these characters are college students, not high schoolers. Which… I am now realizing… Are priors that may need adjusting. I thought these were 20-somethings, not teenagers.
More to the point: 'A GF is an independent energy force. By combining it with para-magic, it is possible to control tremendous energy. Memory loss is a possible side-effect, but this has not been proven yet.'
Becomes: "A G-Force is a diabolic entity, which submits to your will once vanquished. It would seem a repeated use of this occult power causes memory loss of variable severity.'
That is… A significantly different vibe, goddamn. Diabolic entity?
How about that Sorceress Lore?
EN:
Article: 'A woman who has inherited the power of a sorceress. The origins of the sorceresses go back to ancient times during Hyne's reign. However, there is no factual evidence.'
FR:
Article: 'No being is born a sorceress or a mage. The supernatural powers of the Necromancers are transmitted, from generation to generation, to mere mortals. According to legend, this unbroken cycle goes back to Hyne's reign.'
Those are literally two different sentences. Which one is correct?? I have no earthly clue!
Oh hey, you know that motto, 'Work Hard, Study Hard, Play Hard?'
Yeah in FR it's 'Study, Fight, Obey.'
That is significantly more authoritarian and sinister! Someone took certain liberties with BGU's presentation and I am not sure which of the two translators it was!
The line in the original, 'Balamb Garden was the first Garden built in accordance with Headmaster Cid's ideals and dreams,' becomes:
'BGU associates the progressivism of a cutting edge university with the rigor of a military academy.'
No mention is made of Cid's ideals and dreams, but instead of leaving it as vague platitude, the blurb tells us what BGU's ideals are supposed to be, and they are, again, pretty authoritarian, even if the place clearly prides itself on also being top of the line in humanities and academic studies, not just martial pursuits. Very different vibes!
In the SeeD entry where it's said that candidates must be between 5 and 15 years old, the EN says: 'All hard working and confident youths are welcome. Ambitious overachievers are also welcome.'
FR: 'A sense of duty is necessary. A sense of sacrifice is recommended.'
Very blunt. Very militaristic.
And finally… The most dramatic of changes… The 'hot dogs' that students are coming to blows over with live weapons in the cafeteria…
Are instead pretzels.
I've had some good pretzels in my life but I wouldn't kill someone over this.
So that's the terminal. Little of it is character-defining information, but the vibe of Balamb Garden is significantly more militaristic and authoritarian, and the G-Forces are described in much more ominous terms, with the bond of Junction being explicitly a matter of conquest and dominance.
So let's meet with Quistis. Since most of her dialogue is tutorial, there's only two bits that I'm really interested in, and then we'll be done with this translation comparison.
First off, this line, where she says 'GF gives us strength. The stronger the GF, the stronger we become.'?
In FR, it reads:
Article: "The G-Forces are creatures of magic, who help us and influence our personality."
Emphasis mine.
Right there, in the first tutorial dialogue about GFs, Quistis lays out that bonding with these supernatural beings may grant us power, but it may also literally change our personality.
That's huge. And either it's going to be a major plot point, in which case the EN translator dropped the ball in not including it, or it's not, in which case the FR translator just conjured a major point of character drama out of their ass that is never going to pay off.
And it's impossible for me to know which one fucked up until I've played more of the game.
But that pales in comparison to this one.
Let me quote that bit of dialogue in EN again for you:
Article: Quistis: "You know, boys often choke on this test when I come with them."
Quistis: "I guess my charm makes them nervous."
Squall: (Pauses, turns around to look at her)
Squall, mentally: "(...Whatever)."
Quistis: "I'm just kidding! Trying to keep you relaxed is all."
Here is how it goes in FR instead.
Article: Quistis: "Some students fail because of me… I make them nervous."
Quistis: "My skill? My authority? Who knows?"
Squall: (Pauses, turns around to look at her)
Squall, mentally: "(...Maybe it's your charms.)."
Quistis: "I'm just kidding! Relax, everything will go fine."
Like.
So first off - when I was playing this while much younger, the vibe I got from 'some students fail because of me…' was that those students fucking died murdered by Ifrit, which I don't think is the vibe. The instructor is there to save their life if they, as she puts it, 'choke.' Also, she doesn't specify 'boys,' just 'students.
But more importantly…
In the EN dialogue, Quistis makes a joke about students getting performance anxiety from the Hot Teacher watching them, all on her own. It's clearly a half-joke, meant to tease Squall in a problematically flirtatious manner, that she then plays off as just kidding. But Squall is unfazed by it, reacting with an internal '...whatever' typical of a broody teenager being kind of an asshole to everyone. He clearly thinks the teacher being flirty is eyeroll worthy (really he should report her to administrative staff but at least it's not Persona 5-).
In the FR that connotation is completely reversed. Quistis doesn't seem aware that her attractiveness would be the source of her students' nervosity (and doesn't pinpoint it as being male students specifically); instead she attributes it to being an authority figure whose oversight is intimidating, or to the fact that as an instructor she is stronger/more experienced/more skilled than her students and this puts pressure on them which they can't handle.
It's Squall who introduces the idea in his own internal monologue that it might be her attractiveness that distracts her student. Which suggests that despite his outer appearance, he's not actually made of stone, and is vulnerable to Quistis's charms, even though she may not be aware of it. It's not the teacher being problematically flirtatious with her student; it's the student having a (frankly very ordinary) teacher crush which his aloof demeanor is trying to hide.
And that in turn means we aren't in a Cloud situation. Because we are privy to Squall's inner monologue, and so we know that his facade is a facade, instead of, like with Cloud, needing to piece it together from context cues because he won't let the player in.
That's… Huge. For literally four lines of dialogue, that is a massive gap in characterization between translations.
This is where I stopped - I wanted to hit that bit of dialogue, I didn't go through the whole Ifrit fight and visit Balamb, though I'm sure they will have their own subtle differences in translation.
So. What do we make of that?
I don't think I can play the game twice at the same time. It would probably get old real fast. There is probably a French YouTube walkthrough of FF8 out there on YouTube, but unlike with FF7, where I found a lot of translation issues because the dialogue already sounded wrong in English and so knew to go look for it, the FF8 dialogue (and lore text) is perfectly legible and coherent, it's just saying different things from the FR one, so I wouldn't know where to look aside from just going with 'watch the full thing'. And I have no idea which one, if any, is closer to the original JP script! For instance, it would appear that Quistis and Squall's dialogue in the Fire Cavern is closer to the original in FR than it is in EN, but deciding to call the Fire Cavern 'Sulfur Mine' and Quezacotl 'Golgotha' are decisions entirely original to the FR script.
I guess we'll see! I have to start a fresh playthrough to fully explore Balamb Guard before meeting with Quistis for that missable content anyway.
I'm not sure what I'll do, but I'm definitely interested in hearing people's own opinions on this whole translation kerfuffle, especially if you have pre-existing knowledge of the game's translation issues (that you can talk about without spoilers).
Next Time: The SeeD Exam, I think?
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Tbf, like many fanfics, I would argue that they also read much more as university students than high school students.
According to a website that goes over a bit of the localization, it's closer to this one, with Squall's response being something like "I can't believe this teacher…"
Mister Bad Guy
Mr Mercury to friends
- Location
- Bay Area
You know, I do know that this is a fantasy setting and Final Fantasy has never been particularly realistic, but that strikes me as an even dumber explanation than if it was just a gun that was also a sword. I'm picturing Squall's sword just exploding mid-combat after too many swings like that one knight in Army of Darkness.
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- Location
- Lake Wobegon
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
And lo! Thus did Omicron embark upon the learning of Japanese (this is a lie).
Headmaster Cid: "I fukken dare you to cancel these university students for their political opinions, I absolutely dare you"
Mother Nyx
Mother of Elpis
- Location
- The Kei Klub
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Thank you so much for covering all these games, but especially my favorite, FF8. And, I knew there were some translation issues when came to English/Japanese but it's interesting to see French is also an issue.
GilliamYaeger
M'crazy.
Final Fantasy 8: Adventures in localization where they're all different flavours of wildly inaccurate!
It's a special kind of frustrating, going through something and realizing that you're not actually experiencing the story as it was originally written.
It's a special kind of frustrating, going through something and realizing that you're not actually experiencing the story as it was originally written.
Does this imply that at some point a party member will have a bladeless Gunblade?
Or as we call it outside of the world of Final Fantasy 8, a gun-
Thankfully, it's easier than ever to learn Japanese. It'd be nice if you didn't have to, though.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
the ffxiv community infamously managed to have people go insane over the differences between the Japanese, English, French and German scripts
VIII has yet to beat that
Well, this is one of FF8's most famous tracks:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeScjOTYl7g