This Final Fantasy seems to be introducing some kinda bespoke and interesting mechanics early on... GFs seem to do a lot but that whole implementation of magic is not like anything I expected, and the gunblade interactivity is neat, though it has the same drawback as ATB in making the game even more timing-based.
World-wise, the visual style is an impressive step forward from FFVII that seems to have pretty distinct elements, and I'm curious about the setting but especially so now that you're drawing attention to these translation differences. Some of those do suggest dramatically distinct expectations of tone for the school.
This is partially about getting past that cutscene crash right and seeing the game from your childhood in full right? I think it's a decent idea to go play the French version, and continue the experience that was cut short rather than play the english version. It's never a simple question of right or wrong when it comes to localization, so if you have an emotional attachment to one version - and given that you outright replayed the opening yet again you presumably care at least a little - then why not go for it?
Those French translations certainly seem much more interesting, but I'm in the same boat as you with knowing nothing about the game's story, so who's taking more liberties/making shit up whole cloth is a mystery.
I have a strong suspicion it's the French that's more off this time, because of three factors:
1) They renamed Quetzacoutle "Golgotha" and named what's clearly a lightning attack "Purifying Fire."
2) According to a third party site the translation of Quistis and Squall's dialogue is much closer to the English than the French (though still a little off)
3) FF has a long history of summons that are basically neutral/your buddies and the French calling them diabolic. I strongly suspect that even if they are diabolic in this game, that would be meant to be a twist because of how different it is from previous games, so it shouldn't be laid out this early.
But maybe I'm wrong! I certainly didn't do enough research on the localization to say how accurate the English is. Or maybe they're both equally wrong on different things.
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.
OH BOY CRAFTING (and also other things, I'm sure you'll find some particular uses for these items eventually).
Heck, could always treat it like some RPGs where enemies instead of dropping money drop buttloads of random materials you sell for your funding. Dunno how much magic stones sell for at this point though, and there's probably better ways of making money eventually.
It's probably because I also played FFVIII way back as a kid, but Gunblades have always been peak "THAT'S SO STUPIDLY COOL" for me. Granted, I didn't realize it was supposed to be triggering vibrations when he pulled the trigger, I just figured it like... literally fired a bullet down the blade at the same time as Squall stabbing people in the face.
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.
Oh yes, two fun things about the gunblade, one involving that R1 trigger! IIRC, Squall actually cannot get critical hits with his weapon - instead, that R1 is effectively his crit option, so in general if you get the timing down he's one of the better physical attacking party members. Secondly? For whatever reason, gunblades (and thus Squall) are stupid accurate. As in, Squall will always have a base hit rate of 255%, and even when blinded will still have over 100% hit rate. I'm genuinely unsure if it is actually possible for Squall to miss with his physical attacks barring things like auto-evading enemies or flying targets or something.
Also, since I highly doubt we'll be covering it in this thread as it isn't actually Final Fantasy, just heavily Final Fantasy adjacent - a game that took the "press trigger for better attacks" to a full on interaction system is Legend of Dragoon, with its Additions system: View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzabuxIhOz8
Basically, party members unlock better and better default attacks... if you can keep up the rhythms needed for the more complicated ones. Paper Mario/the Mario and Luigi series is another good example of mixing up RPG combat with Action Commands to make things a bit more interactive, and it's always been something I've enjoyed.
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.
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.
Ah yes, another Final Fantasy that fell victim to "we locked a single translator in a broom closet for two weeks before release to get the script done"?
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.
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.
Seriously, enemy blurbs, full model rotation, little symbols for weaknesses and resistances and the like...
Also fun fact, it's not just enemies you can scan and get all this out of, you can totally scan party members and it'll even list their current status and elemental resistances and the like based on their junctions.
Bonus fun fact: while you can rotate models on the scan screen to look at them from all angles, female party members cannot in fact be rotated (jury's out on female enemy characters I can't recall whether or not they apply). I GUESS they didn't want people looking up Quistis's skirt or something, even if I'm also 90% sure there's nothing up there but a black void because Early 3D Game Modeling.
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.
Ah yes, the other half of child me's inability to junction anything - I got very familiar with limit breaks, because my optimal strategy for every battle quickly became "be at low HP start spamming limit like there's no tomorrow".
It's also an interesting look at the evolution of Limit Breaks through the series, though I suppose we should wait until we've gotten more discussion of them to go into detail on that.
…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).
FFVIII is very designed for the possibility of low level runs, between bosses giving no EXP, methods to get no EXP but still get AP from enemy encounters, and the fact that things level scale.
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.
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.
IIRC rules are more region-specific, than character specific. So for example, the Balamb area has the "standard" rulesets of choose your 5 cards, see everyone's cards, take one card from the loser at the end. Then you might go to another city or region, and the rules there are things like "random cards chosen from your collection and winner takes all have fun loser".
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.
Yeah, for as fun as Triple Triad is and easy to get invested in... it's also a game system that can heavily punish the player for small mistakes by ripping away your best cards. Granted, it also goes the other way once you put together a decent deck and can just high number roll over anyone except specific characters with good decks, like presumably the Queen of Cards.
Feels weird to me that they'd throw it in this late, particularly after your first big AP infusion with Ifrit. But I guess the devs didn't want to frontload too many tutorials, considering so far you've had GFs, Junctioning, R1 Triggers, and so on.
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.
My findings are that a professional doctor should probably be more worried about her patient instead of apparently sitting around watching Vtubers play FFVII during her work hours.
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.'
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.
Between the earlier bits and this, I'm really hoping someone rolls into the thread like last time with "here's the accurate fan translations book for FFVIII", because now I'm genuinely curious how much this really is a "sleep-deprived broom closet gremlin throwing shit at the wall two hours before release" situation.
Like SolipsistSerpent, I'm leaning English being slightly more accurate... but I've also heard that Squall's translation has a tendency to insert random "whatevers" in place of actual dialogue, soooo they might just both be ass. Or hey, maybe the original script is ass, who knows!
While this might be the first FF to not do the 'crush the party into a single character' thing it isn't the first Square title to avoid that: Chrono Trigger's party members are always fully visible (though they are uninteractable ghosts with no collision) trailing behind your party lead. This is also the approach taken by Phantasy Star IV prior to CT. So the JRPG area was already moving away from the single-visible-person approach in the SNES era; I assume the reversion for 7 was because of the challenges of developing for the brand new Playstation hardware and 7's novel 3D system.
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…
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.
I have distinct memories of the timer running all the way back to the entrance in the original English release I played as a kid, but I fired up the Steam remaster and that version stops after Ifrit.
The hot dogs were an English dubism anyway; IIRC it was bread in the Japanese, one of those flavored breads you mostly get in Japan that folks are always fighting over in the school cafeteria in old manga (I know it factored into Ranma 1/2 at least)
IIRC rules are more region-specific, than character specific. So for example, the Balamb area has the "standard" rulesets of choose your 5 cards, see everyone's cards, take one card from the loser at the end. Then you might go to another city or region, and the rules there are things like "random cards chosen from your collection and winner takes all have fun loser".
For the most part they're region-specific, but people actually seem to be playing Open/Face-Down randomly within the Balamb Region, or maybe Open in Balamb Garden and Face-Down in Balamb, I haven't checked. Both rulesets are present, though.
My findings are that a professional doctor should probably be more worried about her patient instead of apparently sitting around watching Vtubers play FFVII during her work hours.
Reimu Endou of NijisanjiEN, who has been streaming her own mostly-blind playthrough of FFVII, which is only her second FF game ever after... XVI. It feeds the new debilitating FF7 content addiction this Let's Play has saddled me with.
I think I made it through the entire game without junctioning magic to my stats once or ever once understanding the intricacies of GFs, but things got HARD in the final disc
The hot dogs were an English dubism anyway; IIRC it was bread in the Japanese, one of those flavored breads you mostly get in Japan that folks are always fighting over in the school cafeteria in old manga (I know it factored into Ranma 1/2 at least)
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.
That's really neat actually! I always loved when turn based games give you something to do other than just watch when you attack an enemy. Probably why Thousand Year Door is one of the few turn based rpg's I ever actually beat. Did FF8 first come up with the idea of these mid attack qte's?
I'm assuming you don't want a full explanation of this just yet? For now I'll just say that there's a little bit more to it than this.
I have distinct memories of the timer running all the way back to the entrance in the original English release I played as a kid, but I fired up the Steam remaster and that version stops after Ifrit.
If Omicron is here just ripping the bras off monsters, it might not just be the game that's horny.
That's really neat actually! I always loved when turn based games give you something to do other than just watch when you attack an enemy. Probably why Thousand Year Door is one of the few turn based rpg's I ever actually beat. Did FF8 first come up with the idea of these mid attack qte's?
Of the games I can think of off the top of my head, FFVIII barely beats out both Legend of Dragoon and Paper Mario 64 for having action commands. Granted, Dragoon's release was barely months apart and both are Square so they could easily have just had some cross-team discussion.
That said give it an hour or two, Foamy probably played Phantasy Star EightySeven: The One They Released In 1987 or something that actually secretly pioneered the entire concept but was only ever played by twelve english speaking people including Foamy.
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).
Sadly I can't do translation analyses like I did with FFVII, because apparently every FFVIII Japanese script site I've tried to Google up is either a dead website, or is not a script dump, and thus does not have all the text. The most "complete" one I've managed to find is just a straight run-through of the game, without much side text or dialogue.
So I can't give the original Japanese dialogue for Quistis talking about GFs potentially influencing the user's personality, because it's not in the script site.
If it matters, the bit where Quistis talks about other students during the Fire Cave test is present. There, the English translation is actually pretty close: Quistis does jokingly say it might be her "charms" that cause the other students to "choke", although the English script seems to have added the part about "boys", even though the Japanese script just refers to "students". And "choke" is more like "cannot show their true ability", so not a case of failure, but more "I know you can do better than that".
As mentioned, a lot of Squall's "whatever" are different in the Japanese script, but overall I admit I can't say it's completely inaccurate: the responses that get translated into "whatever" are stuff like "none of your business", "not interested", and in the Fire Cave instance "the heck kind of teacher are you". So the idea of Squall being dismissive and teenage aloof is still there.
Not sure if you mean he paints impressionist artworks or does really good impressions or if he's really good at impressing the desire to kill for him upon these poor children
If it matters, the bit where Quistis talks about other students during the Fire Cave test is present. There, the English translation is actually pretty close: Quistis does jokingly say it might be her "charms" that cause the other students to "choke", although the English script seems to have added the part about "boys", even though the Japanese script just refers to "students". And "choke" is more like "cannot show their true ability", so not a case of failure, but more "I know you can do better than that".
Once you complete the SeeD exam, you start collecting your pay, every 15 minutes of gametime you get some Gil, this amount increases as you advance in the game. Hence my joke of AFK to win in FF8.
Yeah, one of the quirks of 90's localizations is that foods tend to get changed. I'll point to Brock's jelly-filled doughnut riceballs of pokemon and King Kai's sweet bean tacos of DBZ.
