The other two characters around Seifer round up the rest of the disciplinary committee; they are Fujin and Raijin. Fujin is the girl, and she expresses herself entirely in single-word all caps sentence, which makes me wonder if she's supposed to be a robot or something. Raijin, meanwhile, has the distinction of seemingly being the only normal guy in this group - he's even friendly to Squall! He and Fujin seem to have a comedy routine where he says something insensitive without realizing it and she reacts by shouting 'RAGE!' and hitting him. So far so anime comedy.
Whilst they're obviously his flunkies, they're not slotting into the typical archetypes you'd expect. Like 'terse girl who shouts single words without being unemotional' and 'chill dude who's just straight up nice and doesn't follow along with his senior's grudges' aren't the characters you'd expect for their roles.
And then every now and then you have a conversation that incidentally clarifies that yes, this school does house literal children, and they are being trained as mercenaries.
Hey now Omi, that sounded awfully judgmental there. Now, when SeeD is intervening in conflicts around the world, killing people for money, and they encounter orphans who lost their families in conflicts that Seed was coincidentally present for, and they take them in, doesn't that just show how kind the Gardens are?
Seifer: "...Instructor. I hate it when people wish me good luck." (He does an unbearably smug hand-scale pose.) "Save those words for a bad student that needs them, eh?"
Quistis: "Ok then."
*beat*
Quistis: "Good luck, Seifer."
Quistis dunking on these kids whenever they try and be cool is a bit I will never tire of.
From a quick online look, it seems like it might be a translation issue? Seifer does call Zell a chicken, but the compound word he's using might be better translated as 'chickenshit'? It's not clear, though.
Chickenshit definitely scans better, but the translators weren't going to put something like 'shit' in in that era. It'd play now, but back then that's a naughty no-no word by the typical standards.
There's this incredible FMV that plays out where Squall is watching the advance, the beach is shaken by explosions, Squall look at tactical maps, the Dollet troops advance on the beach ahead of SeeD while under explosions, then Squall's ship somehow rams through a marine wall and comes to a halt on the beach, disgorging Squad B.
Surprised you didn't mention the best bit of that scene. Squall looking at a high-res photo of Dollet, overlaying some technical data over it, and then moving them out of frame to reveal the
real Dollet behind the image with explosions and violence aplenty with all the sound effects cutting in at the same time. Good one for 'here's the first real mission, this is not your clear cut and clean training scenario anymore'
Squall wants to seek out battle, he wants the excitement of the fight and to put his training to use for real. But he doesn't want to openly acknowledge it, to sound like a bloodthirsty maniac like Seifer, or to openly break orders. So defaulting to the Captain's authority, putting the responsibility on Seifer, is convenient to him. Meanwhile, this acknowledges and validates Seifer's role as squad captain, which in turn satisfies Seifer's ego.
They're both giving each other exactly what the other wants in that exchange. What they want just isn't very nice.
It's interesting because it initially seems like they're setting up for them being opposites, Squall being professional and good, and Seifer being a bloodthirsty thug...but with that it seems like the main difference between them is not one of character but of
affect. They both want to cut loose and prove themselves, but Squall doesn't want to admit to it.
As we climb up the stairway, a crawling soldier emerges; Squall tells him we're here to help and he warns us that the soldiers have entered the Communication Tower and that, furthermore, the place has always crawled with monster and we should be very careful
The obvious implication of the tower normally crawling with monsters being that the tower is not normally occupied, though whether it's actually abandoned or not is unclear.
The game then plays this incredibly cool FMV that zooms in on the floor next to the character, where the tower shaking to life causes a bag of tools to start vibrating, causing a wrench to fall between the plates, and the camera dives in after it, and then towards the engines at the bottom of the tower as everything comes to life and a bunch of panels slide and open and stuff moves in pure sci-fi fashion even if it's not clear what is happening, until a giant metal rod thing emerges from the center, opens up to reveal a parabola, and the antenna at its center fires a beam of light at the sky.
It's like the gunblades. Does it make any sense that this communication tower has three communication dishes situated on top of a tower, and then another
super communication dish inside on a rail system that can unfold and has a bunch of clearly fragile prongs? No, of course not. Is it cool as shit? Damned right.
First 'true' boss battle (with Ifrit as a tutorial) verdict: It's cool, and the bosses are tanky enough to put up a resistance, but the Draw system creates weird incentives regarding how to approach a fight.
Yeah, the FF8 devs were certainly willing to try new things with this game even if the result is...this.
Is that good? Is that bad? I have no idea. The thing is, the game hasn't talked about this at all. In much the same way as Skyrim never tells you 'enemies grow in level with you btw, there are not truly any low-level or high-level areas' in mechanical terms, you only know it by talking to other people or figuring it out by putting 2 and 2 together in your own experience of the game, FF8 just doesn't talk about its scaling system at all. People have raised it in the thread a couple times, and I was aware of it, I just haven't talked about it because… It's not explained. I suspect you could play the entire game blind and you would never find out.
I
super found out in Disc 3 when I originally played this game as a kid without much deep understanding of the junction or limit break systems.
Fun fact, aside from their items drops changing with level, and the expected stat increases, enemies also use different abilities depending on what level you, and by extension they, are. I hit a freaking
wall in this game. I hate the level scaling in this game so much.
The mech catches up with the group at several points. There are ways of avoiding some (all?) of these encounters with the proper timing or zig-zagging, but I don't know them and I'm not super interested in looking them up, so we end up fighting the mech four or five times.
Barring the introductory fight, every other encounter with the boss is avoidable, yes, with the right movement. Can be a bit difficult to figure out what you need to do though, admittedly.
When we reach the Central Square, that poor stupid dog is still there, but interacting with it causes it to run off before it can be squashed by the mech; when we reach the restaurant where Squad C are still lazing about, they take stock of the threat and run away.
You would have been docked points for not saving the dog, so the Garden clearly has their priorities straight.
Speaking of points, to get the best score out of the Dollet mission there's a few things you need to do. Aside from stuff like killing more enemies and escaping as fast as possible, there are some things to watch out for to avoid being docked points. Disobeying Seifer, running from battles, initiating any non-mandatory conversation, jumping down the cliff, hiding in the escape sequence. Not explained anywhere directly, but I don't mind here since they make sense from a 'this is what we expect of our prospective professional mercenaries' perspective.
Junior SeeD Instructor Quistis Trepe, holding the ship-mounted machine gun, lights up the mech with a flurry of gunfire that literally paralyzes it, pins it in place like a bug under repeated impacts. Squall lands on the craft as it starts pulling away; the mech, actively riddled with holes, rears up to try and push through the gunfire. Quistis, a rare expression of anger on her face, keeps firing.
Quistis is easily one of my faves from this game.
