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Honestly no? These aren't even the most visually impressive FMVs in the game. Like they're really, really fucking cool, but this keeps on happening. It was/is a gorgeous game.
Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Let's Play
Honestly no? These aren't even the most visually impressive FMVs in the game. Like they're really, really fucking cool, but this keeps on happening. It was/is a gorgeous game.
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The nature of the SeeD exam of just being thrust into an active combat zone and the implication that there will always be a ready supply of active combat zones to thrust their sorta-child soldiers into paints a really bleak picture of the world this game takes place in. It definitely shoots Balamb Garden from "vaguely sinister" to "actively concerning."
Either the game is really building up to the characters realizing how fucked the world state is and making some kind of stand against it, and is planning to really cash that check in later, or the game is impressively tone-deaf in its implementation of a magic battle high school.
Though I suppose if I were being charitable, I could see SeeD's entrance exam with no convenient conflicts nearby being something more benign, like throwing a squad at some den of monsters or similar generic hero stuff. I don't think I'm ready to be that charitable to it at this point, but I could see that being a public justification for them at least.
Either the game is really building up to the characters realizing how fucked the world state is and making some kind of stand against it, and is planning to really cash that check in later, or the game is impressively tone-deaf in its implementation of a magic battle high school.
Though I suppose if I were being charitable, I could see SeeD's entrance exam with no convenient conflicts nearby being something more benign, like throwing a squad at some den of monsters or similar generic hero stuff. I don't think I'm ready to be that charitable to it at this point, but I could see that being a public justification for them at least.
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Since the test is a real legit mission, not having a good mission pop up would mean that SeeDs spend a lot of time on standby waiting for a mission once they graduate.
While getting paid.
While they have a fucking huge infrastructure for producing more SeeDs.
I don't think anything about the scale of garden and it's training program makes sense if SeeDs aren't actually being kept busy earning money.
All the teachers, cafeteria workers, cleaners, admin staff and builders get paid out of SeeDs doing missions. If missions are rare it's hard to see the business being viable long term.
While getting paid.
While they have a fucking huge infrastructure for producing more SeeDs.
I don't think anything about the scale of garden and it's training program makes sense if SeeDs aren't actually being kept busy earning money.
All the teachers, cafeteria workers, cleaners, admin staff and builders get paid out of SeeDs doing missions. If missions are rare it's hard to see the business being viable long term.
Eh, I think if clearing monsters was the standard exam, while going on a jolly mercenary mission wasn't, they would have gone with monsters even in the presence of an opportunity to participate in an armed conflict. The stakes of an international conflict seem a bit higher than clearing a den of monsters, and a lot more could go wrong, not just with battle performance, but on the diplomatic front as well. It's better not break the routine and just send the experienced teams in unless using such conflicts for exams is itself a routine.
I could see it being an exception if the situation escalated rapidly, and the Garden needed absolutely everyone who could reach the town in time do so, with the bonus that everyone who doesn't fuck up too badly being auto-passed on exams, but that's not how the mission is presented to us.
All in all, yeah, it's the world of forever war and professional mercenaries building an entire industry around it, that's the most straightforward reading of the text.
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- Brittany, France
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Honestly, variations along the lines of 'I couldn't finish the game because I leveled up too much not knowing enemies scaled and as a result made the game impossible for me to complete' seems to be such a common story when talking about this game that it's probably the biggest own goal in FF mechanics since FFII, if it doesn't surpass it.
On the other hand, and looking at it paradoxically, this means that if I am faced with an FFVII situation where the game is just too easy to make engaging with its mechanics interesting, an easy solution presents itself: grind levels to make the game harder.
Insane sentence to type but here we are.
"you're actually punished for engaging with the world and talking to other characters" i changed my mind, those gamedevs belong in jail
My read on this is that they're probably junior students. They aren't yet in their graduation year where they would pass the exam, which is also why Seifer is in charge of the committee they all belong to.
It's definitely something that our first introduction to the world's geopolitics is a war of aggression between two foreign powers we have no allegiance to that we nonetheless join in on as mercenaries, not out of principle, but for money, and that this is implied to be how SeeD tests all its graduates.
Can you imagine being on the other end of that, though? Like, you're a twenty-something career soldier fresh off a couple of tours of duty, you've been to boot camp, you've been trained in the use of modern weapons and para-magic, your best friend has PTSD from the shrapnel of an artillery strike, you're part of a combined arms military strategy by a modern nation-state, and then you walk into Dollet and the radio is like "RED ALERT, RED ALERT, THEY SENT IN THE HIGH SCHOOLERS" and next thing you know a 17-year old in a Japanese school uniform wielding a nunchaku is wiping out your squad by summoning God.
I would just give up and retire to a bakery or something.
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To be fair, "grinding levels makes the game harder" is at least partially balanced out by the fact that higher level enemies and bosses also get better sets of magic to draw, and thus junction. So, in theory if you grind up to level 40 early on and are getting clobbered by random encounters, those same random encounters probably have -ga tier spells available to draw and run off with now, which you can then junction for easy stat points.
But of course, this depends on understanding the junction system, which... some players demonstrably did not. I certainly didn't as a kid (though hilariously enough, both of the roadblocks that shut off my playthroughs back in the day when I didn't know how to junction were not, in fact, difficulty related ones).
Why do you think I kept saying Minus Points in my reply to the update
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I don't think they have strict 'years' the way conventional high schools do. You can take the SeeD written test and practical exam at 15, and people failing the written test is apparently super common, it's not expected that most students manage it.
It feels more like the Bar Exam for being legally accredited, there are classes and schools that prepare you for it, but you can technically take it any time you feel up to it once you meet the requirements.
So Seifer didn't 'miss graduation', he's taken multiple SeeD exams while Squall is taking his first one, while being the same age. Seifer just qualified faster, but was unable to pass the practical.
The Disciplinary committee is odd, with multiple interpretations, but the one time we saw them attempt to enforce a rule we didn't see the outcome.
For all we know they just ran after Zell and yelled at him that running in the halls wasn't allowed, and wasted his time rather then submitting a punishment or reporting him to a teacher.
One note is that on the desk-computer, students are apparently supposed to bring any unusual bugs to the disciplinary committee. And Raijan has an over due book about identifying bugs, so he's probably trying to get random people to show him cool bugs he can geek out over.
This is not a serious committee within the universe of FF8.
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Given how strong our characters are already, who are only testing to become full SeeD members, it's entirely possible that warfare in this world is ultimately decided by which side can hire the most and the best SeeD graduates first, more than the quality of any particular military. Like imagine warfare in that scenario, your average soldier wouldn't be training to win a war so much as to buy time for the nearest band of teenagers to either cave in the faces of your enemies, or cave in yours.
In that case it would probably depend on how tightly knit the Gardens are in the geopolotics of the world. Given how they have three campuses all training full-time mercenaries, they have to have a pretty steady supply of work.
Now that I think about it, I have to wonder what the policy is of the Gardens when it comes to competing contracts. Can a country hire SeeD members from one to fight against the forces of a different Garden? Or do they have a clause where they cannot be deployed against other SeeD forces? If not, that raises some concerns when it comes to transfer students. Did Selphie transfer schools knowing she might have to fight her former classmates in pitched combat?
Honestly, the more I think about how this world works, the more I think I would just fuck off to live in the mountains somewhere.
Is fucking off into the mountains somewhere actually all that good of an option in a Final Fantasy game, though? I mean sure, some people do it, but this is a world with giant murder monsters wandering around everywhere and presumably eating people. Personally I'd probably just run the risk of "eventually superpowered teenagers blow up your town" over "get eaten alive by monsters with powers beyond my feeble human comprehension".
You'd think "the game should reward the behavior you want to encourage, and you want to encourage engaging with the game" would be an easy design principle, and yet...
By the Shonen Convention, not only they can, they must (and get a discount to do so). That's a good way to get a healthy rivalry going.
(The students don't kill each other, of course. Going to zero HP for them just means retreat with shouts about how it's not over yet. Regular soldiers are super dead, though.)
Thozmp
Gets my kicks above the waistline, Sunshine.
There is a surprising amount of people who live out in the wilds on their own, seemingly unbothered by the monsters. Like, once you've set up four walls and a roof, it seems that the monsters either give up or accept you as one of their own.
I appreciate the attempt at verisimilitude in getting docked points for RPG-ing in the middle of the SeeD exam, especially because to my knowledge nothing missable happens regardless of what rank you start at?
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SolipsistSerpent
Endlessly Devouring
I think it's just a common hobby and most of those people do something else for a living. Blacksmithing, usually.
...Ignoring the gameplay abstraction, now I wonder how bakeries and the economy as a whole function in a world where teenagers can hoard arbitrarily large amounts of wealth by taking tests and just fucking around indefinitely as they refuse to advance the plot. Hanging onto rare items forever is starting to sound more appealing.
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And remember, there are three Gardens, of which Balamb isn't even the largest:RubberBandMan said:
So even if Galbadia Garden turns out to be only very slightly larger while Trabia Garden is actually one very enthusiastic old mercenary in a shack or something, that's still at minimum more than twice the massive investment Balamb Garden represents.Omicron said:
Yeah, the Garden system is getting a lot of funding from somewhere.
(I don't think I realized the implications as kid, but a very interesting point to have raised in the thread now.)
Hm. Maybe. Though given Seifer's been held back, they could be in the same year/on the same level as the other candidates and still be junior to him.Omicron said:
15? Wow, I'd forgotten that.RubberBandMan said:
And thanks for the various bits of information and insight in that post!
Or maybe make the front wide enough that either some of your attacks succeed due to the SeeDs being elsewhere or your opponent has to spend more resources hiring enough SeeDs to cover the entire front...StormyEyed said:
...But that said, now I'm also thinking of the way the soldiers still charge into battle, despite presumably knowing how poor the odds are for them, personally, if the magic teenagers are right there in front of them. What motivates them to do that? Given that they're up against an intensely magical killing machine for hire who might well have been training for that position since they were IIRC five, it's probably not their pay on account of dead people don't have much to spend it on. And the Galbadian soldiers fought in Dollet weren't defending their homes or something, they were fighting in foreign territory they'd invaded. Are the penalties for running in the face of SeeDs so harsh that they (mostly; some did run from Seifer at the tower) prefer to take their chances and hope to just be knocked out or something?
Wow, yeah, Kid Me missed a lot of how dark FFVIII's world is when you stop to think about it. Glad I have this thread!
I read a (sadly unfinished) rewrite fanfic a while back that recontextualizes the FFVIII party as the first in a new generation of SeeD with others having bonded with GFs before, but the whole junctioning magic thing being totally new. In that context, Squall and the others' HP is superhuman reflexes letting them dodge bullets until they get tired, and the Dollet operation being the first real world test of it with no one knowing if it would really pay off in live conditions. Quistis is the instructor there, because she was the first one to get it to work, and so they elevated her to teach the others.
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It's not the last time this happens in final fantasy too. FF Type zero recycles this idea. FF megastates just love to make education and the military be one and the same, and it usually preludes some unexpected Apocalypse of course, the original reason for that mix being just another state being in conflict with the military highschool\university.
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Imagine the last thing you experience in your mortal life is some 17 year-old kid with a face tattoo and a pompadour and the code-name "chicken wuss" liquefying your torso with a combo you *know* he stole from Tekken. The last thing you hear as you're hemorrhaging out: "I hope there's still some hotdogs left when we get back."
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- SV's Only Complete Persona Quest
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What gets me about FF8 is that there's quite a few YA series that are technically about child soldiers, but we don't think of them as being about child soldiers since their aesthetics have nothing to do with real-world militaries (e.g. Power Rangers). That's a lot harder to overlook in FF8 since its aesthetics and terminology are much more military reminiscent
Egleris
Vagrant Dragon
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- Italy
Correct; the only thing ranks ever influence is how much you get paid. The maximum rank you can get after passing the exam is 10 (pay 8000 gil), and the minimum is 1 (pay 500 gil), but honestly talking with everybody and jumping down the cliff is fun enough that I don't mind getting docked points for it, and rank 8 (6000 gil) is a perfectly fine starting point. Aside from train tickets, nothing that money can buy you is so important that being a few gil short will ever be any real bother, and if you do feel like you need money, then passing ten SeeD tests will give you an higher rank than you could get from a perfect exam (since it's +10 to whatever the exam gave you, so minimum 11), and they're really not that hard to pass.
Of course, if you fail to get into ten fights between payments, that lowers your rank, but once you know it, keeping up isn't hard.
You know, if Quistis graduated at 15, then even if she's 18, she could have enough experience to justify her teaching position.
At the current moment, we know nothing about Galbadia; maybe they have a crystal that resurrects soldiers who die in battle, or something?
I was under the impression that only Balamb Garden has the SeeD, which is why Selphie has to transfer in, and that the graduates from Galbadia Garden are fed directly into the Galbadian Army - which is why their soldiers can use para-magic. I'm not sure why I thought that; I thought it was somewhere in the Information menu (which is one of the most hidden features of the game, as it needs to be accessed from the "Tutorial" voice on either the main menu or the class terminal, then picking the "Help" voice in the resulting sub-menu, and then finally clicking "Information" at the very bottom), which is where a lot of the most important lore get hidden, but it wasn't there, so I'm not sure where I found the information.
It might be some incidental dialogue somewhere, FFVIII has so much of that it's impossible to remember everything.
Anyway, speaking of dialogue, I checked the Italian translation up to the Fire Cavern, and it seems to be pretty close to the English one overall.
As points of interest:
- At the very beginning, instead of asking Squall "how are you feeling", the question is "are you feeling well?", and if you make Squall answer "yes", he stutters, making it clear that he's just putting up a though front that doesn't reflect reality from his first spoken line.
- Just like in the English version, the reason Squall doesn't ignore Seifer is that he "can't run away".
- The first Quistis conversation proceeds along the same lines as the English version ("something the matter?" "nothing important", with Quistis finishing the sentence and laughing, then "what's so funny?" "I just feel I'm starting to understand one of my students a little better", "I'm not so easy to understand" "then why don't you tell me something about yourself?" "It's none of your business", with Quistis finishing the line again.) Due to the specific word choice in Italian, she comes across as a little more exasperated with Squall than fond of him, although there's elements of both in the dialogue.
- Xu is renamed to Shu, including in her post on the Garden Message Board - where she's a lot less confrontational, saying "have you nothing better to write?" rather than than threatening violence.
- Speaking of the class terminal, the Garden motto has been changed to Practice, Brotherhood, Freedom, which is a weird contrast with the English version. Speaking of contrast, the translation has a line that specifies "graduated SeeDs and teacher can remain at Garden indefinitely", which is a pretty big contrast from your comment that "after 20 people are let go to join armies around the world"; 20 is given as the maximum age at which one can give the SeeD exam, but that's a limit for students that didn't pass the exam, not SeeD.
-The student admission lines are more idealistic - after saying "we seek people willing to work hard to achieve their full potential", it follows it with "for those who want to use their power to protect the world", which is a much more positive take than both the ENG and FR versions.
-GF are identified as independent energy forces and the description says "probably cause memory loss, but this has not been confirmed", pretty much the same as the English version, and the Sorcerer explanation reads "The power of the sorceress exists from ancient times, passed on from person to person through the ages. While unproved, most believe this power to have originated in the age of Hyne." Also, the Para-Magic explanation included a line about how "this was discovered and developed by the well-known scientist Odine"; was that in the English version as well?
- In the Fire Cavern, Quistis makes the observation "students sometimes can't do their best when they're with me. Might it be because of my charm?", to which Squall answers by thinking "what a weird person", which Quistis then reacts to with her "just trying to defuse the tension" bit.
I was planning to make it all the way to the end of the Seed Exam, but I didn't have the time - I got sidetracked playing cards - so I'll get it done tomorrow.
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So this is the fourth FF game to have AP, so it looks like this mechanic is here to stay. I wonder how long it will take
Now you have me imagining the cast of Animorphs in FF8, because that series was very much about the effects of being a child soldier.
Now you have me imagining the cast of Animorphs in FF8, because that series was very much about the effects of being a child soldier.
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- Singapore
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I have the vague headcanon that clients of SeeD can get a discount if they agree to let their contracts be used for educational purposes.
So from the viewpoint of the client, their war is a struggle for national survival, to remain an independent state, and to reclaim their homes and people. They cannot win this alone, and so they have to turn to outside help. Thus, this desperate fight that would decide the fate of an entire nation is used to grade a bunch of teenagers as a matter of routine, with the adults only observing and invigilating the exam, and not bothering to interfere when the teenagers do stuff like go haring off after glory or stuff their faces in a restaurant for the duration of the battle.
I would think a discount would be the least SeeD can offer to the client.
I seem to remember a line to the effect of "well it makes sense they have us watching the square, it's not like they'd entrust crucial mission objectives to students". Am I making that up? I just played through this a couple days ago, but I wasn't exactly taking notes.