Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Let's Play
Something makes me wonder if these three things are related.
Communications really seems to be the theme of this one, huh? Both technological and interpersonal, misaligned and otherwise. That start up sequence is so good I've been listening to it for an hour; I can likewise see why the dev team might think 'we can totally make a movie'. While I haven't seen Spirits Within, a failure state I could see is ending up with a series of Homestuck animations strung together; the cutscenes are awesome because we already have the context for them and they're therefore free to go hard as hell. The gameplay itself is setup to their payoff.
So far FF8 is interesting because there's places where it's really amazingly iterating on and nailing things that FF7 could only attempt, but they've since become so ubiquitous it maybe seems too normal? Idk, this doesn't explain how it landed at the time. I do appreciate that it's leaning into the teenage mercenaries thing more than most. It seems like they took the SOLDIER thread and wanted to explore that a bit more, showing it in an active state instead of the past reason for the tragedies of the present.
Ngl, absent any animation due to seeing only the screenshots, my first thought was 'huh, is she speaking a sign language?'. They kind of have to be economical by default.
I was like 'oh wow this is cool, I wonder why I haven't seen this referenced more?' and then it parks and I'm like 'oh'. Also man, both Seifer and Squall being the only students to use gunblades makes sense in a they're narrative foils your honor way but I'm wondering if they're giving the weapon itself a reputation, or were drawn to it for that reason.
.......Jesse? Is that you?
Is that better or worse than moving out to a cabin in the wilderness and being reduced to a statue deprived of all senses except pain when a passing Malboro farts in your general direction?
daniel_gudman
KING (in land of blind)
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I hated the Robot Shootup Sequence.
"Wow, this sure is a cool way for somebody else, not me the player, to defeat a boss using a cut-scene set-piece, that can never be reproduced in actual gameplay." Having the devs swoop in and beat the boss for me felt patronizing, in a bad gameplay way, "I thought this was a game, not a movie, why are we beating the boss in a video not gameplay."
I think I outright restarted the game so I could build my whole team around beating that damn spider, because I didn't have any saves far enough back for me to accomplish my Plans. Grinding up STR-J and Elem-ATK-J on Shiva so both Squall and Zell could have a ton of Blizzard junctioned to STR and Thunder to elemental attack, while Selphie summoned the Bird, looking back that was the origin of my Two Meatheads And Supporter Strategy.
Rocking up to the beach and the game had a half-assed cutscene like "oh, you beat the boss? ... okay, get back on the boat I guess" felt so sweet.
You are forgetting who is doing the punishing here: Cid, who is Evil. This is also world-building
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I read the same one, and honestly, with some of the things in the tutorial that show up later, there's a pretty strong argument to be made that at the very least things are moving fast in terms of para-magic and junctioning, and this is all highly experimental.
It's never said outright, but it is really interesting how relevant the mechanics tutorialization lore manages to be, and honestly how much the story loses if you didn't read it all like a starry-eyed young teen seeing something they've never seen before.
Egleris
Vagrant Dragon
- Location
- Italy
Could either of you give me the title? I'm quite curious about it now.
Anyway! Continuing the Italian translation from where we left off:
- During their introduction, Squall is even more rude to Zell than in the English version, as he calls him "a pain in the ass" when speaking to Quistis, which is way more dismissive than his English "loud". And Zell is less insensitive; when Squall refuses to shake his hand and he speaks of the duel between Seifer and Squall, he puts it as a question, like he's looking for confirmation for a rumor he's heard, and frames it as "I heard you had a fight?", which is more neutral then framing it as Seifer's victory like he does in English. Squall's reply is the same "we were training, not fighting", and then the conversation is mostly the same, with the difference that, instead of saying "bet that's not what Seifer thinks", Zell frames it as "that's what you think".
The message is the same, but Zell keeping the focus straightly on Squall's feelings, especially after dismissing Seifer's attitude, in this context gives the impression that Zell is more worried about Squall being dragged down by Seifer, rather than egging him for it. It makes him look more emotionally aware and like he's trying hard to be friendly, and like Squall's rebuffing him, re-framing Squall's earlier dismissal of him as attempting to keep distance from somebody who's reaching out.
Also, when Seifer is announced as Squad Leader, Zell doesn't just say "What?", but a rather more pointed "Squad Leader? That guy?", which clearly points to people in-universe (or at least Zell) knowing that making Seifer lead anything is a terrible idea. With how quickly Quistis says "no changes allowed!" in response, it really feels like part of the test for Zell and Squall is to handle a bad commander, like this is an intentional set up to test their ability to obey somebody whose judgment they know is bad.
- Quistis dissing of Seifer is almost word-for-word identical, and just as satisfying.
- On the Seifer insulting Zell, he does remains in the world of chicken insults, but the specific word in Italian is an equivalent of "rooster", specifically, which is a variation on a type of insult used for people who are "full of hot air" - they're said to be like roosters in a chicken coop. So, the insult comes more across as Zell being all posture but with no substance, which works well enough when it's delivered after Zell has started shadowboxing, since that's typical behavior of somebody puffing themselves up (like a rooster, hence the expression), even if in Zell case it's pretty obvious he has some sort of hyperactivity-related condition. Until I saw the perplexity of English players, I had no idea this was a weird insult, it feels very natural in the structure of the scene here.
- During the briefing, Dollet is identified as a republic; Galbadia isn't given an identifier. The rest of the plan is mostly same as in English (students take the town, SeeDs attack returning G Army), although (during the briefing) the retreat is suggested to be so the students aren't in the way when the SeeD vs G Army battle starts, from my reading of it.
- The confrontation in the town square follows the same beats as in English as well - Squall hides behind "the squad leader's order", comments on it being a good way to test Seifer's training, and Zell says they're the same and that their plan is a bad idea.
- Seifer's speech before the observation tower is slightly different, in a nuanced manner - instead of saying "I love battles, I fear nothing", he says "I'm not afraid" (which due to construction implies a "right now", so it's not as strong a declaration), followed by "I love wars, I don't want them to ever end; they make me feel closer to realizing my dream", which, in the context of the discussion the thread was having recently about forever wars and how the Garden supports themselves (as well as some spoilers), I find is a very significant take on his character.
He still continue with his promise of a romantic dream - in Italian this can be interpreted in both the general "love" sense or the "romantic as in of the romance period, AKA knights and great gestures and such" sense, and the context of Seifer's preceding speech on how wonderful war is would add far more weight to the latter interpretation: Seifer wants to be a war hero of some sort.
- Upon meeting Selphie (and if choosing not to jump), the conversation goes with "I don't know, except for roosters (this really doesn't translates well at all in English, does it?), everybody else can manage", which again, lines up with the "full of hot air" interpretation the translation has chosen. Very notably, Selphie then goes "if you don't like rooster, maybe you can go with fowl", which again doesn't translates well at all; in the Italian context, that's a way to define a "good for nothing" person, somebody who is completely incapable, but in a friendly manner - so Selphie's basically saying "if you're not full of hot air, maybe you're just a bit clumsy", which is relatively soft, especially when she follows it with "but that doesn't seem to fit you".
Since other people pointed out that, in other translations, she went with pig/pork, I can 100% say that this is an example of changing things due to context; calling somebody a pig is a pretty big insult in Italian, and a pork is worse, and twice that coming from a woman (Italian is a very, very gendered language, sadly). So... yeah, the translation changed things here, and the result is that it conveys a Selphie who, upon seeing that her challenge (why don't you jump the cliff?) had offended Zell (resulted in him being ribbed by Squall), immediately tries to minimize the insult offered. She comes across as considerate, despite being also obviously shown as reckless, which is a contrast I like.
- EDIT: I forgot, because it's endemic to the Italian translation (in that a lot of monsters have different names): Elvoret is renamed to Herbia. Geezard and Anacondaur have the same names, but not all monsters do; the Bomb is named Piros, for example. This is consistent naming - Bomb is renamed to Piros in all of the Italian localizations of Final Fantasy, not just FFVIII - or perhaps consistent mis-naming. I'll post a full list of the changed names of all monsters at some point, if anybody is interested.
And that's pretty much it for the SeeD exam; I'll be back after I'm done slaughtering X-ATM092 a few dozen times for all those delicious AP.
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In before we each post something different.
Final Fantasy Endless VIII was from the RPGnet forums back in 2008 so I can't promise everything has aged gracefully, having only reread the first couple chapters. Unfortunately the image hoster the threads originally used plastered their watermark all over the screenshots, but thankfully someone seems to have packaged the whole thing into a series of google docs, so I'd just read it that way.
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- Location
- Canada, probably
I've never heard anything similar, no. The closest I can think of is "cock of the walk," which is an arrogant man, especially one in a position of leadership, who thinks he's better than everyone else. So ironically, Seifer, not Zell, is the rooster in English.
Though, if you're going for someone puffed up but without anything to back it up, all style no substance, I think peacock works in english.
Egleris
Vagrant Dragon
- Location
- Italy
Peacock is an insult in Italian as well, with similar connotation; the key difference is that a rooster is about arrogance, so perhaps closer to your first suggestion, while a peacock is about looks. Both are about somebody who thinks they're better than they are though.
Incidentally, I think I found a good way to translate the "fowl" one to English. It's also the word used to identify the "mark" of a con; a successful conman will have "plucked the feathers from the fowl", preferably without the fowl noticing. So, a very different connotation, and one that is still negative but with a lot more pity involved.
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- Location
- Canada, probably
Huh, sounds like it's closer than I thought then, yeah. Probably the biggest difference is that it's fallen out of favour somewhat in (North American?) English, but seems to be more current in Italian.
I like the fowl connection, that's clever. "Hey, maybe you're not an arrogant twit, you're just sort of a rube." It works.
Huh, I remember reading this back then.In before we each post something different.
Final Fantasy Endless VIII was from the RPGnet forums back in 2008 so I can't promise everything has aged gracefully, having only reread the first couple chapters. Unfortunately the image hoster the threads originally used plastered their watermark all over the screenshots, but thankfully someone seems to have packaged the whole thing into a series of google docs, so I'd just read it that way.
Plato, behold a man!
daniel_gudman
KING (in land of blind)
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Well, on the subject of "Rooster" as an insult, thinking about USA culture, I guess maybe Foghorn Leghorn might be in the same direction since that's a Rooster who is a pompous blowhard; but honestly that's more like a coincidence because of the pun between Leghorn (chicken breed) and Claghorn (the radio show parody character that Foghorn is based on).
If I was going to like free-associate "Rooster" as an insult, I think my mind would go to "cockfights", so calling someone a Rooster would I think would imply the strutting and the pride, but also the bloodthirst to actually back it up with violence.
If I was going to like free-associate "Rooster" as an insult, I think my mind would go to "cockfights", so calling someone a Rooster would I think would imply the strutting and the pride, but also the bloodthirst to actually back it up with violence.
GilliamYaeger
M'crazy.
Edit: actually I'm moving this link to the spoiler thread because it spoils plot developments in the first few updates
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Egleris
Vagrant Dragon
- Location
- Italy
Oh, I had read this one! Pretty memorable, but the description I would have given of it would never have matched what the thread provided, hence why I thought it might just be something good about FFVIII that I had not read.
It was somewhat funny, but I don't think it can be considered either a novelization or a "more realistic take" on the game; it's pretty full of wish-fulfillment, and it's both very limited by having to stick with the game's screenshots while also changing far too much at the same time, to the point that the events happening barely match their surroundings.
Note, I'm not saying it's bad; it's well above average, as fanfic go. Just that it's very much a power fantasy rewrite of FFVIII with an interesting restructuring of the events, not an attempt to stay true to FFVIII's plot or message in a more believable setting, which is what the blurb made me think people were talking about.
daniel_gudman
KING (in land of blind)
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Shamus Young did DM of the Rings in 2006-2007, and this story is from 2008; there was a whole genre of fanfic that got popular at the time, where trying to tell a story that went in a completely different direction in terms of characterization, while still using the existing screencaps for the plot, was part of the artistic challenge of the project.
Well yeah, I originally brought it up in the context of 'why regular soldiers would fight SeeD at all?', but that's definitely not the main thrust of the fic. Hadn't really intended it to be taken as a general description.
It does genuinely do some cool stuff though, and while it maybe engages in Competence Wank (no really Quistis is gorgeous, normally I'd be down to clown but Professionals Have Standards) that can be a bit much, the author also does shit like give even the extra side bosses and GFs actual personalities, which is nice. Also the sheer high effort of it, with him having gone through the trouble of photoshopping an authentic-looking font into the screenshots so that he can have his own text there. Just, for the general thread, it'll spoil the story of the base game if you read it first.
- Location
- SV's Only Complete Persona Quest
- Pronouns
- She/Her
It's kinda funny rooster is an insult in Italian, given France is next door and that's their national animal.
Guessing it's the same logic that saw Tina get localised as Terra back in FF6, trying to preserve the 'exoticness' of the name. Even if Seifer is no longer as common as Tina.
I'm reminded the Pokémon Colosseum translation had an extreme case of this. The original Japanese gave all the characters English names, as the setting of Orre was loosely based on Arizona. The English translation, trying to keep the same foreignness for Western audiences... basically gave most of the characters nonsense names (Wes being an exception of course)
Guessing it's the same logic that saw Tina get localised as Terra back in FF6, trying to preserve the 'exoticness' of the name. Even if Seifer is no longer as common as Tina.
I'm reminded the Pokémon Colosseum translation had an extreme case of this. The original Japanese gave all the characters English names, as the setting of Orre was loosely based on Arizona. The English translation, trying to keep the same foreignness for Western audiences... basically gave most of the characters nonsense names (Wes being an exception of course)
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- Pronouns
- They/Them/She/Her
Hm, good point.Egleris said:
Not impossible, but the evidence appears to be against it. The key point, I think, is the soldiers who ran from Seifer: if Galbadia was able to and made it a practice to do those resurrections, would not the penalties on them for doing so be even higher, and they consequently be even less likely to do it? Not certain, granted, but given how much that sort of commonplace resurrection differs from the baseline assumption that people who are killed are dead, it seems like, if they were going with that, there would have been some indication. Even if it was a new thing and the people briefing Squall and company weren't aware of it, presumably they'd have said something about the enemy troops displaying unusual fanaticism, so the candidates should be on their guard.
Suicide missions, or even probable-suicide missions, generally have higher standards though.yrsillar said:
Huh. Sorry that didn't work for you, but glad beating it yourself did, and thanks for the insight into a significantly different way to engage with the game.daniel_gudman said:
Darths and Droids is still going.daniel_gudman said:
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Yes, same name and everything.
Meanwhile, in FR, possibly because they made the decision to change "Siren" to "Ondine," which is pretty close, they renamed Dr Odine to Dr Geyser.
DM of the Ring and Darth & Droids are funny however. Both use this premise where the story is a TRPG session, and all the wildly difference from canon (or sometimes, why canon itself the way it is) are the result of the players taking things in the typical whimsical and plan-wrecking that TRPG players tend to do. That makes the difference of characterization easy to accept, and become entertaining instead.
Without the comedic effect and the excuse from the premise, the author needs to pull quite a heavy lift in making a new characterization that's actually appealing on its own.
I remember that it. It was... weirdly like I imagine a John Ringo book would be.
Final Fantasy VIII, Part 4: Exam Results
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Welcome back, class, to Final Fantasy VIII 101. Today's lesson:
That Mercenary High School Sure Is Shady As Hell Huh
Before tackling the main plot though, let's briefly circle back to this gal.
The most natural course of action when confronted with the Black Widow is to fight it as the game implicitly suggests - hit it until it loses 20% of its HP and goes into a self-repair state, run away, repeat as many times as it manages to catch up to you, get the sweet cutscene where Quistis annihilates it with machine gun fire. It makes narrative sense to - we are playing a group of graduating students facing a death machine they may not yet be ready to fight this early in their career while on a time limit.
But the Black Widow can be defeated. The main problem standing in the way of achieving that is that, any time it goes down, it enters self-repair mode, cannot be killed while in self-repair, and instantly heals to full HP upon finishing the self-repair sequence. However, after the (mandatory) escape from the very first encounter with it, the Widow is limited to five self-repairs in a given fight.
As a result, a viable tactic to tackle the mech is to delete 20% of its HP, enter standby (healing any injured teammates, buffing and and using any extra turns to Draw Protects), and then repeat this process five times until it has exhausted its repairs, at which point we can fight it for keeps - if we can delete its 5770 HP (actual HP count will of course vary depending on playthrough, see level scaling in last update), it will be dead for good.
So how hard is it to do that?
Not too hard, it turns out.
Remember, we can draw Protect from the Black Widow, and most of its attacks are physical. This significantly reduces the threat posed by its attacks, even those that can hit the whole group, including its explosive laser beam. Protect requires regular refreshing as it wears off over time, but we can just Draw-Cast it directly from the mech, which grants an infinite supply. Additionally, Double, which we drew from Elvoret, doesn't wear off over time, and the mech is vulnerable to Lightning. That means a combination of Selphie casting Quezacotl and Zell dualcasting Thunder (not the most efficient set-up, just what I ended up doing) will take off a considerable amount of its health, with Squall providing support duty.
We don't need to unlock special junction abilities and tag Squall with Lightning-Elemental-Attack linked to 100 Thunder and 100 Blizzards junctioned to Strength. Just regular, consistent use of basic spells and summons will see us through.
…at least in terms of defeating the mech.
The problem is, that tactic is slow. Like, "took me nearly 20 minutes to whittle down the mech" slow. Now, I was ready to call this 'doable, but close to the wire,' except then it turned out the game had one last surprise in store for us.
Killing the Black Widow restores Dollet's normal encounters with soldiers, which normally aren't seen while running away from the mech.
Even running from every random encounter I absolutely cannot make it to the beach in what little time I have remaining. We hit 0:00 on the time while in battle, resulting in a game over. The mech defeated me, not by being too strong to kill, but by making me fail my SeeD exam deadline.
Frustrating. For the record, winning the mech battle rewards an amazing 50 AP, as well as a special item enhancing GF stats. I could replay the sequence and refine my timing so I can make it to the beach with the win… But that's like another half hour of this fight. No thanks, let's get back to the present.
It turns out Zell is a Balamb local, known in town, and his parents live there. No reason not to pay them a visit!
It's nothing too deep - Ma Dintch is surprised but happy to see Zell, he says he's just passing through, she asks Squall to take care of him. But it's nice to see that one of our team members has a family.
The house next door, though, is where my interest kicks up.
There, we find an old man telling a story to what is probably his granddaughter, and it feels like an early bit of the setting's deep history.
Old Man: "Long, long ago, when this world was just made, there was a strong god named 'Hyne.' This god was very, very strong, but after fighting a lot of monsters, he became very tired. So he made 'people' like you and me to do all the work, and the god went to sleep."
Girl: "So he took a nap?"
Old Man: "That's right. However, the god was very surprised when he awoke. Surprised that there were so many people."
Girl: "Yeah, there are so many in this world."
Old Man: "Hyne decided to reduce the number of people by taking away the children."
Girl: "You mean… children… like me..?"
Old Man: "Uh huh. Scary, isn't it? …Of course, everyone was scared then, too. And so, the battle against Hyne began. Even though the people were small, they all got together, and finally cornered him. Hyne didn't know what to do. Out of desperation, he gave half his body to the people and ran off with the remaining other half."
Girl: "He can do that?"
Old Man: "Well, he was a god. Anyway, it turns out Hyne tricked the people. The half that Hyne ran away with was the half that had the stronger magic."
Girl: "Wow… So we still can't find the other half that ran away???"
Old Man: "Hmm… It might be close by, actually. It might even be watching you."
Hmm.
Of course, it's impossible at this stage to tell how much of that story reflects the actual backstory of the setting and how much is just a fairy tale distorted by time or simply made up wholecloth. It's also unclear if this is a creation myth, something which people actually believe, or just a fairy tale, a story you tell children that people don't believe. The lore terminal did mention that the power of the sorceresses came back to 'Hyne's reign,' but that sounded like a king, not a god.
Yeah, not much to do here but just remember that for when the events of the story connect back to it, or don't.
Well, we stock up on a couple of status healing items at the shop, fight a couple of Triple Triad matches, and we're off back to BGU.
Nothing to do now but wait for the results of the SeeD exam. Our trio splits up fairly casually and we can just run around for a bit.
Incidentally, if you thought that Hyne story was kind of a big deal to put in a missable conversation off to the side, we're about to outdo it by a factor of a thousand. Two students are off to the side talking to one another in the atrium…
Remember how some of the students mentioned stuff about not being able to use radio? And how I was wondering why Selphie had to run on foot to deliver a message to Seifer in person and no one had a connection device? These students are talking about Galbadia's plans in Dollet and wondering why anyone would bother activating a communication tower in a world where radio doesn't work.
It turns out that 17 years ago, a mysterious event caused a worldwide signal interference. No communication using radio signals can be used. Instead, the means of long distance communication are chocobo messengers, and the Internet, which works entirely off underground cables which are frequently damaged by monsters or warfare.
That's… a fascinating bit of worldbuilding. It serves to create a world which, while aesthetically and technologically modern, still retains the old RPG feeling of isolated dots separated by wilderness, where communication requires physically going from one place to another. There's Internet, but it's not like our Internet - it's a Cyberpunk 2077 style of geographically isolated networks - your Internet connects you to the rest of Balamb Garden, or all of Dollet, but can't communicate between Dollet and Balamb Garden.
So…
Give yourself a prize, Sideways, we're definitely working with some degree of 'the ability of people and communities to communicate with one another' as a theme.
Xu, Quistis and Principal Robin Williams are congratulating one another on their success; it might seem like our sudden retreat was a failure, but actually Galbadia agreed to withdraw from the Dukedom of Dollet in exchange for the Comm Tower remaining active. Which is… interesting. So that wasn't a war of annexation; it was a single operation with the goal of seizing and activating a piece of infrastructure, past which Galbadia doesn't care about retaining the territory. What could they want? This has to be humiliating for Dollet, but, well, they're small and weak, and Galbadia is big and strong.
Xu does lament that Galbadia is withdrawing too soon; if they had stayed and wreaked more havoc, SeeD could have made more money from the conflict. This is the first of multiple bits of dialogue in this update that are going to launch us from 'you know if you read between the lines Balamb Garden is kinda fucked up as an institution' into the stratospheric heights of 'oh wow they're not even trying to hide it.'
Today's not a good day for Seifer, and it's about to get worse.
Seifer: "Squall! D'you hear about the communication tower in Dollet? We would've been heroes if it weren't for that withdraw order."
Quistis (walking onto the screen with Xu): "You were only looking for a fight."
Seifer: "My dear instructor. I'm hurt. Those are rather cruel words for an aspiring student. A mediocre instructor like you will never understand."
Xu: "Seifer, don't be so stuck on yourself. You'll take all responsibility for leaving the designated area."
Seifer: "Isn't it the Captain's duty to take the best possible action?"
Xu: "Seifer, you will never be a SeeD. Calling yourself a captain is a joke."
(At this point, Seifer lowers his head; from his model it looks like he's doing a 'joyless laughter' kind of animation, but in the Remaster it's clear he's shaking with anger instead. They're both different takes from the same kind of feeling, regardless. He doesn't say anything further until the end of the scene. Quistis and Xu walk out, replaced by Cid.)
Headmaster Cid: "Seifer. You will be disciplined for your irresponsible behavior. You must follow orders exactly during combat." (While he's saying this, Cid is standing straight with his hands behind his back and looking severe.)
Headmaster Cid: "But I'm not entirely without sympathy for you. I don't want you all to be machines. I want you all to be able to think and act for yourselves.." (While he's saying this, his posture relaxes and he does casual things like rubbing his head, moving his hands while talking, or folding his arms.)
Headmaster Cid: "I am…" (As he starts talking, one of the Garden Faculty members approaches, each step audible.)
Garden Faculty: "Headmaster Cid, you have some business in your office…"
I was wondering what would become of Seifer. Whether he would be rewarded for his initiative (the Galbadians were after the Tower, identifying their objective mattered), or punished for breaking orders. I guess this is our answer. Although… Cid starts saying he does want to reward initiative, before he is… interrupted.
Hmm.
I haven't known really what to think of those robed and hatted guys until now. In EN, they're "Garden Faculty." This is an elision - a faculty is a collective body, one is 'a member of the faculty,' not 'a faculty.' I imagine this is a matter of character limits. But for characters with such innocuous name, they have a really distinctive and sinister appearance; whereas everyone else is wearing modern clothes or school or military dress uniforms, they wear long, antiquated robes, and hats that conceal their face (they're human, you can see that underneath when they turn at the right angle, but you can't see their face from the front). It's not clear what their position in the hierarchy is, but they appear to be subordinate staff? They're student supervisors, is what it feels like. But maybe they're teachers?
In FR, they're called 'Templars.' Which fits their ominous and antiquated vibe more, but also gives them a significantly more martial-sounding affect, and sounds a lot less like they're just normal staff. But also they clearly aren't normal staff. Normal staff would be the cafeteria kitchen ladies, who are just entirely normal women, not… These guys.
I point this out because they'll come up again in this update.
Anyway, Cid departs, Seifer does not respond to prompt, but we can talk to the faculty member a little.
Garden Faculty: "SeeD shall not act beyond the exact wording of a contract. We are not a non-profit organization. This incident will be a hard-earned lesson for the Dollet Dukedom. They'll now know to be more generous when hiring SeeD."
Right.
This is a step beyond 'to you, this a life-or-death battle for the freedom of your homeland against foreign aggression, but to me, it's a high school graduation exam.' SeeD seems to have made a calculated choice to make an example of Dollet - we showed up just long enough to roll over all opposition, annihilate the Galbadian presence within the city, seize the Comm Tower, destroy the Galbadian mech, and then immediately withdrew without giving Dollet's forces time or resources to actually consolidate their position.
It's utterly ruthless but I kind of admire the effectiveness of it. It's a very obvious show of force that demonstrates to everyone that Balamb Garden's SeeD and their GF-enhanced fighting style are overwhelmingly effective and incredibly valuable, and then it punishes the client for being stingy by sticking to the absolute minimum required by their contract and just straight up abandoning them in the middle of an active war effort, leaving them completely naked.
And, like, it worked. Galbadia did pull out of Dollet. But they were able to make demands in return; we left them in a position of comparative strength, instead of finishing off their local troops. And we can't even be blamed for it. We did no more nor less than our contract said.
Now everyone will know just how powerful SeeDs are, and that they should be paid accordingly.
So yeah! They're assholes.
SeeD candidates are summoned to the second floor, where, oddly enough, we find Fujin and Raijin. Now I'm curious. Did they go through the test, just somewhere we didn't see, or did they just come up to give Seifer moral support? Either way, Fujin is pissed; as Raijin explains (given the EN localization's choice to have her speak in single-word sentences, Raijin has to act as her interpreter, which is an interesting dynamic), she's decided it would be our fault if Seifer failed the test. Which is annoying enough, but I guess when you've committed to making this fucking guy your best friend, the sunk cost fallacy is telling you to be ride or die for him.
Finally, one of the Garden Faculty approaches, announcing the name of those candidates who have passed the test one by one: Zell Ditch, "Squall from Squad B"... And that's it.
Hm.
They passed Squall and Zell, but not Seifer. So they're blaming the breach of orders on Seifer, but not his subordinates. In fact, they hold these subordinates to have done so well that they deserve to graduate as SeeD, while Seifer is held back again. I can sort of see a logic for it - 'it's always correct to obey your superiors so you can't be blamed for obeying the wrong orders, but you can be praised for executing them well' - but they have to be knowingly slighting Seifer.
…
It also means that Squall's behavior was exactly correct. His deferring to Seifer's authority as an excuse to hide the fact that he wanted to cut loose as much as Seifer did resulting in Seifer, the Captain, suffering the full punishment, while Squall is rewarded.
Balamb Garden's core principle: Always obey authority, and you'll be given the chance to kill as you will.
This place is growing more sinister by the minute.
…
And now it's time for Zell to do the rooster run.
No. Look. I'm still not sure I fully understand the Chicken-wuss/"chicken yarou" insult. But someone on the animation team clearly decided to lean into it, because after yelling 'OHHHHH YEAHHHHH!!!" Zell runs off towards Cid's office like this:
It is the most ridiculous run cycle I have ever seen. And it involves him propping his arms and moving them like chicken wings.
Incredible stuff.
And now, all four successful students are in Cid's office. Selphie is here too, of course - I assume the reason she wasn't present in the hallway during the call was because her transfer student status meant special accommodations? And there is one more, unnamed student in the lot, which I like. It's nice to know that it's not just these three's story.
Headmaster Cid: "First of all, congratulations. However… From now on, as members of SeeD, you will be dispatched all over the world."
Headmaster Cid: "We are proud to introduce SeeD, Balamb Garden's mercenary soldiers. SeeD soldiers are combat specialists. BUT… That is only one aspect of SeeD."
Headmaster Cid: "When the time comes…"
Garden Faculty: "Headmaster… It's almost time for the meeting. Please make this short."
(The faculty member turns to us.)
Garden Faculty: "SeeD is a valuable asset to Garden. It's (sic) reputation is solely reliant on each one of you. Handle your mission with care." (They turn to Cid and bow, joining their arms.) "Is that what you wanted to say, sir?"
So, like.
I'm not crazy, right? It feels like these guys are managing Cid. Between cutting him off when he was starting to tell Seifer that he didn't want robots for students and initiative was good, and cutting him off now when he's starting to tell us that we're more than just soldiers and he has a great plan of some kind, both times distracting him with a 'meeting' and telling him to cut it short…
It almost feels like Cid isn't really the one in charge. I know this is a huge stretch from two minor incidents we've seen so far, but I wouldn't be surprised if all these 'meetings' weren't the Garden Faculty regularly taking him to the Mind Control Room to adjust his behavior.
Anyway, Cid does sneak in a personal word to each of the new SeeD members as he hands them their after-action reports.
To Selphie: "I'm looking forward to the Garden Festival."
To the nameless student: "Do your best, even if you don't stand out."
To Zell: "Try to control your emotions a little."
To Squall: "Finally… A gunblade specialist."
It's not much, but it shows that he knows at least a little about each of these students personally, that he's paying attention to their lives (or having Faculty staff relay it to him before the meeting to produce the same effect). Also, it's funny that comments to the spare who is just there to tell us that some people who aren't our party members also get into SeeD sometimes is to tell him to stand out, it's meta comedy. And man, he's really happy about this gunblade thing, isn't he? I'm getting the vibes that those things are a big deal in the setting and hard to master.
Everyone leaves the room but Squall, whom Cid holds back to give him a 'Battle Meter' item. It is apparently supposed to give us a 'Battle Report.' I have no idea what this is or how it works, but in trying to figure out how to use the Tutorial I stumble upon earth-shaking revelations I will be getting to in a moment.
Oh, how about we talk to that Faculty guy before leaving Cid's office?
Garden Faculty: "It is expected you will be using quite a number of GFs along the way… Be sure to ignore all the GF criticism you hear from other Gardens or military forces."
OH MY GOD. COULD YOU GUYS BE ANY SHADIER? It's genuinely impressive how untrustworthy you guys are!!
Incidentally this also tells us that the use of Guardian Force junctioning is unique to Balamb Garden; neither of the other Gardens (Galbadia and Trabia) use them, nor do any of the world's militaries. SeeD's godbound teenagers truly are a unique fighting force in the world.
If they are truly as disproportionately powerful as they seem, then I expect that won't last forever. "Memory loss" may be unfortunate, "personality alteration" (if we take from the FR even more so), and there may be drawbacks we have yet to hear from… But a conquered country is a conquered country. If SeeD is as much of a game changer as our early performance in Dollet suggests, it won't be long before other nations have no choice but to follow suit. But it may well be that we're still early in the development of this new military system that nobody has caught up yet. After all, none of the SeeD we've seen so far seems any older than twenty.
In fact.
Okay, this is the tutorial menu. Not the one on the terminals in our class, although they might be identical for all I know; the one buried in our normal menu. This in turn contains more sub-menus; for instance, selecting 'Basic Terms' sends us to a menu listing things like 'Basic Terms,' 'Battle System' and 'Abilities.' The TEST menu lets us take online tests to increase our SeeD rank; we will be using it in a short bit. But this isn't what I'm here for. No, instead, if we dig to the bottom and pick that unassuming 'Information' tab…
Behold.
MISSABLE FUCKING LORE. It was there the entire time. Just buried in the freaking tutorial menu.
I mean, at least it's in the menu. You can access it whenever. Statistically you're going to be stumbling on it at some point. It's no Icicle Inn. But still.
So what does the hidden lore tell us? Well, let's go in order.
Actually, let's just pause here, because this one is just confusing me.
On the desk terminals, we find this page:
So one text refers to BGU having an administrator/Master, and the other as it having a 'proprietor'. I am guessing those are the same role using three different names? And that guy is 'Master NORG,' in all caps. Which sounds like a Yu-Gi-Oh villain, not a guy. And then who is in charge? Like, Cid is described as both the Headmaster and the founder of Balamb Garden in both tutorials, but is he subordinate to this NORG guy who is 'Administrator,' 'Proprietor,' and 'Master'?
This is confusing. I have no idea what to make of it. I suppose we'll just wait and see. Anyway, that's about all that's in the tutorial aside from…
Oh yeah, all monsters are moon aliens that have rained down on the earth in an apocalyptic event.
I knew it! I knew it couldn't be trusted!
MY MOONSPIRACY AGENDA IS VALIDATED.
Ahem.
What the tutorial tells us, in essence, is that monsters originate from the moon and fall to earth at regular intervals in a recurring event known as the 'Lunar Cry.' These monsters then form a self-sustaining breeding population which roams the world, creating the hostile wilderness conditions that make it difficult to maintain communication between polities. The Lunar Cry also mutate some animals native to the planet into monsters, as well.
So.
We are definitely going to the moon again in this one.
On the bridge leading to the elevator to Cid's office, Zell and Selphie are both doing their own separate, incredibly exaggerated run cycle to show their excitement.
Zell reminds Squall that every SeeD candidate gets to do a speech in front of the class, followed by a graduation party. Squall seems like he would sooner die than give a speech, but Zell seems really excited by the prospect, while Selphie has been reduced to incoherently screaming "Seed! SeeeeD!" SeeeeeeD!" We follow the group back to the class hallway, and…
Seifer is here. No words are exchanged; instead, Seifer claps. At first, this seems like sarcastic applause; but Fujin and Raijin follow, and then the rest of the class, and Zell and Selphie both make delighted expressions, so clearly they feel the applause is sincere. Reluctant, perhaps?
I don't buy that Seifer is over this at all. But for now, he has nothing to say.
Oh boy.
So yeah. Our official introduction into SeeD (we don't get to see the speeches) now over, we are granted an official rank. 6 out of… 10, I think? That's okay. It looks like we rated particularly poorly on 'Attitude,' most likely because we insisted on talking to everyone during the Dollet mission, and 'Conduct,' which is apparently how fast we ran from Dollet (we did terribly on that one). Our Judgment is near perfect; that would be how well we did in the Ifrit mission, winning high for defeating him just under the wire. Attack and Spirit are determined by kill count in Dollet and how many times we ran from battle; we're getting punished heavily for fleeing form the Black Widow here.
So, Rank 6. Decent? Idk. I feel like I did as well as one could with the minimum amount of looking it up and while getting all available dialogues for the purposes of the Let's Play experience. We can of course increase this rank by passing written tests, which we will do in the future.
The salary determined by our rank is FF8's primary method of earning gil, incidentally. If you were wondering about this whole 'not getting gil from monsters' deal, that's because instead, the game will give us money for free at regular time intervals. There are conditions - not getting into enough fights can tank our SeeD rank and reduce our salary - but we are wage earners.
We get a salary. Squall's position as a mercenary isn't just a fiction, it's his actual job, and we get paid for it.
This is such a novel way to handle it, to me. I don't know if it's good or bad, but it's interesting. It recontextualizes our relationship to the world, monsters, and Balamb Garden itself: We are their pride, their child soldier mercenaries, and they pay us for it, handsomely. We are fundamentally attached to BGU in a way that would require a huge shift in the narrative justification of our income to break.
Fascinating stuff.
…
I was going to just keep going until the day after the SeeD graduation party, but honestly this update is already 5k words even if it doesn't include a gazillion pictures, and it's relatively self-contained - this whole thing was like, maybe ten minutes of gameplay, but it's dumped so much lore on us. So I might as well hit one last beat and then call it off for this update.
I mentioned way earlier stuff about a 'crafting system'. I was partly tongue in cheek, I have no idea how it even works and don't need to interact with it for now, but: one of our rewards for defeating Evolret was a magazine. A magazine titled 'Weapons Monthly, March Issue.'
THERE ARE CODEX ENTRIES FOR EVERYONE'S WEAPONS!! IT ONLY TOOK EIGHT GAMES-
Ah who am I kidding this is probably an VIII exclusive, I don't remember IX having it, although IIRC it did have a fairly chunky weapon system of its own beyond just 'better weapon means better stats.'
But yeah. Each of these entries describes the basic starting weapon of one of the four characters currently available to us. It also describes the items needed for 'remodeling,' which I assume to be the process of crafting or transforming our current weapon into a new one. Not that this is something we could do right now, since these are the weapon everyone currently has equipped.
I just really like the framing of information obtained through magazines in the world. It's neat!
And that'll about do us for today.
Thank you for reading.
Next Time: The Big Party.
That Mercenary High School Sure Is Shady As Hell Huh
Before tackling the main plot though, let's briefly circle back to this gal.
The most natural course of action when confronted with the Black Widow is to fight it as the game implicitly suggests - hit it until it loses 20% of its HP and goes into a self-repair state, run away, repeat as many times as it manages to catch up to you, get the sweet cutscene where Quistis annihilates it with machine gun fire. It makes narrative sense to - we are playing a group of graduating students facing a death machine they may not yet be ready to fight this early in their career while on a time limit.
But the Black Widow can be defeated. The main problem standing in the way of achieving that is that, any time it goes down, it enters self-repair mode, cannot be killed while in self-repair, and instantly heals to full HP upon finishing the self-repair sequence. However, after the (mandatory) escape from the very first encounter with it, the Widow is limited to five self-repairs in a given fight.
As a result, a viable tactic to tackle the mech is to delete 20% of its HP, enter standby (healing any injured teammates, buffing and and using any extra turns to Draw Protects), and then repeat this process five times until it has exhausted its repairs, at which point we can fight it for keeps - if we can delete its 5770 HP (actual HP count will of course vary depending on playthrough, see level scaling in last update), it will be dead for good.
So how hard is it to do that?
Not too hard, it turns out.
Remember, we can draw Protect from the Black Widow, and most of its attacks are physical. This significantly reduces the threat posed by its attacks, even those that can hit the whole group, including its explosive laser beam. Protect requires regular refreshing as it wears off over time, but we can just Draw-Cast it directly from the mech, which grants an infinite supply. Additionally, Double, which we drew from Elvoret, doesn't wear off over time, and the mech is vulnerable to Lightning. That means a combination of Selphie casting Quezacotl and Zell dualcasting Thunder (not the most efficient set-up, just what I ended up doing) will take off a considerable amount of its health, with Squall providing support duty.
We don't need to unlock special junction abilities and tag Squall with Lightning-Elemental-Attack linked to 100 Thunder and 100 Blizzards junctioned to Strength. Just regular, consistent use of basic spells and summons will see us through.
…at least in terms of defeating the mech.
The problem is, that tactic is slow. Like, "took me nearly 20 minutes to whittle down the mech" slow. Now, I was ready to call this 'doable, but close to the wire,' except then it turned out the game had one last surprise in store for us.
Killing the Black Widow restores Dollet's normal encounters with soldiers, which normally aren't seen while running away from the mech.
Even running from every random encounter I absolutely cannot make it to the beach in what little time I have remaining. We hit 0:00 on the time while in battle, resulting in a game over. The mech defeated me, not by being too strong to kill, but by making me fail my SeeD exam deadline.
Frustrating. For the record, winning the mech battle rewards an amazing 50 AP, as well as a special item enhancing GF stats. I could replay the sequence and refine my timing so I can make it to the beach with the win… But that's like another half hour of this fight. No thanks, let's get back to the present.
It turns out Zell is a Balamb local, known in town, and his parents live there. No reason not to pay them a visit!
It's nothing too deep - Ma Dintch is surprised but happy to see Zell, he says he's just passing through, she asks Squall to take care of him. But it's nice to see that one of our team members has a family.
The house next door, though, is where my interest kicks up.
There, we find an old man telling a story to what is probably his granddaughter, and it feels like an early bit of the setting's deep history.
Old Man: "Long, long ago, when this world was just made, there was a strong god named 'Hyne.' This god was very, very strong, but after fighting a lot of monsters, he became very tired. So he made 'people' like you and me to do all the work, and the god went to sleep."
Girl: "So he took a nap?"
Old Man: "That's right. However, the god was very surprised when he awoke. Surprised that there were so many people."
Girl: "Yeah, there are so many in this world."
Old Man: "Hyne decided to reduce the number of people by taking away the children."
Girl: "You mean… children… like me..?"
Old Man: "Uh huh. Scary, isn't it? …Of course, everyone was scared then, too. And so, the battle against Hyne began. Even though the people were small, they all got together, and finally cornered him. Hyne didn't know what to do. Out of desperation, he gave half his body to the people and ran off with the remaining other half."
Girl: "He can do that?"
Old Man: "Well, he was a god. Anyway, it turns out Hyne tricked the people. The half that Hyne ran away with was the half that had the stronger magic."
Girl: "Wow… So we still can't find the other half that ran away???"
Old Man: "Hmm… It might be close by, actually. It might even be watching you."
Hmm.
Of course, it's impossible at this stage to tell how much of that story reflects the actual backstory of the setting and how much is just a fairy tale distorted by time or simply made up wholecloth. It's also unclear if this is a creation myth, something which people actually believe, or just a fairy tale, a story you tell children that people don't believe. The lore terminal did mention that the power of the sorceresses came back to 'Hyne's reign,' but that sounded like a king, not a god.
Yeah, not much to do here but just remember that for when the events of the story connect back to it, or don't.
Well, we stock up on a couple of status healing items at the shop, fight a couple of Triple Triad matches, and we're off back to BGU.
Nothing to do now but wait for the results of the SeeD exam. Our trio splits up fairly casually and we can just run around for a bit.
Incidentally, if you thought that Hyne story was kind of a big deal to put in a missable conversation off to the side, we're about to outdo it by a factor of a thousand. Two students are off to the side talking to one another in the atrium…
Remember how some of the students mentioned stuff about not being able to use radio? And how I was wondering why Selphie had to run on foot to deliver a message to Seifer in person and no one had a connection device? These students are talking about Galbadia's plans in Dollet and wondering why anyone would bother activating a communication tower in a world where radio doesn't work.
It turns out that 17 years ago, a mysterious event caused a worldwide signal interference. No communication using radio signals can be used. Instead, the means of long distance communication are chocobo messengers, and the Internet, which works entirely off underground cables which are frequently damaged by monsters or warfare.
That's… a fascinating bit of worldbuilding. It serves to create a world which, while aesthetically and technologically modern, still retains the old RPG feeling of isolated dots separated by wilderness, where communication requires physically going from one place to another. There's Internet, but it's not like our Internet - it's a Cyberpunk 2077 style of geographically isolated networks - your Internet connects you to the rest of Balamb Garden, or all of Dollet, but can't communicate between Dollet and Balamb Garden.
So…
Give yourself a prize, Sideways, we're definitely working with some degree of 'the ability of people and communities to communicate with one another' as a theme.
Xu, Quistis and Principal Robin Williams are congratulating one another on their success; it might seem like our sudden retreat was a failure, but actually Galbadia agreed to withdraw from the Dukedom of Dollet in exchange for the Comm Tower remaining active. Which is… interesting. So that wasn't a war of annexation; it was a single operation with the goal of seizing and activating a piece of infrastructure, past which Galbadia doesn't care about retaining the territory. What could they want? This has to be humiliating for Dollet, but, well, they're small and weak, and Galbadia is big and strong.
Xu does lament that Galbadia is withdrawing too soon; if they had stayed and wreaked more havoc, SeeD could have made more money from the conflict. This is the first of multiple bits of dialogue in this update that are going to launch us from 'you know if you read between the lines Balamb Garden is kinda fucked up as an institution' into the stratospheric heights of 'oh wow they're not even trying to hide it.'
Today's not a good day for Seifer, and it's about to get worse.
Seifer: "Squall! D'you hear about the communication tower in Dollet? We would've been heroes if it weren't for that withdraw order."
Quistis (walking onto the screen with Xu): "You were only looking for a fight."
Seifer: "My dear instructor. I'm hurt. Those are rather cruel words for an aspiring student. A mediocre instructor like you will never understand."
Xu: "Seifer, don't be so stuck on yourself. You'll take all responsibility for leaving the designated area."
Seifer: "Isn't it the Captain's duty to take the best possible action?"
Xu: "Seifer, you will never be a SeeD. Calling yourself a captain is a joke."
(At this point, Seifer lowers his head; from his model it looks like he's doing a 'joyless laughter' kind of animation, but in the Remaster it's clear he's shaking with anger instead. They're both different takes from the same kind of feeling, regardless. He doesn't say anything further until the end of the scene. Quistis and Xu walk out, replaced by Cid.)
Headmaster Cid: "Seifer. You will be disciplined for your irresponsible behavior. You must follow orders exactly during combat." (While he's saying this, Cid is standing straight with his hands behind his back and looking severe.)
Headmaster Cid: "But I'm not entirely without sympathy for you. I don't want you all to be machines. I want you all to be able to think and act for yourselves.." (While he's saying this, his posture relaxes and he does casual things like rubbing his head, moving his hands while talking, or folding his arms.)
Headmaster Cid: "I am…" (As he starts talking, one of the Garden Faculty members approaches, each step audible.)
Garden Faculty: "Headmaster Cid, you have some business in your office…"
I was wondering what would become of Seifer. Whether he would be rewarded for his initiative (the Galbadians were after the Tower, identifying their objective mattered), or punished for breaking orders. I guess this is our answer. Although… Cid starts saying he does want to reward initiative, before he is… interrupted.
Hmm.
I haven't known really what to think of those robed and hatted guys until now. In EN, they're "Garden Faculty." This is an elision - a faculty is a collective body, one is 'a member of the faculty,' not 'a faculty.' I imagine this is a matter of character limits. But for characters with such innocuous name, they have a really distinctive and sinister appearance; whereas everyone else is wearing modern clothes or school or military dress uniforms, they wear long, antiquated robes, and hats that conceal their face (they're human, you can see that underneath when they turn at the right angle, but you can't see their face from the front). It's not clear what their position in the hierarchy is, but they appear to be subordinate staff? They're student supervisors, is what it feels like. But maybe they're teachers?
In FR, they're called 'Templars.' Which fits their ominous and antiquated vibe more, but also gives them a significantly more martial-sounding affect, and sounds a lot less like they're just normal staff. But also they clearly aren't normal staff. Normal staff would be the cafeteria kitchen ladies, who are just entirely normal women, not… These guys.
I point this out because they'll come up again in this update.
Anyway, Cid departs, Seifer does not respond to prompt, but we can talk to the faculty member a little.
Garden Faculty: "SeeD shall not act beyond the exact wording of a contract. We are not a non-profit organization. This incident will be a hard-earned lesson for the Dollet Dukedom. They'll now know to be more generous when hiring SeeD."
Right.
This is a step beyond 'to you, this a life-or-death battle for the freedom of your homeland against foreign aggression, but to me, it's a high school graduation exam.' SeeD seems to have made a calculated choice to make an example of Dollet - we showed up just long enough to roll over all opposition, annihilate the Galbadian presence within the city, seize the Comm Tower, destroy the Galbadian mech, and then immediately withdrew without giving Dollet's forces time or resources to actually consolidate their position.
It's utterly ruthless but I kind of admire the effectiveness of it. It's a very obvious show of force that demonstrates to everyone that Balamb Garden's SeeD and their GF-enhanced fighting style are overwhelmingly effective and incredibly valuable, and then it punishes the client for being stingy by sticking to the absolute minimum required by their contract and just straight up abandoning them in the middle of an active war effort, leaving them completely naked.
And, like, it worked. Galbadia did pull out of Dollet. But they were able to make demands in return; we left them in a position of comparative strength, instead of finishing off their local troops. And we can't even be blamed for it. We did no more nor less than our contract said.
Now everyone will know just how powerful SeeDs are, and that they should be paid accordingly.
So yeah! They're assholes.
SeeD candidates are summoned to the second floor, where, oddly enough, we find Fujin and Raijin. Now I'm curious. Did they go through the test, just somewhere we didn't see, or did they just come up to give Seifer moral support? Either way, Fujin is pissed; as Raijin explains (given the EN localization's choice to have her speak in single-word sentences, Raijin has to act as her interpreter, which is an interesting dynamic), she's decided it would be our fault if Seifer failed the test. Which is annoying enough, but I guess when you've committed to making this fucking guy your best friend, the sunk cost fallacy is telling you to be ride or die for him.
Finally, one of the Garden Faculty approaches, announcing the name of those candidates who have passed the test one by one: Zell Ditch, "Squall from Squad B"... And that's it.
Hm.
They passed Squall and Zell, but not Seifer. So they're blaming the breach of orders on Seifer, but not his subordinates. In fact, they hold these subordinates to have done so well that they deserve to graduate as SeeD, while Seifer is held back again. I can sort of see a logic for it - 'it's always correct to obey your superiors so you can't be blamed for obeying the wrong orders, but you can be praised for executing them well' - but they have to be knowingly slighting Seifer.
…
It also means that Squall's behavior was exactly correct. His deferring to Seifer's authority as an excuse to hide the fact that he wanted to cut loose as much as Seifer did resulting in Seifer, the Captain, suffering the full punishment, while Squall is rewarded.
Balamb Garden's core principle: Always obey authority, and you'll be given the chance to kill as you will.
This place is growing more sinister by the minute.
…
And now it's time for Zell to do the rooster run.
No. Look. I'm still not sure I fully understand the Chicken-wuss/"chicken yarou" insult. But someone on the animation team clearly decided to lean into it, because after yelling 'OHHHHH YEAHHHHH!!!" Zell runs off towards Cid's office like this:
It is the most ridiculous run cycle I have ever seen. And it involves him propping his arms and moving them like chicken wings.
Incredible stuff.
And now, all four successful students are in Cid's office. Selphie is here too, of course - I assume the reason she wasn't present in the hallway during the call was because her transfer student status meant special accommodations? And there is one more, unnamed student in the lot, which I like. It's nice to know that it's not just these three's story.
Headmaster Cid: "First of all, congratulations. However… From now on, as members of SeeD, you will be dispatched all over the world."
Headmaster Cid: "We are proud to introduce SeeD, Balamb Garden's mercenary soldiers. SeeD soldiers are combat specialists. BUT… That is only one aspect of SeeD."
Headmaster Cid: "When the time comes…"
Garden Faculty: "Headmaster… It's almost time for the meeting. Please make this short."
(The faculty member turns to us.)
Garden Faculty: "SeeD is a valuable asset to Garden. It's (sic) reputation is solely reliant on each one of you. Handle your mission with care." (They turn to Cid and bow, joining their arms.) "Is that what you wanted to say, sir?"
So, like.
I'm not crazy, right? It feels like these guys are managing Cid. Between cutting him off when he was starting to tell Seifer that he didn't want robots for students and initiative was good, and cutting him off now when he's starting to tell us that we're more than just soldiers and he has a great plan of some kind, both times distracting him with a 'meeting' and telling him to cut it short…
It almost feels like Cid isn't really the one in charge. I know this is a huge stretch from two minor incidents we've seen so far, but I wouldn't be surprised if all these 'meetings' weren't the Garden Faculty regularly taking him to the Mind Control Room to adjust his behavior.
Anyway, Cid does sneak in a personal word to each of the new SeeD members as he hands them their after-action reports.
To Selphie: "I'm looking forward to the Garden Festival."
To the nameless student: "Do your best, even if you don't stand out."
To Zell: "Try to control your emotions a little."
To Squall: "Finally… A gunblade specialist."
It's not much, but it shows that he knows at least a little about each of these students personally, that he's paying attention to their lives (or having Faculty staff relay it to him before the meeting to produce the same effect). Also, it's funny that comments to the spare who is just there to tell us that some people who aren't our party members also get into SeeD sometimes is to tell him to stand out, it's meta comedy. And man, he's really happy about this gunblade thing, isn't he? I'm getting the vibes that those things are a big deal in the setting and hard to master.
Everyone leaves the room but Squall, whom Cid holds back to give him a 'Battle Meter' item. It is apparently supposed to give us a 'Battle Report.' I have no idea what this is or how it works, but in trying to figure out how to use the Tutorial I stumble upon earth-shaking revelations I will be getting to in a moment.
Oh, how about we talk to that Faculty guy before leaving Cid's office?
Garden Faculty: "It is expected you will be using quite a number of GFs along the way… Be sure to ignore all the GF criticism you hear from other Gardens or military forces."
OH MY GOD. COULD YOU GUYS BE ANY SHADIER? It's genuinely impressive how untrustworthy you guys are!!
Incidentally this also tells us that the use of Guardian Force junctioning is unique to Balamb Garden; neither of the other Gardens (Galbadia and Trabia) use them, nor do any of the world's militaries. SeeD's godbound teenagers truly are a unique fighting force in the world.
If they are truly as disproportionately powerful as they seem, then I expect that won't last forever. "Memory loss" may be unfortunate, "personality alteration" (if we take from the FR even more so), and there may be drawbacks we have yet to hear from… But a conquered country is a conquered country. If SeeD is as much of a game changer as our early performance in Dollet suggests, it won't be long before other nations have no choice but to follow suit. But it may well be that we're still early in the development of this new military system that nobody has caught up yet. After all, none of the SeeD we've seen so far seems any older than twenty.
In fact.
Okay, this is the tutorial menu. Not the one on the terminals in our class, although they might be identical for all I know; the one buried in our normal menu. This in turn contains more sub-menus; for instance, selecting 'Basic Terms' sends us to a menu listing things like 'Basic Terms,' 'Battle System' and 'Abilities.' The TEST menu lets us take online tests to increase our SeeD rank; we will be using it in a short bit. But this isn't what I'm here for. No, instead, if we dig to the bottom and pick that unassuming 'Information' tab…
Behold.
MISSABLE FUCKING LORE. It was there the entire time. Just buried in the freaking tutorial menu.
I mean, at least it's in the menu. You can access it whenever. Statistically you're going to be stumbling on it at some point. It's no Icicle Inn. But still.
So what does the hidden lore tell us? Well, let's go in order.
- Balamb is a small country on the world's smallest continent, known for its 'temperate climate and warm people.'
- Dollet is a small country on the Galbadia continent (formerly the Dollet continent), remnants of an ancient empire.
- SeeD members have the same status as other students while inside the Garden. I find this dubious.
- SeeD often work as 'undercover specialists'; Balamb Garden is the only Garden to produce SeeDs, whose power is rooted in mastering the most powerful forms of para-magic thanks to the use of GFs.
- Balamb Garden was founded 12 years ago. That puts the oldest possible SeeD at 32 (20 is the maximum age for passing the test), assuming the first 'students' enrolled and immediately became SeeDs; in practice, I think it's more likely we're dealing with an upper age range in the early to mid 20s. Balamb Garden recruits children from the age of 5, but we can generously assume that they started with teenagers, who twelve years later would now be around as old as 27, max. That is… not very old.
- Galbadia Garden and Trabia Garden were both founded after Balamb. Each Garden has an administrator called Master, and a headmaster.
Actually, let's just pause here, because this one is just confusing me.
On the desk terminals, we find this page:
So one text refers to BGU having an administrator/Master, and the other as it having a 'proprietor'. I am guessing those are the same role using three different names? And that guy is 'Master NORG,' in all caps. Which sounds like a Yu-Gi-Oh villain, not a guy. And then who is in charge? Like, Cid is described as both the Headmaster and the founder of Balamb Garden in both tutorials, but is he subordinate to this NORG guy who is 'Administrator,' 'Proprietor,' and 'Master'?
This is confusing. I have no idea what to make of it. I suppose we'll just wait and see. Anyway, that's about all that's in the tutorial aside from…
Oh yeah, all monsters are moon aliens that have rained down on the earth in an apocalyptic event.
I knew it! I knew it couldn't be trusted!
MY MOONSPIRACY AGENDA IS VALIDATED.
Ahem.
What the tutorial tells us, in essence, is that monsters originate from the moon and fall to earth at regular intervals in a recurring event known as the 'Lunar Cry.' These monsters then form a self-sustaining breeding population which roams the world, creating the hostile wilderness conditions that make it difficult to maintain communication between polities. The Lunar Cry also mutate some animals native to the planet into monsters, as well.
So.
We are definitely going to the moon again in this one.
On the bridge leading to the elevator to Cid's office, Zell and Selphie are both doing their own separate, incredibly exaggerated run cycle to show their excitement.
Zell reminds Squall that every SeeD candidate gets to do a speech in front of the class, followed by a graduation party. Squall seems like he would sooner die than give a speech, but Zell seems really excited by the prospect, while Selphie has been reduced to incoherently screaming "Seed! SeeeeD!" SeeeeeeD!" We follow the group back to the class hallway, and…
Seifer is here. No words are exchanged; instead, Seifer claps. At first, this seems like sarcastic applause; but Fujin and Raijin follow, and then the rest of the class, and Zell and Selphie both make delighted expressions, so clearly they feel the applause is sincere. Reluctant, perhaps?
I don't buy that Seifer is over this at all. But for now, he has nothing to say.
Oh boy.
So yeah. Our official introduction into SeeD (we don't get to see the speeches) now over, we are granted an official rank. 6 out of… 10, I think? That's okay. It looks like we rated particularly poorly on 'Attitude,' most likely because we insisted on talking to everyone during the Dollet mission, and 'Conduct,' which is apparently how fast we ran from Dollet (we did terribly on that one). Our Judgment is near perfect; that would be how well we did in the Ifrit mission, winning high for defeating him just under the wire. Attack and Spirit are determined by kill count in Dollet and how many times we ran from battle; we're getting punished heavily for fleeing form the Black Widow here.
So, Rank 6. Decent? Idk. I feel like I did as well as one could with the minimum amount of looking it up and while getting all available dialogues for the purposes of the Let's Play experience. We can of course increase this rank by passing written tests, which we will do in the future.
The salary determined by our rank is FF8's primary method of earning gil, incidentally. If you were wondering about this whole 'not getting gil from monsters' deal, that's because instead, the game will give us money for free at regular time intervals. There are conditions - not getting into enough fights can tank our SeeD rank and reduce our salary - but we are wage earners.
We get a salary. Squall's position as a mercenary isn't just a fiction, it's his actual job, and we get paid for it.
This is such a novel way to handle it, to me. I don't know if it's good or bad, but it's interesting. It recontextualizes our relationship to the world, monsters, and Balamb Garden itself: We are their pride, their child soldier mercenaries, and they pay us for it, handsomely. We are fundamentally attached to BGU in a way that would require a huge shift in the narrative justification of our income to break.
Fascinating stuff.
…
I was going to just keep going until the day after the SeeD graduation party, but honestly this update is already 5k words even if it doesn't include a gazillion pictures, and it's relatively self-contained - this whole thing was like, maybe ten minutes of gameplay, but it's dumped so much lore on us. So I might as well hit one last beat and then call it off for this update.
I mentioned way earlier stuff about a 'crafting system'. I was partly tongue in cheek, I have no idea how it even works and don't need to interact with it for now, but: one of our rewards for defeating Evolret was a magazine. A magazine titled 'Weapons Monthly, March Issue.'
THERE ARE CODEX ENTRIES FOR EVERYONE'S WEAPONS!! IT ONLY TOOK EIGHT GAMES-
Ah who am I kidding this is probably an VIII exclusive, I don't remember IX having it, although IIRC it did have a fairly chunky weapon system of its own beyond just 'better weapon means better stats.'
But yeah. Each of these entries describes the basic starting weapon of one of the four characters currently available to us. It also describes the items needed for 'remodeling,' which I assume to be the process of crafting or transforming our current weapon into a new one. Not that this is something we could do right now, since these are the weapon everyone currently has equipped.
I just really like the framing of information obtained through magazines in the world. It's neat!
And that'll about do us for today.
Thank you for reading.
Next Time: The Big Party.
- Location
- the Republic
- Pronouns
- He/They
Omi, I love how you find something to enjoy about every FF game. It's adorable.
That said, I too really like how much lore FF8 has scattered around in it and how all the pieces fit together. It's a quantum leap in that lived-in feeling, even over FF7.
That said, I too really like how much lore FF8 has scattered around in it and how all the pieces fit together. It's a quantum leap in that lived-in feeling, even over FF7.
- Location
- SV's Only Complete Persona Quest
- Pronouns
- She/Her
*Scottish accent* "The Moon! It's Hatching!"
(Missed my chance for FF4, but it's even more fitting here)