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.
Yeah, for the longest time I was under the impression you had to bring it down to 0% HP each time before it fully repaired, and do
that multiple times in one battle. As is, not nearly that difficult (if still time consuming if you haven't been pulling tricks to have things like Thundara/Thundaga already).
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.
IIRC it's suggested to kill the Black Widow around the last screen or two in order to avoid exactly this issue when maximizing your score. Of course, that requires knowing how to dodge it in all the other screens to avoid wasting time and resouces on the way there.
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.
Oh on the subject of Triple Triad matches, Omi would you be interested in having it pointed out when there's card players around with specific rare cards? Because there's some cards which are one of a kind and can only be won from specific characters... and it can be hard to know which ones, because they don't always
play said cards. Heck, there's one in particular you passed by who apparently only has a 10% chance to use theirs in the first place.
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.
Hah, I figured this particular one might stand out as soon as I read about it. I think we'll get more about the radio interference later, but it's certainly an interesting bit of background information.
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.'
It's amazing how much the post-exam dialogue makes me raise an eyebrow or two compared to when I was a kid and just took it all in stride.
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."
Ooh
ouch. Can't believe I'm saying it, but poor Seifer, they really lay into him in this update.
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?
Well, whatever they are, they make me think of a cult with how they all dress exactly the same up to the concealing hats.
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.
Nah mate, that's just Capitalism! If Dollet wanted better service and aid, they shouldn't have cheaped out on protecting their country from an entire army!
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.
I've a sneaking suspicion that Squall
absolutely knew that "following orders" here would screw over Seifer and not himself.
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.
Idunno about mind control... but at the least, I don't think I'm nearly as gung-ho about "War Criminal Child Soldier Maker Cid" as I was before hitting this point of the game. Then again, the kindly old Robin Williams man
could totally be an act, there's no telling this early on.
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.
Ahahahaha
You know, in the spoiler thread we were
just discussing if someone should try and nudge you towards that tab for the crazy amounts of missable lore just stashed away in the menu, accessible at literally any time. Hell, even outside of lore? There's sections for things like "BTW here is every single magic spell in the game, what it does, and what it's best junctioning stats are".
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.
Just a minor tidbit, tiny itty bitty lore
Nothing too important Mr Lunar Cry is
Funny enough, I suspect this ties into that very first Occult Magazine you got at the beginning of the game - that farmer that found a random dead monster in his fields which apparently fell from the skies? I could absolutely buy it fell off the moon.
Selphie has been reduced to incoherently screaming "Seed! SeeeeD!" SeeeeeeD!"
The more of Selphie I see in my replay of FFVIII, the more I buy into fan theories of "this girl is probably on the autism spectrum somewhere".
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.
6 out of 10 is more than satisfactory for a blind playthrough. Realistically, you aren't getting much higher without specifically gaming the system in ways mentioned by others before me.
On that note, totally wasn't
planning on grinding up 75 kills during Dollet originally, but as it turns out? The cheese to get 100 points from Fire Cavern by letting the timer hit 0 on the Ifrit naming screen specifically works on the Remaster, and the original PS1 version...
not the non-remaster on Steam, which happens to be the one I'm playing. In that one, you instead get docked to zero points, which I managed to discover about 2 minutes later
after saving. Whoops.
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.
It's certainly an interesting choice of a monetary system for FFVIII compared to basically every other Final Fantasy game ever! Sadly, it's rather cheesable between the fact that you rarely actually
need to spend money (on account of how the weapons system works and the lack of armor or accessories), and that you can just... spam SeeD Tests to rapidly increase your rank. Like, I'm barely two or three bosses ahead of where you are now, and despite getting a 6 or 7 from the exam I'm already up to SeeD 15 or so without even bothering to look up exam answers online.
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.'
Yep - don't know if you actually visited the weapons shop in Balamb, but getting better weapons in FFVIII is basically just a crafting system. Bring in the necessary bits and bobs you read about in a magazine, hand the shopkeeper some gil, and boom you've got Gunblade 3.0 with an extra 12 attack. You can also
downgrade weapons which is probably why the first magazine or two you pick up covers the most basic equipment characters start with... but I genuinely can't think of any reason to do so. Maybe someone else will know.
Also of note is that you don't actually need the magazines to craft said weapons, just the specific parts - so it might be worth to stockpile screws plus other odds and ends and just drop by weapon stores once in a while to see if you've stumbled upon the requirements for something.
Curious that they apparently regularly have "the moon sends a bunch of murderous monsters" disasters and yet you don't see bad guys using moon imagery. You'd expect more cultural impact from a widely known murder machine like that; I'd expect the moon to be the FF8 World equivalent of skulls in terms of edgy imagery. Galbadian soldiers with moon insignias, goth edgelords with moons on their shirts, etc.
It could be something similar to Endbringers from Worm, if on a smaller scale? Where basically moon imagery/The Lunar Cry is something nobody wants to think about and it's considered super dickish to be using its imagery, as in "bro I had a cousin who lived in Coastal City 12, it got utterly ANNIHILATED last year when twelve billion monsters fell off the moon and hit it head on."
Nah, a standing bounty would be more like how Earthbound did it, which is that monsters and other enemies don't drop money, but rather "X amount of money has been deposited into your account."
Or if they dropped vendor trash you had to turn in to bounty officers to get your pay like real animal bounties historically. Scalps, ears, pelts, fins, etc.
That's what FF12 did, and FF11 from what I heard about it.
Personally what I tend to most associate "beat up monsters and sell their loots to get your actual money" with the Etrian Odyssey series. Heck, it
also has something similar to the weapons in FF8 going on in that the way you unlock new weapons for purchase tends to be "oh hey you sold the blacksmith 20 rat teeth and seventeen harvested Super Wood, now he can make rat-tooth chainswords".
