…you know, I wonder if there was a disconnect between the team that animated the FMVs and the team that was writing the script for the game's dialogue. In the FMV we saw of Squall and Rinoa dancing, he was pointedly a terrible dancer at first who needed her to actively guide him and show him to move, after which he caught the gist of it. But here, Rinoa compliments Squall on his dancing, and he plays it off by saying it's part of SeeD training in a variety of skills useful in subterfuge, like approaching a target inconspicuously at a party. Those seem to directly contradict one another. Either way, Rinoa is saddened to learn that Squall's dancing skills are work-related and not a hobby.
I didn't interpret the dance the same as you.
The way I see it, Squall is a good dancer. And he danced purposely bad at the beginning to escape from this girl grip.
He was thinking that, like this, the girl will grow tired and she will let him go. But when he realized that she will never let him go (and her cuteness probably helps her at this moment) and that he will have to do the dance entirely, he has decided it was less a chore to properly dance. And then, he switched gears.
Like this, there is less dissonance between the FMV and the dialogue. Since the beginning, Squall doesn't seem to like to interact with other people, but he's not always totally upfront about it (not with everyone at least). My theory seems a bit circumvented but it does seem to fit Squall persona.
Also curious if Rinoa will turn out to be an actual princess or not.
More importantly, when did she meet Seifer I wonder? Presumably he's been here in Galbadia rather than Rinoa being at the battleKid school. Or maybe she was there and left?
There's a control room with a few more resistance members, and there's enough unexplored space that it's possible there may be room on the train that we don't see with more people in them, but all in all it does look like the Forest Owls, Timber's resistance cell against Galbadian rule, is made up of like six people.
Something's weird here. It could just be a gameplay contrivance that we're not meant to interrogate, but Rinoa seems too prominent a character to be handwaved like that when all the other characters we've had so far have all had the same backstory justification for using junctioning. It could also be that GFs are actually as easy to Junction as Materia were to use, so Squall just handed Rinoa one and told her 'just, uh, mentally bind yourself to it somehow' and she Just Did It, but that seems weird both in- and out of character.
This is where junctioning really started to sour the game for me. We've touched on the feeling before in this thread, what with magicite and materia where both of them had their pluses and minuses as a magic system where one of the minuses was that they sort of took away the uniqueness of individual characters...well junctioning is that on steroids. Swapping junctions make FF8 characters feel like sleeves for a junction layout, with only their LBs and cutscenes keeping the idea of a party afloat. Not helped by how arbitrary junctioning is. Is it hard? Is it easy? Does it take some special concentration? Does it hurt? Fuck dude, calm down, just go into the menu and do it.
That said, the train heist is a great sequence, really feels like it's carrying on FF7's snatching from the Resident Evil idea bin to create action-horror setpieces.
…you know, I wonder if there was a disconnect between the team that animated the FMVs and the team that was writing the script for the game's dialogue. In the FMV we saw of Squall and Rinoa dancing, he was pointedly a terrible dancer at first who needed her to actively guide him and show him to move, after which he caught the gist of it. But here, Rinoa compliments Squall on his dancing, and he plays it off by saying it's part of SeeD training in a variety of skills useful in subterfuge, like approaching a target inconspicuously at a party. Those seem to directly contradict one another. Either way, Rinoa is saddened to learn that Squall's dancing skills are work-related and not a hobby.
It's just an extension of the leaning against the wall thing, he was deliberately shoddy and halfhearted at dancing so she'd give up and he could go back to brooding. Heck, during the cutscene you can see Squall pull this and then try and walk back to the wall for more brooding.
Telling though, that SeeDs are trained for this. Like, it's clearly for the purpose of assassination they were trained for this. Approach a target in a situation where they're off-guard and not expecting danger.
President Vinzer Deling (as in Deling City, where we saw Laguna last time) is the President of Galbadia. President, or dictator? Zone and Watts at least claim that he is a dictator disliked even by his own population, but of course they'd say that, they're rebels. Deling will be coming to Timber on a private train, and while Selphie excitedly suggests 'blowing it up with a rocket launcher,
Game doing another switch with expected archetypes like with Seifer before. Selphie is excitable and earnest, so you expect her to be the innocent member of the team, but no, her first impulse is 'We should just murder this guy'
Sure! That makes enough sense given the parameters of how the world works. And it's definitely interesting - Deling went to the trouble of invading Dollet just for that tower; this public address is important enough he was willing to cause an international incident and kill a bunch of people for it.
I mean, he's a dictator who had a prison built for his internal opponents and has been annexing territory freely. Entirely plausible that the announcement is just 'I hereby declare that Galbadia owns the planet, and anyone claiming to be another countries' goverment is a traitor to Galbadia'
The SeeDs aren't, though. In fact, they don't give a shit about of that, as far as they're concerned their job is done. Selphie asks Squall if they can just go home now while Zell is just in disbelief at the Owls' lackadaisical approach to rebellion. When we talk to Rinoa again, she starts talking about how they have a plan and Squall asks if he can see their contract first, very obviously in hope that he can tell her 'nope, we were good for one mission, you're on your own now.'
Incredible. We were all expecting Balamb Garden to pull some shady shit like they did in Dollet, withdrawing SeeD at the last minute to maximize conflict potential or something. What I wasn't expecting was for Squall, Selphie and Zell to be the one to go 'these weirdos are cringe, we need to bail.' Our protagonists, everybody. I guess I can't blame them for soaking up the culture of BGU and repeating the same behavior their teacher tries to inculcate in them, but it's hardly heroic.
See, I very much got the impression that it's a status thing. They're not just mercenaries, they're SeeDs the most elite mercenaries in the world. They have no problem with 'let's kidnap the president of a major portion of the world'. They have a problem with being unde rthe authority of a bunch of amateurs. Like, the Forest Owls gave a mission briefing put together with toys bought from some gift shop, and their leadership have no real plan, they're a bunch of unblooded children and a naive princess.
In the interest of fairness, it doesn't seem like Timber has all that large of a population. And while, yes, the dictatorship lasting from childhood is bad, it's also not that long a time according to the years stated. Like, less than two decades at most maybe? And ALL the Forest Owls are kids of La Resistance.
This is Literally Wolverines: JRPG Edition.
A bunch of high-school dipshits getting WAAAAY in over their heads because they are hopped up on zeal.
That said, the plan of like, sneaking train cars in and out of order, as a plan, is insane. We all realize that, right? This is a plan that could be defeated by the people on board of the target literally just looking out the window. It's going to be executed with enough flair that I don't mind too much, but it's genuinely a baffling concept. Yeah, sure, no one is going to notice when you unhook cars and hook them back together while they're inside.
This is is the first time we've seen monsters actively employed by humans in this setting. So far, they have exclusively been encountered in the form of hostile wildlife. So that the first we see of it is the imperial power of Galbadia using a fully sapient shapeshifting undead horror to secretly impersonate their president as part of a rebel trap has… Somewhat sinister implications.
It was obvious that Rinoa was going to be playable from her role in the OP, let alone the fact that we literally got a Limit Break tutorial for her dog earlier. But so far, the game has been consistent in who gets to be a party member: SeeDs and SeeD students who trained at Balamb Garden and learned to junction GFs. So why can Rinoa join the group? How does she know how to junction GFs? Because she absolutely can - her mechanics work the same as everyone else's.
Squall: "Dollet has a communication tower that can transmit and receive radio waves. It had been abandoned for a long time, but the Galbadian Army got it up and running yesterday."
They don't want to be the permanently embedded CIA instructors within this LatAm rebel paramilitary! They already miss Langley! This place probably doesn't even show the Super Bowl!
This sequence, and I mean the sequence, not the FMV surrounding it, always sticks in my mind. Because I was playing it on my parents old, smaller TV and my mother came in and was like 'what are you watching'. And didn't realize I was playing a game when she first say it had assumed it was a movie, which was to me a moment of like 'wow, game graphics are so amazing nowdays'.
Oh my god, a train piracy heist. Ordinarily this would be enough to kick my suspension of disbelief in the shins, but I can't bring myself to care because of the sheer style of it. I'm in love.
If you love Dumb Train Shenanigans, may I suggest Snowpiercer?
In the 'Snowpiercer' tv series, the entire world is frozen and dead. Literal ice age, no survivors, other than a train, that goes around the entire earth on a train track. At a critical moment they get ambushed by a second train. There are two moving things on the entire earth. They are the most predictable and loud/conspicuous of all vehicles. One of them sneaks up on the other. It's incredible.
Immediately at the station, we are accosted by a man saying "Oh, the forests of Timber sure have changed!" to which we reply, "But the Owls are still there" (our two other options are 'Chocobo' and 'Moogle,' I don't know what happens if we pick wrong), following which he invites us to follow him.
In hindsight, I probably could have just left him on read to explore the town as much as I cared at this stage, but I am extremely susceptible to video game NPCs asking me to follow them in a tone of urgency so I just followed him directly after talking to the people around the station - there's a child complaining the Pet Shop is closed, and an old lady selling souvenirs; these include a 'map of Timber' which she drew herself and which is…
Luckily for you, I'm pretty sure you can't explore town at this point - there isn't actually anything to the right of the gift shop, and when you go down to the other train station screen you're railroaded right into boarding the Timber Owl's train.
Speaking of "Bed is actually a couch", for another missable item - be sure to go back and check out the bed that has now been folded back into a couch for another pet magazine volume.
Somehow, I originally read this line as you saying only one combat-capable person including Squall, Selphie, and Zell, and was just like "Damn Omi really throwing shade on Squall's fellow SeeD members".
Then of course I realized we were talking about Rinoa whoops
Frankly you can ignore like 80% of the explanation anyways, the game walks you straight through it all, only advice I'd give is maybe noting down a "which button is which number" for the passwords.
I am 95% sure that the entire briefing about the sensors doesn't even matter because at zero points during this entire mission was there anything like "OH NO SOUND/THERMAL", either it got scrapped in development or it's one of those "we nerfed it in the overseas release" things. Only worry is if the guards walk over and see you inputing codes.
I don't think you can do the 'author's last swords scrawl out as he is taken away midway through writing' in print. Like logistically that's not how it works. Also if they barged into the newspaper owner's home or office to abduct him wouldn't they have just destroyed the final issue before publishing? This is trying to be too cute.
It could just be training off as in "the rest of this article is smudged in this location" or "Squall has stopped giving a shit about reading this article", to be fair. Especially the latter, knowing Squall.
With that said, hmm. FF8 is definitely angling for a special kind of 'political verisimilitude in a fantasy context' with its worldbuilding, focusing on consistent political agendas, wars waged for both foreign and domestic objectives, introducing deterrence as a concept, a brutal depiction of a dictatorship's censorship regime, even as it's set against the tantalizing fantasy backdrop of a "Second Sorceress's War"…
Of course we don't know how true any of it is, since we're seeing the perspective of Timber independentists here. Still, the path of 'elected President following a war, uses a quick military victory over a lesser power to shore up popularity at home and start securing power as a dictator, eventually see popularity decline as the crackdown on dissidents intensifies' makes sense. It's a coherent historical line for a modern country to take. The 'long range missiles' could be an elusive way of referring to nukes, or literally just conventional ballistic missiles that are able to operate despite the worldwide interference wave.
So it looks like, at least for the time being, Vinzer Deling, president and dictator of Galbadia, is our main antagonist. If Gestahl and President Shinra are any indication, this won't last.
It's interesting how FFVIII is possibly the closest we've gotten to like... an actual modern-day, "realistic" setting of Final Fantasy as of yet. FFVII had things like Shinra and Midgar baked into the setting, but there's bits and pieces of FFVIII that feel like they could be picked up right out of our world.
I mean then you throw in superpowered child soldiers and monsters, but hey, can't win them all.
As for the president, obviously he's just a sorceress in disguise and will still be our main villain!
That said, the plan of like, sneaking train cars in and out of order, as a plan, is insane. We all realize that, right? This is a plan that could be defeated by the people on board of the target literally just looking out the window. It's going to be executed with enough flair that I don't mind too much, but it's genuinely a baffling concept. Yeah, sure, no one is going to notice when you unhook cars and hook them back together while they're inside.
Okay, Deling really doesn't like company; he's sitting alone in his luxury car, and when the guard approaches to make his mandatory "no sign of trouble" report, Deling snaps at him and the man bemoans that he's definitely about to have his pay docked and wonders how he's going to be able to propose to his girlfriend now.
Nice of the game to establish before the switch that yes, actually, that Deling dummy the Owls built is 100% going to work because being a snippy asshole is already completely on point for his personality.
…okay, I was expecting a mandatory fight, but a game over over this seems a little excessive. Now we have to reload from Rinoa's base and do the whole sequence again. But at least this time I have a better handle on what's going on; we just need to take the necessary time to enter the codes properly, climb up from the code panel when guards approach, rinse and repeat. Once we have that process down, it's smooth sailing; even the time limit is basically nothing.
...Did you select the second option? Because going "ah naw it's nothing" should just reset the code entry part, and iirc you even get infinite retries. The only reason getting caught matters or doesn't is because if you manage to do the entire mission without getting seen, you get +1 SeeD rank for free (and if you screw it up either 10 or 20+ times, can't recall which, you lose a SeeD rank).
I love this game's FMVs so much. They're so dynamic, so intricate, so pretty. Those trains look absolutely gorgeous, and the sequence that plays as they unhook and the Owls' train sneaks in is just, fantastic stuff.
FFVIII has a lot more FMVs than FFVII so far, doesn't it? Like I seem to recall the FMVs in the first chunk of the game starting to drop off post-Midgar, but FFVIII is still manging to chuck them in all over the place for things like quick setpieces.
That poor soldier from earlier is back to give his report to the President. This time though, 'Deling' doesn't seem angry. He's just about to slip away with a sigh of relief when an officer barges in, asking what's going on (probably because of the noise and rumbling of the track switches), which prompts the Dummy President to spout his angry recorded line, which causes the soldier to despair - that's two paychecks certainly docked now: no ring, and no candlelight dinner! Is he ever going to get married?
Luckily, if you're playing a low level run like me, you'll run from any fights with Galbadia Soldiers, so he's probably alive and fine in my save file!
You uh, are going to run from all fights to spare this poor guy, right Omi?
Setting aside his unnatural posture, our closer look at 'Deling' is interesting - as a body double, we can assume that his appearance is identical to the real President's, and that appearance is almost obnoxiously generic. This could be literally any US politician in the 90s, it's refined almost to an art.
Gerogero, an undead monstrosity, its hideous body twisted and deformed.
…
This is is the first time we've seen monsters actively employed by humans in this setting. So far, they have exclusively been encountered in the form of hostile wildlife. So that the first we see of it is the imperial power of Galbadia using a fully sapient shapeshifting undead horror to secretly impersonate their president as part of a rebel trap has… Somewhat sinister implications.
That melting and emerging bit is absolutely top notch, by the way. It's great going from FFVII's combat models where half of them look like "and then we slapped a bunch of polygons together" to FFVIII's animations and the like that feel at least somewhat more real.
As for Gerogero itself, I'd say if you don't know about the whole "heal the undead" thing, this might actually be the first difficult boss fight in the game if you ignore the optional Diablos? The status effect spam can absolutely ruin an unprepared party, especially if this early on you went "what is item why need item", and you're probably lacking a lot of status effect magic to junction for status resistances.
But of course, if you do know what you're doing this is an option lmao
I used Cura myself because the lack of Life spells this early on means I want to ration my Phoenix Downs just in case, but either way once you're done grabbing whatever Draws you wanted GeroGero goes down like a chunk with healing access.
He's a dictator, of course, so some degree of megalomania is expected, but I still doubt this is about announcing the release of his new book. I'm actually curious, now.
The SeeDs aren't, though. In fact, they don't give a shit about of that, as far as they're concerned their job is done. Selphie asks Squall if they can just go home now while Zell is just in disbelief at the Owls' lackadaisical approach to rebellion. When we talk to Rinoa again, she starts talking about how they have a plan and Squall asks if he can see their contract first, very obviously in hope that he can tell her 'nope, we were good for one mission, you're on your own now.'
Incredible. We were all expecting Balamb Garden to pull some shady shit like they did in Dollet, withdrawing SeeD at the last minute to maximize conflict potential or something. What I wasn't expecting was for Squall, Selphie and Zell to be the one to go 'these weirdos are cringe, we need to bail.' Our protagonists, everybody. I guess I can't blame them for soaking up the culture of BGU and repeating the same behavior their teacher tries to inculcate in them, but it's hardly heroic.
To be fair, if I were in Squall's position watching the Owl's be what feels like a backyard clubhouse of "hey guys we should try one of them rebellion things!" I would absolutely be wanting to get off that train and head back to Balamb. Unfortunately for Squall...
Cid is genuinely as much of a doddering nice guy principal as he looks and the moment Rinoa talked to him in person he fell in love with her cause and made a ridiculous grand gesture that Garden Faculty couldn't stop him from taking, purely because he liked the cut of Rinoa's jib.
All of this is is part of the Moonspiracy and he's effectively using Squall, Zell and Selphie as sleeper assets because he trusts that in the process of fighting for the Timber resistance they will unwittingly (or by being contacted at the appropriate time) fulfill his actual goal for this operation.
If I were Rinoa, I'd be genuinely worried about option 2, just because this is way too good to be true. But I don't get the impression this is her style - our girl here doesn't seem like the suspicious type.
Part of me thinks Cid just plain underestimated what might be necessary to free Timber. So... I guess chalk me up for option 1 but Rinoa really sold how well the Owls could pull this off.
Our next mission: To head to the TV Station and hijack the broadcast. And for the first time now, Rinoa is playable as a member of the party.
…
How, though?
It was obvious that Rinoa was going to be playable from her role in the OP, let alone the fact that we literally got a Limit Break tutorial for her dog earlier. But so far, the game has been consistent in who gets to be a party member: SeeDs and SeeD students who trained at Balamb Garden and learned to junction GFs. So why can Rinoa join the group? How does she know how to junction GFs? Because she absolutely can - her mechanics work the same as everyone else's.
More importantly, when did she meet Seifer I wonder? Presumably he's been here in Galbadia rather than Rinoa being at the battleKid school. Or maybe she was there and left?
This is something I either don't know or forgot and am genuinely very curious about, because wouldn't Rinoa and Seifer... have spent most of their time on separate continents? In a world where inter-continental communications are fairly lackluster? How do they even know each other, to the point that Rinoa is apparently familiar with Seifer?
Game doing another switch with expected archetypes like with Seifer before. Selphie is excitable and earnest, so you expect her to be the innocent member of the team, but no, her first impulse is 'We should just murder this guy'
Child Soldiers, to be fair. For all her happy genki girl appearance, Selphie was still right there with the party in Dollet going "OH BOY LET'S SMASH SOME SOLDIER SKULLS" with a pair of nunchuk thingies.
You know, after seventeen years and all, even if the Dollet Tower could send a Radio broadcast world wide, considering that the President had to go to an entirely different country with an ...active? rebellion in order to send out his broadcast in the first place...who else out there can even still receive Radio signals?
you know, I wonder if there was a disconnect between the team that animated the FMVs and the team that was writing the script for the game's dialogue. In the FMV we saw of Squall and Rinoa dancing, he was pointedly a terrible dancer at first who needed her to actively guide him and show him to move, after which he caught the gist of it. But here, Rinoa compliments Squall on his dancing, and he plays it off by saying it's part of SeeD training in a variety of skills useful in subterfuge, like approaching a target inconspicuously at a party. Those seem to directly contradict one another.
It's probably a staff miscommunication, but I like to think Rinoa was just trying to be nice and Squall didn't have the social skills to do anything but take the compliment at face value and assume that the dance classes he got years ago and failed to keep in practice with must have made him an expert.
I forget what the character body language is like here, but Squall's line in Japanese has an extra "Hm?" at the end, implied to be a sort of intimidating Yakuza-esque "are you, a man asking for my help, telling me that you intend to waste my talents with running errands? Hm? Are you?"
Usually characters who do that take a step forward for more intimidation, intruding on the other person's personal space. Not sure if this is something Squall would do, since it's a bit out of character for him, but it's probably also taught in Garden's "how to negotiate and influence people" classes.
Zell: "Oh… I thought some kid made it. The paint job sucks, too." Squall, internally: "(...? Yeah… It kind of does.)" Rinoa: "Oh, shut up! I made it look like that on purpose. It represents my hatred towards Deling."
The English translation is missing a few ellipses in Rinoa's claimed justification. It's clearly implied that Rinoa is coming up with this justification on the spot.
…I think the trick where Deling's mannerisms starts distorting is the first time I was ever exposed to 'alternate capital letters and small letters to suggest that the person's voice is breaking and going up and down in pitch' trick in fiction, which now seems really common. It definitely made an impression. It makes me wonder what the first historical use of that trick was, though; these days I associate it more with online amateur fiction or comic lettering than published prose.
In Japanese it's done by replacing various hiragana (ie "natural Japanese") with katakana (ie "loanwords transliterated"). When done entirely in katakana, it's supposed to sound artificial and robotic, and mixing it into otherwise "normal" speech also results in the unsettling sense that the voice is distorted.
I'm also curious how this became common, in both Japanese and English, or at least languages using the Latin alphabet. I assume it's likely from some form of speculative fiction, because it would be very odd for a character to speak so unnaturally outside of speculative fiction.
I admit to being slightly disappointed in the Japanese script when I learned Selphie's line here is a fairly straightforward "Everyone around the world, let's be friends with each other!", rather than an over-the-top English "RAAABU ANDO PIIIIISU".
The Dollet radio tower is powerful enough (see those multiple smaller dishes and this giant jet-mounted mega-dish) to handle at least one worldwide broadcast even over the worldwide radio wave interference, and the Timber TV Station is the only TV station currently setup to handle radio broadcast, ironically because it's old and obsolete.
Obvious question of who even has the equipment to receive the radio broadcasts, seventeen years after they stopped working entirely. Especially since it's implied everyone has switched to HD cables (explicitly named "H.D. cables" in the Japanese script, if anyone was wondering) since then, including fairly advanced-looking infrastructure that has to be HD cables only.
The SeeDs aren't, though. In fact, they don't give a shit about of that, as far as they're concerned their job is done. Selphie asks Squall if they can just go home now while Zell is just in disbelief at the Owls' lackadaisical approach to rebellion. When we talk to Rinoa again, she starts talking about how they have a plan and Squall asks if he can see their contract first, very obviously in hope that he can tell her 'nope, we were good for one mission, you're on your own now.'
Yeah, Selphie asking if they can go home can be interpreted in a couple of ways, with quite a bit of overlap. There's the obvious one, which is how Selphie the SeeD, like Zell and Squall, is seeing this absolute amateur hour and wishing that they could just go home already.
There's also the "slightly oblivious Selphie" interpretation, where Selphie had been expecting from the start that it was just one mission op, and the train heist was it. She's asking Squall, as the squad leader, to confirm when they're supposed to be done with this mission. The Japanese script can be read both ways equally well.
Personally I think it really is a mix of both: Selphie thought the train heist counted as "the mission", as in assisting the Forest Owls with one (1) operation. And after seeing how the Forest Owls were very much not an experienced resistance group, that desire to go home and forget about all this became strong enough for her to prompt Squall to ask about the contract.
I like how this does surprise both the SeeDs and likely the player, simply due to how the game has presented SeeD missions thus far. The big example prior was the Dollet mission, which was very military and precise, with Xu's briefing and clear instructions. And it was one and done; once the order came to withdraw, that was it, and upon withdrawal the contract was over. None of this being stuck for an indeterminate amount of time on vague orders and unprofessional superiors.
They did manage to take a nice nap on train en route.
Although the timeline doesn't make sense, by my reckoning. If we take the beginning of the game when Squall wakes up in the infirmary as Day 1, he went to the Fire Cavern that day. Then at dawn of Day 2, SeeD lands on Dollet's Ruputan Beach; given the preparations and briefings beforehand, they likely would have set out on the day before, ie Day 1 afternoon or so. When we see the squads drive to Balamb and set off on the landing boats, it's bright and sunny, and when we see the cutscene of the landing, it's dramatically set to the moon's backdrop, with the sun being just above the horizon.
For most of Day 2, Squall and co. hang around the town square, up until Seifer gets bored and rushes the communications tower. This is probably in the afternoon, if not late afternoon. The communications tower battle happens, the tower is activated, and Selphie finally recalls her message to withdraw to the beach. Which means SeeD withdraws from Dollet at 1900h on Day 2. We see this in the cutscene with the boats sailing away into the setting sun.
So we have the concrete timestamp of the activation of the Dollet communications tower by Galbadia on Day 2 afternoon. We, including both players and Squall, see this happen, so there's no chance for confusion.
When we return to Balamb after the Dollet mission, it's bright and sunny. Now, this might be plausible in isolation due to the travel time between Dollet and Balamb via assault landing craft, since it apparently took at least one night to go from Balamb to Dollet. But that means it's already Day 3.
After an unspecified amount of "free time" on Day 3, Squall and co. return to Balamb Garden, where they receive their exam results, and the immediate investment ceremony with Cid giving his personalized advice. On Day 3 evening and night, there's the SeeD ball, and then Quistis orders Squall to the secret meeting spot.
The next day, ie Day 4, the new SeeDs start off in the morning (with Zell almost oversleeping), get on the train, get the shared dream of Laguna, arrive in Timber, meet the Forest Owls, plan out the train heist, execute the train heist, and defeat the body double, and it's apparently not even evening yet. And if you've been following along, that makes this Day 4, while the communications tower was activated on Day 2, ie not "yesterday".
The only way I can reconcile this is pretending that the Dollet mission and the SeeD ball happened on the same day. Which means the withdrawal from Dollet at 1900h, complete with red sunset backdrop, and the relaxing evening ball all happened in at most a few hours between them. Which is a lot of Garden administration to handle in those few hours, including the immediate investment ceremony. And the "bright and sunny" parts are due to the inability of the game engine to do a night sky for in-engine scenes.
This is deeply unrealistic, so I'm much more inclined to believe the word "yesterday" is the error. It's also the same in the Japanese script (昨日), when I think "the day before" (前日) would solve all these timeline problems.
Honestly I'm still thinking it's 2. Like, if it was just 'SeeD deployment will last until Timber achieves independence' by itself would lend some credence to Cid just having a giga-simp moment. But 'no replacements of any SeeD members can be made'? That means that this otherwise do-anything contract specifically disallows the Timber Owls from swapping out Squall, Selphie and Zell for any reason. That's insanely sus. It feels more likely that, for whatever reason I couldn't possibly guess at, Cid specifically wants to keep those three hard stuck in Timber for the next however-long.
Speculation for if Cid is both good and competent: Clearly, Cid is entangling them into a minor hotspot in order to protect them (as relative unknowns with high potential) from some tragedy that's going to wipe out Balamb Garden. Quistis will be perhaps the only survivor (she's clearly still going to be associated with the faction even if she's no longer a teacher) and that's how she'll rejoin the party; I like to think that generic graduate #4 will play some critical part in helping her escape. Seifer obviously can't die yet, but it's a toss-up between him 1. escaping with Quistis but then running off to do his own thing, and 2. being apparently dead but actually captured by the enemy and encountered during the late game, possibly providing some critical intelligence and/or saying "thank you for killing me"?
…I think the trick where Deling's mannerisms starts distorting is the first time I was ever exposed to 'alternate capital letters and small letters to suggest that the person's voice is breaking and going up and down in pitch' trick in fiction, which now seems really common. It definitely made an impression. It makes me wonder what the first historical use of that trick was, though; these days I associate it more with online amateur fiction or comic lettering than published prose.
Cid is genuinely as much of a doddering nice guy principal as he looks and the moment Rinoa talked to him in person he fell in love with her cause and made a ridiculous grand gesture that Garden Faculty couldn't stop him from taking, purely because he liked the cut of Rinoa's jib.
All of this is is part of the Moonspiracy and he's effectively using Squall, Zell and Selphie as sleeper assets because he trusts that in the process of fighting for the Timber resistance they will unwittingly (or by being contacted at the appropriate time) fulfill his actual goal for this operation.
Watts in Japanese has the verbal tic of ending sentences with "-ssu" (ッス), which is a kind of quirky slurring of the usual "desu". This is fairly common for a wide variety of characters, to the point where there's not really a common archetype other than "casual".
English translations tend to append some sort of extra word at the end, but that word varies greatly. Here, Watts ends his sentences with "sir". In Disgaea, the Prinnies also use "-ssu", and the English translation uses "dood". Ace Attorney's Detective Gumshoe often uses "-ssu", but less often than many other examples, and there it's translated as "pal".
FFXIV also has a "-ssu" user in Wedge, the Lalafell Ironworks engineer, but the English translation ignores that speech tic entirely, so that's also a translation option.
With one exception: 'On the day before the invasion, there was an all out hunt for resistance members.' That is not a sentence which makes sense to me. Why would there be a resistance while Timber hadn't been invaded yet? How would Galbadia be hunting for resistance members on territory it hasn't conquered yet? It seems pretty obvious this should be 'after,' ie describing events that directly followed the conquest. Probably a translation error.
Watts and Zone's fathers were members of Timber GLADIO and were liquidated by Galbadian spetznas, who had already compromised the Owls, in a special operation prior to the ground invasion.
