Update: I ran into several traveling delays. I am currently in Paris, with family, and can't go home for a few days. It is a delightful time to be sure, but I can neither play FFVIII
nor FF7R2 while I'm here. This also means my self-imposed ban from Twitter, which I am pretty sure must be drowning in Rebirth spoilers right now, continues. The pain, it is tremendous.
What's that rumbling I hear in the distance? The entire Step On Me Caucus descending en masse on the thread? Pack up your valuables, folks; we're in for a siege.
We will not be silenced.
Narrative wise... what is there to say about a cliffhanger, in a medium where cliffhangers don't really work because outside rare exceptions, you can continue playing to find out what happens? It's a dramatic as fuck climax, but you can put that disc 2 in whenever you want. The second part isn't coming out in 4 years, and even back in 1998 there wasn't any delay. I think I won't comment on this part much.
I think the Disc split actually helps in this regard.
Something I've often thought about in previous FF games is how cliffhangers don't work because you always have to continue playing until you hit the save point. In this thread, I've often had to essentially create cliffhangers myself by cutting off an update at the cliffhanger point rather than the next save point just because tracking on three paragraphs of "anyway after this powerful emotional experience we fight some random encounters and get some incidental dialogue and then hit a save point" makes me feel like a bad storyteller.
The PSX disc splits, though,
do create actual cliffhangers, because they ask you to save after the big FMV instead of following up immediately with post-cliffhanger dialogue and gameplay; and at least in the PSX version you get that big "INSERT DISC 2" splash screen which creates a delay.
Sure, you can just slot in the next disc, but like... That's the same thing as pressing "Next Episode" on Netflix, it doesn't invalidate the narrative concept of a cliffhanger.
Like, here, I didn't just go on to Disc 2. It was 2am so I just turned off the emulator and went to bed unsure what the future of the game held. It works!
Also I guess I can infer Omi's opinion of Lady Dimitrescu.
Side note but as a bit of marketing history it's kind of fascinating to me how Lady Dimitrescu was front and center in the trailers and promotional material for REVIII only for her to turn out to be the Disc 1 Boss of the game, the first one of a coterie of Evil BOW Anime Generals to be defeated. It's an interesting trick and I wonder to what extent it was intentionally capitalising on the Step On Me appeal factor
before the fans actually turned the character into a meme.
Resident Evil VIII was really good btw.
"Take my best sharpshooter for this mission!"
"I always choke!"
okay.
I
did wonder if we were meant to read this as Martine setting us up to fail, but I just... Don't really see the in-character logic for it here. If he just wanted to ally with the Sorceress there are plenty of other ways he could have been going about it. It's curious.
Yeah, this whole sequence was pretty weird, and the way I could make it make sense in my own head was that Edea didn't have the mic on? Like, the president motioned for her to come forward, and that whole spiel was her taking a moment to just be contemptuous of the crowd before moving on with her actual speech. Except then I guess Deling checking in with her made her decide to just pull the trigger on her takeover right there.
I considered the "Edea is just talking to herself while looking at the crowd who have no idea what's going on" possibility, but Squall actually reacts to her speech (admittedly said reaction is "(...?)") so it seems like he at least can hear her clearly.
So, on the current playthrough I'm going along with the thread, I'm shuffling junctions around like you. When I played through all this as a kid? I had all the junctions spread out among party members, one GF each which I now see is crazy inefficient but at the very least, meant that this section flowed okay? I'm wondering if that was the intended playstyle.
It's definitely an interesting approach to consider, although it runs into the problem that I'm just not going to be constantly rotating my party to keep them leveled up because come on, fuck that, so it'd leave some of those GFs basically unused.
People have surely explained what Aura does already but people who post that aren't me aren't real, so here's something amusing from the wiki;
You were actually the first, so congrats!
Okay but genuinely what are Quistis, Zell and Selphie supposed to be doing after they've pulled the gate lock. Do they run away? Sit and play with themselves? Why did the plan just not talk about what they do after their objective??
It's kind of incredibly conspicuous, right? You'd expect them to get down and come help at some point, there's no way it took
longer for Rinoa and Irvine to get down from the clocktower and run through the crowd to the gateway than it would the Quistis team to join in.
I genuinely remembered this as being Squall and Irvine just leaping up the boxes in comparison to Rinoa because trained supersoldiers in comparison to semi-civilan girl... but nope, apparently boxes too stronk.
It's funny you'd say that; I was fully expecting that to be the case, and actually kind of disappointed when it turned out that they just have the same laborious box climbing animations.
To be fair, both Iguions also have Esuna in their draw list so that's an option to counteract Petrification. Apparently Esuna cures all status effects in this game, dunno if it countered petrification in previous games.
But does it cure petrification that hasn't happened yet and is still on a countdown?
It looks like the original picture is Zell, Irvine and Squall having lunch together, right? Except, Zell and Irvine are both wearing their civilan clothes... But Squall is wearing
his dress uniform.
To a cafeteria lunch.
What a fucking showoff.
It is kind of funny that this game takes "you just fukkin' lose in the cutscene" and turned around and gave that to Selphie as a special move. Probably the least-satisfying way to win a fight in a video game I've ever experienced, just a random-slots "never mind, you win"
Although now that I think about it, it feels strangely under-cooked that Selphie didn't have sorta, a little minigame for her Limit? Squall has his little proto-Quicktime Event, Zell has his little fighting game combos, it seems weird that Selphie didn't get a rehash of like, Tifa's little slot machine thing.
I mean, Selphie has probably the most intense minigame of them all, because it's not self-contained: You can roll for a new spell indefinitely, except the whole time enemies are getting free turns, so it's actually a pretty tense thing to be doing in any fight that's actually challenging. The time you spend getting that Thundara x3 could have been spent actually casting three spells on your own.
- So, the Sorceress' speech in Italian goes like this:
"Disgusting, empy-headed creatures... From time immemorial, I've lived in your fantasies, silly fantasies you came up with. The witch who kills you men in cruel sacrifices, who burns your fields with merciless magic. Fools. When you heard the Sorceress would protect Galbadia, you breathed a sigh of relief, didn't you? Who doesn't dream of such a witch, a mirror for your fantasies? (Deling gets murdered). But reality is cruel; the truth is cruel. Therefore, foolish men, if this is what you wish for, take refuge in your fantasies! I shall be dancing there, and be the terrible witch you all asked for! You and me, together in a cruel fantasy, where life and death are one and the same. An eternal Sorceress and an eternal fantasy, forever living in Galbadia's dreams! And as in your dreams, the sorceress requires an offer, a cruel sacrifice."
My immediate reaction to this is that it's
way too many repetitions of 'fantasy.' Use synonyms, egads.
The differences between the various scripts' rendering of the Sorceress's speech and what they choose to focus on are definitely interesting though, for sure.
Anyway, speaking of the mind-control, I've always had the headcanon that, rather than straight up mind-control, her ability is more akin to the D&D "fascinated" condition, when a target will focus all their attention on whatever they're fascinated by and, if that focus of attention is a person, be very suggestible to anything they say, but direct and impending physical arm (such as the Iguions attacking Rinoa), or beginning an encounter while already hostile to the source of the effect (such as the SeeD would be in an assassination mission, but which Seifer would not have been when they first met) would prevent the effect from working. This allows the scene to mostly work like we see, with the Sorceress being able to fascinate a large crowd so long as all of the threats is merely in her words, but being unable to mind-control the SeeD into not fighting her once the battle starts.
I think the Sorceress's direct, personal mind control which puts someone in a trance and has them completely susceptible to her orders is a different kind of mind control than the more wide spread, subtle mind control she uses over the crowd - my read at this stage is that the Sorceress can have the crowd fail to see the threat in her words and cheer in love of her and ignore her murdering someone in front of their eyes, but if she said "Now all of you jump and turn on one foot," they wouldn't actually do that, because she's using more of an influence than a direct 'obey my specific orders' kind of control.
So, if you are correct in that assessment, that would make FFVIII be forty-eight updates long (since Disk 1 is currently twelve); that would be more than FFVII had. On the other hand, the first twelve updates of FFVII comprised 97.5 k words; the first twelve updates of FFVIII currently total up to 83 k words, nearly fifteen thousands less. That would mean that, if your prediction proves correct, FFVIII entire would end up being 332k words, just about fifteen thousand words longer than FFVII was. Would you say that, from what you've seen of the game to this point, that seems fair to you? I'd honestly be curious about any prediction you have to do about FFVIII in general at this point, not just its length, but it seems like as good a place as any to start speculating from.
I think it's more likely that FFVIII will be shorter than FFVII in terms of game time. The sheer volume of FMVs, combined with the complexity of the mechanics, make me suspect that the actual narrative portion of the game will be shorter, even with more disc space due to 4 discs instead of 3, simply because of gamedev time constraints.
