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Turns out most of the world was in an uneasy truce based on countering the Evil Demon King and the moment he falls they all start squabbling over boarders and who invaded who, and who gets to annex the Demon King military forts.
Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Playing: Final Fantasy IX]
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Turns out most of the world was in an uneasy truce based on countering the Evil Demon King and the moment he falls they all start squabbling over boarders and who invaded who, and who gets to annex the Demon King military forts.
Like Game of thrones?
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
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- Bright lights, big city
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Congratulations you have invented post-WW2 Europe from first principles
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- Not your place of residence
I thought it was because it was a critically acclaimed MMORPG with an expanded free trial in which you can play through the entirety of A Realm Reborn and the award-winning Heavensward expansion up to level 60 for free with no restrictions on playtime.
GilliamYaeger
M'crazy.
Have you heard of the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV? With an expanded free trial which you can play through the entirety of A Realm Reborn and the award-winning Heavensward expansion and also the award-winning Stormblood expansion up to level 70 for free with no restrictions on playtime!
Kadmus
Dragon's teeth are surprisingly hard to sow
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- Devon
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It would definitely be interesting - and a huge swing compared to their usual fare - if an FF game went 'okay, hour ten, you've got the Demon King's head on a pike. let's start the real story'. (And have it not be 'now go kill the bigger bosser Ultra Demon Emperor II' or 'and now there's some time travel weirdness and the final boss is the first boss too' because FFI did that second one already, and the first is a bit of a staple so far.)
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Chrono Trigger's execution of this is interesting in that at first your goals are extremely limited but you sort of 'it seemed like a good idea at the time' move from 'go to local festival' to 'date' to 'fix temporal paradox' to 'stop the apocalypse'.
On the other hand, the Phantasy Star series generally lead with a fairly high-stakes conflict that is directly tied to the endgame - revenge for your brother's murder, weather control breaking down, financee kidnapped, monster hordes + evil wizard attack - so they operate in that register right from jump.
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GilliamYaeger
M'crazy.
That is literally Heavensward. You go from the big climactic fight with the big bads of the expansion atop the floating continent to spending a full IRL year's worth of content trying to rebuild Ishgard, reform a corrupt church, and broker a peace between former enemies to end a full-blown race war once and for all.
And this part of the story is widely regarded as far and away the best part of it.
And the same thing happens with Stormblood!
It is, after all, an award-winning expansion you can play for free up to level 60 with no restrictions on playtime.
What weird cursed contract have the Final Fantasy XIV players been forced to sign that makes them to advertise at every given chance
Ah a most cursed contract indeed
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On re-read, I think that while NORG was previously explaining actions that lead to Squall getting iced in disk 1, but this line here NORG is talking about Cid's actions more recently in Balamb.
So while the civil war was brewing/starting, Cid just told most of the SeeDs to GTFO, leaving a skeleton crew that ended up being the core of his loyalists that Xu then general-custard'D into splitting up into.. seven? Different forces that seemed to be stalemating the monsters and student-defectors. I guess the inverse ninja law is in-universe known to tacticians?
So now that the story has caught up to the 'very recent past' rather then the 'last disc past', NORG is fucking pissed that Cid is doing something as crazy as trying to Kill the sorceress rather then give up himself and the SeeDs to save NORG's hide.
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- SV's Only Complete Persona Quest
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My first thought was this is kinda what happened in The Hobbit
And I suspect a chunk of the problem is that setting up a sense of complex geopolitics is really cool and gets readers really interested and engaged... but actually resolving the problems you set up is messy and complicated and likely to be less satisfying than "yeah, we totally owned that demon lord we're so cool".
Fun fact: when I played this as a kid there was a scratch in the disk that prevented the cutscene with the boat leaving from ever ending, so my last memory of this game is learning that the whole thing is just Robin Williams having a messy divorce with his wife.
In retrospect, considering how that's exactly what was going on in my own family at the time (minus Robin Williams and supersoldier mercenaries) it might explain some of my disdain for VIII.
In retrospect, considering how that's exactly what was going on in my own family at the time (minus Robin Williams and supersoldier mercenaries) it might explain some of my disdain for VIII.
Thozmp
Gets my kicks above the waistline, Sunshine.
It probably doesn't help that there's no real resolution to complex geopolitics which kind of clashes with the need for the game to have an ending.
Can you imagine the sheer frustration that comes from, "we haven't actually managed a solution to... almost anything, but we've run out of disc space, so uh... the end?"
E.I.G.
Robo-Bird
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... no, seriously, what was up with this-
Did you rent the game? Because now I cannot help but wonder if it is a common place for the thing to get scratched, or if that rental copy just had a lot of people try it and get stuck there.
At a guess, the reason so many of these Final Fantasy stories go "and then there was a disk scratch so the game always crashed on this one cutscene" is because as was established back during the FFVII playthrough, the actual games themselves outside of the big fancy FMVs? Not all that big, don't take up much space on the disc, to the point that sometimes literally the entire game is on all of the discs (minus said FMVs).
So, by the process of "random bullshittery I don't know what I'm talking about", I'd guess that disc scratches will disproportionately run into FMVs most of the time instead of actual gameplay bits, since that's what's actually on most of the disc, and cause those to crash.
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- Brittany, France
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The salary system really invites a lot of baffling questions about how it actually works. Especially because one of the defining features of this setting is lack of long-range communications. How many random townsfolks are secretly SeeDs in disguise monitoring Squall to make sure he keeps up the SeeD code???
One thing that surprised me is how frequent that salary is. I keep getting the payout popup during other scenes. I probably made 30k gil just in this Balamb Garden sequence despite only getting in one fight, which I did partly to keep my rank from dropping.
Not that it matters. As I've noted before, even at a fairly low rank, you just accumulate far, far more money than you have stuff to spend it on.
It's another of those things where FF8 tries to do multiple bold new things at once and they intersect in weird ways. In a vacuum, the salary system is a really novel and cool experiment, but it's also set in the game where the introduce crafting your weapons instead of upgrades at shops that scale in cost and where the Item command is one you can ditch for more power, so there's virtually nothing to spend money on. I basically just buy stocks of potions to heal between fights and that's all; for status effects I have Treatment.
My understanding is that NORG ordered Martine to assassinate Edea using his own mercenaries so as to provide cover for Balamb Garden and NORG, Martine agreed that Edea needed taking out but wanted to deflect blame, and lied to Squall and the others that they had been the ones ordered to perform the assassination so that blame (and missiles) would fall on Balamb instead.
The line "That idiot Cid dispatched SeeDs to kill the Sorceress" complicates this by not making any sense in context, but I think that one is genuinely just a translation mistake. I checked the FR version quickly, and in that translation, that line is instead "SeeDs are answering to Kramer, that traitor!" ie he's complaining that SeeDs are showing loyalty to Cid rather than him.
If you kill that line, then suddenly he's just saying this in a somewhat unclear way, rather than outright contradicting himself.
Also random fun fact I found out looking for this: In French, Edea is not referred to as a "sorceress," but, of all things, as a priestess. Which is weird considering she has yet to show any kind of religious inclination!
The crunchy PSX models have their own issue, but a lot of the time when looking at Remastered footage it's like, the action is much clearer but it comes at the cost of the characters visibly existing on a separate layer from the world they're inhabiting, which is more of a long-term damage to my immersion in the game.
I will make a confession: I presented it that way to engineer a cutaway gag. In truth, there are a few lines between that reveal and the fight, though they're not all that important. They go:
NORG: "IS-IT-CID-AND-EDEA'S? THAT-PATHETIC-MARRIED-COUPLE?"
Squall: "What...?"
Squall, mentally: "(The Headmaster and Edea are married!?)"
Squall, mentally: "(...I don't get it.)"
NORG: "Bushurururu... NOW-I-UNDERSTAND. CID-AND-EDEA-ARE-TRYING-TO-TAKE-GARDEN-AWAY-FROM-ME. YOU'RE-ONE-OF-CID'S-FOLLOWERS-AREN'T-YOU!? PREPARE-TO-DIE!"
Rinoa: "Squall!"
[Combat begins.]
...that is not a comparison I would have thought of, and I am scared by how much sense it makes.
That's really fascinating. Like, I was already aware of Cloud's deal to an extent because he's the protagonist of one of the most popular games of all time, and I saw him in Advent Children years before I played FF7, but I have absolutely zero awareness of Squall's character in outside appearances beyond what's been said in the thread. I'll have to look up his Dissidia appearances once I'm done with the game.
when will the government stop your sinful hand
I just think Edea is probably lonely after their divorce and I am, out of nothing but a sense of duty and human kindness, volunteering to be her rebound.
You're right, I had completely forgotten about that early plot beat. It definitely suggests that Cid wanted to place SeeDs on the ground where they could make contact with Galbadia and see the influence of the sorceress for themselves.
He might have been better off telling them that, but it's clear that Cid operates on a philosophy of 'SeeDs have to experience the world and awaken to their true purpose over time rather than being told what to do' so it makes sense he wanted Squall and the others to encounter Edea and get an impression of her on their own.
Which, considering that it cost the Garden Seifer, one of their best fighters, was probably a bad call... But then again Seifer's dream was to be the Sorceress's Knight so he was most likely going to defect anyway at some point.
Exalted does have a bunch of magical schools that are known to produce superpowered warriors with elemental-based powers...
No gunblades, though.
But yeah. "SeeDs as a Wyld Hunt with Sorceresses as Solar Exalts" makes a disturbing amount of sense.
Eeeh, I don't really think so. The game doesn't really seem to think of Cid as not a heroic figure, just as someone who was naive and let himself be tricked and his work subverted.
Like, right now, we have no evidence that Cid himself is particularly interested in "brainwashing children," he seems to just want to be raising elite super soldiers with a fundamentally positive motivation, he actually values their personal growth, and he set them up to fight the sorceress seemingly mostly because the sorceress is the world's Big Bad.
Like we may learn further details about Cid that make him a sinister figure again in the future, especially surrounding his decision to make use of the memory-altering GFs as a power source, but right now no, he is unambiguously an idealistic good guy figure.
No, that one I think is entirely down to Squall just not bothering to register people's existence unless he has to for his job. He's just extremely bad at that kind of routine socializing.
As someone who was highly confused by a plot point in Dune: Part Two because I literally couldn't tell two blond actresses apart and thought they were the same character, I can absolutely relate.
It's getting to be a bit of a trend, isn't it?
It's interesting because it's very clearly correlated to the writers improving in skill and creativity and wanting to tell more complex, layered stories about flawed worlds, and then doing that thing around midway through. It started with IV, where the set-up of Cecil's loyalty to King Baron and the king's turn to wickedness is eventually made a lot less interesting when it turns out the king was replaced by a fake and the main villain was mind control, then V dodges that problem by having its environmental metaphor smoothly transition from the crystal amplifier machines to the living manifestation of letting toxic waste pile up for decades and pretending it's not a problem but not having any of the complex and layered politics. Then VI has this extremely brutal genre shift at the midway mark where the fascist magitek empire gets blown up completely off-screen and the Emperor is replaced by an evil clown god, and VII, well, we've talked extensively about the shift represented by the Shinra/Sephiroth transition.
At this point it's pretty thoroughly settled as a thing this series keeps doing. And, hm.
I think in an odd way this connects back to the 'Small World' question?
The setting of FFVIII has so far obscured the scale of its world by pretty sharply constraining our movements, but the more some names recur, the more it's increasingly looking like this whole geopolitics of mercenary warfare angle, this conflict between Balamb Garden's greed and Galbadia's ambition, these battles for the conquest of nations, are all happening to, like... A half-dozen countries total? Galbadia, Balamb, Trabia, Timber, Dollet, Winhill, Esthar.
This feels like the game that least wants this overworld map of huge stretches of monster-populated desert out of all the games we've seen so far, because of how it restricts its possibility space by creative explicit vacuum instead of leaving implicit space to fill.
The 'flawed world in the grip of conflict based on interesting and believable geopolitics and competing interest' is struggling against the constraints of Final Fantasy's genre convention and gameplay design.
Makes me wonder if that's why the next game in the series has a much more fantastical world design, to move away from the problems introduced by the emphasis on a modern, 'real'-looking setting.
I see that in the time it took me to get to this post all the FFXIV players came out of the woodwork so I wouldn't have to.
It's interesting and complicated, though. FFXIV's storytelling structure is hugely determined by its nature as an MMO; a lot of stuff mentioned about 'now that the cosmic threat is dealt with, let us resolve the aftermath' is, like, left to optional sidequests that you might never play at all, because FFXIV is a game that is simply too large to be a completionist about for all but a select few.
Unfortunately, the latter has the crippling demerit of being set in Stormblood.
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- Te Ika-a-Māui
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Stormblood has some of the all time best moments in XIV, fight me.
Stormblood absolutely has good bits in it. It's just that it also has a lot of bad bits too.
E.I.G.
Robo-Bird
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You mean like all those times before now when Cid tried to say more and a nearby staff member said "hurry up old man" to him to cut him off?
NORG clearly disapproved of the true goal long before the conflict was serious:
(Admittedly that last one doesn't seem to feature an attempt from your transcript/discussion, but it is after two other times the faculty has interjected to stop him from talking so the pattern was set.)