Visual representation of the Mayor of Fisherman's Horizon walking outside his home on a sunny day before being instantly broiled alive by 10,000 mirrors because he decided to live in the center of Archimedes's Solar Death Ray:
Also I think it's Very Funny that dealing with NORG gives the impression that the Shumi are going to be some inscrutable alien race with mysterious customs. And then they're actually just otonagai addicted to Square Enix mascot merch who like to do manzai comedy routines, and NORG was just the tribe's failson outcast who got booted for buying too hard into sigmamale grindset memes and talking like a dork.
Oh, and I guess the XIV TTRPG playtest is out? I haven't read it yet though.
When I wrote my thoughts on the first half of this Let's Play, I was surprised at how far the game had gone. It felt like we were getting into the last stretch of the game, but half of the LP posts was still in the future. What twists could possibly be in store?
By volume, the biggest twist was "The last stretch of FF5 has a lot of dungeons". There was other story stuff, but not as much as I was expecting and nowhere near as much as in the first half, and it didn't really hit me in any way I feel like talking about. It would be redundant with either that prior post or Omicron's musings. And there weren't any big mechanical twists; aside from the Mime job and the trickier bosses, nothing new got introduced.
So all that leaves is contrasting the first half of the game with the second half. The second half is narratively homousian with the first; the stakes are higher, but the tone didn't change so much as shift. That's not a bad thing; the relatively lighthearted tone works for what it's trying to achieve. The gameplay, by contrast, gets muddied. Either the players get powerful enough to trivialize most encounters, or those encounters hit the player hard enough that they need to grind or something. Pick your poison.
One interesting comparison between FF5 and its immediate predecessor: They're both leery of permanent character death, just in different ways. FF4 has a bunch of fakeout Heroic Sacrifices, some of which get reversed astonishingly quickly. By contrast, pretty much everyone who seems to die in FF5 stays dead (aside from Syldra and possibly Lenna), but the dead characters keep finding ways to do stuff.
I think I like FF5's version better. It still dampens the impact of death scenes, but it's more...honest, I guess? Death is mostly meaningless, but you know ghosts can continue to mess around with the living world, so whenever that happens it's "This is happening again" instead of "Ugh, another BS non-death twist?" If I have to pick my poison, the choice seems obvious.
It would still be nice if the games were more willing to commit to character deaths, though.
Speaking of comparisons between FF5 and its immediate predecessor: I talked about how each Final Fantasy up to ~7 was a clear improvement over its predecessor. I'm less certain about that now.
From a narrative perspective, I still think FF5 accomplished its ambitions better than previous games. You could argue that it aimed lower, focusing on a relatively small cast of characters and simplifying its narrative, but I'd argue it didn't aim that much lower. The writers adjusted their goals to match the tech and resources they were working with, and they mostly achieved those goals.
And it's not like every step was a step back. The simple villain and minimal character development are disappointing, but the prior games' attempts at character arcs and nuanced villains aren't just excised; they're replaced with scenes that more clearly establish the relationship between various party members. FF5 doesn't have any individual character stories as detailed as Cecil's arc in FF4, but it establishes a better sense of the relationship between various characters than every prior Final Fantasy combined.
From a ludic perspective...at the halfway point I'd have said FF5 was undoubtedly the best. Its job system is a more refined version of 3's, where jobs go from a temporary hat to part of how you build each character. There are advantages to FF4's static jobs, but they're mostly narrative (using jobs to characterize the party) or production (the devs can better control what tools you have access to at any given point). It doesn't have any glaring flaws like FF2's magic, so I couldn't imagine that anyone would prefer a prior FF's character advancement systems over FF5's.
But there's more to a game than jobs. Most of FF5 is another refinement of Final Fantasy's version of standard JRPG combat, but things break down a bit in the end. The last set of dungeons saw Omicron complaining almost constantly about endgame balance and pacing. I don't think he did that in any previous FF game. The endgame didn't last that long for prior FF games, either—you could probably beat FF1 casually in the time it took to complete FF5's last set of dungeons.
FF5 feels like a step sideways in a way FF4, FF3, and arguably FF2 didn't. Those games had places where they were weaker than their predecessors, but also clear places where they surpassed them—narrative, progression, basic storytelling tools, etc. And I feel that the things that FF2-4 did better than their predecessors were done better enough to outweigh the things they did worse (though I recognize this is not a common opinion for FF2).
FF5, though? Its job system is better, but the endgame combat collapses under its scope. The narrative is more complete, but less ambitious. The game is bigger, there's more to do, but that means the endgame slog lasts longer. The game has different priorities, which it achieved to varying degrees, but which make a direct comparison trickier.
If I had to make a definitive statement, I think FF5 is probably better than FF4? I'd rather not, though.
Anyway, I know there are games, later in history, which would take that concept of enemies roaming the overworld and encounters only triggering when you touch them, and make them their entire 'random' encounter system. And I think that's the way to go. You either do this or normal encounter, not both of them in the same dungeon. And I think this might actually be a better design? Probably more hardware intensive.
I would not be surprised if the overworld encounters took more resources than traditional random encounters, but I suspect the big difference is that they are simply two different kinds of encounters which require different kinds of games.
A traditional JRPG (and many other kinds of RPGs) is fundamentally a resource game. Individual encounters are rarely capable of threatening your party's lives, but they drain your MP and HP, making it a little easier for the next encounter to cause Problems. Random encounters fit this model well; 250 steps at a 5% encounter rate means about a dozen encounters, with a fair amount of consistency (but not so consistent that it feels artificial). If you put a boss X distance into the dungeon, you can reasonably expect the party to expend Y resources to get there. Of course, a reckless party might spend more, but if they use high-level summons to obliterate goblins, they can probably figure out why they're running into problems later in the dungeon.
Overworld encounters (which the player can avoid) don't gel with this design. You put twenty encounters between the dungeon entrance and the boss, expecting players to avoid several while fighting most—but this makes it harder to predict player attrition. A player who discovers an exploit in overworld pathing might get to the boss with full resources and annihilate the boss by abusing spells with normally-prohibitive MP costs, while one who keeps running into every encounter might wipe before even getting to the boss. At worst, game balance becomes impossible; at worst, the player experience becomes harder to calibrate.
Look at Chrono Trigger. On one hand, it's a traditionally-designed JRPG and (quite famously) doesn't have any random encounters; enemies wander around the overworld, and you fight them there. On the other hand, there are tons of encounters you can't avoid; the enemy encounter trigger area often blocks the entire path you need to take, especially in dungeons, and the enemies might not be visible before battle (walking out from behind cover or in from the screen edge or something). The encounters aren't random, but they're arguably even more artificial for it.
In isolation, I agree that overworld encounters are better than random encounters. But they're different more than they're better; they suit different kinds of JRPGs.
That is a strange statement, and Bartz doesn't really interrogate it, just responding "You mean you'll turn it to a world full of evil!" at which point Exdeath loses interest in the conversation and decides to just do with the smiting.
This is basically how half of my family responds when I make the mistake of discussing politics with them, so I can relate to Exdeath here.
"I think that dismantling capitalism would improve the quality of life for 99% of humanity and also give us the freedom to stop climate change from destroying the world."
"You mean you'll turn it to a world full of evil!"
That is so cool. It's a neat plot twist that makes you wonder what Exdeath was setting right (and why it was set wrong to begin with), it's a good way to introduce a third world while still reusing as much of the setting as possible, it's awesome that you can accidentally figure out something's wrong before the characters do.
I wonder how Bartz feels, knowing Krile can speak to his best friend better than he can.
...
On second thought, I wonder how Boko feels, hearing this dumb ape-man calling him his best friend when he never listens to anything he says.
Doubling back quickly to check on the pirate hideout, these lads have some new dialogue complimenting Boko on the wife and kids, marveling at the news that the Captain was a princess all along - and, the most surprising of all, an origin story as to Faris's name:
…Faris is called Faris because when they found her, she had a lisp like young children often do, and so she mispronounced her name and it stuck? That's so cute.
The one thing Ghido could never do. That evil genius.
The game is listing Lenna among the lives lost???
Okay, I totally misread the vibe the game was going for. I don't believe Lenna is dead, obviously, because there isn't a secret Sixth Ranger to take her place and there is zero chance the game just wraps up on a three-people party, but I thought I was supposed to scan the scene of her being swallowed by the Void as "Oh no, the Girly Girl team member has been captured, time to rescue her!" I didn't realize that diagetically people thought she'd actually fucking died. Sometimes the narrative of a story doesn't properly convey what I'm supposed to think happened, and that create these moments of cognitive dissonance.
It's especially troublesome in this relatively primitive era of video game history. FF5 is conveying story beats way better than the NES games or even FF4, but it's still limited by the capabilities of the hardware (and how much work a 32 or 45 people could do in a year and change).
Not sure how much is column A and how much is column B; some teams managed to include a bit of subtle, nuanced character acting in SNES RPGs, but that takes artist-hours to design the subtly different sprites needed to do so, and there's a pretty hard limit on how expressive characters can be while they're a couple dozen pixels tall. FF7 had a different set of technical constraints, which theoretically allow more subtle acting (especially in prerendered cutscenes), but the clunky models and primitive animation tools meant most of the character beats still need to be conveyed in pantomime. Until sometime in the FF8-10 range, the subtleties of character development arguably need to be told instead of shown. Which is a problem when the writers want to show-don't-tell some subtle detail (or when tell-don't-show would just be really tacky).
Oof, bummer. It makes sense (to me at least) that it'd take after 4e's heavy positional/cooldown focused combat...but then it runs into the issue I have with every modern high fantasy combat focused TTRPG: "is this better than just using Pathfinder 2e"?
I've seen people on Twitter get really mad at some of the GM advice in the book, which includes "if your players wipe to an encounter, reset to the start and either let them find a new strategy or nerf the enemies," which is absolutely bizarre advice by Western TTRPG standards... But will be instantly familiar to any FFXIV players as "literally how the game works," lmao
So, the core problem with D&D is that it's too big for its own good. It's THE TTRPG people use to play anything from ye olde hardcore "you better roll up five spare characters, you're gonna need them" dungeon crawl all the way to magical school found family queer narratives. The issue here is that there is actually a fairly narrow range of games where D&D is decent. It's at its best when the game is about going to dark places to kill people and occasionally roll to jump over a chasm or scare a guard into compliance. D&D can handle going outside that range the way most games can with their own ranges*, but the more you stray from the core experience, the more the question "why not just play RISUS at this point?" becomes relevant as more and more rules fade into irrelevance or become obstacles to work around.
D&D 4e acknowledged it and was designed for this kind of game, specifically battle adventure fantasy. It was deeply flawed, partly because of legacy code and partly due to completely new and exciting issues (and also it was the first round of license fuckery), but it was basically the first and last edition of D&D to follow actual design principles and take into account how rules affect and guide the play.
People wildly disliked it.
Admittedly, one area where 3.5e and 5e are better than 4e is in providing you with tools to design your very own bespoke blorbo. If you don't care about tactical combat and all that jazz and just want to roll up a character with a bunch of cool-sounding stuff attached, 4e is lacking compared to other editions. Personally, I'd go to Spire for that as its approach to classes as very specific setting elements is just plain better than D&D's "technically generic and meant to accommodate a wide variety of settings, but with some very specific assumptions backed in", but if you have to choose between D&D products, well...
Either way, D&D 4e did inspire a bunch of spiritual successors, including indie darling Lancer, so its legacy is pretty secure.
(Also, people who call D&D 4e a MMORPG are simply too young to remember D&D 3.X being called Diablo clone.)
*Aside from hyper-specific indie stuff like the Mountain Witch, which have exactly one story in them.
Eh, in my experience (as someone who was introduced to 3.5 as my first edition of D&D after 4e was already out and loves it for the obscenely complicated character creator that it is), the reason I was always turned off from playing 4e was the way it stripped the spell lists and skills down to brass tacks and made everything on your character sheet about fighting. Like, yes, the vast majority of character options in 3.5 are about fighting, too, but I guess in my experience, not being expected to show up with a miniature and a tactical map did wonders for the players being willing to engage with non-combat activities. That's just IMO, though, and as the group's eternal DM I might just be seeing it from a different side, but the willingness to admit that it was just a combat simulator I think hurt the willingness of groups to play it in other ways.
Exactly. I love that part of the 3.5, arguably it's the game's main appeal even as a DM. Like, yes, creativity rules and you can make whatever you want, but being able to pop open a sourcebook and find a bunch of horribly-balanced classes full of bespoke nonsense is just good clean fun.
This 'Fisherkid' is very excited to show us his fishing technique. Unfortunately, said technique is, shall we say, less than refined; he throws his line backwards and smashes the window of the poor weapon store merchant.
Selphie: "...Squall…being sensitive? That's weird. You're the last person I expected to cheer me up. I must look really depressed." Squall, mentally: "(What's so weird? I care just like everybody else. It's just that there are too many things that can't be helped. So why bother talking about everything.)" Selphie: "Uh-oh! There you go again into your own little world. And you're not gonna share anything, huh?" Squall: "...Yeah, whatever…"
The fact that Selphie describes Squall's internal monologues as him perceptibly going off "into [his] own little world" leads me to only one possible conclusion. This is what life is like in FFVIII for everyone but Squall: View: https://youtu.be/AP1d1mOCLsI?si=SlSvYs1xzWlXY9CI
Less jokingly, since the town is made up of a lot of war veterans, could just be his old wartime hobby to fiddle with weapons that only rarely sees practical use these days. FFVIII weapons are less "purchase new weapon" and more "slather current weapon in monster parts until it does more damage", after all.
Though, while McFluffles's hypothesis does make sense, I think part of it, thinking about this now, might actually be Kuja's joke taken seriously.
Like, not landing on your house directly from the moon, that's improbable, but monster attacks in general, from the sea or air or over the bridge or the like. The people of FH might be very strong believers in the kind of pacifism that says there's always a diplomatic solution in conflicts with other sapient beings, if you look hard enough and work at it, and violence against them is never acceptable, but that doesn't necessarily also mean that they believe in a level of pacifism that looks at some spiny fire-breathing moon monster with no signs of sapience but lots of signs of wanting to eat them and says "Yeah, that's fair, hang on while I slather myself in barbecue sauce".
In other words, they might be hesitant to the point of paralysis to raise any resistance against a fascist army here to burn their city down and still respond to a sea serpent appearing on the horizon by getting out their old souvenir rocket launchers.
Yeah, also entirely fair! In the end this is still a Final Fantasy world, magical moon monsters fall from the sky every once in a while to destroy civilization as we know it, so it only makes sense that even a fully "pacifistic" community would still have some kind of protection or militia. Just look at the last Laguna flashback in Winhill - without any proper protection (since Galbadia sure didn't want to put forth the effort), the town was effectively overrun with monsters, random encounters everywhere you go outside.
Welcome back, class, to Final Fantasy VIII 201. Today's lesson:
The Update That Broke Omicron's Spirit
Last time, we explored the Shumi Village, and got a mysterious Phoenix Pinion item. Today, we're going… back? Apparently there is more optional content after our first visit.
Okay, Assistant is still saddled with the unfortunate task of building this statue he doesn't even think is a good idea. No further dialogue by interacting with him, let's go.
[SEVERAL HOURS LATER]
Okay so apparently you have to talk to multiple people in order. So let's just pretend I didn't advance through the entirety of Balamb and instead come back to Shumi Village, heavy sigh. And while we're at it, let's try that Phoenix Pinion.
IT SUMMONS PHOENIX???
This is a pretty hefty version of Phoenix, too. It dealt 4k damage in this encounter, higher than any of the summons I've used so far, and cast some kind of Raise on everyone, which missed.
Okay, so… I had to actually look this up. Because, meaning no criticism, I know people are navigating a fine line of giving me suggestions without just explaining the whole game, "there's this unique consumable item that summons Phoenix and you should use it at the nearest possible opportunity even in a random encounter" is baffling. It turns out…
Okay let's backtrack a bit. A long time ago, we talked about Rinoa's RNG-based Limit Breaks were Angelo has a random chance to appear.
The other four Angelo options are different; these manifest randomly in battle. You currently have Angelo Rush, which attacks one enemy; the other two open to you are Angelo Recovery (which will have him show up to heal a character who is in critical, handily removing the chance to trigger Limit Break for that character if you were leaving them in critical on purpose), and and Angelo Reverse, which only shows up if somebody is dead and uses a single Phoenix Down on them.
Now, these actually interfere with each other, in that FFVIII has a mechanic where things can happen randomly in battle, which basically checks a RNG every tot amount of time. The amount of time it checks is increased the more of these options you have available, and the game will check starting from the weaker and moving to the stronger - meaning that learning any of these two moves will lower the chance to use the fourth Angelo option for this (which is substantially better, but I won't explain why to avoid spoilers), and much more importantly, it lowers the chance to see the other, much more interesting options that will be unlocked way later into the game. There's one of those you ABSOLUTELY won't want to miss, so I suggest you seriously consider leaving Angelo Recovery and Angelo Reverse unlearned.
I don't know if Phoenix works of that specific RNG mechanic, but according to a quick look online, once Phoenix has been summoned once, then it has a random chance of showing up to save the party from a Game Over. So by using the Phoenix Pinion, you're using a one-time on-command use of the Phoenix Summon in order to 'embed' it into the game's RNG as a potential last-ditch save when facing a TPK.
What a truly wild way to design a summon.
Anyway, Shumi Village, Redux. It turns out this is much less of a short trek than I'd maybe anticipated. The second leg of the Shumi questline is long.
Once we've talked to the Attendant and found how little motivated he is, we need to go back to the Elder, who tells us to ask the Moomba for help. So we grab the Moomba, head back in, and he and the Attendant have a one-sided conversation where the Attendant clearly understands what the Moomba is 'saying' using body language, raising further questions on the nature of Moombas.
This ends up motivating Attendant enough for him to get to work. After that, we must return to the Elder, who tells us more about Attendant's own personality and the nature of the Shumi.
Elder: "So my attendant is finally working… Great. The statue should be completed soon." Squall: "Maybe it's none of my business, but what's the point of forcing him to do something against his will?" Elder: "You don't understand. There's nobody in this village who admires Master Laguna more than my attendant. There is a reason my attendant refused to work on the statue initially." Squall: "...?" Elder: "My attendant strongly wishes to leave here and fight alongside Master Laguna. Not to spend time building a statue. Therefore, my attendant does not want to become an Elder. One cannot fight or leave the village once one becomes an Elder." Elder: "A Shumi must become an Elder or something else. I think one must have wits to become an Elder. I was very fortunate. …I believe my attendant will become an Elder someday." [He gets up and walks across the room.] "That would really be ironic." Squall: "Is there any way to prevent the evolution?" Elder: "It is not the Shumi way to abuse our knowledge and pursue personal ambitions. All of us have accepted our destinies." Squall, mentally: "(How sad…)" Elder: "Well, it sounds like they may need one more person to help. I would love to see my attendant go and pursue personal dreams. I once had dreams, too. But as an Elder, my responsibilities must always come first."
This is classic "chasing one's personal dream" vs "accepting a position of importance as responsibility to one's community" conflict storytelling, just passed through the slightly alien lens of Shumi isolationism and their weird evolution-based physiology, not much to say there.
The line about needing one more person to help is supposed to be our hint as to the next step, but it's easy to miss and just, like, leave and figure out it'll solve itself later? But no, we're supposed to deduce that we should go see Artisan, the Shumi craftsman who made those human car models, and ask him to help with the statue. Unfortunately, Artisan doesn't want to help; he has too much to do "before becoming a Moomba" (again, the Moomba here serves as a kind of metaphor for aging, senility, and just the prospect of no longer being able to fulfill your youth's ambitions). And that's where things cut off again; the Elder doesn't know how to convince the Attendant.
The answer, as pointed out by the thread, is to leave, take Balamb Garden, and sail across the world to Fisherman's Horizon.
Do you know how fucking annoying it is to sail across an ocean that has a dividing line in the middle that isn't indicated on the map? With a ship this slow? Really fucking annoying.
This is because we are supposed to remember that in Fisherman's Horizon is Grease Monkey, a world-traveling mechanic who has a Moomba figurine in his ship. Which I had assumed to be related to how Galbadia uses Moombas as service animals, but no, it's meant to hint that he is connected to Shumi Village!
The Moomba figurine activates when we enter, and Grease Monkey…
…
…whose name is also his function, he is using Shumi naming convention, that is actually clever I'll give that to the game. Anyway, Grease Monkey tells us this model was made by Artisan and reacts to the presence of those who have been to Shumi Village, commenting that it's pretty high-tech and beyond his own skill. We tell him about how Artisan is in a slump, and Grease Monkey tells us to take the model Moomba with us, saying it'll fix our problem without specifying how.
So we sail all the way back to the northern continent…
…I was about to say "turns out the Moomba has a built in radio," but, uh.
It can't. Radio waves don't work in this world. That is sort of a plot point. So I'm guessing this is a recording? But Artisan does seem like he's having a conversation with the Moomba model; in fact he immediately starts a lively argument where Grease Monkey tells him "he understands how he feels, but…" while the Artisan replies and Squall says they'll leave them alone, and afterwards Artisan and the Moomba are both animated like they're talking to each other. So what gives? I don't have an answer.
Weirder stuff is about to happen, anyway.
The Master Fisherman followed us here. Or came here independently at the same time as us. We ask what he's doing here and he tells us he is an honorary Shumi - years ago, he helped the Shumi build up the holographic device in the elevator as well as other high-tech elements of their village. Lately he was tired of the ocean, so he came to fish in the pond.
Soon after, Artisan leaves, the Moomba model riding on his head, and decides that he's come to a realization. Yes, he will help with the statue, but not just that. He has a new goal: He will evolve not into an Elder, a Moomba, or whatever else Shumi might evolve into, but into a human. Nobody has done so before, but Artisan has decided he'll be the first, and as part of that process he will follow the Master Fisherman back to FH once he's done with the statue.
And if we check in on the statue team, the three are dutifully at work. When we come back to the Elder, he has a new gift for us to thank us: The Status Guard. It's an interesting example of how FF8 has to handle its equipment; in any other game the Status Guard would be like the Safety Bit or the Ribbon, something that you equip on a character to grant them certain immunities. But FF8 doen't have equipment, the GFs are the equipment; so how does it handle an item like the Status Guard? Simply put, it is a consumable that will teach one GF the Ability St-Def-Jx4, which would allow us to Junction up to four status spells on a single character, potentially allowing them 100% immunity to four separate status effect (or possibly other, more complex combination using magic like Esuna or whatever). It seems pretty good! But it's a one-time permanent effect that I'm going to be paranoid about choosing the "right" GF to use it on so I might never end up using it.
It's pretty clear that we're supposed to come back to Shumi Village when the statue is done for the third and final segment of this questline (which has provided tangible rewards), whenever that is. Hopefully there will be some external indicator of it, but it's entirely possible we're supposed to come back to Shumi Village after every major plot beat to check just in case or risk missing it.
…
So.
Let's Talk About Final Fantasy VIII's Side Quests
FF8 has a lot of optional side quests.
So did VII, but they feel different in a way I've been struggling to articulate.
I think part of it is that VII feels more… Videogamey in a way that signals side quests as more obvious. Like, the Chocobo Raising minigame is very long and complicated and I had to look up a guide, but Chocobo Raising was very clearly signposted as a minigame, you all but had characters tell us "this completely optional chain of minigame has rewards and can/must be completed entirely separately from the main story." There's an old guy who tells us "here are specific items you should give me to get special rewards." Every character has an LB4 unlock item, even if I don't know where to look for it. Meanwhile, FF8 is more… Loose. I would have no idea that the Phoenix Pinion exists or what it does if I hadn't landed on it by accident, same for the Status Guard, right?
But I think that's not really it. I've touched on this in the thread before but it deserves talking about in a proper update: I think the problem is process. I have admired FF8's use of lush pre-rendered backgrounds in small sections to add liveliness to cities quite a bit, but there's a drawback to this: Getting anywhere in this game takes so much time. Every screen is followed by a loading screen, and quests regularly require us to go through multiple screens. Just going from the Elder's house to talk to Sculptor or Attendant, for instance, is Elder's House -> Front of house -> Third screen of Shumi Village -> Front of Sculptor's Workshop -> Back of Sculptor's Workshop. Even paying a visit to the elder to check on progress goes World map -> Background view of Shumi Village entrance -> Foreground view of Shumi Village entrance -> Interior of Shumi Village entrance -> Elevator (This is a cutscene with dialogue, every time) -> First screen of Shumi Village -> Second screen of Shumi Village -> Elder's House. And every time, loading screens. Then, there are obtuse steps like needing to go all the way back to Fisherman's Horizon, and a lot of it is just not obvious, requiring you to be constantly backtracking and talking to everyone, emphasis on backtracking, which is the real killer here.
Everything takes so much time to just do. And that's in a game that doesn't really signal or mark things down as part of a chain of event, requiring you to make guesses and personally remember and keep track of it all, or else to just constantly waste hours double checking every piece of dialogue in the game, everywhere. I've been doing a lot of reloading earlier saves throughout this playthrough [THIS SENTENCE IS FORESHADOWING] because of time-limited, missable quests or even minor options, much more than I remember ever doing in VII. Like, when I missed Vincent in VII, I just turned around, crossed Mt Nibel back the other way and found him in the mansion, and it took some time, and it was frustrating, but also kinda funny, and I coped. But I'm doing a lot of reloading saves and busywork and it's starting to get taxing.
For whatever reason, doing these feels significantly more onerous in FF8 than it does in, I don't know, what modern RPGs have I played recently? Baldur's Gate 3? Disco Elysium? New Vegas?
And it's contributing to a sentiment of fatigue I'm getting with just playing the game, even though its plot is still compelling and its characterization only gets more interesting as things go. It's frustrating.
Well, now that that's out of the way, let's finally get on with the plot.
Return to Balamb
Balamb is here, and there's some conspicuous red object floating next to it. Considering the shape, red color scheme, and halo, it seems very likely that this is Galbadia Garden, and that the Sorceress has figured out how to deploy its own hovercraft capabilities. That is worrisome.
And what do you know, the first thing we see upon entering town is a Galbadian soldier and a Galbadian military vehicle blocking the way. The couple that owns the Balamb Hotel are loudly complaining that they were 'forced out of town' by occupying forces who won't let anyone through. They can't go back to their hotel, or to their daughter that they left behind thinking they were only out a few days.
The soldier tells us that Edea has claimed control of the town and no one will be allowed in until their 'investigation' is complete. This starts an argument between the soldier who finds us suspicious, and Zell, who is a Balamb resident and wants to go in and check on his family. This nearly turns into a fight until Squall finds the right opening - he makes the correct guess that the soldiers are looking for Ellone, and suggests we have information on her location we want to deliver to their officer. Even though Squall is cagey about the details, the soldier decides to send us to talk to the commander (that word is always outlined in red during this whole scene, for some reason) who is staying at the hotel.
We form a new group with Zell and Rinoa, and head in.
There are Galbadian soldiers all throughout the town, and the civilians that are still there all have updated dialogue reflecting their concern with the fact that they're all prisoners in their own town. Notably, the commander is referred to with female pronouns, which I think makes her the first explicitly female Galbadian officer we've heard about in the game - which immediately makes me suspicious this may be a character we've already met. Also, Zell's mom is a community leader, apparently; one of the townsfolk credits her with keeping the town from a panic.
Zell and his mom are happily reunited, and she seems, at first, worried; it soon transpires that she was worried we'd punched our way in, because the soldiers threatened that, should there be any resistance, "the sorceress will burn the town to the ground."
This is getting to be a pretty recurring threat on her part. Is she actually going to make good on it at some point? It's still not clear what the upper ceiling of her power, assuming she means she'll do it with magic, as opposed to just have Galbadian forces firebomb the town. She also says she noticed a gray-haired woman with an eyepatch with the Galbadian army, whom Zell identifies as Fujin.
She doesn't directly say that Fujin is the commander we've been hearing about, but the conclusion is pretty obvious, and a soldier later makes a reference to the commander's "freaky way of talking that gives him the chills." And if Fujin is in charge, that means Raijin is here as well. Squall wonders if that means Seifer is here too, but I don't think so, this is too much investigative legwork for him; he probably just delegated to his minions.
There's a cute beat with a kid labeled "Big Bad Rascal" who shows up his special move he learned to totally fight off the Galbadians himself.
We can find the hotel owners' daughter in this house, very upset that she can't see her parents, and her grandfather preparing to move them into Mrs Dintch's house.
The commander is staying at the hotel, but there's a hiccup; several people have already shown up with unconfirmed rumors, and the soldiers are worried their salary will be cut if they let someone with unconfirmed information talk to her again. Which is an amusing parallel to how Squall's SeeD salary is constantly at risk of being cut arbitrarily for picking the wrong decisions on his mission.
So they don't trust us, and they ask us to first find the captain (who is highlighted in yellow same as the commander is in red in every sentence), who'll check our story and decide if we should get to talk to the commander or not.
Thus begins a really annoying scavenger hunt.
In order to find the captain, we have to retrace his steps, and he's been all over town. This starts with the harbor, where he was seen fishing, caught a few fish and got really excited, saying he would eat them right away. This is meant to be our cue that he went somewhere he can cook, but it can't be the hotel, since we can't go in there. So where? Why, of course: Ma Dintch's house!
Now, where could he have possibly gone with those cooked fish? Well, you see, earlier while I was going through the entire town twice trying to figure out where I was supposed to go, a soldier at the train station was complaining that his stomach was upset and so he hadn't eaten since yesterday and was really hungry. We're supposed to remember that, head back to the train station, and there find the soldiers.
They are lying on the floor, incapacitated by the bad fish the captain fed them. Now, this appears to be a dead end. But earlier, the same soldier who told us they saw the captain fishing also complained that they were with a dog meant to help track Ellone, but they did not have a scent to give her to track, so the dog just kinda sat around all day uselessly. I believe that the conclusion we're meant to draw is "bad fish" = "smells funny" = "dogs have strong sense of smell" = "go get the dog." So we backtrack all the way to the harbor, talk to the dog, and it goes running off.
Come back to the train station, the dog heads into the train, and chases Raijin (as suspected) out. Then we track him back to Balamb Hotel.
Now, if all this sounds like an obtuse chain of logic lumps barely a couple steps above moon logic, rest assured that I edited the flow of actions for clarity and succinctness. My experience of the sequence involved significantly more just wandering around having no clue what to do, tracking red herrings, finding a random guy hiding behind a truck offering to sell us hints for exorbitant sums of money, and, I believe, at least one mandatory rest in order for the chain of off-screen events to proceed. That scene is good, though - I don't know if I mentioned it at the start of the game, but when visiting Zell's house, he refused to let Squall and others inside, saying the privacy of a guy's room is sacred. This time, however, seeing as the Hotel is barred and we can't leave town, he grudgingly lets us in.
Zell's room is, huh, interesting. There is boxing equipment everywhere, which is to be expected, as well as another hoverboard in a corner, and there is this memorial gun altar with a picture of Zell's grandfather above a bunch of rifles and whatever's in the cabinet below, framed by flags.
This gives us a sweet scene where Rinoa asks about the man in the picture, and Zell reveals more about the one man he idolizes:
Rinoa: "Is that your grandfather, Zell?" Zell: "Yep! He's the person I look up to the most! He played a big role in the last war. He wasn't just strong. He knew when to attack, when to retreat… Any kind of situation, he maintained his composure and stayed cool…" Squall: "...So basically, the opposite of you."
[Rinoa laughs.] Zell: "Yo, Squall!!! Why you dissin' me?" Rinoa: [Still laughing] "It's probably none of my business, but… Maybe you're being a little too 'cool', Squall…?" Squall: "..."
[Zell laughs.] Zell: "Heh, heh, heh… She got you there, Squall. Why don't you try to show a little more passion…? You know, like me!"
These dorks have really grown on me.
There is at least one alternate version of this scene: if we head in with Quistis instead of Rinoa, Quistis instead comments on how she thought Zell's hoverboard had been confiscated, only for Zell to reveal a guy "on his level" has more than just one hoverboard, and Quistis tells Squall an embarrassing anecdote about a time Zell lost control of his board and landed in the girl's restroom. I do not know if there are more for the other characters, though.
But in any case, after all this running around, we have finally landed back at the hotel, where Raijin gets literally kicked out on his butt by an angry Fujin, who appears to have correctly sussed out that he was sleeping on the job this whole time. Raijin makes up bullshit excuses (blaming the dog, even), then turns around and sees us standing there.
He's actually really hyped to see us, bless him. Zell actually unconsciously starts picking up his "ya know!" verbal tic when they're talking, which is funny. Unfortunately, it appears that our goal of 'liberate Balamb' is kind of opposite to their new job, and furthermore Raijin tells us Seifer gave them specific orders to kick our ass if they ran into us, which means we have no choice but to fight.
Raijin wields a heavy staff and benefits from a typical PC/NPC divide where despite being ostensibly just another SeeD like us, he has 9,200 HP so he can serve as a boss, with two G-Soldiers acting as basic cannon fodder to occupy us a bit. He's the only actual threat, though, with potent physical attacks dealing 400+ damage, and still fairly easily dealt with; like all humans, he is vulnerable to Poison, meaning we can hit him pretty hard with Bio and Zell's physical attacks and quickly wrap up the fight.
Once Raijin's HP is empty, he falls to one knee, saying "Ughhh, ya got me, ya know…" and we fade out.
As expected, Fujin is waiting for us inside.
Which makes this scene tricky! Because Fujin's most well established character trait is that she talks in single sentences. But it works… Fairly well?
Zell: "So I guess you're the commander! Pack your bags and get the hell outta Balamb!" Fujin: "...RAIJIN, DEFEATED…?" Zell: "That's right, BABY! Now, where's Seifer and the sorceress!? You're all going DOWN!" Squall: "Zell, calm down. Fujin, looks like you're on your own. Are you still willing to fight?" Fujin: [She takes a kinda 'cocky' pose with a hand on her hip.] "RAGE!" Raijin, off-screen: "BWA HA HA HA!!! She's not alone!" Zell: "W-Who's there!?"
[Raijin rushes in Fujin's side] Raijin: "Major come-back, ya know! Actually, I'll feel a lot better, ya know! I feel invincible, ya know!" Zell: [Gestures of frustration] "How the…:? I thought we defeated you!"
[Cue fight]
God she's cool.
This is a pretty serious battle and a welcome uptick in difficulty. Raijin's power significantly increases when fighting with Fujin, namely by unlocking the 'Raijin Special,' a simple but brutally effective staff attack that deals over 1000 damage. My party's HP junctions aren't very strong because I've focused on damage at the expense of survival, and I'm paying the price now. Additionally, while Raijin is a tanky single-target physical attacker, Fujin is a powerful wind mage, whose Tornado can hit the party for 300-400 damage per character. A couple of turns Drawing from them - Fujin has a GF called Pandemona, so we nab that early - end up costing me dearly by letting Fujin and Raijin take turns whaling on me, which means I'm spending the rest of the fight playing catch-up with healing spells, significantly reducing my DPS. Now, there are some tools that would make things a lot easier, like…
…Ultima, for instance, but FF8 has successfully caught me in its particular trap; the prospect of Ultima junctions is too enticing for me to spam the spell. I end up spending a few Full-Lifes just to raise my characters without them immediately dying to the Raijin Special, and objectively those Full-Life casts might have been more precious than Ultima.
Still, once we abuse Squall's Sleep-junctioned attacks to put either Fujin or Raijin to sleep so we can work on the other, things become a lot easier (although Raijin has the nasty surprise of actually using a Hi-Potion on himself at one point).
GF acquired, a ton of AP that just upgraded all our GF abilities also acquired, Fujin and Raijin defeated, everything is looking peachy keen.
What follows is honestly a pretty neat conversation between the two groups about their respective loyalties. Fujin and Raijin don't care about the sorceress, they're only in this because Seifer is and they're ride-or-die for him.
Squall tries to convince them to back out, that "this isn't an internal Garden conflict," but they both refuse; Seifer has a lot of "followers," they say, but they're his only friends. The soldiers only obey Seifer out of fear for the sorceress; without them, he might still be in charge, but he'd be alone.
Zell: "If you guys stand behind him that much… Tell frickin' Seifer to stop this nonsense!" Fujin: "AFFIRMATIVE!" Raijin: "We ain't no sell-outs! We're behind Seifer all the way, ya know!?" Squall: "Ok… Understood. So you want nothing to do with Garden now?" Squall: "...From now on, we're not gonna hold back."
[Squall turns around and walks towards the screen.] Squall, mentally: "(...I guess that's how it goes. That's what comrades are all about…)" Rinoa: "You're just gonna let them go? Squall?" Raijin: "Don't wanna… talk anymore, ya know… Kinda painful… ya know…" Fujin: [She kicks him in the shin.] "WIMP!" [Raijin does his 'ouch' animation.] "RUN!"
[They both run out past Squall.] Rinoa: "...I feel sad." Squall: "Friend or foe… It all comes down to circumstances. That's how we were raised. It's… Nothing special." Squall, mentally: "(Nothing special… Is that true? Then… What is this I'm feeling?)" Squall: "Let's go."
Return to Balamb, fin. We're teleported back to the bridge of Balamb Garden.
I really liked this scene?
Like, the bit at the end where Rinoa is sad and Squall reflects on how people being on opposite sides is just the way war goes is sad, but at the same time it's pretty clear that Squall is sympathetic to Fujin and Raijin's bond with Seifer, because he's beginning to understand what being comrades means. He had them dead to rights; he could have killed them, or possibly just captured them and taken them back to Balamb Garden, but he's willing to let them go to find Seifer again, with the promise that next time it'll be all-out, not just because they're fellow Balamb Garden students, but because he can relate to their loyalty to their leader. I think?
That's my read on what's happening, anyway.
Next, Selphie comes up to the bridge to ask Squall to check on Trabia Garden.
She keeps up her peppy self throughout and says hopeful stuff like 'it's in the mountains so maybe they missed it,' but it's clear it's a veneer of forced cheer over genuine worry. Which gives us a pretty good next step in our journey.
But first,* let's head into the menu to find out what Pandemona's Abilities are like and who to junction it to, before we head out to test it in battle.
*And by 'first,' I mean 'in like an hour after we've done the second leg of the Shumi Village that I placed at the start of this update, there is that entire time between this shot of Selphie and the realization I am about to make.
…
This is the moment that broke me.
I've been in the GF menu a few times over the past few hours, trying to sort out many confusing abilities, to partition my GFs between my characters. I briefly considered doing a spreadsheet of the right Abilities to learn for each GF to optimize my ability spread and that thought just drained the life out of me, so I just kinda went on instinct. At some point it started blurring together and I stopped seeing what I was seeing and just clicking whatever felt right. HP-J on Brothers? Sure, whatever, I'm not even going to check if the other GF I have junctioned to the person using Brothers already has it, whatever. We'll have all the abilities on every GF anyway eventually. Whatever.
So in all that blur, my eyes started just… Glazing over this menu.
…
Leviathan isn't there.
Remember when I said this?
I've been doing a lot of reloading earlier saves throughout this playthrough [THIS SENTENCE IS FORESHADOWING]
Several updates ago, I famously missed Leviathan, reloaded before the NORG fight, got Leviathan, then saved again, tested out Leviathan in a fight (got screenshots and everything), set its abilities, saved, and quit.
Then at some point I reloaded the wrong save. The save where I hadn't acquired Leviathan. And I just kept on trucking.
I've just been into the emulator's virtual memory card; the latest save I have in which Squall has Leviathan is at about 27 hours. We are now at about 32 hours. That's five hours of game that I have trudged through without a GF I had specifically reloaded an earlier save to get, and I just. Never noticed.
But how, you ask? How did you go five hours without ever noticing you didn't have Leviathan, Omi? I don't know. Maybe I'm just a fucking idiot. I can't just blame the game when this is absolutely a colossal fuck-up on my part.
At the same time, it's hard not to face the realization that this couldn't have possibly flown past me if I hadn't grown increasingly divorced from the mechanical side of the game. Even as the story (I want to emphasize this) continues to have me engaged for all that its weird navigation and bullshit puzzles frustrate me, I've been treating any element of combat gameplay that isn't boss fight as something to just zoom past. I have Enc-None some of the time and when I don't I fast forward through every fight at x50 speed spam-clicking Attack or GF.
I've been managing the frustrating chore of Junctioning individual GFs, Magic and Abilities to each character by essentially forming a 'package' for each character and just swapping them around with the Exchange function. Like, there is a "physical attacker" package that has Ifrit and Brothers in it, and if Zell is in the party I give it to him, if I swap Zell for Quistis I Exchange it to her, so they just trade fully-readied Junctions and I don't have to think about it or notice that one of the GFs is one of these packages is fucking missing. I might have noticed earlier if I'd kept playing my self-imposed mini-game of 'allowing' certain characters only certain Junctions based on their GFs, except I stopped doing that the last time the game un-Junctioned all my GFs from the party members that had been put on time-out, breaking all my 'packages' and forcing me to redo everything, at which point I resorted to just slapping whatever on whomever and auto-Junctioning everything because engaging with it further made me wither inside (you can see how despite Squall having a stack of like 60 Ultima the Fujin/Raijin fight was still really difficult because I was facerolling through it with terrible junctions and worse tactics).
So the blame lies with me. But it wouldn't have happened if I hadn't found it harder and harder to engage with the game-as-a-game.
I'm just… Absolutely dejected right now. I wanted to fit more into this update (I went to Winhill at one point, I didn't mention it because I only really got flavor stuff and I was planning on fitting it at the end of this update). I was planning on heading to Trabia and doing Balamb and Trabia Garden as part of the same update.
But right now I am too demoralized. I don't know what I'm gonna do. I guess just write off one of the game's GFs, their core gameplay feature, or go through five hours of game on fast forward all over again. Friends suggested save-editing Leviathan into my saves. I don't know.
I'm just feeling really down right now, so we'll just cut it here.
Yikes. That is a big problem with the game, some, really many, of the nice things are blink and you miss them rewards.
They also tend to be behind far too many screens.
... I'm not sure what advice to give here, I know I tend to stall on the game because of all the little fiddly bits between major segments that you might need to repeat if you get them wrong.
Although it is nice to see how the characters in this one work so very well.
I don't think anyone will blame you for save editing Leviathan back in. You got the GF, you have literally photographic proof in fact. You aren't doing some sort of official speedrun, there's no third party judge.
I checked the wiki, and the only skill you might miss from him is refining support magic. Also, if you don't want to edit your save or go back for Leviathan, there will be one more chance to get him.
All (or almost all) of the minibosses in the final dungeon are paired with a missable GF, so if you missed any through the game, you have one last chance to draw them.
Oof, that's rough. The mechanics of ff8 definitely seems more fiddly vs prior games, and when all summons are obtained by drawing from a boss - vs sidequests or dungeon rewards, say - it's understandable you can miss one of them. Certainly I've done it a few times in my own playthrough, then reloaded to double back.
Same for sidequests and weapon magazines, actually.
