I think you guys have wildly misjudged how funny I'm finding this right now.
Come on Omi. Harness your true power. The power to ignore stuff you don't actually need and just keep going.
Also you still need to go get that ribbon.
A lot of you seems to have wildly misjudged my mood when going for the ribbon jokes, I am not
nearly feel that good humoured about things, how about we just stop that for a bit hmm
Oh! Did you complete the side-quest there? You need to bring either Quistis or Irvine to do it. And you can also obtain another Phoenix Pinion by hassling the baby at the Chocobo crossing.
*stares at this sentence in the context of everything of what he just went through re:missable and hidden quests for the past two updates*
i'm gonna throttle a gamedev
My advice? If you miss something optional and it's not some major plot revelation, like say missing this Phoenix Pinion quest-line, just shrug and say "oh well," and then keep on trekking. It makes RPGs a lot faster, even ones that aren't as borked as this game seems to be. And, for that matter, any time a side quest looks like too much bother, feel free to give up.
For example, I was recently playing Baldur's Gate 3 and I discovered
was recruitable but only many hours after having killed that character. Did I reload? Nope, just kept going and figured, eh, killing them was a more in-character action and also I was in Act II at the time and I was not going back to Act I for this.
If you miss something, well, that's part of the experience of playing the game, too, the way FVIII seems to be designed.
This is something we'll probably have to talk more in-depth at some point in this LP, the mood has never really struck me to do a longpost about it, but basically there is an inherent tension between the desire for me as a LPer to experience all that the game has to offer so that I can talk about it, and the desire to show the game 'as I experience it,' semi-blind, with all the missed stuff that this implies.
In this very thread we've had at least one person, I believe, commenting that their impression of the central relationship of the game had been negatively impacted by scenes like the Fisherman's Horizon concert dialogue between Rinoa and Squall having three different versions, only one of which satisfyingly ties into their romantic arc. What's the correct way to play the game: By just rolling with it, presenting a version of the story in which it's poorly conveyed and handled because I missed optional content and having people telling me 'okay but if you had spotted
this scene it would have made the whole thing a lot better,' or playing with a degree of artificiality, as a pseudo-completionist trying to get the 'best' version of the game?
I am going to take a wild guess that I feel pretty confident in, and say that I think my readers in general would be inclined to say that the
story content (Rinoa and Squall having a meaningful conversation) is more important to giving FF8 its 'best foot forward' than the
gameplay content (never finding or using the Phoenix Pinion). But, well, that's partly because y'all are not in my head, playing the game. I'm the one directly engaging with the mechanics and the systems of this incredibly abstruse but also possibly really deep game and trying to make it work. I'm the one who's collecting GFs and clicking buttons and battle, and the divide between "the story is really good" and "the gameplay is really frustrating" is a major subject of my conflicted thoughts on this game, so trying to figure out how to make its gameplay right for me, if I can, is complicated but also something I need to do if I'm going to spend another 10-20 hours in this game.
sourceforge.net
