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Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]

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Holy shit, what a reveal. Like, there are other things to discuss about this update, I feel, but the shared orphanage history and the circumstances in which Irvine finally decided to talk about it have me completely floored. Damn if this didn't suddenly give us miles to talk about over Irvine's characterization and what he must have been thinking this whole time.
 
Extremely funny that Omi has given Squall so much shit for constantly living alone with his monlogues in his own head, only to find out that he was, at most, only a distant second place all along

IRVINE: (Why isnt anyone else talking about this. I know Squall is allergic to having feelings and okay yeah honestly maybe Selphie is trying to perform being Not Interested but that's not really her character, but anway, damn, Quistis and Zell too? I know Quistis is really wrapped up in being the sensible one so maybe she's juat trying to keep professional distance but it still seems off. I feel like I'm going insane over here.)
 
Honestly that entire sequence kinda looks more like an atemporal vantage of a time traveller fucking with things to reinforce their own future/success than memory issues.

Big 'yes we grew up together years ago and forgot. But did we grow up together years ago yesterday?' energy.

Maybe that's because it feels like 95% asspullium and 5% GF foreshadowing.
 
Omicron said:
IRVINE'S REACTION TO RINOA TALKING ABOUT HOW SHE FEELS ISOLATED FROM THE OTHERS AND IS WORRIED THEY'LL LEAVE HER BEHIND WAS TO REVEAL THAT ACTUALLY THEY ALL GO EVEN WAY FURTHER BACK THAN THEY REMEMBERED, THEY LITERALLY ALL GREW UP TOGETHER EXCEPT RINOA.
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Rinoa: I feel isolated from the group...
Irvine: Let me tell you a story that totally justifies those feelings!
 
Omicron said:
Some of the students seem to allude to secret stuff we might be able to find around the Garden, though we're going to be distracted pretty quickly.

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Follow the directions, and you'll find the August issue of Weapons Monthly.

Also, if you encounter a Gayla monster outside Trabia Garden, you can get a Mystery Fluid from it as a drop/steal; with it, you can teach Quistis the blue magic Acid.
 
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Egleris said:
Yeah, I think in their effort to make the twist as high-impact as they could, they overdid it. There's no real reason for Quistis, Zell and Selphie to have belonged to the orphanage Edea was running; the story, and even the twist, would work just fine if only Squall, Irvine and Seifer were there. And it'd give narrative space to provide more unique backstory for Selphie and especially Quistis.
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Selphie being at the orphanage serves the very important purpose of turning SelphieXIrvine into a Childhood Friend Romance to contrast SquallXRinoa.

You can't have a Battleschool Anime without a childhood friend romance!
 
Omicron said:
IRVINE'S REACTION TO RINOA TALKING ABOUT HOW SHE FEELS ISOLATED FROM THE OTHERS AND IS WORRIED THEY'LL LEAVE HER BEHIND WAS TO REVEAL THAT ACTUALLY THEY ALL GO EVEN WAY FURTHER BACK THAN THEY REMEMBERED, THEY LITERALLY ALL GREW UP TOGETHER EXCEPT RINOA
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"Lol you think that's the only reason you're isolated from us? Let me fill you in." - Irvine, master of tact.
 
Omicron said:
IRVINE'S REACTION TO RINOA TALKING ABOUT HOW SHE FEELS ISOLATED FROM THE OTHERS AND IS WORRIED THEY'LL LEAVE HER BEHIND WAS TO REVEAL THAT ACTUALLY THEY ALL GO EVEN WAY FURTHER BACK THAN THEY REMEMBERED, THEY LITERALLY ALL GREW UP TOGETHER EXCEPT RINOA.
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holy shit. and the worst part is i can see how this could be made to work? you could do a comfort through validation kinda deal out of this, like, "ah yeah you are in fact way behind us, but it's not your fault, I mean considering you haven't known us since before we all know our times tables, I think you're doing amazingly well!"
Omicron said:
On the other hand, this is the funniest shit that has ever happened in a Final Fantasy game.

He has been holding it in the entire game. Slowly going mad on the inside as everyone just kept acting like they didn't recognize him or, indeed, each other from before Garden. Slowly withering inside from thinking about the sheer social awkwardness of bringing it up. Increasingly realizing that everyone but him and Rinoa have brain damage from excessive GF use.
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puh

gods, now I'm wondering if that's how he meant to comfort her instead, the only two people in the group who have functional long-term memories!
 
Zap Rowsdower said:
"You're worried about us sharing experiences you don't? Funny you should mention that, while we're on that subject..."
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I kinda get the feeling that he's actually trying to draw a parallel between her situation and his, with him remembering things they don't... except then they start remembering them and that kinda throws it off doesn't it?

Cataquack said:
Oh, and when you finally face off against {REDACTED}
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That looks like a spoiler there to me.

-Morgan.
 
Maybe, rather than waiting a really long time for the reveal, Irvine has actually explained this to the party several times and this is just the first time it didn't immediately leak out their ears.

More seriously, I'm giving a lot more side-eye to Seifer's whole romantic obsession with being the servant of a Sorceress, knowing now that he was raised by a woman that was going to become one.
 
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So like, not only has Cid sent a bunch of child soldiers to kill his ex-wife, but those child soldiers are children he was probably involved in raising himself, and the ex-wife is their actual mother figure, who he made them forget through brain damage.

And we're not killing Cid in this game?! This might actually be worse childcare than what FF6 Cid did with Celes!
 
I am surprised the characters want to go the orphanage before storming Cid's bedroom and menace to kill him right here and now if he didn't explain everything NOW. I mean, he is still in BGU no ?

Or what, HE HAS RUNNING AWAY THIS F*****G COWARD WHO USES KIDS TO KILL ???
 
Another great part of the lets play. quick question on 21b there is something that looks like a discord post, does that mean that this thread has a discord? if so could i ask for a invite?
 
Goddamn this is bonkers. And I like bonkers twists, but I feel like literally all of the main characters except Rinoa being connected like this is way too much. One or two or three maybe. Like if the Matron who was Cid's wife and the Sorceress ran the orphanage Squall and Irvine came from, but Squall doesn't remember due to GF usage and the other characters had their own separate forgotten pasts, that would be something I could get over. It'd even be kind of interesting to find out what everyone else had forgotten after a reveal like that. But this is beyond excessive.

I don't know if I could play this game after a twist like that, it's so bizarre. Literally no one who wasn't from that orphanage ended up on our SEED teams? Even though they scattered and the members came from two different Gardens? Was the orphanage magic? Was Cid deliberately favoring kids from the orphanage with training and assignments? What the hell? No, seriously, was Edea feeding them all special "make you good at bonding Guardian Force" drops and that's why they all ended up being picked? Explain, game, explain!
 
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Corti said:
I am surprised the characters want to go the orphanage before storming Cid's bedroom and menace to kill him right here and now if he didn't explain everything NOW. I mean, he is still in BGU no ?
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He is not, actually; the moment you gain control of the Garden, Cid is no longer there. There's even a boy in the headmaster's office (that is, in the room under the command bridge) who says that he wanted to play Triple Triad with Cid, but he can't because Cid seems to have left the Garden.

So, yes, after ordering all the student to go kill his wife and putting Squall in charge of making sure that happens, he left/ran away.
 
It's such a bonkers twist, delivered in the most tactless way. It also re-casts all the character interactions quite a bit! Is Seifer following the Sorceress not because of mind control, but because of course he is, that's his mother? Irvine being the only one of his siblings who doesn't have early-onset dementia? Quistis feeling attached and emotionally entangled with Squall and thinking it's romantic (I'm gonna go out on a limb and say it was romantic, because, you know, they knew each other for a couple of years back when they were 4, which she doesn't remember, so it's entirely likely she just found the brooding teenage boy who was her age and also a talented prodigy attractive for completely normal reasons that she couldn't act on as his instructor)? The way they all slotted together as a group fairly effectively, despite some of them being strangers to each other? The fact Cid specifically sent out the orphans his wife raised to kill his wife?

Does this mean that 'Edea's SEED', who are protecting Ellone, are also orphans she raised, except these ones don't have early-onset GF-induced dementia? Did they all look at Squall and co and see the ghosts of their very literally dead siblings, their bodies puppeted by a stranger's mind?

Ugh. GFs are just... existentially horrifying in all the most nauseating ways. If you're a character on the outside, no wonder it's so easy to paint the SEEDs as a villainous group, especially Balamb. They're a bunch of mercenaries who destroy children's brains to turn them into walking nukes.
 
Kadmus said:
Ugh. GFs are just... existentially horrifying in all the most nauseating ways. If you're a character on the outside, no wonder it's so easy to paint the SEEDs as a villainous group, especially Balamb. They're a bunch of mercenaries who destroy children's brains to turn them into walking nukes.
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Now, now, let's be fair, Selphie likes being a walking nuke very much. Her only worry is that she can forget about trains. The rest is worth it for WAR.
 
I mean, most of the thread was on board with rewriting reality to ensure Omicron had as many GF as possible, so the sentiment that GFs are worth it seems shared?

Also, the orphanage scene gets a lot funnier if you're doing the maximum difficulty "lv 100 no junction" challenge run of FFVIII, and not one character has junctioned any GF since the start of the game, and Rinoa is the person with the best stat lineup despite her complaints that she can't keep up in battle.

Character | HP|Str| Vit|Mag|Spr|Spd|Luck
Squall | 4187 | 47 | 41 | 45 | 36 | 37 | 22
Selphie| 3680 | 45 | 28 | 49 | 38 | 37 | 26
Quistis | 3883 | 46 | 30 | 42 | 34 | 34 | 21
Irvine | 3880 | 45 | 31 | 42 | 28 | 39 | 21
Zell | 4018 | 47 | 33 | 42 | 27 | 35 | 20
Rinoa | 4181 | 67 | 31 | 63 | 39 | 36 | 22

Summary: Rinoa has the best STR and MAG by 20 points, which is a 50% increase on everybody else; that's an uncontested lead in the two most important stats. She also has the best SPR, although there her lead is much smaller. She is second to Squall in HP, but HP is in the thousands and she's only 6 points behind (meanwhile third place is near two hundred points under her), whereas in luck she's second to Selphie, but Selphie is an outlier in Luck - everybody else is around the same amount, and Rinoa has 1 or 2 points on most of them. She's in the middle for SPD and VIT, but those have the same thing going on as Luck, where Squall and Irvine are notable outliers, and everybody else is around the same amount, with Rinoa always ahead of at least half the team.

Conclusion: if you're not using junctions, Rinoa is comfortably the strongest character on the team.
 
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Egleris said:
Yeah, I think in their effort to make the twist as high-impact as they could, they overdid it. There's no real reason for Quistis, Zell and Selphie to have belonged to the orphanage Edea was running; the story, and even the twist, would work just fine if only Squall, Irvine and Seifer were there. And it'd give narrative space to provide more unique backstory for Selphie and especially Quistis.

This is the most famous and controversial plot twist in FFVIII, by the way - a large majority of the people that dislike the game point to this twist as one of the primary reasons why.
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I can definitely see how it would become both of those things!

It's also one I'd already heard of - it's been memed about enough that I had some broad awareness of the concept of "everyone went to school together" or something. Which was confusing, because yes, everyone does go to school together, it's sort of the premise you're exposed to in the first five minutes of the game. The actual nature of the twist is so weird and so weirdly brought up that even knowing about it didn't in any way prepare me for it.

E.I.G. said:
Ah yes, another of the moments I have been waiting for:
The reveal that Irvine has been living in something like a horror movie this whole time.


... so, Cid and Edna both ran an orphanage that had most of its orphans turn into mercs when their plan shifted to "make super-mercs to stop super-mages", and on reflection that is kind of fucked up?
I mean, Cid doesn't seem anything but happy to see Squall turn into a driven combat machine, despite having once been fairly responsible for raising him as a kid.
They presumably mean for the best, but that is still child soldiers as their core plan with a possible cherry on top of "look, we already have some kids to start with".
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What's even weirder is that one of Cid's consistent points of characterization is that he does care about Squall being more than just an unquestioning murder machine, and he's always talking about how SeeDs should be well-developed people and in some fashion heroic, which is initially held back by the Faculty - and like, he doesn't seem to be lying, because it comes up in these bouts of like, frustration with the way Squall is behaving?

So he has some concept of what 'SeeD' should be like that's more well-rounded and fulfilling than what it turned out to be in practice, but he's failed to achieve that specific vision and also he shoved memory-eating daemons into his students' skulls without warning them of the side effects?

Cid's degree of genuine sinister-ness vs bumbling good intentions is, like, all over the place, and short of the game revealing that he was full-on evil the entire time and the hints of goodness were a lie, I'm not sure how it reconciles into a coherent character.

mythfan12 said:
There are zero words I can use to describe the emotions this update created in me, and I can't tell if it's positive or just sheer baffled shock.
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I'm glad I was able to faithfully convey the experience of what it was like playing the game once again.

Adloquium said:
I do recall a while back that the other NPCs in the Trabia Garden area do speak in Kansai dialect, like Selphie when she's not trying to fit in. I'm a little curious now if Selphie's Kansai accent had been around since her orphanage days, or if she picked it up when she moved to Trabia. Children tend not to express the dialect very strongly, so it might be hard to tell from the very limited sample size of Selphie's lines in the orphanage flashback.
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Unfortunately, I think it'd be impossible to tell. I went back to check all of Child!Selphie's lines, and they are limited to "Irvy, wanna play?" and "WAR!" Most of the dialogue in this scene, even in scenes featuring the children, is spoken by the present-day cast talking about the kids. So we see Selphie pick on Zell for being a snitch, but we only hear the other characters talk about it.

So unless you could tell a Kansai dialect from these two sentences alone, I think it's a lost cause, at least until/unless we get more flashbacks to her childhood. Which is a shame, because now I'm curious as well!

ZerbanDaGreat said:
NGL I would maul Irvine with my bare hands like a puma if I were Rinoa and he pulled this shit on me.

"INFORMATION" rip "THAT COULD" tear "HAVE BEEN BROUGHT" rend "TO MY ATTENTION" maul "YESTERDAY!!!!!!!!!!"
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Right!?

Like, if nothing else, even setting aside the awkwardness of bringing it up to the others... He could have taken Rinoa aside to tell her about it. She doesn't share the weird memory loss and she might have been able to help figure out what was going on!

One of the things I like about Rebirth's development of the characterization of the FF7 cast is that even though Aerith and Tifa both have very incomplete information on what's going on with Cloud, they very much do communicate like human beings, including talking in private and expressing their mutual concern for him to each other. That's nice!

But yeah if I was in Rinoa's place Irvine would have eaten an Angelo Cannon to the face is what.

uztgft said:
Another great part of the lets play. quick question on 21b there is something that looks like a discord post, does that mean that this thread has a discord? if so could i ask for a invite?
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There is no dedicated Discord server for this Let's Play, I just sometimes talk about the game in the general-discussion Discord servers where I happen to be. One of them has been closed to new invites for a while, and another is, I think, public access and called Wordsmiths, although I post there less often and am not sure if there are specific criteria to extend invites.
 
One of the interesting things here is that, despite Guardian Forces making you lose your memories, everyone involved here instantly remembered when prompted by Irvine, yet before that happened the memories were functionally wiped from their brains. Maybe what's going on here is more complicated than merely "erasing" memories...? Like, maybe it's simply accelerating memory decay or something, so something that happened 5 years ago becomes the equivalent of something that happened 30 years ago in a regular person.
 
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