I will put aside my issues with Ex3 if it means I can appeal to you directly for the inclusion of Yozi-blood Linthan pirate waifus.
Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Let's Play
I will put aside my issues with Ex3 if it means I can appeal to you directly for the inclusion of Yozi-blood Linthan pirate waifus.
Egleris
Vagrant Dragon
- Location
- Italy
That weapon can, in fact, be obtained before visiting the Fire Cave; all of its component can be refined from cards, and the cards in questions aren't that difficult to get - you need 1 Tonberri, 2 Geezard, 6 Adamantoise and 6 Iron Giant cards. I generally always do it because I really like the design, and usually don't bother upgrading to the Lionheart until the end of Disk 3, at which point getting the items can be done easily just by fighting a couple battles in the right places instead of having to spend hours trying to get 20 Enloye cards and grinding low-level Grendels for 1 Dragon Fang per encounter.
Last edited:
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Like... demon-blooded or Yozi-blooded...? Because the logistics are... I mean I know Adorjan had human children, but... I mean, practically speaking???
I do find the ability of FF games to recontextualize familiar elements interesting. "What are summons, how do they work?" is a question with multiple answers across the games, same with how do you use magic. Fira remains the same in all of them, but the ability to invoke it could be a result of long occult study or a property of a shop-purchased piece of technology. It's probably one of the more notable aspects of FF as a franchise, which this let's play highlights.
In this case, though, I do feel people are overthinking things, lol. Potions and the like are just normal items you use normally, by splashing yourself with it and the like. Sometimes you can't do it because gameplay, there is no grander mystery.
Like, I get that people speculate about it for fun, not because they expect there to be a canon answer, but I think it distracts from the disappinting elements of FFVIII: there could have been a gameplay/story integration, there could have been a cool explanation for how you can draw magic out of enemies and the world, what it means to have GFs junctioned to your soul, and, yes, even why you can only use items by selecting that option.
There isn't.
In this case, though, I do feel people are overthinking things, lol. Potions and the like are just normal items you use normally, by splashing yourself with it and the like. Sometimes you can't do it because gameplay, there is no grander mystery.
Like, I get that people speculate about it for fun, not because they expect there to be a canon answer, but I think it distracts from the disappinting elements of FFVIII: there could have been a gameplay/story integration, there could have been a cool explanation for how you can draw magic out of enemies and the world, what it means to have GFs junctioned to your soul, and, yes, even why you can only use items by selecting that option.
There isn't.
Y'know, I always just used the two as largely synonymous, but I guess "demon-blooded" is technically more apt?
This is mostly just a thinly veiled excuse to get more Sophie Campbell/Melissa Uran art of piratical seapunk tomboys wielding scary looking weapons.
Practically speaking, Yozi can assume many forms, including human-shaped ones, at once. Malfeas dances on the streets that are his body. I'm sure that if Kimbery wanted to give birth the human way, she could.
Her being Kimbery, she's more likely to smother mortals she loved in her acidic depths when they inevitably lose her favor and spit out children based on them.
Either way, more Hell/Infernal stuff would be welcome. It's one of the more interesting parts of the setting plagued by bad writing in the previous edition, so seeing a new take on it would be cool.
Someday, somewhere, somehow, I will convince somebody that Stygia/Malfeas/Autocthon are Good Actually, and the coolest, most interesting parts of the setting.
E.I.G.
Robo-Bird
- Pronouns
- It/They
One argument that could be made is that the Item command is the ability to have your GF use the items on your team at combat speed.
It is technically the case that you simply do not have access to Item if none of your equipped GFs know the move, but I think you can use items outside of combat without having that ability set (have not checked that, could be wrong).
It is technically the case that you simply do not have access to Item if none of your equipped GFs know the move, but I think you can use items outside of combat without having that ability set (have not checked that, could be wrong).
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
The FF7 Remake and Persona 5 solution- the healing items are actually just stuff like energy drinks and standard over-the-counter pharmacy goods unless you've got the relevant magic to enhance them.
Thank Hyne Selphie is ADHD enough for caffeine to be a downer for her or two hi-potions and an ether would allow her to reach the speed of sound
Egleris
Vagrant Dragon
- Location
- Italy
I mean, considering the size of the inventory, I always assumed that the item command, in all of the Final Fantasy and not just FFVIII, was simply the ability to summon things from hammerspace. It seems the most straightforward interpretation to me, and handily justify why in FFVIII that's an ability granted by GF.
Yes, you can use items from the menu freely when out of battle; you can also cast spells (such as Cure, Raise and Esuna) from the menu when out of battle, and in neither case do you need to have the ability assigned to the character.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[letting myself be distracted from my writing voice] It's sort of more of a political than metaphysical distinction. In modern Exalted lingo, you'd call someone born with hellish heritage of any kind 'demon-blooded,' although I'm sure you could see 'Yozi-blooded' as occasional sorcerous jargon.
But it's sort of, it's like the difference between saying "Here's my friend Ashley, she's American" (which might prompt some interest for your friends who might ask her why's staying in Europe, how she feels about a specific news item, and so on), and saying "Here's my friend Ashley, she's the daughter of the President of the United States," which is definitely going to change how everyone looks at you (and her) for the rest of the party and cause some to wonder how come they never knew you were secretly Special Agent Leon Kennedy. Then the BOWs start invading campus.
But metaphysically the human child of a Yozi and a mortal is more of a difference in degree than nature from the child of any other demon and a human, I suppose.
But yes, devil-blooded pirate tomboys, very good content.
It's funny to hear that, because I know that it is an issue in different part of the settings, but Exalted is split up into a lot of niches with different aspects of the setting they favor, and in my personal niche my last Exalted game was set in Hell and the last time I ran a game (still ongoing just on hiatus) two of my players pulled out characters who were born and raised in Hell and at this point I am just begging my players to see that Creation is actually cool and where the game should mostly be taking place.
ZerbanDaGreat
Daemon Noble of D E M O G R A P H I C S
- Pronouns
- They/them
Fun fact: this is true in FF15. Potions, hi-potions et al are simply commerically-available energy drinks that become healing elixirs thanks to Noctis' powers.
Squall and co could've been slamming Monster Zero Ultras blessed by their GFs to the dome this whole time but the world wasn't ready for a fantasy based on reality yet.
Creation *is* cool. But for my GM, Exalted was "Minmaxed Solars in the Scavenger Lands ONLY" 100% of the time. There's only so much bickering with inbred Dragonbloods squatting on muddy riverbanks one can take before wishing you were playing Lunars in the East for even the slightest taste of novelty.
Who's bitter? Not me.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Actually, we do have an Ashley who is daughter of the President of the United States. (no, really)
The fact that I know this and it was at the top of my mind made for a kind of surreal last sentence and a half, not gonna lie.
Final Fantasy VIII, Part 26.A: Esthar
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Welcome back, class, to Final Fantasy VII 301. Today's lesson:
Fly Me To The Moon
Last time, Squall emerged from another Laguna flashback, the Estharian authorities arrived, and we were taken to meet with Dr Odine.
*We're taken to the heart of the truly enormous city of Esthar using a hovercar flying over 'roads' that are translucent and aerial, blue-tinged glass that will characterize every place in Esthar. Esthar's aesthetic is overwhelmingly of a kind of kitschy 90s scifi, very colorful, very ethereal. It's also, as we're going to find out, way more important than we'd ever had any reason to expect even knowing Esthar's historical importance. More on this later.
The Presidential Palace is a massive building with sweeping wings, forming an arc at the heart of the town. As is growing common, we're only seeing a tiny slice of the 'actual' building through the rooms we have access to, which is something I've been noticing FF8 doing a lot and is a pretty convenient way to handle the contradiction of 'building as big as it should be' and 'keep the environment manageable.' I say this even though it seems obvious because that's not necessarily a universal sensibility? A lot of modern RPGs go to great lengths to model all of a building. Think of the way Skyrim, or an Owlcat Pathfinder RPG, would model 'a presidential palace' as opposed to the way FF8 does it where there are only three rooms you can ever enter but you do get the full sight of the building in the outside shots. It's just interesting to me how game design trends evolve over time.
Edea explains her situation and asks to be free from the sorceress's control, whereupon Odine walks into the room declaring proudly that it will be an easy task, for there is nothing Odine can do. He clearly wants this to be his big, cool dramatic entrance, but, well, I mean…
I'm honestly kind of surprised this isn't this game Cid. He has everything: the mad science/engineering, the dubious sartorial taste, the moral ambiguity… He fits the bill better than Cid Kramer, if anything.
Squall, of course, has only enough patience to let him introduce himself before jumping to the reason he's here, Rinoa. He demands to know where Ellone is and to see her at once, behaving so aggressively that Odine briefly thinks he's being taken hostage. It doesn't seem to bother him much, though, and he orders one of his assistants to take Squall to Ellone… Under one condition: That he be allowed to observe Rinoa. Squall is reluctant, but Edea tells him to accept, and he just tells Odine he better not 'do anything' to Rinoa.
Considering the situation it's not the worst deal, at least if we accept the premise of 'Ellone is the only way to save Rinoa' which Squall is taking as a given. Still, leaving anyone in the hands of Odine for an extended period of time… Well, he's no Hojo, so far he seems to be amoral rather than just evil, but we still don't fully know what he wanted out of Ellone, or what he might now want from Rinoa, beyond general scientific interest. We are told to head to the Lunar Gate at our leisure.
What's very funny - though it's not like I'm genuinely criticizing the game for it, it's just part of how these games work - is that here and now, with Squall getting clear directions to his goal, is the moment to just pull back and hang out for a while.
There's a whole city to discover, after all! And card games to play!
We challenge Odine for the missable Ward card, which isn't, by far, the most outlandish limited time unique card window we'll see today. EDIT: Turns out it was, update got very long.
The FMVs give you a good idea of the style of the place. It's extremely overdesigned. That little red bubble is us - some kind of forcefield happens once we sit on the central device and it starts taking us flying through tubes.
Esthar is… Huge.
It's possibly the biggest city in the entire franchise. Which is a bit of a weird thing to say, considering that the game was 2D until the last entry and said last entry had Midgar, but it's just… Enormous, both in narrative space and in screen space. What do I mean? I mean that Esthar is made up of at least twenty screens, and has its own internal fast travel system.
This is only a sample.
Most of these screens have little to them other than incidental NPC dialogue, and serve little purpose over than making the city time-consuming to navigate and making it easy to get lost. This, in and of itself, will serve a secondary purpose later - we'll get back to that. For now though, it does a great job of selling the sheer scope of Esthar. Timber was huge, Deling City too, but this is just… On another scale entirely.
As for the incidental dialogue, it's most of the fun here, and we're learning some things. In no particular order:
Putting all this together, I get the strong impression that Esthar is, well…
When they say they just want to be 'left alone' and are 'peaceful' they're kind of evading the topic, yeah? It's awfully convenient that after Adel (and Adel personally this was entirely the evil sorceress's fault) was removed from power, Esthar withdrew into splendid isolation and let the rest of the world sort the fallout of their actions. I mean, what would they ask for, reparations? They removed Adel from power and graciously withdrew their invading armies from everyone else, isn't that enough?
The Esthari don't come across as particularly xenophobic or arrogant. They're nice, even. They've just constructed a narrative in which they aren't to blame for anything that happened under Adel, they don't owe the world anything other than to no longer be waging war on everyone, and then they withdrew to contemplate science and vanished their country behind a holographic screen before anyone could start asking pointed questions.
They are decades ahead of the rest of the world technologically, a bounty they're uninterested in sharing or even trading for. They might have been able to even stop Galbadia's invasion! Of course, this would raise other issues on its own, like all forms of 'benevolent' imperialism do, but I don't think they even considered the question. I'm not sure they're even aware that Galbadia exists except remotely, as a name on a map.
This is all the more important because we'll soon find out that Esthar's "isolation" is… Well, let's put a pin in that.
For now, let's do a détour by the shopping center.
Esthar's shopping arcade is… curious. Essentially, it's entirely automated and operated by touch screens; there's a funny exchange where a mother bemoans that her daughter couldn't help but touch the screen against her instructions and ended up accidentally buying 999 potions. All the stores are named after people: Rinrin's Store, Cloud's Shop, Johnny's Shop, and so on. Several of the stores advertise a sale with an eyecatching splash screen, though I don't think their prices are modified. In terms content it's mostly the usual, a smattering of common consumables and the ability to upgrade our characters' weapons if we have the appropriate crafting materials, which as usual we don't and also as usual doesn't matter because of Junctions. Still, I take advantage to buy 60 Tents and give everyone 100 Curagas to shore up their HP counts.
Incidentally, I don't know if it's shown up in any of my screenshots so far, but I already have a character with 9,999 HP. Zell ended up getting the 100 Full-Life stack at some point in shuffling my Magic and it happened to connect to HP in Auto-Junction, so he's just invincible now I guess. This doesn't really matter; we mostly only wipe to status effects, which make HP mostly irrelevant. If Zell gets tagged with Confuse, Berserk and Slow Petrify, there's not much I can do short of having these immunities up before the battle even starts.
Some of the stores do have some interesting things though. For instance, Karen's Book Store sells books - such as pet books for Rinoa's Angelo, Weapons Monthlies that include some other ultimate weapons, and Combat King issues for Zell.
Two of the stores are closed. At first, I just move on. But then I remember being told that actually these stores have stuff, we just need to insist. Johnny's Shop eventually opens after trying to enter it repeatedly, though it contains nothing of much interest. Cheryl's Store, the last on the list, is more of the hidden valuable prize variety. It will never open and we'll never shop there, but when trying to enter it, there is a random chance of it giving us a prize as some kind of promotional event.
I decide to commit to the bit and it's… Incredibly tedious. The problem is that the Esthar shop menu is one of the least convenient ever designed; likely because of its fancy graphics, it takes time to load. Every time we click a store, it sends us to the normal shop menu, then when we leave the store, we are returned to the first option at the top of the shop list and must manually scroll down to the last one, Cheryl's, which takes time because the game takes much more time registering the input that it normally does in menus
I end up only needing to try and enter Cheryl's Store a dozen times or so to get my prize. I'm lucky; some people need to do it a hundred times or more. Just doing it this way with a relatively quick drop took me about a minute or two minutes, so you could be looking at fully half an hour of clicking the menu before getting the drop. It's ridiculous and I wouldn't have done it if not for some misguided sense of FOMO.
The prize, it turns out, is very good: It's the Rosetta Stone, which can be used to teach a GF Abilityx4. So far we've had several GFs with Abilityx3, which allows a character to equip three passive Abilities like Enc-None, Magic +40%, or Mug. Expanding that to 4 is unprecedented and would be a really good item, unfortunately I'm not sure on which GF it would be best to equip it so I just put it in my inventory where I will never use it and forget its existence.
Another missable: There is a very specific interaction that gives no clues as to its own existence that we need to perform to obtain a magazine. Specifically, we need to talk to one of the citizens who talks about how the President is never in office. Then we must circle back around to the presidential palace…
The Presidential Secretary is standing next to (what is hard to discern as) a massive pile of collected magazines, wondering when he even had time to collect them. He's apparently been ordering them from all over the world. Being the kindly souls that we are, we take the opportunity to relieve her of one of them, which turns out to be Occult Fan IV.
Reports of some kind of… Devil? Train? That kinda looks like a locomotive with a skull on its front, doesn't it? Also an alien attacking people? I'm going to take a guess this is a hint as to how to trigger a particular encounter with the UFO we saw before - we'll need to keep an eye on 'ST Full Recovery Medicine,' as it sounds like the bait for that encounter. No idea what to do about the Train Devil, though.
And now it's time to head for the city exit!
Yeah, this is what I meant when I said Esthar is large. It covers a significant chunk of the world map. To the point that random encounters are actually enabled on these aerial roads!
Outside of the boundaries of the city, we return to a barren-type world map - just endless stretches of rock. Which means, I guess, Esthar produces all its food internally? I'm guessing some of these buildings are giant hydroponic farms and food factories or something like that. And unlike most cities in FF8, I can't easily find a road or railway leading out of the city to anywhere else; Esthar is a closed system, uninterested in connections to other places.
With that said, there are a few points of interest in the desert around Esthar, so let's check them out-
Marlboro encounter, we all die. I haven't really had an opportunity to locate the items necessary to extract enough Berserk/Confuse/Silence to protect everyone, so I wipe on any encounter with those. It's really annoying. I want to beat Marlboro, for bragging rights if nothing else, but right now there's no obvious path to acquiring the means of doing that, so we'll settle it later.
The first location we stumble onto appears to be one of Odine's laboratories, but there isn't much to do there; the NPCs allude to a 'big hunk of rock' that used to be there and was now missing,' and say 'when the research subject moves elsewhere, they move with it.' It's ambiguous but from context, I think this was once the laboratory dedicated to studying the Lunatic Pandora, and that the Pandora moved and the laboratory was deserted afterwards with Odine moving to new subjects.
This grid-like pattern you can see in the overworld picture is, I think, the holographic camouflage system hiding Esthar from the world, and indeed blocking us from getting out. For now, we're stuck in Esthar.
This place is called Tear's Point. Given the association between tear and cry, my best guess is that it's a monument built at the location of a previous Lunar Cry's impact or descent. Could that be why the landscape surrounding Esthar is so barren, because of the Lunar Cry's devastating effect? Hard to know for sure. For now, there's not much else to see other than take in the sights and pick up an item, but… Man. What a place:
I don't think 'monument' is quite it. These rows and rows of pattern-engraved, glass-cased boxes look far too much like a server room. At the same time, those giant statues of women playing the… Lute? Zither? Have no obvious functional purpose, which…
Honestly I like how FF8's aesthetic is this kind of deranged blend of normal modernist aesthetic, weird iPod future sci-fi-ish design, and then randomly the wildest, most bizarre architecture or landscape feature. The floating balloons in Deling City, the bizarre monument trapping Odin, those statues… It's a world that looks almost grounded and then you turn left and find that this prison is randomly built on three giant drills measuring a mile high. It's always slightly jarring, like the world has a mild edge of the surreal to it.
As for the item we pick up there, it is the Solomon Ring.
You remember the Solomon Ring, don't you? It was in Occult Fan III. It's a ring rumored to be able to summoned a Guardian Force, but the legend says the GF will only appear if we have 666 items. Sure enough, when I try to activate the item it tells me 'GF can't be summoned.' The problem is… I have way, way more than 666 items. It just adds up over hours of defeating monsters and refining cards, I have well over a thousand, and I don't want to delete half my inventory just to check if this works. So I decide to avoid frustrating myself and just look it up, and… Yeah, that wouldn't have helped. It turns out that "666 items" is actually 6/6/6 items. As in, we must have 6 of three separate, specific items: Marlboro Tentacles, Remedy+, and Steel Pipes.
Of these, only the Marlboro would be an issue. And it's a challenge I'm willing to face, just… Not today, you know? I want to get on with the plot, I am so tired of getting bogged into the mechanics. It doesn't help that I have just committed to trying the approach of 'permanently junction GFs to characters so that every characters has a set GF set and I never have to worry about swapping junctions,' which is reducing my overhead somewhat but has also severely diminished my party's ability to fight Marlboro.
So we'll figure out this stuff later.
For now…
This place is labeled on the map as the 'Esthar Sorceress Memorial,' but two guards forbid entry so there's nothing further for us to do here now.
Which leaves only one last location in the Esthar region, and the next step of the plot for us: The Lunar Gate.
…well.
Nobody has, so far, told us what the Lunar Gate is or why we need to go there, but, well. Just looking at it it's pretty obvious. We have several of the 'launch tube' transport technology we've seen in Esthar, only bigger and curving up, pointing into the sky, directly at the enormous moon.
This is, very obviously, a space launchpad. And the game decides to be economical in its dialogue, because all the characters seem to implicitly understand what they're looking at and make no comments as they're ushered into the facility and told about how they'll soon be 'taking off.'
It's like a sci-fi art déco airport. A little too ostentatious for my tastes, honestly.
The Lunar Gate Staff explains that our party will enter capsules where they will under go 'cold sleep,' which I find interesting; the sci-fi concept of 'cryosleep' was well-established by the late 90s, so 'cold sleep' just sounds like the translator had never read sci-fi before, which is odd. It's also unclear why anyone would need to undergo cryosleep for a two-hours journey, but maybe the pods are being accelerated to such speeds that the human body couldn't take it or something like that. We're given one last opportunity to back out in case we have more stuff to do, but short of Marlboro Genocide that I'm not equipped for I can't see anything, so let's just get on with it. Rinoa has already been taken to the facility, put to cryosleep and loaded in (...suspicious?), so we'll only get one other teammate on board; I choose Quistis.
Edea: "....."
Edea: "In the meantime, something must be done to suppress my powers…"
Quistis: "But it'd be too dangerous for Matron to be alone!"
Zell: "Then let me be her escort! C'mon Squall, what do you say!?"
Squall, mentally: (...Hmmm?)"
Squall, mentally: "(...Not too sure about that)"/["(...I trust Zell)"]
Squall: "Okay. I'll leave it in Zell's hands."
Zell: "OHHH YEAHHH! I'll do whatever it takes to watch over you. Don't worry about a thing!"
Zell: "Squall, don't worry about us!"
Squall, mentally: "(...Matron is a sorceress. Don't forget that.)"
And with that, it's off to the races, by which I mean the moon, with some admittedly cool space technology visuals.
TO THE MOON!
YES! YEEEEESSSSS! AT LAST! THE ERA OF THE MOONSPIRACY IS SOON TO BE OVER! WE ARE ABOUT TO HIT THE MOON WAY AHEAD OF WHEN I WAS EXPECTING IT, AND FINALLY FOUND OUT WHAT THIS IS ALL ABOUT!
…
Ooooor not.
Or we could leave Squall, Rinoa and [PARTYMEMBER3] to their fate and follow Zell's party instead.
Fuck.
Well, let's cut for image count.
Fly Me To The Moon
Last time, Squall emerged from another Laguna flashback, the Estharian authorities arrived, and we were taken to meet with Dr Odine.
*
The Presidential Palace is a massive building with sweeping wings, forming an arc at the heart of the town. As is growing common, we're only seeing a tiny slice of the 'actual' building through the rooms we have access to, which is something I've been noticing FF8 doing a lot and is a pretty convenient way to handle the contradiction of 'building as big as it should be' and 'keep the environment manageable.' I say this even though it seems obvious because that's not necessarily a universal sensibility? A lot of modern RPGs go to great lengths to model all of a building. Think of the way Skyrim, or an Owlcat Pathfinder RPG, would model 'a presidential palace' as opposed to the way FF8 does it where there are only three rooms you can ever enter but you do get the full sight of the building in the outside shots. It's just interesting to me how game design trends evolve over time.
Edea explains her situation and asks to be free from the sorceress's control, whereupon Odine walks into the room declaring proudly that it will be an easy task, for there is nothing Odine can do. He clearly wants this to be his big, cool dramatic entrance, but, well, I mean…
I'm honestly kind of surprised this isn't this game Cid. He has everything: the mad science/engineering, the dubious sartorial taste, the moral ambiguity… He fits the bill better than Cid Kramer, if anything.
Squall, of course, has only enough patience to let him introduce himself before jumping to the reason he's here, Rinoa. He demands to know where Ellone is and to see her at once, behaving so aggressively that Odine briefly thinks he's being taken hostage. It doesn't seem to bother him much, though, and he orders one of his assistants to take Squall to Ellone… Under one condition: That he be allowed to observe Rinoa. Squall is reluctant, but Edea tells him to accept, and he just tells Odine he better not 'do anything' to Rinoa.
Considering the situation it's not the worst deal, at least if we accept the premise of 'Ellone is the only way to save Rinoa' which Squall is taking as a given. Still, leaving anyone in the hands of Odine for an extended period of time… Well, he's no Hojo, so far he seems to be amoral rather than just evil, but we still don't fully know what he wanted out of Ellone, or what he might now want from Rinoa, beyond general scientific interest. We are told to head to the Lunar Gate at our leisure.
What's very funny - though it's not like I'm genuinely criticizing the game for it, it's just part of how these games work - is that here and now, with Squall getting clear directions to his goal, is the moment to just pull back and hang out for a while.
There's a whole city to discover, after all! And card games to play!
We challenge Odine for the missable Ward card, which isn't, by far, the most outlandish limited time unique card window we'll see today. EDIT: Turns out it was, update got very long.
The FMVs give you a good idea of the style of the place. It's extremely overdesigned. That little red bubble is us - some kind of forcefield happens once we sit on the central device and it starts taking us flying through tubes.
Esthar is… Huge.
It's possibly the biggest city in the entire franchise. Which is a bit of a weird thing to say, considering that the game was 2D until the last entry and said last entry had Midgar, but it's just… Enormous, both in narrative space and in screen space. What do I mean? I mean that Esthar is made up of at least twenty screens, and has its own internal fast travel system.
This is only a sample.
Most of these screens have little to them other than incidental NPC dialogue, and serve little purpose over than making the city time-consuming to navigate and making it easy to get lost. This, in and of itself, will serve a secondary purpose later - we'll get back to that. For now though, it does a great job of selling the sheer scope of Esthar. Timber was huge, Deling City too, but this is just… On another scale entirely.
As for the incidental dialogue, it's most of the fun here, and we're learning some things. In no particular order:
- It's been a very long time since Esthar had foreign visitors. They're somewhat shocked, but don't seem hostile to us, and talk freely and without noticeable disdain.
- Some people wonder if they should open their borders again, and some suggest maybe they should share their 'vast knowledge' with the outside.
- The capital is divided into two halves named, I kid you not, LEFTSIDE and RIGHTSIDE. I guess it sounds more exotic in Japanese.
- Esthar is now a republic, but the President is always absent on some other business, leaving the day-to-day affairs run seemingly kind of haphazardly. The President is praised for bringing peace to Esthar, but the details are vague. He's also an eccentric who always has weird requests, his latest being that Esthar's scientists invent a back-scratching device.
- Scientists in Esthar study the moon, which has a reputation to be scary.
- Science, vehicles, weapons are all much more advanced than in the rest of the world. They were never really actively xenophobic, they just kind of wanted to be left alone and pursue their research in peace.
- Adel's reign brought about atrocities, but there hasn't been a sorceress in 17 years and they've been peaceful ever since.
- Esthar has the technology to make spaceships, and it is rumored that the Gardens were originally built there.
- Tying into the 'moon scary' stuff, people are worried that the Lunar Cry will happen again soon.
- People all share these graceful but extravagant clothes, that don't get dirty because the city is kept perpetually clean. That's… impressive.
Putting all this together, I get the strong impression that Esthar is, well…
When they say they just want to be 'left alone' and are 'peaceful' they're kind of evading the topic, yeah? It's awfully convenient that after Adel (and Adel personally this was entirely the evil sorceress's fault) was removed from power, Esthar withdrew into splendid isolation and let the rest of the world sort the fallout of their actions. I mean, what would they ask for, reparations? They removed Adel from power and graciously withdrew their invading armies from everyone else, isn't that enough?
The Esthari don't come across as particularly xenophobic or arrogant. They're nice, even. They've just constructed a narrative in which they aren't to blame for anything that happened under Adel, they don't owe the world anything other than to no longer be waging war on everyone, and then they withdrew to contemplate science and vanished their country behind a holographic screen before anyone could start asking pointed questions.
They are decades ahead of the rest of the world technologically, a bounty they're uninterested in sharing or even trading for. They might have been able to even stop Galbadia's invasion! Of course, this would raise other issues on its own, like all forms of 'benevolent' imperialism do, but I don't think they even considered the question. I'm not sure they're even aware that Galbadia exists except remotely, as a name on a map.
This is all the more important because we'll soon find out that Esthar's "isolation" is… Well, let's put a pin in that.
For now, let's do a détour by the shopping center.
Esthar's shopping arcade is… curious. Essentially, it's entirely automated and operated by touch screens; there's a funny exchange where a mother bemoans that her daughter couldn't help but touch the screen against her instructions and ended up accidentally buying 999 potions. All the stores are named after people: Rinrin's Store, Cloud's Shop, Johnny's Shop, and so on. Several of the stores advertise a sale with an eyecatching splash screen, though I don't think their prices are modified. In terms content it's mostly the usual, a smattering of common consumables and the ability to upgrade our characters' weapons if we have the appropriate crafting materials, which as usual we don't and also as usual doesn't matter because of Junctions. Still, I take advantage to buy 60 Tents and give everyone 100 Curagas to shore up their HP counts.
Incidentally, I don't know if it's shown up in any of my screenshots so far, but I already have a character with 9,999 HP. Zell ended up getting the 100 Full-Life stack at some point in shuffling my Magic and it happened to connect to HP in Auto-Junction, so he's just invincible now I guess. This doesn't really matter; we mostly only wipe to status effects, which make HP mostly irrelevant. If Zell gets tagged with Confuse, Berserk and Slow Petrify, there's not much I can do short of having these immunities up before the battle even starts.
Some of the stores do have some interesting things though. For instance, Karen's Book Store sells books - such as pet books for Rinoa's Angelo, Weapons Monthlies that include some other ultimate weapons, and Combat King issues for Zell.
Two of the stores are closed. At first, I just move on. But then I remember being told that actually these stores have stuff, we just need to insist. Johnny's Shop eventually opens after trying to enter it repeatedly, though it contains nothing of much interest. Cheryl's Store, the last on the list, is more of the hidden valuable prize variety. It will never open and we'll never shop there, but when trying to enter it, there is a random chance of it giving us a prize as some kind of promotional event.
I decide to commit to the bit and it's… Incredibly tedious. The problem is that the Esthar shop menu is one of the least convenient ever designed; likely because of its fancy graphics, it takes time to load. Every time we click a store, it sends us to the normal shop menu, then when we leave the store, we are returned to the first option at the top of the shop list and must manually scroll down to the last one, Cheryl's, which takes time because the game takes much more time registering the input that it normally does in menus
I end up only needing to try and enter Cheryl's Store a dozen times or so to get my prize. I'm lucky; some people need to do it a hundred times or more. Just doing it this way with a relatively quick drop took me about a minute or two minutes, so you could be looking at fully half an hour of clicking the menu before getting the drop. It's ridiculous and I wouldn't have done it if not for some misguided sense of FOMO.
The prize, it turns out, is very good: It's the Rosetta Stone, which can be used to teach a GF Abilityx4. So far we've had several GFs with Abilityx3, which allows a character to equip three passive Abilities like Enc-None, Magic +40%, or Mug. Expanding that to 4 is unprecedented and would be a really good item, unfortunately I'm not sure on which GF it would be best to equip it so I just put it in my inventory where I will never use it and forget its existence.
Another missable: There is a very specific interaction that gives no clues as to its own existence that we need to perform to obtain a magazine. Specifically, we need to talk to one of the citizens who talks about how the President is never in office. Then we must circle back around to the presidential palace…
The Presidential Secretary is standing next to (what is hard to discern as) a massive pile of collected magazines, wondering when he even had time to collect them. He's apparently been ordering them from all over the world. Being the kindly souls that we are, we take the opportunity to relieve her of one of them, which turns out to be Occult Fan IV.
Reports of some kind of… Devil? Train? That kinda looks like a locomotive with a skull on its front, doesn't it? Also an alien attacking people? I'm going to take a guess this is a hint as to how to trigger a particular encounter with the UFO we saw before - we'll need to keep an eye on 'ST Full Recovery Medicine,' as it sounds like the bait for that encounter. No idea what to do about the Train Devil, though.
And now it's time to head for the city exit!
Yeah, this is what I meant when I said Esthar is large. It covers a significant chunk of the world map. To the point that random encounters are actually enabled on these aerial roads!
Outside of the boundaries of the city, we return to a barren-type world map - just endless stretches of rock. Which means, I guess, Esthar produces all its food internally? I'm guessing some of these buildings are giant hydroponic farms and food factories or something like that. And unlike most cities in FF8, I can't easily find a road or railway leading out of the city to anywhere else; Esthar is a closed system, uninterested in connections to other places.
With that said, there are a few points of interest in the desert around Esthar, so let's check them out-
Marlboro encounter, we all die. I haven't really had an opportunity to locate the items necessary to extract enough Berserk/Confuse/Silence to protect everyone, so I wipe on any encounter with those. It's really annoying. I want to beat Marlboro, for bragging rights if nothing else, but right now there's no obvious path to acquiring the means of doing that, so we'll settle it later.
The first location we stumble onto appears to be one of Odine's laboratories, but there isn't much to do there; the NPCs allude to a 'big hunk of rock' that used to be there and was now missing,' and say 'when the research subject moves elsewhere, they move with it.' It's ambiguous but from context, I think this was once the laboratory dedicated to studying the Lunatic Pandora, and that the Pandora moved and the laboratory was deserted afterwards with Odine moving to new subjects.
This grid-like pattern you can see in the overworld picture is, I think, the holographic camouflage system hiding Esthar from the world, and indeed blocking us from getting out. For now, we're stuck in Esthar.
This place is called Tear's Point. Given the association between tear and cry, my best guess is that it's a monument built at the location of a previous Lunar Cry's impact or descent. Could that be why the landscape surrounding Esthar is so barren, because of the Lunar Cry's devastating effect? Hard to know for sure. For now, there's not much else to see other than take in the sights and pick up an item, but… Man. What a place:
I don't think 'monument' is quite it. These rows and rows of pattern-engraved, glass-cased boxes look far too much like a server room. At the same time, those giant statues of women playing the… Lute? Zither? Have no obvious functional purpose, which…
Honestly I like how FF8's aesthetic is this kind of deranged blend of normal modernist aesthetic, weird iPod future sci-fi-ish design, and then randomly the wildest, most bizarre architecture or landscape feature. The floating balloons in Deling City, the bizarre monument trapping Odin, those statues… It's a world that looks almost grounded and then you turn left and find that this prison is randomly built on three giant drills measuring a mile high. It's always slightly jarring, like the world has a mild edge of the surreal to it.
As for the item we pick up there, it is the Solomon Ring.
You remember the Solomon Ring, don't you? It was in Occult Fan III. It's a ring rumored to be able to summoned a Guardian Force, but the legend says the GF will only appear if we have 666 items. Sure enough, when I try to activate the item it tells me 'GF can't be summoned.' The problem is… I have way, way more than 666 items. It just adds up over hours of defeating monsters and refining cards, I have well over a thousand, and I don't want to delete half my inventory just to check if this works. So I decide to avoid frustrating myself and just look it up, and… Yeah, that wouldn't have helped. It turns out that "666 items" is actually 6/6/6 items. As in, we must have 6 of three separate, specific items: Marlboro Tentacles, Remedy+, and Steel Pipes.
Of these, only the Marlboro would be an issue. And it's a challenge I'm willing to face, just… Not today, you know? I want to get on with the plot, I am so tired of getting bogged into the mechanics. It doesn't help that I have just committed to trying the approach of 'permanently junction GFs to characters so that every characters has a set GF set and I never have to worry about swapping junctions,' which is reducing my overhead somewhat but has also severely diminished my party's ability to fight Marlboro.
So we'll figure out this stuff later.
For now…
This place is labeled on the map as the 'Esthar Sorceress Memorial,' but two guards forbid entry so there's nothing further for us to do here now.
Which leaves only one last location in the Esthar region, and the next step of the plot for us: The Lunar Gate.
…well.
Nobody has, so far, told us what the Lunar Gate is or why we need to go there, but, well. Just looking at it it's pretty obvious. We have several of the 'launch tube' transport technology we've seen in Esthar, only bigger and curving up, pointing into the sky, directly at the enormous moon.
This is, very obviously, a space launchpad. And the game decides to be economical in its dialogue, because all the characters seem to implicitly understand what they're looking at and make no comments as they're ushered into the facility and told about how they'll soon be 'taking off.'
It's like a sci-fi art déco airport. A little too ostentatious for my tastes, honestly.
The Lunar Gate Staff explains that our party will enter capsules where they will under go 'cold sleep,' which I find interesting; the sci-fi concept of 'cryosleep' was well-established by the late 90s, so 'cold sleep' just sounds like the translator had never read sci-fi before, which is odd. It's also unclear why anyone would need to undergo cryosleep for a two-hours journey, but maybe the pods are being accelerated to such speeds that the human body couldn't take it or something like that. We're given one last opportunity to back out in case we have more stuff to do, but short of Marlboro Genocide that I'm not equipped for I can't see anything, so let's just get on with it. Rinoa has already been taken to the facility, put to cryosleep and loaded in (...suspicious?), so we'll only get one other teammate on board; I choose Quistis.
Edea: "....."
Edea: "In the meantime, something must be done to suppress my powers…"
Quistis: "But it'd be too dangerous for Matron to be alone!"
Zell: "Then let me be her escort! C'mon Squall, what do you say!?"
Squall, mentally: (...Hmmm?)"
Squall, mentally: "(...Not too sure about that)"/["(...I trust Zell)"]
Squall: "Okay. I'll leave it in Zell's hands."
Zell: "OHHH YEAHHH! I'll do whatever it takes to watch over you. Don't worry about a thing!"
Zell: "Squall, don't worry about us!"
Squall, mentally: "(...Matron is a sorceress. Don't forget that.)"
And with that, it's off to the races, by which I mean the moon, with some admittedly cool space technology visuals.
TO THE MOON!
YES! YEEEEESSSSS! AT LAST! THE ERA OF THE MOONSPIRACY IS SOON TO BE OVER! WE ARE ABOUT TO HIT THE MOON WAY AHEAD OF WHEN I WAS EXPECTING IT, AND FINALLY FOUND OUT WHAT THIS IS ALL ABOUT!
…
Ooooor not.
Or we could leave Squall, Rinoa and [PARTYMEMBER3] to their fate and follow Zell's party instead.
Fuck.
Well, let's cut for image count.
Final Fantasy VIII, Part 26.B: Esthar
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Well, at least we are met with a cute surprise: Rinoa's dog rushes to us as we are leaving!
He's worried, poor thing!
…you know, this is the first time we've seen the dog since, uh, all the way back at the resistance train in Disc 1? This dog has featured on screen twice. Now, sure, Angelo contributes to battles as a Limit effect, but… For a game that spends so much time having character models present in cutscenes, walking along after you, caring about the logistics of movement sometimes to ridiculous effects, it's weird that the dog just… Doesn't exist in the narrative from his first appearance to now 40 hours later? Well, it doesn't matter, I guess. Selphie and Zell reassure him, and Angelo runs out. Selphie tries to pursue him, and everyone runs after Selphie, but before Zell can reach the exit, a great noise is heard outside, and the ground shakes. Something massive is happening outside. Zell gets out, and…
A gigantic black monolith, so large that it's passing through the clouds and its top fades into sky-like blue from air distortion, an utterly enormous construct, is hovering above Esthar, slowly crossing the city's skies.
We need to form a party (which, with Zell and Edea as mandatory characters, just means picking who of Irvine and Selphie gets left behind), and run to the city to check on Dr Odine, whom all the characters are suddenly worried about - I'd say that's odd but actually none of them have had time to get to know any Esthari other than Odine, and he's a scientist who might have an idea What The Fuck This Is.
Form a group, a quick run back to-
…a quick reload and a quick trip back to-
WE RELOAD, EQUIP ENC-NONE AND RUN TO ESTHAR BLESSEDLY FREE OF RANDOM ENCOUNTERS.
You little old fuck.
Back in Esthar, everyone is confused and worried about the giant black monolith slowly and menacingly hovering towards them, and they don't know what to do. Do they even still have an operational military, beyond their soldiers now acting as law enforcement and their intercontinental cruise missiles?
That monolith, it turns out, is the Lunatic Pandora mentioned in the last Laguna flashback. I was expecting it to be on the moon, but it looks more like it's related to the moon. It's also… Well, that thing could wipe out a large metropolis simply by tipping over. God knows what actual offensive power it might have.
According to the Assistant, Galbadians 'salvaged' the Lunatic Pandora and activated it. He wants to sound the alarm (as if anyone could miss it passing overhead), but Odine is not worried; he believes that the city is not the Pandora's target. Rather, it is heading towards Tear's Point, the strange monument/open-air server room we saw earlier. What it's planning to do there, nobody's sure, but Odine is definitely excited to see it on the move again.
Zell asks what the hell is that thing and what it's doing, which Odine mistakes as a request to tell him all that Odine's found out about the Pandora over his many years of research, launching into a long-winded speech before Zell cuts him off and demands clear actionables - what's going to happen, is the enemy coming, what should they do?
Honestly as much as I would like to know what Odine knows about the Pandora, 1) This is an emergency situation where there literally is no time, 2) Odine strikes me as the kind of guy who would make the most interesting subject in the world tedious to listen to, so yeah, just give us the big picture, gramps.
We get layered holographic maps with the Pandora's path being highlighted and specific expected locations and time stamps. Every time FF8 remembers its initial presentation as a kind of mil-scifi oriented game, I'm reminded of how much I love that stuff and how strong a hook it was.
But to keep things short: It will take about 20 minutes for the Pandora to complete its course. During that time, it will intersect with three of the map locations across the city for a period of a few minutes each time. These will be measured by a real-time in-game clock. We will need to reach one of the locations in the correct time windows; if we miss the first, we'll have to proceed with the second, and so on.
This is why I told you earlier we'd circle back to how many screens Esthar has and how hard it can be to find our way through it - the city also functions as a timed dungeon. We will need to locate the first contact point, and then remember the path that will take us to it without a legible city map. During that time, our two challenges will be 1) finding the correct path between screens, 2) dispatching random encounters quickly enough to make time, because the Galbadian army will be raining soldiers from the monolith. The lifts that allow for fast travel will, of course, be disabled.
Odine has one last warning for us: The Galbadians may not be the primary threat. Lunatic Pandora has 'an effect on the moon,' and the triple alignment of the moon, the Pandora, and Tear's Point will 'maximize the effect.'
I think it's no big guess at this stage to figure that it will likely trigger a new Lunar Cry. So. That's kind of a problem.
Fortunately, the Galbadian soldiers and elites are even worse opponents than they've been previously, and dispatching them is tremendously easy, which allows us to make our time to the first location, where we are faced with an unapproachable slab of rock several miles high and no obvious way in. This would completely stomp us, except the Galbadians, in a bout of reckless confidence, open a hatch in the side to jump in and attack us. We dispatch them in seconds, and enter…
THE MONOLITH.
There's a meteor draw point on these stairs, which is nice.
We literally don't have room left for Curagas.
We are now in a grand hall which has three elevators, each one a different color and labeled with their appropriate number, from left to right. This looks like a dungeon, then! It seems like a good opportunity to level up some of the 'back half' cast. With no obvious hint where to go, I decide to just take things in order, and enter Elevator 01 on the left.
…huh.
That is… Familiar. Also not what I was expecting. The outside architecture looked very artificial (there is a giant logo stamped on the side of the monolith, after all), but it seems like most of the inside of this giant structure is composed of tunnels carved through rock. A kind of blue-green rock that we've seen before.
Could this place be related to the Centra Excavation Site that Laguna explored in the past?
We actually find a Holy Draw Point, which is nice, and then we pass onto an aerial platform which honestly reminds me of some of the best architectural gigantism from Remedy Entertainment's Control.
Just dizzying views, the camera so far up it's hard to make out our characters.
This particular pathway leads to a dead end, though. There's a doorway at the end, but it doesn't open and doesn't react to prompts.
I'm starting to think this place may be the final dungeon, and we're getting a short taste before the actual endgame. It won't last long, however. We circle back, take another exit, and…
…run into whatever the hell this is. Some kind of floating construct? It doesn't appear to be moving. Zell, being the characteristic hothead that he is, decides it's "no time for pondering" and everyone rushes ahead… And immediately gets swatted away.
No, like, literally. The construct-thingy telekinetically grabs the party, hurls them through the air, and they land on the ground in what appears to be the Esthar Sorceress Memorial Monument we briefly visited earlier. Note again how the Pandora is fading into the sky, it's very distinctive and kind of strange.
Zell: "Dammit! Kills me to let 'em go!"
I think I might have been right. This was only a taste of the final dungeon a little ahead of schedule. All questions remain unanswered.
Zell, Edea and Selphie watch impotently as the monolith drifts away towards its destination, the Tear's Point - and as it approaches, the place reacts to it.
A crack appears on the face of the women's statues. The central circle of the monument begins to glow. And the Pandora seats in the sky, dominating the landscape.
Back at the monument, Edea whispers: "The Lunar Cry…"
Yeah, it's definitely looking like this may be the trigger for another apocalyptic monster invasion from the moon. Unfortunately, there is nothing we can do here, and Zell tells the group to head back to Esthar.
We leave them on that, transitioning to space, where…
Squall's pod is soaring through space. Soon, it approaches-
…
…….
…………
HELLO, READERS. IT IS ME, OMICRON FROM THE FUTURE. I HAVE TAKEN DANGEROUS STEPS TO FIND ELLONE SO AS TO PROJECT MYSELF INTO THE PAST AND AVOID A DIRE PORTENT. YOU SEE, IN MY TIMELINE, UPON REACHING THE UNADVERTISED ENDPOINT OF THE DUNGEON, I JUST WENT WITH IT. AFTER ALL, WE MOVED RIGHT AWAY INTO THE NEXT FMV, AND THEN WE REACHED THE LUNAR BASE, AND IT WAS ALL COOL PLOT SHIT AND I PLAYED FOR LIKE AN HOUR EXCITED TO FIND OUT WHAT WAS COMING NEXT.
THIS WAS OBVIOUSLY A TRICK. I DON'T KNOW WHY I DIDN'T IMMEDIATELY REALIZE IT. REMEMBER, READERS: WE ARE PLAYING FINAL FANTASY VIII. IF YOU ENTERED ELEVATOR 01 OUT OF 3, AND IMMEDIATELY REACHED THE NEXT PLOT BEAT, THE CORRECT ANSWER IS TO IMMEDIATELY SHUT DOWN THE GAME AND RELOAD RATHER THAN WASTE YOUR TIME. THIS SHOULD NOT BE A SURPRISE TO ANYONE. EVERY TIME YOU FEEL LIKE THE PLOT OF FF8 IS 'MOVING FORWARD,' AND YOU ARE 'GOING WITH THE FLOW,' YOU SHOULD REMEMBER THAT YOU ARE BEING TRICKED AND MISSING A CARD THAT CAN BE REFINED INTO 100 INVINCIBILITY ITEMS, OR SOME SIMILAR SHIT.
HEAR MY MESSAGE. YOU ALONE CAN PREVENT TIME COMPRESSION. IMMEDIATELY RELOAD THAT SAVE FROM 30 MINUTES AGO.
…
Oh, wow, that was weird.
Okay, backtracking, backtracking… We didn't visit any room that had a save point while on the Pandora, and I didn't bother wasting time locating a save point while rushing to get to the Pandora with the 20 minute timer, so… With 'traditional saves' we'd be reloading to the world map, before entering Esthar again to go visit Odine about the approaching Monolith. Wow.
Thankfully emulators grant us quicksaving options, so we actually 'only' have to reload back to the Pandora some… Hour ago, from my perspective in the future.
Yay.
Yeah. Okay. This wasn't just 'familiar.' This is the 'Centra Excavation Facility' we explored as Laguna. We took the wrong elevator first, but if we use Elevator 03 instead, we… Well first we get lost. The path we want is extremely poorly signposted. But once we do, we get down into the guts of the rocky tunnels, and there we find all the boulders that were unleashed by Laguna messing with the traps, along with the hatches meant to release them. All of these conceal (invisible, we have to just blindly prod for them) items and Draw Points.
This is not the entire facility from the flashback - and I checked, because fuck doing it again - but it's most of the rooms that are just 'tunnels carved in rock,' as opposed to the mining apparatus.
So I'm guessing that Laguna was exploring the site at the time during which Esthar was excavating it from the Centra ruins. And, in turn, that means that the event that happened within about a year or so of that, in which a weird monolith appeared on the horizon before his flashback ended, was the Lunatic Pandora 'coming online,' as it were. In the time since then, Odine lost interest in it in favor of Ellone, for whatever reason. Is it too dangerous?
Well, for now, let's collect our rewards. They are: A Power Generator (which unlocks the Ray-Bomb Blue Magic for Quistis), another Phoenix Pinion, Confuse, Silence, Holy Draw Points, the fifth Combat King magazine, and at the top of it all, an Ultima Draw Point. Unfortunately we get single digit draws from all these magic springs (only 5 Ultimas, a pittance). Oh, and a Speed Junction Scroll, which will allow us to teach any GF to Junction Speed, and a 'LuvLuv G,' which raises GF Compatibility.
All in all, was this worth the trip back? I don't know. Depends on how often I end up needing Zell's ultimate Limit Break, My Final Heaven, taught by the magazine, I guess. I do terribly at his Duel minigame, frankly, so I never get great output from him. The Speed Junction scroll is honestly more enticing. Only 5 Ultimas though, man… I feel like I've been robbed.
Well, that's about it. We head back up through Elevator 02 (03 and 02 are connected as a single system), head through 01 again, find the weird construct, get knocked into the air, play out the exit cutscene.
And with this, it's to catch up to the present…
…next time. The transition from Zell's ground-bound adventures to Squall's journey into space makes for a nice transition point, and this update is big enough as it is. We'll cover the adventures briefly interrupted by this trek back through time, in our next update. Where we will return to some of those 'we'll come back later' and 'put a pin in that' moments.
There's one thing I'm going to say here, because it's something that's really grown apparent to me in this update:
Final Fantasy VIII is a game that was designed to be replayed.
I… don't mean that as a compliment, as such. What I mean is, there is no natural way to play FF8 that would lead to picking up most of its missable content. Most of these missables are deliberately put into places where the player has to actively resist the flow of the story to get them. A character takes a break mid-speech, and you need to press "challenge to a card duel" rather than just press "dialogue" as would be natural. You need to leave the plot and go wandering in the off-world a bit when urgency is the greatest. If you take the 'wrong' option at a multiple choice point, that is the one which advances the plot, you need to turn off the console and reload to explore first. Even if you don't know that there is something to miss, the moment you see the plot move forward despite there being two elevators you didn't take, you need to turn off and reload just to check.
All these moments break the flow of the game and make the pacing and storytelling worse… Because they're not meant to be experienced in your first playthrough. They exist purely either for guidebook-consuming obsessives who play with their guidebook open (and I don't want to dismiss that aspect, I was part of that demographic), or for people who have already played the game, know all the narrative beats, know where all the 'gates' are located, and so won't mistakenly advance the plot, won't push forward rather than scrounge around because they want to see what's next.
And I think to an extent this is incompatible with modern gaming culture, because of three notable features:
And I don't know how to feel about that. Except maybe that if I'd known ahead of time I'd end up splitting this update, I might have just reloaded back even further and figured out how to get the status defenses to resist and kill Marlboro and at least get the Solomon Ring's GF out of the whole deal. Ah, well.
Thank you for reading.
Next Time: The Lunar Base.
He's worried, poor thing!
…you know, this is the first time we've seen the dog since, uh, all the way back at the resistance train in Disc 1? This dog has featured on screen twice. Now, sure, Angelo contributes to battles as a Limit effect, but… For a game that spends so much time having character models present in cutscenes, walking along after you, caring about the logistics of movement sometimes to ridiculous effects, it's weird that the dog just… Doesn't exist in the narrative from his first appearance to now 40 hours later? Well, it doesn't matter, I guess. Selphie and Zell reassure him, and Angelo runs out. Selphie tries to pursue him, and everyone runs after Selphie, but before Zell can reach the exit, a great noise is heard outside, and the ground shakes. Something massive is happening outside. Zell gets out, and…
A gigantic black monolith, so large that it's passing through the clouds and its top fades into sky-like blue from air distortion, an utterly enormous construct, is hovering above Esthar, slowly crossing the city's skies.
We need to form a party (which, with Zell and Edea as mandatory characters, just means picking who of Irvine and Selphie gets left behind), and run to the city to check on Dr Odine, whom all the characters are suddenly worried about - I'd say that's odd but actually none of them have had time to get to know any Esthari other than Odine, and he's a scientist who might have an idea What The Fuck This Is.
Form a group, a quick run back to-
…a quick reload and a quick trip back to-
WE RELOAD, EQUIP ENC-NONE AND RUN TO ESTHAR BLESSEDLY FREE OF RANDOM ENCOUNTERS.
You little old fuck.
Back in Esthar, everyone is confused and worried about the giant black monolith slowly and menacingly hovering towards them, and they don't know what to do. Do they even still have an operational military, beyond their soldiers now acting as law enforcement and their intercontinental cruise missiles?
That monolith, it turns out, is the Lunatic Pandora mentioned in the last Laguna flashback. I was expecting it to be on the moon, but it looks more like it's related to the moon. It's also… Well, that thing could wipe out a large metropolis simply by tipping over. God knows what actual offensive power it might have.
According to the Assistant, Galbadians 'salvaged' the Lunatic Pandora and activated it. He wants to sound the alarm (as if anyone could miss it passing overhead), but Odine is not worried; he believes that the city is not the Pandora's target. Rather, it is heading towards Tear's Point, the strange monument/open-air server room we saw earlier. What it's planning to do there, nobody's sure, but Odine is definitely excited to see it on the move again.
Zell asks what the hell is that thing and what it's doing, which Odine mistakes as a request to tell him all that Odine's found out about the Pandora over his many years of research, launching into a long-winded speech before Zell cuts him off and demands clear actionables - what's going to happen, is the enemy coming, what should they do?
Honestly as much as I would like to know what Odine knows about the Pandora, 1) This is an emergency situation where there literally is no time, 2) Odine strikes me as the kind of guy who would make the most interesting subject in the world tedious to listen to, so yeah, just give us the big picture, gramps.
We get layered holographic maps with the Pandora's path being highlighted and specific expected locations and time stamps. Every time FF8 remembers its initial presentation as a kind of mil-scifi oriented game, I'm reminded of how much I love that stuff and how strong a hook it was.
But to keep things short: It will take about 20 minutes for the Pandora to complete its course. During that time, it will intersect with three of the map locations across the city for a period of a few minutes each time. These will be measured by a real-time in-game clock. We will need to reach one of the locations in the correct time windows; if we miss the first, we'll have to proceed with the second, and so on.
This is why I told you earlier we'd circle back to how many screens Esthar has and how hard it can be to find our way through it - the city also functions as a timed dungeon. We will need to locate the first contact point, and then remember the path that will take us to it without a legible city map. During that time, our two challenges will be 1) finding the correct path between screens, 2) dispatching random encounters quickly enough to make time, because the Galbadian army will be raining soldiers from the monolith. The lifts that allow for fast travel will, of course, be disabled.
Odine has one last warning for us: The Galbadians may not be the primary threat. Lunatic Pandora has 'an effect on the moon,' and the triple alignment of the moon, the Pandora, and Tear's Point will 'maximize the effect.'
I think it's no big guess at this stage to figure that it will likely trigger a new Lunar Cry. So. That's kind of a problem.
Fortunately, the Galbadian soldiers and elites are even worse opponents than they've been previously, and dispatching them is tremendously easy, which allows us to make our time to the first location, where we are faced with an unapproachable slab of rock several miles high and no obvious way in. This would completely stomp us, except the Galbadians, in a bout of reckless confidence, open a hatch in the side to jump in and attack us. We dispatch them in seconds, and enter…
THE MONOLITH.
There's a meteor draw point on these stairs, which is nice.
We literally don't have room left for Curagas.
We are now in a grand hall which has three elevators, each one a different color and labeled with their appropriate number, from left to right. This looks like a dungeon, then! It seems like a good opportunity to level up some of the 'back half' cast. With no obvious hint where to go, I decide to just take things in order, and enter Elevator 01 on the left.
…huh.
That is… Familiar. Also not what I was expecting. The outside architecture looked very artificial (there is a giant logo stamped on the side of the monolith, after all), but it seems like most of the inside of this giant structure is composed of tunnels carved through rock. A kind of blue-green rock that we've seen before.
Could this place be related to the Centra Excavation Site that Laguna explored in the past?
We actually find a Holy Draw Point, which is nice, and then we pass onto an aerial platform which honestly reminds me of some of the best architectural gigantism from Remedy Entertainment's Control.
Just dizzying views, the camera so far up it's hard to make out our characters.
This particular pathway leads to a dead end, though. There's a doorway at the end, but it doesn't open and doesn't react to prompts.
I'm starting to think this place may be the final dungeon, and we're getting a short taste before the actual endgame. It won't last long, however. We circle back, take another exit, and…
…run into whatever the hell this is. Some kind of floating construct? It doesn't appear to be moving. Zell, being the characteristic hothead that he is, decides it's "no time for pondering" and everyone rushes ahead… And immediately gets swatted away.
No, like, literally. The construct-thingy telekinetically grabs the party, hurls them through the air, and they land on the ground in what appears to be the Esthar Sorceress Memorial Monument we briefly visited earlier. Note again how the Pandora is fading into the sky, it's very distinctive and kind of strange.
Zell: "Dammit! Kills me to let 'em go!"
I think I might have been right. This was only a taste of the final dungeon a little ahead of schedule. All questions remain unanswered.
Zell, Edea and Selphie watch impotently as the monolith drifts away towards its destination, the Tear's Point - and as it approaches, the place reacts to it.
A crack appears on the face of the women's statues. The central circle of the monument begins to glow. And the Pandora seats in the sky, dominating the landscape.
Back at the monument, Edea whispers: "The Lunar Cry…"
Yeah, it's definitely looking like this may be the trigger for another apocalyptic monster invasion from the moon. Unfortunately, there is nothing we can do here, and Zell tells the group to head back to Esthar.
We leave them on that, transitioning to space, where…
Squall's pod is soaring through space. Soon, it approaches-
…
…….
…………
HELLO, READERS. IT IS ME, OMICRON FROM THE FUTURE. I HAVE TAKEN DANGEROUS STEPS TO FIND ELLONE SO AS TO PROJECT MYSELF INTO THE PAST AND AVOID A DIRE PORTENT. YOU SEE, IN MY TIMELINE, UPON REACHING THE UNADVERTISED ENDPOINT OF THE DUNGEON, I JUST WENT WITH IT. AFTER ALL, WE MOVED RIGHT AWAY INTO THE NEXT FMV, AND THEN WE REACHED THE LUNAR BASE, AND IT WAS ALL COOL PLOT SHIT AND I PLAYED FOR LIKE AN HOUR EXCITED TO FIND OUT WHAT WAS COMING NEXT.
THIS WAS OBVIOUSLY A TRICK. I DON'T KNOW WHY I DIDN'T IMMEDIATELY REALIZE IT. REMEMBER, READERS: WE ARE PLAYING FINAL FANTASY VIII. IF YOU ENTERED ELEVATOR 01 OUT OF 3, AND IMMEDIATELY REACHED THE NEXT PLOT BEAT, THE CORRECT ANSWER IS TO IMMEDIATELY SHUT DOWN THE GAME AND RELOAD RATHER THAN WASTE YOUR TIME. THIS SHOULD NOT BE A SURPRISE TO ANYONE. EVERY TIME YOU FEEL LIKE THE PLOT OF FF8 IS 'MOVING FORWARD,' AND YOU ARE 'GOING WITH THE FLOW,' YOU SHOULD REMEMBER THAT YOU ARE BEING TRICKED AND MISSING A CARD THAT CAN BE REFINED INTO 100 INVINCIBILITY ITEMS, OR SOME SIMILAR SHIT.
HEAR MY MESSAGE. YOU ALONE CAN PREVENT TIME COMPRESSION. IMMEDIATELY RELOAD THAT SAVE FROM 30 MINUTES AGO.
…
Oh, wow, that was weird.
Okay, backtracking, backtracking… We didn't visit any room that had a save point while on the Pandora, and I didn't bother wasting time locating a save point while rushing to get to the Pandora with the 20 minute timer, so… With 'traditional saves' we'd be reloading to the world map, before entering Esthar again to go visit Odine about the approaching Monolith. Wow.
Thankfully emulators grant us quicksaving options, so we actually 'only' have to reload back to the Pandora some… Hour ago, from my perspective in the future.
Yay.
Yeah. Okay. This wasn't just 'familiar.' This is the 'Centra Excavation Facility' we explored as Laguna. We took the wrong elevator first, but if we use Elevator 03 instead, we… Well first we get lost. The path we want is extremely poorly signposted. But once we do, we get down into the guts of the rocky tunnels, and there we find all the boulders that were unleashed by Laguna messing with the traps, along with the hatches meant to release them. All of these conceal (invisible, we have to just blindly prod for them) items and Draw Points.
This is not the entire facility from the flashback - and I checked, because fuck doing it again - but it's most of the rooms that are just 'tunnels carved in rock,' as opposed to the mining apparatus.
So I'm guessing that Laguna was exploring the site at the time during which Esthar was excavating it from the Centra ruins. And, in turn, that means that the event that happened within about a year or so of that, in which a weird monolith appeared on the horizon before his flashback ended, was the Lunatic Pandora 'coming online,' as it were. In the time since then, Odine lost interest in it in favor of Ellone, for whatever reason. Is it too dangerous?
Well, for now, let's collect our rewards. They are: A Power Generator (which unlocks the Ray-Bomb Blue Magic for Quistis), another Phoenix Pinion, Confuse, Silence, Holy Draw Points, the fifth Combat King magazine, and at the top of it all, an Ultima Draw Point. Unfortunately we get single digit draws from all these magic springs (only 5 Ultimas, a pittance). Oh, and a Speed Junction Scroll, which will allow us to teach any GF to Junction Speed, and a 'LuvLuv G,' which raises GF Compatibility.
All in all, was this worth the trip back? I don't know. Depends on how often I end up needing Zell's ultimate Limit Break, My Final Heaven, taught by the magazine, I guess. I do terribly at his Duel minigame, frankly, so I never get great output from him. The Speed Junction scroll is honestly more enticing. Only 5 Ultimas though, man… I feel like I've been robbed.
Well, that's about it. We head back up through Elevator 02 (03 and 02 are connected as a single system), head through 01 again, find the weird construct, get knocked into the air, play out the exit cutscene.
And with this, it's to catch up to the present…
…next time. The transition from Zell's ground-bound adventures to Squall's journey into space makes for a nice transition point, and this update is big enough as it is. We'll cover the adventures briefly interrupted by this trek back through time, in our next update. Where we will return to some of those 'we'll come back later' and 'put a pin in that' moments.
There's one thing I'm going to say here, because it's something that's really grown apparent to me in this update:
Final Fantasy VIII is a game that was designed to be replayed.
I… don't mean that as a compliment, as such. What I mean is, there is no natural way to play FF8 that would lead to picking up most of its missable content. Most of these missables are deliberately put into places where the player has to actively resist the flow of the story to get them. A character takes a break mid-speech, and you need to press "challenge to a card duel" rather than just press "dialogue" as would be natural. You need to leave the plot and go wandering in the off-world a bit when urgency is the greatest. If you take the 'wrong' option at a multiple choice point, that is the one which advances the plot, you need to turn off the console and reload to explore first. Even if you don't know that there is something to miss, the moment you see the plot move forward despite there being two elevators you didn't take, you need to turn off and reload just to check.
All these moments break the flow of the game and make the pacing and storytelling worse… Because they're not meant to be experienced in your first playthrough. They exist purely either for guidebook-consuming obsessives who play with their guidebook open (and I don't want to dismiss that aspect, I was part of that demographic), or for people who have already played the game, know all the narrative beats, know where all the 'gates' are located, and so won't mistakenly advance the plot, won't push forward rather than scrounge around because they want to see what's next.
And I think to an extent this is incompatible with modern gaming culture, because of three notable features:
- Less time spent replaying games. There are just so many games these days, and they are all so long, that it's much less of a plausible ask for someone to reply a narratively-driven game like FF8 that doesn't have any NG+ function just to get all the collectibles and break the game balance.
- The death of guidebooks. Now, in a way it is easier than it has ever been to find walkthroughs of games telling you where to look for things. I have, myself, resorted to one during this update, simply because the idea of reloading to do this, and then not getting everything and only learning that I still missed something because my thread pointed to me the Speed Junction Scroll or w/e, was agonizing. However, this ties into the third point…
- The rise of spoiler culture. Now, to be clear, it's always been rude to tell someone that Aerith dies ahead of them knowing it. But the thing is, it's harder to confidently look things up without risking exposure? I have found one or two online guides that are very conservative in their spoilers and break their walkthrough into discrete tabs, and even then they're not perfect, but beyond that just googling anything about a game can reveal spoilers in the scrolldown menu. Forget YouTube. Spoilers are simultaneously everywhere and despised. It's impossible to avoid them, and it's considered valuable to avoid them. Maybe a 1997 guidebook would have spoiled an important plot point, but if it did, it's probably because it didn't care. Should it have cared? Maybe, I don't know.
And I don't know how to feel about that. Except maybe that if I'd known ahead of time I'd end up splitting this update, I might have just reloaded back even further and figured out how to get the status defenses to resist and kill Marlboro and at least get the Solomon Ring's GF out of the whole deal. Ah, well.
Thank you for reading.
Next Time: The Lunar Base.
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ZerbanDaGreat
Daemon Noble of D E M O G R A P H I C S
- Pronouns
- They/them
This is what they took from us. Reasonable management of development resources via limited scope, as opposed to today's maximalist "if we don't render all 26 of the Esthar City Hall's bathrooms the bombs will go off" design that leads to Shinra HQ being an 8-hour stretch of gameplay in FF7 Remake.
I mean to be fair we call shit 'Westside' and 'East End' in English, sometimes prosaic is also accurate.
Form a group, a quick run back to-
…a quick reload and a quick trip back to-
WE RELOAD, EQUIP ENC-NONE AND RUN TO ESTHAR BLESSEDLY FREE OF RANDOM ENCOUNTERS.
"I will... never be a memory..."
At this point I would definitely give up and decide I'm never beating FF8 after all, much like when I realised I missed a Bard song in FF5 and decided the only logical course of action was to allow Exdeath to destroy the world
Entropy Judge
Recurring Bouts of Misanthropy
It might also have to do with how much space you have for the game and for things in the game. Like, even in Skyrim, I think pretty much every room they give you is used by someone for something. None of it is ever just ... space. So they look at what they need a given building to do (sleeping areas, cooking areas, armory, etc), and then they put all those areas in - because the player can theoretically use all those areas as well as the NPCs - and then that's what the building has.
I ... don't think it really matters, IIRC? Like, I wouldn't go putting it on someone with Abilityx3 just in case you need to split GF up weirdly, but I don't think it really matters.
Also, much like the Weapon Refinements, you don't need to have read the Combat King magazines to actually execute the moves. You just can't see them until you do. (Best strategy for raw damage, though, is just Punch Rush -> Booya -> Punch Rush looping for however long you can keep it going. If you're really nuts, the damage gets absurd very quickly.)
- Location
- Spain
No way, Odine outfit is too ridiculous even for Banana man.
Oh god.
That has to be Laguna right?
- Pronouns
- Him/He
It's interesting, because while FF6 had a lot of missable things and one (well really, one-and-a-half) story change in the world of ruin, FF7 is the one that really opened up the game in repeatability.
Different party members did say different things in scenes, limit breaks unlocked on use and thus you could be discovering new things on your second playthrough. The Romance Arc could give you very different outcomes. There were minigames that required you to retrace your steps the halfway across the entire world to get to play all of them, and it was hugely unlikely you found the 'perfect route' for things like the great glacier or went down all the paths of the snowboarding minigame.
The mechanical differences in battle probably weren't going to be too different, but things like many (many) dialogue choices where you could decide to say the other thing really livened up the story on the second time through. Plus it being a 'mystery' story means that seeing what was (and wasn't) foreshadowed is enjoyable in a way that FF6 was not.
And FF8 extends that in quite a lot of ways. Lots of things in FF8 are turned up several notches compared to FF7, for good and ill.
Anyways, while it seems you have a decent heads up on things, the guy in charge of the space-place (or only named guy, maybe) should have a card you want.
Although you maybe don't need to get it right there, with the rules that are in play there. You could wait until the next couple plot beats and track the card down in the overworld section and play him under more sensible conditions.
It matters a little I'd say, but it's also the sort of thing that's fine to be put in a corner until end game when he's more aware of his options. With him grabbing that it's unlikely he'll end up in a situation where he has to pick and choose which party member is left out in the cold.
Different party members did say different things in scenes, limit breaks unlocked on use and thus you could be discovering new things on your second playthrough. The Romance Arc could give you very different outcomes. There were minigames that required you to retrace your steps the halfway across the entire world to get to play all of them, and it was hugely unlikely you found the 'perfect route' for things like the great glacier or went down all the paths of the snowboarding minigame.
The mechanical differences in battle probably weren't going to be too different, but things like many (many) dialogue choices where you could decide to say the other thing really livened up the story on the second time through. Plus it being a 'mystery' story means that seeing what was (and wasn't) foreshadowed is enjoyable in a way that FF6 was not.
And FF8 extends that in quite a lot of ways. Lots of things in FF8 are turned up several notches compared to FF7, for good and ill.
Anyways, while it seems you have a decent heads up on things, the guy in charge of the space-place (or only named guy, maybe) should have a card you want.
Although you maybe don't need to get it right there, with the rules that are in play there. You could wait until the next couple plot beats and track the card down in the overworld section and play him under more sensible conditions.
It matters a little I'd say, but it's also the sort of thing that's fine to be put in a corner until end game when he's more aware of his options. With him grabbing that it's unlikely he'll end up in a situation where he has to pick and choose which party member is left out in the cold.
slybrarian
Creature of Fable
- Location
- A Far and Sunless Land
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Well, you say this, but in my experience for the last couple years trying to find this sort of thing has gotten increasingly difficult as useful material gets buried beneath mountains of listicles, stupidly long YouTube videos, and awful fandom.com & fextralife wikis. And that was before generative AI took off and Google started pushing search results further and further down beneath irrelevant adds.
Egleris
Vagrant Dragon
- Location
- Italy
In theory, this is what the Occult magazines are supposed to guide you to.
The first step, obviously, is to realize that "666" means "three times 6 specific items", which is of course the hardest thing to figure out, and I genuinely don't believe anybody ever did without checking a guide first. Then, the other three Occult magazines each point to one of the three items: Occult I has "a camp was being surrounded with Steel Pipes" (and the monster in the image is the Wendigo, which can drop and/or be mugged for Steel Pipes), Occult II has "something to do with Marlboro" (and the tentacles are the only item with the Marlboro's name on them), and Occult IV has a "status recovering item", and once you refine some Remedy Plus with "Med Lv Up", you'll find that its text says "heals status conditions and spell effects". That's, according to the game developers, how you're supposed to figure out how to get the Solomon's Ring GF.
As I said, if anybody were to tell me they figured that out themselves, rather than looking it up in a guide, I wouldn't believe them.
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Thing is, at least, most of the 'missable' content doesn't matter. My very first playthrough (and only full playthrough) of FF8, I wasn't using a guide. I was just playing through it, largely ignored the card game, and as soon as I could learn Enc-None I kept it on. Beat it just fine, basically doing a low-level run without even really knowing how that took advantage of the game's systems.
I understand wanting to get most of what the game has to offer, but if it's frustrating, don't worry about it. There are reasons FF8 is often one of the derided Final Fantasies, even though it's got a lot of good things going on too.
somewhatLazy
Serial Procrastinator
- Location
- lurking
I see that Johnny from Midgar has managed to make it good in the world.
Also, if Cloud's shop doesn't sell chocobo items, I riot. Yes, I know that there's no chocobos in this game. I hold strong to my position.
I mean, does it really matter if you get Nice GF Item #76? 8 is a fairly easy game and the missable rewards aren't really broken. If reloading the game and breaking the flow of the story is ruining your experience, then just don't do it. If you want to do something like collect all the unique cards, then the thread can warn you about it in advance. The most challenging endgame optional content with rewards locked behind it the first superboss can be done without any of the gamebreaking exploits (source: I did it).