- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
not the first to say this but this is totally just laguna. I'm saying this blind but I will be flabbergasted if I'm wrong.
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 had the same reaction on reading that bit.
I really enjoy the mental image of Squall getting strapped into a rocket pod after walking through the Moon Gate to the Moon Tear to stop the Moon Pandora from aligning with the Moon and enabling another Moon Cry in which Moon Monsters from the Moon will rain down from space to destroy the city...and then realizing (with obligatory flashback to every time somebody said the word "Moon" "Lunar" or "Lunatic" in the entirety of the game) with five seconds to go until liftoff: "Wait a minute...am I going to the Moon?!"
ZerbanDaGreat
Daemon Noble of D E M O G R A P H I C S
- Pronouns
- They/them
Laguna somehow managing to go from a POW in Esthar's clutches to the fucking president would be the most stunning case of a clown failing upwards since Buggy Onepiece so now I resent that we're going to space instead of confirming or denying the possibility.
- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
I mean we did just see him getting pushed to be LEADER OF THE RESISTANCE at the end of our last look at him. That scans quite naturally for winding up in charge far enough down the line. Just implies the resistance succeeded.
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
A resistance succeeded anyway given Adel is no longer in charge and it wasn't an external conquest, just a question of if it was the one he was in charge of or a palace coup or some other Estharian anti-Adel group (and law of conservation of detail says it was the resistance we saw that did the deed)
- Location
- Norway
Moonsters.
And yeah, there are certain spoilers that really just became part of the general knowledge at some point. It Was His Sled and all that. Or that one Harry Potter one, you know what I'm talking about without even hinting any more at what it is. That said, spoiler policies like this thread has is absolutely excellent, and putting out a baseline for what you already know definitely helps the overall discussion.
That said it's always fun to see people tiptoe around certain spoilers, though I can understand some frustration if it fails to tiptoe silently enough.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Trying to get that update (about a part of the game I had already played through when I posted the last) done tonight so I can post it because it is just so much and I need the thread to experience it.
*nods wisely* Wizards used to shit their pants.
- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
Nono, it's that big one- harry's a wizard.
Damn, and here I was hoping the series named Harry Potter would feature a main character who does pottery.Nono, it's that big one- harry's a wizard.
[Edit: For clarity I must explain this is a joke and I have in fact read the books. I'm a dumbass whose sum total cultural knowledge is as if I've lived under a rock in the woods my whole life and who can't stop putting my foot in my mouth, but I have in fact read the books in this case.]
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somewhatLazy
Serial Procrastinator
- Location
- lurking
Avada Kedavra, sinner.
- Location
- USA
Considering how much FF8 likes to do call-backs to earlier scenes (e.g., "This is like talking to a wall."), this only makes me think that my previous head-canon about Squall was correct.
Laguna: "Why did you make me President?!"
Resistance Members: *look at each other, then look back*
Resistance Member: "I mean, you're right here, and we need a president..."
Laguna: "You FUCKING guys!"
Final Fantasy VIII, Part 27.A: Clair de Lune
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Welcome back, class, to Final Fantasy VIII. Today's lesson:
I Think I'll Try Defying Gravity
Last time, we did our best to deal with the gigantic monolith appearing in the sky of Esthar, in vain. Today, we leave the ground to follow Squall and the others into space, their party oblivious to what's happening on the ground.
Note the distinctive orange shoulderpads, which will help us tell this guy apart from others in obfuscating space suit later.
Controller A: "3 capsules are approaching. Shall we recover them?"
Man in Space Suit: "Of course. What do you expect?"
Controller A: "Are these the special personnel coming aboard?"
Man in Space Suit: "Yeah, I hope they don't cause any problem."
Controller B: "Shall we put troops on standby?"
Man in Space Suit: "I have a feeling we won't need to."
Controller A: "Then we'd better station them all the more. Capsule recovery team, initiate recovery process. Security, go to standby."
I like the exchange where the Guy In The Suit is like "this'll be fine" and the controller's reaction is "okay, definitely bringing reinforcement now," very funny way to establish a sort of informal funny/serious dynamic between the base's staff.
As a reminder: It hasn't come up much recently, but a major aspect of the world-building of this game is that radio communication is nearly impossible due to interference of mysterious origin. This matters because it means Squall and the others, along with the whole staff of the Lunar Base, are going to be 'deaf' (but not blind, as visual observation is possible) to what's happening on the ground. It also should mean that the Lunar Base team doesn't know who's in these pods, but the line 'the special personnel coming aboard' suggests that they do have some advance warning; presumably they can send communication pods or something? Still, the ability of the base to communicate with the ground should be fairly limited, which will have repercussions we'll see later - the most immediate of which is that the Lunar Base's isolation seems to have led to a kind of relaxed work culture, as these guys spend months in total isolation without anyone other than each other to talk to.
The cryopods are caught by energy nets that slow them down to a stop, then retrieved by astronauts who manually move them towards the docking area of the Lunar Base.
I really thought we were going to the moon proper, but the Lunar Base was (very briefly) mentioned earlier in Esthar as being an observation base in orbit above the moon, so I should have expected this; we're visiting a space station, not a lunar station.
I'm still not sure why a trip this short requires cryosleep.
All the pods are slotted into these hatches, from which our characters come out drifting up in zero gravity: note how the door is perpendicular to the hatch hentrances. Squall catches Rinoa (still unconscious, obviously) so she doesn't hurt herself, then the technician announces that they'll engage artificial gravity, and all the characters drift to the ground. And here, the game uses a visual trick I really like, where the 'down' position for the gravity was perpendicular to the bottom of the screen, so everyone lands on the 'wall' to the side and continue talking at a weird camera angle. It's neat! It's a neat use of cinematography!
Squall delivers a letter of introduction. The staff member who retrieves Rinoa's body tactlessly asks if she's "dead," upsetting Squall, but the guy in charge tells him they understand the situation and will get her to the main lab. That guy, whose rank or official position we aren't given, is named… Piet.
Not quite the deep cut Star Wars reference I was expecting here.
We are taken to a medical facility, where Rinoa is laid down in a fancy medical bed with like, a sliding metal cover, like some kind of all-in MRI bed, that occupies the center of the room, it's very dramatic.
Piet: "I've talked to my crew. Everything will be alright. Come, let's go to the control room."
As we leave, Squall throws another barb at one of the staff members, telling them they better not do anything to hurt Rinoa, prompting a dismissive comment about how "you're her knight in shining armor, got it." Honestly, while Squall's worry about Rinoa is entirely understandable and sympathetic, the way he's been lashing out at everyone, including everyone who is trying to help him, is getting a little grating. But, well, he's a scared, angry teenager, so it makes sense, I guess.
Before we get to the control room, we run into a few crew members, and with the opportunity to talk to them, we start getting a picture of the true purpose of Lunar Base.
Because, again, we were told 'hey btw you're going to space' five minutes ago, and the Lunar Base (then referred to as 'Luna Base') was referenced in one line of dialogue in one flashback earlier, and nobody at any point paused to request explanations (in fact Squall is constantly pushing through and ignoring any missing information because he doesn't care), this makes the way information about the Lunar Base is conveyed feel very rough and jarring. How rough and jarring? Well, we've just arrived and we talk to a random, unnamed NPC, and they tell us:
Staff: "We alternate every 6 months, so I live up here with the same crew for 6 months every year. We can't take our eyes off her for a second. If Adel were to revive, terror would reign over Esthar once again, just like 17 years ago."
Wait, hold on, what? You're telling me that the purpose of this base is keeping a watch over the place where Sorceress Adel is kept captive? And this is how we find out? This could have warranted some main story dialogue before we got to that point! This isn't even a problem with the plot itself so much as like, how information is conveyed? I know I got on Squall's case a few hours ago for blowing through Edea's explanations regarding Ultimecia's plans, but those were still relatively understandable. Ever since though, we've just been continuously blowing through any potential explanation of what things are before they happen, and it's making everything feel like it is just randomly happening?
But sure, why not. Luna Base is watching over Adel's prison. We'll learn more about this.
Staff: "Esthar has the best sealing technology. With it, not only are her powers sealed, she can't receive any type of junctions from the outside."
Oh, okay, so junctions are real in the narrative again now. Sure.
My misgivings aside, finding out that this entire time the terrifying Sorceress Adel who had mysteriously disappeared one day without the world having any idea what she was up to was in fact imprisoned in space by Esthar, following a popular revolt against her dictatorial rule, is a neat twist. It's going to tie into something I'll be getting to in a moment.
DISCLAIMER: I'm going to rewire the timeline a bit here. You may have noticed that Piet told us "Come, let's go to the control room." However, as usual, there is no telling which direction the control room is in, so it's entirely possible to, while searching for it, stumble on Ellone and her next plot beat. This ultimately isn't a big deal but for now we'll pretend we went through the control room first.
The moment we enter the control room, Quistis nerds out about how cool it is that we're so close to the moon - but the staff is much grimmer about this.
Controller: "This is no time to be impressed. Look at the monitor there."
Quistis: "This monitor?" [She watches a screen while we talk to the other NPCs.]
Piet: "Look at the surface of the moon. The monsters' behavior becomes abnormal when there are irregularities in the moon and the planet's gravitational forces. I guess they're affected just like the tides are affected by the moon."
[We approach the same monitor as Quistis, and cue FMV.]
…ah.
Not only is the moon home to monsters, but it is crawling with them. There are strange formations of monsters, shrouded in some kind of energy field, large enough to observe from orbit, large enough to obscure craters and other landscape features. Just seas of monsters, teeming on the lunar surface, increasingly agitated and restless.
That's… probably not good.
Squall, mentally: "(...The hell is this!?)"
Quistis: "Monsters…"
Controller: "The lunar world is a world full of monsters. Didn't you learn that in school? As you can see, the monsters are gathering at one point. History's about to repeat itself. The Lunar Cry is starting."
Operator: "It's really a rare phenomenon. You know that huge crater in the Centra continent? It's from the Lunar Cry that occurred over 100 years ago. It supposedly wiped out the city there."
Controller: "See them clustering at one point? Eventually, they're going to drop down onto the planet. This is called the Lunar Cry."
Oh, well. I guess if this is just a little civilization-shattering cataclysmic event that wiped out a major nation's capital and left a crater where it used to be, this is no big deal. Not worth breaking Esthar's isolation to warn the world about. Really not that much of a big deal at all.
With that said… As far as all these people know, this is wholly unrelated to the plotline surrounding Squall. Ultimecia has no established link to the moon*, the Lunar Cry is just a natural disaster that is brewing as we speak but beyond anyone's ability to stop at this stage… Except, of course, we the players know that Galbadia is, for some fucking reason, moving the Lunatic Pandora towards the Tear's Place and thus most likely accelerating the time table on this disaster. But no one here has any way of knowing that.
*unless, of course, you translate her name to 'Artemis' as was likely intended, in which case the connection is ominously obvious
Once informed of these dire portents, Piet invites us to find Ellone's room on the second floor, and we head there…
…but not before challenging him to a children's card game.
That's right! Admiral Piet of the Imperial Fleet has the Alexander Card! I have no idea if we'll ever run into this guy again, but it'd be just like this game to make it permanently missable in the middle of a crucial story sequence, so we just spend about fifteen minutes fighting him under the worst set of rules known to man in order to get Alexander.
Specifically, the rules aboard the spaceship are: Open (meaning both you and the opponent see each other's hand), Random (all cards are randomly picked from your collection), Elemental (the slots on the board have elemental values that buff cards of their element and debuff other cards, Same (I have no idea what this does) and Plus (I have even less idea what this does). It's just way too much and, frankly, I'm not interested in poring over an online guide to the rules (because god knows the game doesn't explain it in a way I can understand), so I just brute force it via save-scumming until it's done. Not pretty, but it gets the job done.
Now it's time to go meet with Ellone…
…after talking to some scientists first on the way.
Consider how much Luna Base is using top-down shots and abnormal angles where the characters aren't 'upside down' to sell the disquieting nature of the place and its artificial gravity. Nothing bad is happening here, but it's impossible to look at this shot that deliberately breaks all rules of composition and feel comfortable.
Researcher: "Our president goes out to conduct the inspection personally."
Crew Member: "17 years ago, Esthar was a country ruled by the evil Adel and feared by many. The perfect gravitational balance between the moon and the stars makes this an ideal place to seal Adel and her powers."
Researcher: "The sealing mechanism is made of a special material. It seals Adel's power, and at the same time prevents any means of outside contact. Radio waves, sound waves, junctions, you name it. The signals from our wave jamming system are so powerful that it affects radio waves down on the planet."
Staff: "If she were to revive, it'd be an nightmare just like 17 years ago. That's why we're doing everything we can to keep her under control."
Researcher: "Look! That's the president going out to conduct the inspection personally. What you see here is his work. Incredible, isn't it? He was responsible for containing Adel. We've maintained a tight surveillance over her ever since."
As these two speak, the camera fades from the station, and instead reveals a view of space. First of the Adel sealing device in the distance - where it reminds me of nothing so much as Arael from Evangelion, a crystal-like structure with graceful wings unfolding across space - and then, up close, following the president as he makes a personal approach to the center of the device… Where we get our first sight of the sealed Sorceress.
Note the orange shoulderpads.
There is… A lot to unpack there. Let's start with the thing that's striking to me:
Esthar is literally the most important country on earth.
Now, note that I don't mean 'powerful,' though they're probably that as well. I mean important. We have always had a sense that Esthar mattered to the background of the story, of course; the Sorceress's War had a huge impact on world politics, Adel's actions impacted Ellone's life, and so on. But then, Esthar withdrew from the world stage. It ceased waging war, but did not establish relationships or trade with other countries. It simply went into isolation and, as far as anyone could tell, diminished - a former world power, now isolated on its continent as history began again to the tune of Galbadian marching songs.
But Esthar was not a small isolated nation. This whole time, Esthar was a sprawling futuristic metropolis, with technology more advanced than any other nation on earth, more territory than anything short of the Galbadian control zone, living amidst impossible spires of light, driving hovercars and with every citizen dressed in robes, the largest, most powerful, probably most populous nation on earth. While Galbadia devised cruise missiles, Esthar developed space travel, and established the first space station while Galbadia and the Gardens fought far below on earth, never even aware that above their heads, Esthar stood in the sky, the sole master of space.
The radio wave interference that's broken communication the world over and caused some of the events of the early game as well as informing all the isolation between cities and difficulty of travel between monsters, and caused the Galbadian invasion of Dollet to seize the radio tower? That's Esthar's fault. They didn't even cause it intentionally, it's literally just an incidental byproduct of their technique for sealing Adel, and they just… never bothered telling anyone. Oh, and lest we forget, they have Hitler Satan in captivity in a space supermax cell! Which they didn't bother telling anyone either, everyone is just confused as to how Adel disappeared!
I just.
This entire stretch of the plot is the reveal that in the world of FF8, Atlantis is real, except it didn't vanish, it just cut contact with the world and continued to be Atlantis and nobody even, like… Noticed. Esthar controls space, the path to the moon, destroyed radio communication, keeps watch on Hitler Satan and they're so completely self-centered (or don't want people to start asking pointed questions about the war and it's fallout) that nobody even knows.
Galbadia is a joke. This world was Esthar's playground the entire time and nobody else even knew because it was beneath them to let the world know.
Also, Adel is… huge? Given what Edea looks like, I'd assumed Adel to look like a human with some very extra makeup, but no. She's at least twice the size of the president slumped over. Probably three times in total. And with inhuman grey skin and lavish robes.
I think it wouldn't be a stretch to expect Adel to be the final boss, at this point. Or rather, Ultimecia possessing Adel, or the Ultimecia-Adel conglomerate entity, whichever way those chips end up falling. She just has the aesthetic pat down perfectly.
…
And finally…
I mean, the president is obviously Laguna, right?
I split this whole sequence into two despite playing it in one go, and I didn't put that speculation because I didn't really think about it in the first half, when the bits and pieces we got about the President were all scattered and I only collaged them together later in my update. But here… The fact that the President of Esthar was an eccentric weirdo who was never in the office do his job was one thing. But now we've seen the 'Man in the Space Suit' with the orange pauldrons who seems nominally in charge but is a quirky weirdo whom his own subordinates overrule, and now it's been revealed he's the president who seems to have personally defeated Adel, and the reason he spends so little time in his office is because he's up there taking charge of the Adel seal. Why would that be the job of the president?
I think it's now pretty clear that Laguna Loire was invited to lead the resistance, led the uprising against Adel, personally defeated the witch, ensured she would be sealed, and now spends much of his time in this space station keeping watch over the witch, for the sake of his adoptive daughter whom he's (for SOME REASON) left behind on earth. Which also likely explains why Ellone was taken up to Lunar Base, of all places: so she could reunite with her dad.
Wait, so - LAGUNA WAS ALIVE THIS ENTIRE TIME. REINCARNATION SUBPLOT? COMPLETELY FOILED. I MADE THAT UP IN MY OWN HEAD, THE GAME WAS NEVER GOING THERE, I'M SO MAD.
Never mind that. This was a lot, but now, it's time. Before we enter Ellone's room, a crew member tells Squall that as his childhood friend, he should spend some time with her, and Squall, still single-minded in focus, thinks to himself that he doesn't have time, and enters.
It's been a while since we saw her face to face. Ellone. Squall's big sister. The one who pulled everyone into this bizarre time travel plot. Ultimecia's desired host. The key to saving, or dooming the world.
We approach…
WHAT!? DON'T YOU LOOK AT ME LIKE THAT! THIS IS LITERALLY ONE OF ONLY TWO OPPORTUNITIES IN THIS SCENE! WE LITERALLY HAVE TO CHALLENGE HER TO A GAME! WE CAN'T RISK TALKING ABOUT SOMETHING AS IRRELEVANT AS 'THE PLOT' UNTIL WE'RE SURE WE'VE SECURED THE BAG!
Ellone's card is, of course, Laguna's - her father figure. And obtaining it under the space station's rules is a nightmare. It requires many, many attempts… But, in the end, we pull it off. We win the card. It's a high-end Triple Triad card, though its stats are poorly located… But more importantly, it refines into 100 Heroes. Hero is a consumable which makes a character temporarily invincible. Needless to say, this seems, uh… Quite powerful. This could even be the solution to our Marlboro problem.
And now, with the important business out of the way, we can actually talk to her.
Ellone: "Squall, I'm so happy to see you again."
Squall: "Me too."
Ellone: "I'm so sorry. I got you involved in so many things… so much hardship."
Squall: "It's alright. I understand what you were trying to do." [DO YOU? DO YOU, SQUALL? BECAUSE I SURE HAVE NO FUCKING CLUE-]
Squall: "Where we of any help?"
Ellone: "Of course! You were my eyes. Thanks to you guys, I was able to see how much I was loved. I couldn't change the past but just seeing it was more than enough. Thank you so much."
Squall: "It's ok. I came here because I need your help. You said you can't change the past, right?"
Ellone: "You can find out things about the past that you never knew. And from what you've learned, you may see some things differently in the present. You're the one that changes, not the past."
Squall: "Really? There's no way to change the past? No, I want to find out myself. Take me to Rinoa's past. I need to see the past through Rinoa. I want to find out what happened to her, and I want to try to warn her…"
Ellone: "...You want to save her. You don't want to lose Rinoa."
Ellone: "Squall, I can't. I don't know Rinoa. I told you I can only send people I know in the present into people I knew in the past."
Squall: "I brought Rinoa with me. She's resting in the med lab. Please come with me."
Okay, no, now I can work it out. If Laguna became President of Esthar directly after the revolt, but was separated from Ellone… Or had to send her away for some reason… Then Ellone would have grown up with very little idea of what actually transpired around her childhood. Laguna's past, the nature of his romance with Raine, what exactly happened in Esthar when she was captured, how long Laguna spent searching for her and what he was willing to do to find her - she never knew that. And she most likely thought that she had been abandoned, that she wasn't loved. So she sent Squall's mind into Laguna's past so that she could observe it all. Her goal was likely to change outcomes - I imagine her priority must have been to save Raine, or to ensure that Laguna could stay with her, but she wasn't able to effect these changes. Instead, it gave her a front row view to the past of the people who took care of her, and let her experience how much people cared about her, and changed her attitude.
Which… honestly kinda makes me feel bad about how much of the Laguna flashbacks is him and his crew just goofing around like idiots? I mean, they're funny, they're likeable, but wow, that's a high quotient of goofball antics to actual emotional beats.
Still, she found what she wanted for in that past. Except it wasn't what Squall is looking for. The fact that Ellone tells him 'well I've never meet Rinoa' because she cannot possibly expect that Squall would be crazy enough to backpack-carry his girlfriend across an ocean, a desert, and the void of space itself to get her in the same room as Ellone is just. Top tier comedy. Absolutely flawless. Who would even think that?
Silently answering Squall's request, Ellone attaches herself to our party, though she doesn't have a character status menu. If you mess up and missed the control room like I did the first time, this is then the second time we can get there, with Ellone patiently waiting then, once the presentation on the impending Lunar Cry is over, gentling poking Squall to go on to Rinoa.
Except.
As we leave the control room towards the medical bay…
Rinoa's medbay pod opens on its own. And in the corridor, alarms start to blare, security lights go on, bathing everything in flashing red. "Red alert!" the comms scream, "All units report to med lab, stat!" The NPCs start rushing about. Squall is immediately concerned with Rinoa's safety, but he is also, at the same time, worried about Ellone's own safety - she's not a combatant, after all. He tells her to wait in the control room, with Piet and the other professionals; I'm not sure she'd be safer there than standing behind two hardened SeeDs, but I do appreciate that Squall is finally showing concern for people other than Rinoa again, even at the same time as he's most worried about her - the fact that this is his sister Ellone and he cares about her is finally shining through again. Ellone departs, telling them to be careful, and Squall tells Quistis to go with her and take care of her. Which, okay, Ellone will definitely be safer in the company of Esthar troops and Quistis, but now it's Squall who is just being completely reckless. Not that it's anything new.
Not that it matters, either.
A crew member is hurled out of the med lab, hitting a wall, and slumps to the ground. Moments later, Rinoa emerges, walking slowly, swaying from side to side, moving in a drunken stupor similar to when Ultimecia-Edea had her in thrall, but more intense. And this time, it's followed by an eerie visual effect, afterimages of Rinoa splitting and merging as she advances.
Squall soon arrives, but 'Rinoa' doesn't seem to see or hear him. She doesn't perceive him at all. If we try to approach her, the only result is a buzzing sound, and Squall getting tossed backwards against the wall, where he too slumps briefly haggard. Of course, he's SeeD, and he immediately gets up and does it again - only to be slammed back again and again, as many times as we try. The power that has hold of Rinoa is strong, and even if it weren't strong enough to defeat Squall, there is no way Squall would use even a quarter of the force required to restrain Rinoa, given how scared he is of her getting hurt.
He is utterly helpless.
We are in full on 90s sci-fi horror anime territory here. We're in Akira, in Evangelion, presaging the escape scene from Elfen Lied years ahead of time. Not necessarily in the specifics - this is not nearly as gruesome as some variations on the subject - but the eerie psychic waking up from stasis and starting to slowly walk through a military facility, taking down everyone in her path without seeming to even be aware of them? That's Tetsuo's escape in Akira, and I'd wager every scene of that kind - all the way to Western hollywood without ostensible anime inspirations like Magneto's escape from the plastic prison in X-Men 2 - were directly riffing from it. Elfen Lied traumatized a generation of Western anime fans in the 00s, but before it, though much more subdued, there was Rinoa in the Lunar Base.
I DON'T KNOW QUISTIS, WHAT DO YOU THINK!?
In the control room, we find that Rinoa has knocked over everyone except Ellone and Quistis, and she's now accessing the terminals. Unfortunately, Squall and Quistis have no idea as to the details of what is happening here, even as Ellone shouts "No!" By the time the wounded Piet manages to mutter that Rinoa is accessing Adel's Tomb's Seal Deactivation Device, it's too late - the comms blare that Adel's Tomb's Level 1 Seal has been deactivated. Then Rinoa turns around and starts to slowly drift towards the entrance; Ellone asks Squall what's happening to her, Squall tries once again to approach her, and is once again telekinetically hurled backwards without so much as sparing him a glance. She leaves the control room, still in her trance.
At least the weird afterimages are gone for now?
So, it's pretty obvious at this point that Rinoa is being possessed by Ultimecia. The sorceress is using her to reach Adel's tomb, and everyone just played into her hands. There are just three things I'm kind of muling over here:
Before Squall can rush after Rinoa (not that there'd be much point at this stage), Quistis draws his attention to the screen - the moon is changing!
Oh, that's… That's not good. I mean, I'm not an astronomer, I don't know shit about celestial bodies, but I think you generally don't want your moon well-marbled?
Oh, and it's moving. The red-black patterns are moving across the surface of the moon like giant ant swarms. They're gathering towards one place, the same one we saw before, only now its density is even thicker, the surface completely occluded, the swarming shapes utterly black with red lights within.
Squall: "It's overflowing with monsters."
Piet: "It's finally starting…"
Squall: "The Lunar Cry…"
Piet warns that we absolutely must stop Rinoa, and that the Level 2 Seal is located on the tomb itself. Which means there's only one thing to do: chase Rinoa into space. Squall runs out towards the locker room containing the space suit, but on his way, he is interrupted again. The two staff members who were, earlier, explaining about Adel's tomb and the president's visits, have an entirely new subject of focus.
It's…
*shudder*
It's one of the most striking visuals I have seen in the game thus far, and it is, for my money, one of the most striking visuals in Final Fantasy. We've known, this whole time, that the moon was important and sinister. It sits in the sky of this world, vastly larger than our moon, because it is implicitly much closer. It takes up a chunk of the sky, dominating the horizon. We've heard of the phenomenon which spawned monsters, known as the Lunar Cry. And it sounds… metaphorical, right? Monsters rain down from the moon, like tears.
But it is so, so much more literal than that. The scientists point to Squall, and the camera looks down first at the earth, and then pans across the space station, and sweeps over, to the moon, where the gathering of monsters and the strange energy that surrounds them have formed…
Eyes On Me.
A weeping eye.
This is absolutely disgusting and will haunt my nightmares for years to come, 10/10 outstanding visual, FMV artists just knocking it out of the park on this game.
Cut for image count.
I Think I'll Try Defying Gravity
Last time, we did our best to deal with the gigantic monolith appearing in the sky of Esthar, in vain. Today, we leave the ground to follow Squall and the others into space, their party oblivious to what's happening on the ground.
Note the distinctive orange shoulderpads, which will help us tell this guy apart from others in obfuscating space suit later.
Controller A: "3 capsules are approaching. Shall we recover them?"
Man in Space Suit: "Of course. What do you expect?"
Controller A: "Are these the special personnel coming aboard?"
Man in Space Suit: "Yeah, I hope they don't cause any problem."
Controller B: "Shall we put troops on standby?"
Man in Space Suit: "I have a feeling we won't need to."
Controller A: "Then we'd better station them all the more. Capsule recovery team, initiate recovery process. Security, go to standby."
I like the exchange where the Guy In The Suit is like "this'll be fine" and the controller's reaction is "okay, definitely bringing reinforcement now," very funny way to establish a sort of informal funny/serious dynamic between the base's staff.
As a reminder: It hasn't come up much recently, but a major aspect of the world-building of this game is that radio communication is nearly impossible due to interference of mysterious origin. This matters because it means Squall and the others, along with the whole staff of the Lunar Base, are going to be 'deaf' (but not blind, as visual observation is possible) to what's happening on the ground. It also should mean that the Lunar Base team doesn't know who's in these pods, but the line 'the special personnel coming aboard' suggests that they do have some advance warning; presumably they can send communication pods or something? Still, the ability of the base to communicate with the ground should be fairly limited, which will have repercussions we'll see later - the most immediate of which is that the Lunar Base's isolation seems to have led to a kind of relaxed work culture, as these guys spend months in total isolation without anyone other than each other to talk to.
The cryopods are caught by energy nets that slow them down to a stop, then retrieved by astronauts who manually move them towards the docking area of the Lunar Base.
I really thought we were going to the moon proper, but the Lunar Base was (very briefly) mentioned earlier in Esthar as being an observation base in orbit above the moon, so I should have expected this; we're visiting a space station, not a lunar station.
I'm still not sure why a trip this short requires cryosleep.
All the pods are slotted into these hatches, from which our characters come out drifting up in zero gravity: note how the door is perpendicular to the hatch hentrances. Squall catches Rinoa (still unconscious, obviously) so she doesn't hurt herself, then the technician announces that they'll engage artificial gravity, and all the characters drift to the ground. And here, the game uses a visual trick I really like, where the 'down' position for the gravity was perpendicular to the bottom of the screen, so everyone lands on the 'wall' to the side and continue talking at a weird camera angle. It's neat! It's a neat use of cinematography!
Squall delivers a letter of introduction. The staff member who retrieves Rinoa's body tactlessly asks if she's "dead," upsetting Squall, but the guy in charge tells him they understand the situation and will get her to the main lab. That guy, whose rank or official position we aren't given, is named… Piet.
Not quite the deep cut Star Wars reference I was expecting here.
We are taken to a medical facility, where Rinoa is laid down in a fancy medical bed with like, a sliding metal cover, like some kind of all-in MRI bed, that occupies the center of the room, it's very dramatic.
Piet: "I've talked to my crew. Everything will be alright. Come, let's go to the control room."
As we leave, Squall throws another barb at one of the staff members, telling them they better not do anything to hurt Rinoa, prompting a dismissive comment about how "you're her knight in shining armor, got it." Honestly, while Squall's worry about Rinoa is entirely understandable and sympathetic, the way he's been lashing out at everyone, including everyone who is trying to help him, is getting a little grating. But, well, he's a scared, angry teenager, so it makes sense, I guess.
Before we get to the control room, we run into a few crew members, and with the opportunity to talk to them, we start getting a picture of the true purpose of Lunar Base.
Because, again, we were told 'hey btw you're going to space' five minutes ago, and the Lunar Base (then referred to as 'Luna Base') was referenced in one line of dialogue in one flashback earlier, and nobody at any point paused to request explanations (in fact Squall is constantly pushing through and ignoring any missing information because he doesn't care), this makes the way information about the Lunar Base is conveyed feel very rough and jarring. How rough and jarring? Well, we've just arrived and we talk to a random, unnamed NPC, and they tell us:
Staff: "We alternate every 6 months, so I live up here with the same crew for 6 months every year. We can't take our eyes off her for a second. If Adel were to revive, terror would reign over Esthar once again, just like 17 years ago."
Wait, hold on, what? You're telling me that the purpose of this base is keeping a watch over the place where Sorceress Adel is kept captive? And this is how we find out? This could have warranted some main story dialogue before we got to that point! This isn't even a problem with the plot itself so much as like, how information is conveyed? I know I got on Squall's case a few hours ago for blowing through Edea's explanations regarding Ultimecia's plans, but those were still relatively understandable. Ever since though, we've just been continuously blowing through any potential explanation of what things are before they happen, and it's making everything feel like it is just randomly happening?
But sure, why not. Luna Base is watching over Adel's prison. We'll learn more about this.
Staff: "Esthar has the best sealing technology. With it, not only are her powers sealed, she can't receive any type of junctions from the outside."
Oh, okay, so junctions are real in the narrative again now. Sure.
My misgivings aside, finding out that this entire time the terrifying Sorceress Adel who had mysteriously disappeared one day without the world having any idea what she was up to was in fact imprisoned in space by Esthar, following a popular revolt against her dictatorial rule, is a neat twist. It's going to tie into something I'll be getting to in a moment.
DISCLAIMER: I'm going to rewire the timeline a bit here. You may have noticed that Piet told us "Come, let's go to the control room." However, as usual, there is no telling which direction the control room is in, so it's entirely possible to, while searching for it, stumble on Ellone and her next plot beat. This ultimately isn't a big deal but for now we'll pretend we went through the control room first.
The moment we enter the control room, Quistis nerds out about how cool it is that we're so close to the moon - but the staff is much grimmer about this.
Controller: "This is no time to be impressed. Look at the monitor there."
Quistis: "This monitor?" [She watches a screen while we talk to the other NPCs.]
Piet: "Look at the surface of the moon. The monsters' behavior becomes abnormal when there are irregularities in the moon and the planet's gravitational forces. I guess they're affected just like the tides are affected by the moon."
[We approach the same monitor as Quistis, and cue FMV.]
…ah.
Not only is the moon home to monsters, but it is crawling with them. There are strange formations of monsters, shrouded in some kind of energy field, large enough to observe from orbit, large enough to obscure craters and other landscape features. Just seas of monsters, teeming on the lunar surface, increasingly agitated and restless.
That's… probably not good.
Squall, mentally: "(...The hell is this!?)"
Quistis: "Monsters…"
Controller: "The lunar world is a world full of monsters. Didn't you learn that in school? As you can see, the monsters are gathering at one point. History's about to repeat itself. The Lunar Cry is starting."
Operator: "It's really a rare phenomenon. You know that huge crater in the Centra continent? It's from the Lunar Cry that occurred over 100 years ago. It supposedly wiped out the city there."
Controller: "See them clustering at one point? Eventually, they're going to drop down onto the planet. This is called the Lunar Cry."
Oh, well. I guess if this is just a little civilization-shattering cataclysmic event that wiped out a major nation's capital and left a crater where it used to be, this is no big deal. Not worth breaking Esthar's isolation to warn the world about. Really not that much of a big deal at all.
With that said… As far as all these people know, this is wholly unrelated to the plotline surrounding Squall. Ultimecia has no established link to the moon*, the Lunar Cry is just a natural disaster that is brewing as we speak but beyond anyone's ability to stop at this stage… Except, of course, we the players know that Galbadia is, for some fucking reason, moving the Lunatic Pandora towards the Tear's Place and thus most likely accelerating the time table on this disaster. But no one here has any way of knowing that.
*unless, of course, you translate her name to 'Artemis' as was likely intended, in which case the connection is ominously obvious
Once informed of these dire portents, Piet invites us to find Ellone's room on the second floor, and we head there…
…but not before challenging him to a children's card game.
That's right! Admiral Piet of the Imperial Fleet has the Alexander Card! I have no idea if we'll ever run into this guy again, but it'd be just like this game to make it permanently missable in the middle of a crucial story sequence, so we just spend about fifteen minutes fighting him under the worst set of rules known to man in order to get Alexander.
Specifically, the rules aboard the spaceship are: Open (meaning both you and the opponent see each other's hand), Random (all cards are randomly picked from your collection), Elemental (the slots on the board have elemental values that buff cards of their element and debuff other cards, Same (I have no idea what this does) and Plus (I have even less idea what this does). It's just way too much and, frankly, I'm not interested in poring over an online guide to the rules (because god knows the game doesn't explain it in a way I can understand), so I just brute force it via save-scumming until it's done. Not pretty, but it gets the job done.
Now it's time to go meet with Ellone…
…after talking to some scientists first on the way.
Consider how much Luna Base is using top-down shots and abnormal angles where the characters aren't 'upside down' to sell the disquieting nature of the place and its artificial gravity. Nothing bad is happening here, but it's impossible to look at this shot that deliberately breaks all rules of composition and feel comfortable.
Researcher: "Our president goes out to conduct the inspection personally."
Crew Member: "17 years ago, Esthar was a country ruled by the evil Adel and feared by many. The perfect gravitational balance between the moon and the stars makes this an ideal place to seal Adel and her powers."
Researcher: "The sealing mechanism is made of a special material. It seals Adel's power, and at the same time prevents any means of outside contact. Radio waves, sound waves, junctions, you name it. The signals from our wave jamming system are so powerful that it affects radio waves down on the planet."
Staff: "If she were to revive, it'd be an nightmare just like 17 years ago. That's why we're doing everything we can to keep her under control."
Researcher: "Look! That's the president going out to conduct the inspection personally. What you see here is his work. Incredible, isn't it? He was responsible for containing Adel. We've maintained a tight surveillance over her ever since."
As these two speak, the camera fades from the station, and instead reveals a view of space. First of the Adel sealing device in the distance - where it reminds me of nothing so much as Arael from Evangelion, a crystal-like structure with graceful wings unfolding across space - and then, up close, following the president as he makes a personal approach to the center of the device… Where we get our first sight of the sealed Sorceress.
Note the orange shoulderpads.
There is… A lot to unpack there. Let's start with the thing that's striking to me:
Esthar is literally the most important country on earth.
Now, note that I don't mean 'powerful,' though they're probably that as well. I mean important. We have always had a sense that Esthar mattered to the background of the story, of course; the Sorceress's War had a huge impact on world politics, Adel's actions impacted Ellone's life, and so on. But then, Esthar withdrew from the world stage. It ceased waging war, but did not establish relationships or trade with other countries. It simply went into isolation and, as far as anyone could tell, diminished - a former world power, now isolated on its continent as history began again to the tune of Galbadian marching songs.
But Esthar was not a small isolated nation. This whole time, Esthar was a sprawling futuristic metropolis, with technology more advanced than any other nation on earth, more territory than anything short of the Galbadian control zone, living amidst impossible spires of light, driving hovercars and with every citizen dressed in robes, the largest, most powerful, probably most populous nation on earth. While Galbadia devised cruise missiles, Esthar developed space travel, and established the first space station while Galbadia and the Gardens fought far below on earth, never even aware that above their heads, Esthar stood in the sky, the sole master of space.
The radio wave interference that's broken communication the world over and caused some of the events of the early game as well as informing all the isolation between cities and difficulty of travel between monsters, and caused the Galbadian invasion of Dollet to seize the radio tower? That's Esthar's fault. They didn't even cause it intentionally, it's literally just an incidental byproduct of their technique for sealing Adel, and they just… never bothered telling anyone. Oh, and lest we forget, they have Hitler Satan in captivity in a space supermax cell! Which they didn't bother telling anyone either, everyone is just confused as to how Adel disappeared!
I just.
This entire stretch of the plot is the reveal that in the world of FF8, Atlantis is real, except it didn't vanish, it just cut contact with the world and continued to be Atlantis and nobody even, like… Noticed. Esthar controls space, the path to the moon, destroyed radio communication, keeps watch on Hitler Satan and they're so completely self-centered (or don't want people to start asking pointed questions about the war and it's fallout) that nobody even knows.
Galbadia is a joke. This world was Esthar's playground the entire time and nobody else even knew because it was beneath them to let the world know.
Also, Adel is… huge? Given what Edea looks like, I'd assumed Adel to look like a human with some very extra makeup, but no. She's at least twice the size of the president slumped over. Probably three times in total. And with inhuman grey skin and lavish robes.
I think it wouldn't be a stretch to expect Adel to be the final boss, at this point. Or rather, Ultimecia possessing Adel, or the Ultimecia-Adel conglomerate entity, whichever way those chips end up falling. She just has the aesthetic pat down perfectly.
…
And finally…
I mean, the president is obviously Laguna, right?
I split this whole sequence into two despite playing it in one go, and I didn't put that speculation because I didn't really think about it in the first half, when the bits and pieces we got about the President were all scattered and I only collaged them together later in my update. But here… The fact that the President of Esthar was an eccentric weirdo who was never in the office do his job was one thing. But now we've seen the 'Man in the Space Suit' with the orange pauldrons who seems nominally in charge but is a quirky weirdo whom his own subordinates overrule, and now it's been revealed he's the president who seems to have personally defeated Adel, and the reason he spends so little time in his office is because he's up there taking charge of the Adel seal. Why would that be the job of the president?
I think it's now pretty clear that Laguna Loire was invited to lead the resistance, led the uprising against Adel, personally defeated the witch, ensured she would be sealed, and now spends much of his time in this space station keeping watch over the witch, for the sake of his adoptive daughter whom he's (for SOME REASON) left behind on earth. Which also likely explains why Ellone was taken up to Lunar Base, of all places: so she could reunite with her dad.
Wait, so - LAGUNA WAS ALIVE THIS ENTIRE TIME. REINCARNATION SUBPLOT? COMPLETELY FOILED. I MADE THAT UP IN MY OWN HEAD, THE GAME WAS NEVER GOING THERE, I'M SO MAD.
Never mind that. This was a lot, but now, it's time. Before we enter Ellone's room, a crew member tells Squall that as his childhood friend, he should spend some time with her, and Squall, still single-minded in focus, thinks to himself that he doesn't have time, and enters.
It's been a while since we saw her face to face. Ellone. Squall's big sister. The one who pulled everyone into this bizarre time travel plot. Ultimecia's desired host. The key to saving, or dooming the world.
We approach…
WHAT!? DON'T YOU LOOK AT ME LIKE THAT! THIS IS LITERALLY ONE OF ONLY TWO OPPORTUNITIES IN THIS SCENE! WE LITERALLY HAVE TO CHALLENGE HER TO A GAME! WE CAN'T RISK TALKING ABOUT SOMETHING AS IRRELEVANT AS 'THE PLOT' UNTIL WE'RE SURE WE'VE SECURED THE BAG!
Ellone's card is, of course, Laguna's - her father figure. And obtaining it under the space station's rules is a nightmare. It requires many, many attempts… But, in the end, we pull it off. We win the card. It's a high-end Triple Triad card, though its stats are poorly located… But more importantly, it refines into 100 Heroes. Hero is a consumable which makes a character temporarily invincible. Needless to say, this seems, uh… Quite powerful. This could even be the solution to our Marlboro problem.
And now, with the important business out of the way, we can actually talk to her.
Ellone: "Squall, I'm so happy to see you again."
Squall: "Me too."
Ellone: "I'm so sorry. I got you involved in so many things… so much hardship."
Squall: "It's alright. I understand what you were trying to do." [DO YOU? DO YOU, SQUALL? BECAUSE I SURE HAVE NO FUCKING CLUE-]
Squall: "Where we of any help?"
Ellone: "Of course! You were my eyes. Thanks to you guys, I was able to see how much I was loved. I couldn't change the past but just seeing it was more than enough. Thank you so much."
Squall: "It's ok. I came here because I need your help. You said you can't change the past, right?"
Ellone: "You can find out things about the past that you never knew. And from what you've learned, you may see some things differently in the present. You're the one that changes, not the past."
Squall: "Really? There's no way to change the past? No, I want to find out myself. Take me to Rinoa's past. I need to see the past through Rinoa. I want to find out what happened to her, and I want to try to warn her…"
Ellone: "...You want to save her. You don't want to lose Rinoa."
Ellone: "Squall, I can't. I don't know Rinoa. I told you I can only send people I know in the present into people I knew in the past."
Squall: "I brought Rinoa with me. She's resting in the med lab. Please come with me."
Okay, no, now I can work it out. If Laguna became President of Esthar directly after the revolt, but was separated from Ellone… Or had to send her away for some reason… Then Ellone would have grown up with very little idea of what actually transpired around her childhood. Laguna's past, the nature of his romance with Raine, what exactly happened in Esthar when she was captured, how long Laguna spent searching for her and what he was willing to do to find her - she never knew that. And she most likely thought that she had been abandoned, that she wasn't loved. So she sent Squall's mind into Laguna's past so that she could observe it all. Her goal was likely to change outcomes - I imagine her priority must have been to save Raine, or to ensure that Laguna could stay with her, but she wasn't able to effect these changes. Instead, it gave her a front row view to the past of the people who took care of her, and let her experience how much people cared about her, and changed her attitude.
Which… honestly kinda makes me feel bad about how much of the Laguna flashbacks is him and his crew just goofing around like idiots? I mean, they're funny, they're likeable, but wow, that's a high quotient of goofball antics to actual emotional beats.
Still, she found what she wanted for in that past. Except it wasn't what Squall is looking for. The fact that Ellone tells him 'well I've never meet Rinoa' because she cannot possibly expect that Squall would be crazy enough to backpack-carry his girlfriend across an ocean, a desert, and the void of space itself to get her in the same room as Ellone is just. Top tier comedy. Absolutely flawless. Who would even think that?
Silently answering Squall's request, Ellone attaches herself to our party, though she doesn't have a character status menu. If you mess up and missed the control room like I did the first time, this is then the second time we can get there, with Ellone patiently waiting then, once the presentation on the impending Lunar Cry is over, gentling poking Squall to go on to Rinoa.
Except.
As we leave the control room towards the medical bay…
Rinoa's medbay pod opens on its own. And in the corridor, alarms start to blare, security lights go on, bathing everything in flashing red. "Red alert!" the comms scream, "All units report to med lab, stat!" The NPCs start rushing about. Squall is immediately concerned with Rinoa's safety, but he is also, at the same time, worried about Ellone's own safety - she's not a combatant, after all. He tells her to wait in the control room, with Piet and the other professionals; I'm not sure she'd be safer there than standing behind two hardened SeeDs, but I do appreciate that Squall is finally showing concern for people other than Rinoa again, even at the same time as he's most worried about her - the fact that this is his sister Ellone and he cares about her is finally shining through again. Ellone departs, telling them to be careful, and Squall tells Quistis to go with her and take care of her. Which, okay, Ellone will definitely be safer in the company of Esthar troops and Quistis, but now it's Squall who is just being completely reckless. Not that it's anything new.
Not that it matters, either.
A crew member is hurled out of the med lab, hitting a wall, and slumps to the ground. Moments later, Rinoa emerges, walking slowly, swaying from side to side, moving in a drunken stupor similar to when Ultimecia-Edea had her in thrall, but more intense. And this time, it's followed by an eerie visual effect, afterimages of Rinoa splitting and merging as she advances.
Squall soon arrives, but 'Rinoa' doesn't seem to see or hear him. She doesn't perceive him at all. If we try to approach her, the only result is a buzzing sound, and Squall getting tossed backwards against the wall, where he too slumps briefly haggard. Of course, he's SeeD, and he immediately gets up and does it again - only to be slammed back again and again, as many times as we try. The power that has hold of Rinoa is strong, and even if it weren't strong enough to defeat Squall, there is no way Squall would use even a quarter of the force required to restrain Rinoa, given how scared he is of her getting hurt.
He is utterly helpless.
We are in full on 90s sci-fi horror anime territory here. We're in Akira, in Evangelion, presaging the escape scene from Elfen Lied years ahead of time. Not necessarily in the specifics - this is not nearly as gruesome as some variations on the subject - but the eerie psychic waking up from stasis and starting to slowly walk through a military facility, taking down everyone in her path without seeming to even be aware of them? That's Tetsuo's escape in Akira, and I'd wager every scene of that kind - all the way to Western hollywood without ostensible anime inspirations like Magneto's escape from the plastic prison in X-Men 2 - were directly riffing from it. Elfen Lied traumatized a generation of Western anime fans in the 00s, but before it, though much more subdued, there was Rinoa in the Lunar Base.
I DON'T KNOW QUISTIS, WHAT DO YOU THINK!?
In the control room, we find that Rinoa has knocked over everyone except Ellone and Quistis, and she's now accessing the terminals. Unfortunately, Squall and Quistis have no idea as to the details of what is happening here, even as Ellone shouts "No!" By the time the wounded Piet manages to mutter that Rinoa is accessing Adel's Tomb's Seal Deactivation Device, it's too late - the comms blare that Adel's Tomb's Level 1 Seal has been deactivated. Then Rinoa turns around and starts to slowly drift towards the entrance; Ellone asks Squall what's happening to her, Squall tries once again to approach her, and is once again telekinetically hurled backwards without so much as sparing him a glance. She leaves the control room, still in her trance.
At least the weird afterimages are gone for now?
So, it's pretty obvious at this point that Rinoa is being possessed by Ultimecia. The sorceress is using her to reach Adel's tomb, and everyone just played into her hands. There are just three things I'm kind of muling over here:
- There are two points at which this could have happened. The most obvious is that, after the battle against Edea, Ultimecia took over Rinoa's body as we saw, and then never left it, the coma being merely a ruse which she somehow guessed would get Squall to bring her into contact with her target. However, there is another possibility. Remember when Odine asked to be allowed to examine Rinoa and then we no longer had eyes on her until she was already loaded into the cryopod? It's entirely possible that it was then that she was possessed, with Odine's direct contribution - indeed, in that case this might not even actually be Ultimecia, merely some kind of sleeper agent programming put there during her sleep. Seems like a stretch, though.
- It's interesting to me that, after two games of highly personable villains who had a very extreme beef against the main characters (Kefka and Sephiroth), Ultimecia seems to neither know nor care anything about the main cast? She's from the future, she only knows SeeD as some cursed group designed to take her down, she never calls anyone by name, and she's too angry and arrogant to ever bother putting up a conversational front to extract information. She wants Ellone for her power, but as far as we've seen a lot of our limited information is because Ultimecia doesn't give a shit about any of us (or Seifer, for that matter), and doesn't even consider any of us worth giving a villain monologue to? It's an interesting bit of characterization in the abstract but also a good reminder of why villains do these monologues, because as a result she's kind of a cipher to us, the readers.
- …if Ultimecia wanted Ellone first, and Adel as her backup prize, why isn't she grabbing Ellone now that she is right there, even closer than Adel is? My best guess is that she's not fully aware of her actions; in the same way that Edea 'invited her in' and led to an 'Edea's body entirely controlled by Ultimecia' that ultimately benefited Edea's goals, Rinoa is resisting, leading to an Ultimecia-Rinoa conglomerate being that struggling against itself and that's why she's moving so slowly and not saying a word and doesn't seem to notice anyone around her.
Before Squall can rush after Rinoa (not that there'd be much point at this stage), Quistis draws his attention to the screen - the moon is changing!
Oh, that's… That's not good. I mean, I'm not an astronomer, I don't know shit about celestial bodies, but I think you generally don't want your moon well-marbled?
Oh, and it's moving. The red-black patterns are moving across the surface of the moon like giant ant swarms. They're gathering towards one place, the same one we saw before, only now its density is even thicker, the surface completely occluded, the swarming shapes utterly black with red lights within.
Squall: "It's overflowing with monsters."
Piet: "It's finally starting…"
Squall: "The Lunar Cry…"
Piet warns that we absolutely must stop Rinoa, and that the Level 2 Seal is located on the tomb itself. Which means there's only one thing to do: chase Rinoa into space. Squall runs out towards the locker room containing the space suit, but on his way, he is interrupted again. The two staff members who were, earlier, explaining about Adel's tomb and the president's visits, have an entirely new subject of focus.
It's…
*shudder*
It's one of the most striking visuals I have seen in the game thus far, and it is, for my money, one of the most striking visuals in Final Fantasy. We've known, this whole time, that the moon was important and sinister. It sits in the sky of this world, vastly larger than our moon, because it is implicitly much closer. It takes up a chunk of the sky, dominating the horizon. We've heard of the phenomenon which spawned monsters, known as the Lunar Cry. And it sounds… metaphorical, right? Monsters rain down from the moon, like tears.
But it is so, so much more literal than that. The scientists point to Squall, and the camera looks down first at the earth, and then pans across the space station, and sweeps over, to the moon, where the gathering of monsters and the strange energy that surrounds them have formed…
Eyes On Me.
A weeping eye.
This is absolutely disgusting and will haunt my nightmares for years to come, 10/10 outstanding visual, FMV artists just knocking it out of the park on this game.
Cut for image count.
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Final Fantasy VIII, Part 27.B: Clair de Lune
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Then the camera dives in into the 'iris' of this unwholesome, gigantic eye, and morphs it into the shape of an actual eye, pulling back so that the moon-eye has transitioned into a fish-eye, and we get a glimpse of just quite the scale of the problem is.
Thousands… Millions of monsters, swimming in a sea of strange, viscous energy, which is forming into a bubbling dome. That dome stretches, pushes up from the surface of the moon…
Animators: "DO YOU SEE OUR FLUID ANIMATIONS!? DO YOU SEE THEM, MOTHERFUCKERS?"
At first, the disturbing fluid is bright blue in color, almost, almost like the water of that earth below. But then that changes. It starts turning purple, and we get a sweeping shot of the inside of that fluid column, where millions (billions?) of monsters are growing increasingly agitated.
Then a flash of light, and the blue has become red, and the water is not much like water at all.
A pillar of blood, hurling projections all across its length, darts towards the earth like a tentacle or a spear.
At this point, it's probably too late to do anything. But I guess Squall wouldn't be a hero if he didn't try, would he?
A crew member says it looks like the Lunar Cry is aimed straight at Tear's Point in Esthar, and a researcher exclaims that this would mean the Lunatic Pandora is at Tear's Point - how could this happen? When did it happen?
…
In Greek mythology, Pandora's Box contained all the evils of the world, sickness and death and war, safely contained within until the woman Pandora opened it and unleashed them all upon the world. It seems fitting then that the Lunatic Pandora appears to have been a device designed to unleash all the monsters safely contained within the moon upon this world below. But why on earth would anyone build such a device?
Foolish question, really. Final Fantasy games are full of lost civilizations that all did very similar things. For now, we rush into the locker room, where we find an unconscious astronaut - and, in the airlock, Rinoa finishing to put on her own suit.
Once again, no response, no acknowledgment. Rinoa puts on her helmet and opens the airlock. We have no choice but to find a suit of our own in the lockers and throw ourselves after her.
We emerge into a loading bay, a massive door opening, and trying to steer Squall in Zero G. The mechanics are simple, and complicated exactly in that they're simple (it looks like we're moving in 3D but we're actually just 'floating' along a vertically locked axis), but it doesn't matter - nothing we can do here can change the outcome. All that we can do is proper Squall forward towards the gate, where on the path he meets a group of three chattering in panic.
Aide on the Left: "The flood of monsters is drawing near Adel's Tomb!"
Aide on the Right: "At this rate, Adel's Tomb might fall somewhere near Esthar!"
Panicky Gentleman: "Why is everything happening all at once? This is crazy! It's like someone planned the whole thing! Who could've set this up?"
Squall, mentally: "(...Sorceress Ultimecia…)"
As he passes in front of the screen, we get a look at the 'Panicky Gentleman' and his suit's orange pauldrons - the President. Along with two 'aides.' Hm. I wonder who they are.
The gate locks in front of Squall before he can reach them. Rinoa is already behind them, heading towards the tomb and, beyond it, outer space. There is no choice but to turn around and head back into the Lunar Base.
The first thing we see upon getting in is the aides and the president (all still conspicuously wearing their face-obscuring suits) arguing; the aides are trying to convince Laguna to evacuate immediately, and he's telling them to forget about him and just see to their own safety, whereupon they both bodily grab him and hoist him off-screen, except then he resists and manages to crawl back on screen just long enough to yell at Squall to take care of Ellone before being pulled back by his aides again.
It is impossible for this man to be Laguna more than he already is. If the 'twist' isn't that this is Laguna and Squall just can't recognize him because of the suit, I am calling false advertising. If you put a gun to my head I would raise the bet by a thousand dollar before betting 'this is Laguna.' On God.
For those keeping track, this is the point where I decided to just reload and do the Lunatic Pandora sections for the hidden loot, then fast-forwarded back to this point. Just to give you a representation of my experience. But now we're back for the great climax.
All Squall can do is rush back into the control room and watch helplessly as Ellone cries out that the Lunar Cry is starting and Rinoa is about to be swallowed by the tide of monsters. Out there, in space, alone and silent, Rinoa drifts to Adel's Tomb.
She approaches a panel on the side, and starts to input commands. I guess they didn't think to slap a password on the damned thing, huh. Maybe it was left open because Laguna had to evacuate mid-procedure, but it really feels like this should need the equivalent of like, nuclear codes.
Red lights engulf the tomb device, and within the translucent structure that seals Adel like a shroud, something stirs.
The sorceress smiles, eyes shining red, and the Lunar Cry engulfs the tomb device, knocking Rinoa into the sky, drifting helplessly off into space.
In the control room, Piet shouts to evacuate while Squall cries out Rinoa's name. Quistis insists that they can't just leave, they have to do something for Rinoa, and even Ellone agrees - Rinoa is the only thing on Squall's mind. She's calling him, even now. He should be protecting Rinoa, not Ellone.
Which is kind of a rude thing to say, under the circumstances! Squall is powerful but he can't teleport or fly through space, and there is a giant tide of monsters coming their way! I have no idea what he's supposed to even do here.
And… I don't know… that he does, either?
His plea is, once again, for Ellone to 'take me to Rinoa, please.' He is once again begging her to send him into Rinoa's past, something we're not sure she could do - she did physically meet Rinoa now, but according to her, she can only "send people in the present into people that I knew in the past," and she didn't know Rinoa in the past - as far as we, and she, know. More importantly, the station is about to be hit by several billion monsters, and he is asking to be put in a state we know totally incapacitates people in the middle of the evacuation, in the hope that he can… Reach into the past and somehow change things so that what just happened does not happen and Rinoa is never sent tumbling into space?
The more Squall's insistence that Ellone's weird and highly idiosyncratic form of mental time travel is the only thing that can help him goes on, the weirder it gets.
Ellone says hesitantly that she doesn't know if she can send him, and Piet calls on everyone to move on with the evacuation; they move to an elevator, and we move to an aerial view of the incoming apocalypse.
The Lunar Cry hits the sky above the Pandora, and it spills out into a seemingly endless tide of blood. Underneath it, the Pandora shines, a golden glow from within revealing an intricate lattice of veins and spiraling shapes within it. At the heart of the red tide, something shines like a star - most likely Adel's Tomb? And descends towards the Pandora, phasing through its surface with the same rippling motion as when Edea phases through walls. It emerges in some strange place in the core of the monolith, where tendrils of light reach out to it.
What this means, beyond Adel (and Ultimecia?) having likely claimed control of the Pandora, I do not know. Before we can see any results from this fantastical display, Squall, Piet, Ellone, and Quistis all enter a narrow room filled with a small number of what look to be escape pods.
Piet delivers grim news - the autonomy on the suits is comically low by real-world standards, and there is almost no hope of retrieving her alive under the circumstances.
Piet tells Squall that it's unfortunate, but it can't be helped; Quistis laments that there must be something they can do; and Squall shouts in helpless rage, punching the air. He begs Ellone - he has never felt this way in his life, he can't take it. Please, take him to Rinoa's past.
Ellone hesitates again, then says that she doesn't know if it will work, but she'll try. Piet tells everyone to hurry it up, and Squall finally takes place in his own escape pod, and they all close around their occupants.
Although they don't close all the way and have huge holes where the head should be so I'm not sure how exactly they're supposed to keep anyone alive.
Okay, never mind, these aren't escape pods, this is one escape pod, and everyone is just strapped into their seats, I'm dumb.
Words can't express how cool this is. This is a straight up space escape sequence with a pod fleeing from a space station even as a tide of blood reaches it and blows it apart, sending shrapnel fragments down to earth as the Lunar Base is torn asunder. Please just go and watch all the Lunar Base FMVs on YouTube or something (well, avoid spoilers somehow I guess). It's increasingly obvious to me why this is the era in which Square started to believe they had the power to make something like Spirits Within work. It is spectacle on a scale never before seen in video games.
And as they fall… Toppling down to earth, a spear of millions of monsters behind them, Rinoa drifting helplessly into space… The lights come in as Squall's consciousness fades, and he is transported.
…to Rinoa and Irvine in a car, escaping from the desert prison, Rinoa yelling at Irvine to go back and help the others.
He's done it. He's reached into Rinoa's past.
Now how could that possibly help their current circumstances?
…
That was a lot.
This sequence wasn't without its issues, but God, the visual flair. I am of course talking about all the straight-up sci-fi stuff going on, the Lunar Base and astronauts, the cannons firing crypods and the energy nets capturing them, everything about the Lunar Cry… But it goes into all the little visual touches that bring it all too life. Whenever we get a fucked up angle with characters walking upside down or whatnot because of gravity, we also see astronauts flying through the window, tending to their astronaut tasks in the background of the station. Adel's awakening is sinister as hell, but the cherry on top of that whole sequence is when the camera lingers for half a second more to let us see her smile before it cuts. The visuals of Ultinoa's slow walk through the station… Chilling.
Narratively, there's a lot of intriguing stuff there. A bunch of twists and turns, of reveals that recontextualize not just recent events, but the history of the world that we were previously familiar with. Adel has been recast as an entirely new kind of threat from before, and the Lunar Cry has finally manifested as an apocalyptic threat.
Which… perhaps could have been foreshadowed better? The Lunar Cry isn't quite like the GF memory loss, in that there have been several mentions of its existence… All, as far as I'm aware, contained in the codex buried in the tutorial menu, at least until we came to Esthar. This might have merited a higher place in the ladder of things bring up either as history or as a fear for the future in conversations with NPCs? This was very sudden.
The trickier thing is that this whole sequence we just went through is like a half-hour of walking and talking and staring at cutscenes as our characters fail to foresee the inevitable, fuck up dealing with the threat, fail to save Rinoa, and watch the apocalypse happen in fast-forward while Squall is pleading to Ellone to send him to the past as seemingly the only solution to anything that is happening right now. There are no fights, no mechanics other than Triple Triad, this was just sitting down and watching our heroes fail.
And you know what? I can't really blame them. I totally failed to foresee that Rinoa was a sleeper agent, when I should have. I just got swept into a tidy narrative of 'Ultimecia passes into Seifer's body and Rinoa is just unconscious from shock' and then got to wrapped up in being bothered about Squall's behavior to even theorize that Ultimecia could be lying in wait within Rinoa's body, waiting for Squall to bring her into contact with her target. Would that have been… a reasonable assumption? I don't know; I felt like Squall's plan was bizarre and kind of unhinged the entire time, which I don't hold too much against him as a panicking teenager, but then that makes Ultimecia's own plan amount to successfully anticipate a bizarre plan she shouldn't have anticipated because it's unhinged.
…
Honestly staring at this whole sequence, I am genuinely kind of amazed. This is great TV. All my nitpicks shouldn't detract from that. I greatly enjoyed this sequence. I just, uh…
…I feel like I just watched the end of the game? Specifically the Bad End? I feel like in a Devilman Crybaby meme or something?
The sheer scale of the Lunar Cry is so utterly absurd, seas of monsters so vast they occlude continents from space view, reaching out so far as to blot out the horizons, and they are all just coming down upon the earth in a wave so immense that we can see, in the FMVs, the tide start to arc at the ends around what I'm pretty sure is the curvature of the earth.
To me this doesn't look like an apocalyptic threat that we must in some way save the world from. It looks like the world just ended and there is absolutely nothing our six teenagers with ridalong daemons could possibly do about it. We'll be coming home to a world so thick with monsters there literally isn't enough physical space for humans to move through.
I don't know. Maybe I'm being tricked by a difference between the visual Wham effect of the scene and it's intended scope. Maybe I am supposed to read this scene as 'the world just ended and the only hope we have is for Squall to change the past so that this never happens in the first place,' but it's not really how it's been presented so far? The emphasis seems exclusively on Squall trying to use time travel to save Rinoa.
This is way too much rambling for thoughts that were probably already clear a few pages ago, so I think we'll leave on that for today. With just one last consideration…
…
President Fucking Laguna.
I'm so mad.
Thank you for reading.
Next Time: Into Rinoa's past!
Thousands… Millions of monsters, swimming in a sea of strange, viscous energy, which is forming into a bubbling dome. That dome stretches, pushes up from the surface of the moon…
Animators: "DO YOU SEE OUR FLUID ANIMATIONS!? DO YOU SEE THEM, MOTHERFUCKERS?"
At first, the disturbing fluid is bright blue in color, almost, almost like the water of that earth below. But then that changes. It starts turning purple, and we get a sweeping shot of the inside of that fluid column, where millions (billions?) of monsters are growing increasingly agitated.
Then a flash of light, and the blue has become red, and the water is not much like water at all.
A pillar of blood, hurling projections all across its length, darts towards the earth like a tentacle or a spear.
At this point, it's probably too late to do anything. But I guess Squall wouldn't be a hero if he didn't try, would he?
A crew member says it looks like the Lunar Cry is aimed straight at Tear's Point in Esthar, and a researcher exclaims that this would mean the Lunatic Pandora is at Tear's Point - how could this happen? When did it happen?
…
In Greek mythology, Pandora's Box contained all the evils of the world, sickness and death and war, safely contained within until the woman Pandora opened it and unleashed them all upon the world. It seems fitting then that the Lunatic Pandora appears to have been a device designed to unleash all the monsters safely contained within the moon upon this world below. But why on earth would anyone build such a device?
Foolish question, really. Final Fantasy games are full of lost civilizations that all did very similar things. For now, we rush into the locker room, where we find an unconscious astronaut - and, in the airlock, Rinoa finishing to put on her own suit.
Once again, no response, no acknowledgment. Rinoa puts on her helmet and opens the airlock. We have no choice but to find a suit of our own in the lockers and throw ourselves after her.
We emerge into a loading bay, a massive door opening, and trying to steer Squall in Zero G. The mechanics are simple, and complicated exactly in that they're simple (it looks like we're moving in 3D but we're actually just 'floating' along a vertically locked axis), but it doesn't matter - nothing we can do here can change the outcome. All that we can do is proper Squall forward towards the gate, where on the path he meets a group of three chattering in panic.
Aide on the Left: "The flood of monsters is drawing near Adel's Tomb!"
Aide on the Right: "At this rate, Adel's Tomb might fall somewhere near Esthar!"
Panicky Gentleman: "Why is everything happening all at once? This is crazy! It's like someone planned the whole thing! Who could've set this up?"
Squall, mentally: "(...Sorceress Ultimecia…)"
As he passes in front of the screen, we get a look at the 'Panicky Gentleman' and his suit's orange pauldrons - the President. Along with two 'aides.' Hm. I wonder who they are.
The gate locks in front of Squall before he can reach them. Rinoa is already behind them, heading towards the tomb and, beyond it, outer space. There is no choice but to turn around and head back into the Lunar Base.
The first thing we see upon getting in is the aides and the president (all still conspicuously wearing their face-obscuring suits) arguing; the aides are trying to convince Laguna to evacuate immediately, and he's telling them to forget about him and just see to their own safety, whereupon they both bodily grab him and hoist him off-screen, except then he resists and manages to crawl back on screen just long enough to yell at Squall to take care of Ellone before being pulled back by his aides again.
It is impossible for this man to be Laguna more than he already is. If the 'twist' isn't that this is Laguna and Squall just can't recognize him because of the suit, I am calling false advertising. If you put a gun to my head I would raise the bet by a thousand dollar before betting 'this is Laguna.' On God.
For those keeping track, this is the point where I decided to just reload and do the Lunatic Pandora sections for the hidden loot, then fast-forwarded back to this point. Just to give you a representation of my experience. But now we're back for the great climax.
All Squall can do is rush back into the control room and watch helplessly as Ellone cries out that the Lunar Cry is starting and Rinoa is about to be swallowed by the tide of monsters. Out there, in space, alone and silent, Rinoa drifts to Adel's Tomb.
She approaches a panel on the side, and starts to input commands. I guess they didn't think to slap a password on the damned thing, huh. Maybe it was left open because Laguna had to evacuate mid-procedure, but it really feels like this should need the equivalent of like, nuclear codes.
Red lights engulf the tomb device, and within the translucent structure that seals Adel like a shroud, something stirs.
The sorceress smiles, eyes shining red, and the Lunar Cry engulfs the tomb device, knocking Rinoa into the sky, drifting helplessly off into space.
In the control room, Piet shouts to evacuate while Squall cries out Rinoa's name. Quistis insists that they can't just leave, they have to do something for Rinoa, and even Ellone agrees - Rinoa is the only thing on Squall's mind. She's calling him, even now. He should be protecting Rinoa, not Ellone.
Which is kind of a rude thing to say, under the circumstances! Squall is powerful but he can't teleport or fly through space, and there is a giant tide of monsters coming their way! I have no idea what he's supposed to even do here.
And… I don't know… that he does, either?
His plea is, once again, for Ellone to 'take me to Rinoa, please.' He is once again begging her to send him into Rinoa's past, something we're not sure she could do - she did physically meet Rinoa now, but according to her, she can only "send people in the present into people that I knew in the past," and she didn't know Rinoa in the past - as far as we, and she, know. More importantly, the station is about to be hit by several billion monsters, and he is asking to be put in a state we know totally incapacitates people in the middle of the evacuation, in the hope that he can… Reach into the past and somehow change things so that what just happened does not happen and Rinoa is never sent tumbling into space?
The more Squall's insistence that Ellone's weird and highly idiosyncratic form of mental time travel is the only thing that can help him goes on, the weirder it gets.
Ellone says hesitantly that she doesn't know if she can send him, and Piet calls on everyone to move on with the evacuation; they move to an elevator, and we move to an aerial view of the incoming apocalypse.
The Lunar Cry hits the sky above the Pandora, and it spills out into a seemingly endless tide of blood. Underneath it, the Pandora shines, a golden glow from within revealing an intricate lattice of veins and spiraling shapes within it. At the heart of the red tide, something shines like a star - most likely Adel's Tomb? And descends towards the Pandora, phasing through its surface with the same rippling motion as when Edea phases through walls. It emerges in some strange place in the core of the monolith, where tendrils of light reach out to it.
What this means, beyond Adel (and Ultimecia?) having likely claimed control of the Pandora, I do not know. Before we can see any results from this fantastical display, Squall, Piet, Ellone, and Quistis all enter a narrow room filled with a small number of what look to be escape pods.
Piet delivers grim news - the autonomy on the suits is comically low by real-world standards, and there is almost no hope of retrieving her alive under the circumstances.
Piet tells Squall that it's unfortunate, but it can't be helped; Quistis laments that there must be something they can do; and Squall shouts in helpless rage, punching the air. He begs Ellone - he has never felt this way in his life, he can't take it. Please, take him to Rinoa's past.
Ellone hesitates again, then says that she doesn't know if it will work, but she'll try. Piet tells everyone to hurry it up, and Squall finally takes place in his own escape pod, and they all close around their occupants.
Although they don't close all the way and have huge holes where the head should be so I'm not sure how exactly they're supposed to keep anyone alive.
Okay, never mind, these aren't escape pods, this is one escape pod, and everyone is just strapped into their seats, I'm dumb.
Words can't express how cool this is. This is a straight up space escape sequence with a pod fleeing from a space station even as a tide of blood reaches it and blows it apart, sending shrapnel fragments down to earth as the Lunar Base is torn asunder. Please just go and watch all the Lunar Base FMVs on YouTube or something (well, avoid spoilers somehow I guess). It's increasingly obvious to me why this is the era in which Square started to believe they had the power to make something like Spirits Within work. It is spectacle on a scale never before seen in video games.
And as they fall… Toppling down to earth, a spear of millions of monsters behind them, Rinoa drifting helplessly into space… The lights come in as Squall's consciousness fades, and he is transported.
…to Rinoa and Irvine in a car, escaping from the desert prison, Rinoa yelling at Irvine to go back and help the others.
He's done it. He's reached into Rinoa's past.
Now how could that possibly help their current circumstances?
…
That was a lot.
This sequence wasn't without its issues, but God, the visual flair. I am of course talking about all the straight-up sci-fi stuff going on, the Lunar Base and astronauts, the cannons firing crypods and the energy nets capturing them, everything about the Lunar Cry… But it goes into all the little visual touches that bring it all too life. Whenever we get a fucked up angle with characters walking upside down or whatnot because of gravity, we also see astronauts flying through the window, tending to their astronaut tasks in the background of the station. Adel's awakening is sinister as hell, but the cherry on top of that whole sequence is when the camera lingers for half a second more to let us see her smile before it cuts. The visuals of Ultinoa's slow walk through the station… Chilling.
Narratively, there's a lot of intriguing stuff there. A bunch of twists and turns, of reveals that recontextualize not just recent events, but the history of the world that we were previously familiar with. Adel has been recast as an entirely new kind of threat from before, and the Lunar Cry has finally manifested as an apocalyptic threat.
Which… perhaps could have been foreshadowed better? The Lunar Cry isn't quite like the GF memory loss, in that there have been several mentions of its existence… All, as far as I'm aware, contained in the codex buried in the tutorial menu, at least until we came to Esthar. This might have merited a higher place in the ladder of things bring up either as history or as a fear for the future in conversations with NPCs? This was very sudden.
The trickier thing is that this whole sequence we just went through is like a half-hour of walking and talking and staring at cutscenes as our characters fail to foresee the inevitable, fuck up dealing with the threat, fail to save Rinoa, and watch the apocalypse happen in fast-forward while Squall is pleading to Ellone to send him to the past as seemingly the only solution to anything that is happening right now. There are no fights, no mechanics other than Triple Triad, this was just sitting down and watching our heroes fail.
And you know what? I can't really blame them. I totally failed to foresee that Rinoa was a sleeper agent, when I should have. I just got swept into a tidy narrative of 'Ultimecia passes into Seifer's body and Rinoa is just unconscious from shock' and then got to wrapped up in being bothered about Squall's behavior to even theorize that Ultimecia could be lying in wait within Rinoa's body, waiting for Squall to bring her into contact with her target. Would that have been… a reasonable assumption? I don't know; I felt like Squall's plan was bizarre and kind of unhinged the entire time, which I don't hold too much against him as a panicking teenager, but then that makes Ultimecia's own plan amount to successfully anticipate a bizarre plan she shouldn't have anticipated because it's unhinged.
…
Honestly staring at this whole sequence, I am genuinely kind of amazed. This is great TV. All my nitpicks shouldn't detract from that. I greatly enjoyed this sequence. I just, uh…
…I feel like I just watched the end of the game? Specifically the Bad End? I feel like in a Devilman Crybaby meme or something?
The sheer scale of the Lunar Cry is so utterly absurd, seas of monsters so vast they occlude continents from space view, reaching out so far as to blot out the horizons, and they are all just coming down upon the earth in a wave so immense that we can see, in the FMVs, the tide start to arc at the ends around what I'm pretty sure is the curvature of the earth.
To me this doesn't look like an apocalyptic threat that we must in some way save the world from. It looks like the world just ended and there is absolutely nothing our six teenagers with ridalong daemons could possibly do about it. We'll be coming home to a world so thick with monsters there literally isn't enough physical space for humans to move through.
I don't know. Maybe I'm being tricked by a difference between the visual Wham effect of the scene and it's intended scope. Maybe I am supposed to read this scene as 'the world just ended and the only hope we have is for Squall to change the past so that this never happens in the first place,' but it's not really how it's been presented so far? The emphasis seems exclusively on Squall trying to use time travel to save Rinoa.
This is way too much rambling for thoughts that were probably already clear a few pages ago, so I think we'll leave on that for today. With just one last consideration…
…
President Fucking Laguna.
I'm so mad.
Thank you for reading.
Next Time: Into Rinoa's past!
Alectai
Speaks Words of Wisdom... On occasion
FF8 has finally hit Crazytown territory, yeah.
And there's a damn good reason hardly anyone knows about the Lunar Cry--it's exactly Because it's functionally a civilization-ending event. It's also why nobody bothers trying to wipe out all the monsters, because every so often in a way you can't neccessarily predict, the fucking Moon pours billions down to earth all in one place and they just fan out.
People understand it exists, people know that it's something to be Concerned about, but the sheer visceral reality of it just... Isn't in living memory.
But now you know now why there's a bunch of mobile, floating shelters lying around all over the place @Omicron ! You also know why Sorceresses are so respected--they were effectively capable of serving as protectors for settlements even in the face of infinite tides of monsters.
You can't stop a Lunar Cry, it drops in and effectively just resets civilization. But you Can survive it, because the swell of monsters is just unsustainable--whatever weird space magic allows them to spawn in such overwhelming numbers on the Moon apparently doesn't carry over to the planet, so they'll eventually drop down to a more reasonable Fantasy World carrying capacity. But anything that isn't in a reinforced bunker, able to regularly reposition--or ideally both--just gets wiped off the face of the earth barring an Act of Fucking God.
The Lunatic Pandora doesn't trigger Lunar Cries directly, as we saw, it was already winding up before it got taken over. What it Does, is allow you to determine where Ground Zero is.
Which is superweapon enough. Because Ground Zero is Fucking Gone, as we saw with the Centra.
And there's a damn good reason hardly anyone knows about the Lunar Cry--it's exactly Because it's functionally a civilization-ending event. It's also why nobody bothers trying to wipe out all the monsters, because every so often in a way you can't neccessarily predict, the fucking Moon pours billions down to earth all in one place and they just fan out.
People understand it exists, people know that it's something to be Concerned about, but the sheer visceral reality of it just... Isn't in living memory.
But now you know now why there's a bunch of mobile, floating shelters lying around all over the place @Omicron ! You also know why Sorceresses are so respected--they were effectively capable of serving as protectors for settlements even in the face of infinite tides of monsters.
You can't stop a Lunar Cry, it drops in and effectively just resets civilization. But you Can survive it, because the swell of monsters is just unsustainable--whatever weird space magic allows them to spawn in such overwhelming numbers on the Moon apparently doesn't carry over to the planet, so they'll eventually drop down to a more reasonable Fantasy World carrying capacity. But anything that isn't in a reinforced bunker, able to regularly reposition--or ideally both--just gets wiped off the face of the earth barring an Act of Fucking God.
The Lunatic Pandora doesn't trigger Lunar Cries directly, as we saw, it was already winding up before it got taken over. What it Does, is allow you to determine where Ground Zero is.
Which is superweapon enough. Because Ground Zero is Fucking Gone, as we saw with the Centra.
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E.I.G.
Robo-Bird
- Pronouns
- It/They
Now that we are here, I want to bring something back:
And then we get to one of Timber's most recognizable landmarks: The giant TV.
It's apparently still on, but all it's broadcasting is this spooky string of words that flow, blur and flash; this is the worldwide radio interference. Not a shutting down of the signal as I might have implied earlier, but a noise that drowns out all other communication. Pretty spooky.
…do these letters mean anything? I'm genuinely struggling to tell on this low resolution. I think I might be seeing a "Kill," a "Never let" something…
*squint*
"I WILL NEVER LET YOU [something] BACK"? "BRING ME BACK THERE I AM ALIVE HERE"?
Okay, that definitely rates on the spook-o-meter.
Current theory: The radio interference is the result of something (Hyne?) trapped on the moon screaming to be heard and released from its prison drowning out every other radio wave.
This prison plot was very foreshadowed. This game definitely wanted to be replayed, in order to look at things like this again and go "oh, oh that's what that was".
... people the main character's age don't really remember Sorceress Adel. Despite her screams that are drowning out radio signals across the world, she is still forgotten.
Oh, now I remember why I liked this game.
Kuja
I'M A SQUIIIID
- Location
- AZ
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I really like the specific note that the Luna Base is constructed at the Lagrange Point. Maybe someone on the FF8 team was a Mobile Suit Gundam fan, but narratively the idea that a prison must be constructed at the specific point where the fundamental hold of nature and physics cancel one another out, leaving a prisoner isolated even from the omnipresent touch of gravity is skin crawling.
Why would someone build a device to split the atom?
Why would someone build a device 3,000 times more powerful than that?
To win.
To be powerful.
And to make others admit that you are powerful.
To know that even friends must recognize your power over them.
In a world of selfishness and cruelty, the power to plant your feet and ball your fists and say;
I am the greatest.
I am going to win; and I am going to make you lose, and you will acknowledge MY POWER, acknowledge that I MATTER-
THAT I AM ALIVE HERE
THAT YOU WILL BRING ME BACK
THAT YOU WILL NEVER FORGET ME
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Raj
Master of Procrasination
- Location
- Canada
- Pronouns
- He/Him
This is still one of the most amusing plot elements to me, just because of how much we were all convinced it was either Reincarnation, or Laguna being Squall's Dad or some other element.
But no he's just President, and the reason so much time travel happened was that his adopted daughter wanted to know why he seemingly abandoned her it looks like.
- Location
- USA
I'm more curious how long Laguna's been President. Adel's been sealed away for 17 years, so does that mean he's been the President for all that time? So less "President of the US" and more "President" Putin or Xi, I guess.
Although I suppose if Mitterrand had served for 14 years in the real world, I should be wondering instead how long an Esthar presidential term lasts before the next election.
Although I suppose if Mitterrand had served for 14 years in the real world, I should be wondering instead how long an Esthar presidential term lasts before the next election.
- Location
- Maryland
You know, I'm starting to think Hyne isn't real, but instead part of a mythos invented by ancient humanity to explain why the moon occasionally became the eye of a hateful god that wept armaggeddon onto the world.
Guile
Having a really great time right now
That she will... never be a memory?
That's President Fucking Laguna Sir, Omi.Omicron said:
Thozmp
Gets my kicks above the waistline, Sunshine.
NORG's payment system really is robust. Thousands, millions of miles from the planet, and your paycheck still arrives right on time.
Surprising he didn't set 'Broke into my
Edited to fix strikethrough failure because I forgot how it worked for a bit.