I suspect the Lunar Cry is more of a localized apocalypse than a global apocalypse given the destruction of Centra is consistently described as having been 'over 100 years' rather than 'over 1000 years', implying that the time since the Centran Lunar Cry is on the order of less than ten generations - that's not enough time to recover from a global apocalypse, meaning the destruction of that particular cry must have been confined to the Centran continent
Also, kudos to FF8 for having a female villain who is neither conventionally attractive nor comically ugly with Adel the Five Meter Tall Body Builder please step on me
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, short version, should be more-or-less technically correct ...
Say you have a card in a corner, something with, say, A's on its outward facing sides. And then someone puts an A-facing card above it, so there are two A's touching. And then that same person puts a card with a sideways-facing A against the other A on the card in the corner. That should trigger the Same rule and flip the card in the corner (Because the card faces are the Same). I'm not entirely certain it triggers the Plus rule as well - assume the same set-up, but it's not about the same faces, but the addition adding up (A corner card with 9 and 6 as its open faces being flanked by a 3 against the 9 and a 6 against the 6 - both faces add up to 12, so Plus triggers).
I think Plus is the more obnoxious, just because unless you either deliberately or reflexively do all the available addition variables in your head or something, it's just really hard to keep track of.
Congratulations! I have literally never bothered to do the Lunar Base card games. Absolutely not worth it. (No, Laguna's Card is not the best for Refining IMO.)
If I had a nickel for every time a Final Fantasy game went to space, I'd have... four nickels by now I think, which isn't a lot but it's weird that it happened four times.
Still not as weird as Squall glaring at Ellone and also a random stranger in the command centre before forcing them to play Gwent with him.
YES! YEEEEESSSSS! AT LAST! THE ERA OF THE MOONSPIRACY IS SOON TO BE OVER! WE ARE ABOUT TO HIT THE MOON WAY AHEAD OF WHEN I WAS EXPECTING IT, AND FINALLY FOUND OUT WHAT THIS IS ALL ABOUT!
…
Ooooor not.
Or we could leave Squall, Rinoa and [PARTYMEMBER3] to their fate and follow Zell's party instead.
…you know, this is the first time we've seen the dog since, uh, all the way back at the resistance train in Disc 1? This dog has featured on screen twice. Now, sure, Angelo contributes to battles as a Limit effect, but… For a game that spends so much time having character models present in cutscenes, walking along after you, caring about the logistics of movement sometimes to ridiculous effects, it's weird that the dog just… Doesn't exist in the narrative from his first appearance to now 40 hours later?
...Never really thought about it before, but yeah. It's going to feel especially weird if Angelo proceeds to never be seen again after this moment, because then it goes from "We can forget about his introduction and just file it under Off To Game Mechanics Land" to "They know the dog exists, but what the dog doin' all game?"
Being fair, "Retired Military-turned-police + intercontinental cruise missiles" still makes for a pretty strong operational military.
...Also, uh, random question that feels important: Who the hell is even leading the Galbadian Army to take over the Lunatic Pandora and attack Esthar right now? Like, President Deling is dead and cremated, Edea got the sorceress smacked outta her and left, and Galbadia just had what was presumably a major military loss in the duel of the Gardens. Shouldn't they be backing off to lick their wounds, or plotting revenge against Balamb Garden? Not... somehow digging up an ancient superweapon and launching an attack on the one nation that isn't against them, currently, and was strong enough to rival them in the past?
That is… Familiar. Also not what I was expecting. The outside architecture looked very artificial (there is a giant logo stamped on the side of the monolith, after all), but it seems like most of the inside of this giant structure is composed of tunnels carved through rock. A kind of blue-green rock that we've seen before.
Could this place be related to the Centra Excavation Site that Laguna explored in the past?
HELLO, READERS. IT IS ME, OMICRON FROM THE FUTURE. I HAVE TAKEN DANGEROUS STEPS TO FIND ELLONE SO AS TO PROJECT MYSELF INTO THE PAST AND AVOID A DIRE PORTENT. YOU SEE, IN MY TIMELINE, UPON REACHING THE UNADVERTISED ENDPOINT OF THE DUNGEON, I JUST WENT WITH IT. AFTER ALL, WE MOVED RIGHT AWAY INTO THE NEXT FMV, AND THEN WE REACHED THE LUNAR BASE, AND IT WAS ALL COOL PLOT SHIT AND I PLAYED FOR LIKE AN HOUR EXCITED TO FIND OUT WHAT WAS COMING NEXT.
THIS WAS OBVIOUSLY A TRICK. I DON'T KNOW WHY I DIDN'T IMMEDIATELY REALIZE IT. REMEMBER, READERS: WE ARE PLAYING FINAL FANTASY VIII. IF YOU ENTERED ELEVATOR 01 OUT OF 3, AND IMMEDIATELY REACHED THE NEXT PLOT BEAT, THE CORRECT ANSWER IS TO IMMEDIATELY SHUT DOWN THE GAME AND RELOAD RATHER THAN WASTE YOUR TIME. THIS SHOULD NOT BE A SURPRISE TO ANYONE. EVERY TIME YOU FEEL LIKE THE PLOT OF FF8 IS 'MOVING FORWARD,' AND YOU ARE 'GOING WITH THE FLOW,' YOU SHOULD REMEMBER THAT YOU ARE BEING TRICKED AND MISSING A CARD THAT CAN BE REFINED INTO 100 INVINCIBILITY ITEMS, OR SOME SIMILAR SHIT.
HEAR MY MESSAGE. YOU ALONE CAN PREVENT TIME COMPRESSION. IMMEDIATELY RELOAD THAT SAVE FROM 30 MINUTES AGO.
Wow, thanks Future Omi! With your help, now Present Omi can struggle with shitty Triple Triad rules for an hour to complete his card collection instead of enjoying some of the craziest plot bits in the game uninterrupted!
All in all, was this worth the trip back? I don't know. Depends on how often I end up needing Zell's ultimate Limit Break, My Final Heaven, taught by the magazine, I guess. I do terribly at his Duel minigame, frankly, so I never get great output from him.
In your situation of "I'm kind of ass at Duel" getting Zell's My Final Heaven might actually be more useful to you than it would be for other players. Playing for maximum damage, Duel is at its best just looping two attacks over and over, inputing them so fast that it takes like .05 seconds per attack so you hit the enemy dozens or even hundreds of times to rack up numbers, but if you aren't good at doing that then you might as well route your way into a big ultimate finisher instead.
There's one thing I'm going to say here, because it's something that's really grown apparent to me in this update:
Final Fantasy VIII is a game that was designed to be replayed.
I… don't mean that as a compliment, as such. What I mean is, there is no natural way to play FF8 that would lead to picking up most of its missable content. Most of these missables are deliberately put into places where the player has to actively resist the flow of the story to get them. A character takes a break mid-speech, and you need to press "challenge to a card duel" rather than just press "dialogue" as would be natural. You need to leave the plot and go wandering in the off-world a bit when urgency is the greatest. If you take the 'wrong' option at a multiple choice point, that is the one which advances the plot, you need to turn off the console and reload to explore first. Even if you don't know that there is something to miss, the moment you see the plot move forward despite there being two elevators you didn't take, you need to turn off and reload just to check.
All these moments break the flow of the game and make the pacing and storytelling worse… Because they're not meant to be experienced in your first playthrough. They exist purely either for guidebook-consuming obsessives who play with their guidebook open (and I don't want to dismiss that aspect, I was part of that demographic), or for people who have already played the game, know all the narrative beats, know where all the 'gates' are located, and so won't mistakenly advance the plot, won't push forward rather than scrounge around because they want to see what's next.
And I think to an extent this is incompatible with modern gaming culture, because of three notable features:
Less time spent replaying games. There are just so many games these days, and they are all so long, that it's much less of a plausible ask for someone to reply a narratively-driven game like FF8 that doesn't have any NG+ function just to get all the collectibles and break the game balance.
The death of guidebooks. Now, in a way it is easier than it has ever been to find walkthroughs of games telling you where to look for things. I have, myself, resorted to one during this update, simply because the idea of reloading to do this, and then not getting everything and only learning that I still missed something because my thread pointed to me the Speed Junction Scroll or w/e, was agonizing. However, this ties into the third point…
The rise of spoiler culture. Now, to be clear, it's always been rude to tell someone that Aerith dies ahead of them knowing it. But the thing is, it's harder to confidently look things up without risking exposure? I have found one or two online guides that are very conservative in their spoilers and break their walkthrough into discrete tabs, and even then they're not perfect, but beyond that just googling anything about a game can reveal spoilers in the scrolldown menu. Forget YouTube. Spoilers are simultaneously everywhere and despised. It's impossible to avoid them, and it's considered valuable to avoid them. Maybe a 1997 guidebook would have spoiled an important plot point, but if it did, it's probably because it didn't care. Should it have cared? Maybe, I don't know.
The point of it all is, playing a game like FF8 while trying to 1) get most of the missable stuff even if I'm not going for 100% completion and 2) play it as blind as possible and avoiding spoilers, is just an impossible contradiction. It's extremely frustrating. And I value the efforts of the thread in helping me with that by being highly careful in pointing things out ahead of my next update without revealing the exact context, but at some point it's increasingly clear that I am not playing the game the way it was meant to be played.
And I don't know how to feel about that. Except maybe that if I'd known ahead of time I'd end up splitting this update, I might have just reloaded back even further and figured out how to get the status defenses to resist and kill Marlboro and at least get the Solomon Ring's GF out of the whole deal. Ah, well.
Yeah, replaying games was something that was much more plausible back in the day, especially when we were all kids who got one new game every few months (if you were lucky) so of course you'll play the same game over and over to get the most out of it. Nowadays? We're all grown adults, we probably have jobs and some small degree of disposable income (video games aren't particularly expensive, in my experience), and things like Steam exist. I got probably a hundred games I've never played, so I'm a lot less likely to spend time replaying a game in a short period of time unless I really, really like the gameplay (I do not really, really like the gameplay of FFVIII, when I could just be replaying the entire Fromsoft Soulslike Library instead).
Can I just say I love that you found NORG so hilariously entertaining that you're still cracking jokes about his silly text accent all these updates later? He's such a stupidly memorable villain for a guy with ten minutes of screentime what with being Jeff Bezos meets Jabba the Hutt and talks exclusively through discount Microsoft Sam and Google Translate.
Thing is, at least, most of the 'missable' content doesn't matter. My very first playthrough (and only full playthrough) of FF8, I wasn't using a guide. I was just playing through it, largely ignored the card game, and as soon as I could learn Enc-None I kept it on. Beat it just fine, basically doing a low-level run without even really knowing how that took advantage of the game's systems.
I understand wanting to get most of what the game has to offer, but if it's frustrating, don't worry about it. There are reasons FF8 is often one of the derided Final Fantasies, even though it's got a lot of good things going on too.
I mean, does it really matter if you get Nice GF Item #76? 8 is a fairly easy game and the missable rewards aren't really broken. If reloading the game and breaking the flow of the story is ruining your experience, then just don't do it. If you want to do something like collect all the unique cards, then the thread can warn you about it in advance. The most challenging endgame optional content with rewards locked behind it the first superboss can be done without any of the gamebreaking exploits (source: I did it).
See, on one hand, this is absolutely true! None of these games tend to be spectacularly hard, there's probably plenty of us in the thread that played them at age seven or something and banged our heads on the RPG optimizing walls until we won, you don't really need every secret and collectable.
But at the same time, Omi's doing an LP for the sake of dozens of viewers, so missing things (particularly hidden story beats) can feel like a major drag on his part and the part of those more familiar with the game who will then go "Omi Omi you MISSED THIS". Not that he has to address every single little thing, but if it's only slightly out of the way (and not a specific-strategy demanding superboss that takes 20 hours of leveling to prep for without perfect optimization), I can get that little gremlin might be in his head poking him to go back.
Somewhere, someone is sitting on thousands of Prima Game Guides scoured from used bookstores and closed Game Stops in dead malls. For now, he watches and waits...but once the internet becomes an unusable SEO AI Hell, and the masses are crawling on their hands and knees for a coffee stained copy of "The DEFINITIVE Tips & Tricks Guide for TWISTED METAL: Head On" for the PSP or a Nintendo Power Guide for "DBZ Budokai Tenkaichi 2" with half the pages missing, then who will be laughing now, hmmm?
Flashbacks to me going through multiple guides for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of time, my own and several owned by friends, only to find that every single one was missing the pages for the Water Temple for some inexplicable reason, leaving me stuck in a keyless hellhole for over a year.
Jokey jokes, but you know, this is actually something I remarked upon when I reached Aerith's death in the FF7 LP. This thread generally has a pretty stringent "no spoilers" policy, and before I start each game I do a brief rundown of 'everything I know about the game's story' breakdown ahead of time so that everyone knows which parts I'm blind about and which I'm not.
In spite of this:
1) Other readers have brought up Aerith's death without spoiler markers before we even reached FF7 and no one brought it up or even seemed to notice it as a breach of the no spoilers policy, least of all me;
2) I personally brought up Aerith's death in the thread without realizing I was breaking my own policy;
3) When doing my 'everything I know about the game going in' post before starting FF7, I forgot to note that I knew about Aerith's death, because it was literally so obvious I forgot it was technically spoilers.
Which really says something about how foundational that piece of video game lore is to video game community cultures, I think?
Aerith's Death is just one of those things. The things that are so well known in related communities, that it doesn't feel like a spoiler anymore, up there with "Vader is Luke's Dad". It still is a spoiler, sure, but the fact that it happens doesn't really spoil how it happens, or effects the characters and the storyline, as you got to experience yourself when it came up in the FFVII playthrough.
Whoa hey now, let's not slander Wizards with shitting their own pants!
They shat on the floor and vanished it away from there, thank you very much. just pulled their robes outta the way in the middle of the hall and went "excuse me, Squeliumbus Plunderbollux, I must take a poo" mid-conversation and let it all out (presumably).
Goddamn, NORG made some seriously good systems to wire you money even in the depths of space. Maybe he loaned it out for a high price to Esthar and that's how they can communicate with the space station despite the Radio Waves all being covered up by Adel screaming.
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?
Really something that could have been foreshadowed a bit better, not gonna lie.
Honestly, considering we're somewhere in the middle of Disc 3 out of 4 right now... maybe this is just the usual "things had to be cut" breakpoints we're starting to run into that plagues basically every JRPG. Esthar as a whole feels like it plopped out of nowhere for the next major objective as of Disc 3, so I wouldn't be surprised if there's just missing bits of game or faltering translations around here that are starting to take root.
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.
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.
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.
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!
It really is wild when you think about it. I feel like usually when you have these isolated civilizations in Final Fantasy up until now, it's some little backwater village or something similar and oh no the Evil Empire comes to invade and bring havoc! But nah, Esthar is just straight up a world superpower that feels like it could have stepped in at any point and ended Galbadia's growing reigns of terror.
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!
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.
I'm sure we'll get some kind of villain monologue eventually... but for now, she's a lot more focused on nabbing herself a new sorceress body from the looks of things. And likely a stronger, better one.
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…
Come on now, you knew it would happen at some point, there's no way you stick something as insane as "oh yeah the moon just shits billions of monsters down on the planet every once in a while" in the background lore and don't make use of it.
Man if I ever run a DnD campaign or something I need to steal the Lunar Cry idea for worldbuilding lore, it's such an insanely dope idea.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
Ultimicia might just be improvising as she goes, to be fair. Hops out of Edea into the nearest viable target to sell her "defeat", then lays dormant until a better opportunity arrives. And when Squall hears "oh go to Esthar" and starts dragging Rinoa's Ultimicia-carrying body along, she goes "well shit thanks for the perfect opportunity".
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.
Best part is, I genuinely can't recall how this gets handled, it's been too long and I only got maybe an hour past this point in the game back in the day. Basically everything else from here on out until the final boss (because for some reason my PS1 memory cards had a save file at the final boss lmao) is New Ground for me, baby!
FFVIII may have one of the messier combat systems in the series... but when the story hits, it hits hard. I generally can't fault the plot, or at least I can't fault it any more than any other FF games because they all have their issues.
If I had a nickel for every time a Final Fantasy game went to space, I'd have... four nickels by now I think, which isn't a lot but it's weird that it happened four times.
Let's see, so far there's FFIV (Moon Whale, FuSoYa, etc.), FFVII (Cid's Rocket, Meteor), FFVIII here... am I forgetting one, or are we counting the maybe-space-station from FFI?
Let's see, so far there's FFIV (Moon Whale, FuSoYa, etc.), FFVII (Cid's Rocket, Meteor), FFVIII here... am I forgetting one, or are we counting the maybe-space-station from FFI?
I thought Omicron wasn't angry that Laguna became President; he was angry that Laguna still lives. Because that means his belief of "Squall/Rinoa is just Laguna/Julia reincarnating to do the romance they missed out on" no longer works because Laguna is still alive.
So how aware of things do you think Adel was? On the one hand I could see an argument Adel knew everything that was happening and that's why she smirked.
But on the other hand it would be significantly funnier if she had no idea what was happening.
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."
Lol at revealing this in what amounts to a throwaway line. That's the central mystery at the start of the game! That's one of the first things we learn about the world and what our first mission revolved around!
And, like, it's not like the answer is unsatisfying. "Radio is a sacrifice to keep the dreadful sorceress sealed" is a fairly good reveal... Or it would be with, you know, some more gravitas put into it.
This entire sequence is extremely Komm Susser Tod, and I'm living for it. Even knowing that this led to Spirits Within... It's worth it. The vibes are immaculate.
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.
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.
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.
The Lunar Base has every single rule in the game active. Now, due to how the game works, you can technically cancel one rule after accepting a game (no need to actually play that game). This is of course RNG, but I say that not having Random makes the 2 unique cards way easier to get.
Whoa hey now, let's not slander Wizards with shitting their own pants!
They shat on the floor and vanished it away from there, thank you very much. just pulled their robes outta the way in the middle of the hall and went "excuse me, Squeliumbus Plunderbollux, I must take a poo" mid-conversation and let it all out (presumably).
Rowling has revealed herself as a garbage human being, but this is one thing I can still respect about her: she did more to make people accept Death of the Author than any sort of academic paper or reasoned discourse.
Or possibly it was just the first symptom of the black mold.
So how aware of things do you think Adel was? On the one hand I could see an argument Adel knew everything that was happening and that's why she smirked.
But on the other hand it would be significantly funnier if she had no idea what was happening.
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.
Well, I guessed Utimecia might be in Rinoa's body the moment I heard she passed out around the same time as Edea being exorcised. But I didn't think she was specifically laying in wait for this, because that's insane.
On the other hand... Maybe she wasn't laying in wait just for this. She might not have been expecting things to go this well. She might have had some other plan for getting past the seals that she didn't have to use because the main characters unexpectedly made things way easier for her. For example, maybe she was planning on having some of the Galbadian troops the Pandora was dropping into Esthar storm the spaceport and fly up to the sattelite and unleash Adel. It would explain why they were dropping them off into a city that was just going to be destroyed by monsters, anyway. Otherwise, you're just throwing away troops for no purpose.
Lol, every time I (re)play FF8, I always hunt down a guide for manipulating the triad rules to make things as painless as possible. The Lunar station is always pretty terrible, though, because it starts out with every single rule active. Because it starts out with all the rules, though, if you keep challenging someone and backing out before the game starts, eventually one rule will be randomly deleted. It makes things a little bit easier.
So I know that this was a very cool sequence but there's two glaring things I have to take issue with.
1. Why is Adel still alive? I guess we can infer she's unable to be killed for some reason, but that really doesn't gel with the rest of what we know about Sorceresses? Like, everyone thought an assassination attempt could succeed against Edea!
2. Why the fuck are there controls to release her seals? If you have to lock Hitler Satan in a forever jail, you don't include doors or windows.
And the thing is, 1 isn't too bad, even if it's a bit jarring; we can draw on inference and FF history (you can't kill anything until the protagonists come around, it has to be sealed away until then, sucks to not be a protagonist but maybe you should get good) to come to an answer. But 2 is unnescessary! You could have the entire Rinoa sequence without needing to include seal release mechanisms, just have her get to the bridge so she could locate the prison, then take a spacewalk to transfer Ultimecia to a more fitting host and wake up Ulti-Adel.
2 just makes everyone involved feel like a brainded imbecile. I know it's a comparatively tiny thing, but it just stuck in my teeth.
(I'm guessing that it's Ulti-Adel at this point, because why would Ultimecia care about staying in weak untrained Rinoa when she could have God-Empress Trained And Experienced Sorceress Adel's body instead?)
The moonspiracy monster orbital drop, on the other hand, is peak cinema. That an ancient (though maybe not ancient unless you count the Roaring Twenties as ancient) civilisation developed a targeting device for it is also super cool and genuinely makes sense from both a warfare and a peaceful point of view.
So I know that this was a very cool sequence but there's two glaring things I have to take issue with.
1. Why is Adel still alive? I guess we can infer she's unable to be killed for some reason, but that really doesn't gel with the rest of what we know about Sorceresses? Like, everyone thought an assassination attempt could succeed against Edea!
2. Why the fuck are there controls to release her seals? If you have to lock Hitler Satan in a forever jail, you don't include doors or windows.
1 is just an extension of the "Esthar doesn't bother to tell anybody anything" issue.They know that killing a sorceress is impossible or counterproductive (presumably because they can just bodyhop). They just didn't bother to tell anybody.
2 Is perfectly reasonable though. Making an un-openable prison just seems pointlessly cruel - what if the sorceress repents later?
Keep in mind this thing was done under Laguna supervision.
HELLO, READERS. IT IS ME, OMICRON FROM THE FUTURE. I HAVE TAKEN DANGEROUS STEPS TO FIND ELLONE SO AS TO PROJECT MYSELF INTO THE PAST AND AVOID A DIRE PORTENT. YOU SEE, IN MY TIMELINE, UPON REACHING THE UNADVERTISED ENDPOINT OF THE DUNGEON, I JUST WENT WITH IT. AFTER ALL, WE MOVED RIGHT AWAY INTO THE NEXT FMV, AND THEN WE REACHED THE LUNAR BASE, AND IT WAS ALL COOL PLOT SHIT AND I PLAYED FOR LIKE AN HOUR EXCITED TO FIND OUT WHAT WAS COMING NEXT.
THIS WAS OBVIOUSLY A TRICK. I DON'T KNOW WHY I DIDN'T IMMEDIATELY REALIZE IT. REMEMBER, READERS: WE ARE PLAYING FINAL FANTASY VIII. IF YOU ENTERED ELEVATOR 01 OUT OF 3, AND IMMEDIATELY REACHED THE NEXT PLOT BEAT, THE CORRECT ANSWER IS TO IMMEDIATELY SHUT DOWN THE GAME AND RELOAD RATHER THAN WASTE YOUR TIME. THIS SHOULD NOT BE A SURPRISE TO ANYONE. EVERY TIME YOU FEEL LIKE THE PLOT OF FF8 IS 'MOVING FORWARD,' AND YOU ARE 'GOING WITH THE FLOW,' YOU SHOULD REMEMBER THAT YOU ARE BEING TRICKED AND MISSING A CARD THAT CAN BE REFINED INTO 100 INVINCIBILITY ITEMS, OR SOME SIMILAR SHIT.
HEAR MY MESSAGE. YOU ALONE CAN PREVENT TIME COMPRESSION. IMMEDIATELY RELOAD THAT SAVE FROM 30 MINUTES AGO.
