It was good when I was a teenager.
Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Let's Play
It was good when I was a teenager.
I'm willing to compromise (Kompromise?) here and go as far back as Problem Sleuth instead.
Homestuck, I can see debates about the quality and falloff, though I think it was at least pretty good up until the Act 5 finale.
Problem Sleuth, on the other hand, I will absolutely throw hands with anyone who says that isn't good.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Hm. I could see it, but... We were told explicitly that the last Lunar Cry was 100 years ago. That really doesn't seem like enough time for a total civilizational reset then leading to rebuilding civilization from scratch leading to pristine modernity without scars. Or if it was, people would talk about it more - this would be within a couple of generations of them. If the last Lunar Cry was like, 500, 1000 years ago, sure, it'd make sense as a periodic apocalypse that resets civilization. But this is way too recent. Unless it's very localized, and it just destroys one place but the rest of the world is fine, as happened to Centra, but then that doesn't lead to an apocalyptic state for the rest of the world.
Yeaaaah, God. I had totally forgotten about the ominous TV screen in Timber but it takes on a whole new look in light of these developments.
Adel has been screaming her grief and anger in radio waves for the past seventeen years, and most of humanity doesn't even know that it's happening.
Like if radio static was the screams of Lucifer buried alive on the moon. Amazing stuff.
This isn't necessarily rare in countries that don't have term limits. It's in part why term limits exist, because one extremely popular dude being reelected indefinitely is inherently bad for the health of a democracy even if that dude is in fact just that popular. But also, I think:
1) He's coasting on the popularity of having freed the country from Hitler Satan's dictatorship, so he's good to keep that seat pretty much as long as he wants it
2) The fact that he's so rarely in office means that the actual running of the government is delegated to competent bureaucrats, making his position effectively honorific, which reduces incentives to run against him.
That's a very good question! And one to which I don't have any answer. Caraway was removed from office and was part of the anti-Edea faction anyway, Deling's body is cooling in the grave, and Ultimedea was last seen leading a military expedition with a chunk of the Galbadian forces and a Garden, which she subsequently lost and, as far as Galbadians are concerned, disappeared. Who would be replacing her? Who would even know to follow these orders? She was ruling through terror and mind control and seemed to scorn people too much to have any loyal lieutenant privy to her plans, so-
...
......
Oh my FUCKING god it's FUCKING Seifer, isn't it!?
Yeah, it's like... I'm not playing for completionism, when things get too annoying I drop them, if I miss a random Phoenix Down I don't care, and so on.
At the same time, when I run into issues like "the entire payoff to the game's most annoying dungeon can be missed by taking the wrong elevator" or "woops Leviathan was lootable at one specific stage of that multi-stage boss fight," it's like... Part of the main game, that can just be missed?
I'm trying to give a faithful representation of what FF8 is like to play, and that includes "look at all this missable stuff, and all the work I've had to do to get it." And being told after every update all the most obnoxious stuff I passed right besides is like... It gets my mood down. It actively makes me more frustrated and less engaged with the game.
Indeed, people travel using meteorites.
Well, she was screaming over every radio frequency, so.
I would wager at least some level of aware.
I'm guessing that Adel has some kind of power that makes her hard to kill, like maybe she has the same ability to body-swap as Ultimecia? We don't know yet, but I'm not going to call that a plot hole until I'm sure this is a question we're not getting an answer to, and... Actually, I wonder if we'll be getting a flashback fight with Laguna's crew vs Adel before we get to the final boss in the present?
The controls are just, they're like the self-destruct buttons that evil lairs have in fiction. It doesn't really make sense but it's necessary for the fiction.
Yeah, I've given Familiar as Tonberry's very first ability to learn, but he has yet to get enough AP for it and the fact that he's currently set to Irvine means he hasn't had much chance to get more.
illhousen permaban, carried unanimously
Okay. Listen. The 'Laguna reincarnation theory' may have been scuttled, but. We can still salvage this. I am reorienting. We can find a new crackpot theory based on overreading flimsy evidence. Laguna is alive, but we still have some paratext and text that suggest that Squall and Rinoa are in some way bound by fate, there is something about time, connections... People projecting themselves into the past to change it... A witch from the future... Let me just think...
...
Ultimecia is Rinoa from the future.
I will not be elaborating at this time.
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- Location
- Norway
Oh my fucking god...
- Pronouns
- She/They
Fuck it, I need some crackpot theory to base my entire understanding of the game around, and that's as good as anything else I can come up with. I'm on board.
Besides the game has already brought up time travel bullshit, at this point anything goes.
cB557
voOOP
Given Adel's prison seems to be some really advanced thing that needs regular checkups to remain operational, I think I'd rationalize the off button as not being an actual off button, but it just having a bunch of controls on it to keep it calibrated, and if you set it to the right settings you can weaken or deactivate or break it.
Egleris
Vagrant Dragon
- Location
- Italy
Don't worry, once you get past the next plot beat and regain full control of the whole team, GF abilities will become a solved problem in extremely short order. Just be patient for a little bit more - not like the part of the game you're in is boring or anything, anyway.
Also, do you still have that Meteor you got from the Lunatic Pandora? If so, giving it to Rinoa might be worthwhile, especially if you make sure to pare down her spell collection to remove as many useless offensive spells as you can. Speaking of, I guess it's time to reveal a new "why did they do things this way?!!!" bit of mechanics: in the menu, under the magic command, when you select a spell to cast out of battle, you can instead choose to simply remove all stocked copies of that spell on the character's inventory by pressing square. That might help you reorganize the spell lists!
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Galbadia is currently powered by a highly sophisticated line of reasoning called the Sorceress's Basilisk. Anyone who isn't enthusiastically dedicating themselves towards ensuring the Sorceress's return might be tortured by her, if she somehow manages to come back on her own, so obviously the only rational choice is for everyone to work in lockstep to return her ASAP.
- Location
- Singapore
- Pronouns
- Singular They
It also has some odd implications about how Adel is screaming.
Esthar is using a super-powerful jamming signal to block all possible communication or emanations from Adel, and it is Esthar's jamming that is making radio unusable. However, they evidently cannot jam every signal, leading to the Timber TV display.
Given the distances involved, the signal Adel is emitting is probably magical or psychic in nature. More curiously, it is being sent through that distance, and read by the radio wave receptors in Timber, which convert it to readable text.
In other words, Adel's psychic/magic powers are compatible with machine interfaces. Which raises questions on the security of any radio-reception technology, since we've seen that Esthar's jamming is imperfect, and sufficiently powerful radio signals can overcome it anyway, viz the Dollet radio tower.
I assume Adel never thought about using this interface compatibility to do more useful hacks, rather than just screaming in anger the entire time.
In all probability I'm just overthinking it, and like a lot of FFVIII, the Timber TV display is just like that because it's cool.
Omi, what? What's this nonsense you're talking about?
Ultimecia is obviously Selphie from the future! See, by the end of the game she somehow obtains the Sorceress mantle or powers or whatever, and outlives all her friends. Missing them greatly (and without them to keep her morality in check) she starts a thousand year plan to go back in time and see them again!
But, in the tragedy of being old and immortal, over the course of that plan she forgets their names and faces and barely remembers anything beyond "SeeD"... she can't even recall why she remembers that word, just that it's like a curse that drives her on. So eventually when she returns to the present as Ultimecia, Selphie doesn't even realize she's fighting and trying to kill the very friends she came back to see once more!
And this all culminates in a very sad scene when you defeat final boss Ultimecia where on her dying breaths she remembers them, but is unfortunately too far gone to tell her friends how much she cares about them, perpetuating the time loop forever because present day Selphie isn't warned...
...Unless you buy our FFVIII Official Game Guide which tells you all the steps to unlock the secret ending and break the loop so everyone lives happily ever after! Only $79.99 plus tax~
Entropy Judge
Recurring Bouts of Misanthropy
It is, however, a Refinable item. Curse Spikes -> Dark Matter -> Shaman Stone -> Rosetta Stone, IIRC.
Egleris
Vagrant Dragon
- Location
- Italy
Yeah, that's correct. Of course, the Dark Matter is the hardest item to refine in the game, especially given how hard to obtain Curse Spikes are, and it has a ton of other uses one might prefer to save it for; and the Rosetta Stone itself requires the "Refine GF Ability Item" ability, which is on the last GF, so I don't know that I'd compare "just refine it" with "solve this one puzzle in the last dungeon and keep checking this terminal in Esthar" as means of easily acquiring one.
- Location
- Land of the Midday Sun
Also you need Siren at level 100 for the first step. One of the few cases when a GF's level comes into play, and IIRc the only case for crafting.
- Pronouns
- Him/He
This sort of thing can be confirmed throughout the game by visiting Deiling city and talking to the G-army people who are stationed around the streets constantly. The dialogue updates every so often with what's going on internally and with implications.
FF8 usually does do quite a lot of foreshadowing and world building, it just doesn't force you to sit through it if you just want to see what happens next in the sappy teenage drama. It's a game that you're meant to explore for narrative pay off more then mechanical payoff.
FF6 had this sort of thing as well, there were entire skipabble towns in Vector that talked about the rise of power of the empire who started subjecting their nearest neighbors, while FF7 was less interested in history (that wasn't tied to a playable character's plot), while FF8 put a lot of thought into the civilizations, how they work, how they fell, and just used it as a foundation for the actual plot of making Squall suffer.
I'm Andrew Hussie's age (almost literally, we're only a few months apart birthday wise) and I started to read Homestuck when I was in my early 30s.
It was always pretty good. Came apart a bit at the end and people who made elaborate theories got to look very silly indeed, but there's genuine worth there.
Actually, this FF8 playthrough shows some commonalities, in terms of FF8 the game: something of worth with a lot of doubtful housing.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
This is a... let's say conciliatory way to put it. I would phrase it somewhat differently.
Unless you came into this thread just for FF8, by now you probably know what I like in these games, and that it involves world-building, cool lore, incidental dialogue - I make it a point to talk to every single NPC I can find in every town in every game and to summarize what they have to say for my readers, and I do it for a reason: I love this stuff! And yet, I find the way FF8 is handling it to be incredibly obnoxious and I keep missing available information and being frustrated by it and by things being insufficiently signaled or foreshadowed, so what gives?
To put it bluntly the game has a delivery mechanism problem when it comes to that stuff. Like, if the way to find out more about how Galbadia is changing over the course of the game is that, between every plot beat, we should take the Garden, sail its gigantic ass halfway across the planet, and go through the like fifteen screens that make up Deling City (loading time between each one, of course), then take the Garden and sail its titanic behind back to where the plot is happening, that's not... reasonable?
The problem isn't that the game is 'not forcing me to sit through the foreshadowing and world-building.' It's that it is hiding it from me and putting it in inconvenient places where it only exists for a limited time. I would, in fact, very much like to season this sappy teenage drama with some bouts of world-building and foreshadowing! Unfortunately the game is actively fighting me on this.
Thozmp
Gets my kicks above the waistline, Sunshine.
I'd ask how you are quoting me, as well as why, given that what you quoted isn't even something I posted.
He quoted Omicron out of your post's own quote but the quote box linked to your post, not his.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
This problem, right here, is why fast travel exists in open-world games, and also in pioneering JRPG Phantasy Star IV!
SolipsistSerpent
Endlessly Devouring
Well, yes, that's all well reasoned, but I meant I didn't expect her to be waiting for Rinoa to be taken to the space station to fix her coma.
Entropy Judge
Recurring Bouts of Misanthropy
AFAIK, that is only an issue if you're playing the PS version of the game. Everything I've read is that it's not an issue with the PC version.
I mean, it ... makes sense, at least? If you want to know what the people in Deling City, or Trabia, or wherever think about things, then you ... kind of have to go there. There's no radio, no world wide web, you can't telepathically talk to someone across the planet. It's like an obnoxious level of realism present in the game (or perhaps attempts at verisimilitude?), in that of course if the teenage merc wants to know what the bad guys think about things he's gonna have to go there himself regardless of whether or how that impacts the player.