I feel ashamed I didn't immediately put together that the President of Esthar was definitely Laguna once they started framing him that way on the space station and talking about him. In my defense there is a lot to pick through. The real conspiracy of this game isn't even the Moon itself it's just everything Esthar is directly responsible for while telling no one else and isolating to a point they might as well not exist. And wow, Adel is also physically huge, like she's FromSoft Soulsgame Humanoid Boss-sized.
But holy shit the Lunar Cry.
The Lunatic Pandora monolith looming and overshadowing entire backgrounds of the game's most expansive cityscape as it moved above Esthar before settling at the monument, in the previous set of updates, was a good mood setter. It looked oppressive as an omen of things to come, even without the kind of unsettling and revealing peek inside it. But the Lunar Cry blows its scale out of the water completely. Now that I've watched the FMV properly, nothing else in the game so far compares to its terrifying immensity. Now that is how you frame a goddamn calamity. What an incredible scene.
... I am wondering about Ultimecia now, though. I was waiting for the other shoe to drop with Rinoa, because I had a hunch since she passed out that her body was occupied, but I had no idea when that would come back to bite the cast. And it was in a really freaky way when it finally did, in the station, that sequence was very effective.
It was also extremely convenient that Squall brought Rinoa's body all this way, at this time, so that she could release Sorceress Adel right when the Lunar Cry burst out of the moon, and the keystone that guides its descent on the planet was parked adjacent to the most technologically and materially powerful country in the world which was responsible for entombing Adel.
Because did she plan for this exact confluence of events? But as you point out, we'd also heard that she was targeting Ellone, and if that was indeed Ultimecia... I can't make a good guess where Ellone sits in her plans now for her to just seemingly ignore her, because Ultimecia's hasn't explained herself, and any more detailed explanation that Edea was able to give about Ultimecia's ultimate goal was skipped by Squall putting the conversation out of his mind.
I think that a reason it's especially interesting for Ultimecia to be such a relative enigma compared to some previous Final Fantasy protagonists, is, in a story that seems so concerned with human connections and communication in the way it writes most of our cast, the antagonist stands out for being so unwilling to converse on the same level as anyone else, so completely unconcerned with those who stand to oppose her having any personal significance. Even Seifer who devoted himself to the fantasy role that orbited around her, meant nothing to her. I'm curious if before the final stretch of the story we're going to get any deeper insight on her personality.
Fascinated to see how Squall traveling to the past in this attempt to change the present is going to go. I think my expectations are less that he's going to fail and more that... we're going to learn something essential about how it can be done and he'll only succeed somewhat? Throwing darts at the wall here.
