The Ragnarok is so impossibly cool that there is not one but two different spaceships named after it in FF14. Or, well, technically only one, but that's because the other is an entire class of spaceship that was used by the Allagan Empire to seal away Bahamut in an artificial moon.
Ultinoa: "Find the legendary Lunatic Pandora, said to be hidden beneath the ocean. Only then shall the sorceress provide you with dreams again." Squall: "(Rinoa! Where are you? Answer me!)" Seifer: [Standing up] "As you wish, Ultimecia." [He leaves.]
Well, I guess that definitively answers the "who the hell is still leading Galbadian Forces" question. Though, I do still end up wondering why they would look at Edea's upjumped teenager guard dog who they probably assumed was a superpowered boy toy and go "hm yes, this is a stable person we should be still taking orders from after our last boss killed our last last boss, and then got half our forces killed fighting against Balamb Garden".
I'm wondering if 'provide you with dreams again' is a mistranslation of a sentence meant to say 'fulfill your dream' (of being the sorceress's knight). If it isn't, this suggests that Ultimecia is manipulating Seifer by… literally making him unable to dream? Poetic but very strange.
My first thought was just like... dreams in general that she would be manipulating, so he gets to keep living out his "be the Sorceress's Knight" thing in his dreams. Could be a mistranslation though you're right.
This next sequence does not exist in the realm of reality so much as it operates entirely off emotional vibes. What it has going for it is a sense of emotional sincerity. Things happen because people feel, reach out, and believe. Do they happen because it's practically believable for the sequence of events they portray to happen? Not so much. For some of you that might be a deal breaker. For others not so much. I don't judge.
And then we get that absolutely gorgeous shot of the two teenagers in space suit holding each other tightly as in the background, the moon weeps blood.
Honestly the fact that Squall is so socially underdeveloped that he literally doesn't recognize an invitation to a hug and has to be explained what it is then still finds a way to deflect his way out of it is just. So him.
Also of note that the whole Rinoa Coma Plot ended pretty abruptly - once Ultimecia left her body she apparently just woke up completely fine, so this entire charade about Squall needing to find Ellone to project into her past was, like… I don't know. It was such a weird beat. In the end he succeeded by transporting to the 'past' of 'literally a minute ago' (the emergency oxygen supplies last 5 minutes, and there was 1:30 minute on the counter in the minigame, so he was projecting from a distance of like thirty seconds into the future, which is kind of comical).
I guess what it accomplished (other than showing "by god is that The Ultimecia Possessing Rinoa?!" is showing Squall hey, Rinoa does in fact genuinely love him just as much back now that he's realized he loves her, which is just enough motivation to push him into going for the suicidal space rescue plan.
Okay, so there's another one of those guys, and it's… Red, instead of purple. I guess different colors mean different abilities or threat levels? Not that it matters -
17 years is way too suspicious a date to be a coincidence. But with that said, it's looking like after a rollercoaster of disastrous events, Rinoa and Squall may finally be able to get a break - and share some peaceful moments together, alone with each other, in a ship devoid of monsters, as it pulls down towards the earth. Ground control guides Squall through the input sequence, then recommends he turn off the artificial gravity to save up on fuel, and wishes him, "from all of us at Ground Control, godspeed." As they do, the soft instrumental music fades, and it's replaced with the vocals version of Eyes On Me.
Airstation: "Rinoa? The sorceress!? She's on the ship!?" Squall, mentally: [Turning to her] "(So… It's true? Rinoa is a sorceress?)" Rinoa: "I've… become a sorceress. I can't stay with you anymore, Squall." Airstation: "Respond, Ragnarok!" Rinoa: "I don't want the future. I want the present to stand still. I just want to stay here with you…" Squall, mentally: "(Rinoa…)" Airstation: "Respond, Ragnarok!" Rinoa: "Nobody would want to be around me anymore…" Airstation: "The sorceress will be seized upon arrival. Be sure to follow the crews instructions." Rinoa: "I'm… scared." Airstation: "Squall, do you copy? Is the sorceress listening, too?" Rinoa: [She curls up into fetal position.] "I'm scared, Squall." Squall: "He gets up from his seat and, wordlessly, holds her.] Rinoa: "I don't wanna go back."
Obviously, Rinoa's updated Limit Break was a 'clue' foreshadowing her newly awakened sorceress powers. Unlike Edea, whose Limit Break was a cheeky reference to the Disc 1 FMV but not otherwise exceptional, Rinoa's Limit Break puts her in a state where she loses full control of herself but gains terrible magical power, specifically exclusively offensive magical power (Rinoa will not use support spells while in Angel Wing). This is a fantastic way to tie into her new deal, I just wish the narrative side was done better. Not sure why it comes with an angelic motif included, but why not.
Yeah, probably could have done with like... at least one forced battle scene of some kind that makes the limit break happen automatically and get explained/commented on. Otherwise entirely possible to just blast through the whole space ship cleaning sequence without getting a single hint of Sorceress Rinoa.
Okay, first off, I do have to say it's very funny that Rinoa is trying to deliver vital information to Squall that he actually already knew about, she was just unconscious during all our scenes with Edea (put a pin in that) so she doesn't know that we already knew about Ultimecia and time compression. Our girl is just cursed with being out of the loop. With that said she does add a wrinkle we didn't know about before, which is that Ultimecia would be the only person who could survive within time compression? Which, I'll be sad if this turns out out to be another case of 'villain wants to just destroy the universe and be the only thing left alive for no clear reason.'
I'll be honest I've just been pushing Time Compression in the same box as Jojo Part 6 and its time powers, assuming Ultimecia is just like... going to compress and reset time or something, ascending herself to godhood of the new world order.
In any case, Squall is now alone, stranded on some barren rock on the coast of the Centra continent. This is kind of a visual trick - the brief moment he spends on the map emphasizes his loneliness, while the Ragnarok's presence in the background is meant to make an inattentive player realize - if they hadn't already - that this is the airship and they should probably go back to investigate it. Moving just a few inches in any direction dumps us back onto the ship screen, and from there, we board it again - this time, the lights are on, making the whole place feel much more welcoming.
Did Esthar just like, refuel this thing while this thing while they were grabbing Rinoa? Because last I checked it had "just enough fuel to return to the planet".
I mean technically they've been on screen together right up until the jump to space, she was on Squall's back the entire trek while Edea was in the party.
Selphie: "We have to go get her!"
[At this point and without further clarification, Selphie runs out of the room. Irvine follows after her. Nobody else pays attention to it, because even forty hours into the game they have yet to understand what she's like.]
It's a perfect scene and I am going to explain why it is by going down in order of the characters involved:
Squall: Has once again decided that he couldn't care less about the main plot of the game, the only thing he does care about is Rinoa, and he makes at best a token effort to listen to the apocalyptic changes that have occurred since last time before cutting Zell off and admitting that he just doesn't give a shit. Has to be browbeaten by others into accepting his own feelings and that letting Rinoa go because it was 'her choice' was stupid, and that he needs to make a bold, romantic, dramatic action out of love. Ends the scene with a newfound commitment to doing just that and acting once again as a leader by ordering everyone to launch Operation Save Rinoa.
Zell: Excited and a little hyperactive, but actually paid attention and remembered all the important information regarding the mission, including specifically what happened to Matron. Is excited to share it and tripping a little over his own words, but is also the only member of the group to be actually properly mission-minded and to have a threat assessment. All of it is for naught because, as ever, his useful information just crashes on the rock of an indifferent Squall.
Quistis: Seems to have finally found a place to resolve her character arc by being Squall's auxiliary emotional intelligence. If she can't have a romantic relationship or strong friendship bonds with her peers, she will go back to her teacher training and just sit on the Squall/Rinoa proto-couple rolling disaster to try and course correct it into something that won't implode, mostly by unpacking Squall's own feelings to him so that he can understand what even is his own motivation. We must imagine Sisyphus happy.
Selphie: Heard the words 'Rinoa is in Esthar,' stopped paying attention, has no particular concerns regarding 'sorcery' or 'personal choices' or 'Squall's feelings,' skipped the entire discussion that followed to hijack an advanced experimental Esthari spaceship with no plans more complex than 'ram the spaceship through a wall, drop down, grab Rinoa and run.' Is having the time of her life.
Irvine: At some point this guy decided that since apparently no one remembered him and everyone had been happy to let him shove an Amnesia Engine into his own brain without warning him about the consequence, he'd just stop caring and be happy as long as he's included in whatever Selphie's doing right now, and she's having a good time, so he is too.
It's just a perfect encapsulation of everyone's individual characters at this point in time in one sequence, on top of just being really funny.
He is also, as you can see from this picture, larger than any other character on the screen.
Irvine, Quistis and Rinoa all leave. Squall lingers just a moment, turning to the man, thinking "I've seen him before," then turns and leaves. Once he's done so, the man puts his hands on his hips and shakes his head, probably with a sigh.
A very large, silent man, who expresses himself entirely through body language and expressions, in a position of authority in the Esthar government, that Squall thinks he recognizes but can't quite identify?
Man I am just waiting with bated breath for the party to finally get the memo of "yeah Laguna and his squad of dumbos somehow ended up as the highest authorities of the possibly strongest country in the entire world".
I know you're just having fun here, but since you are, how are you squaring this theory with the literal first thing we learned about Artemisia, that is, that she's from many generations into the future? Any member of our current party would be dead by then, Rinoa included.
Eh, "generations into the future" doesn't stop it from being something like "Rinoa with her Magical Sorceress Powers lived a long time, to eventually become Ultimecia many generations in the future".
FF8 feels like it wants to go there with mature, emotional concepts...but its hamstrung by an inability to actually...go there. A handful of years form now, the first Drakengard game will present a level in which the main character rampages through a battalion of literal child conscripts who cry and beg for mercy - contrast with FF8 where our cast is largely composed of teenage mercenaries, and the game wants to explore how emotionally fucked up they are from that...but FF8 also tries to keep a foot in feeling of "wow! cool battle-high school!". Did FF8 need an actual on-screen witch burning to hammer home how paranoid the people of this setting are about the sorceresses? I'd say no, but then again, maybe yes?
IIRC the stats are in a terminal somewhere in Esthar.
Also I wish there were full model kits, the one model kit that exists was assembled using parts included in the JP GF action figures. "Luckily" each action figure had always the same part, nowadays it would be randomized.
You're better off 3d printing a model, there's a few print files around.
I mean, that's a bit much? FFVIII's gameplay is weird and quirky and all kinds of broken, but it can still be fun, and can also be perfectly inoffensive if you just take one hour to break the game before heading to the Fire Cavern and then never think about it again, just like in FFVII you don't have to think about gameplay again after the Midgar Zolom. Drakengard is actually torturous.
I mean, that's a bit much? FFVIII's gameplay is weird and quirky and all kinds of broken, but it can still be fun, and can also be perfectly inoffensive if you just take one hour to break the game before heading to the Fire Cavern and then never think about it again, just like in FFVII. Drakengard is actually torturous.
Triple Triad joke aside, I'm very much in agreement. FFVIII's gameplay tends to be at worst boring because you get tired of all the junctioning nonsense and just slap the biggest numbers down or spend an hour breaking the game, it just feels bad because it's coming on the heels of the entire rest of the series which generally had gameplay I enjoyed more. Drakengard, on the other hand, is "shitty discount Dynasty Warriors interspersed with terrible dragon flight minigame levels, all under a soundtrack that sounds like it genuinely wants to murder you with sound alone (and probably does considering Ending E).
What makes Ragnarok suddenly showing up extra hard to take seriously for me is that almost the exact same scene happened in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where naturally it was played as a joke (and even then had an Infinite Improbability Drive to justify it)
FF8 gameplay is memorable in its swinginess as you figure out the systems, which honestly is very much above average to me. Sure I sometimes want a tactical challenge, or better yet a tactical challenge and a quirky system that makes boring people cry (this is banner saga 1 btw, because the optimal way to play is to keep enemies alive as much as possible because every single enemy shares a AP pool so the way to spread damage caused by enemies to multiple places is to only kill them near the end of combat - it was hilarious to see the crying from the gnognards pavlonian trained to "eliminate variables all the time" and used to snowballing as the combat resolves calling the system shit).
Just because you can break something doesn't mean you need to. And this was my first experience with level adjusted enemies, so it was interesting to realize you can get a level 1 run (yes, I know this sort of breaks things, it's surprising is the point).
Being surprised is funnier than being challenged, ff8 is very surprising for a mass market non indie game. In systems and characterization.
Not surprisingly I also loved the "and then humanity (in midgar) died" pseudo post ending cutscene of ff7, maybe I'm just perverse.
Squall: "I was always alone…" Rinoa: "Squall…" [She pulls closer, and he leans down, touching kind of forehead-to-forehead.] "You missed out on all the good things in life. You've missed out on so much…" Squall: "...Maybe." Rinoa: "Definitely."
Okay, girl, chill. He's like, seventeen. I can assure you that he has not wasted his life. It's fine to have had kind of a crappy teenage years, this is not 'missing out on all the good things in life,' God. But I guess it really does feel that way when you're that age.
God okay no when you fretted about seeming like you're nitpicking over being bothered by this on Discord I imagined something that was less of an obvious fuckup than this. I thought that there would be a proper reveal scene of Rinoa being a sorceress now to set up Squall having to dramatically save her from being sealed away in The Contraption like Adel was, not that the game would just fucking assume you knew that already.
Being 15 to 25 in 1999 and having played a lot of shoddily translated jRPGs in a foreign language originally written and edited by the intern in a march of death japanese company means that you just ignored certain script schizophrenia.
It just happened sometimes that a game would assume you knew something, then told you that thing (if you were unlucky, this step was omitted). Sometimes testers dropped the ball, sometimes they didn't even understand there was a ball to drop. And the gamers rarely cared, cause what were they gonna do, ask for a patch?
Ultimecia is the theoretical end point of the Sorceress, all the power compressed into a single body. Now she plans temporal compression to gain all the power of Sorcesses past too!
…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.
Edea's whole thing seemed to be that by allowing Ultimecia uncontested control of her body, she could keep control of her memories, so Ultimecia had to directly pilot her through the past she seemingly didn't know very much about and couldn't, say, fill Edea with the urge to destroy SEED and let her figure out the details.
Which implies that here Ultimecia isn't in as direct a control over Rinoa's exact actions, but is able to use Rinoa's contextual knowledge.
Except... Rinoa has no idea what Ellone looks like. They never met. Oops.
Now, we're back to our original group, our party - the SeeDs, And Also Rinoa. Hm. The Timber Maniacs, Featuring Irvine Kinneas of Galbadia Garden? Squall's Emotional Support Black Ops Squad? No, none of these work.
I know you're just having fun here, but since you are, how are you squaring this theory with the literal first thing we learned about Artemisia, that is, that she's from many generations into the future? Any member of our current party would be dead by then, Rinoa included.
If Sorceresses aren't immortal, why is Adel still alive? Anyway even if they can age (although... Edea is looking pretty well-preserved for being the same age as Cid, isn't she?), they can still be sealed in carbonite. Heck, maybe she's an alternate Rinoa from the timeline where Squall didn't save her from Esthar freezing her just now.
Edit: Oh, and if Ultimecia is Rinoa, why doesn't she remember anything about this time period? Duh, because she's had GFs junctioned to her since before becoming a Sorceress. When/if she gets frozen in a Sealing Tomb, she'll have GF-induced amnesia gradually progressing the whole time.
Okay, so I've been holding my peace on this on the assumption that there would be an explanation later, but the Space Arc is seemingly done with now, and there's something I still don't understand:
Why did everyone go to space in the first place? Even if we posit that Ellone couldn't wait one more day to see Laguna and just had to go up to the extremely dangerous space station shortly before a Lunar Cry was going to start, and Laguna left pre-emptive instructions to give her the VIP treatment when she showed up, what possible reason would anyone on the ground in Esthar have to allow Rinoa, Squall and Quistis to follow her?
Why did everyone go to space in the first place? Even if we posit that Ellone couldn't wait one more day to see Laguna and just had to go up to the extremely dangerous space station shortly before a Lunar Cry was going to start, and Laguna left pre-emptive instructions to give her the VIP treatment when she showed up, what possible reason would anyone on the ground in Esthar have to allow Rinoa, Squall and Quistis to follow her?
"Dr. Odine, sir, I was just about to scrub the launch-"
"Vait. I haff a feeling zis iz goingk to be stupidt as hell. Let's let zem do it and see vhat hepenz."
Zell: Excited and a little hyperactive, but actually paid attention and remembered all the important information regarding the mission, including specifically what happened to Matron. Is excited to share it and tripping a little over his own words, but is also the only member of the group to be actually properly mission-minded and to have a threat assessment. All of it is for naught because, as ever, his useful information just crashes on the rock of an indifferent Squall.
Tying in with the game's themes that everyone has their own hidden depths and so how in its own way a teenage love story is as important as the literal moonpocalypse, Zell seems like he'd be the stereotypical Dumb Jock character at first, but he's actually fairly smart (just impulsive). It's been a while since I played the game, but the wiki mentions that he's interested in world events and often offers up a summary of the history of new places the party goes to and also, in an optional dungeon, the Deep Sea Research Center, you need to bring him along if you want to complete the dungeon because only he was the necessary knowledge.
No, it isn't signposted that you need Zell specifically. You'll get stuck partway through the dungeon without him and will have to redo the whole thing. Final Fantasy 8, everyone!
No, it isn't signposted that you need Zell specifically. You'll get stuck partway through the dungeon without him and will have to redo the whole thing. Final Fantasy 8, everyone!
There should be two solutions to that, one with Zell, and one without. Either way, that dungeon is ass. I think it's possible to fuck up with and without Zell and get stuck at that spot (and then have to reset the entire dungeon and try again).
you need to bring him along if you want to complete the dungeon because only he was the necessary knowledge.
No, it isn't signposted that you need Zell specifically. You'll get stuck partway through the dungeon without him and will have to redo the whole thing. Final Fantasy 8, everyone!
