Truly every time you see this pair it drives it further and further home that Cid and Edea Kramer are the story of a former psychic super-soldier girl and her house husband. Massively underrated.
She's wearing the cleavage dress still and is alone with her husband who she has not seen for years in a private getaway literally thousands of miles from the nearest person.
The patience she shows to calmly explain plot to her kids instead of shooing them out the door is insane.
Random fun fact: confusing one of these guys in defensive mode prevents them from taking actions. They just sit there spinning until you knock them out of the confusion.
What's funny though, is that he clearly sees this as a potential missteps on a 'forgot our anniversary' level and attempts to dodge… By blaming it on the GF memory erasure. Hysterical.
Selphie's last diary entry is labeled "a day of anticipation" and says that she may actually meet Sir Laguna soon. In spite of her hectic behavior, she's clearly paying enough attention to have caught the thread on President Laguna. She's also recorded how excited she was about being the first non-Esthari to fly the Ragnarok. It's very cute.
On the topic of children's card games and Martine, I can't believe that you didn't mention the best thing about him, which is his own shameless admission that he got all his rare cards by confiscating them off students.
THE MOON CRIED. A GIGANTIC PILLAR OF BLOOD CONTAINING MILLIONS OF MONSTERS REACHED DOWN TO CONNECT THE MOON AND EARTH. How has no one else noticed? Hey, how about the fact that radio waves are working again and long range communication is possible for the first time in 17 years? No? Yeah, don't think so.
Along with the Shumi tribe, the Lunar Crystal really does feel like a cool idea that was more important earlier in development, but even after other ideas were more emphasized the developers either liked it too much or had already made too much content to cut it out entirely.
What I think Edea is saying here, implicitly, is that it is the experience of being loved that keeps a sorceress righteous. And it is being without love, or at least without evidence of love, facing only fear and prejudice, that eventually turns one's feelings bitter and selfish, for there's no one in the world to stand with you.
THE MOON CRIED. A GIGANTIC PILLAR OF BLOOD CONTAINING MILLIONS OF MONSTERS REACHED DOWN TO CONNECT THE MOON AND EARTH. How has no one else noticed? Hey, how about the fact that radio waves are working again and long range communication is possible for the first time in 17 years? No? Yeah, don't think so.
Zell: "Yeah, and that Ultimecia! We can't let that sorceress from the future mess up our world! Let's go kick her ass! We're SeeDs! We're here to destroy sorceresses, right!!!?"
Everyone is waking up a little hungover from Edea's mind control and looking back at their own actions… And failing to experience any kind of regret and mostly just being okay with carrying on in the same way they'd been doing before with the world domination.
She's clearly worried she's a liability to her friends and the world as a whole, although now that Ultimecia has Adel available to her I doubt she'll settle for Rinoa again.
Rinoa: "Oh no...I can't risk it...Ultimecia may take over my body once again..."
Ultimecia: "why would i settle for the tiny bronco when the airship is right where i want it"
Rinoa:
I love Squall straight-up admitting that it doesn't matter how sensible it would be to keep Rinoa in a place that can contain her, he'd just end up dramatically breaking in again because he's a lovesick idiot. Not that Rinoa is any better, already imagining herself tragically but romantically dying on the sword of the man she loves. Get a grip, girl. The parallels between Squall and Seifer were already obvious, but Squall outright calling himself her knight makes them obvious-er.
You know, it's funny. This is the second game in a row in which one of our core protagonists is compromised by the Big Bad having some ability to override their will and control them that is poorly understood in-character and with unknown but broad limits. Only, in VII, this was used as a tool of psychological horror, and Cloud's refusal to admit he was a liability along with everyone else's refusal to look at the problem nearly led to the end of the world. Here, however, the characters do acknowledge the situation and its risk… They just make an active decision to take those risks anyway out of love. Rather than horror, this serves as romance. It's neat how the context of different games makes similar beats hit differently.
This is genuinely really sweet? I don't have much else to say besides Squall and Rinoa's relationship is sweet. It's cute. They're dorky teens in love and I'm absolutely here for it.
This is followed by a very funny exchange in which Rinoa says that 'those words' ("Just stay close to me") are what started everything, and Squall acts confused - she's clearly referring to one of Squall's early lines, which he just meant professionally as a mercenary/bodyguard but clearly made an impression on her, so he doesn't remember it even though she does. What's funny though, is that he clearly sees this as a potential missteps on a 'forgot our anniversary' level and attempts to dodge… By blaming it on the GF memory erasure. Hysterical.
This is wild. So far it seemed like Ultimecia was projecting her spirit from the future back in time, like Ellone did with us, but Edea actually met her while she was dying? Like, physically? Did Ultimecia move herself physically back in time, but then died and only her spirit or ghost is hanging around and possessing people? It's frustratingly hard to figure out from just these lines!
I swear to God. The whole Card Club quest line works off magic school anime rules. The principal is a legendary player, people fight in duo, every victory is followed by a comment to the effect of "I can't remember the last time I lost… You're good, kid…" I kind of love it.
As a fantasy game where card games are the most impactful part where you are in a fantasy school and also work with spirits of monsters, I can conclusively state that Final Fantasy 8 is, in fact, Yugioh GX.
Still. Beating the card is a powerful boon. Not for Gilgamesh himself - his card is only kind of good - but because it refines into something very special:
Man, it's incredible how much Laguna is coded as a dead guy whose memories linger and still impact people, for someone who is, right now, almost definitely the President of the most powerful nation on Earth.
THE MOON CRIED. A GIGANTIC PILLAR OF BLOOD CONTAINING MILLIONS OF MONSTERS REACHED DOWN TO CONNECT THE MOON AND EARTH. How has no one else noticed? Hey, how about the fact that radio waves are working again and long range communication is possible for the first time in 17 years? No? Yeah, don't think so.
God, look at him. He looks so goofy, I love him. The pose! The : o expression! The moustache! The fact that his 'hair' is three spikes on top of his head! He's perfect.
He's also a mean sonuvabitch. Scan fails to register his HP count, but I can guesstimate it as being well over a hundred thousand at this level. Its resistances are also high: Squall's Renzokuken only deals 500 damage per hit to him, although it also has a unique animation that is frankly its own reward - Squall jumps on top of Cactuar's head and hangs on to it to bash it up the head.
Doomtrain provides us with our second source of Status Defense x4, so GFs willing we will soon no longer have to worry about status effects. It also has some funky stuff like Auto-Shell, which casts Shell on everyone at the start of a fight, and Forbidden Medicine Refinement, which probably unlocks high tier items.
Incidentally, Doomtrain's original Japanese name is Glasya-Labolas, one of the demons of the Ars Goetia. The fact that you need the item "Solomon's Ring" to summon him is a reference to the legendary ring Solomon wore that allowed him to summon and control the seventy-two demons that the Ars Goetia make reference to, which is pretty fun.
No clue about the significance of the items, though,
On the one had, it's genuinely touching that Edea's Knight isn't some powerful warrior, but actually a bumbling doofus who keeps her grounded via his unconditional love and acceptance. On the other hand it's very funny to imagine an almost Roger Rabbit-esque situation where everyone is just like "Him?" and Edea is just like "He makes me laugh. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯" while Cid does Robin Williams bits in the background.
Doomtrain.
It's. It's an actual train from hell. It literally has the yellow striped bars that go up and down. It has rails made up of ghostfire. Its locomotive has a demon face.
Rinoa: "But Edea's still… I can't guarantee anything, either, if Ultimecia possesses me again… You saw me. She controlled me in outer space and made me break Adel's seal. What might happen next time? What will I end up doing? Will I end up fighting everyone? …Scary thought, isn't it?" Squall, mentally: "(Rinoa….. Even if you end up as the world's enemy, I'll… I'll be your knight.)"
Squall: "Rinoa if you decided to conquer the world I would absolutely do war crimes for you. I was trained to be an amoral PMC operative, I absolutely have the pedigree for it, you just gotta point me at what you want conquered."
Our boy Squall here finally admits his emotions and is immediately ride or die with Rinoa, we stan. Also a fun little reminder that there are a whole lotta similarities between Squall and Seifer and Squall has never had a problem admitting it.
(Also: innocent declaration of naive love from Squall or foreshadowing his assistance of an evil future-Rinoa? You decide!)
There's now an entry for the Moon, described as "a world of monsters. Many works of art and epics about the moon throughout history are evidence of its mystical powers." I hadn't really thought about it, but 'a world of monsters' does imply that the moon must have had like… An entire ecosystem. It must have an atmosphere, water… Basically a smaller planet? I wonder what life is like up there.
Honestly, few things break my immersion in a fictional world more than "insanely apocalyptic event happens; no one cares."
It's especially annoying in this case because just one game ago, we had tons of NPCs who did react to the impending doom that was Meteor, but here, the Lunar Cry seems to have been relegated to a localized color filter.
Look, just because the world is ending doesn't mean you can't go wander to every corner of the world doing sidequests and party wiping to Malboros leaving everyone in the lurch when they never find out what happened to you.
Further pages also inform us that Adel's Tomb was shot into space using the Ragnarok, and that this is how the spaceship was lost. The Ragnarok itself is based on "an ancient Centra legend of the Dragon Ship." Odine's page reveals that he is the man who discovered Guardian Forces, which is a wild sentence. Like, is this saying that GFs are artificially engineered? Or that they always existed as spirits but it was only until he came around that he was able to assert their existence? How do you even discover Ifrit, he was just a huge fire guy hanging out in a cave? Weren't the Brothers attached to the tomb of the unknown king centuries ago? The only way I can make sense of this is if it's saying that Guardian Forces have always existed and been mentioned in human legends and folklores under a vague understanding of spirits, but it was Odine who scientifically classified them as a specific order of being with specific traits. It's also said he developed paramagic by studying a sorceress with her cooperation, becoming the first sorceress researcher, I don't remember if we already had that information before.
I'm just gonna read it as a slight mistranslation and he's the first person to truly weaponize Guardian Forces. Like, they clearly existed in the world beforehand, but Odine was the guy who figured out how to junction them to people so they get super magical powers out of it.
It's the field of flower we saw in the OP… Which also makes it the field of flowers Selphie sends enemies to when using The End, which recontextualizes it: Selphie's ultimate power is banishing enemies to her lost memories of her childhood home. Pretty neat!
Good thing you can't actually walk out into that field, can you imagine how many wild random encounters you'd run into from all the monsters Selphie has sent there over the course of all those FFVIII playthroughs? Probably like 400 copies of the endgame superboss or some shit.
This is followed by a very funny exchange in which Rinoa says that 'those words' ("Just stay close to me") are what started everything, and Squall acts confused - she's clearly referring to one of Squall's early lines, which he just meant professionally as a mercenary/bodyguard but clearly made an impression on her, so he doesn't remember it even though she does. What's funny though, is that he clearly sees this as a potential missteps on a 'forgot our anniversary' level and attempts to dodge… By blaming it on the GF memory erasure. Hysterical.
Damn wish I had that excuse sometime in life. "Hey how come you didn't finish your chores", "sorry ma GF ate my memories". "You forgot to do your entire Thesis paper?" "Must have been them GFs".
Squall suspects this is a trap to draw Rinoa back to Esthar to seal her again, but Zell reveals that the name of the man who contacted them is… Kiros. And that's enough for Squall to decide to take the chance and trust Esthar on this.
Oh hey, actual ingame confirmation of the Laguna squad being in Esthar. Sure we had obvious hints all over the place until now, but I think this is the first time one of their names are actually brought up in the present.
It's easy to forget, but Edea and Rinoa have never actually talked. Ultimedea briefly mind controlled her but did not actually talk to her; then Rinoa passed out when they beat her and she's been unconscious for the entire time we've known the 'real' Edea. This is their first time speaking to one another. And now, they're meeting as a sorceress of the present, and a sorceress of the past. Rinoa asks Edea for advice on how to live as a sorceress, and Edea's recommendation is simple: to find herself a knight. Someone who will always be by her side. In fact, Edea tells us that there is a direct link between the sorceresses being knight-less and going evil - a knight "presents her with peace of mind."
Probably nothing important. Really I bet they just blew up the image of a normal Cactuar on a PC and printed it, glued it over the card, and drew a mustache on it.
They 'can't remember the last time they were defeated,' and on second thought, reminisce that it was Headmaster Cid.
I swear to God. The whole Card Club quest line works off magic school anime rules. The principal is a legendary player, people fight in duo, every victory is followed by a comment to the effect of "I can't remember the last time I lost… You're good, kid…" I kind of love it.
Now we must find our next opponent - Prince Spade. As it turns out, it's an old friend; the very same student who gave us our first pack of cards and allowed us to start playing Triple Triad in the first place.
Nah it's okay, you're both normal SeeD now so it's totally not an abuse of authority or weird "teacher shows up in teenage student's bedroom unanounced in the middle of the night" thing!
Given the self-referential approach of the Final Fantasy games, the way they constantly bring back and iterate not just on monsters but on characters or boss types, it's no surprise they would bring Gilgamesh back eventually. But this small preview that Our Boy does in fact exist in this game, without telling us anything else about him, is only making me want to know more, and unfortunately I can't. All this is is a card, and a spoiler/reveal that Gilgamesh is in the game, somewhere.
Still. Beating the card is a powerful boon. Not for Gilgamesh himself - his card is only kind of good - but because it refines into something very special:
Omi please no, not the super awesome special edition Gilgamesh card! If Gilgamesh is in the game, he'll be super disappointed in you for getting rid of such a limited edition piece of merch!
The takeaway here, I think, is that Laguna is the kind of person who has no issue deliberately setting aside his pride and doing cringey things for the sake of stopping fights and helping others get along. He tells them that as long as they have heart, it will bring them together and help them find an answer in the end, and then everyone pauses for a picture.
Laguna has a strange kind of charisma, can't deny it. He's just a lovable goofball to everyone he meets that draws you into his orbit. Could probably get me to go along with his shenanigans.
Laguna's picture fades as we move from the flashback to the present.
Man, it's incredible how much Laguna is coded as a dead guy whose memories linger and still impact people, for someone who is, right now, almost definitely the President of the most powerful nation on Earth.
We do a quick drop by Timber, which is completely unchanged. It's possible some NPC dialogue has been altered at some point but the content has not changed in any way, this town is exactly the same as it was thirty hours ago. The same is also true of Dollet, and Trabia Garden.
…
Basically, the Lunar Cry has only affected Esthar. Not a single other town in the world is even aware that it happened at all.
There's… something, there, about how Esthar's self-imposed isolation means information is kept in a closed loop. Most people don't know anything about what's going on in Esthar, to the point that the entire nation is surrounded by holo-camouflage walls walling off every valley leading into it so that people can't even see Esthar without being there. Those autarky measures are so successful that no one outside the borders is even aware that a localized apocalypse is unfolding there; Esthar's greatest triumph being now its greatest curse.
But also are you fucking serious, for real?
THE MOON CRIED. A GIGANTIC PILLAR OF BLOOD CONTAINING MILLIONS OF MONSTERS REACHED DOWN TO CONNECT THE MOON AND EARTH. How has no one else noticed? Hey, how about the fact that radio waves are working again and long range communication is possible for the first time in 17 years? No? Yeah, don't think so.
This wouldn't bother me nearly as much as it does if the Lunar Cry itself hadn't be so lavishly produced, with so much CGI going to emphasize its terrifying, celestial scope, only to turn to actually just… Not mean that much at all? I mean, it's pretty rough being an Esthari right now, but the city is still standing, and nobody outside it has even been affected at all. The basic encounter outside of Balamb is still a solo BIte Bug.
Well, I guess I got one something: Esthar is kinda on its own lone continent compared to the majority of cities in the world, so it's entirely possible that most people just... didn't see the Lunar Cry happen? Maybe the sky turned red for a bit and they thought it was sunset at most, the actual event being past the sight horizon of the presumably round planet.
The Cactuars are back. Introduced in VI, they were present in VII but I don't think we encountered them in this LP. They've always been goofy little guys, but they've never been this goofy; their ridiculous pose and rapid yet stilted movements have now become so iconic they are part of a running gag in Rebirth. Mechanically, Cactuars have a simple gimmick: they have very low HP but very high Evasion and flee from fights very quickly, taking any rewards with them. Of course, Squall has perfect accuracy, so all we need is to have him hit quickly and hard. Some Cactuars still escape, but as it turns out they each reward 20 AP for our GFs, so even without further optimization it's an easy way to grind some AP.
God, look at him. He looks so goofy, I love him. The pose! The : o expression! The moustache! The fact that his 'hair' is three spikes on top of his head! He's perfect.
Fun fact, Jumbo Cactuar was one of the additional bosses (and Espers) added to FFVI's GBA version. Didn't teach any new unique spells like Leviathan, Gilgamesh, or Diabolos did, but it did have a +2 speed level up bonus which iirc is the highest in the game.
Despite one of my readers explicitly warning me of this, I forgot that Scan was technically an 'offensive' spell, as it is targeting an enemy. Therefore, Rinoa spends every other turn casting Scan instead of Meteor or Ultima, and for obvious reasons Scan does not benefit from a boost in magic power.
I have in the past tried to use this to build some characters towards some archetype (Zell with Ifrit's Strength Bonus in a rapidly leveling party, for instance) and because it's one of the few ways to increase stats outside of Junctions. But practically speaking it's unfeasible. Unless your mind is made of spreadsheets
This is, as you can probably tell from the previous paragraph, a fairly intricate logistical challenge. Ideally, everyone would have Status Defense x4, and I would equip them all with 100 Sleep, Confuse, Berserk and Silence to those four slots, making Bad Breath easy to overcome. That's not possible, however. I only have one character with Status Defense x 4 (currently equipped to Squall), the others will need to be hit by at least some of those status effects. Furthermore, I don't have 300 of these spells. I barely have 100 Confuse. I can make one character immune to Confuse, and that's it.
Double-checking, there's a few spells that when junctioned give partial status resistance to multiple status effects at once: 100 copies of Holy would give you 40% resistance to all of those but Silence, Reflect grants 25% to all of them, and Esuna grants 20% to all. Not 100% coverage and for all I know FFVIII pulls nonsense like "300% inflict rate so actually you need at least 66% resistance or more to even have a chance of dodging", but it is an option to half-ass your protections if you have those spells.
The problem being, of course, that Wendigo is actually strong. So when I roll into the fight with characters at mid-to-low HP, they start wrecking my shit. I immediately course correct and start healing and firing back, but they are just so fast. Wendigos have multi-hitting physical attacks with high damage and a huge amount of HP, and I realize quickly to my horror that… I'm not actually fast enough to heal then kill them faster than they can kill me.
It's. It's an actual train from hell. It literally has the yellow striped bars that go up and down. It has rails made up of ghostfire. Its locomotive has a demon face.
This seems to be paying direct homage to the Phantom Train from VI, and you know what? I am living for it. This is the kind of over the top nonsense I love in VIII's summons. Doomtrain deals damage, though it appears to not be particularly strong; however, fitting of the reward for harvesting Malboro tentacles, it is our own Bad Breath, inflicting almost every status effect in the book, from Confuse to Vit 0.
In most FF games, random encounters are weak enough, and summons MP-expensive enough, that pulling out a status-based summon (like Hades in VII) wouldn't usually be the most effective choice in combat. But given that VIII does not have MP costs and random encounters can be very tough when scaled up at high level, this might be a very funny way to deal with mobs.
Hell yeaaaaaaah Doomtrain! Someone on the design team really went "hey remember the Phantom Train from FFVI? What if that, but as a summon to run over your enemies and it looked way more evil?"
Anyways, you did equip it to Selphie on a permanent basis, right? Because if not, she won't be happy.
...In fact, checking she's probably already unhappy, Selphie only gets the second-highest base compatibility with Doomtrain in the main party, behind Rinoa by 20 points. Unacceptable.
It really feels like it should have been some kind of summoned boss fight like Diablos was, yeah, but I guess the idea either didn't happen or got cut because instead it just goes "sick tentacles bro" and joins your GF Roster.
Honestly, few things break my immersion in a fictional world more than "insanely apocalyptic event happens; no one cares."
It's especially annoying in this case because just one game ago, we had tons of NPCs who did react to the impending doom that was Meteor, but here, the Lunar Cry seems to have been relegated to a localized color filter.
It's pretty hard to justify, can't deny it. At best we've got "Esthar is on the other side of the globe nobody saw the big ol' beam or heard about the monsters yet", but especially with radio communication back up you'd think someone or other would pass on the news.
A part of me thinks the Shumi should have been cut from the final game. That's a painful thing to say after making NORG jokes for half the playthrough, but the Shumi affect very little and their place in the story is ancillary at best. That and the way they turn into moombas when old is just weird and off-putting.
I was absolutely expecting Doomtrain to be a sick boss fight like Diablos and disappointed he wasn't, but at that point I felt like I'd been on enough of a downer already to linger on it and decided to just appreciate there not being yet one more obstacle in the way of getting the GF.
I was absolutely expecting Doomtrain to be a sick boss fight like Diablos and disappointed he wasn't, but at that point I felt like I'd been on enough of a downer already to linger on it and decided to just appreciate there not being yet one more obstacle in the way of getting the GF.
Nah it's okay, you're both normal SeeD now so it's totally not an abuse of authority or weird "teacher shows up in teenage student's bedroom unanounced in the middle of the night" thing!
I mean... how would it be different from the Marlboro? They do the same thing - beating the Marlboro was the boss fight there, as already mentioned.
Also, as the best way to inflict Vit0, Doomtrain is by far the best GF to summon, although lv 100 Cactuar is certainly very time-effective as far as "inflicting 9999 damage in one hit" goes.
Anyway, there is a few things left to do, that you could find interesting or annoying, depending.
In no particular order:
You know the man who randomly appears in the Garden's Training Center, selling gear? He's a special member of the CC Club, outside of the normal figures; you should go beat him, because he has a unique GF card.
Speaking of, Xu also has a unique GF card to win; it might take a bit to do so, however.
And, of course, Cid has a unique Character card that you haven't won from him; that one might take a while, since you have to play him under Centra rules and he plays it rarely, but it seemed worth mentioning.
That being said, you don't actually need to do this; thanks to having completed the CC Club quest, you have unlocked something in Disk 4 that makes all of the unique missable cards (except for one) available in a simpler manner. So, anything that provides cards as a prize you'd only be doing to have access to the unique cards earlier - you can still complete the collection even if you ignore any other rare card going forwards.
So, you know the minigame in the Chocobo forests, where you need to use the flute and so on to reveal the Chocobo without having to pay? Completing it in at least one forest will grant an extra effect in battle to the Gishal Green item - you could probably guess which one. It might be fun to check out.
In addition, each forest has one extra minigame in it that you can take part into only after you've completed the first minigame to obtain the chocobo; this one basically requires you to continue running around the forest until the radar pings again, at which point you use the flute to make the chocobo dig something out of the ground. If you do this in all six of the forests, you can then go to the seventh forest, the Chocobo Sanctuary, and be rewarded with the Chocobo card.
The Chocobo Sanctuary can be found right at the very top of Grandidi forest, the place you visited to fight the Marlboro.
Remember that one UFO encounter around Winhill? There's five more of them on the world map to find. You want to set Enc-None for this, since otherwise it'll take forever; the UFO are the ONLY enemy on the world map that can be met with Enc-None active, so having it will make it much easier to know what's going on.
Aside from the one near Winhill, the other encounters are: one in the desert where you found the Ragnarock (next to Cactual Island), one is on the beach east of Timber (if you open the menu while on the right beach, you will see at the bottom that it's called Mandy beach), and one is on a small island around Trabia (it's a small gray one, the name on the menu is Heath Peninsula). Once you've met all of these (four in total, counting the Winhill one), the next encounter is unlocked on the flat yellow mountains north of the Chocobo Sanctuary at the top of Grandidi Forest (which is where you fought the Marlboro); you need to land on the plateau with the Ragnarock, it's the only way to access the area.
Once you've done the one encounter on the plateau, the last one can be had in the crater where Balamb Garden once was, but you should make sure you have at least 5 Elixir before heading there; if you have less, you can always use Med. LvUP to make more.
Remember how I mentioned that FH is, technically, one of the two poles of FFVIII world? This is because of how the map is structured, where you can go all the way around both the top-bottom and left-right edges of the square map, which only makes sense if FH is one pole, and the other pole is then found by taking the four corners of the square map and folding them together - so, basically, each corner of the map is around the same area, more or less.
If you explore that section of the map with the Ragnarock, you should find something interesting. Bringing Zell along to explore what you find is recommended, but not actually necessary - he just has unique dialogue options that you would miss otherwise.
Now, as I mentioned above, this is not necessary. However, if you want to access the cards this quest presents right now, instead of waiting for Disk 4, now that you have the Ragnarock is the best time to do so.
How it works is that the Queen of Cards, which should still be in Balamb if you haven't make her move, can create new cards; she only does this when she goes to Dollet, however, not when she moves to any other location, so the dialogue doesn't present itself until she goes there. This dialogue basically confirms that character cards and many GF cards (such as Angelo) are basically commissioned to an artist to make them.
Anyway, the Queen of Cards will move to a new location whenever you either win from her, or lose to her, any unique card (GF or Character); since she doesn't have any unique cards herself, you need to lose to her the first time to get her moving. However, if you lose five specific cards, then when she goes to Dollet, she will create five new cards in the world - until she does this, these cards do not exist and cannot be won even if you play with the right person. If she wins or loses one of these cards while in Dollet, that also counts.
Doing this the regular way is a very long process, but if you wait until this point in the game, then you can lose the first four cards that she wants (MiniMog, Seclet, Chocobo and Alexander) all at once in the same game - the way to do this is to select a game with those four cards plus a common that you don't mind losing, like a Bite Bug, and keep playing the Queen (either always winning, or just saying "not play" after you've seen what the trade rule is) until she gives you the trade rule "All". When that happens, you lose on purpose, and she'll nab all four cards; then you talk to her again to confirm that she's going to Dollet (if she's not, you need to reset and try again).
This way, when you go to Dollet and talk to her, she'll tell you which card she has created, and where they can be found; and also that the four cards you lost to her are now in her son's hand - so you can win back by playing against him in Dollet. One of the four cards she created is Doomtrain, which is the last card you need to lose to her while she's in Dollet to have her create the fifth and last card - which can be found by playing with Odine's assistant in Esthar, but only after it has been created in this manner.
Again, since you completed the CC Card quest, this isn't strictly mandatory; you only need to do this if you want her cards now rather than waiting until Disk 4.
And then there is the Obel Lake questline, but I would not suggest that you try to pursue that one - it's the most annoying thing in all of FFVIII, bar none, and while there's a decent prize at the end, it's really not worth the hassle. If you still want to, Obel Lake is easily found - it's the only lake in the entire world map, and is located in the Timber area.
Perhaps I am less concerned about Omi's mental well being then I should, but I would say you really should do Obel Lake. It's such a FF8 quest, and as far as I remember it doesn't have any frustrating RNG, just has you do things that don't make sense.
And then there is the Obel Lake questline, but I would not suggest that you try to pursue that one - it's the most annoying thing in all of FFVIII, bar none, and while there's a decent prize at the end, it's really not worth the hassle. If you still want to, Obel Lake is easily found - it's the only lake in the entire world map, and is located in the Timber area.
Perhaps I am less concerned about Omi's mental well being then I should, but I would say you really should do Obel Lake. It's such a FF8 quest, and as far as I remember it doesn't have any frustrating RNG, just has you do things that don't make sense.
Agreeing with the peeps pointing out to the curvature of the planet. The rest of the world wouldn't have a direct view to the event. And sure, radio now works, but besides Esthar (who knew what caused the jamming and so would be aware the very hour it would be down), who would think about it? Oh, the horizon got red for a moment. I'm sure we can now start using radio technology 18 years after it mysteriously became unusable.
Fun fact, Jumbo Cactuar was one of the additional bosses (and Espers) added to FFVI's GBA version. Didn't teach any new unique spells like Leviathan, Gilgamesh, or Diabolos did, but it did have a +2 speed level up bonus which iirc is the highest in the game.
Agreeing with the peeps pointing out to the curvature of the planet. The rest of the world wouldn't have a direct view to the event. And sure, radio now works, but besides Esthar (who knew what caused the jamming and so would be aware the very hour it would be down), who would think about it? Oh, the horizon got red for a moment. I'm sure we can now start using radio technology 18 years after it mysteriously became unusable.
Raiden also had a +2 speed, but you'd have to loose Odin, and you could get and use Cactuar as a substitute, which is an improvement.
*squints eyes*
I... do not recognize this. But I'd totally believe this may have annoyed teen-me so hard that I elected to yeet away the memories of it.
Raiden had +2 Strength, Odin had the Speed bonus. This was an issue, since once you got Raiden there were no other Speed bonus in the game, so both the Advance version and the Pixel Remaster changed things so Odin wasn't the only Speed bonus in the game.
Raiden had +2 Strength, Odin had the Speed bonus. This was an issue, since once you got Raiden there were no other Speed bonus in the game, so both the Advance version and the Pixel Remaster changed things so Odin wasn't the only Speed bonus in the game.
Agreeing with the peeps pointing out to the curvature of the planet. The rest of the world wouldn't have a direct view to the event. And sure, radio now works, but besides Esthar (who knew what caused the jamming and so would be aware the very hour it would be down), who would think about it? Oh, the horizon got red for a moment. I'm sure we can now start using radio technology 18 years after it mysteriously became unusable.
I wonder if the Timber display screen is still showing the creepy text static. The Dollet tower cut through it for Deling's speech, but I don't recall if it went back to Adel FM.
I also don't recall if it's even possible to check from the currently accessible areas of Timber, so it might remain a mystery.
