- Location
- Sweden
Using summons doesn't lower your rank itself, but GF kills don't give you any SeeD experience so if you do it all the time getting into combat won't prevent the gradual rank loss from salary.
Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Let's Play
Egleris
Vagrant Dragon
- Location
- Italy
Oh, I'm not defending it - just saying that, once you get to the point where you're facing Ultima Weapon, you as a player will be aware of the possibility and be prepared for it. I'm not saying it was a good idea, I'm saying that you've faced enough of the bizzarre ideas the developers had that it is not that big a deal. If it was the first time a save point was hidden, that'd be entirely different, but as it is, when you're playing is just a minor annoyance.
Yeah, that's how most people play the game until they fully understand the system, and it's actually a perfectly reasonable way to do things; unlike the characters, GF gains in power as they level up and become faster to use the more they're used, so they are very consistent and reliable as a way to deal damage that is entirely junction-agnostic, all the way from the beginning of the game to the end.
Diablos especially doesn't take very long to start hitting at the damage cap - the fact that his percentage damage is based on the enemy's max HP, instead of their current HP like all other Gravity abilities, makes him excellent to take down anything that isn't immune to Gravity, and both Quetzal and Shiva are excellent at striking enemy weak points all the way through - Ruby Dragon and Marlboro are both weak to ice, for example - so you can generally get by on GF usage. They even act as shields against one-hit-kill attacks (like Ultima Weapon's Light Pillar) if you learn how to time them appropriately.
So, yeah, overall just relying on the GF for all of your damage is the easiest strategy to employ and the one a newcomer to the game will stumble upon first; there's nothing strange about it being the main way most players approach the game.
The drops and draws (Meteor!) you get as you go down are extremely valuable, and the dungeon is, I believe, seven screens long; going through it without fights is absurdly boring, and Ultima Weapon as the last enemy in a long gauntlet is more fitting than being the only monster in the ruins. Plus the scene with Zell is fun and I wouldn't want to miss it.
And, of course, if you don't know that you need to save 10 units of steam, you can make it to the bottom with not enough steam left, and have to go all the way back up and try the puzzle again, repeating until you succeed; having Zell open the way ensures that you have to go down only once, and even with the forced fights that still saves time, from my point of view.
So, overall I would say that, while solving the puzzle of the steam correctly remove the forced fights, it's more trouble than it's worth, and having Zell solve the issue is less "cheating" and more "the best way to handle the situation".
As for things most people don't know about: did you know that Piet can be met (and be defeated in Triple Triad for the Alexander card) after the Lunar Cry? His location is a spot on the world map that appears to hold nothing, but if you walk into it, you will find something there. The precise location is at the very bottom of the internal sea in the Esthar area, where there is a thin estuary, in the spot of dry land on the right. Completely invisible on the world map, so if you don't stumble on it by accident or otherwise already know, then you never will.
Also, speaking of things people might miss! @Omicron, I'm sure I don't need to tell you this, but don't forget, when you met the mysterious Esthar president, it's important that discussing the plan to save the world be the last thing you do. Nothing new, but never hurt to have a reminder, right?
Last edited:
- Pronouns
- They/Them/She/Her
(And replying to the rest of the post; I just didn't quote the whole thing.)Egleris said:
Eh. Maybe? ...I think part of the issue might be that it's just hard to sort out what is objective, for overall quality, because it requires not just working out which game is better along a given axis, but what weight that axis ought to have.
Fortunately, I don't think it's really something we need to settle.
IIRC, pretty much.Deathwings said:
Last edited:
- Location
- Singapore
- Pronouns
- Singular They
The Internet was in that weird state where it was enough of a thing that the average consumer could go online and look stuff up (via dial-up paid by the minute), but the websites available were also entirely fan-made, with no real communication or citations. So not only was there very little information available online, what information there was tended to be misinformation passed around like playground rumours.
Which segues into a certain common mindset a lot of developers had: they believed the "most fun" way to play a game was to go through it blind and miss the majority of things, until the player met their friends (who also happened to be playing the same game, because of course the devs believed their game was worthy of being the most popular game of the time) and shared strategies and rumours. No friends? No friends who had the same game? Too bad.
Having official guide books is probably not that large of a consideration in "extracting money". Judging from the general quality of the guide books of the time, including the Official Brady Games guide for FFVIII, I would be very surprised if the guide writers had any real support from the developers for the content, as opposed to just general publishing guidelines of "include this" or "exclude that". Mostly the advantage is in screenshots and maps, because bandwidth was still a premium at the time.
If nothing else, the "official" guide books were at least not incorrect. Compare to earlier iterations, like the How To Win At books by Jeff Rovin, which often had outright wrong or impossible advice.
- Location
- SV's Only Complete Persona Quest
- Pronouns
- She/Her
GameFAQs was created in 1995, four years before FF8. So online guides were certainly a thing at the time, if still in their infancy. I usually think of Sierra games like King's Quest when it comes to old 'impossible to beat without a guide' games, and their heyday was pre-1995.
As for DLC, it kinda did exist back then for PC games, in the form of 'expansion packs'
As for DLC, it kinda did exist back then for PC games, in the form of 'expansion packs'
Absolutely not.
Coming from a guy without Siren who has reached Ultima.
There is something that no one have said about this save point, which makes it being hidden, particularly bad : usually, FF has a save point at the beginning of a dungeon, and one before the boss. It's usually a warning to prepare for a big fight coming.
So, if there is no save point... You just move forward in the next room or push buttons on the console without a worry in the world, even if it's one hour you are fighting monsters. Life is quiet, you don't even need to be full HP.
And in this case... Perfect trolling 10/10 FF8 dev team.
Egleris
Vagrant Dragon
- Location
- Italy
That's seriously impressive. If you don't mind me asking, how many GF did you manage to collect in that particular playthrought?
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I literally thought "oh fuck oh fuck I am literally having Squirt's experience of playing SMT 1, why are you doing this to me" playing through it, but then I forgot when it came to the update
I actually thought the phrase 'drowned out by the fireworks' because that specific phrasing was nagging at my brain and it turns out 'Words Drowned by Fireworks' is the name of the track that plays during the Gold Saucer date in FF7
it turns out i was partially wrong, sleep does have a time limit, and somehow i was able to spend five minutes drawing meteors from Dragons without them ever waking up only to eat shit in a later encounter when an enemy decided to just wake up and kick my ass when i wasn't prepared for it? what the hell even is this mechanic
It was relevant very early on, when GFs were my main way of dealing quick, party-wide damage to enemies and so I used them a bunch. It quickly fell off as GFs became a 'nice to have' thing compared to powerful junctions, though, and I haven't had reason to worry about it in like, fourty hours.
god I wish, this game desperately wants for more modern design and writing sensibilities
As a few people have been saying, there is, but it's apparently hidden without Move-Find. Since I always have Move-Find equipped, I did not realize this and thought it was just properly placed and always visible. Finding out that this vital save point is hidden is like... Some crimes cannot be forgiven.
Loving this design, she'd fit right in in Number NoneRemember that joke theory a while back where Ultimecia is actually Selphie's future self (or should I say future 'selph'?)
Well, since we've already seen Ultimecia so this doesn't count as a spoiler, I got inspired:
Liking the name 'Selphimecia' personally
you can't see it right now but my eye is doing this twitching thing movie characters do when they're on the verge of madness
Malboro, easily. I'm sure if I had Stat Def x 4 on everyone with 100 Pain/Confuse/Berserk/Sleep it would be easy, but I don't think that's a realistic ask of the player. The same Quistis Initiative-Degenerator build would take out the Ruby Dragon just as it does Malboro, and as a fight Malboro is significantly more agonizing to put up with. Bad Breath is just that fucking annoying.
FF8 is doing a weird thing compared to most FF games in that you never leave behind enemy types entirely. Instead of Bite Bug being replaced with Red Bite Bug, you encounter Bite Bug up to the end of the game. This has benefits and drawbacks: The main benefit is consistency, that we get to know each monster and become familiar with their behavior, that it doesn't look like they're somehow weirdly contained to single areas. You get to think in terms like, 'I know that Ruby Dragons dwell in places such as X and Y, and Malboros are rare and found only in W and Z."
On the other hand, the sense of progression is partially lost. I killed my first Anacondaur back in Dollet, and somehow that snake went through a training regimen from hell to show up at the Deep Sea Base to pretend to be a challenge while I was killing elder dragons. Some of the monsters just feel randomly placed - I know where to find a Ruby Dragon or a Malboro, but Wendigo or Grendel are just, like, whatever. Sometimes they're in a place, sometimes they aren't, I have no idea of what kind of 'environment' a Vysage likes.
And after a time the low number of overall enemies starts being felt. The Lunar Cry is sort of refreshing in that regard, but am I really still fighting Mesmerizes sixty hours in? To pull a number totally out of my ass, it feels like FF8 has like... Half the number of enemies of VII, maybe? I didn't count. Every FF8 enemy is effectively multiple enemies in a trenchcoat thanks to their tiered scaling, but what it's been showing me is that visual variety is important even when that variety includes some palette swaps.
Plus, it feels like VII's enemies had more visual coherency - that you could separate 'wildlife,' 'Shinra goons,' 'Shinra machines,' 'Hojo creations,' 'Jenova horrors' in a way that VII doesn't really do as much of. I can tell why, I think; in VIII, 'monsters' are specifically a category of beings from the moon and animals mutated by the Lunar Cry, so everything you fight is either a Lunar Cry spawn or a Galbadian military weapon. VII had more of a feeling that sometimes a 'monster' is just, like, a frog that happens to be angry at you, or that a 'dog' in this universe often happens to have tentacles, and sometimes it's an intrinsically destructive creature like a Greek chimera on a rampage, and sometimes it's a thing hideously mutated by Jenova cells. VIII defines its monsters fairly narrowly - a dog is an animal, you're not going to be fighting one, 'monsters' are a very specific category of being.
With that said and before it seems like I'm too critical: While VIII feels like it has a narrower portfolio of monsters, the monsters it does have are just, I've never seen anything with that much life in any of the previous games. They don't just have intricate character models, they have unique idle animations and attack animations that are full of personality and originality. The first time a Wendigo turns one of your character into a volleyball and starts dribbling them across the battlefield is unforgettable. Even their death animations are customized for each individual monster. They're just clearly a labor of love, which means spending most of the game with the same monsters a lot less frustrating.
Well, I've just tried this, and the game breaking its own rules for it is very funny, although Boosting to 250 is obnoxious enough that I am never doing it again
My feelings toward CRT are ambivalent, but I think this image was the best illustration of the argument for me:
(source: RetroTINK5x)
I don't know which of these I actually prefer, and I think it would depend on the game, but it definitely demonstrates that there is a meaningful difference between them as mediums that isn't just pining for old games. I'm not going to go so far as to compare it to playing Simpsons episodes at the wrong aspect ratio or "fixing" the colour grading on old films, but there's definitely an effect that some of these older games (probably the better looking ones) were deliberately aiming for, and lose when the original medium is "corrected".
It's been noted in some posts I've read that the CRT/pixel picture is more complex than sometimes thought. Some games very clearly took advantage of scanlines to produce desired effects, and this portrait of Dracula above seems like an obvious example; I don't mind Picture 1 but just comparing the way the eyes' red glow works and the curve of the lips, Picture 2 is immediately more readable as a human expression drawn for a certain effect.
At the same time, not all games did this. Some games were created on machines that didn't have the same CRT effects, with the translation to the TV screen being mostly a 'whatever happens, happens' kind of deal. Others were made for arcade machines, which used CRT screens, but ones that had a different method of displaying allowing for crisper pictures; so when these arcade games were ported to consoles, the resulting picture on the TV screen wasn't necessarily how they were actually designed to look originally. Then there is also the question of 'pixels' - a sprite being rendered 'fuzzy' on a CRT screen is not necessarily the same as a 3D rendered model being rendered down into a pixelated sprites by the final hardware it's running on, like this Princess Peach:
View: https://x.com/Ian_Fisch/status/1820897217915322697
So it's a complicated topic! The 'CRT effect' is clearly real, but in trying to reconstruct it with modern means, we might accidentally end up missing some of the nuances of how it originally worked, or misunderstanding its origin and exact effect.
And then to complicate things further - speaking personally, I played a lot of PSX games in childhood, and trying to recapture that experience is no small part of why this Let's Play happened. At the same time... The majority of the video gaming experience I had as a kid wasn't with the PSX. It was with Nintendo handheld console: The GB, GBC, GBA, and Nintendo DS, after which I dropped off gaming in general for a few years. And these handheld consoles... Don't have CRT screens. So none of that question of whether they should look like the pixelated screenshots they have ported on modern hardware or trying to apply the 'CRT blur' applies. The GBA is approximatively a million times less powerful a piece of hardware than the PSX, but in its favor, the text box illustrations for its Castlevania games don't look like any of these four Dracula screenshots above, they look instead like this:
Which is an entirely different thing still!
Anyway, it's just a really interesting topic to me.
Last edited:
Well, you can't just drop this and walk away now.
How would you adapt Selphie-Ultimecia to Bleach? Given arrancars' whole deal, an obvious read would be for her to be Ultimecia full time with Selphie as a long-forgotten living self occasionally making itself known in small ways like the train motif, but it would mean losing out on Selphie's whole personal vibe for the most part, which is maybe not the best choice.
What would be her role? Is she one of Aizen's creations with a weird plot-relevant time power, or does she do her own thing elsewhere so the protagonists could have a filler movie?
Most importantly, did she max out Style?
There's an additional layer to consider. You know what environment would even better to experience this sort of game than a friend group?
Your nerdy coworkers at the game company you work at.
It's a struggle to create works that aren't tailored towards your own perspective and the people at SE back then probably had a very warped perception of how common it would be to have a bunch of peers also playing the game you are enjoying.
- Pronouns
- Him/He
Completing every side quest and finishing everything is the equivalent of getting every steam achievement, back in the day. Most players aren't expected to do that, and even most hard core players probably aren't going to find everything they need.
Consider Armored Core 6, how many people actually found all the data logs, or found all the hidden parts without a guide? There's no New Game + feature here, you're most likely going to keep finding new things on your third of fourth playthrough, even if you've beaten the main game without a problem.
It's hell on blind completionists as you can see, but most people are either okay with missing stuff, or have a guide for every step. Omi is walking the narrow treacherous path, for which I am thankful for.
Consider Armored Core 6, how many people actually found all the data logs, or found all the hidden parts without a guide? There's no New Game + feature here, you're most likely going to keep finding new things on your third of fourth playthrough, even if you've beaten the main game without a problem.
It's hell on blind completionists as you can see, but most people are either okay with missing stuff, or have a guide for every step. Omi is walking the narrow treacherous path, for which I am thankful for.
Egleris
Vagrant Dragon
- Location
- Italy
Perfectly understandable, and the Ruby Dragon's Dragon Breath is an especially egregious example - when the dragon uses it, it's a physical, non-elemental attack, but when Quistis learns it as a Blue Magic, it's a fire-elemental magical attacks. It's really annoying.
Revlid
blob of bugs
- Location
- England
Time travel is already a plot point... The groundwork has been laid...
Triggerhappy
Stick with Trigger and You'll Make it Through
- Location
- SoCal
Actually not as much less powerful as you might think considering people have managed to port Tomb Raider to the damn thing XD
Closer to maybe '1/10'.
- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
so basically it's like how the thief suite of abilities in ff5 is practically mandatory to run at all times.
- Location
- SV's Only Complete Persona Quest
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I'm guessing Omicron was talking more about aesthetic than lore
Even moreso, to be honest. The only FFV thief abilities that can feel somewhat mandatory are Find Passages to see hidden passageways in dungeons (but it can just be quickswapped in if you really want to check and the passages usually only lead to bonus loot or shortcuts), and maybe Sprint for the super fast movement or Vigilance to prevent back attacks.
Meanwhile, right here we've got Move-Find going "lol lmao if you don't have this you don't get a save point in front of an optional superboss that can instakill you if you aren't set up right". Granted most other cases of it are just missable draw points, but there's a few convenient save points mixed in:
Last edited:
OOf, it's a very long time, it was my first playthrought, so I am not really sure. I thing I have firstly missed Siren because I didn't know you can steal GF from enemies I think, but I have realized you can steal them later. I think I have missed Leviathan because forgot to steal Norg. No Doomtrain either because I have no idea how to invoke it. No Tomberry too. Probably Cactuar because it's difficult to miss and when I meet something like, I do a point of honor to defeat (reason I have Cerberus too). I suppose I have all the rest.
Honestly, the impressive part was that I was able to kill Monarch (Oops, Ultima Weapon in english) without refining anything (I mean I probably didn't really understand how the thing was working, but the moment I have understood that refining destroy cards, I fully refuse to interact with it, because no way in hell, I will destroy my cards for consumable, especially unique cards) and my whole junction thing was mid. After all, for my first playthrought (this long lost past where I was doing multiple playthroughts of my games...), I rush the main story. So, I didn't have a lot of magic too (which has made the final fight kinda epic in the same time. You don't engage as much with a system until you are in front of the final boss and absolutely underlevel but still refuse to return grinding and will find a way to kill it right here, right now !).
And I was reluctant to use powerful items too, because, you know, hoarding mentality, I think I have still succumbed of the worst treachery to use some invincible item to beat Ultima Weapon. I find that Invincible was a cheating (and boring) statut and I didn't like to use it (yeah, I was a very difficult kid !).
- Location
- Singapore
- Pronouns
- Singular They
Yeah. The whole thing relies on a number of assumptions that I think the developers of the time did not fully examine:
- The player is a young to mid teenager. This is kind of a prescriptive assumption, in that the game is marketed towards this demographic. Assumed male, because that's what video games were marketed to at the time.
- The player has a large enough friend group of roughly the same age cohort they can spend time around, and who have the same general interests. This is a safe assumption for the hypothetical teenager, since school provides that. It ceases to be a safe assumption once the hypothetical player age goes up into adulthood.
- The player's friend group all play the same game. This is one of those assumptions which is understandable at a glance, but falls apart at the slightest scrutiny. It's not just possible, but quite common for a given group of teenagers to all play the same game. It's much less likely for that game to be the specific game being designed, unless that game is named Dragon Quest or Monster Hunter or Pokemon (or Souls, in more recent times). So there's a touch of hubris in there: "if everyone is playing the same game, why can't it be our game?"
- The childhood experience of the developers is a good and positive one, which children today should have the joy of experiencing. This is probably the biggest motivation for these design decisions of obtuse mechanics; there's a fairly famous interview of the devs for Earthbound/Mother that cited this for why they had a lot of secrets and easter eggs in their games. "Don't look up guides, talk to your friends like we did."
- The game only needs to be popular for a few years at most, after which nobody will care. Thus, someone going back decades later to try the game is left to their own devices, since the assumed "friend group who share strategies" is long gone, and only the rise of wikis helped mitigate this. For popular games like the Final Fantasy series, as we've seen in this thread, this is less of an issue, since people can and will jump in to give paragraphs of advice. For less renowned games (eg Paladin's Quest/Lennus), too bad.
This sort of mindset started long before FFVIII (or FFVII or whatever is the usual cutoff for "Squaresoft hubris"), and was fairly common among a few generations of game devs, leading to the sort of bizarre design decisions we're seeing in FFVIII, where things are hidden or change based on nonsensical criteria. FFVIII is not so much a particularly bad case of it, but mostly just representative, especially since it combines that sort of information-hostile game design with the game dev vision overshooting the technical capabilities of the time (a zillion loading screens).
Listen, you can absolutely find the Triforce in Ocarina of Time, it's just hidden in the secret Temple of Light dungeon that you can only unlock by winning the Postman's footrace. Would the Zelda 64 Secrets webring lie to me?
RogueIce
Noctis Æternæ
- Location
- New Lunar Republic, Equestria
Ironic, then, that Earthbound itself shipped with an Official Guide straight from Nintendo itself. Which was framed as a travel guide showcasing the places you'd visit. It was really great. I regret losing my copy.
Final Fantasy VIII, Part 31: President Laguna Loire
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Welcome back, class, to Final Fantasy VIII 301. Today's lesson:
The President of Esthar
But first, I promised that if we covered the remaining 'side quests' of the game, we would be doing so at the start of the update and with only the briefest of overviews, so let's get that out of the way.
Obel Lake
What the fuck even is Obel Lake.
Okay, here's the deal: There is one lake on the entire FF8 map (we can presume either that most lakes are below the 'resolution' of the world map or, again, the planet is very small), and it's called Obel Lake. It's there:
That little mass of land at the center isn't actually an island, it's a peninsula, the connection is just obscured by the tree.
The Obel Lake 'quest line' is… How to put it.
I can't actually complain about it. It is so out there and so convoluted and has so little reward that it goes way past obnoxious missable content. You don't actually miss anything by not doing it, there's no hidden GF at the end. No, as far as I can tell, Obel Lake was only ever conceived for one of two kinds of people: completionist maniacs who play with guidebooks opened and do all the content because it is there, and clueless fools who stumble upon it accidentally and are promptly driven insane.
To trigger the quest, we must press the edge of the lake in a specific spot, and a dialogue box will open. We're given the option of either skipping rocks, or humming a song. Skipping rocks gives us a random number of skips. Humming a song will cause a 'black shadow' to appear and greet us.
We will never see the shadow or receive any explanation as to its nature. It's just there. Repeatedly calling the shadow will eventually cause it to ask us to find its friend, 'Mr Monkey.' If we accept it will point us to 'a forest somewhere' (the map has dozens of forests), then tell us he might have taken a train towards Dollet. We must put two and two together and investigate a forest near Dollet.
Wait, no. That's going too quickly. First, we need to toss the rock repeatedly, until we specifically get the message that the rock skipped 'many many times.' Then we can go run around the Dollet forests, where we eventually get a dialogue box telling us we found a monkey. We need to hit the monkey with a rock, whereupon the monkey insults us and disappears. Then, we need to keep looking around, until we run into the monkey again, toss a rock at it again, whereupon he calls us losers and tells us he can throw a rock better than us, and tosses a rock back at our face.
The rock has the carvings 'U R A H E O' on it.
We head back to the black shadow, tell it where Mr Monkey is, it thanks us. Then we talk to it again, and it notices the carved rock, and starts reminiscing about places it saw similar rocks. We need to repeatedly talk to it, and it will give us one of a series of random hints, formulated in ways like, 'At the beach in Balamb, something special washes ashore at times' or 'There's also something on top of a mountain with a lake and cavern.' These hints at very specific places on the map, and alternate between 'you could conceivably find these' to 'you will never get it without a guide.' Even with perfect directions from a guide, there is still a significant amount of running around trying to locate the precise, seemingly empty spot on the map where we must press X to find a new rock with a new series of markings. Also? Some of the shadow's hints don't actually hint at rocks at all, but at Draw Points that contain outdated spells and are thus literally a waste of time and effort.
We're talking 'this nondescript spot on a random cliff with no visual landmark' levels of obscure.
Once we have gathered four rocks, we can talk to the shadow again and put the rocks together. When read together, they spell out 'M O R D R E D P L A I N S H A S T R E A S U R E'. What the hell is Mordred Plains? Well, you see, every single location on the map is part of a region, and that region is not found on the map, but instead in the character menu.
Bottom left.
Mordred Plains are a featureless barren rock plain in Esthar. We must land, and start pressing X, and then some of the rocks start talking to us.
Rocks come in blue, white, red, and black varieties. Each has different lines, and each tile on the map has a rock associated with it. We are supposed to orient ourselves to the treasure's location from what the rocks have to say. The thing is, each of the rocks has a different trait, which you can only figure out by trial and error or a guide: The blue rocks are informative, the white rocks just give meaningless information that should be ignored, the black rocks always repeat the same useless line, and the red rocks always lie. This means to find the treasure, we must always do specifically the opposite of what the red rocks tell us, and ignore everything every other rock says. Once we do this, we find…
A Three Stars. A Three Stars teaches a GF "Expendx3-1," an Ability that makes it so when a character triple-casts, they only expand one stored spell instead of three.
This is, theoretically, a powerful item. In practice it is absolutely not worth the effort to go through this baffling quest. I have summed it up so you're not getting the full experience, but the quest is only feasible with a guide that points you to each step exactly, and even with that there'll still be significant running around figuring out where exactly you need to press X to unlock the next step or reward.
Like I said: I don't resent this Quest, because its reward is so meaningless it is very obviously a completionist trap, and I was fully prepared to drop it at any moment without remorse. I just wanted to include it there as an example of just how obtuse and overcomplicated the quest design of that era could get. But if there was a GF locked behind the Obel Lake quest? You'd be hearing about me on the news.
The UFO
Remember forever ago when we tripped over an actual goddamned flying saucer around Winhill? You might not remember it because at the time I was too baffled and forgot to screenshot it, though I did mention it.
Well, rather than a single easter egg, this UFO is actually a questline of its own, even more obtuse than the Obel Lake one, because as far as I can tell no hints exist to point to its locations whatsoever. It's pure chance that a player might randomly happen to be wandering in each consecutive location the UFO visits.
There are four locations, starting in Winhill, and in each one we see the UFO pass by while carrying an item - a pyramid, a Moai statue, a cow, crops. Once we've visited each (completely unremarkable) location on the map, we then need to head to another utterly unremarkable location, where we actually get into a 'fight' with the UFO.
The UFO doesn't move or attack and has pathetic HP - we attack it and it starts exploding, flying off into the sky and disappearing across the horizon. For this, we are rewarded with an Aegis Amulet, which teaches a GF Evasion Junction. This is, again, a fairly meaningless reward.
But it's not over. From there, we must head to the crater where Balamb Garden used to sit. There, we can trigger a random encounter:
The alien has 10 HP, its name is PuPu, and it is asking us for Elixirs to help it out.
…unfortunately, I didn't think to give anyone the Item Command for this fight. So I can't actually use Elixirs on PuPu. Oops. I try escaping the encounter to trigger it again, but it seems like PuPu only ever triggers once. There are a variety of outcomes to this encounter - if killed, it drops an Accelerator, which teaches Auto-Haste. It can be eaten alive using the Devour Command, which is unlocked by Eden but we're not going to care about that in this playthrough. And finally, helping it out results in it giving us its Card, which is unique and can be refined into a Hungry Cookpot, which teaches Devour to another GF. Running away is the only option which has no reward and locks us out of any further reward. Unfortunate.
However, I last saved before starting the entire quest and I'm not doing it again, so PuPu will sadly have to remain stranded on the planet.
And this concludes the two most convoluted, least indicated, least rewarding subquests in FF8; true makework nonsense, which I am setting out here mostly so you can best understand how tedious true completionism would be in this game. Just… don't bother. It's not worth it.
Now let's go.
The President of Esthar
We head back to the city, where terrified citizens are still drifting through the street while soldiers stand guards, many of them visibly terrified, and random encounters still sprawl the streets. We've seen it already, so we just Enc-None through and head for the Presidential Palace.
And here we are.
Squall identifies the two men in Esthari robes as Ward and Kiros, and then looks to the distant figure, casually dressed in beige trousers and a blue shirt, and thinks 'that's probably…' The man of the hour is gesticulating in front of the window; he's either talking to himself or rehearsing some kind of speech.
It's time for the reunion.
As we approach, the floor turns to a screen revealing the city below, and Ward approaches the man in the blue shirt.
He turns around, and lets out a casual "Hey there!" and approaches.
And there he is.
Laguna Loire, President of Esthar.
…
We've all known this was coming for a few updates now, but I just want to revisit how, just…
By all narrative rights this man shouldn't be alive.
He has so many death flags, fuck. Everybody we ever met who knew that guy talked about him in the past tense. There's a statue of him built by the Shumi that's all about how he changed their lives and was then gone forever. He's a war veteran who went to Do One Final Job to save his (surrogate) daughter and vanished from the historical record.
He has a surrogate daughter, whom we knew, who grew up in an orphanage. His kid is literally in an orphanage trying to reach into the past to reconnect with a father she never knew!!! Squall, whom I maintain is absolutely still Raine and Laguna's son, also grew up in an orphanage thinking his parents were dead!!!
EVERYTHING IN THE STORY POINTED TO THIS GUY BEING DEAD, AND HE WAS JUST CHILLING AS THE KING OF ATLANTIS THIS ENTIRE TIME
Fuck. Even seeing it coming hours ago, I still feel bamboozled. This is the Reverse Aerith, goddamn.
So what does President Laguna have to say?
Laguna: "Been wanting to meet you guys! You guys are the ones who were inside my head, right? Ellone told me. It was like there were some kind of waves running through my head. They gave us so much power during battle. We thought there were some kind of faeries flying over us."
Laguna: "So I'm Laguna. President Laguna Loire of Esthar. Pleased to meet ya."
[He strikes a pose he thinks his cool.]
God, that idiot. He's perfect.
Oh yeah, turns out?
Ellone was wrong. She did change the past.
This was sort of implicit in everything that happened during the flashback, but - the Junctions? The 'fairies' helping them? The greater power Laguna and his friends talked about feeling in these moments? Ellone sent Squall and his friends, with the power of their GF junctions, into Laguna - saving him and his friends in multiple high-risk situations where they would have died! Against an endless wave of Esthar soldiers, against the ruby dragon… She wasn't able to effect the outcomes she was looking for, saving Raine and reconnecting with Laguna and so on, so she missed the forest for the trees - the fact that Laguna was only ever alive in the first place thanks to her.
Which… I guess makes this a stable time loop? Fuck.
Being extremely himself, Laguna starts by saying we are in too much of an emergency to talk about all the things we clearly should be talking about… Then backtracks and goes sure, whatever, let's chat. This guy's chillitude is maximum.
Squall is already about to burt a blood vessel, I can tell.
Kiros says if we just let Laguna talk about whatever he'd like we'll never leave, so we should direct the conversation with questions, and Laguna comments that Squall looks way too serious. This meeting is already everything I could ever want.
Our list of questions is sadly fairly limited, but within those limits, we're finally getting some hard answers about the unseen parts of Laguna's story.
Squall: "Where's Ellone?"
Laguna: "What the heck has he done with his life? Don't you wonder? When Ellone was about 2, there was a massive hunt for girls in Esthar. The massive hunt was to find the successor for Esthar's ruler, Sorceress Adel. Ellone was raised by Raine who lived next door. And I came to know her. Then there was another massive hunt for a successor in Esthar again. Elle was taken away, even though I was there… It's the most painful episode of my life. So I rescued her and sent her off to Winhill. Shortly after that, Raine died. And Ellone was sent straight to an orphanage."
Squall: "Why didn't you go back to Winhill with her?"
Laguna: "I wanted to! But I had my reasons. I found out about this afterward, but… The reason why Ellone had to leave the orphanage was because of her special power. Doc Odine wanted to do research on Ellone's special power. He looked everywhere for her. The owner of the orphanage were Cid Kramer and his wife Edea. You know them better than I do. The Kramers took Ellone out of the orphanage to protect her. They prepared a big ship to accommodate her. Gracious of them, huh? After awhile the ship turned into another orphanage and Elle looked after the kids. She said her life on the ship was a happy one, but who knows…? I don't know how she could have been happy on a ship."
Laguna: "She was on the ship for over 10 years. That ship was attacked by Galbadia recently. Esthar's ship rescued them, and she finally met up with me. It was pure luck that we found her. I was out in space at that time. Ellone followed me out to space. Little Elle was all grown up… Then she told me everything.""
Squall: "Did she get back safely from space?"
Laguna: "Our escape pod team was a little late. Ellone was taken into custody by Galbadia. She's inside Lunatic Pandora. We're gonna rescue her. Help us out, okay? Phew…"
Not much to say there; this confirms the timeline that we were more or less able to put together from already available information. It does tell us that Laguna and Ellone did actually have time to meet and talk to each other already, which is nice. I also love the little bit about Laguna hating ships so he disbelieves that anyone raised on a ship could ever be happy, it's funny.
Honestly though. 'I had my reasons.' What reasons? Could they have to do with your newfound responsibilities and power as president of the most powerful country on earth? Hiding a secret child while assuming the responsibilities of power, leaving someone else to raise your (surrogate) daughter… How French of you, Laguna Loire. Or should I say…
President Laguna Mitterrand!?
Ahem. Forgive me. Where were we?
Asking about Raine's story doesn't get us an answer - even all these years later, it's too painful for Laguna to remember.
Squall: "What are you doing here?"
Laguna: "You know what I've been doing all my life, right?"
Squall: "You were a silly Galbadian soldier. I didn't like your attitude at all. But I understood the bond between the 3 of you. Then you changed, after you went to Winhill. Then Ellone was abducted by Esthar and you went on a journey. A journey to get Ellone back. You wrote articles and appeared in movies to get by. You were trying to find a way into Esthar. You somehow got into Esthar and rescued Ellone."
Laguna: "I got a lot of help along the way."
Squall: "What I don't understand is… Why are you the president?"
Laguna: "Wanna know? It's a long story."
Yes, Laguna. Yes, I would like to know how the hell you cast down Adel and became president.
What plays next is a flashback that I previously thought we'd get to experience as one of the playable Laguna sequences - maybe even with Adel as a boss fight! - but it turns out, instead, to be a purely narrative flashback told by Laguna to Squall, complete with FMV cutscene. Because it turns out that Laguna did not, in fact, defeat Adel with junction power borrowed from the future, but simply by being himself: a silly goober.
Odine, whom Laguna accurately describes as "ingenious yet inhumane," is angry that Laguna's rescue of Ellone will anger Adel and bring an end to his research. (This causes Ward to run after Odine in an 'I'm gonna hurt you if I catch you' way which turns into a comedy skit of them running in circles in the background, Looney Toones style, while Laguna is talking.) However, Odine had devised many ingenious devices during his tenure as Adel's head scientist, and one of them… was the sealing facility we saved Rinoa from.
Wonder what that budget line was like. It's not like it was discreet either, they built a huge complex complete with space launch facility for it, how'd they get that past Adel?
Laguna meets up with the resistance, and they discuss their two problems: How to stop the crystal pillar from summoning the Lunar Cry and destroying Esthar like it did Centra (this is a little abrupt, as I didn't realize this was a concern they had at the time), and how to get rid of Adel. Together, they used Odine's laboratory to sink the Lunatic Pandora into the depths of the ocean, but they 'were found out'. It's unclear what they mean by that but it's not like the Lunatic Pandora would be discreet to move, that thing can probably be seen from the entire country on a clear day. So they prepare for a 'final battle' to lure Adel… Which turns out not to be a battle at all.
…okay, I was fully not expecting Adel to just Show Up in this flashback just casually walking up to the place, on foot and with no escort. Also she was, indeed, huge, as well as… More on that in a moment.
Laguna and his allies all prostrate themselves before Adel and tell her they found the culprit who moved the Lunatic Pandora, and they've locked themselves in the building with Ellone as a hostage. It's a decent cover story, honestly! Adel has probably never met or even heard of Laguna, and has no reason to distrust a groveling servant at face value. She heads into the 'memorial,' where we find Ellone (or, as it'll turn out, a holographic projection of her) floating in the middle of the central device, the very same that was about to be used on Rinoa. Adel approaches, whereupon it turns out…
…Adel is yoked as hell. She has guns for days. Put Michael Bay on the phone because she's about to deliver Pain and Gain. Someone call the Buff Lady Enjoyers because I think they might be in danger. Adel might gaslight and girlboss, but she's definitely gatekeeping that workout equipment.
I don't know why it's so funny to me that Adel isn't just huge, she's huge; that wasn't obvious from the cinematic shots of her inside her prison. It's also fairly novel for the FF series; none of its female characters, even one-shot antagonists, have ever been visibly muscular. Even Tifa, the last game's resident punchgirl, was not particularly buff, she was just magically incredibly strong. But no, Adel finds the time to hit the gym every day between committing war crimes, and we love that for her. Also, depending on whether these black markings on her torso are some kind of absurdly adhesive skintight fabric or tattoos, she may in fact be fully tits out on display. You go, queen.
Unfortunately, Adel is a sorceress and not a complete idiot, and she passes her Perception check to realize that this is not the real Ellone. She turns around on Laguna who falls to his knees as if begging for mercy… Then gets up on his feet and shoves Adel. It's not a very successful shove, she basically just staggers back a couple of feet, but it turns out that's all he needed; Kiros and Ward trigger some kind of transport beam device that grabs Adel and hurls her into the Contraption, where she is immediately frozen.
I said earlier I'd expected Laguna dealing with Adel to be the final time travel flashback, but… In a sense, it's important that here, he does succeed without a proper fight, that is to say, he succeeds without Squall's power. At the last moment, when everything is in the balance, Laguna saves Ellone and ends the threat of the sorceress not with borrowed magic from the future, but by being himself: a silly overdramatic but extremely sincere guy who makes 'perfect plans' that immediately fall apart but who still manages to pull off a win in the clutch, because there's someone he cares about on the line. I think that's the perfect ending for his side of this story.
This does, incidentally, clarify what wasn't explained very clearly earlier on, which is that Esthar was definitely 100% about to put Rinoa in the Forever Timeout Machine and saving her was absolutely correct. What the hell, guys.
Laguna explains that they couldn't keep someone that dangerous around, and so they decided to send her TO THE MOON.
A completely gratuitous and insanely sick cinematic of the three Ragnarok-class ships taking the prison to space plays there.
This is followed by a 'fierce debate' over who should rule the country - one can imagine that Adel was ruling the country as god-queen for decades now, and they didn't really have any civic institutions to fall back on. Hilariously, Laguna 'wasn't even paying attention' while a cult of personality around the Hero of the Revolution developed basically on its own and carried him to power more or less to his bafflement and surprise. This is very funny, but it's not completely remove from what might realistically apply in these kinds of revolutionary scenarios. It does bring more support to the idea that Laguna is, not necessarily a figurehead exactly, but basically president for life (or as long as he wants the post) as a honorific position while the actual running of the country is delegated to other institutions.
Laguna: "Odine made a lot of noise about wanting to do research on Ellone. It was a mistake to send Ellone alone back to Raine. Raine died, and Ellone was sent to the orphanage. If I had only gone to Winhill with Elle… I would've been able to see Raine one last time."
Laguna: "Raine was dead. Ellone, missing. My job kept me busy. I was left there thinking this and that, and before I knew it, all this time had passed."
Yeah man, that's rough. I assume he didn't know about Raine being pregnant FROM A MYSTERIOUS FATHER, or he would have gone with Ellone - but that might mean he doesn't know about her MYSTERIOUS BABY THAT'S NEVER BEEN BROUGHT UP AGAIN AFTER THE FIRST TIME WE HEARD ABOUT HIM. Sorry, I mean 'them.' For all we know, it could be a girl, right Squall?
Now, if we ask about the plan to defeat Ultimecia, Laguna replies, "Straight to the heart of the matter, just like a workaholic SeeD," which is extremely funny given that we just spent ten minutes talking to him about his life. Laguna then introduces Odine, who walks in from stage left to explain his plan.
And what a plan it is. I… don't even know how to sum it up, so I'll just tell it in the man's own words, which means we'll all have to put up with his silly accent:
Doc Odine: "Egh, Sorceress Edea told me everything. Sorceress Ultimecia comes from ze future to possess ze sorceress of the present day. Meaning she leaves her body in ze future and sends only her consciousness here. Does zat sound familiar to you?"
Squall: "It's like when Ellone sent our consciousness back to the past."
Doc Odine: "You're a smart one! My first guess was zat someone in ze future with an ability like Ellone was sending ze sorceress here to our time. But no! Zat is not ze answer. So how does ze sorceress come back to this time…? You want to hear how?"
Squall: ["Yes"] / "No"
Doc Odine: "Eghhhhh! I kept this a secret to surprise you… It iz because of me, Odine! I researched Ellone's power long ago. I made out a pattern from ze electric current running through Ellone's brain. Once ze pattern was determined, it was easy to mechanize. It may only be a toy right now, but in ze time of Ultimecia, it iz an impressive working machine! Which means there iz a machine which imitates Ellone's power. It iz I who made ze first model of zat machine. I named zat machine 'Junction Machine Ellone'! It iz a wonderful thing to know zat my invention is used in ze future!"
Squall: "Junction Machine Ellone."
Laguna: "That's about it."
Squall: "So Sorceress Ultimecia came to know about Ellone, from that machine. And Elle became Ultimecia's target."
Laguna: "You can't blame Odine. It's useless."
Doc Odine: "You vant to go outside!? You vant to fisticuffs!?"
Incredible stuff. The dude literally just built a time machine. Just casually drop that into the plot, why not.
I do like Odine. Honestly, I think he would have been a better fit for this game's Cid. The fact that he is unrepentant and obviously still completely amoral even though he's now on our side makes him oddly much more likeable than VI Cid's hypocrisy and family-centered morality.
With that said… Why does Ultimecia need Ellone if she has a time machine that replicates Ellone's powers to begin with? Well, we're about to get an answer.
Doc Odine: "There iz only one way to defeat Ultimecia. You must kill her in ze future. There iz nothing we can do unless we go to ze future. There iz no way to jump to ze future under normal circumstances. But there iz still a way!"
Doc Odine: "It iz because Sorceress Ultimecia plans to compress time. Compressing time with magic… Vat good will it do for ze sorceress to compress time? There may be many reasons, but it doesn't matter. Let's just figure out what Ultimecia iz up to."
Doc Odine: "In order for Ultimecia to exist in this time, she must take over ze body of a sorceress from ze present. But ze machine must have a limit. Ultimecia probably needs to go back further in time to achieve time compression. Only Ellone can take her further into ze past. Zat iz why she iz desperately seeking her. We must take advantage of Ellone's power."
Doc Odine: "There are 2 sorceresses in our time. Sorceress Rinoa and Sorceress Adel. Of ze two, Adel has not awakened yet. Once regeneration is complete, neither Laguna nor I will be safe. Sorceress Adel is probably in ze process of awakening inside Lunatic Pandora. Ultimecia will want to possess Adel, if Adel wakes up. Zat will be a horrible event. Adel iz a horrible sorceress. If Adel's consciousness wins over Ultimecia, Adel will first destroy this era."
Doc Odine: "So we must use Sorceress Rinoa to inherit Ultimecia's powers. Zat's all for ze mission briefing."
Doc Odine: "First, go to Lunatic Pandora. Ellone's probably being held captive inside, so rescue her first. Then kill Sorceress Adel before ze awakening process is completed. Now, we're left with Rinoa as ze only sorceress of this era. Then wait for Ultimecia to possess Rinoa. When Ultimecia arrives, it's Ellone's turn. Ellone will send Rinoa back to ze past with Ultimecia."
Doc Odine: "Ellone will have to send Rinoa and Ultimecia inside another sorceress she knows in the past. Edea or Adel… Zat's up to Ellone. Once Ultimecia is in ze past, she'll use ze time compression magic. We will see some influence here. I don't know vat kind of influence, but once Ellone feels it, she'll cut Rinoa and Ultimecia off from ze past. Rinoa will come back to this world. Ultimecia also goes back to her own world. Vat would be left is ze time compressed world. Past, present, and future will all get mixed together."
Doc Odine: "You will keep moving through ze time compression towards ze future. Once you're out of ze time compression, zat will be Ultimecia's world. It's all up to you after zat."
Okay.
You got all that? I know that was quite a bit of text to transcribe, but I wanted to make sure you got the exact wording of Odine's plan and explanation for it.
Because as far as I can tell… The plan is to give Ultimecia exactly what she wants?
Time Compression is her goal! Possessing Rinoa is her goal! Using Ellone to travel back in time is also her goal! Time Compression is a state no one is supposed to be able to survive except her and we are going to deliberately let her trigger it, on purpose?
I guess it's a better alternative than 'seal Rinoa' or 'fight off Ultimecia's time travel raids for the rest of our lives,' if what you care is 'Rinoa' over 'the fate of the world as we know it' (and we know that is explicitly true in Squall's case), but like… This seems insanely reckless!
With that said, I have to respect how the solution to 'our enemy lives in the future and only sends back her mind, making it impossible to kill her' seems to be 'then move the future into stabbing range.' Hrm.
There have been many, many mentions of how time compression 'doesn't make sense' or is impossible to imagine and characters wondering how anyone could live in time compression and why anyone would want this, and so far the characters have dismissed it because 1) it's obvious this is not a desirable state, 2) Ultimecia isn't in a mood to share her motivations, 3) they don't need to know the answers to work towards preventing it. But the game is very clearly aware of how weird and complicated the core idea of its ending is; the characters all acknowledge it themselves repeatedly. I will be very disappointed if the game doesn't pay this off by revealing why Ultimecia wants this strange outcome in a way deeper than 'I just want to live forever.'Which she will, and it'll turn out she's Rinoa from the future who wants to live forever in that moment with Squall.
I guess the idea here is that they're controlling the terms under which Ultimecia is achieving her goal in order to control the outcome. Spawn-camping Adel to murder her before she's had time to wake up and get her morning coffee is very funny in a callous 'I believe SeeDsl would do that' way (no one is even suggesting asking her if she'll consider the errors of her ways), and it denies Ultimecia the primary host body she was after, the one that would make her most powerful, instead locking her within Rinoa's babby sorceress body, then shoving her into another body in the past and… I'm kind of struggling to parse what the exact chain of events meant by "once Ellone feels it, she'll cut Rinoa and Ultimecia off from ze past. Rinoa will come back to this world. Ultimecia also goes back to her own world. Vat would be left is ze time compressed world." Is the idea there to stop time compression while in progress, so that time is only 'partially compressed'? Or is it just that time compression will still be happening but by acting quickly enough we can kill Ultimecia before everyone dies?
It's a confusing application of a confusing concept, but hopefully things will be clearer as they unfold in real time.
This concludes the briefing with Laguna. At this point, the last question, "Let me out of this room," allows us to take a break, leave, run around the world spending a few weeks doing side quests, and so on. Thankfully we already took care of that so we're not going to break the pacing quite that badly.
In a bit of lampshade hanging, Laguna's reply when talking to him next is "So you were briefed about the mission? I don't understand it, either." Which, haha, funny, but if you're aware of how confusing it sounds maybe you could have made it less confusing for the sake of the player? Ah, well.
Laguna: "Let's go! We'll get aboard Ragnarok! Let's do the final briefing there! I always wanted to ride that thing. Plus the name sounds so cool!"
[He, Kiros, and Ward leave.]
The only close-up shot of Ward we've had so far reveals he's grown a beard. It suits him.
I love you, Laguna, you big dork.
The man really stood up in the middle of the room and said 'This is the point of no return, please complete any side quest before continuing!'
Laguna: "Let's go over the plan again."
Laguna: "First, enter Lunatic Pandora and rescue Ellone!"
Laguna: "Next, you fight Sorceress Adel! It'll be a surprise attack. Show no mercy."
Laguna: "Now, here comes the tricky part! Adel will need to pass on her powers before being defeated. Rinoa, will you be willing to accept them?"
Rinoa: "Yes!"
Laguna: "Good! Next, we wait for Sorceress Ultimecia to possess Rinoa! This'll be hard on you, Rinoa, but will you do it?"
Rinoa: "...yes."
Laguna: "That's the spirit! Then, Ellone sends Rinoa and Ultimecia to the past! Ellone brings back Rinoa! Then, head to the future through compressed time!"
Laguna: "Ultimecia lives far in the future where none of us can technically exist. There's only one way to make yourself exist in a world like that!"
[Throughout the next bit, Laguna is gesturing passionately like he's giving a hot-blooded shonen speech.]
Laguna: "As friends, don't forget one another! As friends, believe in one another! Believe in your friends' existence! And they'll also believe in yours. To be friends, to like one another, and to love one another… You can't do these things alone. You need somebody. Right, guys?"
Laguna: "What place reminds you of your friends? Imagine being in that place with all your friends. Once time compression begins, think of that place and try to get there! That's all! That place will welcome you. You'll be able to get there no matter what period you're in! You need love and friendship for this mission! And the courage to believe it."
Laguna: "It's all about love, friendship, and courage! I'm counting on you guys!"
He really went and said 'surviving this should be physically impossible, but nothing is impossible with the power of friendship.' I love him. It's like he was designed in a lab to be Squall's kryptonite.
Except, Squall has had his own character growth over the course of this game, and so, once everyone's left the room to go to their positions on the Ragnarok, he pauses before leaving, turns to Laguna, and instead of making a snarky comment in his mental voice or rolling his eyes and saying 'whatever,' he tells the man:
Squall: "Love and friendship and all that sounds corny, but everyone seems to be up for it."
Laguna: "You think it'll succeed?"
Squall: "We'll try."
[Squall leaves, and Laguna's bad leg suddenly starts cramping, so after all this cool speechifying our last image of him in this scene is him doing comical pantomime.]
I love this. I love that Squall still thinks this is corny as hell but is okay with it because his friends are, that Laguna actually acknowledges his own doubt by asking if Squall believes it'll work, and that Squall gives the most positive answer he's capable of, which is also the most sincere thing he's ever said: All they can do is try, and they'll try their best, and whatever happens, happens. Squall isn't big on hope, or faith, but he believes in one thing, and it's in doing things with his own two hands.
So that's our course set. Seifer is aboard the Lunatic Pandora, probably holding Ellone captive. We'll head there, kick his ass for the… Third? And hopefully final time, save the girl, and then fight Adel, which will probably be the final boss of the dungeon. Then, we trigger Time Compression, and that will be our final dungeon - and at the end, Ultimecia in her future world.
The end is in sight, which makes this a good stopping point.
Before we leave, though, let's run around the Ragnarok a little bit - Laguna came aboard, so we can have incidental dialogue with him; he just says "Let's talk when it's all done. I have a lot to tell you… Well, if you don't want to hear it, I'll understand." Wow, such mysterious! What could Laguna have to say to Squall personally that's at the same time really important but also best left until after their fate-of-the-world final confrontation? That could be aaaaanything.
Oh, also, we can challenge Laguna to a card game…
…and he plays the Squall card. Fascinating.
Hey, let's just talk to Kiros and Ward while we're there, why not? I'm sure they have interesting things to say.
…
Okay I was playing coy with it but I do have to admit I wasn't expecting the game to all but just have the characters come out and say it several plot beats ahead of when it's actually supposed to be revealed. That is. Wow. I think calling this 'implication' would be generous at best. They stop barely short of saying the words 'Laguna is your father and Raine was your mother', but only just.
Some friends you can trust with your family secrets, psh.
God but this does mean that Laguna didn't just let Ellone be taken to an orphanage and then adopted by Balamb Garden, but also Squall, while he was very much alive and the President of the most powerful nation on Earth. This man has reached undefeated levels of deadbeat dad, holy shit.
And the cherry on top? Squall may be the densest neutronium brick on Earth when it comes to certain things, but him just standing there and letting Ward and Kiros directly comment on his mother and father's appearances to his face and him not responding at all just, goes way past what my suspension of disbelief and acceptance of the 'dialogue outside of mandatory cutscenes isn't allowed to affect the plot or character development' principle. There is only one way I can make sense of this:
Squall has already figured out Laguna is his father, and he is simply refusing to acknowledge this or ask Laguna about it out of sheer stubborn frustration at being related to this ridiculous man.
Top tier, A+, 10/10 Characterization of the Year.
Thank you for reading.
Next Time: Raiding Lunatic Pandora!
The President of Esthar
But first, I promised that if we covered the remaining 'side quests' of the game, we would be doing so at the start of the update and with only the briefest of overviews, so let's get that out of the way.
Obel Lake
What the fuck even is Obel Lake.
Okay, here's the deal: There is one lake on the entire FF8 map (we can presume either that most lakes are below the 'resolution' of the world map or, again, the planet is very small), and it's called Obel Lake. It's there:
That little mass of land at the center isn't actually an island, it's a peninsula, the connection is just obscured by the tree.
The Obel Lake 'quest line' is… How to put it.
I can't actually complain about it. It is so out there and so convoluted and has so little reward that it goes way past obnoxious missable content. You don't actually miss anything by not doing it, there's no hidden GF at the end. No, as far as I can tell, Obel Lake was only ever conceived for one of two kinds of people: completionist maniacs who play with guidebooks opened and do all the content because it is there, and clueless fools who stumble upon it accidentally and are promptly driven insane.
To trigger the quest, we must press the edge of the lake in a specific spot, and a dialogue box will open. We're given the option of either skipping rocks, or humming a song. Skipping rocks gives us a random number of skips. Humming a song will cause a 'black shadow' to appear and greet us.
We will never see the shadow or receive any explanation as to its nature. It's just there. Repeatedly calling the shadow will eventually cause it to ask us to find its friend, 'Mr Monkey.' If we accept it will point us to 'a forest somewhere' (the map has dozens of forests), then tell us he might have taken a train towards Dollet. We must put two and two together and investigate a forest near Dollet.
Wait, no. That's going too quickly. First, we need to toss the rock repeatedly, until we specifically get the message that the rock skipped 'many many times.' Then we can go run around the Dollet forests, where we eventually get a dialogue box telling us we found a monkey. We need to hit the monkey with a rock, whereupon the monkey insults us and disappears. Then, we need to keep looking around, until we run into the monkey again, toss a rock at it again, whereupon he calls us losers and tells us he can throw a rock better than us, and tosses a rock back at our face.
The rock has the carvings 'U R A H E O' on it.
We head back to the black shadow, tell it where Mr Monkey is, it thanks us. Then we talk to it again, and it notices the carved rock, and starts reminiscing about places it saw similar rocks. We need to repeatedly talk to it, and it will give us one of a series of random hints, formulated in ways like, 'At the beach in Balamb, something special washes ashore at times' or 'There's also something on top of a mountain with a lake and cavern.' These hints at very specific places on the map, and alternate between 'you could conceivably find these' to 'you will never get it without a guide.' Even with perfect directions from a guide, there is still a significant amount of running around trying to locate the precise, seemingly empty spot on the map where we must press X to find a new rock with a new series of markings. Also? Some of the shadow's hints don't actually hint at rocks at all, but at Draw Points that contain outdated spells and are thus literally a waste of time and effort.
We're talking 'this nondescript spot on a random cliff with no visual landmark' levels of obscure.
Once we have gathered four rocks, we can talk to the shadow again and put the rocks together. When read together, they spell out 'M O R D R E D P L A I N S H A S T R E A S U R E'. What the hell is Mordred Plains? Well, you see, every single location on the map is part of a region, and that region is not found on the map, but instead in the character menu.
Bottom left.
Mordred Plains are a featureless barren rock plain in Esthar. We must land, and start pressing X, and then some of the rocks start talking to us.
Rocks come in blue, white, red, and black varieties. Each has different lines, and each tile on the map has a rock associated with it. We are supposed to orient ourselves to the treasure's location from what the rocks have to say. The thing is, each of the rocks has a different trait, which you can only figure out by trial and error or a guide: The blue rocks are informative, the white rocks just give meaningless information that should be ignored, the black rocks always repeat the same useless line, and the red rocks always lie. This means to find the treasure, we must always do specifically the opposite of what the red rocks tell us, and ignore everything every other rock says. Once we do this, we find…
A Three Stars. A Three Stars teaches a GF "Expendx3-1," an Ability that makes it so when a character triple-casts, they only expand one stored spell instead of three.
This is, theoretically, a powerful item. In practice it is absolutely not worth the effort to go through this baffling quest. I have summed it up so you're not getting the full experience, but the quest is only feasible with a guide that points you to each step exactly, and even with that there'll still be significant running around figuring out where exactly you need to press X to unlock the next step or reward.
Like I said: I don't resent this Quest, because its reward is so meaningless it is very obviously a completionist trap, and I was fully prepared to drop it at any moment without remorse. I just wanted to include it there as an example of just how obtuse and overcomplicated the quest design of that era could get. But if there was a GF locked behind the Obel Lake quest? You'd be hearing about me on the news.
The UFO
Remember forever ago when we tripped over an actual goddamned flying saucer around Winhill? You might not remember it because at the time I was too baffled and forgot to screenshot it, though I did mention it.
Well, rather than a single easter egg, this UFO is actually a questline of its own, even more obtuse than the Obel Lake one, because as far as I can tell no hints exist to point to its locations whatsoever. It's pure chance that a player might randomly happen to be wandering in each consecutive location the UFO visits.
There are four locations, starting in Winhill, and in each one we see the UFO pass by while carrying an item - a pyramid, a Moai statue, a cow, crops. Once we've visited each (completely unremarkable) location on the map, we then need to head to another utterly unremarkable location, where we actually get into a 'fight' with the UFO.
The UFO doesn't move or attack and has pathetic HP - we attack it and it starts exploding, flying off into the sky and disappearing across the horizon. For this, we are rewarded with an Aegis Amulet, which teaches a GF Evasion Junction. This is, again, a fairly meaningless reward.
But it's not over. From there, we must head to the crater where Balamb Garden used to sit. There, we can trigger a random encounter:
The alien has 10 HP, its name is PuPu, and it is asking us for Elixirs to help it out.
…unfortunately, I didn't think to give anyone the Item Command for this fight. So I can't actually use Elixirs on PuPu. Oops. I try escaping the encounter to trigger it again, but it seems like PuPu only ever triggers once. There are a variety of outcomes to this encounter - if killed, it drops an Accelerator, which teaches Auto-Haste. It can be eaten alive using the Devour Command, which is unlocked by Eden but we're not going to care about that in this playthrough. And finally, helping it out results in it giving us its Card, which is unique and can be refined into a Hungry Cookpot, which teaches Devour to another GF. Running away is the only option which has no reward and locks us out of any further reward. Unfortunate.
However, I last saved before starting the entire quest and I'm not doing it again, so PuPu will sadly have to remain stranded on the planet.
And this concludes the two most convoluted, least indicated, least rewarding subquests in FF8; true makework nonsense, which I am setting out here mostly so you can best understand how tedious true completionism would be in this game. Just… don't bother. It's not worth it.
Now let's go.
The President of Esthar
We head back to the city, where terrified citizens are still drifting through the street while soldiers stand guards, many of them visibly terrified, and random encounters still sprawl the streets. We've seen it already, so we just Enc-None through and head for the Presidential Palace.
And here we are.
Squall identifies the two men in Esthari robes as Ward and Kiros, and then looks to the distant figure, casually dressed in beige trousers and a blue shirt, and thinks 'that's probably…' The man of the hour is gesticulating in front of the window; he's either talking to himself or rehearsing some kind of speech.
It's time for the reunion.
As we approach, the floor turns to a screen revealing the city below, and Ward approaches the man in the blue shirt.
He turns around, and lets out a casual "Hey there!" and approaches.
And there he is.
Laguna Loire, President of Esthar.
…
We've all known this was coming for a few updates now, but I just want to revisit how, just…
By all narrative rights this man shouldn't be alive.
He has so many death flags, fuck. Everybody we ever met who knew that guy talked about him in the past tense. There's a statue of him built by the Shumi that's all about how he changed their lives and was then gone forever. He's a war veteran who went to Do One Final Job to save his (surrogate) daughter and vanished from the historical record.
He has a surrogate daughter, whom we knew, who grew up in an orphanage. His kid is literally in an orphanage trying to reach into the past to reconnect with a father she never knew!!! Squall, whom I maintain is absolutely still Raine and Laguna's son, also grew up in an orphanage thinking his parents were dead!!!
EVERYTHING IN THE STORY POINTED TO THIS GUY BEING DEAD, AND HE WAS JUST CHILLING AS THE KING OF ATLANTIS THIS ENTIRE TIME
Fuck. Even seeing it coming hours ago, I still feel bamboozled. This is the Reverse Aerith, goddamn.
So what does President Laguna have to say?
Laguna: "Been wanting to meet you guys! You guys are the ones who were inside my head, right? Ellone told me. It was like there were some kind of waves running through my head. They gave us so much power during battle. We thought there were some kind of faeries flying over us."
Laguna: "So I'm Laguna. President Laguna Loire of Esthar. Pleased to meet ya."
[He strikes a pose he thinks his cool.]
God, that idiot. He's perfect.
Oh yeah, turns out?
Ellone was wrong. She did change the past.
This was sort of implicit in everything that happened during the flashback, but - the Junctions? The 'fairies' helping them? The greater power Laguna and his friends talked about feeling in these moments? Ellone sent Squall and his friends, with the power of their GF junctions, into Laguna - saving him and his friends in multiple high-risk situations where they would have died! Against an endless wave of Esthar soldiers, against the ruby dragon… She wasn't able to effect the outcomes she was looking for, saving Raine and reconnecting with Laguna and so on, so she missed the forest for the trees - the fact that Laguna was only ever alive in the first place thanks to her.
Which… I guess makes this a stable time loop? Fuck.
Being extremely himself, Laguna starts by saying we are in too much of an emergency to talk about all the things we clearly should be talking about… Then backtracks and goes sure, whatever, let's chat. This guy's chillitude is maximum.
Squall is already about to burt a blood vessel, I can tell.
Kiros says if we just let Laguna talk about whatever he'd like we'll never leave, so we should direct the conversation with questions, and Laguna comments that Squall looks way too serious. This meeting is already everything I could ever want.
Our list of questions is sadly fairly limited, but within those limits, we're finally getting some hard answers about the unseen parts of Laguna's story.
Squall: "Where's Ellone?"
Laguna: "What the heck has he done with his life? Don't you wonder? When Ellone was about 2, there was a massive hunt for girls in Esthar. The massive hunt was to find the successor for Esthar's ruler, Sorceress Adel. Ellone was raised by Raine who lived next door. And I came to know her. Then there was another massive hunt for a successor in Esthar again. Elle was taken away, even though I was there… It's the most painful episode of my life. So I rescued her and sent her off to Winhill. Shortly after that, Raine died. And Ellone was sent straight to an orphanage."
Squall: "Why didn't you go back to Winhill with her?"
Laguna: "I wanted to! But I had my reasons. I found out about this afterward, but… The reason why Ellone had to leave the orphanage was because of her special power. Doc Odine wanted to do research on Ellone's special power. He looked everywhere for her. The owner of the orphanage were Cid Kramer and his wife Edea. You know them better than I do. The Kramers took Ellone out of the orphanage to protect her. They prepared a big ship to accommodate her. Gracious of them, huh? After awhile the ship turned into another orphanage and Elle looked after the kids. She said her life on the ship was a happy one, but who knows…? I don't know how she could have been happy on a ship."
Laguna: "She was on the ship for over 10 years. That ship was attacked by Galbadia recently. Esthar's ship rescued them, and she finally met up with me. It was pure luck that we found her. I was out in space at that time. Ellone followed me out to space. Little Elle was all grown up… Then she told me everything.""
Squall: "Did she get back safely from space?"
Laguna: "Our escape pod team was a little late. Ellone was taken into custody by Galbadia. She's inside Lunatic Pandora. We're gonna rescue her. Help us out, okay? Phew…"
Not much to say there; this confirms the timeline that we were more or less able to put together from already available information. It does tell us that Laguna and Ellone did actually have time to meet and talk to each other already, which is nice. I also love the little bit about Laguna hating ships so he disbelieves that anyone raised on a ship could ever be happy, it's funny.
Honestly though. 'I had my reasons.' What reasons? Could they have to do with your newfound responsibilities and power as president of the most powerful country on earth? Hiding a secret child while assuming the responsibilities of power, leaving someone else to raise your (surrogate) daughter… How French of you, Laguna Loire. Or should I say…
President Laguna Mitterrand!?
Ahem. Forgive me. Where were we?
Asking about Raine's story doesn't get us an answer - even all these years later, it's too painful for Laguna to remember.
Squall: "What are you doing here?"
Laguna: "You know what I've been doing all my life, right?"
Squall: "You were a silly Galbadian soldier. I didn't like your attitude at all. But I understood the bond between the 3 of you. Then you changed, after you went to Winhill. Then Ellone was abducted by Esthar and you went on a journey. A journey to get Ellone back. You wrote articles and appeared in movies to get by. You were trying to find a way into Esthar. You somehow got into Esthar and rescued Ellone."
Laguna: "I got a lot of help along the way."
Squall: "What I don't understand is… Why are you the president?"
Laguna: "Wanna know? It's a long story."
Yes, Laguna. Yes, I would like to know how the hell you cast down Adel and became president.
What plays next is a flashback that I previously thought we'd get to experience as one of the playable Laguna sequences - maybe even with Adel as a boss fight! - but it turns out, instead, to be a purely narrative flashback told by Laguna to Squall, complete with FMV cutscene. Because it turns out that Laguna did not, in fact, defeat Adel with junction power borrowed from the future, but simply by being himself: a silly goober.
Odine, whom Laguna accurately describes as "ingenious yet inhumane," is angry that Laguna's rescue of Ellone will anger Adel and bring an end to his research. (This causes Ward to run after Odine in an 'I'm gonna hurt you if I catch you' way which turns into a comedy skit of them running in circles in the background, Looney Toones style, while Laguna is talking.) However, Odine had devised many ingenious devices during his tenure as Adel's head scientist, and one of them… was the sealing facility we saved Rinoa from.
Wonder what that budget line was like. It's not like it was discreet either, they built a huge complex complete with space launch facility for it, how'd they get that past Adel?
Laguna meets up with the resistance, and they discuss their two problems: How to stop the crystal pillar from summoning the Lunar Cry and destroying Esthar like it did Centra (this is a little abrupt, as I didn't realize this was a concern they had at the time), and how to get rid of Adel. Together, they used Odine's laboratory to sink the Lunatic Pandora into the depths of the ocean, but they 'were found out'. It's unclear what they mean by that but it's not like the Lunatic Pandora would be discreet to move, that thing can probably be seen from the entire country on a clear day. So they prepare for a 'final battle' to lure Adel… Which turns out not to be a battle at all.
…okay, I was fully not expecting Adel to just Show Up in this flashback just casually walking up to the place, on foot and with no escort. Also she was, indeed, huge, as well as… More on that in a moment.
Laguna and his allies all prostrate themselves before Adel and tell her they found the culprit who moved the Lunatic Pandora, and they've locked themselves in the building with Ellone as a hostage. It's a decent cover story, honestly! Adel has probably never met or even heard of Laguna, and has no reason to distrust a groveling servant at face value. She heads into the 'memorial,' where we find Ellone (or, as it'll turn out, a holographic projection of her) floating in the middle of the central device, the very same that was about to be used on Rinoa. Adel approaches, whereupon it turns out…
…Adel is yoked as hell. She has guns for days. Put Michael Bay on the phone because she's about to deliver Pain and Gain. Someone call the Buff Lady Enjoyers because I think they might be in danger. Adel might gaslight and girlboss, but she's definitely gatekeeping that workout equipment.
I don't know why it's so funny to me that Adel isn't just huge, she's huge; that wasn't obvious from the cinematic shots of her inside her prison. It's also fairly novel for the FF series; none of its female characters, even one-shot antagonists, have ever been visibly muscular. Even Tifa, the last game's resident punchgirl, was not particularly buff, she was just magically incredibly strong. But no, Adel finds the time to hit the gym every day between committing war crimes, and we love that for her. Also, depending on whether these black markings on her torso are some kind of absurdly adhesive skintight fabric or tattoos, she may in fact be fully tits out on display. You go, queen.
Unfortunately, Adel is a sorceress and not a complete idiot, and she passes her Perception check to realize that this is not the real Ellone. She turns around on Laguna who falls to his knees as if begging for mercy… Then gets up on his feet and shoves Adel. It's not a very successful shove, she basically just staggers back a couple of feet, but it turns out that's all he needed; Kiros and Ward trigger some kind of transport beam device that grabs Adel and hurls her into the Contraption, where she is immediately frozen.
I said earlier I'd expected Laguna dealing with Adel to be the final time travel flashback, but… In a sense, it's important that here, he does succeed without a proper fight, that is to say, he succeeds without Squall's power. At the last moment, when everything is in the balance, Laguna saves Ellone and ends the threat of the sorceress not with borrowed magic from the future, but by being himself: a silly overdramatic but extremely sincere guy who makes 'perfect plans' that immediately fall apart but who still manages to pull off a win in the clutch, because there's someone he cares about on the line. I think that's the perfect ending for his side of this story.
This does, incidentally, clarify what wasn't explained very clearly earlier on, which is that Esthar was definitely 100% about to put Rinoa in the Forever Timeout Machine and saving her was absolutely correct. What the hell, guys.
Laguna explains that they couldn't keep someone that dangerous around, and so they decided to send her TO THE MOON.
A completely gratuitous and insanely sick cinematic of the three Ragnarok-class ships taking the prison to space plays there.
This is followed by a 'fierce debate' over who should rule the country - one can imagine that Adel was ruling the country as god-queen for decades now, and they didn't really have any civic institutions to fall back on. Hilariously, Laguna 'wasn't even paying attention' while a cult of personality around the Hero of the Revolution developed basically on its own and carried him to power more or less to his bafflement and surprise. This is very funny, but it's not completely remove from what might realistically apply in these kinds of revolutionary scenarios. It does bring more support to the idea that Laguna is, not necessarily a figurehead exactly, but basically president for life (or as long as he wants the post) as a honorific position while the actual running of the country is delegated to other institutions.
Laguna: "Odine made a lot of noise about wanting to do research on Ellone. It was a mistake to send Ellone alone back to Raine. Raine died, and Ellone was sent to the orphanage. If I had only gone to Winhill with Elle… I would've been able to see Raine one last time."
Laguna: "Raine was dead. Ellone, missing. My job kept me busy. I was left there thinking this and that, and before I knew it, all this time had passed."
Yeah man, that's rough. I assume he didn't know about Raine being pregnant FROM A MYSTERIOUS FATHER, or he would have gone with Ellone - but that might mean he doesn't know about her MYSTERIOUS BABY THAT'S NEVER BEEN BROUGHT UP AGAIN AFTER THE FIRST TIME WE HEARD ABOUT HIM. Sorry, I mean 'them.' For all we know, it could be a girl, right Squall?
Now, if we ask about the plan to defeat Ultimecia, Laguna replies, "Straight to the heart of the matter, just like a workaholic SeeD," which is extremely funny given that we just spent ten minutes talking to him about his life. Laguna then introduces Odine, who walks in from stage left to explain his plan.
And what a plan it is. I… don't even know how to sum it up, so I'll just tell it in the man's own words, which means we'll all have to put up with his silly accent:
Doc Odine: "Egh, Sorceress Edea told me everything. Sorceress Ultimecia comes from ze future to possess ze sorceress of the present day. Meaning she leaves her body in ze future and sends only her consciousness here. Does zat sound familiar to you?"
Squall: "It's like when Ellone sent our consciousness back to the past."
Doc Odine: "You're a smart one! My first guess was zat someone in ze future with an ability like Ellone was sending ze sorceress here to our time. But no! Zat is not ze answer. So how does ze sorceress come back to this time…? You want to hear how?"
Squall: ["Yes"] / "No"
Doc Odine: "Eghhhhh! I kept this a secret to surprise you… It iz because of me, Odine! I researched Ellone's power long ago. I made out a pattern from ze electric current running through Ellone's brain. Once ze pattern was determined, it was easy to mechanize. It may only be a toy right now, but in ze time of Ultimecia, it iz an impressive working machine! Which means there iz a machine which imitates Ellone's power. It iz I who made ze first model of zat machine. I named zat machine 'Junction Machine Ellone'! It iz a wonderful thing to know zat my invention is used in ze future!"
Squall: "Junction Machine Ellone."
Laguna: "That's about it."
Squall: "So Sorceress Ultimecia came to know about Ellone, from that machine. And Elle became Ultimecia's target."
Laguna: "You can't blame Odine. It's useless."
Doc Odine: "You vant to go outside!? You vant to fisticuffs!?"
Incredible stuff. The dude literally just built a time machine. Just casually drop that into the plot, why not.
I do like Odine. Honestly, I think he would have been a better fit for this game's Cid. The fact that he is unrepentant and obviously still completely amoral even though he's now on our side makes him oddly much more likeable than VI Cid's hypocrisy and family-centered morality.
With that said… Why does Ultimecia need Ellone if she has a time machine that replicates Ellone's powers to begin with? Well, we're about to get an answer.
Doc Odine: "There iz only one way to defeat Ultimecia. You must kill her in ze future. There iz nothing we can do unless we go to ze future. There iz no way to jump to ze future under normal circumstances. But there iz still a way!"
Doc Odine: "It iz because Sorceress Ultimecia plans to compress time. Compressing time with magic… Vat good will it do for ze sorceress to compress time? There may be many reasons, but it doesn't matter. Let's just figure out what Ultimecia iz up to."
Doc Odine: "In order for Ultimecia to exist in this time, she must take over ze body of a sorceress from ze present. But ze machine must have a limit. Ultimecia probably needs to go back further in time to achieve time compression. Only Ellone can take her further into ze past. Zat iz why she iz desperately seeking her. We must take advantage of Ellone's power."
Doc Odine: "There are 2 sorceresses in our time. Sorceress Rinoa and Sorceress Adel. Of ze two, Adel has not awakened yet. Once regeneration is complete, neither Laguna nor I will be safe. Sorceress Adel is probably in ze process of awakening inside Lunatic Pandora. Ultimecia will want to possess Adel, if Adel wakes up. Zat will be a horrible event. Adel iz a horrible sorceress. If Adel's consciousness wins over Ultimecia, Adel will first destroy this era."
Doc Odine: "So we must use Sorceress Rinoa to inherit Ultimecia's powers. Zat's all for ze mission briefing."
Doc Odine: "First, go to Lunatic Pandora. Ellone's probably being held captive inside, so rescue her first. Then kill Sorceress Adel before ze awakening process is completed. Now, we're left with Rinoa as ze only sorceress of this era. Then wait for Ultimecia to possess Rinoa. When Ultimecia arrives, it's Ellone's turn. Ellone will send Rinoa back to ze past with Ultimecia."
Doc Odine: "Ellone will have to send Rinoa and Ultimecia inside another sorceress she knows in the past. Edea or Adel… Zat's up to Ellone. Once Ultimecia is in ze past, she'll use ze time compression magic. We will see some influence here. I don't know vat kind of influence, but once Ellone feels it, she'll cut Rinoa and Ultimecia off from ze past. Rinoa will come back to this world. Ultimecia also goes back to her own world. Vat would be left is ze time compressed world. Past, present, and future will all get mixed together."
Doc Odine: "You will keep moving through ze time compression towards ze future. Once you're out of ze time compression, zat will be Ultimecia's world. It's all up to you after zat."
Okay.
You got all that? I know that was quite a bit of text to transcribe, but I wanted to make sure you got the exact wording of Odine's plan and explanation for it.
Because as far as I can tell… The plan is to give Ultimecia exactly what she wants?
Time Compression is her goal! Possessing Rinoa is her goal! Using Ellone to travel back in time is also her goal! Time Compression is a state no one is supposed to be able to survive except her and we are going to deliberately let her trigger it, on purpose?
I guess it's a better alternative than 'seal Rinoa' or 'fight off Ultimecia's time travel raids for the rest of our lives,' if what you care is 'Rinoa' over 'the fate of the world as we know it' (and we know that is explicitly true in Squall's case), but like… This seems insanely reckless!
With that said, I have to respect how the solution to 'our enemy lives in the future and only sends back her mind, making it impossible to kill her' seems to be 'then move the future into stabbing range.' Hrm.
There have been many, many mentions of how time compression 'doesn't make sense' or is impossible to imagine and characters wondering how anyone could live in time compression and why anyone would want this, and so far the characters have dismissed it because 1) it's obvious this is not a desirable state, 2) Ultimecia isn't in a mood to share her motivations, 3) they don't need to know the answers to work towards preventing it. But the game is very clearly aware of how weird and complicated the core idea of its ending is; the characters all acknowledge it themselves repeatedly. I will be very disappointed if the game doesn't pay this off by revealing why Ultimecia wants this strange outcome in a way deeper than 'I just want to live forever.'
I guess the idea here is that they're controlling the terms under which Ultimecia is achieving her goal in order to control the outcome. Spawn-camping Adel to murder her before she's had time to wake up and get her morning coffee is very funny in a callous 'I believe SeeDsl would do that' way (no one is even suggesting asking her if she'll consider the errors of her ways), and it denies Ultimecia the primary host body she was after, the one that would make her most powerful, instead locking her within Rinoa's babby sorceress body, then shoving her into another body in the past and… I'm kind of struggling to parse what the exact chain of events meant by "once Ellone feels it, she'll cut Rinoa and Ultimecia off from ze past. Rinoa will come back to this world. Ultimecia also goes back to her own world. Vat would be left is ze time compressed world." Is the idea there to stop time compression while in progress, so that time is only 'partially compressed'? Or is it just that time compression will still be happening but by acting quickly enough we can kill Ultimecia before everyone dies?
It's a confusing application of a confusing concept, but hopefully things will be clearer as they unfold in real time.
This concludes the briefing with Laguna. At this point, the last question, "Let me out of this room," allows us to take a break, leave, run around the world spending a few weeks doing side quests, and so on. Thankfully we already took care of that so we're not going to break the pacing quite that badly.
In a bit of lampshade hanging, Laguna's reply when talking to him next is "So you were briefed about the mission? I don't understand it, either." Which, haha, funny, but if you're aware of how confusing it sounds maybe you could have made it less confusing for the sake of the player? Ah, well.
Laguna: "Let's go! We'll get aboard Ragnarok! Let's do the final briefing there! I always wanted to ride that thing. Plus the name sounds so cool!"
[He, Kiros, and Ward leave.]
The only close-up shot of Ward we've had so far reveals he's grown a beard. It suits him.
I love you, Laguna, you big dork.
The man really stood up in the middle of the room and said 'This is the point of no return, please complete any side quest before continuing!'
Laguna: "Let's go over the plan again."
Laguna: "First, enter Lunatic Pandora and rescue Ellone!"
Laguna: "Next, you fight Sorceress Adel! It'll be a surprise attack. Show no mercy."
Laguna: "Now, here comes the tricky part! Adel will need to pass on her powers before being defeated. Rinoa, will you be willing to accept them?"
Rinoa: "Yes!"
Laguna: "Good! Next, we wait for Sorceress Ultimecia to possess Rinoa! This'll be hard on you, Rinoa, but will you do it?"
Rinoa: "...yes."
Laguna: "That's the spirit! Then, Ellone sends Rinoa and Ultimecia to the past! Ellone brings back Rinoa! Then, head to the future through compressed time!"
Laguna: "Ultimecia lives far in the future where none of us can technically exist. There's only one way to make yourself exist in a world like that!"
[Throughout the next bit, Laguna is gesturing passionately like he's giving a hot-blooded shonen speech.]
Laguna: "As friends, don't forget one another! As friends, believe in one another! Believe in your friends' existence! And they'll also believe in yours. To be friends, to like one another, and to love one another… You can't do these things alone. You need somebody. Right, guys?"
Laguna: "What place reminds you of your friends? Imagine being in that place with all your friends. Once time compression begins, think of that place and try to get there! That's all! That place will welcome you. You'll be able to get there no matter what period you're in! You need love and friendship for this mission! And the courage to believe it."
Laguna: "It's all about love, friendship, and courage! I'm counting on you guys!"
He really went and said 'surviving this should be physically impossible, but nothing is impossible with the power of friendship.' I love him. It's like he was designed in a lab to be Squall's kryptonite.
Except, Squall has had his own character growth over the course of this game, and so, once everyone's left the room to go to their positions on the Ragnarok, he pauses before leaving, turns to Laguna, and instead of making a snarky comment in his mental voice or rolling his eyes and saying 'whatever,' he tells the man:
Squall: "Love and friendship and all that sounds corny, but everyone seems to be up for it."
Laguna: "You think it'll succeed?"
Squall: "We'll try."
[Squall leaves, and Laguna's bad leg suddenly starts cramping, so after all this cool speechifying our last image of him in this scene is him doing comical pantomime.]
I love this. I love that Squall still thinks this is corny as hell but is okay with it because his friends are, that Laguna actually acknowledges his own doubt by asking if Squall believes it'll work, and that Squall gives the most positive answer he's capable of, which is also the most sincere thing he's ever said: All they can do is try, and they'll try their best, and whatever happens, happens. Squall isn't big on hope, or faith, but he believes in one thing, and it's in doing things with his own two hands.
So that's our course set. Seifer is aboard the Lunatic Pandora, probably holding Ellone captive. We'll head there, kick his ass for the… Third? And hopefully final time, save the girl, and then fight Adel, which will probably be the final boss of the dungeon. Then, we trigger Time Compression, and that will be our final dungeon - and at the end, Ultimecia in her future world.
The end is in sight, which makes this a good stopping point.
Before we leave, though, let's run around the Ragnarok a little bit - Laguna came aboard, so we can have incidental dialogue with him; he just says "Let's talk when it's all done. I have a lot to tell you… Well, if you don't want to hear it, I'll understand." Wow, such mysterious! What could Laguna have to say to Squall personally that's at the same time really important but also best left until after their fate-of-the-world final confrontation? That could be aaaaanything.
Oh, also, we can challenge Laguna to a card game…
…and he plays the Squall card. Fascinating.
Hey, let's just talk to Kiros and Ward while we're there, why not? I'm sure they have interesting things to say.
…
Okay I was playing coy with it but I do have to admit I wasn't expecting the game to all but just have the characters come out and say it several plot beats ahead of when it's actually supposed to be revealed. That is. Wow. I think calling this 'implication' would be generous at best. They stop barely short of saying the words 'Laguna is your father and Raine was your mother', but only just.
Some friends you can trust with your family secrets, psh.
God but this does mean that Laguna didn't just let Ellone be taken to an orphanage and then adopted by Balamb Garden, but also Squall, while he was very much alive and the President of the most powerful nation on Earth. This man has reached undefeated levels of deadbeat dad, holy shit.
And the cherry on top? Squall may be the densest neutronium brick on Earth when it comes to certain things, but him just standing there and letting Ward and Kiros directly comment on his mother and father's appearances to his face and him not responding at all just, goes way past what my suspension of disbelief and acceptance of the 'dialogue outside of mandatory cutscenes isn't allowed to affect the plot or character development' principle. There is only one way I can make sense of this:
Squall has already figured out Laguna is his father, and he is simply refusing to acknowledge this or ask Laguna about it out of sheer stubborn frustration at being related to this ridiculous man.
Top tier, A+, 10/10 Characterization of the Year.
Thank you for reading.
Next Time: Raiding Lunatic Pandora!
E.I.G.
Robo-Bird
- Pronouns
- It/They
The best part of this, is that it appears to be a family trait to get handed the control over powerful groups.
This is technically speaking the leader of the most powerful nation on the planet discussing a contract with the leader of the strongest mercenary group on the planet.
This is technically speaking the leader of the most powerful nation on the planet discussing a contract with the leader of the strongest mercenary group on the planet.
- Pronouns
- Him/He
I think it's telling, and very self aware, that the game itself explicitly says 'Who cares how time travel works? LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP ARE WHAT MATTERS.', multiple times, so even those in the back can hear it.
For all it's flaws and frustrations, FF8 knows exactly what it's about, and puts it all right there for everyone to see.
Now that we're most of the way through the game, we haven't really had any 'what the fuck is going on with this characterization?' moments, have we?
FF6 had a lot of moments where there was like two different characters taking turns being in the story with the same name and sprite, and FF7 had a few really in depth characters, and a few that didn't really make sense when you looked at them as a whole, but FF8 seems to have really gotten the Characterization down solid, even if the plotting may be a bit screwy at times in service to the characterization.
For all it's flaws and frustrations, FF8 knows exactly what it's about, and puts it all right there for everyone to see.
Now that we're most of the way through the game, we haven't really had any 'what the fuck is going on with this characterization?' moments, have we?
FF6 had a lot of moments where there was like two different characters taking turns being in the story with the same name and sprite, and FF7 had a few really in depth characters, and a few that didn't really make sense when you looked at them as a whole, but FF8 seems to have really gotten the Characterization down solid, even if the plotting may be a bit screwy at times in service to the characterization.