I was wondering whether I should link this precise post, myself.
You gotta wonder what the hell the translators were thinking. It's bad enough changing the stuff relating to Time Compression to make it intentionally more confusing, but changing Ultimecia's way of speaking so all her Cs are Ks is practically goofy.
The whole Griever thing, too, must really come out of nowhere in the English translation proper. It misses the point that Griever is a thing at all (and strong as he is) precisely because he draws upon Squall's beliefs.
Can't speak for anybody else, but in my case, I wanted to have the translation out before you posted the ending because otherwise it would have certainly been lost in the discussion of the ending. Plus, maybe knowing the different translation of Artemisia's speech might help when you make your call on your opinion of her as a villain in the wrap up post, right? Seems like important information to put out there for you to consider.
Doesn't Omi have a Discord for this plus streaming? I think? It seems it would be better to wait there for Omi to reach that particular point, mention the difference in localization, then provide it to him after. 🤔
Welcome back, class, to Final Fantasy 401. Today's lesson:
Time Compression
Last time, we defeated Sorceress Adel, sent Ultimecia to the past in Adel's body, and Ultimecia initiated Time Compression.
Today, we resume at that very moment when the world starts coming undone.
There was a particular fascination in the 90s with this kind of CGI fluidity - not just water physics, we've talked about those before, but those trippy fluids moving and bubbling in shapes like this. I wonder if it's because animating a whole surface 'moving' was a step up from animating a skeleton with very basic articulations, so this was a display of technological prowess?
Here, the very fabric of Adel's sealing room warps and begins to stretch down into an impossible sky until, in a flash of light, it spits out the party.
Moments ago, they were at the heart of the Lunatic Pandora. Now, they are falling through the sky, without ground anywhere in sight. And as they do, the world around them begins to distort, to warp. Silvery bubbles appear in the sky around them, wobbling, but in their reflection we see flashes of past FMVs.
Time Compression - moments from the past emerging into reality. It's a neat visual for a fairly abstract concept.
Selphie asks where they're all going, when one of the bubbles starts blowing up in size, and everyone falls through - into what looks like water, but they're all still able to speak, so it's more like… A figurative sea of memory?
Put a pin in the idea of Time Compression having a blurry line between 'affects physical reality' and 'affects memories.' We'll get back to it eventually.
Squall tells everyone to head to Edea's house, and Rinoa is afraid she'll disappear, but he tells her to stay by his side and he won't let her.
The idea that's emerging there seems to be that while caught within Time Compression, one's memories and will can act as a lodestone, guiding one towards specific places and moments in time, and that's what Squall is doing - trying to move forward while focusing on a memory of the orphanage. In so doing, they rise to the 'surface' of the water and, when they cross it, start 'falling' into the sky, a flock of black birds engulfing them and turning into a tunnel of light.
We emerge in the white-curtained room where Rinoa first approached Edea back in Disc 1. In front of us is a save point; approaching it first causes the obligatory save menu notification to pop up… Then it goes away and the save point, uh, multiplies.
The room is filled with save points, and all of them are non-functional. It's trippy, confusing, and it's breaking the fourth wall - save points have never had an in-game reality, they're purely a gameplay contrivance, so what does it mean that the game is playing tricks on us with them? Ultimately nothing save that the game is about to start messing with our UI and gameplay capabilities, and that it wants us destabilized.
We pass through the doors, and just as Rinoa did, we find Edea sitting in her chair. Only this time, when she gets up, her form blurs and splits, and two Edeas turn around to look at us…
Enter a new enemy. A 'Sorceress from beyond time.' What does that mean? Does she come from the past, the future, or outside reality itself? Scan doesn't reveal her HP total, but she is a weak opponent. One hit is enough to dispatch her. Only, when we do, she twirls around, her form stretching and fading, and another emerges.
Two sorceresses land on the ground as our surroundings warp and shift and we find ourselves in Timber.
The sorceress battle proceeds like this - each individual sorceress is weak, with low HP and basic spells, but every time we defeat one, we are transported to a new environment from the past. From the beach, to Esthar's streets, to the Garden's sparring grounds…
Eventually, a second type of sorceress appears, though Scan doesn't reveal any new information about them. This one self-buffs with Double, but ultimately her HP is too low to pose a threat. More of this second type appears, and we're taken the Fire Cave and Winhill, until finally one last sorceress type emerges, boring a hole through reality, her form twisted into something like a caterpillar.
We are no longer inside any recognizable place from our memories. We're standing on a chunk of rock drifting in a dark, red wind.
The sorceress starts a countdown, and whatever's at the end of it probably isn't very good. Every time we attack her, she responds with a strange attack, moving sinuously towards the character and then flicking her hands around them, as if caressing them, and dealing considerable damage. Still, our own damage severely outpaces her own, and she never gets to finish her countdown.
She changes color, erupting in light and disintegrating not unlike the Ultima Weapon and Adel. We move to the post-battle screen, and emerge… Right where we wanted to be.
Edea's house.
Though easy, this series of battles against the sorceresses was an incredible mood-setter. The weird enemy animation, the disturbing entrances and exits, the 'enemy from beyond time', the constant moving through time and places as the textures around us seem to distort and melt, really captured the feeling of being caught in a reality going haywire, where time and physics stop mattering.
The house is as it was during the orphans' childhood, with beds made and furniture intact, at least until they step onto the beach, where the back of the house is in the same state of disrepair it is in the present… And then, an image starts to overlap with the house. A vision of the future.
It is a beach, but not the same beach; the coastline is different and the lighthouse is gone. It is connected rather by the idea of being a beach and the presence of SeeDs - White SeeDs, specifically. The legacy of the White Ship seems to have endured, perhaps beyond that of Balamb Garden. Dead SeeDs, most importantly, lying on the ground of this future beach under the dark, looming presence of Ultimecia's Castle.
An extravagant piece of architecture, with crenelated walls, towers raising in pointed spires, gargoyles so large they would dwarf small houses, shrouded in a perpetual dark cloud and sitting on a jagged chunk of earth torn out of the ground and floating over the ocean under the oversized moon, bound to the earth only by chains.
It's notable how there is nothing futuristic about this castle. Ultimecia's aesthetic leans entirely towards the gothic, towards stone walls and firelight, chandeliers and portcullis. Like as much this is a purely aesthetic preference, the sorceress's own aesthetic tastes enabled by magic so powerful it does not need the convenience of modern technology. At the same time… It could just as well imply a broken future, in which the perpetual fighting against the sorceresses and Ultimecia's own reign of terror have dragged mankind back down to premodern levels of technology, a slow post-apocalypse in which a Renaissance castle pulled out into the sky is an overwhelming fortress that you don't have artillery to reach.
But most likely she just liked the aesthetic.
We walk across a ruined battlefield full of dead SeeDs, and begin to climb onto one of the chains connecting the castle to the earth. It's a very striking visual. Halfway up the chain, we run into a set of three doors, kinda Ancient Greek in vibe, each one spilling light. It'd be easy to assume they're just decorative, but we lose nothing by trying to jump over, and…
…hm.
Okay, I was fully not expecting a portal back to the present. Like, it's a point of no return, I was expecting it to be more… Point of return-y. And it turns out, it is, it's just…
Well, so, I'm exploring, right? Each of the three doorways leads to a different location on the planet. We have Enc-None equipped, but notably even with it off we just run into standard leveled encounters for the various regions.
First, the northern continent, checking out Galbadia; and as we approach the prison…
It is surrounded by a circle of light.
The same is true of all the towns on the map. Rather than radically change the world map, the devs placed a 'shield' around every town so we can't enter. Which is… Okay, I guess. But then what's the point of being able to come back?
Well.
Some places are untouched. So for instance, we can visit the Odin Monument, say to grab the Tonberry GF if we didn't already get it. Alternatively, it's possible to skip the Gilgamesh sequence and get Odin for the end game by not acquiring him until after the Seifer fight, then doing a quick pass by the Centra Ruins and doing the dungeon and fight, so you can have Odin for the final dungeon. Why you would do this I have no earthly idea; but you sure can!
There's another thing. We can see the red dot indicating the location of the Ragnarok on the map, but it's… Pretty far.
Still, if it's indicated in the map, it must be that we can access it, right?
Long story short: Yes, and it takes time and a little navigation. We need to find one of the chocobo forests (the kid is still there, still asking for money, completely oblivious to the ongoing collapse of space-time). Then we have to run across the shallows to reach the Cactuar Desert, and there we find our ship!
…
I'm just…
I don't understand what this game considers 'essential content.'
There is an incredibly obviously signposted point of no return. Except it's not actually, you can come back to the present day even after going through an apocalyptic nightmare trip through space and time fighting witches from beyond time! Well, you can't use that to visit the Shumi Tribe or get any glimpse of how any normal human being is reacting to the ongoing collapse of reality, and you definitely can't visit Garden. You can go and get Odin and Tonberry if you missed them, though, and the Deep Sea Base is obviously important to have available for as long as possible, that part's normal. Oh, yeah, and obviously also essential is the children's card game sidequest. Couldn't risk missing out on that.
Xu wanted to play some cards with Squall, so she and the CC just, left Garden, traveled across half the world, found the Ragnarok wherever it was dumped by the time compression, got onboard, and only then realized anything was weird?
Xu: "Oh, am I glad to see you! I wanted Squall to play cards with the CC group members. And when I got here… no one was around. Then all that ruckus started outside. What on earth is going on? Is this all because of that Sorceress Ultimecia?" Squall: "Yeah, time compression is starting. We have to kill Ultimecia before she begins compressing time in this world." Xu: "Hmmm… Sounds serious. Go kick some butt!!!!" Xu: "Oh, Squall. Since the CC members are all here… Why don't you play a hand with us? We all learned rules from around the world. And Quistis… I mean, Cardmaster King will play in the airlock." Xu: "Go defeat Ultimecia! I'm behind you 100%."
These guys have a one-track mind and I kind of respect it. Play cards until the end of the world, sure, why not.
All the CC members can be found at varying points of the Ragnarok, just… Hanging out.
Jack: "But watching you guys in action, I get the feeling that everything is going to be okay..."
This is literally the only 'visiting a place with NPCs during the end game and getting encouragements' bit we're getting. These. Fucking. Yu-Gi-Oh cosplayers. Incredible.
Of course, now that we have the Ragnarok, we can use it to travel the world. There's not really much to see, given that we completed basically everything before initiating time compression, but hey, it's there if we need it!
Also, Rinoa has some fascinating dialogue in the cockpit:
Rinoa: "Even if Ultimecia is defeated, it won't change the fact that she was born. My powers will be carried on across generations and eventually reach Ultimecia. What does it mean to inherit Ultimecia's power?"
This is an interesting implication, of course - Rinoa gained her powers because of Ultimecia's actions, and Rinoa's powers will eventually be part of the powers that Ultimecia gathers into herself in the distant future. Whatever strength Rinoa gathers will ultimately feed the final sorceress. Because our plan is to kill Ultimecia in the future, we are not taking any steps to prevent her rise. Indeed, preventing it might be impossible; the game has leaned pretty strongly in the direction of everything being a stable time loop, which…. I have to just bite my tongue and accept, I guess. Whatever.
~~Of course this is foreshadowing for when it turns out that Rinoa's power will 'reach Ultimecia' because she, herself, is Ultimecia~~
Anyway, with this détour over, let's head back to the future.
Zell: "...Whoa…! So this is her castle?" Selphie: "Finally." Irvine: "I've never seen anything so creepy. You think what's-her-face really lives there?" Rinoa: "We've come this far. She's gotta be here." Quistis: "So this is the future… Where Ultimecia reigns…" Squall: "I don't know what's going on. But since we're still here, I think we still have some time to do our job." Quistis: "What are we going to do, Squall?" Squall: "We'll divide into two parties."
OH NOOOOO
NOT THE DREADED 'YOU HAVE TO ACTUALLY USE YOUR BACKBENCHERS'
WHY DO THEY ALWAYS DO THIS
Blah. I never intended for Zell to be part of my endgame party but the fact is, taking him along on the Deep Sea Base pulled him far, far ahead of the last three. So I just put my three 'endgame' party members in one party, the other three in the second party, and we'll tweak it if that doesn't work.
We approach the gates, and they part, releasing mist into the night (extremely Addams Family core). Then there's a flash of light, and a message I, uh, wasn't expecting.
"The parties' powers have been sealed by Ultimecia's servants. The following powers have been sealed: Item, Magic, GF, Draw, Command Ability, Limit Break, Resurrection, Save."
Which is, uh, hm.
Everything?
The game just disabled its entire gameplay.
This screenshot is from a little later after I unlocked Magic, which would normally be greyed out.
These aren't merely combat abilities being disabled. I cannot use items; I cannot use spells; I cannot use Abilities, including any refining abilities. I cannot save the game.
I mean, I can, because I'm using an emulator, and you better believe that I'm not going to be ignoring the quicksave function as some kind of self-imposed challenge. We are not dealing with this bullshit today, 1999 game design; this is 2024, free saving is my unalienable right and yes, I do make manual save backups for games that presume to have the audacity to force me into single-file autosave runs.
Cut for image count.
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Final Fantasy VIII, Part 33.B: Time Compression & Ultimecia's Castle
With essentially every game mechanic disabled, we find ourselves at the foot of a spiral staircase in the main hall of a castle that is giving Resident Evil 1, Dracula vibes. In some ways, this is going to be a massively uptiered vision of the Shinra Mansion. It's gaudy as hell in all the best ways.
Throughout the dungeon, we'll see these green circles on the floor: They allow us to swap control between each party. This will be used twice for puzzles, but for the most part they're a matter of convenience; there's a circle in most rooms so that we can freely change parties as we like.
For now, let's start with our strongest party and explore in a random direction - say, the left side of the room. Turns out there's a door, and it leads into this sweet topdown view of a corridor with entirely too many gargoyles in the rafters.
If this was a horror game I would be expecting those to drop down on my head any second now.
This leads us to a room that I'm going to call the 'Chandelier Room' because of the prominent lighting apparatus above. When I approach this room's green circle, it tells me a lever was depressed, and I hear a clicking mechanism - something, somewhere has opened up. Interesting! I decide to swap over to the second group to explore elsewhere while my first party has the lever locked (if I move them from the green spot, it unclicks).
Once I do I feel a little silly, because the game's limited view frame just barely obscured the fact that there was a boss sitting at the top of the stairs, right there in the first room, and I would have seen it immediately if I'd gone up instead of left.
Right away, as in at the top of the same stairs we just saw below, we run into our first boss, an imposing creature with a vaguely sphinx-like design. When we reach it, it challenges us, and battle begins.
This is 'Sphinxaur.' Being the first available boss in the level, it is necessarily designed such that a group with only the Attack command can defeat it, otherwise we would be softlocked at the very least. Which means this isn't the most exciting of battles, since we literally only have one command and a single target. Sphinxaur casts Blizzare, but we have high Spirit, so we just tank it and trade damage until its mask breaks, revealing its human face and giving it a new name, Sphinxara.
Sphinxara immediately follows up by summoning Jelleye, a fairly low tier enemy even accounting for level scaling. I don't particularly want to face attacks from two enemies at once, though, so we focus fire and quickly take it down.
This proves to be a mistake. Immediately after Jelleye's demise, Sphinxara summons Forbidden, a skeleton-type enemy with more powerful attacks and significantly more HP. Its Iai blow takes out Selphie, leaving me with only two party members.
I scramble to kill Forbidden, and Sphinxara replies by summoning Tri-Face, which is capable of inflicting Confusion on the entire party and causing a wipe. I immediately abandon all thoughts of dispatching that add and just focus fire on Sphinxara, desperate to kill it before Tri-Face can kill me.
And it works!
Sphinxara starts exploding and melting and disintegrating in an impressive light show, as will all the bosses we'll meet in this dungeon. And once the fight is over, we get to unseal one of our powers.
Just one.
This is… tricky. There are obvious first choices, but, hm. Okay, the two most versatile picks, by far, are Item and Magic. I have spent the entire game building up spell stores, so we might as well use this opportunity to use them. So I unseal magic.
…whereupon it turns out that because 'Resurrection' is still sealed, I can't raise Selphie. I can heal characters who are KO, but if one of my characters is taken out, then they're going to stay taken out until I spend a seal pick on 'Resurrection,' even if I have Items, Magic, and a supply of Phoenix Downs and Life. And as it happens, Selphie is KO.
So I decide to just reload. Knowing that Sphinxaur's adds are a trap makes it easier to just focus on it while ignoring Jelleye, and the fight remains extremely simple.
It turns out, because passive commands aren't disabled, auto-potion still works. This proves a boon.
Bam, done, beat it with everyone alive, unlock Magic, move on through the big conspicuous door behind it.
It looks like we're on a balcony level on the second floor of the Chandelier Room - and we can cross by walking over said chandelier! Neat! The large door behind us lead us to another balcony, an external one this one, and an imposing figure waiting for us.
This is Krysta - though a unique boss, we've met its Triple Triad card quite a few times. Scan helpfully informs us that it counters attacks. Unfortunately, we only have two commands, Attack and Magic, which severely limits our options. I decide to throw a spell at it to test if it only reacts to physical attacks…
No luck. Its counter is strong enough to kill Quistis and Selphie, and Irvine can't survive more than one hit. I can't raise dead characters, and I can't hit it with either attacks or magic, so this is a wash. The group quickly wipes and we need to find a different approach. Luckily, there's an obvious one: Just beat up on other bosses until more of our power has been unlocked.
We take back control of the Squall Squad (the Squalld?) and leave the green circle to investigate a suspicious hatch in the floor. Unfortunately, a message tells us it is rusted shut and can't be open. So what should we do?
It turns out the lever in the green circle was keeping the chandelier up so that we could cross over to Krysta. Without a party to hold it up, attempting to cross the chandelier causes it to crash down under the weight (it then rises up again, so we haven't permanently lost the path to Krysta or anything). This is actually a good thing: The shock has blown the rust off the hatch, and we can now force it open!
We head down into the wine cellar, where a floating monster called Tri-Point welcomes us by announcing "USING ELEMENTAL ATTACKS. WHATEVER I USE, I DON'T LIKE." This is a hint as to how its elemental weaknesses work - its weakness swaps between Fire and Ice (while Lightning remains neutral) and it swaps every time we hit it, so the ideal form is to have characters with junctioned elemental attacks take turns bouncing it back and forth. It is neutral to Lightning, and its most powerful attack, Mega Spark, hits for thousands of damage, so walking in absorbing lightning would also be optimal.
However we have Meteor and Str 255 Squall, so we don't need to do any of that and just tear it to shreds.
Once we've dealt with the threat, the next obvious unlock would be Items to fully open up our possibilities, but I've been traumatized by Selphie's incurable KO so I instead pick Resurrection in case another one of my characters falls.
We then swap over to the Quistis Squad (the Quad?) and head to the right of the building, through another spiral staircase to the Painting Room.
Even through Time Compression, Balamb Garden's payment system endures.
I love this room. I mean, I hate the puzzle we have to solve there, but I love the room. When we enter, if we move to the left, we find this huge interactable painting:
We are however told that the title of the painting is too faint to read. The puzzle we have to solve is reconstituting that title, and in order to do this, we must examine every other painting in the room. And the reason why I love this room, is because it's a gorgeous gallery of pre-rendered paintings of various subjects. Some are landscapes, some are plays on well-known paintings like Rembrandt's Night Watch, others are mythological subjects… And they're all really cool, and I really wish I had access to a high-resolution render of each one. There are twelve of them in total so I can't really include them all, but here's a selection of my favorites:
Once we've gotten a look at each painting, we go back to the original painting, and we are given a list of the titles and asked to figure out the painting's name:
This is where I stalled.
What the fuck am I supposed to do here? Well, picking names at random based on 'vibes' ends after three. So it's clear that the painting's title comprises of the name of three other paintings, we just have to figure out which ones. Attempting to work it out based on the subjects runs into the issue that the resolution is too low, the painting too blurry; it almost definitely involves Vividarium (Garden), but other than that? No clue. This is a dead end.
…
The answer has nothing to do with paintings. The answer is a clock.
The painting room is composed of a total of four screens. From the far end of one of those screens, we can see that the floor is actually a clock, set to 8:20:30 - but the actual time doesn't matter, only the roman numerals do: VIII, 4 rendered as IIII (rather than the correct IV), and VI.
So we go back to the painting, and pick the names in order in which they appear in the list: Xiphias, Vigil, Viator. Does this work?
OF COURSE NOT. Because the clock isn't indicating anything like a time or even a set of numbers, the numbers don't matter, the letters within the numbers do.
VIII: Vividarium
IIII: Intervigilium
VI: Viator
This fucking game.
The correct title of the painting is "Vividarium et intervigilium et viator," which the game translates as, "In The Garden Sleeps A Messenger."
Once the title is revealed, the painting changes; the skies clear, the ominous shape in the distance fades, and the vegetation returns to life.
Sure kinda reminds you of Edea's house, doesn't it? A topic which would make a lot of sense if Ultimecia was Rinoa distantly remembering that place as where she made her promise!
This, of course, rouses a monster from its slumber, and initiates a boss battle.
Trauma is vulnerable to wind, and can spawn Droma, a miniature drone with its own pulse cannon. Said pulse cannon is particularly dangerous to this group, because they only have the dregs of the magic junctions I didn't give to my main party so their stats are low. It is also the first time our new friend shows up:
Gilgamesh can appear at any point during the battle. He lands amidst a circle of four blades - Excalipoor, Excalibur, Masamune, and Zantetsuken. Excalipur is the 'joke option,' dealing only one damage; the others are supposed to be useful.
There's just one problem: the Zantetsuken option isn't disabled against bosses. Nor does it bypass instant death immunity. Which means Gilgamesh can just show up, use Zantetsuken, whiff, and leave, having accomplished nothing. As happens here.
It's not ideal.
Long story short though, we still win. We unlock the Draw command, and proceed with the Irvine Initiative. Our next step takes us underground, to what appears to be the castle's dungeon; there's a locked armory door, and a prison cell. We enter it, only for it to close behind us and a new opponent to appear.
The Red Giant is the fourth of nine bosses we're going to be confronting so allow me to keep this story short: it hits very hard and is very tough, but we eventually win. When we do, it plays this sick death animation where it goes still and its entire surface corrodes before disintegrating.
Hell yeah.
We unlock the GF command, grab the prison key which was unwisely kept inside the cell, get out, and swap to the Rinoa Roundabout to finally deal with Krysta.
I made a gamble that GFs don't trigger its counterattack, and am quickly proven correct. Doomtrain, Bahamut and Eden blast the irritating piece of overgrown jewelry to smithereens with minimal threat to us. Before it dies, Krysta surprises us with one last mechanic; it casts Ultima before dying, which could result in a game over even if we 'won' if our party wasn't in top health. Fortunately, we are, and for its special animation, Krysta appropriately shatters, like crystal.
Cool.
Next up, we investigate the left wing further, passing through a chapel, to a rickety bridge - when we cross it, our footsteps cause it to shake, and an item that was resting on it to fall off the edge. Oops!
We pass through a gigantic clock tower, where an enormous pendulum swings above the chasm at its center; we enter the clockwork, go out onto the clock's face, and climb down from the hands.
Aesthetically this is definitely one of the coolest dungeons in the franchise. The gothic aesthetic is frankly unmatched, and the way the game uses pre-rendered background really allows each individual setpiece to shine. It also helps that most of the rooms have a clear purpose; unlike might have happened in previous games, most of the castle isn't composed of generic corridors or rooms. Instead we go from the Courtyard to the Chapel to the Clocktower to the Bridge, or from the Stairway to the Painting Room to the Dungeon to the Armory. It's really good. It also drives home that Enc-None is the best thing to happen to this game because if I had to travel through these uptillion individual screens while dealing with a normal level of random encounters I would scream. I still deal with mobs while with the Irvine party in a vain hope of leveling them up a bit (it doesn't really work, for whatever reason the XP gains seem shockingly low), but at least Squall's party is blessedly exempt.
Down from the clock tower, we find a bridge leading to a smaller, individual building. Squall warns us that this is Ultimecia's chambers; frankly we probably could fight her in our current state but I'm not doing that without first unlocking all my abilities and defeating every boss in the castle, so we turn around and head back to do the rest.
Turns out, the item on the rickety bridge was the Armory Key, and that bridge was over the dungeons, so the key just… Fell down there, right in front of the door we have to use it on. Neat!
The boss waiting for us in the armory is composed of Vysage and its hands, Lefty and Righty. I don't know if I've ever brought it up before, but this is a random encounter, which raises my eyebrow a little; some of the bosses we've run into in the castle have been reskins of random encounters, but this one literally just is a random encounter, which feels underwhelming. Where the devs really just that out of time and/or ideas?
Well… No. Vysage is one of the funniest gags in the game. The fight starts off as normal - Vysage is a status effect attacker, he inflicts Doom which puts a timer at the end of which Rinoa will be KO, we deploy multi-hitting spells, blast it with Holy and Bahamut, and then, as its HP is exhausted…
It pulls itself out of the ground, revealing that the Vysage which we saw this before was but three appendages of a single, gargantuan mummy that laid buried underground, and who immediately starts blasting us with its Evil Eye attack, inflicting Slow and Curse on everyone.
It's a very funny 'oh shit' moment but ultimately this is still the Zell Zone we're talking about and we just have Eden sent it into another galaxy to explode, whereupon it vanishes and I unlock Commands.
Cut for image count.
Final Fantasy VIII, Part 33.C: Time Compression & Ultimecia's Castle
We are now running out of easily accessible bosses. Actually defeating every boss in Ultimecia's Castle (in order to unlock all our sealed abilities) is a challenging task mostly because of the goddamned puzzles getting in the way. The next one I would never have pulled off without a guide, because it requires picking up a hidden key by pressing X on a random floor tile with no indication whatsoever of being special.
That key unlocks the treasure vault, which contains four empty chests. Interacting with each chest causes itself and up to one other chest to open or close; this is a basic puzzle in which we need to figure out the order in which to interact with each chest in order to have them all open at once, whereupon smoke pours out and a new monster appears.
Catoblepas: "What do you humans plan to do… Against the likes of me…?"
Catoblepas talks a big game and, appropriately, it has the highest HP of any boss we've fought so far at 38,500 and is modeled after a Behemoth blown up to enormous proportions and given a badass evil makeover. Its attacks deal high damage but, in the end, a little under 40k is just enough to survive three Darksides from Squall and die on the fourth; I take advantage of the time between those attacks to Draw Meteor from it. Similarly to Krysta, Catoblepas has a last ditch attack, in its case Meteor, which isn't enough to make a dent in our party.
At this point, the only sealed abilities left are Limit Break and Save, and we don't need Save, so I quickly grab Limit Breaks.
And now for the (almost) final boss of the Castle and our final sealed ability, which is hidden behind the most infuriating puzzle in the game.
Please allow me to explain. There is a room with two lifts:
Lifts indicated by the glowing green circles which also serve to swap parties.
The lifts are weight-operated: If we arrive from the right-hand balcony, we enter the right-hand lift, which causes it to go down, and the left-hand lift to rise in turn. However, as soon as there is no longer any weight on the righ-hand lift, it will rise, causing the left-hand lift to go down again.
This poses a problem: We need the left-hand lift to access the left-hand balcony to get to the (almost) last boss. But we can do that by going through the left-hand lift, because as soon as we depart, it rises. And we can't do it by approaching from the south entrance, because getting in the left-hand lift while it's down will just do nothing.
Now, the solution is plainly obvious. You just load Party A into the left-hand lift, then swap control over to Party B, have Party B climb into the right-hand lift, and they will go down, causing Party A to go up and reach the balcony. Obvious, right?
Well, no.
Here, you can see both parties just standing around like idiots as the lifts fail to budge at all. The problem has, somehow, become worse; Irvine's party can't even get down.
So what's the solution?
Well, I'm going to let you think about it for a bit. Really ponder it. Just think of the most sensible way for this puzzle to work. Really just, take a minute.
Okay?
…
Boys are heavier than girls.
No, really, that's it.
Each party member has a hidden weight variable. In the picture above, the lifts are stuck because the party made up of Squall (boy), Zell (boy) and Rinoa (girl) is heavier than the party composed of Irvine (boy), Quistis (girl), and Selphie (girl), so the left-hand lift is stuck to the ground.
The solution to the puzzle is to invert the parties, so that Quistis/Selphie/Irvine are in the left-handed lift, and the heavier Squall/Zell/Rinoa party gets on the right-handed lift, causing it to go down and raise the lighter party up to the balcony.
I feel like every FF8 developer should go to jail?
Words cannot express the intensity of the mental 'FUCK OFF' I let out when I saw this was the solution.
Doing so gives us access to the floodgate key, which -
Wait I thought there would be a boss here. What do you mean there's not? Okay, so what am I supposed to do with the 'floodgate key' and where is the (almost) final boss?
…
The floodgate key is used in the dungeons as part of an entirely separate puzzle that doesn't lead to a boss. This puzzle instead requires us to first use the floodgate key to drain the water level in a separate part of the underground. Then, we need to head to the chapel and play the church organ.
For a brief moment there I have a traumatic flashback to the piano minigames in FF7 and FF7 Rebirth. This, however, is wholly different. We are not being asked to play anything good. No, you see, there is no immediate result for playing anything on the organ. However, unbeknownst to us, there is another screen which has a grate with eight bars. Whichever key we played last before ending the 'concert' corresponds to a given bar, which will be lowered when we next visit. But the grate only 'remembers' a single concert at a time.
Which means, we need to press every single key at once in order to lower all the bars and move through. Let me tell you, pressing all the face buttons and all the trigger and shoulder buttons on a Playstation controller at the same time is annoying as hell. Still, after I've contorted my fingers in the requisite way, we access the formerly flooded section of the castle.
There, we find a Rosetta Stone, which teaches a GF Ability x 4. I can't even really be mad; Ability x 4 is a really good ability. But fuck me that was an obtuse puzzle, and it's gotten us no closer to the (almost) last boss.
No, in order to find that boss, we need to head back to the clocktower, reach its top, and jump onto the swinging pendulum.
Ultimecia's Castle sure looks worn down as hell.
Doing this will allow us to reach a broken piece of the stairs and head out to the outside, where on a piece of broken floor exposed to the wind, we find the dragon, Tiamat. This is the first time we see Tiamat since II, and she's back in a less… copyright-infringing form, though still a dragon. She is, in fact, a fancier-colored Bahamut, with a deeper palette and gold accents.
'Used to be a GF' - a fascinating statement, but one without much more for us to go on.
Tiamat is even tougher than Catoblepas, and Scan warns us of her Dark Flare. Tiamat is a similar fight to Odin: She doesn't do anything except charge up Dark Flare, the countdown to which is given to us in the form of the phrase 'Dark Flare' appearing on the screen a character at a time.
If we survive, she just starts charging Dark Flare again. Dark Flare does considerable damage - I waited it out just to see and the results weren't pretty:
Ultimately though, dealing over 80k damage in the space of a few rounds isn't that hard. Squall hits for 10k, Rinoa beats this with Meteor, and Zell has Bahamut junctioned, which is the superior dragon. It doesn't take us very long to bring down Tiamat, and Dark Flare is entirely optional.
Dragon slayer.
With this, we unlock the ability to Save, and our characters have regained their full power.
So! That takes care of (almost) all the bosses in Ultimecia's Castle - some where harder to find than others, but in the end, we got through all of them. So now is the time to confront the witch, right?
Well, not quite.
In the chapel, there's this ominous purple cloud. The first time we went through, its nature wasn't apparent; it's now clear however that this is the same purple smoke that heralds every boss's manifestation in this dungeon. This, therefore, is a boss in hiding - but there's no way to interact with it.
This is another two-party puzzle. Our secondary party, the one who won't fight, needs to go to one of the stairway rooms, where there is an obnoxiously positioned rope of the kind that old-timey manors such as this very castle have to ring bells and summon servants.
Ringing the bells causes the message 'Monsters can be heard roaring far away' to appear, bells to ring, and a 60 second timer to start counting down. During that time, we need to head to the green circle, swap over to the main party, and then have that party rush to the Chapel, where…
…the cloud of darkness has revealed its true nature as a silvery reskin of the Ultima Weapon.
In order to initiate battle, we must make contact, whereupon our opponent's identity is revealed.
"It is bad luck to run into this monster" is such a hilariously casual and understated sentence.
It looks like the Final Fantasy writers took the concept of the 'Ultima Weapon' that was used in VI and VII, and the name of the game's first true superboss 'Omega,' and decided to mash it together into the Omega Weapon, the true ultimate monster, one tier higher that every other ultimate monster that came before.
I dig it.
So, how fare the Omega Weapon as a superboss? Well, it's definitely stronger than Ultima. In fact, it's in a theoretical stronger than previous superbosses: The Emerald Weapon had a ludicrous 1,000,000 HP, but at lv 100 the Omega Weapon has that beat with a mind-boggling 1,161,000 HP. 16% higher HP for seemingly no reason other than to surpass its predecessor!
However, the picture is not so simple, because the Omega Weapon exists in a game with a much, much higher power level than VII.
Poison damage from Doomtrain actually heals TOW, but what we care about here is the Vit-0 effect, which lets Squall's attacks deal 9,999 damage a hit.
Squall can just hit 9,999 damage easily, every day. Rinoa's Meteor is even more powerful, dealing in the vicinity of 15,000 damage. While we're not yet in "Knights of the Round" territory, that one had sharp limitations (that you could, and indeed for superboss fights, mostly had to abuse with Mime), whereas this is a completely unenhanced Meteor; we have ways to push it higher. So damage isn't a huge problem. How about resistance? Our main challenge here will be surviving TOW's attacks until it does.
Well, TOW follows a set pattern: It opens the fight with lv 5 Death, instantly killing any character whose levels are multiples of 5, which in our case is Zell.
It follows this up with Meteor, which is the least dangerous of its attacks - its damage depends on Spirit values but it's at most a few thousand damage spread three ways. This, however, is followed by the much more dangerous Megido Flame:
Laser beams trace a pattern on the ground, which then explodes, dealing 9,998 damage to everyone.
This is not like Sephiroth's Heartless Angel, which just brought down characters to 1 HP. No, it deals 9,998 damage specifically. Meaning: Any character who doesn't have precisely 9,999 HP will die instantly no matter what.
So, victory was always impossible, as I showed up unprepared. No matter.
First, we need to head into the menu, and un-junction everything from Party B so we can have the entire GF roster on Party A.
Then, we play with Magic Junctions until everyone has 9,999 HP.
We perfect everyone's Junctions - get as many time spells as possible to Speed Junctions, as close to 255 in their 'main stat' as we can get, immunity to Instant Death to deal with Lv 5 Death for Zell…
And Cerberus, whose Counter Rockets summon gives everyone Triple.
This means I can buff the entire party at once, or heal everyone at once, and it means Rinoa can triple cast Meteor for 45,000 damage.
Now, that's still, like, more than 20 turns for 45k damage to cut through one million HP. So triple-casting Haste is a must. Now let's go.
Lv 5 Death is a breeze, Meteor is only a problem because we have to make sure everyone is back at full HP before the follow-up (Omega also throws in physical attacks with seemingly random timing which complicates planning), then everyone survives Megido Flame with 1 HP.
Then it's Triplecast Curaga time. We're past the Megido Flame gate; now it's down to whatever TOW's next move is. It turns out to be Gravija, which inflicts damage equal to 75% of current HP. That makes things a little awkward if we cast Curaga before Gravija, but otherwise it can't kill us so it's a free turn. And then…
Said move, it turns out, is Terra Break, a move in which the Omega Weapon shatters reality and casts us all into a dark void wherein it fires beams of light until this non-world explodes.
Terra Break casts 16 beams. Each beam has a default damage of around 4,000, halved by Protect.
That's, let me just do some quick math, oh, a cool 72,000 damage.
The beam's targeting is random, so while in theory it would be possible to survive it if every single beam decided to hit Zell or something, in practice this is simply too much damage. There is no hope of surviving this attack without special protection. Having everyone under Protect would take the total damage down to 36,000, which is still more than the total HP of all three characters in the party, but is close enough to that maximum that I could hope to have one survivor thanks to the beams' random spread landing inefficiently.
But that's still a grim prospect. What else do we have?
Well, Zell has the Defend command, which negates all physical damage on the turn it's used. Zell could conceivably Defend against Terra Break, then doublecast Full Life to bring Rinoa and Squall back to full HP. Sounds like a plan! Let's go again.
Gil, you stupid piece of shit, stop using Zantetsuken against bosses-
Attempt number three ends up scuffed as hell because I don't properly heal my character before Megido Flame, so only Squall survives it at 1 HP. Still, he can double-cast Full-Life, then Zell can defend and successfully tanks Terra Break. Awesome!
There's just one problem: Dying strips everyone of buffs. This should have been obvious, but at no point in my 'plan for two characters to be KO' journey did I really consider this factor. Also? TOW's followup to Terra Break is Ultima, dealing massive damage to the entire party, and then Pillar of Light, the irreducible 9,999 damage that always kills its target. I scramble to get everyone buffed again but by the time I do, I lose half the team to Megido Flame, and then Terra Break wipes them out. Another loss.
For my next move, I decide I'm tired of this. I take away Zell's Magic, and instead give him Item, and I use a Holy War on the first turn. It's cheap, but whatever; it lets us survive the first rotation and learn its pattern. When Holy War wears off, I triplecast Aura, allowing everyone to enter Limit Break.
Meteor Rinoa is an absolute beast, dealing 60-70,000 damage per turn. Unfortunately, against a million HP, it's less 'overwhelming victory' and more 'bare minimum to win.' There is, however, a new weapon in our arsenal.
Squall's Limit Break, Renzokuken, hits four to eight times, then after the final hit, has a chance to play a 'finishing move' that deals extra damage. This is Squall's Lion Heart, his ultimate finishing move.
It hits seventeen times.
That's a total of 21 to 25 hits. With Str 255 and Vit 0, each hit deals 9,999 damage.
That's a total of about 210,000 to 250,000 damage.
We're not out of the woodworks yet. Between Terra Break and Pillar of Light, KOs are unavoidable, and KOs strip buff, which means all my carefully arranged little architectures of destruction relying on Aura, Triple or Protect can't last forever and have to be frequently recast, all while TOW continues its endless repeating pattern, draining my resources. But in the end…
Meteor Rinoa, Squall's Lion Heart, and Zell's invaluable support in tapping the supply of Megalixir we've been gathering all game (they heal everyone for 9,999 HP) do the job. The Omega Weapon falls.
Our reward for this is a Three Stars and 250 AP, enough to instantly learn any GF Ability, but quite frankly at this point neither of those matter; the actual reward is the victory itself. It's not a clean victory, I did use one Holy War at the start, but frankly I am not doing this a fifth time just now, and I did play fairly for most of it.
…
A while back in the thread, someone asked what people's favorite final dungeons in the franchise were. A pretty consistent response, I've found, was 'VI or VIII.' So I was really curious and excited to get to VIII's final dungeon. So verdict?
Yeah, this might be the best final dungeon in Final Fantasy.
I complained in VII that the last dungeon was kind of nothing and didn't even have any cool bosses. Well, this one had a unique mechanic and nine bosses. Perhaps be careful what you wish for… But mostly I wished for exactly this?
A good final dungeon tests you on your mastery of all the mechanics you've learned during the game. Thanks to its initially annoying sealing gimmick, that is exactly what Ultimecia's Castle does: It brings you down to the bare essentials, and then asks you to pick your own abilities based on your understanding of the mechanics and how to best leverage each component of the system, and then it gives you a series of bosses in varying degrees of toughness to challenge in almost any order. Plus, it does so with a killer aesthetic; 'gothic castle that has a fucked up 19th mansion inside it' is just top tier. It's channeling Spencer Mansion, definitely; I am actually wondering if Bloodborne's Cainhurst Castle wasn't directly inspired by Ultimecia's Castle. The puzzles are… Annoyingly obtuse, but they have the merit of existing, and Enc-None means that we only have to deal with random encounters as much as we want to.
I thought of this is actually fun, rather than a chore, even if I did curse the devs' name a couple of times at baffling bits of design.
…
Can't help but notice that we're just… Not going to the moon though, huh. And that the final dungeon is entirely unrelated to the Lunar Cry that happened a few hours ago and was subsequently never noticed by anyone else on the planet, a Lunar Cry that is in fact wholly separate from and unrelated to the other apocalypse currently happening. Or that those legends about Hyne never materialized into anything main plot related. And that NORG never came back. And that the last time we saw Seifer was him handing Rinoa to Adel, then presumably running off screen while we were fighting her and just… Never appearing again. Not going to be a final miniboss, but not going to actually see the errors of his way or be forced to acknowledge his defeat on-screen, huh. 'Ultimecia possessing Adel in the past' was mentioned by Rinoa but we just, never actually saw that. Also, four out of those nine bosses were reskins of previous enemies, huh?
We'll have a bunch to talk about in the wrap-up post.
Well. I've just spent most of my evening going through Ultimecia's Castle, its bosses and its annoying puzzles, and I have claimed victory over them all. I'm not sticking around to re-fight the Omega Weapon today.
This is literally the only 'visiting a place with NPCs during the end game and getting encouragements' bit we're getting. These. Fucking. Yu-Gi-Oh cosplayers. Incredible.
The real hero of this story isn't any sorceress knight or himbo president, it's whatever exhausted bureaucrat is making sure that Squall and co keep getting their salary on time through arrests, visits to Atlantis, and the literal end of all spacetime.
As far as I am aware those card game NPCs have many (any?) special one off cards that you converted to materials to win again to once more convert to materials.
Making them a sort of really confused endgame shop mechanic for really rare stuff, with the limit being that you needed to complete that quest and get the rare cards in question first beforehand.
This was probably mentioned to you, but for people who haven't played this:
This is where the missed Drawn GFs show up. You can choose draw as your first command, and then if you missed one of the draw-from-enemies GF's they'll show up with a specific boss. Since at least three of the bosses are designed to be beatable entirely with attack commands +/- some elemental/status junctions, this lets 'one save file' players have another chance.
Also if you exit the front doors, all your abilities are unsealed and there's a save point. This lets you revive, heal, or do whatever before going back in and getting abilities resealed.
The dungeon also, naturally, has a pretty extensive background music playing for it, which is this pipe organ sounding thing that just fits the vibes perfectly.
Looking back at it, it's pretty clear that the team built and designed the ending dungeon extremely detailed, and then went back and started filling in some of the plot beats leading up to it when the deadline started looming.
This is pedantry, but IIII is actually correct specifically on clock-faces. This is the clock of the Palais de la Cite, and was installed in the 1300s, to show how old it is (people still hadn't fully adopted arabic numerals then, they knew how roman numerals worked), and that's a clear IIII. Now sure, some clocks don't do this - famously, the clock faces on Big Ben use IV - but I think the vast majority of roman numeral clock faces do, in fact, use IIII.
Additionally it was correct for romans wayyyy back when, as was VIIII for nine, but that's like, truly ancient history (subtractive use is younger than purely additive), but can still be seen on the colosseum:
Behold, gate entrance LIIII, or 54. There's also a gate XLIIII, which is gate 44, showing how even the romans weren't the most consistent with the entire thing, mixing both the additive and subtractive form. But yeah, in the modern times, IIII is accepted clockface notation specifically. Weird, huh?
These aren't merely combat abilities being disabled. I cannot use items; I cannot use spells; I cannot use Abilities, including any refining abilities. I cannot save the game.
This marked the second time when I was young that I put down my controller, turned off the game and went and did something else for a couple days. I think more than anything else, this is why I played FF8 once and never returned to it. It was the straw that broke the camel's back. I hate this kind of game design. Locking abilities is one of the fastest ways to turn me off from a game because it always screams of "the devs panicking that the game is too easy." A game really needs to put in the work, thematically and mechanically to convince me that locking abilities is good game design and FF8 doesn't come even a tenth as close.
I will say that thematically the sequence of getting to the orphanage is really strong; the bosses are cool, and I will agree the imagery of the final dungeon is very cool. It's just a shame the game put a home-run swing directly into my biggest gaming pet peeve.
These aren't merely combat abilities being disabled. I cannot use items; I cannot use spells; I cannot use Abilities, including any refining abilities. I cannot save the game.
You know the more I read these reviews the more I become simultaneously convinced I made the right decision to skip this game because I wouldn't have enjoyed playing it and sad that that's true, because they had some cool ideas.
We're heading into Time Compression, I highly doubt Neo-NORG is going to show up in Ultimecia's stronghold as a random boss. Maybe he'll get a beat in the epilogue?
Making a puzzle based on a never previously relevant secret character weight variable isn't the most obnoxious puzzle in the series, but I think it crosses the threshold for revocation of kneecap privileges.
When Roman Numerals were a going concern, they were a non-positional system. The order didn't matter, only what they mean all together. So, the way to add two numbers together was to just pile all the symbols together and swap out bigger ones as needed.
For example, to add 24 and 12:
XXIIII + XII = XXIIIIXII = XXX IIIII I = XXXVI
Three-Ten and five and one, "Thirty-Six"
So formally "IV" is six, not four, because its "1 and 5." This whole convention around subtracting the smaller sign when it proceeds the immediate next-larger one is a hellish mess from the transition to the strictly positional system of Arabic numerals.
The solution to the puzzle is to invert the parties, so that Quistis/Selphie/Irvine are in the left-handed lift, and the heavier Squall/Zell/Rinoa party gets on the right-handed lift, causing it to go down and raise the lighter party up to the balcony.
Do the parties have to be full? The place my mind immediately jumped was "take a character out of one party", but I genuinely can't remember if that's possible.
There's just one problem: the Zantetsuken option isn't disabled against bosses. Nor does it bypass instant death immunity. Which means Gilgamesh can just show up, use Zantetsuken, whiff, and leave, having accomplished nothing. As happens here.
When Roman Numerals were a going concern, they were a non-positional system. The order didn't matter, only what they mean all together. So, the way to add two numbers together was to just pile all the symbols together and swap out bigger ones as needed.
For example, to add 24 and 12:
XXIIII + XII = XXIIIIXII = XXX IIIII I = XXXVI
Three-Ten and five and one, "Thirty-Six"
So formally "IV" is six, not four, because its "1 and 5." This whole convention around subtracting the smaller sign when it proceeds the immediate next-larger one is a hellish mess from the transition to the strictly positional system of Arabic numerals.
I'm afraid you're simply and flatly entirely wrong here. First, the archeological evidence is clear - That doesn't explain XLIIII as gate 44, or gate LIX or so on at the Colleseum, to use the example I went previously and they're next to each other, we know which number they are, and there's also no way that's arabic based. Secondly, they're based on the previous Etruscan numerals, which also had a subtractive form, but a slightly different one - IXX is 19, rather than the XIX of roman numeral form.
To take another bit of archeological evidence, the archeological remains of the calendar Fasti Antiates Maiores:
Please forgive the fact the interveaning two millennia haven't been entirely kind. What you can see in the bottom row are various numbers. The first number you can really make out is XXIIX. That is the total number of days in Feburary, which, uh. Yeah, it's the total number of days in Feburary. Twenty Eight. Not thirty two (Yes it should be XXVIII here properly, but, uh, consistency wasn't that much of a concern). This is also the case in column 4, which has XXIX for April, being the number of days in (the pre-julian roman calendar) for April, twenty nine. And it's well attested by other sources that's how many days were in the pre-Julian April (and also like, most months, it was the most common month length).
Subtractive notation is not something caused by later people fucking it up, but was well in use by the Romans, and is attested by, frankly, every bit of archeological evidence we have for the roman numeral system at all. And it's also inconsistent as hell - see Legion twenty-two consistently using IIXX to represent their legion and not XXII as it should be, or how 1000 may also be reckoned as CIↃ because fuck you! Why is there a I? Why is one C backwards! Because that's one of the like, five different ways you can write roman numerals. But to say the subtractive notation doesn't exist?
When Roman Numerals were a going concern, they were a non-positional system. The order didn't matter, only what they mean all together. So, the way to add two numbers together was to just pile all the symbols together and swap out bigger ones as needed.
For example, to add 24 and 12:
XXIIII + XII = XXIIIIXII = XXX IIIII I = XXXVI
Three-Ten and five and one, "Thirty-Six"
So formally "IV" is six, not four, because its "1 and 5." This whole convention around subtracting the smaller sign when it proceeds the immediate next-larger one is a hellish mess from the transition to the strictly positional system of Arabic numerals.
Thought that Irvine being turned all green here kinda makes him look like The Riddler. Apparently The Riddler is called 'Sphinx' in the French translation, and they're fighting a monster based on the Sphinx.
Plus there's a bunch of puzzles throughout the castle, a castle that'd hardly be out of place in Gotham given its aesthetic. Hmmm...
No I mean it was formally improper then, too, not that it wasn't done, it doesn't match how you'd do it on like an abacus to actually perform the calculation.
Like the Arabic Numerals were the particular symbology that "won" the conversion to positional notation, but the transition from "non-positional" to "positional" look literally millenia, and these sortof half-way conventions around subtractive notation made the numbers harder to use when they were meanwhile on an extreme premium for character count because they were getting carved in stone.
