I can't say for sure what happened to Hyne's skin, or all the other background elements in the final version of the story. But I do believe that the other half of Hyne, the more powerful half, is what become the Sorceress's power; passed on from generation to generation, junctioned to them like a GF, consuming and overwhelming them. Because...
One of the things that's stuck out to me all this time about the way people talk about the Sorceress' power is how they make it sound inevitable that the sorceress will turn against humanity. That their morals will rot, that they'll set themselves apart from other people, so forth and so on. There's even the entire massive theme of a Sorceress's knight - their emotional and moral anchor, keeping them human. And their association with angels! Adel stands out for her lack of wings, but Rinoa and Ultimecia just have wings, and Edea's outfit makes her look like she has them.
Hyne's resentment for humans eating away at people, his goals and his purpose and his general divine otherness eating away at those unable to keep a hold on their identity, is what makes the most sense to me. People persecute sorceresses because sorceresses become like Hyne because their power is Hyne's - this even works well with Adel's making the people bring her children, young girls in particular, and them rising up and getting angry at her with it! With Adel screaming at the world for years and years...
Your post touches on something I had in my head and debated on including with my previous post, then forgot to, and decided I would sit on it until Omicron posted the roundup. Which is that I realized FF8's ending has one of the most fridge-horror moments in the entire franchise. Sure, the squad gets a happy ending with a party at the Garden, Zell chowing down, Squall & Rinoa kissing, etc.
But the sorceresses sure don't.
Despite my earlier complaints that we don't really see it playing out, the sorceresses are feared and hated as avatars of a child-killing creator deity leaving his mark upon humanity, persecuted for their unearthly powers.
And that will never change.
Artemisia comes from who knows how far in the future; and if one assumes her speech at Deling is truthful, she hates people for the traumas inflicted on her - "Hailing the very one whom you have condemned for generations. Have you no shame? What happened to the evil, ruthless sorceress from your fantasies?"
Meaning Squall & Co party down and then for years afterwards, girls born with strange powers are still feared and hated. Maybe burned. Maybe stoned. Maybe "just" exiled.
The imagery in the time loop means we know for a fact that SeeD exists as a sorceress-hunting PMC up until the loop closes when Artemisia dies. But what about afterwards? Will the fear and hatred die down? Or does SeeDs knowledge of the future mean that people will know a sorceress attempted to destroy all reality, and redouble their hated of the strange women?
Will there ever be a time when people are free of the hatreds inspired by Hyne's twisted gift?
We don't know. Maybe one day, far removed even from Artemisia's time, the old legends of sorceress knights will inspire people to take up arms and defend those unjustly hated. Maybe someone will even get to the moon and find a way to quiet the Lunar Cry and lay Hyne to a final rest. Or maybe not - maybe the future of FF8 is an endless cycle of wrathful sorceress-queens laying the earth waste time and again while the moon spills tears of blood and fury upon the world. Forever.
Okay, god damn, I didn't think FF14's Eden Raids adapted this quite so...directly?
Incidentally, now that we've seen the original form it takes, I'd just like to point out what Junction Griever looks like in Dissidia...and the sheer swagger of her ultimate move in that form.
I expect the game will have some kind of mechanic forcing us to use two parties like it did in VI and VII, which would be inconvenient because right now Quistis, Selphie and Irvine have no GFs and thus garbage stats and no abilities, but whatever, we'll take it as it goes.
But before we do, I'd like to pull back a little, because I know that some FF8 vets reading this are boggling and gnashing their teeth at everything I just said, and I need to actually address it before they have a collective aneurysm (love you guys, I would too if I were in your position).
Remember when Ultimecia said "I'll start with you three"? It sounds like it's just a thin excuse for how we only fight with three characters despite all six being present in the scene, right? She just points to our Mandatory Limited Three-People Party and says "You first." Makes perfect sense.
Well, no. You see, in Japanese, Ultimecia says instead (translated more literally): "So, who will come first? Who will fight me? Hmpf, it matters not, the end will be the same! I will choose!"
This is a gruelling process of watching Selphie, Irvine and Quistis try their best with absolutely no resources, and being erased from the timeline one by one until the main party is back online! Of course, the game doesn't have the degree of adaptability to adjust the ending based on who 'dies' there, so whether or not someone gets absorbed into time won't change their ultimate fate, but it sure doesn't feel that way watching it happen.
So yeah, this is exactly the mechanic I was expecting to get a nice little talk about... and you managed to skip it entirely through sheer luck. Himbo Omi strikes again.
And when first quoting this, I considered why not just have something similar to FFV where dead party members from the final battle get a little "oh no they dead oh look they came back"... but I guess considering the final cinematic used instead of ingame scenes, that wouldn't have really worked unless they wanted a bunch more work and a Disk 5 that exists entirely for ending variations.
This, right there, is when I thought, for one brief moment, that my theory was finally and truly validated: Ultimecia is Rinoa, has to be Rinoa, because how else would she have Griever as a GF? How would she even know its name? Where would it even come from?
And once again, Scan is where the answer lies.
"In Squall's mind, the strongest GF."
This may be slightly ambiguous wording. But if you once again look at the JP script, everything becomes clearer, for better or worse:
Sorceress Ultimecia: "I will summon the one you believe is most powerful. The strongest you believe he is, the stronger he becomes."
She literally Drew Griever from Squall's mind. He made up an OC so powerful, it is the ultimate GF. The implications are… What? Are all GFs just 'ideas'? When we Draw Siren from Elvolet, are we pulling some unformed memory of idea in its mind and turning it into a pseudo-sentient being? Is that why GFs can exist as thought-forms within people's brains rather than needing a physical place to exist? Is the reason you lose memories from GF use because of how much your brain's power you use to sustain the existence of the idea that is the GF?
This is just Ghostbusters, Ultimecia read Squalls mind and went "WHAT DO YOU FEAR MOST WHAT IS THE STRONGEST" and he, edgy dipstick that he is, somehow instantly thought of his OC GF Griever who is totally the best and the strongest and beats all the other GFs.
The music changes. So far, the boss music for this fight had been Premonition, the 'sorceress battle theme' so to speak, which shares a melody with Liberi Fatali and played during both Edea battles and against the 'sorceresses from beyond time.' A dramatic tune, but one we've heard quite a bit by now.
Now, instead, scare chords sound what sounds like a warning, and drums roll in the distance as the next attack begins. That music, The Legendary Beast, will play for the remainder of the Griever fight, and it has distinct military overtones that are a perfect fit for a monster drawn from Squall's imagination.
It was also Quistis's ultimate Limit Break. Aside from Degenerator (which doesn't work on bosses), the strongest move Quistis has access to is Shockwave Pulsar. It is learned from Dark Matter, an extremely difficult to get item, and it plays out with the exact same animation. Why is Griever's strongest move Quistis's own ultimate LB? Who knows.
Clearly, Squall just implements anything he thinks is cool back into his OC, even now. So at some point, Quistis used Shockwave Pulsar and he instantly thought "holy shit what an awesome move Griever should totally have that as his super special ultimate" and then there we are.
She will not get to cast it. Ultimecia's repeated Hell's Judgments make it incredibly easy to tap Limit Breaks, and while I am not playing this fight as hard as I could, I am still running the setup that I devised for the Omega Weapon. Meteor Rinoa hits the Meteor button for tens of thousands of damage, splitting damage between Ultimecia and her lower half, and breaking the Draw-Cast Apocalypse sequence. Like her previous phase, we've blown past her mechanics.
Young Squall, rushing on to find Ellone. And shortly behind him, Edea, calling out to the running child.
There are many, many missing pieces to the picture that is Final Fantasy VIII. And this is one of the last ones the game will provide us before leaving the rest unresolved. To tie off that dangling plot thread - to close the loop.
What a villain! What a bundle of promises and unfulfilled potential.
In many ways Ultimecia is the opposite of Sephiroth. Where the white-haired bishie had a very clear backstory, psychological stakes, and new reveals regarding his true heritage dispersed across the game, but personally became a total cipher halfway through the game and just vanished from the narrative, Ultimecia is a constant presence, her schemes hounding our heroes' every steps, hiding her identity, possessing our friends, suggesting a complex backstory of persecution and revenge, only to ultimately look at the camera and say "I am a generic evil witch who wants to rule/destroy the universe and be worshipped by all in the hell I'll create."
Her final speech suggests, hints at a sense of real pathos - childhood memories lost, the inexorable flow of time, time that escapes no matter how hard you hold onto it, a desperate attempt by a grieving sorceress to do the impossible and make time stand still… But it doesn't land, because it doesn't connect to anything, we know nothing of what Ultimecia has loved and lost, she has always only ever acted like a petty, vengeful, contemptuous witch who cares for nothing and no one but her own power.
The flair, though! Never before had we seen a villain's final form embody the Big Crunch, personally become the singularity into which all of space and time will collapse, our heroes only managing to withstand that impossible pressure through their bonds to one another. What a character design! And those last moments, of Ultimecia having been defeated, staggering weakly, muttering that she cannot disappear yet, and passing on her power to one another, is the most human we've ever seen a post-final fight FF big bad act.
And yet it all leaves a sour taste in the mouth. She wrote too many cheques she couldn't cash. There is something there, and even outside of the 'Rinoa from the future' meme, trying to put it into a broader shape only makes me more frustrated.
Yeaaaaah, Ultimecia has a lot of flair, but she absolutely feels like a victim of the game being cut short at some point or another in development. Possibly also a victim of the potential Rinoa connection being severed.
Why do the kind-hearted Cid and Edea, who have never shown an inclination to treat the orphans they take care off callously, decide to begin training them as superpowered child soldiers to combat the sorceress threat?
Because a boy from the future told them they would.
Why is Cid so eager to have a gunblade specialist among his SeeD graduates?
Because he knows the boy from the future who shows up after defeating the sorceress carries a gunblade.
Why does Ultimecia's power exist in the past?
Because she went back and gave it to Edea before dying.
Why are SeeD waging a war across generations, why does Ultimecia curse their names, why does she refer to the 'fantasies' of the evil sorceress and her own persecution?
Because Cid and Edea set into motion a self-perpetuating order of Sorceress Hunters who are waiting for the day Ultimecia shows up to try and bring her down.
We have spent the entire game wondering about Cid's personality, his history with Edea, and the creation of SeeD. Why does Cid, who looks like a bumbling kind-hearted father figure, create an organization of child soldiers? Why does he teach them to use GFs that risk erasing their memories? Why did he build an organization dedicated to hunting sorceresses if his wife was one? Why did Edea willingly participate in the creation of an order meant to oppose her own kind? How did we go from a little orphanage by the sea, dedicated to raising a mere handful of kids in a peaceful place, to an enormous organization at the bleeding edge of military technology and paramagic, with dozens of staff and hundreds of students?
Because the plot literally told them to. There is no prime motivation. There is no darkness in Cid's heart. The subtle indications that Edea and Cid always had a kind of attraction/obsession towards militaristic approaches to child-rearing, perhaps rooted in the trauma of the Sorceress's War, that was just pure illusion. The inherent moral ambiguity of creating SeeD, the strange dichotomy between Cid's fatherly demeanor and his ruthless child soldier school, the question of why anyone would dedicate their lives to fostering an order of Sorceress Hunters, it's all cleansed and made neat in this one move: he has to, because he already knows he will.
They're two kindly caretakers for a small local orphanage who are one day told by a boy from the future that they will create an organization dedicated to fighting sorceresses called SeeD, which will operate out of Gardens, have at least one gunblade-wielding operative of particular importance who is one of Edea's current wards, and who will fight a very important battle against a particular sorceress in the future.
So they set out to do what the future told them they needed to do.
This singular twist actively bleeds out every remaining once of shadow and moral ambiguity within Final Fantasy VIII's backstory. Nobody ever did anything wrong, except Adel and Ultimecia. Even the moral compromises which Cid did eventually take while creating SeeD are explained by his need to rely on NORG.
In the end your parents always loved you and never did anything wrong.
Stable time loops can certainly work as a narrative device, and I'll give that this one is at least decently constructed... but yes, it also does kind of take all the moral ambiguity out of Cid and Edea and Garden. For all the jokes of "War Criminal, Child Soldier Training Cid" early on in the LP, everything just falls to the side as this Robin-Williams looking old guy goes "yeah you told me to do it in the distant past or something", and then between that and blaming NORG (oh hey other plot point that gets completely dumped) just sort of absolves him of all responsibility.
What follows - the game's final cinematic, its resolution and epilogue, all pre-rendered FMV - lasts a staggering 16 minutes. Even by today's standards, an 18-minute pre-rendered cutscene might raise an eyebrow! By the standard of the time, this is just - I'm pretty sure this was a non-significant amount of dev time and occupied a solid chunk of the final disc? Maybe more than the gameplay did?
For my money, this scene is the creepiest a Final Fantasy game has ever been. The walk after Jenova's escape beats it for spook factor, but this had me genuinely unsettled; I felt a chill at a few points watching Rinoa's image distort and fade as the music started glitching out. I felt like I was watching both reality and Squall's mind break down at the same time. Which, hey, is what is happening, no?
Part of why I felt that scene so unsettling was that I wasn't even sure what was happening. My grip on the reality of the scene was as shaky as Squall's own. And I don't count that as a demerit; confusion can be a powerful scare tool. And it wasn't hard to come up with answers - time compression erasing those moments in time, accelerating the memory erasure from the GFs, or blending together all moments of Squall's history until he couldn't tell them apart or make sense of them, or remember what truly happened…
…
The thing is that this confusion is not intentional. It is entirely an artifact of the English localization losing two lines. To quote Ultimecia, highlighting the lines that got dropped, rather than merely rephrased, in EN:
Your very existences shall be absorbed by the algorithm of time compression!! You will feel agony as your thoughts are ripped apart and all your memories fade away to nothing.
There won't be a thing you can do, think or even feel!
That's the world I'm going to send you to!
There will be absolutely nothing you can…
…No, you'll be able to worship me, the sole existence for all eternity!!
This is not supposed to be ambiguous. Time Compression explicitly tears apart the mind and destroys memories, exactly as is happening to Squall right now.
old man wrinkles Laguna scares me, for some reason. It just feels wrong for the guy who's perpetually a dumbass child talking about the power of friendship to actually get old.
"Wait," I hear you say, "don't tell me they're pulling that shit again, what the hell, what about our entire party that got stranded in the Time Hole, do not tell me Seifer and Laguna are the only ones we get an epilogue for?"
Look at our man, he did it, he really accomplished his goal after all this time.
I mean or the cafeteria staff looked at this level 100 super SeeD who just saved the world and went out and made sure he has his own private Hot Dog stock so she doesn't accidentally shatter the entire cafeteria in a fit of rage when he can't get any, either or.
Final Fantasy VIII is about time. Which is why it's ironic that it truly feels like time is what it needed more of. There is a very specific and narrow path to its ending which the game mostly nails - Lunatic Pandora Raid to Ellone rescue to Adel battle to Time Compression initiated to walking through the future to confronting Ultimecia to the ending to the epilogue - and if you just stay entirely focused on that path you might even not notice how everything else falls apart at the end.
Yeah, just as came up a bit ago, it feels like there's some clear rushing in the last chunk of Final Fantasy VIII. Disk 3 and Disk 4 are extremely short, to the point that if it weren't for the massive AMVs (holy shit man 18 minutes of ending credits FMV?) it probably would have been on 3 Disks instead, or at least should have been.
Let me address the elephant in the room, because I have been joking about this entirely too much to not be taking it seriously on some level.
Ultinoa Trutherism
It has become my understanding, since finishing the game, that "Ultimecia is Rinoa" is a popular fan theory, popular enough to get a nod with Dissidia naming Ultimecia's weapons after Rinoa's, but one that is also explicitly disproven by canon and the developers' words. I am genuinely grateful to everyone who was able to keep a lid on it and leave me to think this was just my brilliant idea I'd come up with it myself rather than wink wink nudge nudge hint that it was a popular (disproven) fan theory.
Sometimes when you watch a blind Let's Play you get to look at someone reinventing The Moon Landing Didn't Happen from first principles.
From the moment you first said "Rinoa = Ultimecia", the spoilers thread was full of people alternating between "is this a bit, does he know" and "wait is Omi seriously managing to accidentally stumble into one of the most infamous debunked theories?" Suffice to say, I find it hilarious to discover it was apparently the latter.
I will, as usual, be doing a wrap-up post summing up my overall thoughts on the game as a whole. I don't know how long it'll take, or how much steam I'll have left for it, but I have many things to say about the game that I hope to put together once my brain isn't completely scrambled by Total Final Fantasy VIII Immersion. Please look forward to it, but in the meantime:
Care to defend this statement with actual arguments? It's fine if you don't want to, I'm not trying to start a fight, but I am incapable of understanding how you could have come to such a conclusion. And I am the one who thinks FFV is better than FFVII, which I repeatedly stated is better than FFVIII; however, the idea that FFVIII isn't superior to FFVI in every single measurable respect is impossible for me to wrap my head around.
While it's obviously a matter of taste in the end (and personally I'm soft on FFVIII because it was one of my first Final Fantasy games), I feel like between the fact that Omi clearly had quite some annoyance wrapping himself around the combat system, and the fact that most of your suggested solutions were some variation of "play the game intentionally non-optimally or with restrictions to keep it interesting", that really does point to FFVIII being a fairly flawed game.
Granted, the last three games have had some level of broken system power creep (Espers letting you powerlevel stats if you juggle them + just teaching literally everyone the most powerful spells in the game in FFVI, FFVII being generally not that hard but also you can pull off ridiculous unecessary combos with materia to break things, and FFVIII's... everything with the junction system), but of the three I think FFVIII clearly leans into becoming the most frustrating because of how tilted the balance can be. Enemies with level scaling, juggling your junctions, some bosses or enemies suddenly pulling out "I win unless you pre-planned for this" cards like Bad Breath). By comparsion, FFVI/FFVII mostly fall apart because the player just overpowers the game at some point and the challenge is mostly gone, FFI/FFIII/FFIV aren't too breakable because of how their designed, FFV doesn't fall apart until near the end unless you super grind, and FFII is in fact a game in the Final Fantasy series and we'll stop there because despite also having childhood nostalgia for it, I'm absolutely not going to bat for its messy systems lmao
And of course, this is talking exclusively about gameplay, not things like the setting and story. If you ask me about those aspects, I think FFVIII knocks it out of the park quite regularly? Yeah things start to fall apart towards the end, but let's be honest almost all of these big fancy RPG games have lategame issues where they wrote checks they can't cash because the dev team suddenly has 2 weeks before launch. There's still a pretty solid core of Squall's character development and love story with Rinoa, the side cast characters are all plenty identifiable and lovable (more than I can say about some characters in FFVI or FFVII)... it's an overly ambitious game, sure, but I think it falls more into "overly ambitious but it's cool that it tried" rather than "overly ambitious and godawful for it what were they even thinking".
Well, we'll see what Omi has to say in his final wrapup eventually, I'm sure. I feel confident in thinking he at least enjoyed the party members quite a bit.
I respect the FF series for being willing to start from scratch each mainline series, to really try something new each time, but I have fond memories of tinkering with the junctioning system, of mastering it to be functionally invincible, without having to level grind. I wish they played with this sort of system to radically alter stats when you wanted, of magic doing more then being a thing you cast with MP or ATB charges, and actually had an impact on your character and what you can do.
And that they tried it again, in a game without ATB and it's fucked up stupid system that should have been in the ground long before it went 3D, I hate hate hate it.
Once again, I am hearing the words "We need a Final Fantasy VIII remake, complete with revamped junction system". Please Square Enix, pleaaaaase stop playing with your pretty boy Sephiroth and the rest of your FFVII toys for just a few years and give some love to the other games.
...What's that? FFIV After Years? That one sequel novel to a game Omi hasn't played yet that is absurdly godawful? FFVII Remake is already controversial for quite a few people?
...On second thought maybe we should let FFVIII lie.
Oh hey, I just realized. Edea kills Ultimecia by way of a stable, Selphie-induced time loop. The gang beats down Ultimecia, Selphie fires off The End. And because of Time Compression, all time is concurrent, so it punts Ultimecia to the Orphanage where Edea defeats her and absorbs her power, as mentioned previously.
Edea: "...The sorceress?" Squall: "Yes, Matron. We had defeated her… Matron, stand back."
[Ultimecia approaches with slow, staggering steps.] Edea: "It's ok. There's no more need to fight. That sorceress is just looking for someone to pass her powers on to." Edea: "In order to die at peace, a sorceress must be free of all her powers. I know… for I am one, too. I shall take over that sorceress's powers. I do not want one of the children to become one."
[Edea approaches Ultimecia.]
Wait, wait, wait. What? The one-off theory I slapped together while waiting for my lunch to reheat was right? Or at least 90% of the way there? What the hell. I don't even feel a sense of accomplishment for getting it right. Maybe if I'd at least included supporting quotes for the idea…
Grats on finishing the game. Not much to add here that others hadn't already say, except. Re Hyne: Gonna leave here a video about another Frenchman gets obsessed enough to track the whereabouts of Hyne in the plot as-is, and rants on the French translation as a bonus. Bit clickbait, but a couple interesting ideas: View: https://youtu.be/wrW7O9JF_QI
Let's go back to Griever. The ultimate GF, drawn from Squall's mind. Squall merely thought very hard about his cool OC, and that was enough to produce a GF powerful enough to threaten the universe. What?
Never saw Ghostbusters? View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zhDfUAQSbs
Griever's just Squall's own Stay Puft Marshmallow Man (except instead of world-ending beast conjured by a god it's a world-ending beast conjured up by the closet thing TO a god, an all-powerful Sorceress weaponizing Squall's own chuuni cringe against him)
Damn. What a cool and mechanically neat battle with an immense, extensive, confusing, insufficient, daunting, and yet emotionally compelling ending. There's a lot to comment on, but I'm finding myself at a loss. This is an extremely dense finale because of how abstract and open to interpretation so much is, even though a lot of it is also clear, just presented in a particular fashion or tied to specific narrative calls. I definitely must offer special regard to this thorough presentation of the Ultimecia-Rinoa theory and the way it fits in the cracks left in the final game through an evocative and surprisingly tight manner. I am an Ultinoa Truther, this is far too strong to ignore and it really gets my mind racing about all the details you can extrapolate to fit.
Excellent work covering FFVIII Omi, congratulations for completing it!
Gaia wandering a black and empty landscape, and being returned to reality thanks to Ryne... The direct homage at the end is so good. Like, it totally sucks that there's nothing explicitlyexplicit, but, if you'll forgive me the contradictory expression, it's explicitly implicit - it's a direct fucking parallel to FF's most famous and most onscreen romance, and they cap it off by making the big fuckoff crystal in Eden a rainbow. They knew what they were doing, it's just that they refused to commit.
Eden's Promise itself, in its normal appearance, is actually a really roundabout visual reference to Ultimecia, too. This is Eden's Promise. A lot of people instinctively wonder why the hell it has so many boobs or boob-looking things on her chest. The reason is that it references the statue of Artemis at the temple of Ephesus. Of course, as the LP has noted several times, Ultimecia's name in Japanese is Artemisia and it got translated over weirdly. In conclusion: Eden's Promise is an Ultimecia, even before you take into account the very-very-similar story and themes (and the second phase of the fight in Savage difficulty).
Found a Reddit post and a Tumblr post that translate some of Ultimecia's Japanese dialogue.
Deling City said:
It reeks. Filthy rabble.
Since time immemorial, we sorceresses have existed within a fantasy world, a world you so foolishly made up in your heads. Sorceresses in black dresses, sacrificing pious citizens in dark rituals. The merciless sorceress who uses dark magic to burn your fertile land and to chill your homes at night. Such drivel.
And now, that the sorceress from your fantasies appears in front of you as a friend to Galbadia, are you lulled into a false sense of security? Which one of us is living in a fantasy now?
Reality isn't so sweet, not sweet at all, and all that remains for you fools is this: *kills the president*
So, run back to your fantasies. Hide, and I shall continue to dance for you in that illusionary world. I shall dance for eternity as the sorceress who brings ruin. You and I, together we shall create the final fantasy, and within it, life and death will be nothing but mere dreams.
Eternal shall be the sorceress, and also Galbadia, her loyal servant.
A sorceress needs dark rituals, a sacrifice has to be made."
... eeD. SeeD ... SeeD. SeeD, SeeD. SeeD! How sickening.
Why can't I get rid of you? Why do you keep getting in my way?
The world is on the brink of the perfect time compression, I will not suffer your meddling any longer. Your very existence shall be absorbed by the algorithm. Experience what it means to have your memories ripped apart as your entire being fades into oblivion. I shall send you into a world of nothingness, and there's nothing ... no, there is ONE thing you can do: worship me as the one true existence.
So, which one of you will face me first? Huh, it matters not, the outcome will remain the same. Allow me to choose.
Alternate Pre-Battle Rant from a Tumblr post said:
…eeD…
SeeD…SeeD…
SeeD, SeeD, SeeD!!
It displeases me…
Why do you interfere with sorceresses!?
Why won't you let me be free!?
In just a little longer, my perfect world of time compression would have been completed…
I won't allow you to interfere…
Your very existences shall be absorbed by the algorithm of time compression!!
You will feel agony as your thoughts are ripped apart and all your memories fade away to nothing.
There won't be a thing you can do, think or even feel!
That's the world I'm going to send you to!
There will be absolutely nothing you can…
…No, you'll be able to worship me, the sole existence for all eternity!!
So, who will come first!?
Who will fight me!?
Hmpf, it matters not, the end will be the same!
I will choose!
Have you remembered something?
Something from your childhood
A sensation
The words from back then
The emotions from back then
As you become an adult
You leave something behind, throw something away
Time will not wait for you
Even if you cling to it
It slips away the instant you open your hands
And…
But look at her bottom half. Taking a picture wasn't easy - it's only targetable for a brief portion of the fight and I didn't think to Scan it in time - but allow me to just pull up a reference image.
The top half of Ultimecia is a highly stylized nightmare of blades and flesh, faceless, winged like a twisted angel. The bottom half is just… A woman. Eyes closed, hair hanging down loose, her arms folded, cradling herself, naked and utterly vulnerable.
Somebody in the art team didn't quite get all the yonic imagery out of their system with Jenova, so the final boss of this game is just straight-up giving birth to herself right in front of God and everybody.
Safer Sephiroth eat your heart out. This is one of the coolest FF final boss designs of all time, except for the ridiculous, ridiculous wings on top of her head.
it's an overly ambitious game, sure, but I think it falls more into "overly ambitious but it's cool that it tried" rather than "overly ambitious and godawful for it what were they even thinking".
I think it's a little fascinating that this has been a refrain for the past, what, three games? Omicron's FFVI wrap-up had "it shoots for the moon and crashes to earth with regularity" somewhere in there, VII's dev team was enamored with "disc storage rather than cartridge and actual FMVs, what can we do with them? Answer: Make VII the 'Everything (Mini)Game'", and, as we've just seen, VIII is...VIII.
In terms of Ultimecia's inexplicable spelling quirk, I've always subscribed to the theory that it was an attempt to convey a (bad Hollywood version of a) Russian accent
But that's not all! We can go one step further! A 'good' stable time loop doesn't only create the answer to its antagonist; it also creates that antagonist in the first place. Edea knew she was meant to create an order of sorceress hunters, and so she did, and that role was eventually revealed to them. That order defeated Ultimecia, today. But they did not stop existing. They were not dissolved, because they also knew that the Ultimecia which they had defeated now would also arise in the future. And so Edea created an organization which, across generation, carried on the idea that they are meant to defeat Ultimecia, the final sorceress that will one day arise.
And then one day, Ultimecia is born - or whatever her name was - into a world that names her, a sorceress, as an enemy of SeeD, and she fights against their persecution, she grows up and loses things, she becomes obsessed with time, grief, power, with people's hatred, with their 'fantasies' of what a sorceress is, she decides she will give them exactly what she wants.
I can't stand stable time loops either. In general I dislike time travel as a plot device - I can stomach a parallel timelines story in small doses, because in that case you can maintain a causal chain of events, and there's often some drama in the fact that Setting Right What Once Went Wrong entails leaving an original timeline to its grim fate - but I absolutely loathe stable time loops as a concept. Ever since the Laguna scenes were revealed to be not uncovering buried memories of the party's, but reaching back and affecting events in the past, I've been dreading what the story was going to do with it, and this is definitely what I was worried about.
Especially because like. Knowing the events of the game, the party is equipped with all of the knowledge necessary to disband SeeD, their mission fulfilled, especially because Squall loves RInoa, who is a sorceress, and is thus deeply, personally motivated to maybe try and stop the whole hunting sorceresses mission, and to maybe try and redeem their reputation in the eyes of the public so the world doesn't see his girlfriend as a horrible world-devouring monster. But no, by the needs of the stable time loop, SeeD must continue to exist, who will perform such violence they bring Ultimecia into existence, who will go back in time to destroy the lives of thousands, maybe millions of people. It's just. It's bad! I don't like it! Whenever someone wants to write a stable time loop story they need to be bonked over the head with a rolled up newspaper!
Especially because the parallel timelines version you suggested, of a Rinoa who died in space, who became Ultimecia, and who we have in our party all being separate and unique individuals has so much potential. Time Compression could have been less wibbly wobbly, but more an Ultimecia trying to merge the separate time streams so that she can bring a version of Squall - who likely died in her world - into her own, to create a unified timeline that would make her happy and fulfilled for all time, that just so happens to destroy time for basically everyone else. I think you could've gotten a much more consistent, much more satisfying story out of that foundation.
But this is the story we got, messy and incomplete as it is I suppose.
Oh my god. This is our resolution to Seifer. This is.
God we really do desparately need a sidestory with those three goobers, their chemistry is so good and I need to see what all of their off screen adventures got up to. The fact that they're able to sell so much of their chemistry just with the body language of the three of them, there's so much there that I wish we could have seen.
Also Seifer is just. Malding so goddamn hard at being out-fished I burst out laughing watching that part of the ending.
Look Omi it's fine, Fisherman's Horizon was declared a neutral zone and does not recognize international law, as long as he doesn't leave no court can touch him.
Thinking on the Ultinoa theory a bit more though, I have to wonder if that being a theoretical later-in-development change had some knock on effects on the rest of the story. The game was obviously crunched for time in the end, you don't wind up with a laundry list of unfinished ideas that big at the end of the story without a looming deadline making you make some hard decisions about what's got to go, and I have to wonder if moving from parallel timelines Ultinoa to the stable time loop story took a chunk out of the budget for the rest of the story. Maybe it's just wishful thinking, but I have to wonder if they stayed the course on the original idea, if some of the bigger ideas - the Moon and Hyne, GFs and memory erasure - could have been integrated a bit more into the story we got. There would almost certainly have been plenty of other bits that got discarded by the end, there wasn't enough time to follow up on everything they had going on, but just maybe they could have tied things together a bit better otherwise.
I don't know, it's easy to what-if a story like this, but there's just so much there, so many points where it hits it out of the park, and even more points where it drops the ball spectacularly, that I think this is a game that I'm going to be chewing on on some level for a while now. I look forward to your wrap-up post on the game, because I'll be thinking on it for a while now myself.
I've remarked before - not sure if it was this thread or the spoiler one - that FF8 is very, very unbalanced in its villains. Most of the FFs since 3, arguably two, has had two villains, a grounded one that may have personal ties to and rivalry with the protagonist, and a cosmic one with far more power but far less connection to the protagonists that takes over from the grounded one at the 11th hour, with the exact balance and relationship between the two shifting over time over time. Xande and the Cloud of Darkness, Golbez and Zemus/Zeromus, Geshtahl and Kefka, Sephiroth and Jenova. Its probably not a spoiler to say that most of the later games follow that model to one degree or another; its a good model since it allows you to have most of the game focus on the personal grudge but also have larger stakes and bigger bosses than just the personal connection would allow.
8's 'grounded' villain, Seifer, is barely there outside of pre-rendered cutscenes, and its cosmic villain, Ultimecia, is there even less despite ostensible screen time being far more than the grounded villain.
Is it possible that the hypothetical Rinoamecia version would have had Hyne be a grand cosmic villain manipulating her/that she wanted to fuse with and control, to provide better explanation for having a final boss bigger than 'woman', and when they dropped Rinoamecia they didn't have time to write Hyne a new plot role or dungeon AND do all of the other rewriting they'd need to do so they just gave the Rinoamecia replacement Sorceress some less explained super mode stuff? Maybe the Sorceress being half of Hyne's power meant that Time Compression would reunite her with the other half to give ultimate power or something, or she'd need the other half to acheive the time compression in the first place.
What follows - the game's final cinematic, its resolution and epilogue, all pre-rendered FMV - lasts a staggering 16 minutes. Even by today's standards, an 18-minute pre-rendered cutscene might raise an eyebrow! By the standard of the time, this is just - I'm pretty sure this was a non-significant amount of dev time and occupied a solid chunk of the final disc? Maybe more than the gameplay did?
It's not just a long cutscene, though. It is also artistically ambitious, bold, and trippy as hell. It's a staggering flex from the animation department, and all of it is incredibly confusing because of two missing lines from the English release.
Especially because the parallel timelines version you suggested, of a Rinoa who died in space, who became Ultimecia, and who we have in our party all being separate and unique individuals has so much potential. Time Compression could have been less wibbly wobbly, but more an Ultimecia trying to merge the separate time streams so that she can bring a version of Squall - who likely died in her world - into her own, to create a unified timeline that would make her happy and fulfilled for all time, that just so happens to destroy time for basically e
Yes, radiant historia ff8 would be super rad (just like radiant historia already is rad). I suspect though, that the same studio that was at this time shuttering the disc 2 of xenogears (great game, great fake 3d tech in the ps1, superb music pity Omi won't play it here) into a long series of cutscenes with some gameplay near the end, had no enthusiasm for delaying their flagship game more (then they did spirits within).
You know, whenever I hear that FFXIV has everything from every Final Fantasy in it, and I try to contemplate how a full mashup of all Final Fantasy settings would work, it leaves me wondering how people would square it all together.
To add on to what others have said, the main approach FFXIV has is to look at past Final Fantasy games, and draw as much or as little inspiration from them as needed, based both on the FFXIV plotline happening at the moment, and how cool it would be to have references. So we can have "same theme different detail" references like the Eden raids for FFVIII, as well as "hey I recognize that reference" like a one-off boss fight just happening to be Quetzalcoatl.
This does mean the same well of inspiration can be drawn from multiple times. FFIV's moon has been referenced at least twice, and even more if we take implicit possible references. Which has indeed led to players who grew up on FFIV going "OH THE NOSTALGIA", and players who have never played FFIV going "I don't get it".
This is why I was deeply curious if "lions are imaginary" meant Squall came up with it on his own, or if it was more along the lines of fictional creatures from media, because that would be the difference between Ultimecia summoning Squall's Edgy OC Fursona and Ultimecia summoning Shadow The Hedgehog.
Irvine: "Let's go! Let's go back to our time!" Zell: "Shut up! Just calm down and think where we have to go." Selphie: "Careful guys! Don't pick the wrong time!" Quistis: "Whatever you do, don't fall into a time warp!"
A mildly interesting aspect of this part in the Japanese script is how each character is calling out. Irvine and Selphie are drawing out their syllables, meaning they're calling out to the others rather than stating or instructing. Zell doesn't say "Shut up", but just repeats "Calm down! Calm down and think where we have to go!" And Quistis doesn't draw out her syllables, meaning she's giving precise orders.
But that's not all! We can go one step further! A 'good' stable time loop doesn't only create the answer to its antagonist; it also creates that antagonist in the first place. Edea knew she was meant to create an order of sorceress hunters, and so she did, and that role was eventually revealed to them. That order defeated Ultimecia, today. But they did not stop existing. They were not dissolved, because they also knew that the Ultimecia which they had defeated now would also arise in the future. And so Edea created an organization which, across generation, carried on the idea that they are meant to defeat Ultimecia, the final sorceress that will one day arise.
And then one day, Ultimecia is born - or whatever her name was - into a world that names her, a sorceress, as an enemy of SeeD, and she fights against their persecution, she grows up and loses things, she becomes obsessed with time, grief, power, with people's hatred, with their 'fantasies' of what a sorceress is, she decides she will give them exactly what she wants.
It's even more confusing, because this allegedly stable time loop manages to reach beyond that time loop and cause fear of Sorceresses before Edea gets the idea of SeeD from Squall. Obviously there is Adel, whose actions in themselves are sufficient cause for fear and persecution. But when we talked to the students of Galbadia Garden during our first visit, the general knowledge is "Sorceresses only exist in history", and Sorceress Edea's appearance is this unprecedented surprise. This doesn't make much sense if the only well-known Sorceress feared in history was Adel, who was shipped to space seventeen years ago.
Going just by the popular viewpoint of the world's population, the persecution of Sorceresses through the ages isn't something only SeeD does and propagates. It should instead be a reaction to Adel's atrocities, understandable through human nature. Ultimecia shouldn't be blaming SeeD, she should be blaming Adel.
Well, that and whoever was taking Odine's "toy" Junction Machine Ellone and improving it to the point of actual usability. Why would anyone (or any organization, since it was a work of generations) do that?
It has become my understanding, since finishing the game, that "Ultimecia is Rinoa" is a popular fan theory, popular enough to get a nod with Dissidia naming Ultimecia's weapons after Rinoa's, but one that is also explicitly disproven by canon and the developers' words. I am genuinely grateful to everyone who was able to keep a lid on it and leave me to think this was just my brilliant idea I'd come up with it myself rather than wink wink nudge nudge hint that it was a popular (disproven) fan theory.
From that brief clip, the situation seemed to be caused by having three primary scriptwriters (Kitase, Nojima, Nomura), and Kitase mentions Nojima liking to put in all sorts of sly hints and plot hooks and potential references. So Kitase himself had no intention of linking Ultimecia and Rinoa, but he has no idea if any of the other two did.
There is when there are objectively better materia, and your fighting the super-bosses.
Like the other mentioned if you just want to beat the main campaign it isn't a problem at all, and if anything you'll be overpowered arguably, just from playing the game.
Personally I vastly prefer FF7 style of gameplay to FF8, as it makes the main story fun if a bit easy, and you can make the choice on if you care enough to engage the super boss, especially since guides now exist.
Levelling Materia in FF7 is fairly trivial. Take an hour and bash on the dudes around Mideel, who're extremely easy compared to the stuff in the Northern Crater but have very good AP drops.
Well, more on that later. Right now, we have a battle to win.
This is, I think, our first explicit acknowledgment that part of the reason for time compression is to gather the power of all sorceresses across history into herself. This will not be the last vital piece of information hidden behind Scan.
Interesting thoughts and the end, there! And thanks again, in general, for doing these LPs and commentary and such.
Though I am now thinking... is this a stable time loop? Because if Ultimecia is the final sorceress, having already absorbed the power of all previous ones by the time the party fights her in the future... what does it mean that she then passes her power on to Edea in the past, where, in addition to at least Edea's existing power and Adel's power, it will eventually make its way back to her? Does this mean that sorceress power can be destroyed as well as transferred, that some of that power went somewhere else on Ultimecia's defeat, that she hadn't actually absorbed all other sorceresses... or that this is less a stable loop and more of a spiral, events repeating but with Edea, Rinoa, possibly Adel-junctioning-Rinoa, and Ultimecia more powerful each time and as a result varying the details of events? If so, that raises questions about both the origin point of the spiral, and where it's going.
...And in conjunction with Omicron's speculations at the end of the post, I'm in turn now wondering if, while this Ultimecia wasn't Rinoa, a previous-in-metatime Ultimecia was. Maybe Adel was the driving villain in a previous arc of the spiral, too, perhaps even the first one, reaching out from space to engineer her freedom before there was an Ultimecia to reach back through time.
Oh, right, also? I'm not sure "It's a stable time loop!" exactly washes Edea and Cid's motives clean. Because, like... it's not as if Squall presented extensive ironclad evidence of his claims, is it? Mysterious soldier shows up, says "I'm from the future and you start turning this orphans into child soldiers to kill people like that woman over there okay byeeee." and vanishes, who just responds "Oh, okay, that was extremely credible so I guess it's my inescapable destiny to start teaching five year olds to do kill people for money"? And Cid didn't even see Ultimecia or future!Squall, his wife just came back inside, told him that she'd met a couple of time travellers, and they needed to start an exciting new business venture... and then he just completely went along with that, apparently.
Now that we're finished, I'd like to put on record that my initial reaction to Omi theorizing that Rinoa was Ultimecia was less frustration, which it could easily have looked like, and more AMAZEMENT that he managed to hit on that exact the-moon-landing-didn't-happen point that others had theorized back in the day. I had looked forward to people bringing it up, and there he is doing so just fine by himself.
Bastard.
With that said, thanks for the playthrough Omi! Looking forward to your final words and then your coming LP's. It's been a fun ride so far.
