Final Fantasy VIII, Part 16.B: The Balamb Garden Civil War
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Anyway, speaking of nothing in particular...
Oh yeah, combat encounters!
Oh no, combat encounters!
This is the Tri-Face. It's got 7201 HP, a full-screen poison-confusion attack that deals high damage, and can spit acid. Each one is a genuinely tough combat encounter, but brings in a ton of XP, and since Zell is lagging down at lv 15 I decide to fight a few to try and get our boy up in levels. That's easier said than done, though; Sleep-Attack ends up being our main way of keeping these fights under control; it's real cheesy, but otherwise I would just be there all day spending all my Curas without making much progress. The Tri-Faces' Draw lists do offer Slow and Bio, so I help myself to a bunch of those, but the gains feel slim.
Incidentally my Limit Breaks trigger a few times due to just how much damage they output and they feel… really weak? Angelo Cannon deals 295 damage to a Tri-Face, which is less than Rinoa could deal with a Fira. Zell is slightly better off, his fighting game moves deal about 100 damage a hit and he can get like… Four, five hits in a LB sequence, but it's still not much. Granted, Zell also suffers from a cripplingly low level, while Rinoa has Magic junctioned but not Strength, so maybe that's the issue here. Ah well. At least we're not going to run into-
…hm.
YEAH SO IT TURNS OUT CONFUSION IS REALLY FUCKING DANGEROUS.
"How dangerous" you ask? As you can see from the Z over his face, Squall put that doggie to sleep, but not before being affected by Confusion along with Rinoa, and Squall proceeded to take down the entire party on his own. Now, Confuse is typically easy to deal with - even if we don't have Remedy, Esuna or Treatment available, simply attacking the confused character will 'slap them awake.' But Confuse also doesn't end unless removed, so if Zell is KO and Rinoa and Squall are both confused, then they'll just indefinitely spam random commands at each other, and if neither of them elects to use an attack and accidentally wake each other up, they will simply commit murder-suicide that way.
How very romantic. Let's move on.
The shutters we opened, it turns out, revealed the lower levels of the oil tanks that are still full of oil. And unlike in our world, it looks like some creatures were happily living in said oil and are unhappy about our interference.
Fortunately, the game soon provides me with the opportunity to avenge myself on a much funnier opponent: the Oilboyles.
Yes, that's their name. The Oily Boys.
They are oil-dwelling, gasteropod-like lifeforms whose bodies are packed full of oils. This makes them hilariously vulnerable to fire damage.
Ifrit hits them each for 1500 damage, and the battle is over in a couple of turns. This easily ranked among the easiest boss fights in the game so far. Once it's over, Squall reiterates that we need to hurry - the missiles could hit any minute now.
And just as he speaks these ill-fated words…
Seen from up close, those missiles are strangely plane-like - but when you think about it, what's really the difference between a cruise missile and a suicide drone? I do find the color scheme interesting though, and the shape - for one thing those war paints go unnecessarily hard, but also the curved lines of the missiles give them a blade-like, kind of unsettling aesthetic, a little alien or organic.
And.
Well.
"Why did the missiles in that one FMV do unnecessary dramatic backflips," you all asked earlier?
That's simple.
The missiles are sentient, evil demon planes.
God, we actually see that eye/camera lens swivel around to track its surroundings and the pupil contracts like a real animal. Outstanding stuff. Why are the missiles not behaving like normal missiles? Because they're full of malicious intent.
Yeah, it was my bad to expect the missiles to obey base realism and resemble real armaments. This is magitech. Whatever those things have going on in their on-board computer, it's at most only half real computing, and probably mostly paramagic.
They're also coming in incredibly close to the water, close enough to cut a wake through it, which is… Actually what you want cruise missiles for? The ability to fly close to the ground and escape detection and interception. And those demon computers aboard probably grant them incredible evasion. Yeah, Galbadia's missile tech is scary.
And it's getting closer.
And there it is. We have reached the heart of Balamb Garden. A circular room, built out of long-rusted metal panels, but at the center of which sits an apparatus that looks entirely too fantastical for its surroundings, a strange sphere carved with some kind of mystical-looking pattern. The fusion of forgotten magic and abandoned industry.
What the hell do we do now indeed, Zell?
Squall has no answer. There's a kind of pedestal, with a handle we can rotate, and it seems to be our only interface. With no other idea what to do, Squall turns it, and turns it again.
Then the whole thing stirs to life. Lightning sparks around the central apparatus. Those weird drill-like helixes start to turn. The entire dashboard comes to life, antiquated green monitors lighting up, and the platform on which our heroes stand starts to rise in the air.
Back in Cid's office, he looks around himself in confusion at the noise and tremor, and a circle of light shines in the ground, spreading beneath his feet… And the platform rises, taking him up along with the party.
Everyone is now standing on some kind of… bridge?
That's a bridge, right? It's small, but it has a computerized dashboard with indicators like you might find for altitude, a voice tube to speak to the rest of the building, it's sitting high up in the air, enough we're only seeing sky…
…
…you know, the whole 'oil stratum' thing was so incongruous, I legitimately did not even think to question it. Like, it was so baffling to me to have some 'oil layer' inside Balamb Garden that I didn't even pause to ask, 'what could that be for?' I just assumed there was no answer.
But now. Now it's obvious. At the heart of Balamb Garden is a giant oil reservoir, and a reactor-like machine, which can be powered up to activate a bridge.
So what's the only possible conclusion to this?
The beautiful mechanical halo which sat above Balamb Garden starts spinning and lighting up. It then goes down, its center forming a pillar of light that enshrouds the whole garden, and seems to phase through it then go down, burying into the ground with a great plume of dust. Something has happened, here, with that impact, that the dust is obscuring, and that the party can't see either, blinded by the light of the halo - but from the bridge equipment, they can tell:
The missiles are coming.
Just like in the game over cinematic for failing to modify their parameters, the missiles approach Balamb Garden and then veer off, up into the air, then immediately dive back down, looking in the process like nothing so much as birds of prey trying to confuse and terrify their target.
I think that's what's on board of these missiles. A bird-like, or cat-like intelligence, that sees Balamb Garden's strange displays of light and shielding halo and it hiding in the smoke, and treats it not as a static building, but as prey, some kind of intelligent animal to be outfoxed with swarm tactics and misdirection.
On the bridge, we see Squall look up helplessly as the missiles dart left and right, then he shields his eyes from a flash of light as they finally hit and explode…
…and Balamb Garden emerges from the smoke, having used its newfound flight capabilities to outrun the blast.
…
CID IS ALWAYS AN AIRSHIP PILOT. HAS BEEN SINCE THE SECOND GAME IN THE SERIES WITH VI AS THE ONLY EXCEPTION. OF COURSE IN THIS GAME HE WOULD BE COMMANDING AN AIRSHIP EVEN IF HE DOESN'T KNOW HE'S DOING IT. THE SCHOOL WAS THE AIRSHIP! IT WAS RIGHT THERE THE ENTIRE TIME, I'M SO FUCKING MAD.
FUCK.
Okay, well. At least the threat of the missiles is over now? Balamb Garden is just… Flying. Across the countryside. Zell thinks this is awesome, and we should get a better view, so down we go. It looks like the monster threat has been eradicated - the students are now pacing through the halls and mostly concerned about their school now flying at high speed through the air.
Turns out? That inexplicable observation deck from earlier wasn't so inexplicable.
Like genuinely, the jump in quality of depicting 3D characters between VII and VIII is unreal.
Blue skies. Green plains. Birds flying freely. And a girl whose hair is blowing in the wind.
How strangely like the epilogue of Final Fantasy VI. Are you fully human, Rinoa, I wonder?
There's a fun bit next that I'm mostly going to gloss over in the interests of wrapping up this update at a satisfying point - Xu calls everyone back to the bridge because there's trouble and Cid says they're heading straight to Balamb and are going to crash into the town. Everyone yells at Squall to do something even though he doesn't know how the controls work better than any of them, so he just randomly smashes buttons and somehow manages to avert disaster.
That still doesn't tell them how to actually handle the damned thing, but luckily, once diverted towards the sea, the school (which turns out to have a keel, and therefore was probably made for this purpose) settles into the water more-or-less gently.
He literally just mashed buttons at random.
Squall asks what the hell happens next, and Cid surmises that they'll just passively drift along until they can figure out the controls. Given that the school was not equipped with either boats or planes, it looks like everyone will have a few days off just hanging out, stranded at sea. "So," Cid says, "it looks like we can finally relax for a while." Then he makes a joke about how he lost his room and doesn't have anywhere to change, which I think is supposed to allude to the fact that most of his office is now occupied by the bridge's support pillar? I'd figured he had a room of his own.
And there we are.
Balamb Garden, drifting across the azure.
…
Man, what a chapter.
It's kind of fascinating to me how much was raised and then not resolved by instead distracting us with answers to questions we hadn't asked. Who is Garden Master NORG? Why did a fight erupt between Cid and the Faculty? What is Cid's relationship to NORG? Who knows! Did you know that Balamb Garden had secretly been a water-capable airship this entire time!? That there is a vast architecture of tunnels, machinery and oil reservoirs within the school, entirely untouched by humans and full of monsters!?
When Cid initially said Balamb Garden used to be a shelter until he 'remodeled it' I'd genuinely thought he meant that, like, most of BGU's surface construction was a modern building built on top of an old bunker complex. But no, not at all! He literally just House Flipped a vast and unknown magitech structure by swapping the decorations and turning the old bridge into his office!
This entire time, our 'school' has been a beached battleship that someone looked at, thought 'to me this seems like an oddly-shaped mall,' and proceeded to put plaster on the walls and paint them over until it did in fact look like a mall, and opened it to the world as WalmarCid.
Which means…
The other Gardens have to be the same way, don't they? Galbadia Garden was incredibly similar to BGU in appearance. If Cid didn't build his own Garden, merely repurposed a pre-existing construction, then Martine probably didn't build his either.
Which would explain why each Garden is so visually similar despite having been founded by different people. Huh. Now I'm really curious as to what Trabia Garden looks like. Or… what's left of it, anyway.
Actually, we have one last picture today - a piece of the Codex about Trabia.
Turns out, the Moombas, those mascot critters from back at the prison, are from there! And it's a wild and inhospitable place inhabited only by said Moombas and the 'Shumi tribe,' plus Trabia Garden.
…
I don't want to assume insensitive material that hasn't been shown before, but. Knowing the connotations often associated with the word 'tribe' in fantasy contexts. Especially tribes that live in hostile, frozen far northern climes…
Is Selphie a D&D Barbarian who had a makeover after going to school? Is that why she is so cheerful, comfortable with violence, and utterly fascinated by trains?
This is probably not the case, but it's wild to imagine.
Anyway. I have no idea where the story goes from here, but I'm excited to find out.
Thank you for reading.
Next Time: Squall gives Rinoa a tour of his school.
Oh yeah, combat encounters!
Oh no, combat encounters!
This is the Tri-Face. It's got 7201 HP, a full-screen poison-confusion attack that deals high damage, and can spit acid. Each one is a genuinely tough combat encounter, but brings in a ton of XP, and since Zell is lagging down at lv 15 I decide to fight a few to try and get our boy up in levels. That's easier said than done, though; Sleep-Attack ends up being our main way of keeping these fights under control; it's real cheesy, but otherwise I would just be there all day spending all my Curas without making much progress. The Tri-Faces' Draw lists do offer Slow and Bio, so I help myself to a bunch of those, but the gains feel slim.
Incidentally my Limit Breaks trigger a few times due to just how much damage they output and they feel… really weak? Angelo Cannon deals 295 damage to a Tri-Face, which is less than Rinoa could deal with a Fira. Zell is slightly better off, his fighting game moves deal about 100 damage a hit and he can get like… Four, five hits in a LB sequence, but it's still not much. Granted, Zell also suffers from a cripplingly low level, while Rinoa has Magic junctioned but not Strength, so maybe that's the issue here. Ah well. At least we're not going to run into-
…hm.
YEAH SO IT TURNS OUT CONFUSION IS REALLY FUCKING DANGEROUS.
"How dangerous" you ask? As you can see from the Z over his face, Squall put that doggie to sleep, but not before being affected by Confusion along with Rinoa, and Squall proceeded to take down the entire party on his own. Now, Confuse is typically easy to deal with - even if we don't have Remedy, Esuna or Treatment available, simply attacking the confused character will 'slap them awake.' But Confuse also doesn't end unless removed, so if Zell is KO and Rinoa and Squall are both confused, then they'll just indefinitely spam random commands at each other, and if neither of them elects to use an attack and accidentally wake each other up, they will simply commit murder-suicide that way.
How very romantic. Let's move on.
The shutters we opened, it turns out, revealed the lower levels of the oil tanks that are still full of oil. And unlike in our world, it looks like some creatures were happily living in said oil and are unhappy about our interference.
Fortunately, the game soon provides me with the opportunity to avenge myself on a much funnier opponent: the Oilboyles.
Yes, that's their name. The Oily Boys.
They are oil-dwelling, gasteropod-like lifeforms whose bodies are packed full of oils. This makes them hilariously vulnerable to fire damage.
Ifrit hits them each for 1500 damage, and the battle is over in a couple of turns. This easily ranked among the easiest boss fights in the game so far. Once it's over, Squall reiterates that we need to hurry - the missiles could hit any minute now.
And just as he speaks these ill-fated words…
Seen from up close, those missiles are strangely plane-like - but when you think about it, what's really the difference between a cruise missile and a suicide drone? I do find the color scheme interesting though, and the shape - for one thing those war paints go unnecessarily hard, but also the curved lines of the missiles give them a blade-like, kind of unsettling aesthetic, a little alien or organic.
And.
Well.
"Why did the missiles in that one FMV do unnecessary dramatic backflips," you all asked earlier?
That's simple.
The missiles are sentient, evil demon planes.
God, we actually see that eye/camera lens swivel around to track its surroundings and the pupil contracts like a real animal. Outstanding stuff. Why are the missiles not behaving like normal missiles? Because they're full of malicious intent.
Yeah, it was my bad to expect the missiles to obey base realism and resemble real armaments. This is magitech. Whatever those things have going on in their on-board computer, it's at most only half real computing, and probably mostly paramagic.
They're also coming in incredibly close to the water, close enough to cut a wake through it, which is… Actually what you want cruise missiles for? The ability to fly close to the ground and escape detection and interception. And those demon computers aboard probably grant them incredible evasion. Yeah, Galbadia's missile tech is scary.
And it's getting closer.
And there it is. We have reached the heart of Balamb Garden. A circular room, built out of long-rusted metal panels, but at the center of which sits an apparatus that looks entirely too fantastical for its surroundings, a strange sphere carved with some kind of mystical-looking pattern. The fusion of forgotten magic and abandoned industry.
What the hell do we do now indeed, Zell?
Squall has no answer. There's a kind of pedestal, with a handle we can rotate, and it seems to be our only interface. With no other idea what to do, Squall turns it, and turns it again.
Then the whole thing stirs to life. Lightning sparks around the central apparatus. Those weird drill-like helixes start to turn. The entire dashboard comes to life, antiquated green monitors lighting up, and the platform on which our heroes stand starts to rise in the air.
Back in Cid's office, he looks around himself in confusion at the noise and tremor, and a circle of light shines in the ground, spreading beneath his feet… And the platform rises, taking him up along with the party.
Everyone is now standing on some kind of… bridge?
That's a bridge, right? It's small, but it has a computerized dashboard with indicators like you might find for altitude, a voice tube to speak to the rest of the building, it's sitting high up in the air, enough we're only seeing sky…
…
…you know, the whole 'oil stratum' thing was so incongruous, I legitimately did not even think to question it. Like, it was so baffling to me to have some 'oil layer' inside Balamb Garden that I didn't even pause to ask, 'what could that be for?' I just assumed there was no answer.
But now. Now it's obvious. At the heart of Balamb Garden is a giant oil reservoir, and a reactor-like machine, which can be powered up to activate a bridge.
So what's the only possible conclusion to this?
The beautiful mechanical halo which sat above Balamb Garden starts spinning and lighting up. It then goes down, its center forming a pillar of light that enshrouds the whole garden, and seems to phase through it then go down, burying into the ground with a great plume of dust. Something has happened, here, with that impact, that the dust is obscuring, and that the party can't see either, blinded by the light of the halo - but from the bridge equipment, they can tell:
The missiles are coming.
Just like in the game over cinematic for failing to modify their parameters, the missiles approach Balamb Garden and then veer off, up into the air, then immediately dive back down, looking in the process like nothing so much as birds of prey trying to confuse and terrify their target.
I think that's what's on board of these missiles. A bird-like, or cat-like intelligence, that sees Balamb Garden's strange displays of light and shielding halo and it hiding in the smoke, and treats it not as a static building, but as prey, some kind of intelligent animal to be outfoxed with swarm tactics and misdirection.
On the bridge, we see Squall look up helplessly as the missiles dart left and right, then he shields his eyes from a flash of light as they finally hit and explode…
…and Balamb Garden emerges from the smoke, having used its newfound flight capabilities to outrun the blast.
…
CID IS ALWAYS AN AIRSHIP PILOT. HAS BEEN SINCE THE SECOND GAME IN THE SERIES WITH VI AS THE ONLY EXCEPTION. OF COURSE IN THIS GAME HE WOULD BE COMMANDING AN AIRSHIP EVEN IF HE DOESN'T KNOW HE'S DOING IT. THE SCHOOL WAS THE AIRSHIP! IT WAS RIGHT THERE THE ENTIRE TIME, I'M SO FUCKING MAD.
FUCK.
Okay, well. At least the threat of the missiles is over now? Balamb Garden is just… Flying. Across the countryside. Zell thinks this is awesome, and we should get a better view, so down we go. It looks like the monster threat has been eradicated - the students are now pacing through the halls and mostly concerned about their school now flying at high speed through the air.
Turns out? That inexplicable observation deck from earlier wasn't so inexplicable.
Like genuinely, the jump in quality of depicting 3D characters between VII and VIII is unreal.
Blue skies. Green plains. Birds flying freely. And a girl whose hair is blowing in the wind.
How strangely like the epilogue of Final Fantasy VI. Are you fully human, Rinoa, I wonder?
There's a fun bit next that I'm mostly going to gloss over in the interests of wrapping up this update at a satisfying point - Xu calls everyone back to the bridge because there's trouble and Cid says they're heading straight to Balamb and are going to crash into the town. Everyone yells at Squall to do something even though he doesn't know how the controls work better than any of them, so he just randomly smashes buttons and somehow manages to avert disaster.
That still doesn't tell them how to actually handle the damned thing, but luckily, once diverted towards the sea, the school (which turns out to have a keel, and therefore was probably made for this purpose) settles into the water more-or-less gently.
He literally just mashed buttons at random.
Squall asks what the hell happens next, and Cid surmises that they'll just passively drift along until they can figure out the controls. Given that the school was not equipped with either boats or planes, it looks like everyone will have a few days off just hanging out, stranded at sea. "So," Cid says, "it looks like we can finally relax for a while." Then he makes a joke about how he lost his room and doesn't have anywhere to change, which I think is supposed to allude to the fact that most of his office is now occupied by the bridge's support pillar? I'd figured he had a room of his own.
And there we are.
Balamb Garden, drifting across the azure.
…
Man, what a chapter.
It's kind of fascinating to me how much was raised and then not resolved by instead distracting us with answers to questions we hadn't asked. Who is Garden Master NORG? Why did a fight erupt between Cid and the Faculty? What is Cid's relationship to NORG? Who knows! Did you know that Balamb Garden had secretly been a water-capable airship this entire time!? That there is a vast architecture of tunnels, machinery and oil reservoirs within the school, entirely untouched by humans and full of monsters!?
When Cid initially said Balamb Garden used to be a shelter until he 'remodeled it' I'd genuinely thought he meant that, like, most of BGU's surface construction was a modern building built on top of an old bunker complex. But no, not at all! He literally just House Flipped a vast and unknown magitech structure by swapping the decorations and turning the old bridge into his office!
This entire time, our 'school' has been a beached battleship that someone looked at, thought 'to me this seems like an oddly-shaped mall,' and proceeded to put plaster on the walls and paint them over until it did in fact look like a mall, and opened it to the world as WalmarCid.
Which means…
The other Gardens have to be the same way, don't they? Galbadia Garden was incredibly similar to BGU in appearance. If Cid didn't build his own Garden, merely repurposed a pre-existing construction, then Martine probably didn't build his either.
Which would explain why each Garden is so visually similar despite having been founded by different people. Huh. Now I'm really curious as to what Trabia Garden looks like. Or… what's left of it, anyway.
Actually, we have one last picture today - a piece of the Codex about Trabia.
Turns out, the Moombas, those mascot critters from back at the prison, are from there! And it's a wild and inhospitable place inhabited only by said Moombas and the 'Shumi tribe,' plus Trabia Garden.
…
I don't want to assume insensitive material that hasn't been shown before, but. Knowing the connotations often associated with the word 'tribe' in fantasy contexts. Especially tribes that live in hostile, frozen far northern climes…
Is Selphie a D&D Barbarian who had a makeover after going to school? Is that why she is so cheerful, comfortable with violence, and utterly fascinated by trains?
This is probably not the case, but it's wild to imagine.
Anyway. I have no idea where the story goes from here, but I'm excited to find out.
Thank you for reading.
Next Time: Squall gives Rinoa a tour of his school.
