Honestly I think some RPG teams just have fun throwing together all that alternate text for small sequences like this. Granted it's easier in a game like FFVIII with no voice acting to just slap in a variable or switch or whatever on a bunch of NPCs for "Is the party leader Irvine" and then give them a few lines of alt dialogue.
It's definitely going to be interesting watching what the advent of voice acting will do to the game's writing, because when your dialogue is voiced it suddenly puts a lot of restrictions on how much writing you can do. I know that it comes with FFX, but... Sight unseen I would
guess that it will operate in a fashion similar to XIV, where only major plot beats are voiced, and the overwhelming majority of incidental dialogue is text-only, which lets them sorta have a "best of both worlds" approach.
So, uh, if Squall now has Cid's job, and NORG is busy metamorphosing... who's paying the salary Squall keeps getting? Shouldn't he be the one making salary decisions (and taking in the contract money, and paying his subordinates) now?
Did NORG set up an auto-pay system and forget to turn it off when the civil war kicked in?
This is a solved problem! Most leaders of modern nations are paid a salary. The President of the French Republic earns 16k€ a month, for instance. The power to raise one's salary is restricted, and the salary is handled by part of the administrative system of the state. Balamb Garden most likely has administrative staff as part of the Faculty whose job it is to put money into Squall's bank account and whom Squall doesn't have authority over.
I think you missed a sidequest. If you went to talk to the Master Fishmerman right after you arrived (he's the guy under the umbrella), he'll give you the Occult Fan III magazine. After liberating the town and the Fisherkid finally learns to fish, you can talk to the Master again, and earn a Megalixir. Unfortunately, to get the sidequest, you must talk to the Master Fisherman first thing before doing anything else in Fishermans Horizon, otherwise the sidequest won't happen.
From what I've read, it's not that they swam across the ocean, it's that they hitchhiked in good ol' Iron Clad. Basically, they managed to get inside or under Iron Clad before the base blew up, and the mech's incredibly sturdy build sheltered them. However, they couldn't actually control the mech, so they just rode along (maybe drove it) until you destroyed it finally. That's why they pop up in the water after you knock it into the water.
You should have gone back there after talking to Irvine; a scene will play out and you'll get a Mega Phoenix.
Also, you should look around the area where you fought the boss. The cafeteria lady's son is hanging out there, and maybe you can convince him to come home.
As you can now see, basically everything in that post was missable content that I ended up making an entire update about. Including the explanation about using the Iron Clad to survive! Wild stuff to separate from the main plot!
I choose to believe that the other option besides 'play along' is 'resist the inevitable'.
This is actually a really interesting, non-obvious train of thought for Squall to have at this point. You'd expect him to be worrying about the object level- how he was never trained for this job, he doesn't know how to succeed- but that's not on his mind at all. He's thinking first of taking care of himself (this job is stressful, maybe I should quit), then everyone he's now responsible for, then specifically Cid's emotions. He's got a surprisingly nurturing personality, under all that edge.
Man, FF8 actually has really good character writing, huh.
Comparing this and FF7 it's interesting from a character point of view as well. Both Cloud and Squall have avoidant personalities, but Squall seems way more conscious of his tendencies.
It's interesting, because the sharp reduction in cast members (from 9 party members to 6) initially had me kinda worried that we were seeing a writing crunch with the game not having enough writing time for a broader cast? But instead it's more like the writing got
concentrated. At this stage, the only character I'd describe as "shallow" is Zell, and that's mainly because we haven't had a plot beat focused on him. Squall, Rinoa, Quistis, Selphie and Irvine have all had character depths explored.
It's also very...
mundane character writing, which is interesting in its own right. Like, I'm sure we'll be getting the supernatural reveals soon and getting into how GFs fry your brains and so on, but so far Squall's damage is completely normal and relatable. He has the psychological issues of a real teenager. This is unlike Cloud, who is a very interesting and deep character, but whose psychological issues have a lot to do with the alien parasites boring holes into his brain and his personality doing the fusion dance with his memories of his only friend.
I can easily see why certain players would find the former
less interesting than the latter, though. In some ways Cloud's baggage is more... Exciting?
Having a smaller cast is kind of a letdown in some ways, but in other ways it's like, this game doesn't have a Vincent. And that is a point in its favor.
The steal mechanic always seemed to me like a really bad idea that somehow never sees much improvement across multiple games. Mechanically, you give up some combat rounds for the chance of extra loot. It's almost never worth it on field enemies (except certain special snowflakes), so you're encouraged not to equip it unless you expect a boss, but then you fight surprise bosses. So now you have two different reasons you might want to reload from a save: equipping Steal, and savescumming the drop chance. If you want more challenging fights to give better loot, there are better ways to go about it.
From a lore perspective, what is even happening with Steal? What is your character doing during the fight that they couldn't do after the fight? Do all enemies just have some kind of soul-bind to an object such that you can only take it while they're alive?
Notably, Fabula Ultima, a TTRPG that very consciously emulates early Final Fantasy games in its gameplay, has its equivalent to the Steal move be called "Soul Steal" and it literally manifests an item out of your enemy's soul, because it's the only way this mechanic makes even halfway sense when dealing with "stealing" from a dragon or a wild tiger.
It's interesting because the next game in the series, FFIX, has a thief as its main protagonist. Given that so far the main character of VII and VIII have been impossible to remove from the party, that means Steal has got to be more useful in IX that it's been so far... Right? We'll find out.
I have very, very faint literally-over-2-decades-old memories that say the "correct" piece is a romantic slow song and the "incorrect" piece is an Irish jig, but looking at that list of instruments something tells me my memory is playing tricks on me
Thank you, incidentally; hearing one of the two pieces described as an "Irish jig" jostled my brain into knowing what to pay attention to in the music, and I was able to actually succeed at the music selecting game by picking the scores that sounded like they'd be right for an Irish jig.
Ironically, the next scene is a romantic soulful moment between Rinoa and Squall... and it fails if you picked the slow romantic song instead of the baffling out of place dancing song.
I have to ask, what the hell is Tap? My first thought is that maybe it's another name for drums (which is surprisingly not on the list) but I don't know.
Others have said it, but yeah, it's tap dancing. Every character gets an animation for it. It's great.
This keeps happening, and while it's ambiguous as to whether Squall is just really face blind, I wonder if the game is trying to telegraph memory problems given Selphie's diary entry worrying about it.
It's certainly a possibility! I'm inclined against it just because Squall doesn't appear to have any...
operating memory issues? Like he doesn't seem to forget anything within the timeframe of the game. He may have amnesia about stuff that happened before the opening movie, but so far aside from maybe those face blindness moment he never seems to have forgotten something we saw happen on-screen.
Like, as Omicron said, in a modern game (excepting Elden Ring and its compatriots, which deliberately ape older games to their detriment in this respect)
those be fightin' words
I think, more than anything, this is a game design that benefits from being 15 and having no other real responsibilities, and if you only get one new game a year than being able to dive deep into one particular game and explore and find new things every playthrough would be a joy.
Now though, while I can appreciate the idea, it's hard to justify playing a game more than once when my backlog is as big as it is, so having missable content feels more like gotchas than anything else.
Though even then, I do like the concept, and I think there's something to be said where two people can play the same game, and talking to each other about it they can realize that they've both seen different pieces of content that the ither hasn't. I think if I had the time for them I'd enjoy this game design more, it's just hard to get the intended effect.
One of the most profound forms of nostalgia I have experienced playing this old game is thinking back to when I was a teenager with no extracurricular activities and no real awareness that my time on this earth was limited, who could spend several hours a day playing the same game, month after month after month, and never getting bored. I can almost remember what that's like when I'm faced with moments like this, but it's so distant it's grown alien to me. I can't play games like this anymore (don't look at my play time on Hades).
