Thoracic cavity, yes. I was referencing a YouTuber known as the Fat Electrician that did a short video on US Snipers since I liked the turn of phrase he used. Though now I'd like to do some research on whether the headshot preference is Hollywood dramatics or some natural change of tactics over history.
And we have a name for the Sorceress! This whole time it's been bothering me that I felt like I remembered her name being 'Medea,' one of mythology's famous witches, but I knew that it wasn't actually that and couldn't remember the truth, so I'm glad we've cleared that up: They took 'Medea' and chopped off a letter, calling her 'Edea.' Hence my brain's confusion.
Speaking of Type-Moon, knowing absolutely nothing about the Sorceress besides what I read in this update, my mental image of her is a cross between Jadis the White Witch, and Abridged!Caster.
Irvine: "Rinoa…" (He's obviously going to hit on her but before he can say anything else he's interrupted.) Quistis: "Irvine Kinneas! You're playing a major role in this mission. Now behave yourself!" Irvine. "No one understands me… Sharpshooters are loners by nature…" (He takes a dramatic pose, tilting his head back with a hand on his forehead.) "We hone our instinct, pour our whole being into a single bullet. The pressure of the moment… An instant of tension… That's what… I have to face alone… It's not easy. So like… Just do me a favor, and let me be! You get my drift?"
Irvine you dramatic bitch. Oh my god. I cannot fucking take him serious, what a… What a teenager. Fuck. You know, I give Squall a lot of shit, but at least our boy has yet to turn to the camera and say "I am so tormented you guys, none of you understand my paaaaaain, any way let me slide into your DMs queen."
Hell of a racket these car rental places run; "Hire our cars, drive until the tank's empty, then just fucking abandon it in the wilderness! It's fine, we'll come get it eventually, letting wild monsters fuck in the backseat for six hours between rentals is a feature."
This is the map of the Tomb of the Ancient King. We can open it at any time by pressing Select:
It even has a mercy mechanic in the form of pressing Triangle to instantly escape from the Tomb. Doing so results in the loss of a SeeD rank, but that's something we can easily manage with tests - we're still 'only' Rank 9 out of 30 and I'm still pretty much free of any possible money problem.
We're still not gonna do it, but mostly out of pride.
So. How does the Tomb work?
It is, pretty much, a series of identical corridors and crossroads. We pick a direction, and move to the next screen. Usually, it's another identical crossroads.
And I do mean identical. That is to say, they're identical no matter which side you enter from. That means, the crossroads screen you see above is the entrance screen of the Tomb. If we advance forwards, we land on this screen:
Which you may recognize as identical minus the sword. Now, if we turn back, we find… This exact same screen. There is no change in background to reflect that we came from the north. Or the east, or west, or south.
Which means that a given crossroads screen, by itself, contains no indication of which direction we're facing, and which exits will lead where. We cannot know if we are facing North, South, East or West.
We have to rely on memory. Navigation goes something like this:
"I am on the first screen, facing North. I will take the left-hand road, going West. This means on the next screen, I will be facing West; I will then take the right-hand road, going North."
Do you get what I mean? It's pretty much designed to fuck with an innate tendency to get cardinal directions and personal positioning mixed up - left/right/front/back and North/South/East/West are unrelated, but we tend to get them confused. Of course, not all screens are crossroads: There are bends, which are linear, and can serve as useful references on the map if we get lost.
This is "Sacred", probably one of the most bizarrely named GFs in the game. He is a minotaur wielding a giant mace, and he has a simple gimmick - every turn, he heals a small amount of HP (a little over 100). This isn't enough to make him an invincible foe, but it does mean his nominally small 1940 HP is somewhat inflated by the constant healing.
Now, Scan identifies Sacred as an "Earth GF," and says that he "recovers by power of the earth." Between this and the students who were shouting about Float when we entered the tomb, it seems pretty obvious that casting Float on Sacred will shut down his healing. Unfortunately, we don't have any stocked Floats, so we have to do things the hard way. Now, Sacred is also vulnerable to Poison and Wind damage; however, we have yet to encounter a source of Bio or Aero that I am aware of, so we cannot take advantage of this either. So we'll have to do things the extra hard way.
So. I try to save things with Irvine using Phoenix Down and healing items, but I can't outpace the damage coming. Though it does give us a hilarious opportunity to see what Rinoa's Limit Break, Angelo Cannon, is like:
She mounts her dog on her arm and launches it like a cannon.
Soon enough, Float starts running out on first the Minobros, then my characters, then Protect also starts running out. So, fuck it: I just blast everyone with my remaining Tier 3 spells, Shiva and Ifrit, and try to just DPS race the Minobros.
Squall, mentally: "(Both Balamb and Galbadia Garden are joining forces with the general from the Galbadian army. …Why? …No point in me thinking about it. 'SeeDs aren't meant to question why.'*) [*This is presented as a quote Squall is repeated.] Rinoa: "Umm… Is my contract… still in effect?" Squall, mentally: "(...What is it this time?)" Rinoa: "Don't leave me in this house, ok? Want me to explain why?" Squall, mentally: "(This might take a while…)" Squall: "You should know by now. Just tell us what to do and we'll do it." Rinoa: "Okay, then. Thanks."
Something extremely funny to me how Squall is doing his usual impression of a brick wall, barely paying attention to Rinoa as she quite obviously fishes for some assurance that her contracted mercenaries will stay by her side, and he's just like "yeah whatever" which she still manages to take as an assurance. Did he even mean it that way? Maybe! Maybe not!
Rinoa: "Hmph… He always does this! So discourteous… making people wait." (She gets up.) "I'm gonna go complain. Everyone wait here." (She pauses at the door and turns around. "Oh, by the way, this is my house. So don't worry."
(She leaves the room.)
General Caraway: "She has not received the type of training you all have, and may become a burden. It's for the best that she stays out of this operation." Selphie: "So you're Rinoa's father?" General Caraway: "I can't remember the last time she called me that." Zell: "So the father's a top military officer, and the daughter's a member of an anti-government faction!? That's bad… Really BAD!" General Caraway: "Yes, indeed. It's a serious problem. But it doesn't concern you. It's our problem. " Squall, mentally: "(That's not the case…)" General Caraway: "Besides, we have far more important things to worry about." Squall, mentally: "(Garden's directive and Rinoa's orders have the same value to us.)" Squall: "Once our mission is accomplished here, we're working for Rinoa, as per our contract. I don't know what your situation is, but please don't interfere when the time comes."
General Caraway: "And if I do?" Squall, mentally: "(What's his problem?)" Squall: "We're all SeeDs here. We'll act accordingly."
[...]
And finally… Squall. Squall, my man. You're trying to thread a pretty tough needle here and fucking it up.
Like, I get what's going on. He has conflicting contracts - long term work towards Timber's independence under Rinoa which Balamb Garden has pointedly not invalidated yet, and the immediate mission to assassinate the Sorceress. So instead of starting a confrontation with the vital contact for the assassination mission, he decides to compromise by going "Dude, I'll roll with it for now because we don't have time but once the assassination is over if you try to keep me from taking Rinoa back I'm killing you and everyone who stands in my way," and admittedly the latter part ("We're all SeeDs here" is pretty obvious in what it's implying) is pretty badass, but also, well.
He just broke Rinoa's trust by doing the one thing she specifically asked him not to do: Leave her behind trapped in her father's house.
So. Yeah. Sorry, broody boy, you've fucked that one up as well.
Honestly I think we should give Squall a little credit here, if only a little. Squall is a shithead, we all know this, he's very antisocial and cold and rude, but... he doesn't actually disparage authority all that much? That's Seifer's hat. Squall, so far, has more been defined by being like "ok :|" while chattering away in his head. When he has been shitty it's usually to those equal to or subordinate to him, when there's no 'greater reason' for them to be bothering him and for him to observe social niceties.
Here, despite failing to push very hard for bringing Rinoa with them (an objectively very hard sell), he's still stepping up to the plate with her dad. First with some trademark mental comments denying that their obligation to Rinoa is lesser to them than the assassination mission, and then backtalking a dude who self-evidently is not intimidated by the glamour and status of SeeD in order to state fairly overtly that any authority he has over the group and by extension Rinoa ends the second the sorceress mission does.
It doesn't help Rinoa in the immediate, and it's undoubtedly partially motivated by teenage dick-waving, but for someone as quiet as Squall I feel it's worth noting all the same.
I feel like there are so many better ways to pull off a classic American movie sniper rifle assassination. I think the part that really gets me is how the plan is predicated on Caraway having enough access to the Presidential Residence to plant a sniper rifle and let the Sniper Team sneak in, but they're only doing that after the Sorceress has left the Residence, because they are literally only using the building as a vantage point. And also the part where instead of shooting Edea by surprise, the plan is to warn someone with unknown magical powers by dropping gates around her parade carriage before taking the shot. Like… She's just gonna cast Protect or something, you know?
But, well, there it is. That is Caraway's plan to assassinate the Sorceress Edea. I assume that the Gateway team will be the ones tasked with engaging the Sorceress in close combat once the sniper inevitably fails, but for now, that's what we got.
I guess because they're already planning to fail, the gate-lock scenario may lower the odds of her getting domed clean by Irvine from the clock tower but greatly increases the odds that the rest can charge her car and beat her to death with hammers. Can't assassinate an archduke without a couple wrong turns and convenient traffic jams, or so I've heard.
Irvine. "No one understands me… Sharpshooters are loners by nature…" (He takes a dramatic pose, tilting his head back with a hand on his forehead.) "We hone our instinct, pour our whole being into a single bullet. The pressure of the moment… An instant of tension… That's what… I have to face alone… It's not easy. So like… Just do me a favor, and let me be! You get my drift?"
You fire a shotgun! The only "loneliness" you experience is people refusing to stand near you because they don't want to be splashed with your buckshot!
Third… I've been wondering the whole time if Zone and Watts's comments about the 'princess' were meant literally and figuratively, and it turns out they probably meant it figuratively but it was also most likely a joke about her being the daughter of somebody important… And also it turns out she's a foreigner. She not a Timberian! She's not fighting for the liberation of her homeland! She's a Galbadian who took up the cause of a people not her own, and ended up their leader figure, creating an awkward situation in which the resistance to Galbadia is led by a daughter of Galbadia - is this just a continuation of imperialism from another direction? It's a real question that arises in revolutionary movements. The implications are fascinating.
So considering the interwar to WW2 aesthetic the important question is now if Rinoa has a French Accent because of the arc de triumph and the city of lights or German because of the role of Germanbadia ?
Here is Irvine declaring that it is fate for them to be together (note: he was basically doing eenie-meenie-whiny-moe about which girl to hit on literally two minutes ago).
Seifer. Suzaku is fundamentally the vaguely homoerotic rival, and Squall, as the one who's actually hanging out with Rinoa, is too reliable to be anything but the love interest who defrosts just in time to get tragically stuffed into a fridge.
Now, the real question is, what's the Galbadian equivalent of gracious pizza product placement?
How can you be so sure though? What if General Caraway undergoes parthenogenesis coupled with sexual dimorphism? As long as we don't see her mother we can never be sure.
Also, Minotaur and Sacred are I believe the first time the Life spell is available to draw! Did you grab a few for future use? They scale HP pretty well as a junction, too, if you aren't just playing Curaga Cottages.
Entirely possible I'm forgetting or missed something like that, to be fair... but also I don't usually consider Draw Points when it comes to magic since at most they give you 14-15 copies of a spell and then tend to go dormant for a while, compared to enemies which are an infinite supply to completely top off or junction.
Squall decides not to head into the compartment because, and I quote him, 'Selphie might throw a fit if I go in first,' at which point she appears, heads inside, and tells Squall "Hee! You caught on!" So I guess Selphie has now claimed rights of… First entry into train cars. I know she's passionate about trains, but that one's a little weird.
NGL, I *hate* Deling City. It is such a pain in the ass to navigate, and it doesn't help that the most efficient way to get around is on a noisy-ass bus that has to stop and go for every NPC trying to cross the street. Super visually underwhelming too. It's meant to be magic-chic fantasy Paris, but it's literally 75% asphalt intersections.
Forget the sweeping Art Nouveau aesthetics and cobblestone seaside towns, the true homage to early 20th century Europe is the vicious cycle of imperialist land grabs and poorly thought out/overly complicated political assassinations threatening to plunge the world into chaos.
Is irving the Nega-Vincent? Outgoing with a bright color scheme against black, red, and brooding? Serial womanizer instead of Vinny's terminal oneitis? And as everyone who's read Dracula knows, Cowboys are the natural enemy of the Vampire.
But you see why a real powergamer might spend literally hours playing cards after the fire cavern, and thus become an unstoppable god for the SeeD exam.
... so, this thread actually did inspire me to restart the game, and yeah, I've spent hours using that to get extra stuff in the form of cards to get extremely powerful.
Which has a strange dynamic honestly. You have to manipulate your damage so you do not one shot enemies to keep them from dying before you get their cards, which makes battles take a lot longer too.
I end up drawing a lot more magic than otherwise because I keep re-rolling to get everything as a collectable and convertible card. Which isn't too bad, because apparently I am the kind of person who actually finds that sort of grind fun.
Consider that the Card command lets you access boss cards (those on the level 6 and 7 pages) before they can be obtained from playing - that's what makes the command useful for powerlevel purpose; in Balamb, if you are capable of carding everything in the Fire Cave (which requires keeping Squall at starting level, so that he doesn't one-shot the Red Bats), it's quite efficient.
I assume that the Gateway team will be the ones tasked with engaging the Sorceress in close combat once the sniper inevitably fails, but for now, that's what we got.
So, I think it's worth pointing out, while you can only buy Normal and Shotgun Ammo right now (more will become available eventually, but not for a good, long while), another way exists to obtain more Ammo:
CardMod can be used to produce bullets, in that some cards refine into some. Additionally, you will eventually stumble into the "Refine Ammo" ability, whose function I'm sure you can guess. These are the only ways to have some variety in Irvine's Limit until very late into the game, and some Ammo Types can only be obtained through this mean. It's the only Limit whose power is bounded by refining, so it seemed worth noting.
Irvine. "No one understands me… Sharpshooters are loners by nature…" (He takes a dramatic pose, tilting his head back with a hand on his forehead.) "We hone our instinct, pour our whole being into a single bullet. The pressure of the moment… An instant of tension… That's what… I have to face alone… It's not easy. So like… Just do me a favor, and let me be! You get my drift?"
What gets even more ridiculous is Irvine's last line here, translated as "You get my drift". The line in Japanese is more like "That's the sort of thing I'd say", meaning Irvine is acknowledging that the previous lines were all a performance intended to be as melodramatic as possible. He's doing the equivalent of winking at the audience here.
Slight overstatement in the translation here. The hotel isn't completely booked like the line "fully booked" implies, but rather there are "lots of guests booked in".
There's another brief conversation listed in this location ("in front of the hotel") on the script site that I felt was intriguing, but I don't know if you encountered it. It's in the Side Dialogue section, so not MSQ related. From context, the speakers are two women.
"A new era is here. A new era where we women will be advancing in society."
"I wonder if the sorceress will be an ally to women?"
In contrast to the usual fear and concern over what the sorceress represents for the world, it's interesting to see a few people in-universe view her as a potential feminist icon.
There's a guard at the entrance who denies us entry. When Squall explains that we are awaited, the guard says he's aware of that, he has been instructed not to allow us in until 'our skills have been tested.' Rinoa muses that Caraway is "still so skeptical of people," again hinting that she knows Caraway.
The Japanese script site author didn't have Rinoa in their party, so Zell is the one to speak up: he complains that they (the party) are "clearly being looked down upon", especially once they hear the details of the test. Zell compares it to "a test of courage" (きもだめし), as in the children's dare where one braves a scary route to reach a given destination, then immediately return. He's annoyed that SeeD is looked down upon, by making them participate in essentially a children's game.
As a side note, I suspect part of the translation's promotion of Caraway from "Colonel" (大佐) to "General" (大将) is Squall's thoughts upon reaching Caraway's mansion: Squall considers Caraway the "number one" of Galbadia's army, so the translators might have felt a mere Colonel commanding the entire Galbadian army is a bit too low-ranking.
Squall also considers that this may be Caraway planning a coup d'etat, before dismissing the idea due to the assassination order being for the sorceress, not the President. So at least Squall has put some thought into the political implications of all this.
This is probably the most jarringly 'video game-y' moment in the game so far, in that we are given a sidequest that is very obviously a sidequest under flimsy pretenses that don't really hold up to scrutiny. There is a place outside Deling City called the Tomb of the Unknown King, and Caraway's test is for us to go there and come back with proof - specifically, retrieve the lost ID number of a Galbadia Garden student who also wanted an appointment with Caraway, was also sent to the Tomb 'yesterday' and never came back.
There's no evidence that this student died or anything, it's only been one day, they could have just backed down and left to go anywhere, but this is our test. The guard adds that we will find what we're looking for very close to the entrance (How would he know that?) and that we shouldn't go any further as the place is highly dangerous.
The guard does mention that every day, students (from Galbadia Garden, presumably; he says "like you", ie the SeeDs) come seeking Caraway. (Why?) The rest is pretty much the same: a student from Galbadia Garden went to the Tomb Of The Unknown King the previous day and has not returned, and the information about their student number will be found near the entrance. No explanation is given for how this guard knew this information, which is presented as statements of fact, rather than "this probably happened".
It gets even more video-gamey when the guard gives the map, and says "press Select to see the map". And then he mentions how one can escape the dungeon (exact word "dungeon", ダンジョン) from the map, but it will bring the SeeD rank down. How would he know, and is he planning on snitching to the party to the SeeD Ranking Board?
More recent games, such as the variety of mobile games involving Final Fantasy all-stars, have more detailed depictions of this LB, freed from the constraints of Playstation graphics. I think the one I saw was from Brave Exvius? Angelo Cannon is supposed to be Angelo perching on the discus projectile thing Rinoa usually shoots, rather than Rinoa somehow equipping Angelo onto her crossbow.
I do not know if this was always intended, or if the modern devs looked at the original Angelo Cannon and desperately tried to come up with something that was slightly less bizarre.
Yeah, in Japanese it's just a difference of one letter: Sekhmet is セクメト, Sacred is セクレト. Why the change, I have no idea.
Also for some reason the Japanese script site lists the younger brother's name as セレクト, ie swapping the middle two letters, which makes it "Select". I assume this is a typo that got copy-and-pasted consistently everywhere.
Regarding the ghost in the tomb: yeah, no further insights from the Japanese text. It is what it is, including the utter lack of reactions from the party.
Honestly a solid B+. I was fully expecting to hate the gimmick, but actually it… Engaged my brainmeats in a pleasing way? It was a fairly simple navigation challenge with basic memory checks ('don't forget your positioning during fights'), a good aesthetic, engaging random encounters, a fun antagonist/boss fight, and a solid reward. Despite the mind-numbingly bullshit sound of 'labyrinth where all screens are identical,' it was actually fun to play through. This was a very nice palate cleanser after the Centra Mining Complex.
Yeah, the Brady Games guide for the Centra Mining Complex is like one and a half pages of directions (which is a lot, considering most areas get like two paragraphs at most) of "go left/right, climb up/down, make your way back to the beginning" and such.
The guide walkthrough for the Tomb Of The Unknown King (minus the boss strategies) is one paragraph, with one simple rule: always turn right. Which is similar to the usual advice of navigating a maze of "place a hand on one wall and follow it throughout".
Rinoa: "Don't leave me in this house, ok? Want me to explain why?" Squall, mentally: "(This might take a while…)" Squall: "You should know by now. Just tell us what to do and we'll do it." Rinoa: "Okay, then. Thanks."
Squall's thought here is ruder in Japanese. He thinks "Will she start rambling nonsense?" Which matches Squall's "don't know, don't care" attitude, but still rude.
His voiced response does use the word "order", as in "Just give us orders (and we'll do it)". I feel like this is yet more continuation of the tension between Squall and Rinoa of "just following orders" and "think for yourself".
Rinoa: "Hmph… He always does this! So discourteous… making people wait." (She gets up.) "I'm gonna go complain. Everyone wait here." (She pauses at the door and turns around. "Oh, by the way, this is my house. So don't worry."
(She leaves the room.)
In the Japanese text, Rinoa re-iterates not to leave her behind. I suspect this is the dialogue for if you didn't have Rinoa in your party.
If so, there's a dialogue choice where Squall can either ask if this is an order, or ask what she means by not leaving her behind. For the former, Squall reminds her that their contract is still in effect, and Rinoa hesitates to make it an explicit order, before saying "let's just go with that".
For the latter, Squall asks if Rinoa's worried that something will happen that would make them leave her behind, and Rinoa avoids the question, this time explicitly saying it's an order. Squall then thinks "she's always making things troublesome".
Given I don't think there's a dialogue choice if Rinoa was in the party in the earlier conversation, I wonder why there's one here, especially since the choice doesn't really matter, even for characterization.
The "carousel clock" in the clocktower (which is a clock that is also, literally, a carousel) will rise up at that time, giving the Sniper Team a clear shot from the roof of the Presidential Palace to the Gateway.
Amusingly, in Japanese Caraway describes it as "a gimmick clock in bad taste". He only ever refers to it as a "gimmick clock", so presumably the translators had to have looked at the game itself to know it's a carousel.
Like, Caraway has to desperately hope that any Galbadian soldier that learns what Rinoa is doing is permanently silenced, and that's got to be a weird position for a general.
Which has to mean Caraway is likely desperately hoping there are many people in the world named "Rinoa", because Zell happened to speak that name aloud in the middle of Seifer's assault of President Deling on live television.
Yeah. Generally, you take the shot you can get, which means there's a preference for center mass, but if the target is just poking their head out and you have a decent chance at it, then that's the shot.
I guess because they're already planning to fail, the gate-lock scenario may lower the odds of her getting domed clean by Irvine from the clock tower but greatly increases the odds that the rest can charge her car and beat her to death with hammers. Can't assassinate an archduke without a couple wrong turns and convenient traffic jams, or so I've heard.
Honestly I do think the plan makes sense in that it's something that could plausibly have been arranged, but not perfectly arranged because it has to deal with too many unknowns and on a time crunch. So it's less "the best plan" and more "the plan we came up with and can't think of anything better without increasing risk".
As Caraway mentions (at least in the Japanese text), at any sign of trouble, the Sorceress will cancel all scheduled appearances and hole up. This parade is the only time she will be in public view; the investment ceremony will be held at the President's residence, and given the side NPC conversations about the high number of VIPs arriving in Deling City for the ceremony, there's both a good chance for Caraway to arrange for a sniper rifle to be snuck into the carousel clock during the preparations, and a horrible chance to intercept the Sorceress during that ceremony, because the guest list is likely full and closely vetted, including servants on the day itself.
Also everyone knows the Sorceress can mind control people, so a sneaky Agent 47 infiltration might fail if the Sorceress happens to spot you before you get into position.
Trapping the Sorceress's parade at the Triumphal Arch means the Sorceress is momentarily stationary without knowing where the attack is coming from (and likely unable to spot a sniper), and as mentioned also allows for the direct assault option.
Now, there's obviously a lot of problems that could come up, like "what if the Sorceress just teleports away", but I get the feeling Caraway's answer to that is "then we're all screwed".
Now, there's obviously a lot of problems that could come up, like "what if the Sorceress just teleports away", but I get the feeling Caraway's answer to that is "then we're all screwed".
Yeah that makes sense. While typing my post the possibility of Edea just teleporting out of the gate trap also occurred to me, and my first response was also "well then they're all fucked aren't they". The current plan is the best everybody could reasonably scrouge up basically the day of the parade being scheduled with whatever SeeDs are in the neighbourhood.
