- Location
- Te Ika-a-Māui
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Something was in the water at Square HQ in the late 90's, man.
Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Playing: Final Fantasy IX]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Let's Play
You know, one of the best ways I've seen for unlocking a Tonberry King summon was actually in a multi-cross fanfic - Archangel's Amazing Adventures, in which the titular Gundam Seed starship goes on an interdimensional odyssey.Thankfully, once twenty Tonberries have been dispatched, the next encounter contains a surprise: First, a Tonberry as normal, then once it dies…
…the Tonberry King enters the stage.
Unfortunately, hm. I didn't know he would appear mid-battle. My team isn't properly healed or prepared in any way. I just left Squall dead on the floor from an earlier fight. Ah.
Well, thankfully I am constantly quicksaving, so I just reload to before the fight before the King can show me my just desserts, change my team around a bit, and head back in.
The Tonberry King is the vengeful embodiment of a massacred people, explicitly here because I murdered a horde of Tonberries, with no rhyme or reason, not even getting any reward out of it, to draw him out of hiding. I'm the bad guy here!
During the course of the fic's Final Fantasy VI arc, one minor subplot involves a small number of Tonberries working on board the ship's kitchen; the first one just shows up there out of the blue, and then the team goes searching for the rest. Later, they stumble upon the Tonberries' king, and upon learning that the other chefs have set up shop in the kitchen, decides to join them.
To me, that offers an interesting framework for a Tonberry sidequest in a game. When you encounter a Tonberry, rather than kill it, you do something to recruit it (maybe choosing to be passive and do nothing, healing them, or some other kind of unique action that shows that you are not driven by violence), and it migrates to your home base as a friendly NPC. Do it enough times, and you have a chance of encounter the King, who appreciates how you've treated his kin and chooses to join you. Would be sort of different from the "kill enough Tonberries to draw on the King" mission that FF8 has.
Here are a couple of details from the guide, since you shot through the battle so quick. The dragon was fire-type, so the guide recommends using Shiva and ice against it. Also, both fire and wind magic heal it.Then we reload because it turns out the UI we were shown when picking whoever was getting 'subbed in' for Kiros didn't actually exchange their Junctions, so Kiros has no abilities and terrible stats. Thankfully, just before the fight we're given a dialogue option to check our stuff, so we can reload to there and give Kiros some actual junctions.
He promptly annihilates the dragon with his Limit Break, Blood Pain.
I'm pretty sure this is basically the optimal strategy in FF8 yes. I personally abused Squall's limit break in my playthrough, but any good multi-hit LB can probably work fine.
50/50 just reveling in the ability to do conditional shit like this or the reason being some plot-critical spoiler
Final Fantasy VIII Is A Well Balanced Game, Junctioning Is A Well Designed System
Damn
If only Squall had some kind of spell that made people be full of life again
Some sort of... Full-Life spell
Ellone says you can't change the past, the game immediately demonstrates a action in the future changing a scene in the past for frivolous and inconsequential reasons that make no sense.
Turns out this FF timestream has more holes in it than swiss 🧀, but only from the perspective of the omniscent player.
There is no existential horror implied here *slaps game disc case, and get hurt because slapping hard plastic with corners is dumb and you shouldn't do it*
Maybe it's a metaphor about savegames
Turns out this FF timestream has more holes in it than swiss 🧀, but only from the perspective of the omniscent player.
There is no existential horror implied here *slaps game disc case, and get hurt because slapping hard plastic with corners is dumb and you shouldn't do it*
Maybe it's a metaphor about savegames
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- Location
- Land of the Midday Sun
Dunno, but Ruby Dragons change moveset depending if you have 3 active party members or if you have less. The strongest attacks come out only with a full active party, so here having only Laguna and Kiros might be an advantage.
FourthWall
Love & Destroy
- Location
- Chiraq
Hubris. Hubris and the Legend of Grandia series.
Egleris
Vagrant Dragon
- Location
- Italy
I think I mentioned the card sidequest in Balamb Garden, didn't I? Have you found it yet? If not, and you'd like help in finding the starting element in the chain, you can find that player in the hall, although he sometimes takes a bit of waiting in the hall to show up.
Ah, you finally found the most broken element of the entire mechanical mess that is FFVIII - repeatedly refreshing a character's turn until you get a limit, so that leaving characters in critical doesn't just give you a chance to use them, it guarantees that you can. Honestly, without this being possible, I think most of the other exploits wouldn't be as bad - still something to fix, but with minor tweaks, many of which I've mentioned before. But this specific element should just have been removed altogether.
Tomberry is tied with Shiva for my second favorite GF in the game, both because it's a cute critter and because of the silly shenanigans it allows. I really like to use Level Up and Down (which work on every non-boss) to tailor the enemies so the drops/mugs/draws I want are easier to find, for example, and of course he's key to the dark art known as "menu grinding".
The Ruby/Rubrum Dragon has a specific AI, where if the team has only two members alive, it doesn't use any of its party-wide attacks, one of which is extremely lethal, and also doesn't cast its two most powerful single target magics. I suspect that this fact, and the fact that you can exclude Ward from the dream (easy to write in for the developers, as he's mute and thus doesn't have any lines either way) were specifically put there so that a player with poor system mastery would not get steamrolled by the dragon encounter. It seems to me they wanted to make sure the player met what's likely either the strongest or second-strongest random encounter in the game, to show off the best (non GF) dragon the Final Fantasy series has had so far, but didn't want to place an enemy that might well have been unbeatable for some players as an obligatory boss fight.
Yes! So, this is part of why I have been keeping up the translation thing, because I wanted to point out that I'm pretty sure Ultimecia is a mistranslation made by the English (and French) version, and the correct translation of the name would have been Artemisia, which is the translation the Italian (and German, and Spanish) version of the game went with.
So, my argument for this is manifold, and goes like this:
Ultimecia isn't an actual name, but Artemisia is - it was historically the name of a couple famous queens and a Renaissance painter, all of whom, notably, had history of being women who faced various forms of discrimination - and is obviously derived from the name of the Greek goddess Artemis.
Furthermore, Artemisia is also the name of a plant, a bitter flower that can cure/cause hallucinations/nightmares, and has been often named as an ingredient in many fictional "witch brews". In a game that has the protagonist group named "the seeds", which are raised in "the Garden", that seems extremely thematically relevant. And now, we learn that, just as our protagonists have had visions of the past through Ellone's power, Artemisia is apparently using a similar power (to see the past in dreams) to possess/control people. The floral motif and the thematic connection is way too strong to assume that this was a coincidence, so I don't. Assuming a mistranslation instead seems smarter to me.
Artemis, notably, is a name that has shown up before in the series, as one of the ultimate bows in Final Fantasy IV and Final Fantasy V (and we know that FFVIII is paying more homages to FFV than usual, what with including the Minotaur brothers). The Artemis Bow also, importantly for my point, appears in Final Fantasy Tactics - where it's incorrectly renamed to Ultimus bow. So that gives us a previous example of an English translation team accidentally changing what should have been an "Artemis" based name into a "Ultima"-derived one.
Artemis, of course, has plenty of reasons to be a good inspiration for the name of this game's villain all on its own; in addition to being a hunter goddess (as referenced by the bow connection), she is also a goddess of the wilds, which provides us with another obvious thematic contrast with out team: a garden is a showcase of natural beauty that has been tamed and civilized through careful cultivation of seeds, and thus is the opposite of what a goddess of the wild is supposed to represent, the untamed and savage ability of nature to dominate life. These are all things that are reflected in the way Artemisia acts when possessing Edea; we know that the flair for the dramatic and the dominatrix aspect of her character's are Artemisia's efforts, and not Edea's, because in both flashbacks we see of Edea pre-possession, she'd dressed demurely and appears to have a much more gentle and caring personality.
And, of course, bringing it all together, there's one last thing that Artemis is the goddess of: just as her brother Apollo is god of the sun, Artemis is the moon's goddess. I don't think I need to bring up all the reasons why having a thematic connection to the moon would be extremely fitting for the villain of FFVIII, do I? We've been harping on the moon's importance the whole game, (and more jokingly about the Sailor Moon parallels, too), so having the villain named after the goddess of the moon seems entirely fitting to me.
So, my point is thus: the villain of Final Fantasy VIII is supposed to be named Artemisia, not Ultimecia, and while everybody is free to disagree, I don't think I'll change my mind on this. Everybody feel free to comment on it, though; I'd be curious to see what sort of arguments people feel they can make to justify the idea that the name Ultimecia was somehow not a mistranslation but rather the originally intended name.
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- Location
- Te Ika-a-Māui
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Simple: her name is Ultimecia because she's the ultimate human. 
Kadmus
Dragon's teeth are surprisingly hard to sow
- Location
- Devon
- Pronouns
- He/Him
In the translators' defence, it was the 90s and not everyone can know extremely basic mythological information about the Greeks, and back then you couldn't just look shit up online the way you can now.
Also Ultima, the spell, is apparently アルテマ - Arutema, so Ultimecia starting with an A in Japanese would not be out of place. アルティミシア - Arutimishia has, you'll note, the exact same first three characters.
EDIT: Of course, Japanese has the U sound, so it could simply be that the initial Ultima translation is wrong.
Also Ultima, the spell, is apparently アルテマ - Arutema, so Ultimecia starting with an A in Japanese would not be out of place. アルティミシア - Arutimishia has, you'll note, the exact same first three characters.
EDIT: Of course, Japanese has the U sound, so it could simply be that the initial Ultima translation is wrong.
Egleris
Vagrant Dragon
- Location
- Italy
Yes, I knew that and expect that was indeed the cause of the mishap; as I said, it happened before in Final Fantasy Tactics as well.
That's possible, but hard to be sure about, because I don't know japanes, and Ultima the spell first appeared in FFII, which did not have an official translation until the FFVI translation had already established Ultima as the name of the spell. For all I know (which is nothing), the FFVI japanese version of "Ultima" was a shortened form of the word "Ultimate", as in FFII ultimate spell, which was referenced that way in FFVI as an homage, and then carried back when FFII got an official translation. It's hard to be sure because my knowledge of japanese isn't up to the task of knowing the truth.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Well, I don't know Japanese either, but what I do know is that the Eden Raids in FFXIV: Shadowbringers are to a large extent a homage to FF8 (in a similar way to the Ivalice Raids borrowing from Tactics, the Crystal Tower Raids from III, and so on), and the main antagonist of Eden is eventually revealed to be someone whose real name is Artemis.
So take that as you will.
So take that as you will.
Horologer
Incertae sedis
- Location
- a risen sea
ウ is more like the u in "strudel" than the u in "strung", though. Japanese doesn't really have an "uh" sound, as far as I'm aware, so I can see what translators would choose ア (which has an "ah" sound) over ウ. It's still not quite right, but it's probably about as close as you can get.
It's probably come up before, but transliterating English into Japanese is really tricky because Japanese just flat-out doesn't have a lot of English phonemes, so you get... the analogy that comes to mind is a hash collision, actually. You have two English sounds that map to the same Japanese one, most famously "r" and "l", which makes things kind of awkward. If you're an ESL translator it's probably even easier to transliterate a word incorrectly, because English orthography is a mess even on a good day.
ZerbanDaGreat
Daemon Noble of D E M O G R A P H I C S
- Pronouns
- They/them
Honestly, maybe it's just down to reading it via LP or whatever, but I'm not really that pressed about the way Squall is acting. The mechanical implementation of it is naff because for some reason they didn't just have cutscene mode take over once Squall is meant to storm off instead of having everyone become robots until you wander off gormlessly on your own, but like... as far as he's concerned he's heard everything he needs to hear. His enemy is Ultimecia, someone he can hate without second thoughts, his goal is Ellone, someone he already wants to find, and it might be his only shot at saving Rinoa, someone he's only just realised at the worst possible time he is deeply, madly, embarrassingly in love with. He's too restless to stay still for one more second so he's eager to rush off and set a course for Wherever The Fuck and once he's done that he lets himself unpack his feelings about Rinoa in private and immediately goes to pieces.
He doesn't know what Time Kompression is but he probably doesn't think he needs to know if Chadstriding into wherever she's held and decapitating Adel will be enough to foil Ultimecia's plans. She may re-possess Edea at some point, making his long-lost mother-figure his enemy again, but currently he doesn't have to think about that any more so he doesn't.
Like I feel like if you turned that exact event into a theoretical FF7 Remake style fully animated and voice-acted cutscene Squall storming out mid-expositon would land fine, because it rings true for his character to me.
He doesn't know what Time Kompression is but he probably doesn't think he needs to know if Chadstriding into wherever she's held and decapitating Adel will be enough to foil Ultimecia's plans. She may re-possess Edea at some point, making his long-lost mother-figure his enemy again, but currently he doesn't have to think about that any more so he doesn't.
Like I feel like if you turned that exact event into a theoretical FF7 Remake style fully animated and voice-acted cutscene Squall storming out mid-expositon would land fine, because it rings true for his character to me.
Simping's over for Edea. Now Ultimecia is my mommy.
Selphie: If I stop writing, my memories would fade, I'd be left with nothing but my GFs, turning me into a perfect killing machine who knows no compassion, no remorse, who has no attachments and will stop at nothing to complete its mission...
Selphie: Yes! Yes! Haha! Yes!
Plot twist: Ultimecia is Chara doing another walkthrough of FFVIII world for old times sake. Time compression is a speedrun strat.
I am validated.
Though the inclusion of the Edea plot beat does make it more sane than going straight to the movie from the end of disc 2.
Also less funny: can you imagine going straight from Seifer's final lament over his role as a knight and the sorceress' utter contempt for him to the B-movie that has probably started his path? I would die. Squall would die. Seifer would double die.
I see what you did here, and you should feel bad.
Selphie: If I stop writing, my memories would fade, I'd be left with nothing but my GFs, turning me into a perfect killing machine who knows no compassion, no remorse, who has no attachments and will stop at nothing to complete its mission...
Selphie: Yes! Yes! Haha! Yes!
Plot twist: Ultimecia is Chara doing another walkthrough of FFVIII world for old times sake. Time compression is a speedrun strat.
I am validated.
Though the inclusion of the Edea plot beat does make it more sane than going straight to the movie from the end of disc 2.
Also less funny: can you imagine going straight from Seifer's final lament over his role as a knight and the sorceress' utter contempt for him to the B-movie that has probably started his path? I would die. Squall would die. Seifer would double die.
I see what you did here, and you should feel bad.
Revlid
blob of bugs
- Location
- England
"'But, but, but'... That's not something a leader should say" is a truly staggering lecture coming from Cid, a man who pushed all leadership responsibilities onto a teenager and fled the instant the stakes got remotely personal (they were also personal for the teenager, but Cid hoped he wouldn't remember that due to progressive brain damage from his method of empowering child soldiers). Amazing that Squall didn't simply punch him.
Also, assuming imprisonment isn't practical, I appreciate that none of the party care to voice the possibility of just killing Edea to prevent the Sorceress Ultemecia from possessing her again, and nor does Cid. It's noteworthy to me, however, that Edea doesn't raise the possibility, either. She laments that she could turn back into the Sorceress at any moment, but doesn't at any point suggest that this would be a fate worse than death, ask them to kill her rather than allow her to be taken again, or even pre-emptively argue against it and for her own life, which would also be a reasonable position to take. Given how apocalyptic a threat Sorceress Edea was, the refusal to even address the risks of her own continued life comes across as... kind of selfish? Everyone else in that scene has an excuse (they are children and a loser), what's hers? It feels like the game really needed a character to say "hey why not just kill her", only to be shut down with "no that wouldn't help because X", or "no I won't let you because emotions" because otherwise I'm still thinking "hey why not just kill her", and the game is refusing to answer.
I really hope she and Squall are ready for an actual conversation next update, because statements like "There was no way I was going to let Ultimecia get a hold of Ellone. The only thing I could do was... Surrender my soul to Ultimecia and lose control of my mind. That was the only way I could save Ellone" elicit nothing but a baffled "why??? in what sense??" from me. Is Edea the only other person she can possess? Are there others? What are the conditions and limits? Could we end this whole threat now by just kicking her off a cliff, or is that just a stalling action?
Also, assuming imprisonment isn't practical, I appreciate that none of the party care to voice the possibility of just killing Edea to prevent the Sorceress Ultemecia from possessing her again, and nor does Cid. It's noteworthy to me, however, that Edea doesn't raise the possibility, either. She laments that she could turn back into the Sorceress at any moment, but doesn't at any point suggest that this would be a fate worse than death, ask them to kill her rather than allow her to be taken again, or even pre-emptively argue against it and for her own life, which would also be a reasonable position to take. Given how apocalyptic a threat Sorceress Edea was, the refusal to even address the risks of her own continued life comes across as... kind of selfish? Everyone else in that scene has an excuse (they are children and a loser), what's hers? It feels like the game really needed a character to say "hey why not just kill her", only to be shut down with "no that wouldn't help because X", or "no I won't let you because emotions" because otherwise I'm still thinking "hey why not just kill her", and the game is refusing to answer.
I really hope she and Squall are ready for an actual conversation next update, because statements like "There was no way I was going to let Ultimecia get a hold of Ellone. The only thing I could do was... Surrender my soul to Ultimecia and lose control of my mind. That was the only way I could save Ellone" elicit nothing but a baffled "why??? in what sense??" from me. Is Edea the only other person she can possess? Are there others? What are the conditions and limits? Could we end this whole threat now by just kicking her off a cliff, or is that just a stalling action?
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GilliamYaeger
M'crazy.
At a guess, this is a translation error? Edea seems to have gone to great lengths before her possession to make sure she herself never knew where Ellone was, so this is more "Ultimecia was inevitable, so the best I could do was make it happen in favorable circumstances" I guess?
Egleris
Vagrant Dragon
- Location
- Italy
There is an actually, extremely plot relevant reasons this would not work. The game is withholding it because, if it provided it right now, it would spoil one of the most high-impact twist the game has in store. So we should just do as the game did and not discuss it - just be assured, the reason exists, and it's a good one. I'm just worried than even this, me hinting at it, could be considered a spoiler.
Just assume the rest of the team was explained while Squall was distracted, if it helps you with the suspension of disbelief.
GilliamYaeger
M'crazy.
Maybe make this reply in the spoiler thread if you're hesitant? Might be fine, but if you wanna err on the side of caution...
Thinking more about genocide, as you do, I think it ties into the whole "how real are monsters, anyway" thing I've talked about a few times.
To reiterate, most monsters in FF series don't exists. On a narrative level, I mean. The best example of it is FFVII, where you have a giant snake who's definitely real in that characters talk warn you about it, you see it on the overworld map, you need to come up with a way to avoid or defeat it, and then you see its sibling carelessly impaled on a tree by Sephiroth to establish his cred. The snake's existence is undeniable, unlike many other monsters you can encounter around the same area, whose presence passes without note or care by the characters. Nobody's organizes their towns as fortresses endlessly besieged by monsters, nobody's talking about people being snatched in the night by horrors, etc. Those monsters are not there, not really, not in ways that matter. They're a mechanical consideration, a challenge and a drain on resources shaping the pace of the game, not a narrative tool to drive the plot.
FFVIII is generally more interested in incorporating monsters into the story, what with providing a lore reason for them to be everywhere and occasionally using them as actual characters, like president's body double. Laguna does talk about hunting mobsters to make the village safer, and now he has encountered a dragon who happens to be a big movie critic. Still, the tension between the narrative and game realities still exists. I think a good way to formulate it is to imagine a hypothetical anime adaptation of FFVIII: what would it keep, what would it discard. In such an anime, our protagonists would still encounter monsters on occasion, in remote areas like the cave and the tomb, and occasionally closer to home like the body double, but most random encounters would just be gone since they don't serve a role in the narrative, only in the gameplay.
Enc-none ability farther drives the point home: you, the player, has the power to determine whether monsters even exist, and a lot of areas work better if they don't (though, admittedly, not all: not encountering any soldiers during the big garden battle is obviously not how this sequence is "supposed" to go in the narrative).
That makes it easy to dismiss the moral implications of killing monsters and the nature of Everybody's Grudge. Sure, you kill hundreds, thousands of monsters, some of them probably actual people, in the course of the game, but they're not real, they're a game mechanic with about as much moral weight as Tetris blocks.
In comes Tonberry King, who exists squarely on the boundary between the narrative and the gameplay. He is an actual character (if barely) with an established story and some dialogue lines, he has a presence to him that could not be easily dismissed, and his existence revolves around taking what was until this point a disconnected mechanic (you encounter monsters every few steps and must kill them before moving on, none of you acknowledging what just happened) and saying, "This is real, this happened, this matters. You murderer. Have a reward."
That's what makes him weird: he is designed to make you stop and look back and think about what you've done, to turn an annoying gotcha ("oh, don't you know that you're playing a crazy murderhobo with kill count higher than some armies?") into an actual genuine story beat... And nothing comes of it. He arrives, you kill him, you take his soul as a reward, you move on.
Like a leviathan emerging from primordial depths, revealing for a moment the horror waiting beneath your feet, only to sink back, leaving you amidst pristine blue sea. But you've seen it, you can't forget. You feel your sins crawling on your back. Everybody's Grudge is real and is waiting for you in the End.
Irvine: Hey Selphie I just got two train tickets, want to join me in murdering monsters from a moving train so we have memories that will last forever? Does a finger gun.
Selphie looking upwards: That's just not fair!
X being : "I want to be stomped every day by this sexy dominant girlboss momma and I am totally fine to endanger the world for it because I want to enjoy my own kink the longest time possible."
And of course, it's not something that the devs could have openly said in the game for "kids", but the ones who know, know.