The word Seifer uses is チキン野郎, "chicken yarou". To unpack, the "yarou" part is a rude way of addressing someone, like calling them "bastard" or "SOB" or some such. Quite common for a rude insult.
The "chicken" part is strange. It's "chicken" in katakana, which normally is used for chickens as food, like chicken skewers or chicken nuggets, or chicken meat as an ingredient. I have no idea why Seifer chose this insult.
Going deep into speculation without evidence, there was mention earlier about how Balamb Garden's "hot dogs" were originally other foodstuffs in Japanese. So I'm wondering if the scene earlier where Zell rushed into the cafeteria while the Disciplinary Squad was there had something to do with chicken meals, and Seifer calling Zell "chicken yarou" is the equivalent of calling him "hot dogger". Without even the English language implications of "wiener", too.
Otherwise, I have no idea why "chicken yarou".
(The lack of optional and incidental dialogue in the Japanese script site I'm using is really hurting.)
The word Seifer uses is チキン野郎, "chicken yarou". To unpack, the "yarou" part is a rude way of addressing someone, like calling them "bastard" or "SOB" or some such. Quite common for a rude insult.
The "chicken" part is strange. It's "chicken" in katakana, which normally is used for chickens as food, like chicken skewers or chicken nuggets, or chicken meat as an ingredient. I have no idea why Seifer chose this insult.
Going deep into speculation without evidence, there was mention earlier about how Balamb Garden's "hot dogs" were originally other foodstuffs in Japanese. So I'm wondering if the scene earlier where Zell rushed into the cafeteria while the Disciplinary Squad was there had something to do with chicken meals, and Seifer calling Zell "chicken yarou" is the equivalent of calling him "hot dogger". Without even the English language implications of "wiener", too.
Otherwise, I have no idea why "chicken yarou".
(The lack of optional and incidental dialogue in the Japanese script site I'm using is really hurting.)
Guessing blindly, maybe someone put in "chicken" because they knew it was an insult in English, then added "yarou" to make the intent more legible to a Japanese audience. Then whoever did the English translation dutifully translated both words, stringing them together into a nonsensical insult.
Mayhaps you joke, but I'll be damned if the intro and exit of Dollet didn't shape my small child brain back in the day after growing up on Nintendo games up until that point in time.
I'm going to have to start skipping most of the ambient dialogue with unnamed NPCs, I think - in previous games I tried to give at least a flyby overview of all NPCs in a given space but there's just so much incidental dialogue in FF8. There are entire screens that are only there so you can listen to a conversation between friends about how exams suck or which teacher they're crushing on.
Honestly, I think it's worst in Balamb Garden itself compared to other areas? If just because the Garden has like half a dozen entirely optional areas you can run off into to run into oneoff NPCs with flavor text and card decks. You can easily just run out the main gate at the beginning of the game, hit up the dorms after Fire Cavern, and never see anything else up to this point... or you can go "Cafeteria? Library? Training Area? Quad? SOUNDS DOPE" and take over an hour before even getting your first junctioning tutorial from Quistis.
And then every now and then you have a conversation that incidentally clarifies that yes, this school does house literal children, and they are being trained as mercenaries.
I also make a very brief détour by the Training Grounds before deciding I don't feel like fighting monsters on my own. Enough to see one of its monster encounters though:
Ah, the Grat, a surprisingly dangerous enemy if you run into a group while running off to explore the Training Ground solo, on account of having status effects like sleep enabling them to start pounding the shit out of Squall.
Luckily, you don't have to - anytime you use Zell's Limit Break, your Duel options will pop up at the bottom of the screen with their combos listed for you to mash them out.
...Double Luckily, swapping to PS1 means you actually know what the damn prompts are. I used Duel multiple times in the course of the SeeD Exam, and every time immediately stalled out after one piss-poor damaging attack because my Xbox Controller does not, in fact, have a "C" button.
Quistis: "You're the squad leader. Good luck to you." Seifer: "...Instructor. I hate it when people wish me good luck." (He does an unbearably smug hand-scale pose.) "Save those words for a bad student that needs them, eh?" Quistis: "Ok then." *beat* Quistis: "Good luck, Seifer."
(Seifer is speechless and gestures angrily.) Seifer: "Add Instructor Trepes to the list." Squall: "The list…? What is it?"
Oh my god. Does Seifer have a grudge list? Does he have a list of everyone is planning to Get Back At on the day of the revolution or something??? I love it, what a shithead.
God I love this interaction. Quistis shows no hesitation giving Seifer shit, and as we later learn it's very deserved considering this isn't his first time taking the exam.
As for the list, Idunno I guess Seifer is just a School Shooter in the making? Luckily, his school shootings aren't very effective because Gunblades don't actually have bullets.
I think this is the most normal-looking Cid we've ever had. Even FFV Cid had that kind of 'dignified scholar' vibe, this is just… This is literally a principal. Headmaster. Whichever. He's a middle-aged dude with little spectacles and a vest. I would bet actual money his trousers are tweed. He probably has a British accent! Look at him, he's wearing a tie.
He's so mundane-looking it has to be a trick. Let's be on the lookout for any evil plans.
So yeah, I'm not quite going to call them 'child soldiers' because they're not really children, but they absolutely are throwing their students into actual war. Cid tells us to prove ourselves worthy of joining the 'pride of Balamb Garden, the elite mercenary force, SeeD,' and wishes us luck. (Seifer notably doesn't mouth off to the Headmaster the way he does to the inexperienced junior instructor Quistis, lmao).
Well... yeah, on one hand I guess they aren't literally children (though Zell and Selphie are both officially 17 like Squall, and Seifer is only 18). But on the other hand, the Garden is absolutely noted to take some very young recruits and mold them into loyal supersoldiers, which probably breaks some part or another of the Geneva Convention.
This routine where Quistis can anticipate Squall's next line also showed up in the briefing and it's consistently pretty funny. She absolutely has a bead on her student's affect. Then Zell decides to start doing punches and kicks at the air (oh god, he's ADD. That's what's going on, he literally can't sit still), Seifer gets annoyed and then one of the weirder running gags in this sequence starts: Seifer calls Zell a 'chicken-wuss.'
Now, Zell is offended by this, obviously, but like… I don't get how it connects to the scene? Like, Zell has had no opportunity to show himself to be cowardly (or, for that matter, brave); they haven't been in combat, and his major sin right now is 'being annoying.' It's not that I don't buy that he would be offended to be called chicken or a wuss, it's that I have no idea why Seifer picked that attribute at random to insult him with when it has no connection to anything.
From a quick online look, it seems like it might be a translation issue? Seifer does call Zell a chicken, but the compound word he's using might be better translated as 'chickenshit'? It's not clear, though.
Like, if you google 'Chicken-wuss', every result you get is referencing FF8. This insult was essentially made up by the translator to try and convey whatever the JP script was getting at. Is Seifer calling Zell a coward or not? It's not clear.
To be honest I always just took it as Zell being a fairly high-strung individual who's easy to set off, and it's something that Seifer enjoys poking fun at because he's just a shit like that. Chickenshit probably would have been a better translation for that though.
Everyone exchanges some banter (Quistis is professional and reminds everyone that an order to evacuate takes precedence over glory hound tendencies, Seifer tells everyone they just have to take orders from him, the captain, Zell is nervous about getting into his first battle and Seifer mocks him for it), and then it's time for Operation Overlord.
When did Saving Private Ryan come out? 1998? Yeah, I believe that. It's Omaha Beach time, baby.
So, since Omi didn't bother actually giving us a video of The Best FMV In Cinematic History, for everyone's viewing pleasure: View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1d8iDVBMxTs
God I love this cutscene, this right here? This was what defined the name "Final Fantasy" for me as a child, and part of why the entire Dollet sequence is still burned deeply into my brain over 20 years later.
We actually have Seifer as a party member, which I wasn't expecting. Like Squall, he has sky-high accuracy and high Strength, higher than our boy's even. Zell, meanwhile, is a speedster with also solid strength and decent luck and is otherwise terrible, so I guess we want him to hit as hard and as quickly as possible. I'm going to be shuffling GFs across a the group a bit, it doesn't matter too much, what matters is that each character has one GF.
For all that he's only in the party for ten minutes tops (unless you do some grinding abuse like I did for maximum SeeD rank), he's a surprisingly powerful party member. Only one simple limit break though, compared to Squall's multi-hit attack, Zell's Duel Combos, and Quistis and Selphie's Not Yet Appearing In This Let's Play.
We meet Squad A on the beach (note Transfer Student Girl here), who are in charge of communications, and are thus staying behind while we secure the beachhead.
Each Soldier at this stage has 87 HP, which means they die in two hits or one critical hit from standard attacks, or a single spell. They also come with a full basic suite of Fire/Thunder/Blizzard/Cure and do very little damage, so there is very little reason not to just hit them for spells until we get bored. Granted, farming Draws off a single opponent does get boring pretty quickly, but as a balancing factor I'm not sure how much that holds.
Orrrr you can be playing the PC version, turn on Hi-Speed mode so everything goes faster, and hold down the A button until you've drawn the maximum of every spell!
This still takes way too long I don't know why I did it it only extended my grinding time please send help
Once the edge of town has been cleared, Squad A moves in and boasts about their role tapping into the 'Information Network System' without 'the use of radio waves,' whatever that means (hack into the town's Internet???), and all of Squad B, including Squall, comments that support duty is boring and doesn't reward any glory, which gets them labeled 'meatheads.'
We fight through more G-Soldiers, encountering Squad C on the way (they appear to have found a restaurant and be too busy sampling Dollet cuisine to help), and finally we secure the Central Square.
He's not fooling anyone, though. Including Zell, who calls them out on acting all buddy-buddy all of a sudden. This is the first thing we've had resembling a moment of bonding between Squall and Seifer, and the context is… really interesting.
Squall wants to seek out battle, he wants the excitement of the fight and to put his training to use for real. But he doesn't want to openly acknowledge it, to sound like a bloodthirsty maniac like Seifer, or to openly break orders. So defaulting to the Captain's authority, putting the responsibility on Seifer, is convenient to him. Meanwhile, this acknowledges and validates Seifer's role as squad captain, which in turn satisfies Seifer's ego.
They're both giving each other exactly what the other wants in that exchange. What they want just isn't very nice.
Okay that moon is really fucking big though, innit. This is the third shot we've seen emphasizing the moon's massive, dominating presence in the sky: First in the landing FMV, where the ships were tiny dots across the surface of its reflection; then just before in that huge close-up above the roofs of Dollet, and now here, taking up half the sky in this long shot of us crossing the bridge.
Are we going to go to the moon in this one again? That would be rad.
On the mountain path to the Communication Tower, we run into several Dollet soldiers, injured on the path - I assume those are the same soldiers who 'retreated into the mountains', the mountain on which we now, presumably, stand.
Like, I have encountered significantly more monsters as cards than I have as monsters so far. Tripe Triad effectively acts as a preview of a solid number of monsters and, even, some bosses! This here is Anacondaur, a 'venomous snake that uses squeeze attacks' with a hefty 1400 HP. Seifer opens the fight by saying that 'the finishing blow determines the XP, so leave it to me,' which I find confusing because as far as I can tell that… isn't true? Battles always seem to give out evenly divided XP to all characters. Strange.
This fight is our first look at Seifer's Limit Break, No Mercy, which has me doing the DiCaprio pointing meme because it turns out it's the same technique he uses in the OP - cast a fire spell to blind the opponent and put him off guard, then dive in with a heavy sword blow, although in this case it's more of a sword beam.
Killing Blow specifically means things like magic or weapon attacks; GFs don't give any bonus EXP.
What really surprised me about No Mercy is the fact that it's a multi-target attack - somehow, Seifer hits every enemy on the field with his fireballs and followup sword beam.
Which makes it decent, actually? Because if you haven't noticed yet... there's not a lot of multi-target options in FFVIII, you can't just expand spells to hit the entire ally/enemy party at once, you mostly need GFs for that kind of stuff.
You might actually recognize her from her hairdo: this is in fact Transfer Student Girl, the girl we showed around the campus, whom we saw earlier on the beach with Squad A.
Not for any waifu reasons or something, mind you, it's because when you're playing the game with no junctioning because you're a dumbass and only have the Attack and Limit commands, her limit break is a godsend.
Anyways like how Zell is totally ADD, Selphie absolutely feels autistic-coded to me, though it might be a bit early to say that with how little screentime she's gotten so far.
Galbadian soldiers are actually seen running out of the tower because they're scared of Seifer's crazed assault. What a man. I am honestly kind of warming up to him; I guess all it takes for me to start liking someone who's been a total dick for 90% of his screentime is for him to shout about his "ROMANTIC DREAM" while Leeroy Jenkins-ing himself at a fortified position alone and for the enemy to be the ones coming out running in fear.
Actually, wait, before we head in and towards the big boss fight, let me just… See something…
Selphie joins us with a lot of magic. Specifically: All the magic that Seifer Drew while he was on the team. Additionally, ever since Quistis joined Squall for the Fire Cavern exam, she's been visible in the Menu - she's in a separate section as an off-team member but we can, at any time, see her status, Junction or un-Junction GFs from her, and do other menu stuff.
Seifer doesn't join Quistis in the menu, and he transferred all his Magic to Selphie. Which suggests to me that his guest appearance on the team was not intended to last - he was there for a brief sequence, and now he's gone for good, or at least for a pretty long while.
This ties into something weird I've noticed - Seifer's No Mercy LB seems to appear at random. He doesn't need to be at low HP for it, and if it appears on one round and I don't use it it's gone, then reappears later. I think they gave him a special mechanic where his Limit Break appears randomly but semi-often so the player would be guaranteed to see it for the little while Seifer is in the party.
...Welp, guess I spent time refining and shuffling all of Seifer's magic before he left for nothing, game just auto gives it to Selphie. Which... makes sense, but for some reason I didn't think of it.
And yeah, where everyone else requires low health or other specific triggers to get their limit breaks, Seifer seems to be coded to always have it available no matter his health. This was particularly useful while solo grinding on this mission if I ran into a double Anacondaur encounter, because those things hit fast and hard.
All Summons obtained so far have a very cheap ability called "Boost," which costs only 10 AP to learn. It is supposed to allow us to enhance the damage dealt by that GF when summoned with repeated button presses; however, the game does not indicate how to do that, so I haven't been able to work it out yet. So far, Shiva and Ifrit have both unlocked Boost, and have started on… I think I put Shiva on the ability to refine Ice magic out of items, and I forget what I gave Ifrit. Quezacotl, however, has a rather more unique Ability; Card is a Command ability which allows its user to turn enemies into Triple Triad cards.
I'm vaguely aware that card abuse is one of the main ways of breaking the game open, although I don't know how, haven't looked it into it, and am not interested in hearing at this stage. I've set Quezacotl to learn Card strictly in hopes of boosting my Triple Triad selection with more cards to win more matches, that's it. However, while Quezacotl has learned Card by the time we reach the Tower, the only enemies within are Galbadian units, who appear immune to Cards.
Maybe we're not allowed to turn human beings into monster cards like this is Yu-Gi-Oh. Lame.
First, the Boost command: Basically, you have to hold Select/whatever button to remove the HUD from view during the summoning animation, then you mash the Square key in the time leading up to their attack as long as the indicator for it doesn't have a red X over the button. More you mash, bigger boost you get, though accidently hitting at the wrong time instantly drains the boost to below the starting value, so don't fuck that up. Luckily, I'm pretty sure the Boost/Don't Boost timing is the same per summon, so after a time or two you'll be fine.
As for cards... Yeah, Card command helps break the game open both because it gets you lots of Cards to be used with another ability Quezacotl has available, and also because it allows you to keep levels low while still grinding AP because enemies turned into Cards don't give AP, but still give random drops and AP.
Elvoret also contains the seeds of his own demise: his Draw options include Scan, Esuna (nice), and Double. Double is a spell new to the series, and its effect is that… It creates a status effect that allows a character to Dualcast?
A character affected by Double always has the ability, when using Magic, to either cast as Single or Double. Double spends the chosen spell twice to cast it twice, affecting either the same target twice or two separate targets.
That's… interesting. This is definitely earlier than I would expect such a power to show up, but also the way Draw and Magic work means that there are controls put on it; because I can only access it when the game lets me access it.
And yeah, I was really surprised that Double shows up this early, though granted it's specifically from a boss rather than a random encounter. In the same vein, the next boss has Protect available which is the first you see of that. Double is pretty good though, and also a way around the fact that you can't heal the entire party at once - if your healer has Double, they can just cast cure on two party members at once.
Siren is a Guardian Force. Drawing her from Elvoret is, as far as I'm aware, the only way to obtain her, and if we miss her in this fight, she's missed forever. That's a pretty huge deal… and we are given no warning of this. The game fully expects us to have, by now, internalized that we should always Draw-check every enemy we encounter to see if it has anything we want. Which, considering that enemies so far have mostly had one of a small selection of spells that repeats often, is a pretty big ask!
I didn't end up missing Siren either here or in my original long-ago playthrough (she's called Ondine in FR btw), but I think the first totally missable GF that is supposed to serve as your 'going forward, always check bosses for GFs!' might have warranted some highlight.
So iirc, in the original JP version of the game Drawn GFs were one and done, but other/later releases give an extra opportunity to obtain them. That said, the opportunity is like... late Disk 3 or 4, sooo not really relevant or something you want to wait for when you can just always have the Draw command equipped to someone and check every boss anyways.
Because... why wouldn't you check every boss, when that's sometimes the only good source of powerful spells? Imagine missing Flare or Holy or Ultima or whatever because you didn't bother using one of your nine character slots for the Draw command, how embaressing.
Still. I decide that, since I haven't seen Selphie or Zell's Limit Breaks so far, I might as well play close to the wire, avoid Cure abuse, and try to stay in the danger zone to trigger Limit. My characters end up dipping into critical range several times, and their Limit… never shows up.
Aside from Squall, whose Renzokuken still shows up as normal when in crit HP, neither Selphie nor Zell ever ends up giving me a prompt to try a Limit.
So, this was basically just some bad luck - the lower your HP, the more likely Limit is to show up.
But you wanna know something special about FFVIII limit breaks in comparison to FFVI (completely random) or FFVII (bar what fills up)?
The game does a roll for whether or not you get the Limit Break every single time you open a character's menu. So, you can just rapidly switch party members between two low HP characters until the little Limit arrow shows up, and get it basically whenever you want.
I don't know how I feel about it, because I don't know how it works and I don't know how it will impact the gameplay. I know there are are advices on how to break FF8 that involve a lot of more or less circuitous methods to go through the game without ever gaining XP, like ways to beat random encounters that only reward AP but no XP so your GFs learn Abilities without increasing enemy levels, and I don't… want that? I have zero interest in playing that way.
Contrary to the two extremes some people will have of "FFVIII is now completely trivially broken and I did it in the first three hours" and "FFVIII got too insanely hard because I overleveled", if you just go into the game with a decent understanding of the Junction system? It's not too difficult to avoid running into a situation where the game out levels you.
It's also a nearly unwinnable fight. The Black Widow has 5700+ HP, and it can heal itself back to full HP up to five times. While we are on a 30 minute window. We are not meant to fight it, except as a deliberate challenge; instead, when the Black Widow has lost 20% of its HP, it temporarily goes down and enters a self-repair state, which is signaled in increments of 20%, until it heals back to full (so there is no point trying to damage it while it's in that state).
Instead, when the mech is down, we are able to escape again, which we can't do while it's active. This is our cue to run like hell, although the mech is in prompt pursuit.
It's also iirc impossible to kill the mech on the first encounter outside the base of the tower - you have to flee at least once then fight it again further along the path to go for a proper kill.
The mech catches up with the group at several points. There are ways of avoiding some (all?) of these encounters with the proper timing or zig-zagging, but I don't know them and I'm not super interested in looking them up, so we end up fighting the mech four or five times.
Of course there have been dozens, hundreds, if not thousands of CGI cutscenes of video game characters blowing mechs up with machine guns since FF8 came out. But at the time? With this level of graphics? With this cinematic attention to detail, to movement, to sound and fury, to battle damage? The way the Black Widow moves through Dollet, smashing everything in its path, the way it has so much weight you briefly almost believe it's gone down under its own weight, the way its pursuit of Squall is so relentless, getting closer and closer until you see through its eyes, and then the sudden heroic reversal and the power of the machine gun?
In 1999? Come on. This was a revelation.
The more I see of FF8's cinematic, the more it's no wonder to me these animators started to think, foolishly, and in the event erroneously, 'you know what? I think we can pull off a feature-length Final Fantasy movie.' It didn't work, but goddamn. Can you blame them for getting high on their own supply at this stage?
Omi Once Again Forces Me To Grace You All With Top Tier Cutscenes Myself: View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TX0ndYDprLQ
And no, I really can't blame them, FFVII and FFVIII alone have some totally awesome FMV work that I'm sure left some players if not devs thinking "what if we got a whole movie of this?"
It'll take me some time for me to settle my thoughts on the gameplay of the game. So far, it's engaging but it's clear that abusing Draw is eventually going to be a quick way to make the game completely unfun while significantly reducing the challenge posed by fights, but in the worst possible way ('I have 300 Cure casts so I can never die' rather than being too strong and blowing up the boss too fast). And I'll have to find my own balance on this, because the game leaves it entirely up to me whether I murder my own fun or not. We'll see how it goes.
Personally, I'll continue to avoid giving specific gamebreaking info unless it's directly asked about. Hopefully others will stick with not overexplaining how to snap the game in half as well, but I have my doubts there's already been hinting in thread.
*cough* You can actually name the entire party. Omni is skipping the actual 'select name' screen because they aren't worth the screenshot, but the full party's first name is selectable to be anything really, just like GFs.
Their last names (when mentioned) aren't changable, considering we see Zell's mom referred to by various NPC's, that's probably pretty sensible.
I am like... 95% certain that the only party members you actually get to rename in their introduction are Squall and one other. Now, I'm pretty sure there's also an item you can get later that lets you rename any party member you want, but Quistis, Zell and Selphie at least all just have their names given to you.
As mentioned though, could be a Remaster difference.
Still. I decide that, since I haven't seen Selphie or Zell's Limit Breaks so far, I might as well play close to the wire, avoid Cure abuse, and try to stay in the danger zone to trigger Limit. My characters end up dipping into critical range several times, and their Limit… never shows up.
Aside from Squall, whose Renzokuken still shows up as normal when in crit HP, neither Selphie nor Zell ever ends up giving me a prompt to try a Limit.
Possibly stepping over the line for mechanics spoilers, and I don't know if you already knew about this (but did not mention it in the write-up), but there's an odd thing for FFVIII's Limit Breaks that I discovered very early on, pre-Dollet mission, that I assumed you would know about by now. Just in case, though, I'll put it under a spoiler block.
In combat, there should be a button that swaps between party members whose turns are ready. This is a default control, so it should be unremarkable.
The odd thing about FFVIII is when a character's turn comes up, the game checks to see if the character can potentially perform a Limit Break based on their HP, then "rolls" the probability to see if the Limit Break option comes up. I think there's some sort of formula about how critical the character's HP is, influencing the probability of the Limit Break command appearing.
This Limit Break probability roll happens each time the character's command window comes up. And as mentioned, there's the button that swaps between character command windows for those whose turns are ready. If there is only one character with a ready turn, the game just "swaps" to that same character.
Therefore, the "proper" way to go for Limit Breaks is to keep spamming that character swap button until the Limit Break command comes up. This also means if you can keep your characters at low HP but still surviving, you can spam Limit Breaks nonstop.
Again, apologies if you already knew about all this. I'll leave it here in case other players new to FFVIII weren't aware.
I admit before I checked the Japanese script, I also thought this was the case.
But "your head looks like a chicken" has a common insult in Japanese, 鳥頭, "tori-atama". Which is literally "bird head", but by default translated into "birdbrain".
So I assumed it couldn't be that, because surely the English translator would be well aware of it. And as it turned out, it's "chicken yarou", which is definitely unusual and strange.
And decided to put it in a separate post, but Bestiary! Omi didn't hit all of them anyways, presumably because he didn't grind like a nut to get 70+ kills so missed a few of the randoms on the three whole screens they happen in.
I might be mis-remembering, but I distinctly recall reading somewhere that Fujin speaking in single words in all caps was the translators' attempt to translate her speaking entirely in kanji in the Japanese version.
Why they had her speaking in Kanji I'm less clear on; I'm not familiar enough with the nuances of Japanese to know if "loud and monosyllabic" is a good translation of that or if it should have been "very erudite because she uses the fancy ideograms a lot of our target audience of twelve year olds has trouble learning".
I'm going to have to start skipping most of the ambient dialogue with unnamed NPCs, I think - in previous games I tried to give at least a flyby overview of all NPCs in a given space but there's just so much incidental dialogue in FF8. There are entire screens that are only there so you can listen to a conversation between friends about how exams suck or which teacher they're crushing on.
It's genuinely incredible work and cinematic as shit, and it does the whole 'transition from pre-rendered FMV to in-game character models' thing that VII did so well in a few instances and this game clearly loves even more (rightly so).
The character who delivers the killing blow (to every enemy in the game, not just the Anacondaur) does actually gets bonus EXP (I think 10% of the total or thereabouts?), but the GF also count as characters. If Shiva delivers the killing blow, the extra EXP are going to her. It's a very weird way to handle things, but then, FFVIII and weird mechanics go hand-in-hand.
Even at that all his characters shouldn't have gotten the same XP. Unless lower level characters getting more XP is a remaster-specific change? 'Cause that's definitely the way it is in the version I'm playing through now.
Edit: Looks like I was wrong about the lower level character thing, firing up my save again it looks like even XP with a kill bonus, and I must have just been coincidentally getting the kill bonus on my lower level characters before.
This ties into something weird I've noticed - Seifer's No Mercy LB seems to appear at random. He doesn't need to be at low HP for it, and if it appears on one round and I don't use it it's gone, then reappears later. I think they gave him a special mechanic where his Limit Break appears randomly but semi-often so the player would be guaranteed to see it for the little while Seifer is in the party.
And then, with a solid 14 minutes left on the counter, we reach the end of the gameplay chase sequence, and start the best cutscene in video game history.
Listen. Look. I know I'm biased. I can never escape my childhood self who sat through this sequence after this series of at the time really difficult fight and had his mind absolutely blown.
Goddamn what a setpiece. Fuck. The game lulls you into a sense of quiet with the start, and I think that's mainly because the mechanics are so original and so complex that it needs a quiet period where you're free to walk around, experiment and go through the tutorials piecemeal, until you fully understand the basic layer of mechanics. This means the game has a crazy onboarding cost, players will just bounce hard off a combination of 'start slow just hanging out for half an hour before even getting into a fight while getting a bunch of exposition and lore dumped on you' and 'have a bunch of baffling mechanics you've never seen the like of thrown at you in several scattered tutorials.'
FF8 is not making it easy to get into it. But once it has gone through that slow, leisurely opening, it hits you with the SeeD Exam, and holy shit.
Honestly, I'd stack the first hour or two of FFVIII (all the content 'till this update, depending on how long it takes you) against most sequences in pretty much any RPG you could name (including modern ones) and give Dollet the W.
I might be mis-remembering, but I distinctly recall reading somewhere that Fujin speaking in single words in all caps was the translators' attempt to translate her speaking entirely in kanji in the Japanese version.
Why they had her speaking in Kanji I'm less clear on; I'm not familiar enough with the nuances of Japanese to know if "loud and monosyllabic" is a good translation of that or if it should have been "very erudite because she uses the fancy ideograms a lot of our target audience of twelve year olds has trouble learning".
Fujin does speak almost entirely in kanji, with the only exceptions being katakana for proper names like "Seifer" and "Balamb". As mentioned, I suspect she speaks entirely in kanji as a "character quirk", rather than anything meaningful. There's no character archetype that is signified by speaking entirely in kanji; even "old-fashioned" characters who avoid loanwords (eg Godo in FFVII) don't restrict themselves that much.
In other examples, I've seen this speech pattern translated as "erudite but terse": speaking in single words or very short phrases, but using fancy complicated words for those. Giving statements, rather than conversation. Saying "Mediocre" and "Inadequate", rather than "bad". "Negative" instead of "no". And like Fujin does, saying "Rage" or "Anger" rather than elaborating what made her angry.
I think this is the most normal-looking Cid we've ever had.... He's a middle-aged dude with little spectacles and a vest.... He's so mundane-looking it has to be a trick. Let's be on the lookout for any evil plans.
No trick! Its the Banality of Evil, that just Some Guy was the one hiring out teenagers that are stuffed full of forbidden magic. I recall wondering what that meant mechanically for his inevitable boss fight; would he climb in a giant robot? Tranform, perhaps into a big snake? Or reveal that he also wields sinister magical powers, himself.
As minor trivia, "romance" and "romantic" in Japanese as a loanword does not always mean "love romance" as it does in English, but it often does. In general it means the sort of dreamy fantasies that people would imagine in terms of "if literally anything was possible".
I notice that the Japanese use that older fashioned meaning for romance a lot more than native english speakers. I know Dragonball had at least one ED about ZA ROMANCE, for instance.
I know people love to overstate what Nomura did and didn't do with these games, but I am placing every instance of weird food obsession solely at his feet.
Squall is immediately dismissive of his new teammate and asks Quistis if he can't just switch, which, rude. Zell immediately proves just as insensitive by going 'Hi Squall I heard Seifer kicked your ass,' Squall goes 'it wasn't a real fight we were just training,' and Zell goes 'Yeah ask him if he believes that.' Squall is extremely coping about his duel that definitely was just training, it's honestly pretty funny.
See, you read that as Zell being insensitive, I read it as him being deliberately rude in retribution for Squall's insensitivity.
Quistis dragging Seifer and Squall is the best thing. She's a surprisingly good comedic character.
Well, Headmaster Cid does train child soldiers by bonding them to suspicious spirits. I'd keep an eye on him, too.
Okay, I'm not going to lie. I never actually heard the "Guardian Force= GF = Girlfriend" joke before this thread, but now that I've heard it, I can't help but snort a little at lines like this:
I'm going to be shuffling GFs across a the group a bit, it doesn't matter too much, what matters is that each character has one GF.
Selphie's weapon looks like giant nunchaks, but it could also be a three section staff with a small middle section, it's a little hard to tell from the graphic.
I guess all it takes for me to start liking someone who's been a total dick for 90% of his screentime is for him to shout about his "ROMANTIC DREAM" while Leeroy Jenkins-ing himself at a fortified position alone and for the enemy to be the ones coming out running in fear.
For those unfamiliar with the game: Unique among Final Fantasy games at least up to now, FF8 has monsters that scale with player level. You know, like a Bethesda game.Is that good? Is that bad? I have no idea. The thing is, the game hasn't talked about this at all. In much the same way as Skyrim never tells you 'enemies grow in level with you btw, there are not truly any low-level or high-level areas' in mechanical terms,
Default Skyrim anyway, that was the first thing I modded out because I hate that shit. On a normal RPG if fights are too hard you can grind, if they're too easy you can rush ahead to harder ones. If all of them level up with you to keep roughly the same difficulty, well, better hope the Devs picked exactly the right difficulty to make them challenging but not too hard, because now there's no way for you to adjust it via play. Also, starter area enemies leveling up with you until every random bandit is as tough as a demigod is just weird and suspension of disbelief breaking. I don't know, maybe FF8 will make it work, but I know level scaling made The Old Republic gameplay really boring.
EDIT: Wait a minute... Seifer's been held back, Quistis is a recent graduate... Is Seifer a former classmate of hers?!
Default Skyrim anyway, that was the first thing I modded out because I hate that shit. On a normal RPG if fights are too hard you can grind, if they're too easy you can rush ahead to harder ones. If all of them level up with you to keep roughly the same difficulty, well, better hope the Devs picked exactly the right difficulty to make them challenging but not too hard, because now there's no way for you to adjust it via play. Also, starter area enemies leveling up with you until every random bandit is as tough as a demigod is just weird and suspension of disbelief breaking.
Hold up here, that's not how Skyrim level-scaling -- which is actually pretty well done -- worked.
For a start, encounter zones do have a maximum level.
Secondly, the individual enemies (actually, all NPCs, including ordinarily non-hostile ones) can have their level specified in one of two ways, either as a scaled level with a minimum and a maximum, with the specific level within that range set as a percentage of the player's level, or as a fixed level. Notably, perks are always fixed as well for a given enemy.
Thirdly, what enemies are generated are controlled by a system called 'leveled lists', which can be configured in various ways but are generally set up to make stronger enemies (and better loot -- items in chests and such use the same mechanism) appear and become more common as the player levels up, but that don't usually eliminate the weaker opponents entirely.
So, in general, every time you level up in Skyrim, you're making yourself stronger than your enemies, because you'll either be climbing beyond their caps or otherwise outlevelling them, either individually or considered as a group.
It is possible to make things overly hard on yourself as I discovered in my first playthrough, wherein I powerlevelled via pickpocket and then tried to use magic as my primary combat system, but in general if you just fight people reasonably often those fights will pretty much exclusively get easier as you go.
What gets me about FF8's level-scaling is that, unlike Oblivion and Skyrim, it's not an open-world game where that'd at least make sense. My guesses for why the devs would include it here are either that they were throwing everything at the wall to see what stuck, or they thought it might balance out the Junction System
As might be apparent from their names, Fujin and Raijin are unusual in that their names are Japanese kanji. Meaning "Wind God" and "Thunder God" respectively. I don't know if this is somehow significant or symbolic, especially since calling someone "Fujin" or "Raijin" is usually a way of addressing a title, rather than a given name. So in the world of FFVIII, apparently parents can give their kids names like "Thunder God" and nobody thinks this is odd.
Actually, were they named that? I don't think they're supposed to be siblings or anything, did they just meet a person with the perfect counterpart name and decide they have to be BFFs for life? (and if so, does Fujin have a sibling named Raijin, completely separate from the Raijin in the game? What kind of weirdo would name one kid Fujin if they weren't going to name another one Raijin?) Or are they nicknames, or were they so damn chuuni they named themselves that?
At least that's a localisation decision that makes sense. Like, you can see why someone would go from Siren to Ondine, unlike whatever was up with Golgotha.
THE POINT IS. This spider mech isn't cute at all. The Black Widow (like fuck I'm typing X-ATMwhatever every time) is a deadly autonomous machine, with deadly attacks such as Crush, in which it grabs a party member in its pincers/mandibles, or a beam attack which sweeps the ground and then explodes. It's incredibly intimidating and incredibly cool.
Considering Quistis is a junior instructor and Seifer was held back, wouldn't the two of them be the same generation? Looking it up, they're both 18 year olds, so odds are the two were classmates at some point.
Quistis: "You're the squad leader. Good luck to you." Seifer: "...Instructor. I hate it when people wish me good luck." (He does an unbearably smug hand-scale pose.) "Save those words for a bad student that needs them, eh?" Quistis: "Ok then." *beat* Quistis: "Good luck, Seifer."
(Seifer is speechless and gestures angrily.)
I think this is the most normal-looking Cid we've ever had. Even FFV Cid had that kind of 'dignified scholar' vibe, this is just… This is literally a principal. Headmaster. Whichever. He's a middle-aged dude with little spectacles and a vest. I would bet actual money his trousers are tweed. He probably has a British accent! Look at him, he's wearing a tie.
He's so mundane-looking it has to be a trick. Let's be on the lookout for any evil plans.
Seifer opens the fight by saying that 'the finishing blow determines the XP, so leave it to me,' which I find confusing because as far as I can tell that… isn't true? Battles always seem to give out evenly divided XP to all characters. Strange.
Perhaps even he didn't feel comfortable explaining the actual strat for clearing this sequence on minimum level, which is to fucking kill Squall and Zell so that Seifer is fighting an entire war alone while dragging two corpses behind him.
This ties into something weird I've noticed - Seifer's No Mercy LB seems to appear at random. He doesn't need to be at low HP for it, and if it appears on one round and I don't use it it's gone, then reappears later. I think they gave him a special mechanic where his Limit Break appears randomly but semi-often so the player would be guaranteed to see it for the little while Seifer is in the party.
To be specific it appears Seifer needs to be under 84% max hp, a threshold so high one almost wonders why they required him to be damaged at all. But this actually relates to how Limit Break chance works.
Limit level is a hidden parameter derived from calculations about the character's current state of danger - 25% health or lower, dead allies, suffering negative status effects, that kind of thing. Once that derived stat breaches Limit Level 4, a character will be able to Limit Break, with a random modifier thrown in so that it's not guaranteed straight away. In particular your chances of achieving Limit seem to scale up as your HP drops even further, so what I suspect is happening is Seifer's HP gate is so sky-high that it correspondingly juiced his odds to the point it appeared to you like he could arbitrarily do it whenever.
Equally, you remember how you remarked that Seifer had maxed accuracy? He and Squall share that unique trait as the game's only two gunblade-wielders, which means that they're effectively immune to the Blind status effect. This means a very basic cheese strat is to Blind Squall on purpose, because it's a negative status and thus raises his odds of being able to Limit Break.
There's another parameter called Crisis Level which is itself derived from Limit Level, a bit of a weird way to do it but what do I know about programming. Basically it allows Limit Breaks to scale up beyond simply becoming accessible; Crisis Level 0 is when you have no chance of Limit at all, 1 is when you do, but then 2, 3 and 4 somehow raise the effectiveness of that character's Limits - Squall's Renzokuken will deal bonus hits, for example. Guest characters don't even get to touch this part of the Limit system and the odds for you are astronomically low unless you get sweaty with it, so consider it more an explaining for why at some point some day somebody might hit harder for some inscrutable reason.
We decided to just chase after these Galbadian soldiers halfway across the city forcing Selphie to chase after us so she could deliver the order that the whole time we were meant to be withdrawing.
Astounding stuff. The pride of Balamb Garden, everybody.
Seifer wants to stick around to kill more enemies, but Squall reminds him that we will miss the ship and be stranded in Dollet with a bunch of angry Galbadian soldiers, then Seifer checks his watch and realizes that withdrawing at 1900 hours means we have 30 minutes to get to the beach.
These absolute fuckups. Seifer was running away from Selphie like doing a challenge run where you dodge the Sunset Saspirilla dude who's hunting you down across the Mojave to trigger the quest, while Squall and Zell were just like [Garfield voice] "huh i wonder what's so important for her to tell the Seifer", and Selphie just forgor until they'd all already chased Seifer up a literal mountain and fought a sky-demon.
Going deep into speculation without evidence, there was mention earlier about how Balamb Garden's "hot dogs" were originally other foodstuffs in Japanese. So I'm wondering if the scene earlier where Zell rushed into the cafeteria while the Disciplinary Squad was there had something to do with chicken meals, and Seifer calling Zell "chicken yarou" is the equivalent of calling him "hot dogger". Without even the English language implications of "wiener", too.
Speaking of World's Greatest Headmaster Cid being modelled on Robin Williams, has Squall being modelled on River Phoenix been brought up yet? Also notable since Phoenix died a few years before FF8 started development
What gets me about FF8's level-scaling is that, unlike Oblivion and Skyrim, it's not an open-world game where that'd at least make sense. My guesses for why the devs would include it here are either that they were throwing everything at the wall to see what stuck, or they thought it might balance out the Junction System
I can see balance as being somewhat what they were going for, especially since I'm pretty sure that as enemies scale to higher levels their drawable spell selections also start to widen. For example, a level 40 Galbadian Soldier might hit harder than a level 7 one, but they could also give easy access to -ra tier spells instead, so theoretically someone who hasn't been playing with a lot of the other methods of getting better magic would be able to use that as easy access to higher tier spells for junctioning.
Of course, if you just don't understand junctioning in the first place, this is just "enemies are now harder, get fucked lmao grinding has negative effects on your gameplay". Some have mentioned Skyrim, but if anything I'm pretty sure that's an Oblivion problem where the level scaling was a mess such that one bad level threshold would suddenly replace every goblin in the world with hordes of trolls and minotaurs.
Of course, if you just don't understand junctioning in the first place, this is just "enemies are now harder, get fucked lmao grinding has negative effects on your gameplay". Some have mentioned Skyrim, but if anything I'm pretty sure that's an Oblivion problem where the level scaling was a mess such that one bad level threshold would suddenly replace every goblin in the world with hordes of trolls and minotaurs.
Speaking of World's Greatest Headmaster Cid being modelled on Robin Williams, has Squall being modelled on River Phoenix been brought up yet? Also notable since Phoenix died a few years before FF8 started development
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