Omegahugger
Inattentive Idiot
I mean, isn't that more or less what Final Fantasy VII ended up doing?
Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Playing: Final Fantasy Tactics]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Let's Play
Yes, but the end of the world as we know it was a good thing there. Red feels fine.
I guess kind of. Though, FFVII going "meteor might hit, 500 year timeskip I guess" feels a lot less like sequel bait (despite the fact that FFVII got buttloads of sequel content), because at least by that point most major plot threads are wrapped up. I wouldn't be happy with a literal "rock falls basically everyone dies" ending, but it still feels like an ending to the story rather than either a sequel hook or a very badly planned ending time the way FFVI could because you'd be leaving so much unresolved by closing off the game there.
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
...so, do they have a Russia, or is Russian an elaborate conlang from the media Squall's fictional OC Donut Steel fursona animal comes from?
Seems like the latter so far, but no real idea. I haven't seen any other explicit signs of Russian nomenclature or influence. So bump up Squall another few points on the dorkometer, I guess?
Kuja
I'M A SQUIIIID
- Location
- AZ
- Pronouns
- He/Him
...his fursona is literally named 'Furry'
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
the specter of neverwinter nights 2 rises over this thread once again
Russian as Klingon is 10/10, no notes once again.
Griever is a gift that just keeps on giving.
Mask of the Betrayer was good aside from the ending, though.
Did we get anything like that for FFVII? Remake, I suppose.
- Location
- USA
Eh. Kiros Seagill is coded as Southeast Asian/Indian (dark skin, katars, maybe the braids too?) despite no other signs of such cultures in the game, so it's not as if "something
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Griever the SEEDhog is now FF canon, thanks Omi.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I have now reached the end of CD 2. Much drama happened, huge plot developments, twists and surprises and so on. However, in the process of writing down my experience, I got sidetracked by something much, much more important than all that nonsense:
Going absolutely insane doing the same boss fight over and over again trying to figure out what the fuck is going on with the game's damage calculation formulas.
Going absolutely insane doing the same boss fight over and over again trying to figure out what the fuck is going on with the game's damage calculation formulas.
In a "it kicked my ass" sense, or just confusion?
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
In a "this math doesn't make any sense" sense, but then I figured it out.
- Pronouns
- She/They
I'm sorry, I don't know what I like more. The idea that Squall made his edgy fursona OC and named it Griever, or the idea that he made his edgy fursona OC and named it fluffy.
Also this bit here, Squall was finally asked about the cool OC he made and plastered on all of his stuff, and is realizing mid-sentence that he only ever gave it two character traits.
I can hear him dying on the inside as he gets to "strong and proud" and realizes that's literally all he's thought of despite how much real estate it takes up in his brain.
I'm just. Squall might just be my favorite Final Fantasy character by this point, he's such a dork I love him.
- Location
- Singapore
- Pronouns
- Singular They
Throughout all of this sequence I was kind of wondering what Rinoa sees in him, because yeah, Squall came up with an imaginary animal with the Coolest Appearance, called it a "lion", gave it a name, and then completely stopped thinking about fleshing it out any more, just settling on "strong". Not just "strong", but "really strong". And when pressed, he adds "proud".
Not even any examples of how strong it is, or what it can do. Just "really strong".
Incidentally, Squall uses ライオン, ie "lion" in katakana. Which makes sense for a word that is in-universe made-up, hence Rinoa being unfamiliar and going "ライ... オ... ン?", sounding out the syllables slowly. Japanese also has proper kanji for "lion", being 獅子, but as we've established they don't exist in FFVIII, so there's no reason to use that kanji.
The whole thing reads as Rinoa gamely trying to understand her boyfriend's hobbies. "So this is a 'pi... kachu'? And you're saying it's the strongest character?"
It's the cheekbones. Girls flip for sharp cheekbones and ain't none sharper than PS1 rendering innit
It's the duality of man, and for artistic purposes it's better the truth is never revealed (it's fluffy).
You know, when I played and replayed this game I never paid attention to these date dialogs or the merchandise tie in logo, because I'm antisocial, but my eyes have been opened. This is actually funny.
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Rinoa's stated reason for dancing with him is that he was the best looking guy there.
Turns out Rinoa is kind of shallow and just wants some one strong and hot. Probably why she was with Seifer before.
Turns out Rinoa is kind of shallow and just wants some one strong and hot. Probably why she was with Seifer before.
Final Fantasy VIII, Part 23.A: The End of Disc 2
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Welcome back, class, to Final Fantasy VIII 201. Today's lesson:
Versus Edea
Last time, we paused at the entrance to Galbadia Garden. The SeeDs and Balamb students have drawn out the vast majority of the Galbadian troops into the outside, allowing us to strike deep at the heart of Galbadia Garden.
In case you're wondering, yes, this does mean 'explore Galbadia Garden as a standard dungeon with monster encounters.' There are Galbadian Soldier encounters, but they are very rare, and against a single soldier each time; the vibe here is strongly that the inside of the building has been deserted of actual humans, Edea and Seifer allowing monsters to run rampant as a form of 'security' whose collateral damage is irrelevant.
And notably - I wasn't sure of that before - but Galbadia Garden has entirely lost its purpose as a school; we'll find out soon that all the students have been kicked out. I previously assumed Edea used mind control to take over so that she would have a force of Garden mercenaries that would be, if not equal to SeeDs, at least in the same ballpark, but no, it seems she's content to simply use the Galbadian military and monsters. I suppose this at least spares Irvine the trauma of fighting his comrades, but, well, I would have kinda liked to have that kind of drama. Ah well.
Irvine: "The sorceress should be here somewhere."
Squall, mentally: "(No turning back now…)"
Squall: "Forget about the past! She's our enemy now! Don't think twice for a second. There's no way we can fight her like that. I, for one, can't. She chose to fight and became our enemy. We choose to fight back. We have no choice. At least I'd like to think so."
Squall, mentally: "(Seems like I'm the only one confused…)"
Squall: "We've come this far. I guess there's no need for me to say anything."
Rinoa: "We're still listening. Squall, we want to know how you feel."
Squall: "I'll tell you later… After we all get out of this. Let's go."
So far so 'summarizing character arc so far,' but I like that Squall realizes that he's the one who is most bothered by the Matron-Edea connection, that his cold mercenary act is no longer holding up and he's the one being held back by feelings, rather than his comrades.
Our team going forward. Quistis gets the bruiser set, Rinoa the mage set, Squall the dark knight set.
So, Galbadia Garden. How does it fare as a dungeon?
Eeeh. It looks like the name of the game here is 'asset reuse.' Galbadia Garden has us go through multiple iterations of this corridor and this room:
They look incredibly generic, which doesn't help. Galbadia Garden's aesthetic appears to be 'Balamb Garden, but stripped down and utilitarian.' And don't get me wrong, it works for the place it is: It does a great job selling that Galbadia trains larger numbers of students than Balamb, but that its teachings are more generic and its students less elite. It has two color palettes; the 'outside-facing' areas like the atrium or auditorium use dark reds, oranges and browns, but the 'student-facing' areas like corridors, dorms and classrooms use tastefully boring grays. But as a dungeon, it's not super exciting.
With that said, the first encounter we run into as we start exploring is exciting in its own right, though not quite for the encounter itself.
As these poor, innocent creeps appear into view, our party disappears, and the screen reads: "Zantetsuken."
Oh yeah, it's coming.
I don't think it's a stretch to say that Odin has always been kind of a favorite of the game's developer. In most iteration, he gets a lot of spectacle. Whether it's his dramatic introduction before a boss fight, his backstory, the transformation or Raiden, or the cutscene itself, FF animators and writers just go ham when Odin is concerned. And I can't blame them. The shot of the raining sky gathering over the battlefield, followed by a horse's hoof stepping in the waters carried by the rain, panning to the knight himself, his breath visibly steaming, is cool as hell.
Then Odin takes it to the next level, leaping forward with his horse and delivering several sword blows that are accompanied by impact kanji on the screen, before posing with his sword dramatically held out as the enemies fall apart in two pieces.
This may be the ideal Odin form.
I was dubious of the 'RNG summon' format but actually this might be perfect. The problem with Odin has always been that he's useless against bosses but, against random encounters, it's always a gamble whether his huge MP cost and the turn spent casting him is worth the chance that he whiffs against the enemy's percentage-based instant death resistance, so he ends up spending most of his time sitting in inventory. But here, there is no opportunity cost, there is no MP cost, there is no wondering if an enemy is vulnerable to instant death or not; if Odin appears, he costs you nothing and immediately kills everyone, solving the encounter. If he doesn't, you're free to not think about him at all. He won't appear where he's useless, so he's never dead weight. This may be the ideal way to handle such a tricky summon. FF8 throws a lot of things at the wall, but sometimes, they stick.
Before long, we run into Fujin and Raijin. Despite seemingly standing watch in the perfect place to flank us as we pass, they do not initiate hostilities. It looks like they've finally had their fill of Seifer's bullshit.
Fujin: "...FATIGUED.
Raijin: "Let's just go. …Let's get it over with, ya know?"
Fujin: "...REQUEST."
Raijin: "...We're leavin' Seifer up to you now, ya know? We don't know what's going on anymore, ya know? …We just want the old Seifer back, ya know?"
Squall, mentally: "(Seifer… He probably thinks he can't go back now.)"
Squall: "All right."
It's a simple dialogue, but I appreciate that Fujin and Raijin actually have a character arc and that it happens mostly off-screen; these two clearly have their own lives and their own drama. I could easily imagine a spinoff featuring these two, going from their early friendship with Seifer, to running around the world looking for him after rumors of his death, to joining up the Galbadian Army under his orders, to the desillusion and deciding to leave him after it's clear that whatever's going around him and Edea is too unhealthy and messy and will only drag them down with him.
Tri-Face is back as a random encounter, and this time we've pushed it over the level threshold to pack Flare, allowing us to grab a cool 100 copies of the high-tier damage spell.
In one of the dorms, we find an actual student. He begs us not to kill him, and explains that the Galbadian army stormed in during class and kicked almost everyone out. There are only a handful of students left, hiding in various places, and they each have a keycard that opens restricted areas. He tells us to be careful and gives us his keycard so we can fight the sorceress. She really didn't bother with mind control in Galbadia Garden, it's curious; maybe it's because of her deep-seated animosity towards SeeDs? Galbadia Garden graduates aren't SeeD as I understand it, but perhaps they're SeeD-adjacent enough that she wants them out of the way, not under her thumb.
Anyway, that's the structure of the dungeon laid out for us: There are three students, each with a numbered keycard, and locked doors labeled 1, 2 or 3, so we need to explore the school until we find them all and backtrack to open all the doors until we've unlocked the way to the sorceress. I'll skip over most of it due to the repetitive environment and the students not having much interesting dialogue, but here are a few highlights:
The ice hockey rink that we visited last time is still around, this time sans the students playing. This immediately rouses my curiosity; if you'll recall, last time we visited Galbadia Garden, someone mentioned a hockey team made up of monsters that they were worried about playing against. Could it be..?
THE ICE HOCKEY MONSTERS ARE REAL.
I thought they might be a boss or miniboss encounter, but no, they are a random encounter exclusive to the ice hockey rink area. See, now this is the kind of missable content I don't mind; it's an easter egg that doesn't matter if you miss it but that you can anticipate based on previous dialogue and actively look for.
They actually call out tactics, shouting "Formation G! Go!!!" and answering "Roger!", so they're clearly sapient and capable of speech. Note how they're using old-school goaltender masks, 'Jason Voorhees' style, which were outdated by the 90s but endures in pop culture and contributes to a serial killer-ish aesthetic on the monster ice hockey players' part. Sadly, we are unlikely to find any further lore on these, as they are a random encounter and easily dispatched after nabbing some Blizzagas off them
At one point during a random encounter, Rinoa gets injured enough to be put into Limit, and for the first time instead of Angelo Cannon, I get this incredible thing:
The power of Dog.
"Invincible Moon" has Rinoa throw a treat to Angelo, who powers up Super Saiyan style, leaps across the moon, showering everyone in magical light, before landing down and having Rinoa make him do a trick before he eats his treat. This renders the entire team invulnerable for several turns. Incredible stuff.
Once we found our way to the atrium, we find our biggest prize, and one that is (theoretically, though you'd have to go out of your way to do so) missable: there is a giant three-headed lizard dog just hanging out in the sun well.
You might have to squint a bit.
Are we meant to read this as saying that hell canonically exists in the FF8 setting?
Quistis: "I don't think G Garden uses GF."
Squall: "Ahh… Let's just take it."
Cerberus: "...PRETTY CONFIDENT. LET'S SEE HOW YOU DO."
That is the Guardian Force Cerberus. If Galbadia Garden doesn't use GFs, I wonder how it ended up here? Best guess is, Edea placed it there as a (heh) guard dog, since we know she has GFs (she used Carbuncle to grant Reflect to the Basilisks). I like how casual they all sound about it and how Cerberus takes it in stride.
Despite its lofty GF status and fearsome appearance, Cerberus is not a very difficult fight. He has 10,000 HP, which is decently hefty, and its gimmick is that it casts Triple on itself before using multiple spells. This could prove a considerable threat, but he doesn't use Triple immediately, so it's possible to just stack damage in the first phase so he doesn't have time to take advantage of his magical offense. Although… That's not quite what happens.
Okay, so, here's the thing. As described in previous updates, my magic spread is very scattershot, but I gotten some mostly coherent builds on each character. Rinoa has a powerful spell junctioned to Magic, and Magic Bonus as a passive, which means every time she gains a level her Magic stat permanently rises. Meanwhile, Quistis has been designated tank, with a Strength Junction and Cover + Counter. However, because I mostly just get enough spells to consolidate to 100 on a single character rather than get 100 of the best spells on each character, I have some tricky calls to make; only one character can get the fat stack of Ultimas. This is all to say, right now Rinoa has Magic 77 and Quistis has Str 81, while Squall has Str 118. He's far above the rest of the pack, but I'm not quite ready for how much difference that makes when all factors compound. You see, early in the fight, Cerberus inflicts Berserk on Quistis, as shown by the red color effect on her:
I could easily cure this with Esuna, but, y'know, why? She's a physical attacker anyway, and while Berserk locks her into attacking every turn, it also increases her physical damage by 50%, which should by all rights push her even above Squall's attack power. So, how much damage does our Berserk Quistis inflict with every hit?
153 damage.
How much damage does Squall inflict with a normal, unboosted, non-critical attack?
Over 1000 damage.
That's not all. Here is Rinoa, with junctioned magic, casting Flare, the most powerful offensive spell in her arsenal:
She still does less damage than Squall's normal attack.
Squall's Strength is a solid 40 points above Quistis's Strength and Rinoa's Magic thanks to Ultima, but even so, he's hitting ten times as hard as Quistis (whose normal, non-berserk damage against Cerberus is around 100). In fact, Quistis's damage is so low that it would make the fight legitimately very difficult if I had to rely on it to any extent at all. So what gives?
Well, I tried this fight again swapping the spells: Quistis with Ultima Junctioned to Strength for Str 117, Squall with Quake Junctioned for Str 82. What's the result?
Quistis deals a little over 400 damage, and Squall deals over 500 damage. With 40 points of Strength in her favor, Quistis still deals less damage.
This was bizarre enough that I had to actually look up FF8's damage formula; I had a suspicion as to what was happening, and I needed to check. It turns out I was wrong: Level does not factor into the damage formula. The fact that Squall is level 35 and Quistis is level 27 should not affect their damage; damage is a factor of character Strength, enemy Vitality, and "power," which should be identical for all uses of the basic physical attack skill. I specify this because it is new to FF8; Level has been included in damage calculation since IV, it's a consistent feature except in this game. In FF8, if a level 10 character with Strength 100 hits an enemy with Vitality 50, they should deal the same damage as a level 100 character with Strength 100 hitting that same Vitality 50. To retread well-trod ground, this is one reason why low level runs are considered easier; damage is only determined by Strength while enemy Vitality scales with enemy level which scales with player level, so a lv 10 character with Str 100 is going up against a lower Vitality than a lv 100 character with Str 100, thus paradoxically dealing more damage. Except! Enemies scale based on total party level, the scaling isn't different per-character! Quistis and Squall are hitting the same Cerberus with the same Vitality, so why is Quistis's damage lower? This can't be weapons either - all weapons have the same base power of 20, stronger weapons merely increase the character's base Strength.
So why? Why is this happening?
…
I found it. It took me multiple reloads of the same save to finally grasp what was happening.
Squall and Quistis both have Elemental-Attack Junction equipped. Auto-Junction shoved two different spells into that slot, seemingly based on an order of priority that favored normal stats over Elm-Atk. Now, the way Elemental Attack works is that you equip an elemental spell into its slot and you get a percentage value; so for instance, 100 Aeros in the attack slot give you 80% Wind:
Like so.
Now, it would be easy to naively assume that this is an extra. You have 80% Wind Damage, so your attack gets an extra 80% of its base damage in the form of wind damage. Right? Well, no. Because that would be helpful. Instead, what Elem-Atk-J does is turn your attacks into Dark Souls style split damage. In the above picture, Quistis is set up so that out of her normal damage, 80% of it is wind damage (maybe? The math doesn't quite work out that way, as we'll see, but close enough), leaving the remaining 20% as physical damage, but the overall total damage does not change.
This means that when facing an enemy that isn't weak to whatever elemental damage you have junctioned, Elem-Atk-J doesn't do anything. And as it happens, Cerberus is more than not weak to wind: He is immune to wind damage.
This means Quistis has a solid chunk of her damage just negated by default. If I go into the junction menu and remove Aero from Elemental Attack, leaving it empty, and then do the ultima swap, then while Squall still deals around 500 damage per hit, Quistis deals 1000+. Her damage is higher, as it should have been this entire time.
Mystery solved, at long last.
…
Anyway in our first actual fight going in blind we obliterate Cerberus because Squall not only has Ultima Junctioned to Strength, but he also has Darkside which triples damage, and the Gunblade's trigger mechanic allow us to trigger critical hits at will, meaning:
That 1000 base damage becomes nearly 5k, deleting half of the doggy's HP in a single hit, meaning we can mug him for Triples and its Speed Junction-teaching stealable item then explode him before his triplecasts can come into play.
As a small note, Pandemona recently learned Speed Junctioning. By junctioning 100 Triples to Rinoa's Speed, her Speed stat has increased to the level that she is effectively taking two turns for each one that her teammates are taking. This would be a tremendously effective boost in raw power… If Rinoa punched just a little harder.
Right now, Rinoa has 100 Flares Junctioned to Magic. I thought that Flare, being an offensive spell only a tier below Ultima, would be enough to make her offensive spells kick ass. But it's not. As things stand, junctioning and then casting Flare, the strongest offensive spell in our arsenal short of Ultima, deals between 700 and 800 damage. That's not insignificant! It's just… Identical to the damage from Squall's standard, no-critical attack damage with (76, not even 100) Ultimas junctioned. If Rinoa casts Triple on herself, she can fire three of those Flares in one turn, and that's… Still less than the damage Squall can do with Darkside and a trigger-activated crit. I was thinking, 'wow, magic damage sucks,' but swapping things around so that Rinoa has Ultima Junctioned pushes her damage from Flare above 1000, and Ultima itself to nearly 2000. Which is a lot better… But it's still not 5000 damage a hit. The two conclusions from this are:
I might have to simply unjunction Ultima to restore something vaguely resembling balance to the game.
Anyway, once Cerberus has been defeated, he joins us as a GF.
He's got a very good set of Junctions (including Hit-J, which junctions spells to accuracy and which I haven't really used so far), native Abilityx3, and the passive Alert that prevents backstabs. With this, I now have enough Abilityx3 GFs to junction one to each character, expanding our list of passive abilities. With that out of the way, we're free to look around for the last student with the last ID card, which opens the elevator door that leads us to the top floor.
Cut for image break.
Versus Edea
Last time, we paused at the entrance to Galbadia Garden. The SeeDs and Balamb students have drawn out the vast majority of the Galbadian troops into the outside, allowing us to strike deep at the heart of Galbadia Garden.
In case you're wondering, yes, this does mean 'explore Galbadia Garden as a standard dungeon with monster encounters.' There are Galbadian Soldier encounters, but they are very rare, and against a single soldier each time; the vibe here is strongly that the inside of the building has been deserted of actual humans, Edea and Seifer allowing monsters to run rampant as a form of 'security' whose collateral damage is irrelevant.
And notably - I wasn't sure of that before - but Galbadia Garden has entirely lost its purpose as a school; we'll find out soon that all the students have been kicked out. I previously assumed Edea used mind control to take over so that she would have a force of Garden mercenaries that would be, if not equal to SeeDs, at least in the same ballpark, but no, it seems she's content to simply use the Galbadian military and monsters. I suppose this at least spares Irvine the trauma of fighting his comrades, but, well, I would have kinda liked to have that kind of drama. Ah well.
Irvine: "The sorceress should be here somewhere."
Squall, mentally: "(No turning back now…)"
Squall: "Forget about the past! She's our enemy now! Don't think twice for a second. There's no way we can fight her like that. I, for one, can't. She chose to fight and became our enemy. We choose to fight back. We have no choice. At least I'd like to think so."
Squall, mentally: "(Seems like I'm the only one confused…)"
Squall: "We've come this far. I guess there's no need for me to say anything."
Rinoa: "We're still listening. Squall, we want to know how you feel."
Squall: "I'll tell you later… After we all get out of this. Let's go."
So far so 'summarizing character arc so far,' but I like that Squall realizes that he's the one who is most bothered by the Matron-Edea connection, that his cold mercenary act is no longer holding up and he's the one being held back by feelings, rather than his comrades.
Our team going forward. Quistis gets the bruiser set, Rinoa the mage set, Squall the dark knight set.
So, Galbadia Garden. How does it fare as a dungeon?
Eeeh. It looks like the name of the game here is 'asset reuse.' Galbadia Garden has us go through multiple iterations of this corridor and this room:
They look incredibly generic, which doesn't help. Galbadia Garden's aesthetic appears to be 'Balamb Garden, but stripped down and utilitarian.' And don't get me wrong, it works for the place it is: It does a great job selling that Galbadia trains larger numbers of students than Balamb, but that its teachings are more generic and its students less elite. It has two color palettes; the 'outside-facing' areas like the atrium or auditorium use dark reds, oranges and browns, but the 'student-facing' areas like corridors, dorms and classrooms use tastefully boring grays. But as a dungeon, it's not super exciting.
With that said, the first encounter we run into as we start exploring is exciting in its own right, though not quite for the encounter itself.
As these poor, innocent creeps appear into view, our party disappears, and the screen reads: "Zantetsuken."
Oh yeah, it's coming.
I don't think it's a stretch to say that Odin has always been kind of a favorite of the game's developer. In most iteration, he gets a lot of spectacle. Whether it's his dramatic introduction before a boss fight, his backstory, the transformation or Raiden, or the cutscene itself, FF animators and writers just go ham when Odin is concerned. And I can't blame them. The shot of the raining sky gathering over the battlefield, followed by a horse's hoof stepping in the waters carried by the rain, panning to the knight himself, his breath visibly steaming, is cool as hell.
Then Odin takes it to the next level, leaping forward with his horse and delivering several sword blows that are accompanied by impact kanji on the screen, before posing with his sword dramatically held out as the enemies fall apart in two pieces.
This may be the ideal Odin form.
I was dubious of the 'RNG summon' format but actually this might be perfect. The problem with Odin has always been that he's useless against bosses but, against random encounters, it's always a gamble whether his huge MP cost and the turn spent casting him is worth the chance that he whiffs against the enemy's percentage-based instant death resistance, so he ends up spending most of his time sitting in inventory. But here, there is no opportunity cost, there is no MP cost, there is no wondering if an enemy is vulnerable to instant death or not; if Odin appears, he costs you nothing and immediately kills everyone, solving the encounter. If he doesn't, you're free to not think about him at all. He won't appear where he's useless, so he's never dead weight. This may be the ideal way to handle such a tricky summon. FF8 throws a lot of things at the wall, but sometimes, they stick.
Before long, we run into Fujin and Raijin. Despite seemingly standing watch in the perfect place to flank us as we pass, they do not initiate hostilities. It looks like they've finally had their fill of Seifer's bullshit.
Fujin: "...FATIGUED.
Raijin: "Let's just go. …Let's get it over with, ya know?"
Fujin: "...REQUEST."
Raijin: "...We're leavin' Seifer up to you now, ya know? We don't know what's going on anymore, ya know? …We just want the old Seifer back, ya know?"
Squall, mentally: "(Seifer… He probably thinks he can't go back now.)"
Squall: "All right."
It's a simple dialogue, but I appreciate that Fujin and Raijin actually have a character arc and that it happens mostly off-screen; these two clearly have their own lives and their own drama. I could easily imagine a spinoff featuring these two, going from their early friendship with Seifer, to running around the world looking for him after rumors of his death, to joining up the Galbadian Army under his orders, to the desillusion and deciding to leave him after it's clear that whatever's going around him and Edea is too unhealthy and messy and will only drag them down with him.
Tri-Face is back as a random encounter, and this time we've pushed it over the level threshold to pack Flare, allowing us to grab a cool 100 copies of the high-tier damage spell.
In one of the dorms, we find an actual student. He begs us not to kill him, and explains that the Galbadian army stormed in during class and kicked almost everyone out. There are only a handful of students left, hiding in various places, and they each have a keycard that opens restricted areas. He tells us to be careful and gives us his keycard so we can fight the sorceress. She really didn't bother with mind control in Galbadia Garden, it's curious; maybe it's because of her deep-seated animosity towards SeeDs? Galbadia Garden graduates aren't SeeD as I understand it, but perhaps they're SeeD-adjacent enough that she wants them out of the way, not under her thumb.
Anyway, that's the structure of the dungeon laid out for us: There are three students, each with a numbered keycard, and locked doors labeled 1, 2 or 3, so we need to explore the school until we find them all and backtrack to open all the doors until we've unlocked the way to the sorceress. I'll skip over most of it due to the repetitive environment and the students not having much interesting dialogue, but here are a few highlights:
The ice hockey rink that we visited last time is still around, this time sans the students playing. This immediately rouses my curiosity; if you'll recall, last time we visited Galbadia Garden, someone mentioned a hockey team made up of monsters that they were worried about playing against. Could it be..?
THE ICE HOCKEY MONSTERS ARE REAL.
I thought they might be a boss or miniboss encounter, but no, they are a random encounter exclusive to the ice hockey rink area. See, now this is the kind of missable content I don't mind; it's an easter egg that doesn't matter if you miss it but that you can anticipate based on previous dialogue and actively look for.
They actually call out tactics, shouting "Formation G! Go!!!" and answering "Roger!", so they're clearly sapient and capable of speech. Note how they're using old-school goaltender masks, 'Jason Voorhees' style, which were outdated by the 90s but endures in pop culture and contributes to a serial killer-ish aesthetic on the monster ice hockey players' part. Sadly, we are unlikely to find any further lore on these, as they are a random encounter and easily dispatched after nabbing some Blizzagas off them
.
We can revisit some areas we went through in our first visit, which is nice.
We can revisit some areas we went through in our first visit, which is nice.
At one point during a random encounter, Rinoa gets injured enough to be put into Limit, and for the first time instead of Angelo Cannon, I get this incredible thing:
The power of Dog.
"Invincible Moon" has Rinoa throw a treat to Angelo, who powers up Super Saiyan style, leaps across the moon, showering everyone in magical light, before landing down and having Rinoa make him do a trick before he eats his treat. This renders the entire team invulnerable for several turns. Incredible stuff.
Once we found our way to the atrium, we find our biggest prize, and one that is (theoretically, though you'd have to go out of your way to do so) missable: there is a giant three-headed lizard dog just hanging out in the sun well.
You might have to squint a bit.
Are we meant to read this as saying that hell canonically exists in the FF8 setting?
Quistis: "I don't think G Garden uses GF."
Squall: "Ahh… Let's just take it."
Cerberus: "...PRETTY CONFIDENT. LET'S SEE HOW YOU DO."
That is the Guardian Force Cerberus. If Galbadia Garden doesn't use GFs, I wonder how it ended up here? Best guess is, Edea placed it there as a (heh) guard dog, since we know she has GFs (she used Carbuncle to grant Reflect to the Basilisks). I like how casual they all sound about it and how Cerberus takes it in stride.
Despite its lofty GF status and fearsome appearance, Cerberus is not a very difficult fight. He has 10,000 HP, which is decently hefty, and its gimmick is that it casts Triple on itself before using multiple spells. This could prove a considerable threat, but he doesn't use Triple immediately, so it's possible to just stack damage in the first phase so he doesn't have time to take advantage of his magical offense. Although… That's not quite what happens.
Okay, so, here's the thing. As described in previous updates, my magic spread is very scattershot, but I gotten some mostly coherent builds on each character. Rinoa has a powerful spell junctioned to Magic, and Magic Bonus as a passive, which means every time she gains a level her Magic stat permanently rises. Meanwhile, Quistis has been designated tank, with a Strength Junction and Cover + Counter. However, because I mostly just get enough spells to consolidate to 100 on a single character rather than get 100 of the best spells on each character, I have some tricky calls to make; only one character can get the fat stack of Ultimas. This is all to say, right now Rinoa has Magic 77 and Quistis has Str 81, while Squall has Str 118. He's far above the rest of the pack, but I'm not quite ready for how much difference that makes when all factors compound. You see, early in the fight, Cerberus inflicts Berserk on Quistis, as shown by the red color effect on her:
153 damage.
How much damage does Squall inflict with a normal, unboosted, non-critical attack?
Over 1000 damage.
That's not all. Here is Rinoa, with junctioned magic, casting Flare, the most powerful offensive spell in her arsenal:
She still does less damage than Squall's normal attack.
Squall's Strength is a solid 40 points above Quistis's Strength and Rinoa's Magic thanks to Ultima, but even so, he's hitting ten times as hard as Quistis (whose normal, non-berserk damage against Cerberus is around 100). In fact, Quistis's damage is so low that it would make the fight legitimately very difficult if I had to rely on it to any extent at all. So what gives?
Well, I tried this fight again swapping the spells: Quistis with Ultima Junctioned to Strength for Str 117, Squall with Quake Junctioned for Str 82. What's the result?
Quistis deals a little over 400 damage, and Squall deals over 500 damage. With 40 points of Strength in her favor, Quistis still deals less damage.
This was bizarre enough that I had to actually look up FF8's damage formula; I had a suspicion as to what was happening, and I needed to check. It turns out I was wrong: Level does not factor into the damage formula. The fact that Squall is level 35 and Quistis is level 27 should not affect their damage; damage is a factor of character Strength, enemy Vitality, and "power," which should be identical for all uses of the basic physical attack skill. I specify this because it is new to FF8; Level has been included in damage calculation since IV, it's a consistent feature except in this game. In FF8, if a level 10 character with Strength 100 hits an enemy with Vitality 50, they should deal the same damage as a level 100 character with Strength 100 hitting that same Vitality 50. To retread well-trod ground, this is one reason why low level runs are considered easier; damage is only determined by Strength while enemy Vitality scales with enemy level which scales with player level, so a lv 10 character with Str 100 is going up against a lower Vitality than a lv 100 character with Str 100, thus paradoxically dealing more damage. Except! Enemies scale based on total party level, the scaling isn't different per-character! Quistis and Squall are hitting the same Cerberus with the same Vitality, so why is Quistis's damage lower? This can't be weapons either - all weapons have the same base power of 20, stronger weapons merely increase the character's base Strength.
So why? Why is this happening?
…
I found it. It took me multiple reloads of the same save to finally grasp what was happening.
Squall and Quistis both have Elemental-Attack Junction equipped. Auto-Junction shoved two different spells into that slot, seemingly based on an order of priority that favored normal stats over Elm-Atk. Now, the way Elemental Attack works is that you equip an elemental spell into its slot and you get a percentage value; so for instance, 100 Aeros in the attack slot give you 80% Wind:
Like so.
Now, it would be easy to naively assume that this is an extra. You have 80% Wind Damage, so your attack gets an extra 80% of its base damage in the form of wind damage. Right? Well, no. Because that would be helpful. Instead, what Elem-Atk-J does is turn your attacks into Dark Souls style split damage. In the above picture, Quistis is set up so that out of her normal damage, 80% of it is wind damage (maybe? The math doesn't quite work out that way, as we'll see, but close enough), leaving the remaining 20% as physical damage, but the overall total damage does not change.
This means that when facing an enemy that isn't weak to whatever elemental damage you have junctioned, Elem-Atk-J doesn't do anything. And as it happens, Cerberus is more than not weak to wind: He is immune to wind damage.
This means Quistis has a solid chunk of her damage just negated by default. If I go into the junction menu and remove Aero from Elemental Attack, leaving it empty, and then do the ultima swap, then while Squall still deals around 500 damage per hit, Quistis deals 1000+. Her damage is higher, as it should have been this entire time.
Mystery solved, at long last.
…
Anyway in our first actual fight going in blind we obliterate Cerberus because Squall not only has Ultima Junctioned to Strength, but he also has Darkside which triples damage, and the Gunblade's trigger mechanic allow us to trigger critical hits at will, meaning:
That 1000 base damage becomes nearly 5k, deleting half of the doggy's HP in a single hit, meaning we can mug him for Triples and its Speed Junction-teaching stealable item then explode him before his triplecasts can come into play.
As a small note, Pandemona recently learned Speed Junctioning. By junctioning 100 Triples to Rinoa's Speed, her Speed stat has increased to the level that she is effectively taking two turns for each one that her teammates are taking. This would be a tremendously effective boost in raw power… If Rinoa punched just a little harder.
Right now, Rinoa has 100 Flares Junctioned to Magic. I thought that Flare, being an offensive spell only a tier below Ultima, would be enough to make her offensive spells kick ass. But it's not. As things stand, junctioning and then casting Flare, the strongest offensive spell in our arsenal short of Ultima, deals between 700 and 800 damage. That's not insignificant! It's just… Identical to the damage from Squall's standard, no-critical attack damage with (76, not even 100) Ultimas junctioned. If Rinoa casts Triple on herself, she can fire three of those Flares in one turn, and that's… Still less than the damage Squall can do with Darkside and a trigger-activated crit. I was thinking, 'wow, magic damage sucks,' but swapping things around so that Rinoa has Ultima Junctioned pushes her damage from Flare above 1000, and Ultima itself to nearly 2000. Which is a lot better… But it's still not 5000 damage a hit. The two conclusions from this are:
- Ultima is absolutely out of proportion with everything else, it warps the entire game balance, having it on a single character just completely breaks comparisons. There's no spell 'close' to Ultima in Junction effect, it just defines combat paradigms.
- Separately from this, a strong Strength Junction, Darkside and trigger-activated critical hits is so absurdly powerful that it makes the very existence of magic questionable. 'Apply sword to face' is a stronger option than the ultimate junction boosting the ultimate spell.
I might have to simply unjunction Ultima to restore something vaguely resembling balance to the game.
Anyway, once Cerberus has been defeated, he joins us as a GF.
He's got a very good set of Junctions (including Hit-J, which junctions spells to accuracy and which I haven't really used so far), native Abilityx3, and the passive Alert that prevents backstabs. With this, I now have enough Abilityx3 GFs to junction one to each character, expanding our list of passive abilities. With that out of the way, we're free to look around for the last student with the last ID card, which opens the elevator door that leads us to the top floor.
Cut for image break.
Final Fantasy VIII, Part 23.B: The End of Disc 2
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
It's time.
Seifer is here, and he's as much of a dipshit as ever. Edea is also there, reclining behind him. Seifer has one small surprise for us, however: He knows about our shared past and Edea's identity. It just seems like it's made him more loyal, rather than less.
Seifer: "Oh, you guys shouldn't have… I was gonna come visit you at my old home."
Squall: "Shut up."
Seifer: "Did you guys come to fight Matron? After all that she's done for us? Rinoa, what are you doing here? You're gonna fight me, too? Come on, remember a year ago we…"
Rinoa: "Stop it!"
[If Quistis in the party] Seifer: "Instructor Trepe, I'm still one of your dearest students, aren't I?"
Quistis: Not anymore."
[If Zell is in the party] Seifer: "Hey Chicken-wuss. Lot's happened between us, eh?"
Zell: "Yeah! I'm dyin' to get even!"
[If Selphie is in the party] Seifer: "Selphie, right? I wish we had time to get to know each other."
Selphie: "Nahh. You're not my type."
[If Irvine is in the party] Seifer: "Hey, you're a Galbadian student. Get over here."
Irvine: "I'm happy right here, thank you."
Squall: "It's too late Seifer. You can't mess with our minds." [He draws his gunblade.] "To us, you're just another enemy, like one of those monsters."
Seifer: "You're comparing ME to them?" [He laughs.] "I ain't no monster. I'm the sorceress' knight." [He starts pacing, doing theatrical flourishes with his gunblade.] "And look at you. Attacking like a swarm. You guys are the monsters."
[Cue battle.]
I like how Seifer makes a custom remark based on who is your third party member, and how (aside from Irvine) they're all some kind of (poor) attempt at an emotional connection that gets summarily brushed off.
Like… Not to put to fine a point on it, but Seifer is doomed. He may mock us for attacking 'in a swarm,' like monsters, but the fact of the matter is, he's alone. Edea isn't getting up to help him. It's 3 vs 1, and he's got less HP than the Guardian Force we casually beat up on our way to him. This defiant stand is romantic, but it's futile.
Our opening move is to rob him of 8 Mega Phoenixes while deleting about a fifth of his HP bar.
Oh, and while we're at it, let's test out our new GF.
In a move that surprises me at first but actually makes a funny kind of sense, despite its intimidating appearance and its summon animation having it literally burst through the gates of hell, Cerberus isn't an offensive summon: Instead, its effect is to buff everyone in the party… With Double and Triple.
Because he has three heads, get it.
This is actually pretty powerful, and means going forward we won't have to worry about spending Triple casts when we can get it for free by summoning Cerberus. This means Rinoa can now heal and support the full party as if she had multi-target spells (by triplecasting Curaga or a buff), or triplecast offensive spells at Seifer, though the latter is not as effective. With Rinoa's crazy Speed rating, this ensures the whole team is more or less invincible.
Seifer makes boasting comments at various stages of the fight, classic stuff like "Is that all you got?", "I can't be beaten!" and "Ready to die, Squall? Kneel before me!" The latter is followed by his Limit Break, Demon Slice.
Seifer first casts Fire as he did in the intro movie, then follows up not with a simple cut but by whirling so fast he turns into a tornado and hits Squall hard enough to toss him flying into the air.
It deals 744 damage. We immediately blast him with Flare and defeat him.
It's not like I need to be spending Flares on this, but it's satisfying.
Seifer is down. His body lies on the ground as we return to the dungeon screen, and Edea finally decides to speak up.
Specifically, she decides to do the horror movie thing where you stand up by standing on your feet first and having your back follow in a way that doesn't look like it should be possible without superhuman balance, and does it while shit-talking her 'knight.'
She then immediately sinks into a pool of shadow. Not to be deterred, Squall has a good enough sense of Galbadia Garden's geography that he remembers the auditorium is right below this room; there's our next destination. Pausing to talk to Seifer has him tell us "There's no ways you guys can beat her"; looks like he's still conscious after all!
Anyway, having much less directional awareness than Squall, I proceed to immediately get lost in the Garden and spend ten minutes wandering around until I finally bump into the auditorium. RIP.
God, she literally waited for us to get here just so she could jump down through a display screen and land above us in a shower of broken glass. She is so fucking extra, I love her.
Sorceress Edea: "So the time has come. You're the legendary SeeD destined to face me?"
Squall, mentally: "(What is she talking about?)"
Sorceress Edea: "I must say that I am impressed."
Sorceress Edea: "...An impressive nuisance. Your life ends here, SeeD."
[At this point, Seifer approaches from behind her.]
Sorceress Edea: [To Seifer] "Worthless fool."
Squall, mentally: "(You're not our 'Matron.')"
Sorceress Edea: "All SeeDs must perish!"
[Cue battle.]
Could Squall finally be waking up to the fact that this is, literally, not his Matron? Is someone going to realize that Edea acting like she doesn't know any of these people she raised as children means maybe, just maybe she's possessed by an ancient evil spirit? Or is Squall just being metaphorical? I suppose we'll see.
Edea does not actually fight us immediately. First, we have to go through Seifer, again. Interestingly, he actually is in crisis. He spends the whole fight in a slouched-over, 'wounded' posture, and Scan tells us that he was 'Defeated once, and still trying to save his pride. HP lowered due to the defeat, but skills are higher.'
Unfortunately, increased damage or whatever that is referring to won't save him. As a matter of fact, I take advantage of the Seifer section of this fight to pre-emptively buff everyone with Shell in preparation for Edea's magic attacks. Then I hit him with Mug and Bio and he goes down again.
…
Seifer's arc is compelling in its own way, even though we've actually spend very little of it on-screen with him actually exploring its implications, and most of our protagonists have shown very little interest in debating his motives and actions with him. Behind all his smug arrogance and aggressive demeanor, there's a romantic, a child who dreams of being knight to a great sorceress. He picked a role that must have been vilified in popular histories and decided, this outcast, this lone and gallant figure protecting the persecuted villain of human history, this is who I want to be, this is noble and beautiful. For this dream, he's let himself be turned into a monster; he tortured his former comrade, he attempted to wipe out his home with weapons of mass destruction, he killed without compunction. He blinded himself to the fact that the woman he served was not the one who had once cared for him. To embody a romantic dream, he made himself into a monster. Like the knight of fairy tales meeting the knights of history. Yet still, he showed incredible resolve, he fought against impossible odds, he got up after being defeated to push himself to his (literal) Limit.
And what's his reward for it? The Sorceress barely addresses him as he fights for her, and when he goes down, she only speaks to him in contempt. 'Worthless.' 'Useless.' She has no affection for him, she does not care about him except insofar as he can be of practical use to her.
He's a fool, and more than that he's a tool, in every sense of the word.
Here is his just deserts, lying on the ground as the Sorceress takes the stage.
Maelstrom is a powerful attack that inflicts heavy damage and inflicts a new status effect I haven't seen before that causes every character to have their modeled darkened. This is Curse, which prevents characters from using their Limit Breaks. That's… fine, honestly. I'll end up using Esuna to cure it just because I don't know what it is during the fight, but I needn't have bothered, my normal moves are plenty enough to deal with the sorceress.
Checking her Draw list quickly, we find the return of a now classic summon: Alexander. We steal it quickly, although we won't get to see what it does until after the fight is over. Her Draw list also includes Blizzaga, Demi, and Esuna, but I don't intend to spend much time Drawing from her - it's time to end this.
16,000 HP, hefty but manageable.
Edea's main attack is Blizzaga, which she seems to favor at the expense of any other elemental spell; going into this fight with Blizzaga junctioned to Elemental Defense would have made it very easy, but even as things stand, with Shell halving its damage she is dealing trivial amounts of damage. She's only really dangerous when she uses Maelstrom again, or Death, which instantly kills Quistis (but we have Life, so she's immediately back up) which incidentally reveals Maelstrom's weakness:
Quistis was raised with 286 HP and Maelstrom dealt 143 damage to her but 1556 damage to Squall: it's a percentage-based effect. That means the only way it can kill us is as set-up for Blizzaga to finish us off, but Blizzaga is single-target, so even that way she can only KO one character at a time, and we can easily keep up with that.
(Also, something extremely funny I find out at one point is that Edea isn't immune to Sleep, which would have opened up some hilariously abusive tactics if I'd really needed to take advantage of it.)
The fight ends up dragged out a little longer than I anticipated just because I am trying to get Squall's Mug off but it's refusing to work, so towards the end I have Quistis and Rinoa stop attacking just to maximize the number of Mugs I can get in before taking Edea out, and…
With the very final blow, we steal a Royal Crown (which can teach one GF Magic +60%), finish her off, drop a Hero consumable that can make a character invincible in combat, name Alexander, and wrap up the final boss of Disc 2.
Edea does not go down, as such. Rather, the combat ends with her still standing but slumped in pain, and when we return to the dungeon screen, she raises her hands as if in pain or shock and purple light explodes out of her, engulfing the whole room and blinding Squall.
We see the next scene through Squall's eyes, the camera low to the ground - he clearly fell over and is, while not unconscious, dazed and struggling to make sense of what he's seeing, muttering internally about "My body…," so he is probably immobilized by some spell.
Rinoa walks towards the unconscious Seifer, her body shuffling in an unnatural way that strongly suggests she is being mind-controlled or possessed, similar to when she followed Edea while under her spell back in Deling City. Rinoa gently cradles Seifer's head and raises it, then lays her own head against his - a surprisingly affectionate gesture that I wouldn't expect if this situation were as simple as 'the spirit possessing Edea has now temporarily taken over Rinoa'. Then, Seifer slowly rises - I think Rinoa might have cast a healing spell on him, but just from the visuals of the scene it's ambiguous (another flash of white light blinds Squall at a couple of points).
Seifer rises to his feet and, without one glance at Rinoa, walks away. It's unclear if he literally walks out of the room or teleports away by magic; the white light again swallows Squall's vision and when it returns Seifer is simply gone… Then Rinoa collapses.
Quistis is the first of the party up, checking on Rinoa, who is passed out.
Hmm. Could it be that the spirit puppeteering Edea passed from her body, first to Rinoa, then through that embrace into Seifer's, preferring the mightier body of a SeeD? It would explain why he got up so suddenly and walked away without one look or word at anyone in the room, after the previous scene emphasized his self-denying resolve to fight for his sorceress.
But then, of course, if that were the case, what happened to the sorceress herself? Well…
Just now, the orphanage flashback's music begins to play.
Sorceress Edea: [Standing up painfully, leaning on the lectern for support] "Squall, Quistis, Selphie. Irvine, Zell. You've all grown so much… and become so strong…"
Sorceress Edea: "I have waited for this day to come. And also feared this day would come."
Sorceress Edea: "Is today a joyous day? Or an odious day?" [She opens her arms, looking up to the sky.] "Where is Ellone!? Have I protected Ellone!?"
Squall, mentally: "(...I don't understand.)"
Quistis: "Squall!" [Pan down to Quistis.] "It's Rinoa…"
Squall, mentally: "(.....Rinoa? What's wrong with Rinoa?)"
AW, C'MON.
You're really gonna end on a cliffhanger like that? No clarification of what's happening to Rinoa beyond 'she's not waking up'? A very strong implication that the 'Edea was possessed' theory was correct but no explicit confirmation? No explanation what just happened to Seifer?
The answer is yes. The game will do just that. Which is frustrating in part because… Well, because it's frustrating. I don't think this lands with nearly as much of a 'wham' as the end of Disc 1. At this point, the game has tried waving the 'maybe we'll do [character] like we did Aerith, how about that' a few too many times. I'm not worried about Rinoa, I don't believe anything seriously bad will happen to her, I just want to know what it is that is happening to her.
And that is what we will find out… in the next installment.
Hopefully. The game could decide to stall us for a couple more update's worth of pacing instead, which would be a dick move.
Retrospective
And that was Disc 2.
What happened over the course of Disc 2?
Disc 2 covered 11 updates, compared to 12 for Disc 1, so things are somewhat even. We picked up Disc 2 with our group waking up in prison; we followed this with a prison escape and a race to prevent intercontinental cruise missiles from being fired at the Gardens and successfully saving Balamb Garden but not Trabia Garden. We landed in the middle of the Balamb Garden Civil War, defeated Master NORG, and finally got some answers from Cid about the nature and purpose of SeeD, his past with Edea, and the nature of the Gardens as mobile hovership-shelters. We found Fisherman's Horizon and our characters started philosophizing about the nature of conflict and whether violence is avoidable; we found the hidden Shumi Village, got distracted by sidequests for a while, then set up a concert for Balamb student and specifically for Squall and Rinoa to try and get them to date. They grew closer, until we reached Trabia Garden and had one of the most poorly timed reveals of all times, discovering that everyone had gone to the same orphanage together and lost their memories, and that their great enemy had once been their matron. Our characters went to find more about their past, but on their way they ran into Galbadia Garden, putting them on an accelerated course to the 'final battle' before they could settle their past. Rinoa and Squall's romance continued to develop, finding out more about Squall's fursona, and in the end we confronted Seifer again and defeated him more conclusively than ever, before facing Edea in a rematch. Stronger from a Disc's worth of adventures and character growth, we defeated her at last, only for [SPOOKY SHIT] to happen and now [???].
Overall, that was pretty good. Some baffling narrative placements in the specific, but the story still holds up in a coherent shape. FF8 is definitely weird - the secret headmaster of Balamb Garden being a giant yellow blob-man was the kind of swerve someone could easily point out as 'see, this game is goofy' and by 'goofy' mean 'stupid,' but… That's mostly aesthetics. The core of it, that NORG is a pariah from his isolated tribe who desires profit and safety and who's been growing increasingly anxious seeing what were supposed to be his obedient, cash-raking puppets upset world politics and threaten his operations until he decided he had to take harsh measures to stop them, is perfectly believable.
I don't really see any reason to go 'ho ho ho Squall died at the end of Disc 1 and this is all just his dying hallucination, that's why everything is so wacky and so dumb.' I know that's not really a serious claim but, like, FF8 Disc 2 is fine. Its main problem is continuing the protagonist-centered drama of the franchise where all the problems of the world end up collapsing to the personal issues and backgrounds of five people. The flashback could have been easily improved in ways several of my readers suggested, but the skeleton is okay. Almost every character got some character development or at least exploration, and Squall/Rinoa remains the central relationship of the narrative and the way it's developing slowly, over time, in a way that highlights both characters' qualities and issues is one of the game's stronger points… If you can manage to grab all the missable content without which it wouldn't hold together. I'm struggling to imagine the game at this point if, say, I had fucked up the concert and left Rinoa out of my party at several points where she gets missable dialogues or cutscenes. It's rare to see devs design missable content in such a way that missing it doesn't just leave you without some power-ups or some optional worldbuilding or lore, but in a way that actively makes it suck by crippling its central romantic arc.
Still, I think Disc 2 did fairly well overall. But part of why I'm putting this retrospective here is because the end of Disc 2 doesn't give me much to chew on; Galbadia Garden is a basic navigation challenge with random encounters and an optional boss, ending in a direct confrontation with Edea that tells us very little that wasn't already clear about any of the characters involved, except Seifer to a small extent, and then some dramatic events that we're barely told enough to even speculate upon, and cut to the next CD.
Hopefully, next time, we'll get some proper answers.
Thank you for reading.
Next Time: The beginning of Disc 3.
Seifer is here, and he's as much of a dipshit as ever. Edea is also there, reclining behind him. Seifer has one small surprise for us, however: He knows about our shared past and Edea's identity. It just seems like it's made him more loyal, rather than less.
Seifer: "Oh, you guys shouldn't have… I was gonna come visit you at my old home."
Squall: "Shut up."
Seifer: "Did you guys come to fight Matron? After all that she's done for us? Rinoa, what are you doing here? You're gonna fight me, too? Come on, remember a year ago we…"
Rinoa: "Stop it!"
[If Quistis in the party] Seifer: "Instructor Trepe, I'm still one of your dearest students, aren't I?"
Quistis: Not anymore."
[If Zell is in the party] Seifer: "Hey Chicken-wuss. Lot's happened between us, eh?"
Zell: "Yeah! I'm dyin' to get even!"
[If Selphie is in the party] Seifer: "Selphie, right? I wish we had time to get to know each other."
Selphie: "Nahh. You're not my type."
[If Irvine is in the party] Seifer: "Hey, you're a Galbadian student. Get over here."
Irvine: "I'm happy right here, thank you."
Squall: "It's too late Seifer. You can't mess with our minds." [He draws his gunblade.] "To us, you're just another enemy, like one of those monsters."
Seifer: "You're comparing ME to them?" [He laughs.] "I ain't no monster. I'm the sorceress' knight." [He starts pacing, doing theatrical flourishes with his gunblade.] "And look at you. Attacking like a swarm. You guys are the monsters."
[Cue battle.]
I like how Seifer makes a custom remark based on who is your third party member, and how (aside from Irvine) they're all some kind of (poor) attempt at an emotional connection that gets summarily brushed off.
Like… Not to put to fine a point on it, but Seifer is doomed. He may mock us for attacking 'in a swarm,' like monsters, but the fact of the matter is, he's alone. Edea isn't getting up to help him. It's 3 vs 1, and he's got less HP than the Guardian Force we casually beat up on our way to him. This defiant stand is romantic, but it's futile.
Our opening move is to rob him of 8 Mega Phoenixes while deleting about a fifth of his HP bar.
Oh, and while we're at it, let's test out our new GF.
In a move that surprises me at first but actually makes a funny kind of sense, despite its intimidating appearance and its summon animation having it literally burst through the gates of hell, Cerberus isn't an offensive summon: Instead, its effect is to buff everyone in the party… With Double and Triple.
Because he has three heads, get it.
This is actually pretty powerful, and means going forward we won't have to worry about spending Triple casts when we can get it for free by summoning Cerberus. This means Rinoa can now heal and support the full party as if she had multi-target spells (by triplecasting Curaga or a buff), or triplecast offensive spells at Seifer, though the latter is not as effective. With Rinoa's crazy Speed rating, this ensures the whole team is more or less invincible.
Seifer makes boasting comments at various stages of the fight, classic stuff like "Is that all you got?", "I can't be beaten!" and "Ready to die, Squall? Kneel before me!" The latter is followed by his Limit Break, Demon Slice.
Seifer first casts Fire as he did in the intro movie, then follows up not with a simple cut but by whirling so fast he turns into a tornado and hits Squall hard enough to toss him flying into the air.
It deals 744 damage. We immediately blast him with Flare and defeat him.
It's not like I need to be spending Flares on this, but it's satisfying.
Seifer is down. His body lies on the ground as we return to the dungeon screen, and Edea finally decides to speak up.
Specifically, she decides to do the horror movie thing where you stand up by standing on your feet first and having your back follow in a way that doesn't look like it should be possible without superhuman balance, and does it while shit-talking her 'knight.'
She then immediately sinks into a pool of shadow. Not to be deterred, Squall has a good enough sense of Galbadia Garden's geography that he remembers the auditorium is right below this room; there's our next destination. Pausing to talk to Seifer has him tell us "There's no ways you guys can beat her"; looks like he's still conscious after all!
Anyway, having much less directional awareness than Squall, I proceed to immediately get lost in the Garden and spend ten minutes wandering around until I finally bump into the auditorium. RIP.
God, she literally waited for us to get here just so she could jump down through a display screen and land above us in a shower of broken glass. She is so fucking extra, I love her.
Sorceress Edea: "So the time has come. You're the legendary SeeD destined to face me?"
Squall, mentally: "(What is she talking about?)"
Sorceress Edea: "I must say that I am impressed."
Sorceress Edea: "...An impressive nuisance. Your life ends here, SeeD."
[At this point, Seifer approaches from behind her.]
Sorceress Edea: [To Seifer] "Worthless fool."
Squall, mentally: "(You're not our 'Matron.')"
Sorceress Edea: "All SeeDs must perish!"
[Cue battle.]
Could Squall finally be waking up to the fact that this is, literally, not his Matron? Is someone going to realize that Edea acting like she doesn't know any of these people she raised as children means maybe, just maybe she's possessed by an ancient evil spirit? Or is Squall just being metaphorical? I suppose we'll see.
Edea does not actually fight us immediately. First, we have to go through Seifer, again. Interestingly, he actually is in crisis. He spends the whole fight in a slouched-over, 'wounded' posture, and Scan tells us that he was 'Defeated once, and still trying to save his pride. HP lowered due to the defeat, but skills are higher.'
Unfortunately, increased damage or whatever that is referring to won't save him. As a matter of fact, I take advantage of the Seifer section of this fight to pre-emptively buff everyone with Shell in preparation for Edea's magic attacks. Then I hit him with Mug and Bio and he goes down again.
…
Seifer's arc is compelling in its own way, even though we've actually spend very little of it on-screen with him actually exploring its implications, and most of our protagonists have shown very little interest in debating his motives and actions with him. Behind all his smug arrogance and aggressive demeanor, there's a romantic, a child who dreams of being knight to a great sorceress. He picked a role that must have been vilified in popular histories and decided, this outcast, this lone and gallant figure protecting the persecuted villain of human history, this is who I want to be, this is noble and beautiful. For this dream, he's let himself be turned into a monster; he tortured his former comrade, he attempted to wipe out his home with weapons of mass destruction, he killed without compunction. He blinded himself to the fact that the woman he served was not the one who had once cared for him. To embody a romantic dream, he made himself into a monster. Like the knight of fairy tales meeting the knights of history. Yet still, he showed incredible resolve, he fought against impossible odds, he got up after being defeated to push himself to his (literal) Limit.
And what's his reward for it? The Sorceress barely addresses him as he fights for her, and when he goes down, she only speaks to him in contempt. 'Worthless.' 'Useless.' She has no affection for him, she does not care about him except insofar as he can be of practical use to her.
He's a fool, and more than that he's a tool, in every sense of the word.
Here is his just deserts, lying on the ground as the Sorceress takes the stage.
Maelstrom is a powerful attack that inflicts heavy damage and inflicts a new status effect I haven't seen before that causes every character to have their modeled darkened. This is Curse, which prevents characters from using their Limit Breaks. That's… fine, honestly. I'll end up using Esuna to cure it just because I don't know what it is during the fight, but I needn't have bothered, my normal moves are plenty enough to deal with the sorceress.
Checking her Draw list quickly, we find the return of a now classic summon: Alexander. We steal it quickly, although we won't get to see what it does until after the fight is over. Her Draw list also includes Blizzaga, Demi, and Esuna, but I don't intend to spend much time Drawing from her - it's time to end this.
16,000 HP, hefty but manageable.
Edea's main attack is Blizzaga, which she seems to favor at the expense of any other elemental spell; going into this fight with Blizzaga junctioned to Elemental Defense would have made it very easy, but even as things stand, with Shell halving its damage she is dealing trivial amounts of damage. She's only really dangerous when she uses Maelstrom again, or Death, which instantly kills Quistis (but we have Life, so she's immediately back up) which incidentally reveals Maelstrom's weakness:
Quistis was raised with 286 HP and Maelstrom dealt 143 damage to her but 1556 damage to Squall: it's a percentage-based effect. That means the only way it can kill us is as set-up for Blizzaga to finish us off, but Blizzaga is single-target, so even that way she can only KO one character at a time, and we can easily keep up with that.
(Also, something extremely funny I find out at one point is that Edea isn't immune to Sleep, which would have opened up some hilariously abusive tactics if I'd really needed to take advantage of it.)
The fight ends up dragged out a little longer than I anticipated just because I am trying to get Squall's Mug off but it's refusing to work, so towards the end I have Quistis and Rinoa stop attacking just to maximize the number of Mugs I can get in before taking Edea out, and…
With the very final blow, we steal a Royal Crown (which can teach one GF Magic +60%), finish her off, drop a Hero consumable that can make a character invincible in combat, name Alexander, and wrap up the final boss of Disc 2.
Edea does not go down, as such. Rather, the combat ends with her still standing but slumped in pain, and when we return to the dungeon screen, she raises her hands as if in pain or shock and purple light explodes out of her, engulfing the whole room and blinding Squall.
We see the next scene through Squall's eyes, the camera low to the ground - he clearly fell over and is, while not unconscious, dazed and struggling to make sense of what he's seeing, muttering internally about "My body…," so he is probably immobilized by some spell.
Rinoa walks towards the unconscious Seifer, her body shuffling in an unnatural way that strongly suggests she is being mind-controlled or possessed, similar to when she followed Edea while under her spell back in Deling City. Rinoa gently cradles Seifer's head and raises it, then lays her own head against his - a surprisingly affectionate gesture that I wouldn't expect if this situation were as simple as 'the spirit possessing Edea has now temporarily taken over Rinoa'. Then, Seifer slowly rises - I think Rinoa might have cast a healing spell on him, but just from the visuals of the scene it's ambiguous (another flash of white light blinds Squall at a couple of points).
Seifer rises to his feet and, without one glance at Rinoa, walks away. It's unclear if he literally walks out of the room or teleports away by magic; the white light again swallows Squall's vision and when it returns Seifer is simply gone… Then Rinoa collapses.
Quistis is the first of the party up, checking on Rinoa, who is passed out.
Hmm. Could it be that the spirit puppeteering Edea passed from her body, first to Rinoa, then through that embrace into Seifer's, preferring the mightier body of a SeeD? It would explain why he got up so suddenly and walked away without one look or word at anyone in the room, after the previous scene emphasized his self-denying resolve to fight for his sorceress.
But then, of course, if that were the case, what happened to the sorceress herself? Well…
Just now, the orphanage flashback's music begins to play.
Sorceress Edea: [Standing up painfully, leaning on the lectern for support] "Squall, Quistis, Selphie. Irvine, Zell. You've all grown so much… and become so strong…"
Sorceress Edea: "I have waited for this day to come. And also feared this day would come."
Sorceress Edea: "Is today a joyous day? Or an odious day?" [She opens her arms, looking up to the sky.] "Where is Ellone!? Have I protected Ellone!?"
Squall, mentally: "(...I don't understand.)"
Quistis: "Squall!" [Pan down to Quistis.] "It's Rinoa…"
Squall, mentally: "(.....Rinoa? What's wrong with Rinoa?)"
AW, C'MON.
You're really gonna end on a cliffhanger like that? No clarification of what's happening to Rinoa beyond 'she's not waking up'? A very strong implication that the 'Edea was possessed' theory was correct but no explicit confirmation? No explanation what just happened to Seifer?
The answer is yes. The game will do just that. Which is frustrating in part because… Well, because it's frustrating. I don't think this lands with nearly as much of a 'wham' as the end of Disc 1. At this point, the game has tried waving the 'maybe we'll do [character] like we did Aerith, how about that' a few too many times. I'm not worried about Rinoa, I don't believe anything seriously bad will happen to her, I just want to know what it is that is happening to her.
And that is what we will find out… in the next installment.
Hopefully. The game could decide to stall us for a couple more update's worth of pacing instead, which would be a dick move.
Retrospective
And that was Disc 2.
What happened over the course of Disc 2?
Disc 2 covered 11 updates, compared to 12 for Disc 1, so things are somewhat even. We picked up Disc 2 with our group waking up in prison; we followed this with a prison escape and a race to prevent intercontinental cruise missiles from being fired at the Gardens and successfully saving Balamb Garden but not Trabia Garden. We landed in the middle of the Balamb Garden Civil War, defeated Master NORG, and finally got some answers from Cid about the nature and purpose of SeeD, his past with Edea, and the nature of the Gardens as mobile hovership-shelters. We found Fisherman's Horizon and our characters started philosophizing about the nature of conflict and whether violence is avoidable; we found the hidden Shumi Village, got distracted by sidequests for a while, then set up a concert for Balamb student and specifically for Squall and Rinoa to try and get them to date. They grew closer, until we reached Trabia Garden and had one of the most poorly timed reveals of all times, discovering that everyone had gone to the same orphanage together and lost their memories, and that their great enemy had once been their matron. Our characters went to find more about their past, but on their way they ran into Galbadia Garden, putting them on an accelerated course to the 'final battle' before they could settle their past. Rinoa and Squall's romance continued to develop, finding out more about Squall's fursona, and in the end we confronted Seifer again and defeated him more conclusively than ever, before facing Edea in a rematch. Stronger from a Disc's worth of adventures and character growth, we defeated her at last, only for [SPOOKY SHIT] to happen and now [???].
Overall, that was pretty good. Some baffling narrative placements in the specific, but the story still holds up in a coherent shape. FF8 is definitely weird - the secret headmaster of Balamb Garden being a giant yellow blob-man was the kind of swerve someone could easily point out as 'see, this game is goofy' and by 'goofy' mean 'stupid,' but… That's mostly aesthetics. The core of it, that NORG is a pariah from his isolated tribe who desires profit and safety and who's been growing increasingly anxious seeing what were supposed to be his obedient, cash-raking puppets upset world politics and threaten his operations until he decided he had to take harsh measures to stop them, is perfectly believable.
I don't really see any reason to go 'ho ho ho Squall died at the end of Disc 1 and this is all just his dying hallucination, that's why everything is so wacky and so dumb.' I know that's not really a serious claim but, like, FF8 Disc 2 is fine. Its main problem is continuing the protagonist-centered drama of the franchise where all the problems of the world end up collapsing to the personal issues and backgrounds of five people. The flashback could have been easily improved in ways several of my readers suggested, but the skeleton is okay. Almost every character got some character development or at least exploration, and Squall/Rinoa remains the central relationship of the narrative and the way it's developing slowly, over time, in a way that highlights both characters' qualities and issues is one of the game's stronger points… If you can manage to grab all the missable content without which it wouldn't hold together. I'm struggling to imagine the game at this point if, say, I had fucked up the concert and left Rinoa out of my party at several points where she gets missable dialogues or cutscenes. It's rare to see devs design missable content in such a way that missing it doesn't just leave you without some power-ups or some optional worldbuilding or lore, but in a way that actively makes it suck by crippling its central romantic arc.
Still, I think Disc 2 did fairly well overall. But part of why I'm putting this retrospective here is because the end of Disc 2 doesn't give me much to chew on; Galbadia Garden is a basic navigation challenge with random encounters and an optional boss, ending in a direct confrontation with Edea that tells us very little that wasn't already clear about any of the characters involved, except Seifer to a small extent, and then some dramatic events that we're barely told enough to even speculate upon, and cut to the next CD.
Hopefully, next time, we'll get some proper answers.
Thank you for reading.
Next Time: The beginning of Disc 3.
ZerbanDaGreat
Daemon Noble of D E M O G R A P H I C S
- Pronouns
- They/them
THE MONSTER HOCKEYThe ice hockey rink that we visited last time is still around, this time sans the students playing. This immediately rouses my curiosity; if you'll recall, last time we visited Galbadia Garden, someone mentioned a hockey team made up of monsters that they were worried about playing against. Could it be..?
THE ICE HOCKEY MONSTERS ARE REAL.
THE MONSTER HOCKEY IS REAL
I mean of course Squall is the strongest you gave him Darkside when he's already junctioned with Griever the Hedgelion he does one Chaos Control and everything in front of him is atomised.
- Pronouns
- Him/He
Auto-juncton is pretty good for what it does (fills in all the fiddly stat-junctioning without you having to compare and contrast every spell against every other spell until you memorize your spell list), but you do want to always check status and elemental junction. As you saw, the wrong elemental attack junction can make your attacker useless, and the wrong sort of status attack without proper defenses on the character can be ruinous.
By the way, the next disk should have a couple new cards at the next new location (well, one new card and one card I believe you missed before) and an entire, not-random-bullshit card quest chain to follow.
There's also a combat focused side quest others have been hinting on that you'll probably hate for being boring, but really ought to be done sooner rather then later, if you're going to be doing it at all.
You've also figured out why Low-level runs can end up so overpowered. For someone who doesn't have everything memorized, a low-level run starts off easy and gets harder over time, eventually bosses and enemies 'floor' in level and stats starts to be pretty hefty, and they don't drop better magic or items natively. Low-level runs is a decent way to increase the challenge of actually engaging with the mechanics, at least until you get everything.
Even at their worst, they take the challenge out of battles, but put the puzzle and figuring things out into the field map/menus. FF8 is very much a game about character preparation, not micromanaging commands inside a battle.
By the way, the next disk should have a couple new cards at the next new location (well, one new card and one card I believe you missed before) and an entire, not-random-bullshit card quest chain to follow.
There's also a combat focused side quest others have been hinting on that you'll probably hate for being boring, but really ought to be done sooner rather then later, if you're going to be doing it at all.
You've also figured out why Low-level runs can end up so overpowered. For someone who doesn't have everything memorized, a low-level run starts off easy and gets harder over time, eventually bosses and enemies 'floor' in level and stats starts to be pretty hefty, and they don't drop better magic or items natively. Low-level runs is a decent way to increase the challenge of actually engaging with the mechanics, at least until you get everything.
Even at their worst, they take the challenge out of battles, but put the puzzle and figuring things out into the field map/menus. FF8 is very much a game about character preparation, not micromanaging commands inside a battle.
Entropy Judge
Recurring Bouts of Misanthropy
Yeah, Magic damage *does* suck. There are ... basically two ways to make it competitive. The first way is to Triple-cast everything, and the other way is to only use Meteor for magic damage. Even then, though, it physically takes longer to set up, and magic is a consumable, so it's inferior to physical attacks. (Meteor is, IIRC, a good bit weaker than Flare, but it's a 10-hit attack, so it ends up with better damage against single targets.)
Revlid
blob of bugs
- Location
- England
Even in a game that leans heavily on interpersonal drama in ways that often don't land for me, Seifer is a special case. I don't know why (or whether) I'm supposed to care about him, and I don't know why (other than Rinoa, who has an offscreen connection) anyone else would, either. He shows up, is a fairly ineffective douchebag, and has become somehow both more douchey and more ineffective with each passing appearance. Even the ambiguity of how much of this might be down to mind control doesn't do much, just pushes back the point at which he can be truly judged to an earlier, more primitive stage of "useless asshole".
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Mizu
Software Developer
- Location
- Victoria, Australia
Wow, that's unexpected. I completely missed this in my own playthrough, having never encountered does there.
Have we seen any indication Selphie even has a type? A few folk have theorised she's autistic from the train obsession, and we haven't seen her display interest in anyone. I guess maybe Irving once when he flirted with her on a train?