Disc 3 feels rather short. The critical path through it involves you bouncing back in and out of Esthar a few times and then wham!!! — you can go to Lunatic Pandora and head off to the last disc. I mean, that sort of slightness makes some sense given that this is the disc where the world finally Opens Up with the airship and everything, but I can’t escape the feeling that there was a bunch of cut content here (almost liek some time compression was going on ohoho). Still, I can’t help but laugh at how Lunatic Pandora just floats menacingly in the corner of Esthar the entire time you get to dilly-dally doing sidequests (or farming cactaurs for AP or whatever).
I think it’s funny that you can just rent a normal gas-guzzling car in high-tech Esthar. My personal reading of this is that they stopped really developing personal automotive technology once their public transit system (of anti-gravity couches) reached a certain point. Thus, in Estharian society, personal motor vehicles are just luxury items, and not a ubiquitous technology that demands constant R&D investment.
“Using a gigantic floating pillar of steel and crystal as a mobile military base and as a weapon to free a witch from Space Jail by making monsters rain down from the moon” is such a great plot development. In the world of science-fantasy weapons analogous to nukes, Lunatic Pandora is a top class act.
Regarding Lunar Cries in general, I find it weird that the one that actually happens in the game doesn’t make any sort of crater, whereas the cry that happened in Trabia 17 years ago left a huge radioactive crater, and the cry that happened in Centra centuries (?) prior is implied to have fractured that entire continent. Perhaps these cries wreck havoc on the lunar ecosystem, making their effect diminish if they happen too often.
Everything about Squall jumping out of a rapidly falling escape pod to rescue Rinoa from space death and also stumbling upon a long derelict space vessel makes my head hurt when I try to think about it in terms of hard astrophysics.
What the heck was the Esthar airstation doing during the 17 years that radio communication didn’t work? I mean, air traffic control pretty much requires radio communication to work and without that it basically becomes a logistically impossible to keep safe — not to mention the fact that the game seems to acknowledge this, since aerial transportation is otherwise never acknowledged in this world, self-guided missiles and low-flying schools being excluded of course. So why were the folks at Esthar airstation immediately ready to make contact with the Ragnarok once the interference ended?
Esthar is a communist society, isn’t it?
Anyhow, as I was exploring the map with the airship, it occurred to me that not only does this game not have treasure chests (replacing them instead with draw points and loose items), but it basically has no caves either. There’s the Fire Cavern at the beginning of the game, and that’s basically it. Considering the sheer ubiquity of caves in the 7 prior games, that’s a modestly laudable achievement.
The Centra Ruins are really great. They’re a perfectly Final Fantasy-sy mixture of ancient ruin and high technology, inside an architecturally impossible octahedral scaffold. My favorite part about them is the slightly out-of-place run down signs at the entrance that say “My Blue Heaven”, almost implying that this site had been some sort of tourist attraction after it had lost its former use but before it became fully abandoned.
[Picture stolen from some youtube walkthrough]
Unfortunately the reward you get for finishing it is Odin, who is awful and really soured my mood while farming for weapon parts later on (no I do not want to gain 4 levels from this Malboro). Also, beating up ~20 Tonberries to get the Tonberry GF was not my idea of fun so I skipped out on that as well.
On the other hand, the Deep Sea Research Center is both a great dungeon and offers you a decent reward. And the Ultima Weapon is also a decently tough boss. My first attempt at against it ended with my party being wiped in what felt like 3 turns. After respeccing my party and redoing all of those forced encounters, I managed to beat it within a turn or two before almost dying again. For a game as impossibly busted as this, that battle felt uncannily balanced for me (it’s the attacks that take off a percentage of your HP, isn’t it?).
Anyhow, I told my wife that Laguna is Squall’s dad and that made her so angry at Lagnua that I couldn’t help but feel kind of impressed and slightly terrified. Like, she even randomly brought up her frustration when we were visiting her family (who have no exposure to FF) a couple weeks back. That was an interesting conversation, to say the least.