No Chicken-Wusses Allowed (FF8 thread)

yes! I love NORG. every time I think of final fantasy 8 I think of NORG

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the way they justify your party’s survival of the missile base explosion is great

obviously not saying anything more than that

final fantasy viii sort of has scooby doo vibes and I will not elaborate on that

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got zell’s card on my first game with his mam
blessed playthrough

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Things are starting to pick up again at work, and staying up way to late has been deleterious to my energy/productivity levels, so these posts will be shorter.

good heavens that was great

also, i just remembered how squall’s party made it back to the garden well before the missiles got there. gotta love the speed of offscreen travel.

My wife was intensely weirded out and confused by NORG on all levels. She also refused to believe him when he said Cid and [redacted] were married, until Cid himself said so. Combine that with all the business about Ellone and that ship of “Edea’s SeeDs” coming to pick her up, and she is now thoroughly confused about what’s going on in the story (like Squall, I guess).

I tried clarifying those points explaining to her how Edea helped found the gardens as an organization to assassinate her if she (or a successor) should go crazy, but for some reason that didn’t sit well with her. Maybe I should have mentioned that “crazy” in this context means “possessed by an evil sorceress from the future,” but that seems like a bit much right now. I dunno.

Anyhow, NORG turning into an ORB is the best possible ending to the NORG subplot.

I love how a draw point for the most powerful offensive spell in the game is hidden inside the house of the notedly pacifistic mayor of Fisherman’s Horizon. (I also love that the town is basically just a mid-way stop for a transoceanic rail line.)

I respecced my party so all main 6 characters had a GF like I talked about in my previous post, and so far I think it’s The Right Thing To Do if you have a handle on the game’s economy but don’t want things to be utterly trivial. The only real issue here is that AP doesn’t get applied to characters outside your party of 3.

I drew the Leviathan Gyarados GF from a boss and noticed that I had a gap in my GF screen. Turns out I missed Carbuncle in Disc 1. Slightly mad at myself, but I think I’ll live. (Drawing GFs from bosses is easily my least favorite design wrinkle in this game.)

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I missed carbuncle too. I was so overpowered by then that that fight didn’t even feel like a boss fight so I didn’t bother drawing.

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Always draw every new enemy at least once

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I don’t get why everybody looks good in the remaster except Squall. He does not look like FMV Squall at all, he looks like Real Doll Squall

Comparison:

image

FF8 always bothered me because it feels like they just threw all these systems but with little regard to whether they worked or not. Summoning GFs is too overpowered and boring, it’s also too fast and easy to trivialize the game by just drawing a bunch, etc.

Now I’m trying to play without much drawing and summoning, but it still feels weird and bad because magic is now a precious source and I’m just reduced to physical attacks and limit breaks all the time.
Draw-cast would be fun but it gets a huge penalty compared to just casting magic, and magic isn’t that hot in the first place!

Nothing works! I’m still enjoying the game and setting so much anyway! Stole 50 cards from Zell’s mom!!!

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refine magic! don’t draw it!

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yeah the standard way to break this over your knee is refining quistis’ card into 180 triples and zell’s card into 3x str+60% then junctioning the triples to str

but then you’re going to beat most of the bosses with one regular attack

you don’t even have to do that, just use the various refine magic abilities from normal items can get you powerful magic much more quickly than drawing ever will

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but you’ll miss drawn GFs

yeah see ff8 is a deep and complex game

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yOu CAn DrAw TheEm AlL iN UlTiMECIA’S KAstle

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9 hours in FF8 and yet again I can’t stop thinking about FITHOS… LUSEC at any point

I like chanting it at work

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Uematsu’s vision of background music appropriate for a space station is extremely weird:

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Little bro would watch me play 8 often, to this day he announces the meal

MEATLOAF…AND KETCHUP

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and how about his idea of what a shining techno-future city sounds like

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the esthar music rules tho

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it’s like two pivots away from Blue Danube in 2001, filtered through his FFVI italian theater work

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My FF8 contribution is that my best friend loved this game and watching her play it for hours has unfortunately cursed me with a deep understanding of how the Triple Triad rules spread and all the ways you can manipulate it. She had a friend who would always wear a Crystal Chronicles t-shirt and only refer to Seifer as “Simply Delicious Seifer” at all times while getting visibly horny at the fight between him and Squall in the opening FMV which I will forever be haunted by.

All in all the only parts of FF8 I remember favorably are Selphie, the battle theme, the Balamb Gardens music and how Zell’s intro cutscene plays out like a Mentos commercial

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