neat game :’)
3 Likes
Very good point I think that’s what they were going for (though it doesn’t work AT ALL in game unlike Blue Danube in 2001)
When we left off in my last post, I was just outside of Trabia Garden in Disc 2. Since then… I’ve beaten the game. (oops) Sorry for not keeping you folks up to date.
anyhow
I had forgotten the orphanage scene took place at Trabia Garden. I had thought that you had to go to the orphanage itself, but no you’re just metaphorically transported there via memory-vision.
My wife laughed each time a character was revealed to have lived there. However, once the reveals were out of the way and the characters were talking about their shared, forgotten experiences she found it kind of touching. My opinion is pretty similar. It seems hilariously contrived, but it’s fine actually.
idk why but all the characters being all “let’s kill mom” seems to be a step above the standard jrpg “let’s kill god”
Trabia Garden itself is surprising in how it feels like a bustling, living, breathing space despite having just been destroyed. It’s astounding how much love and care went into the NPC scripting for such a short segment.
Shumi village is a cute place and Moombas are cute and the idea of Laguna being a universally admired dork is cute, but I could not be bothered to do that rock collecting sidequest (sorry folks).
For some reason the disc-ending battle of the gardens in this remaster is accompanied by the doinky MIDI version of “The Landing”. I guess someone forgot to fix the intro-less variant of that song (oops). Really though, that mistake feels somewhat appropriate given how wildly that scenario oscillates between awesome and awful. I love all the cutscenes with motorcycles jumping between flying schools and the jetpack soldiers and that one fight scene in the background that you just run past. Unfortunately, those promises do not live up to the reality of running around from point A to B to C for 30 minutes while Rinoa dangles helplessly off a cliff for 30 minutes. At least Squall shows some emotion and gives a stirring speech, I guess.
Galbadia Garden was yet another dungeon where the navigational challenge was “this all looks practically the same.”
Edea’s speeches at the end of discs 1 and 2 actually provide Ultimecia with a healthy bit of characterization in retrospect.
It’s funny going to Deling City in Disc 3. You can walk around freely and talk to all the soldiers without issue. Apparently Seifer is now in charge of Galbadia and they’re aware he reports to Ultimecia but none of them really understand what’s going on and General Caraway is just like “not my problem 
”
I can’t believe that Squall carried Rinoa literally halfway across a transoceanic railroad on foot. Thinking about that scene on any sort of logistical level is absolutely hilarious. Like, assuming that their earth has a circumference equal to ours and that the railroad is as close to the equator as it looks on the map, that walk would be well over 2500 miles and could have easily taken Squall over 100 days — and that’s not even counting the walk across the monster-infected Great Salt Lake.
more rambling later
9 Likes
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.
8 Likes
Have not watched this myself, but it’s a look at the development of the remaster.
2 Likes
I just watched that on my lunch break. It has the original staff talk about the original game. Basically nothing remaster-specific gets said at all (which is fine).
1 Like
I feel like a dummy for not catching the wizard of oz connection
The remaster was inside you all along.
I feel like I totally missed it when I played the game back in 1999 or whenever but the idea that radio waves don’t work because Adel’s psychic screaming from her prison in outer space is causing a bunch of noise interference is such a cool idea
I AM ALIVE HERE
BRING ME BACK THERE
I WILL NEVER LET YOU FORGET ABOUT ME
I WILL NEVER LET YOU BOUND ME BACK
8 Likes
had to refund this because the lack of rumble was a deal breaker. R1 for crits! Squall never misses either. love it.
so hard to find real knowledge but i vaguely remember reading that this game was made in 12 months.
the ff8 section in the 25 anniversary ultimania is scant af. then there’s ff9 which has pages upon pages of weapon sketches. yeah ok.
unsubstantiated theory is that square never realized how essential sakaguchi was to an ff game’s cohesiveness, even to this day. the major theory hole there is that he worked on ff9 and i would say that’s a poorly paced game, whereas ff8 feels consistently mellow throughout, save for the major high points.
2 Likes
I appreciate that kitase and nomura were trusted to make this and turned out something so odd and rarely epic. That being said, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that SE has lost faith in them at this point and that they’ll be finishing out their careers/tenures churning out ff7r like modern star wars films, while the ff14rr bois – who can actually SHIP – get a nice, comfy run with things.
3 Likes
sakaguchi returns by ff19 where the logo is a silhouette of his hair, eyebrows, and moustache
9 Likes
flipping through the ultimania book, I learned that seifer was inspired to become a knight from a movie he saw as a child
…which would be the same movie where laguna fought the red dragon!
if it wasn’t for ff, I’d probably be into q anon the way I’m connecting dots over here
7 Likes
you’d be amazed how many people I’ve met who never put it together who exactly Laguna is, despite finishing the game
2 Likes
I’m still not entirely clear on that honestly. I just like to vibe in that world, play cards, eat HOT DOGS!
wait really?
huh.
Laguna is Squall’s dad
Then again the scene where this is revealed isn’t exactly riveting, so I guess it’s not that surprising when I really think about it
1 Like
ok. that would make Ellone Squall’s mum? is the little girl Rinoa??
Ooo. Can I do it?
Ellone is Squall’s half-sister. The story goes like this when you put it all in order: As a young soldier, Laguna has a crush on a piano player named Julia who, on the night before his deployment unexpectedly invites him up to her room where he talks about himself until he passes out. She tells him that she wants to write a song about him which turns out to be Eyes on Me: the Love Theme from Final Fantasy VIII. It’s about how creepy he is, but in a nice way. Laguna is injured on his mission and doesn’t make it back to Galbadia. During his recovery he is taken in by a cafe owner named Raine who has a young daughter named Ellone. Julia marries General Caraway and they have a daughter: Rinoa. Laguna marries Raine and they have a son: Squall. Both Julia and Raine die (of course – no JRPG moms.)
Here’s where I’m a bit fuzzy. Ellone is kidnapped because of her time compression powers (by Adel?) and Laguna goes off to look for her leaving Squall in an orphanage run by Edea (I think). Through a series of misadventures, Laguna defeats Adel and becomes president of Esthar. Edea and her husband Cid start training the kids to fight the sorceresses which involves teaching them to summon amnesia-inducing gods. Laguna’s too busy running a country to go fetch his son, but he sends Ellone to go mess with his GF-addled head.
Squall and Rinoa meet and unknowingly continue the love-affair initiated by their parents.
So that’s all pretty convoluted, but subtextually, there’s some fun stuff going on, particularly in the ending. For instance, Ultimicia’s grand plan is to compress time such that it is always the moment when she is most happy. (As an aside, how great is it that her last word is “and”?) For her, that’s the time when she rules the world. For the party, that’s high school. Laguna is the hero of the game because he does not try to hold onto the night in the hotel room with Julia. He moves on and has a full life. Likewise, the party, and the players, are encouraged to move on with their lives and not hold on to childhood. Be like Laguna, not Ultimecia. And the ending is a graduation party (not literally, but it feels like one).
I like Final Fantasy 8.
18 Likes
Ultimania spells it out on the first page with a hilarious character chart
“Edea -----kills-----> President Deling”
3 Likes