The Complete Story and Review of Final Fantasy VIII | Kim Justice

so here we are then obviously this game's been requested quite a lot that does tend to happen after you do a seven part series entirely on the game that preceded it people have wanted me to do final fantasy 8 ever since and so finally here we go i've decided to give it to you i should immediately say this off the bat don't expect the same sort of thing as ff7 final fantasy 7 is a game that i've played through multiple times for about 20 years it's my favorite game of all time there's not a lot i don't know about it to be honest final fantasy 8 on the other hand is the game that i only ever played up to i guess about halfway through disc one i stopped because my copy of the game got stolen and until now i've not touched it since this is going to be more of a learning experience then what you're seeing here is the first time i've played this game for nearly 20 years finishing what i've started still hopefully it should have some worth and that's not to say we won't be going into any detail at all if a fate has always had an interest in place in the final fantasy canon i don't think there's any other game in the franchise that's more decisive than this one it slowly seems to gather more fans over time and people willing to write in praise of the game but it is still definitely considered one of the lesser entries in the series around the start of the internet reviewing quiz its reputation was pretty freaking low one guy in particular spooney back in his glory days got a big part of his following through taking the game and bodying basically everything about it 2 hours and 40 minutes of ripping the fin apart pins are a little better for the game now but only just it just seems lesser compared to the games between it the hulk in behemoth that is seven and the much loved back to lowe's nine is this surprising i'm not sure final fantasy 8's position was always going to be difficult because the series had changed so much it started as squares last shot indeed their final game which is what it would have been if the first final fantasy hadn't been a big hit in japan even getting an american release but for five main games afterwards the series largely stayed in japan two of the games came out in america and were loved by the audience but it was a kind of niche one over here we didn't even see final fantasy at all until seven which changed everything that was the series introduction to the world really the ten plus million copies it sold to speak for themselves immediately proclaimed as one of gaming's greatest achievements jrpgs went from something that half the time didn't leave their home country to the brand new hotness in terms of sales it's still the most popular entry in the series and honestly i doubt that's going to change sequel then was put in an unenviable position one that i don't think any other game in the series has been at before since simply put i can think of very few games where the expectations were so high in anticipation of the game's release metal gear solid 2 grand theft auto 4 half-life 2 perhaps not many more in these cases it's impossible to see how they could have gotten any higher the previous game wasn't just a classic it was a sales monster in one way it's good for the expectations to be so high it certainly guarantees good sales and that happened hell it sold over eight and a half million and until ff13 it was the fastest selling entry in the series really that only changed because ff13 went multi-platform however it can be a bit troublesome for a series that is known for changing things up so much every final fantasy is set in its own universe the storylines are often totally different the way the games play vary a hell of a lot less thematic similarities sure but don't expect everything you loved about the previous game in the series to be in the next one if you're a veteran of the series you'll know this but a lot of us only had seven at the time which is why i think a fair few of us having experienced the world crisis in the last installment might have been disappointed by the much smaller stories sent in largely around two people neither of whom are exactly regarded amongst the most endearing protagonists not in the way that classic cloud was he and ff7's main guide the gunblade totem squall leonhart may both swin big swords but they are kind of different nor is there really a sephiroth equivalent or even an iris equivalent don't discount the importance of that if a ffa story isn't based on such shocking twists we know heartily squalls main squeezes kind of a t4 equivalent in the way that squall is sort of a cloud equivalent but both will suffer in a direct comparison nor is this game all that dystopian either it's got the sci-fi stuff but it's different more subtle the game's box is a clue to the differences in the old days there always used to be a drawing with the game's name that hinted at the content within ff7 features lumity the thing that in game is going to end the world ff8 features scrolling doing noah in an embrace the first sign before you even load the game that this is going to be a different experience so in respect of that i'm not going to try and compare ffa to ff7 that much unless there's clear similarities that are meant to hook you in as that may well lead to its downfall in respect of what the series tries to do with each installment i'm going to play the game on its own merits as i think that's best later on square would certainly try to attract people into new games more with clear markers towards the past here i think they were largely doing what they'd always done work on ff8 started while ff7 was still being localized into english after all also we're playing the pc version which isn't ideal but my new ps1 copy turned out to be crap which was nice it's not a bad port nowadays mind the graphics are all right and there's the roses and wine mod which brings the playstation music into the game and frankly should be considered essential if you're going to play ff8 on pc through steam unless that is you would prefer the game's soundtrack to be rendered in windows 98 tastic basic midi sound fonts anyway let's get on with to the game itself it all starts with a big old opening video a beach and the soothing sounds of liberi fatale we see pretty much all four of the main people there's squall and we know in the field there's adir a sorceress who unsurprisingly is the game's main antagonist but the main thing people remember is the big fight between squall and his rival cypher al-marzi both toting their respective gun blades this weapon being a particular source of hype now this is definitely a link between ff8 and ff7 the first game established that massive swords were a good fin and ff8 upsleanty with another massive sword only this time there's a gun attached to it holy i imagine that the simple word gunblade was enough to guarantee many a purchase it should be noted mind you that the gunblade is actually not a sword that fires bullets it is in fact a gun with a trigger on it that when pressed sends vibrations through the sword as if a bullet had been fired through it cut someone with this when it's vibrating and presumably that's gonna cause a lot more damage and go through easier so basically it's a vibro sword i know i was surprised to learn this too naturally some people have either attempted to recreate the weapon in real life or given their thoughts on how feasible said weapon is and most agree that even theoretically it's completely ridiculous i mean would you want to swing something that big around with a freaking crooked gun handle but this is a jrpg and such logic has no place here anyway it turns out that the epic battle between cipher and squall where the former tried to carve our hero's bloody head off was just training although squirrel will be left with a big old skull on his face both are part of the balaam garden academy and are training to be super elite soldiers or siege as the game calls them a private army basically ready for action at any time and so here's another similarity between ff8 and ff7 like the previous game you'll be spending a lot of your time in the opening in one big old area unlike midgar though baylem garden is more like a base of operations the world map or at least the first continent is open to you from the off but you'll be coming back here quite a bit in the opening largely the first part of the game deals with squirrel's training and the first characters you come across himself cipher quistus their tutor and zell who's another student generally finns move at a slower pace in ffa than they did in ff7 that's clear from the off of course ff7 isn't out there few rpgs start with you going straight on a bombing mission where you blow up a freaking reactor while ff8 does set up fins more traditionally still you should generally get used to less fins happening as far as the characters go well squall is a man of few words his main quote is usually an ellipsis and a whatever he completely lacks social skills as such people generally don't like him as in real people his introduction is totally different to cloud's total arrogance and bravado he's more intriguing usually dismissed as a typical whining bloody emo but is there something more there there are some strange touches early on christus his instructor who in typical jrpg style is a prodigy and fuss still a teenager herself openly flirts with him most of the time and swell doesn't rebuff it as much as he just doesn't get it the hints which are not subtle just pass him by he usually says more in his inner monologue than he does to other people an ugly passive character then especially for a main hero some fan theories and yes this should really not be taken as canon have posited the idea that squall has asperger's syndrome or is in some way autistic although there's no evidence whatsoever for anything like that unsurprisingly he doesn't get along well with cipher who is more of your typical cloud-style ace arrogant as hell good and he knows it weirdly also the head of the garden's disciplinary committee even if he has no issue with trying to take another student's head off in training cipher is one of the fun bits of characterization in ff8 as he does turn the cloud characterization on its head somewhat showing how easy it is for a hero to be an instead although obviously cipher does lack cloud's deep rooted identity issues the name could also be seen as an allusion to sephiroth hollow i think in many ways he's closer to ff7's protagonist than he is to its antagonist anywho finns are pretty free and easy from the first little bit of tutorial the fire cavern until you get to the first seed exam you're supposed to take your time and figure out the gameplay and this is where you come across the real big differences and the other odd things about the game's battle magic and character building systems the big differences well materia is gone in ff8 magic has been turned into some science called power magic and it can be drawn out of enemies as standard no little orbs of energy required as such magic acts like an item you have a supply of spells but when you use them all they're gone until you get more basic spells such as fire blizzard and cure can be found all over the shop but more advanced spells such as say fundaga or blizzaga or bolt free and ice free if you're used to ff7's less traditional namings are much harder to come by if you get limb then you shouldn't use them willy-nilly and so magic does not level up the way it did in ff7 there is no such thing as mp and ff8 you can cast as many instances of the spell as you want in a battle and the only thing that limits you is how much of that spell you have what levels up instead are your summons or what this game calls guardian forces or gfs after the first dungeon you'll already have three of them when you summon a gf in battle a second atb timer starts during which time the gf takes damage instead of you and once that timer ends a summon attack happens as normal like magic as long as the gf's hp isn't zero and they aren't knocked out you can use them as much as you want in a battle outside of battles the gf's health automatically regenerates as you move simple enough but that's not even half of what gf's do gf's level up and can be set to learn many abilities from new commands that you can use in battle to stat increases to most importantly of all the refinement ability which we'll get into shortly this all blends into the game's big mechanic junctioning you conjunction gf abilities and magic to your stats which is the real way that you create a strong character ff8 still has traditional leveling up allo ff7 but it's very different here in ffa most of the game's enemies and bosses level up with you and so traditional grinding for levels can make something of a wad for your own back you do need to level up in order to better access the really strong magics items and so on but because of this enemies will be very strong at the higher levels correct usage of junctioning is how you always stay ahead of them so yeah that is basically ffh system it is kind of varied and tough to get used to which i do think in many ways contributed to a few complaints about ffx gameplay you see in ffa there is this command called draw that you use to take magic spells away from monsters during battle and add them to your supply in the opening tutorials the game kind of conditions you into thinking that drawing is going to be really important and the main way that you get magic in the game this can go several ways one way in particular being that you could think well i don't want to run out of spells and the more of a spell i have the stronger a stat is when i junction the spell to it so i best get out in the field and draw 100 cures 100 fires 100 scans 100 blizzards needless to say drawing spells all the time in battle soon gets very tedious you get a random number between 0 and 9 each time and it makes everything feel like a grind this however is one what you actually need to focus on is leveling up those gf's and in particular getting them to learn their refinements refinements allow the gf's to draw magic from regular items and this is how you really increase your supply of magic for basic spells like cure and blizzard you refine em stone pieces which are everywhere into your magic supplies using the appropriate gf getting a fixed amount every time you should use drawing just to top up even on the odd occasion in battle or from the many draw points dotted around the world you can also use draw to get the odd gf sometimes you should never spend ages grinding out 100 spells using draw not only is it unfun it's thoroughly inefficient and drawing just to cast a spell totally pointless drawing is nothing compared to refining that's the mechanics anyway how does this work in practice well in short guardian forces totally break the game in fact they're just one of the many ways in which this game can be broken we'll get to others believe me if you know what you're doing and research just a little as i did you can break the game immediately here's the first big example a little beach just outside balaam garden where you can fight these little fishies the fastita colon f as they're known their kind of strawn and just attacking them isn't recommended but guardian forces they'll handle them no problem two summons and they're basically dead especially if you're using kezzakota as they're weak to lightning if the gf's get a bit weary well just move away from the beach for a bit one battle nets you six ability points which is how the gf's level and 6 ap is a lot especially now doing this you can easily learn the refinements for your three current gf's as well as the all-important card command which we'll get to it won't even take an hour and that's not all these little fish drop fish fins one of which can be refined into 20 water spells water is an incredibly powerful spell for the start of your game and junction in it to squirrel's attack really boosts his damage this should condition you into something else are you better off using any of those 100 water spells or just using them as a junction well they're much better as a junction you're going to be doing much more damage on the hole with your basic attack than with a water spill indeed using the spells will decrease the power of your attack magic is obviously essential in the junctioning system but has something used in combat not so much [Music] so how does all of this feel well the thing about ff8 system is that there's two extremes to it depending on how you play guandian's tedious and utterly broken there's not really a middle ground a little work at the start and you're basically going to be good for a long time hell you pretty much have to work to not break the game at some points if you'd like to break jrpgs over your knee and i kind of do well you sure come to the right place if you would actually like something of a challenge you're gonna have to purposefully control yourself a little but you should at least do some of these things so you don't have to always be bloody drawn breaking the game is kind of easy though i sort of miss how you really had to earn those breaks back in ff7 like when you figured out how to beat the midgar zolam the first time you encountered him and learned beta a whole disc before you were supposed to i've only scratched the surface of just how much the game can be broken so early on as we get into triple triad you'll see how the game can be broken even more we'll go back to actual story for now but for the time being let's just say that ff8 is very very easy ff7 was easy too but ff8 makes it look like a wizardry game by comparison so the seed exam firstly we get introduced to zeldingt picture a jrpg character modeled after i don't know mike dent from green day with a face tattoo that cell he's annoying i don't like him that's about it in terms of typical ff characters he's the hot head lots of flesh quick to get angry not even half as fun in lola's barities school is as usual a man of few words and then there's cipher who's going to be our captain on the mission as ever he's arrogant and looking for fun one thing i like though about the dialogue is the subtle hints that this is not cipher's first field exam in fact it's far from it you only need to do the exam once to become a member of seed so for all his arrogance and his presentation as the best cypher's never actually passed this exam ergo every other time he's been on it he flunked it it's a cool foreshadowing oh and we also meet balaam garden's headmaster his name is sid sid cramer in fact now in case you don't know almost every final fantasy game has one character called sit the most famous obviously been ask kicking venus gospel murder and drink your goddamn tea chain smoking swear hero sid highwind from ff7 the main series to date has featured two playable character sets 11 npc sits and one antagonist sid the only game to not feature a sid is the original nest title although remakes have wet cons stood into that too hironobu sakaguchi has said that there is no special meaning or direct reference behind sid but that he's generally supposed to be a wise character in the games sakaguchi compares him to yoda [Music] anyway we're off to lee dukedom whatever of dollar because troops from galbadia have invaded we'll explain more about these places as we go but dolit kind of has the feel of an old mainland european town which perhaps explains the dukedom bit not much of a mission to be honest beat up a bunch of grunts mainly after doing this for a bit seifer gets pissed off with being told to wait around and goes off towards a tower like the galbadians are one into thus breaking the mission orders entirely i think we can see why this isn't cypher's first rodeo he's a loose cannon mcgarnical at the top of the tower we run into two other series mainstays biggs and wedge these two appear in most ff games as somewhat incompetent comic relief and are a direct reference to luke skywalker's win men in star wars when he blows up the death star much like big sins star wars they often end up dead in this instance biggs successfully gets this abandoned communication tower going before we slam the hell out of both of them in the boss battle leyland also gets slammed by the real boss elverway who will draw our fourth gf siren from before slamming lap two one little similarity i dig is that much like bigs and wedge and ff7 their ff8 namesakes also come a cropper on top of a big tower mind you we will be seeing them again oh and i almost forgot we've been introduced to another playable character selfie tillman is young and clumsy you first meet her right in the beginning of the game when you can show her around balaam garden but she gets her proper introduction here through falling off a little cliff she's okay somewhat comparable to yuffie also i've noticed that selfie's weapons of choice are nunchakus that's very clear in the original power version of the game this was changed to something called a shinobu why well nunchucks are classed as a prohibited weapon or banned out white in several european countries but the reason they were often edited out of tv shows films or games in the uk is all down to this one guy james furman former secretary of the bbfc he once read an article in timeout magazine about the wide availability of finns like nunchucks and flying stars or shuriken and from lenon references to illegal weapons in media became something of a pet hater of his i mean unless they were guns obviously and so almost any sequence in a film or tv show involving nunchucks and the like was removed from anything classified in the uk cuts to martial arts films like enter the dragon michelangelo panthera thundercats lilon having a three-pointed staff instead of his nunchucks in soulblade they all suffered thanks to him james furman retired in 1999 and the walls on nunchucks relaxed immediately the version of the game that i'm playing on steam calls selfies nunchucks exactly what they are and i presume that was the case when this pc port was originally released in 2000 anyway as i often do i digress we now have 30 minutes to get back to the drop ship but on the way we're thwarted by this huge robot called xatm092 the way this is supposed to work is that you beat him just enough to stop him and then you try to evade him the rest of the way however as mentioned school is a beast and is even more of one now and so on the third time of asking i just blew the guy up i'll explain more when we get back to gameplay eventually we make it back with loads of time to spare and get back to balaam for the results and it's not good news for cipher as a result of disobeying a direct order not only will he not rejoin in seed he's going to be disciplined but schwarzel and selfie have all made the grade and are now officially part of balaam gardens mercenary group hooray for lim we get to the graduation party where squall contents himself with booze and blowing off cell which makes me like him until finally a girl cajoles him into a thoroughly awkward pardo do on the dance floor in case you haven't gotten it yet squall is not good around people outside he has a somehow even more awkward conversation with quistis one thing you might not be getting is all the long pauses between the text boxes just to emphasize how stilted everything's supposed to be it's like a bloody howled pen to play and i dig that a lot and my goodness it gets worse when christus invites school to the secret area inside the training center now we know that quistis likes squall a lot not only as a student but as a person too things haven't gone well for her either she's no longer an instructor and is now just a regular member of seat it's not spelt out but it's implied that she failed as an instructor due to being unable to control her group as in what cipher did christus pours her heart out to school who utterly blows her off acts like a total says all the things you shouldn't say again what's not spelt out is that a part of squirrel does want to be open to quistus's problems but something else is clearly rejecting it there's a barrier stopping him from getting close to people lots of people don't like squall and after this scene i got that this is still the getting to know phase and first impressions of squall are purposefully not good he's not presented as cool that's kind of cipher's job in fact he's actively dislikable and in keeping with the character that's the side we're seeing of him right now he's not exactly people's favorite ff protagonist and this is a big reason why but i don't think you're supposed to like squirrel right now which is kind of interesting perhaps things will change christus hasn't quite lost hope the girl who squall saw when he was resting up also makes an appearance and we save her from another monster who gets the overkill treatment for now though her and the girl we danced with are still basically a mystery and so finally squall gets to have a rest good thing too because the first seed mission starts tomorrow for now though you might have noticed just how ridiculous the damage i'm doing with squall is at the moment and obviously that doesn't want an explanation it's time to go back to breaking the game back when i was getting refinements for my gs i also learnt two other abilities card and card mod card is a very useful command it allows you to turn most enemies into a card once they've taken enough damage not only does this give you a card but it's also a way to end a battle without earning xp for your characters but you still win items and ap for your gf's this is very handy as it prevents over levelling and what do we use these cards for why we play triple triad after ff7 most people agree that having minigames was a good thing but rather than have a load of different ones or a place like gold saucer to do them in ff8 has triple triad a card game with lots of different walls that you can play with quite a lot of the game's npcs simply hit square and if they play you can challenge them the game works as follows you select six cards to play with from your deck in the top left corner there's four numbers these are the cards values on each side say my opponent plays this card you see that the value on the white is pretty low well if i play this card next to it on that side then i've won that card whoever's won the most cards once the three by three grid is filled wins the game and they get to take cards out of their hand they could take one card they could take a random one or they could take the whole hand depending on how the game is being played triple triad is a pretty freaking cool minigame something that you can constantly get into if even just to chill for a bit but of course it can be used to smash the game to a ridiculous degree at the start of the game you get a few crap cards from this guy assuming you talk to him traditionally from here you should play games lose some win some gradually build a better deck but sod that we can go around a little say back to the fire cavern and get some better ones by using the card command against bombs doing this a few times should give us something we can work with and then well yeah just play go around the balaam garden and play a lot specifically though you want to play against this guy or this guy or this guy get the where cards get five abyss worms ideally 15 if you're really going for a full beast party although that can take a while once you've built an okay deck load five abyss worms takes about an hour of triple triad which isn't a lot in the world of grinding what can you do with five abyss worms well the card mod ability that we also learned works like a refinement only with cards now lay can be changed into items too one of this worm card will find into one windmill one windmill then refines into 20 tornadoes tornado at this stage of the game is ludicrous junction 100 of lows onto squall's strength you're basically good until disc free you're a juggernaut it's even worse due to how squall works in battle and how limits work you see squall is special when you attack if you press r1 right when he's about to strike you will always do a critical hit they aren't as powerful as other characters luck based criticals but still if you learn the timing it's a critical every time also his hit ratio is 255 meaning that he never misses an attack ever this stat has logical reasons to be so high as it's due to squall's proficiency with his gunblade fellow gunblade wielder cipher shares this outrageous stat and then there's limits back in ff7 limit bars gradually raised as you took damage here if you have low hp and the crisis level as it's called is high then the limit option will pretty much always be open squall always does a multi-hit limit break lorenzo kukan where r1 button presses also apply and occasionally does a finishing move to go along with it at this stage of the game and for a long time after well this is vicious against almost anything it's about 5000 hp worth of damage only this t-rex or can stand up to that and if you're worried about keeping squall on such low hp well don't because during the first seed exam i got my fourth gf siren after doing the usual learning of refinements with her i was able to take 30 tents and refine them into 300 ku arcas this is what 100 karagas does when junctioned to school's hp you see you can keep spoilers around six to seven hundred hp more than enough right now and he'll be able to murder basically anything at a moment's notice for a long time this game holy hell is it broken what was all that about squall being a whiny emo again this guy will your ass up harder than the wu-tang clan and still i'm only scratching the surface with cards and refinements there are so many ways of going about this that became clear as i was researching the game you could go further like you could craft most of your party's ultimate weapons by the end of this one that's not a joke with that in place squall can do high five figure damage by the end of the first disc quistis can learn a limit spell that outright kills most enemies in the game instantly in fact i did that one because i had most of the cards i needed to mod for the items you need just through playing hell if you don't want to bother with grinding abyssworm cards for tornado you could always win quistus's card from one of her groupies then you can mod that into free cement for souls and refine lows into triples which have basically the same effect if you're worried about losing wear cards don't because you will get the opportunity to get them back later on there are so many possibilities and i couldn't possibly go through them all a lot of people who love ff8 do so for these reasons all of this is open to you right from the off there's no mundane grinding for levels the fun stuff like triple triad if you enjoy it is there immediately and you can get straight on with breaking the game and creating a beast and i do actually dig that i like breaking rpgs i like overkills i like going back to early game trash mobs and using knights of the round on them and so i like the way ffa plays ff8 system is actually quite remarkable to me allowing so much variation and cute little ways to smash the game that in the grand scheme of finns don't require a ludicrous hundreds of hours commitment to do and you can do it right from the beginning as it is i'm going to chill on game breaking for now as much as i dig it we are going to be good for a long time meaning that we can fully concentrate on story and so we are now seed based on our performance in the exam we now have a cedar rag too this can vary wildly depending on how you did if you talked to other people too much or evaded too many battles you get points knocked off being seed also means you start earning money you no longer earn gill in battles instead you're paid a wage as a seed member being a part of seed is another reason to not shy away from fights your level gradually goes down and it's only maintained through fighting monsters don't fight them and you lose rank which loses you money there are other ways you can lose rank by not maintaining the standards expected of a member so far i really like how gameplay and story intertwine in ffa there is a solid logical base for just about everything so far considering how radically different ff8 is to most every rpg that came before it i get the sense that the team really wanted the world to be consistent without just casually explaining away the usual rpg cliches and it works because finns are a lot more grounded here i mean seed is a weird thing even if dystopia isn't as obvious here as it is in ff7 it says a lot about ffh's world when there are these military schools who have their own mercenary groups trained from a young age that gets sent off to help the highest bidder for their services we aren't loyal to balaam or anything like that we're loyal to money they routinely send these teenagers off to pass exams in real life combat situations they keep monsters in the training center who will kill you something's not spoken what about all the people who don't make it where's all the bodies at in final fantasy 7 cloud started off as a grunt but that was before the game got started when you started you had a cause a moral imperative inevitate you don't even have that in final fantasy 8 being a grunt is your first aspiration and now you're part of seat meaning that you are a grunt it's not actually that special when you think about it so our first mission takes squall and company to a place called timber on the way there however the parties seemingly get a dose of knockout gas and have this weird dream where their galbadian soldiers squirrel suddenly takes the role of laguna lua a hard-drinking prototype soldier with his pal's kiwas and watts he's somewhat more talkative but no less awkward as evidenced when he tries to approach a girl playing piano in a bar still something about laguna attracts this girl to him and they end up in a hotel room together the gooner is well he seems to be a bunch of things that squall would like to be he's more comfortable around people he has that badass sort of image and even though he is awkward he can sure as hell talk a lot he has less inhibitions still squall doesn't think that much of him as evidenced by his classic line when he wakes up from the dream i dreamt that i was a geez squirrel's really got a touch for these cutting one-liners [Music] anywho anywho for this mission we're being paid by a resistance force in timber who are leading a charge against those damn galbadians we're getting the impression now that galbadia is the driving force in this world they're certainly the most militaristic one what with their antics in dalit and now this they took timber over a while back and apparently it wasn't pretty the resistance meanwhile is led by that girl squirrel danced with at the graduation turns out her name's renault squirrel finally has a name to the face they're both here now and this is after all their story another subtle ff8 touch by the way is that unlike most ff games school and rinoa are the only two characters you get the chance to rename everyone else zell selfie quistis and company stay that way so you know you could give one of them your name and the other one someone who's close to you if you're feeling very corny you can also give names to your guardian forces which emphasizes somewhat that they are sort of your pets and they tend to prefer being used by one of you over everybody else anyway the resistance is planned anyway the plan of the resistance is to take their train and use it to kidnap vinza dalin the president of galbadia by replacing his exclusive cart with a fake one and so it's mini game time you have to use codes to uncouple a cup without forting the guards below to your presence a typical ffin that does break the game up and stops it from just being go here and kill some monsters seed themselves are somewhat non-plussed about the whole thing as the resistance appears to be sort of incompetent remember school and company are mercenaries they don't have beliefs or they're not paid to have beliefs the plan itself works out fine but the resistance didn't count on the galbadians using a body double who turns out to be this really creepy undead monster who's probably the hardest enemy you've faced so far i should note that the first time i played the game this battle stopped me dead especially because i hadn't actually saved in hours everything from here on out is brand new to me of course we don't have much trouble this time around but i should have remembered that because the monster is undead i could have just chucked a phoenix down in his direction phoenix downs resurrect people usually but for undead monsters the reverse is true they instantly kill him it turns out that the president is on his way to timber so that he can make a television broadcast this is actually a big deal as there hasn't been a broadcast via radio waves for 17 years everything in ffa's world is online this was why galbady wanted to get that cons tower online back in dalet the resistance crouch down and try to think up a plan to thoughtless in minutes much to see to displeasure they all think they're very unprofessional and it gets worse they see the contracts that sidwell took for them which gives the resistance full control over the squad until timber is independent what the hell's going on thinking back it seems that the garden faculty weren't too pleased about the mission you were going on and holy hell if you didn't think that you were a grunt before you sure are now it doesn't help that the relationship between school and winoa is awkward as hell when you meet it's clear that we know was actually expecting cipher the dance didn't go that well after all she's surprised and somewhat disappointed to learn that cipher who she met afterwards and who was able to introduce her to sid personally is not actually a seed [Music] back in timber our plan is to bust the tv station and at least try to get some sort of message out the g army's all over the place and the trains aren't running but as we've seen the army is not exactly a problem for seed the resistance have a weird characterization they are somewhat capable but we know aside they do act as incompetent comic relief it is a little confusing but i guess that reflects seeds opinion of them anyway we find our way there it does seem weird that we struggle to actually find the station when it's clearly the biggest thing in the town but there you are there is another weird touch the radio signal hasn't been off as such but seems to have been broadcasting all these weird messages for a long time like some monsters trapped in there anyway the president's already there and as the plan changes again renault and squall finally have a right go at each other squirrel's pissed at the resistance as incompetence we know as annoyed at seeds passivity it's been building and this is literally their first mission together we know i might come across as a bit spoiled here why is she mad at seed when they've been brought here to help with this silly resistance but her reaction is kind of understandable seed have been brought along to help and they're not exactly helping much because squall is so passive that he doesn't deign to make any suggestions as to the plan rinoa is frustrated because these guys are clearly looking to her for orders despite openly being at best ambivalent about anything she says and also openly being a hell of a lot more trained and supposedly combat ready than she is you'd probably be pissed off with squall 2 in this situation there's a whole bunch more to say here but i'll keep it for now as it is the broadcast starting first we get the signal going and holy what are you doing here trump how the hell did ffa call him as a president in 1999 i mean just what okay i'm just plain this guy's just the announcer and any visual similarities to trump are purely coincidental but you do have to admit he looks a lot like him this is the real guy president vince dealing if anyone he looks a bit like bush senior he says that galbadia is the only nation that can bring peace to the world but there's a few matters that have to be solved with other nations first fortunately he has an ambassador who'll be doing the rounds and sorting out these trifling affairs which largely consists of you're not under control of galbadia and we're going to make you be under control of galbadia dealing just about manages to say that said ambassador is a sorceress before suddenly the broadcast is interrupted by cipher he's presumably bashed through everyone else to get here and his gunblade is now at dylan's throat christus is there too trying unsuccessfully to control cipher's savagery and now we get to go there too and when we get there things get worse quickly everyone's shouting christus says that cipher broke out of the disciplinary room aka the brig and zell being an idiot manages to spurt out that they're all members of seed and belong to garden good going dude and then finally the sorceress makes her appearance she plays on cipher's mental weak point by calling him a boy if you consider the way that he's carried himself you know that's the last thing cipher wants to be but seemingly she assumes control makes him let go of the prez and takes him off through the wall so yeah things have not gone well in the aftermath there's little to do except find our way out at a friendly house the team contemplate just how badly finns have gone on selfie wants to go home zell knows just how badly he's screwed up quistis has failed to control a student again rinoa who actually has by far the friendliest disposition towards cypher is worried about him and squall is utterly oblivious saying that he's most likely dead logically seen as he was captured in an attempt to most likely kill a president this is true but saying it kind of makes you totally suck as a leader winona hates this argues with squall again and calls him amini yeah amini look we'll break all this down shortly finally we're allowed to move on needless to say balaam garden isn't somewhere we can go right now as thanks to zenit could potentially be directly in galbadia's line of fire so instead we opt to go to the nearest garden right here in galbadia this could be thought of as dangerous but gardens are considered neutral zones in this world and thus one of them is probably the safest place to be right now and so that's where we're going [Music] right i think it's time for a summary of our characters and the general state of things in short everything and everyone is for some the introduction of winoa is where finns start to go off the whales if anything she's less popular than squall as a character so far i'm not quite feeling that but we're still in disc one so we'll see but what's the impression that you have so far basically everyone in this game is utterly useless and incompetent that's the one i have our seed team are rubbish they worked well in the controlled conditions of the field exam but here well they botched everything people are dead someone else got captured they revealed where they were from and have potentially caused an international incident aside from that it went great and squall well he's not a leader he has no idea what to say to people or how to direct them his passivity caused a lot of this just as much as zell's hot-headedness caused him to say lewand finn cipher is if anything even more of a hot-head linzell and christus couldn't do much to control that our headmaster sid didn't even bother to explain what they were doing to be honest selfie comes out of finn's the best if only because she's so laid back but even so it's not like she could change finns much either what's stressed is that this whole thing isn't something you were basically powerless to stop as is the case with similar situations in ff7 if seed had done better they could have stopped him but they didn't and it's their fault and the resistance well as much as seed clash with them for being amateurs because they're so much better obviously crouching down and trying to set plans in minutes and all that at least they tried still their main plan to capture the president was a duffer it's purposefully very logical and thought through but the point of it in writing and how it works out is that they can't see the forest for the trees and because of that they were very easily fooled it would have been better to concoct a riskier yet simpler plan especially with seed in tow selfies blow up with a rocket launcher suggestion may be kind of nuts but something along those lines would have probably done the job we're once and we're good at doing grunt fins like leaving soldiers cold with gun blades nunchakus and fists as established we are very bad at this fought out strategical type nonsense and then there's rinoa ooh boy again not a popular character if squall is mopey and whiny he's not so much that as utterly childish in his own way whenever comes across as very immature and spoiled words like meanie don't help god only knows what the writers were going for there surely jerk or even would have been better hell that one word is probably a big part of the reasons why people don't like quinoa it makes her sound 11 years old she does serve a function right now though she's the only person who stands up to school's coldness as mentioned previously squall is a total right now and that's not changed funnily enough her ability to actually think and act quickly something that everyone else just lacks may well have helped in the tv studio when chaos waned but she wasn't there why well because of the argument that she had with squall the whole thing wheelie is an omnishambles isn't it good grief from being to cup we up before we leave tim below i wish to point out a couple of things first for all of school's cultness selfie manages to get in quite possibly leave for lack of a better word cuntiest line in the whole game right here when talking about the lady who is risking her house to hide you from galbadian troops i mean holy talk about the unexpected savage why are we all such complete and selfie's the good one she's probably the only actually likable character in the whole game at present aside from the flashback people i stress again that i believe this dislikeability to be intentional but damn one other funny thing that happens is if you go into this old guy's house now you may have noticed another thing different about ff8 you don't really go into people's houses and root around for treasure chests the game conditions you away from them they aren't in dungeons so they're not likely to be in towns either there's a cupboard in this house that throws a lampshade on the whole fin first time you try and open the cupboard you're charged for it the man wonders what young folks are doing these days going around and opening cupboards two more times and you gradually get more hints including one that points to something definitely being in there on the fourth time you look closer and all of a sudden boom you've found it 500 gil it's the family savings and you've just taken them my god we are so heroic so so heroic that said i kind of wish that treasure chests hadn't been dropped if only because it gives you more impetus to check every house for them and while you're there you may as well hear the npc stories which often provide the character moments and details that you need to have a chance of grasping this game's plot so far so far there's only three people who've shown all that much in the way of heroism or competence in the whole game and they exist in a dream world we kind of wish we was rolling with lem right now don't fret though after we know and swell get into their tenth fight of the day while walking through a forest on route to galbadia garden because squall is once again being a complete mr logic to zell who's worried about balaam the hoodoo strikes again causing squalls selfie and quistis to feel asleep and so we're back with laguna kiwos and good old watts this time they want a mission in an excavation site for a lost civilization a detail that weirdly you only find in menus like i said you kind of need to look around a lot and talk to npcs all the time there's tons of world details and character details to find that gradually make the whole thing more sensible if you don't then you may end up feeling a bit lost laguna is kind of odd on this mission he seems less sure of himself and prone to various mishaps like dropping old keys out of his pocket or obsessing over hatches or getting more cramp in his legs it's like he's going soft and the interactions are very well written again it's worth going around every nook and cranny because otherwise you might miss these little character interactions completely and the other good thing about that is that you fight more enemies which means you get to hear the man with the machine gun more which is one of the best songs in the entire freaking game finally though we get ambushed on the edge of a cliff even though we smash these guys one of them gives kiosk and watts a big critical hit before dying yay for narrative battles i suppose it is a little annoying it kind of makes sense if you think of our squad as still part of the nondescript g-army group that we routinely beat the piss out of but then their stats are the same as ours so it doesn't really come off that way on the cliff side kiosks and watts appear to be close to death but laguna who seems to have gone a little bit hat stand sees a boat that will take them back to galbadia heroically he throws kiosks and watts over the cliff's edge and into the water before one heroically hesitating to go down himself slipping and bonking his head on the way down and so the flashback ends with our daring galbadian heroes in more than a little bit of peril we're back in the room and we're going to the albania garden fortunately it's right next to the forest galbadia's garden feels somewhat different to balaam although the makeup is similar less populated perhaps and also maybe a little hostile presumably word gets around about seeds exploits in gardens across the world and the fact that we royally screwed the pooch on our last mission is probably not going to endear us to the other folks in garden one thing to note also is that quistus and selfie like kiowas and watts are down to one hp and in desperate need of healing that's important it's a statement in gameplay like the dreams our group are having are closer to reality than they might appear it's also a hint that while our parallel heroes might be down they're not out christus the only other person who's been here before gets an audience with the headmaster and relays the results back to us firstly we're okay here and secondly balaam garden is okay what happened in timber is being treated as an independent action in other words cipher has been thrown under the bus more than that the trial has already happened and the sentence has been carried out so yeah cypher as far as our group know has been executed again the dynamics are odd all the garden people in the room have little but negative memories of the guy zell hated him but is pretty shocked at his death selfie never really knew him christus thought he was troubled and has no good memories of him and squall is kind of complex but deep in his own thoughts about it winoa is the only one who has positive memories including as has revealed a love affair last summer there's also the unsaid thought did cipher do that for renault probably not as evidenced by what quistis says he was mainly doing it for him because he didn't trust these damn rookies to do the job properly the body language here is fantastic by the way as it is through most of the game a lot of folks worried about ff8 switched from the cartoony models we were used to to actual properly proportioned people but it definitely worked for the best here seriously people's reactions make a lot of the scenes more than the text does school is very troubled at how people are talking about cipher suddenly he's in the past he's a memory this is not something that he's had to deal with really this whole scene where squall kinda has an outburst is seen as another whiny emo mimi me moment for him but really it's because squall is so used to shine away from problems until they just go away whether it's christus pulling her heart out to him or we know her calling out his coldness cypher being dead is not a problem that's going to go away and squall doesn't like it remember how immature and childish he actually is the whole thing's another reminder of how stunted these folks are emotionally meanwhile squirrel runs into two people i've not touched on fujin and wajin who we've seen before they're ciphers lackeys and they're passing on a message from balaam new orders they also ask about cipher and squall gives them the bad news they don't believe it mind you and quickly announce that they're off to galbadia to go look for cipher this could be seen as people processing grief in their own ways but well let's review cypher is a highly capable soldier who clearly ripped through the entire president's garage to get a blade at his throat this after breaking out of the brigade garden in the first place and the last time we saw him was when he went through a wall into an unknown place under control of a sorceress whom we know little about he is also a total hothead who awakes skulls and scorch the freaking earth at a moment's notice are we actually supposed to believe that cipher being who he is would have submitted to an execution just like that like even if you're not bothering with due process or anything for a trial and it's safe to say that galbadia wouldn't bother it's all a bit too fast and convenient isn't it anyway our new orders are communicated to us by galbadia's headmaster martine the introduction of this sorceress is very worrying indeed it hardly needs to be said that dealing's talk of bringing peace to the world was total and that he actually wishes to bring the entire world to heal under galbadia's wall the sorceress is key to that as she will intimidate the world's leaders into submission you've already seen how effortlessly she got to cifer after all it should be noted that sorceresses have caused their fair share of problems in this world's past and that garden despite being neutral is not exempt from lee's plans and so garden have taken the big step and given us the go-ahead to assassinate the sorceress we will do so with the help of a sniper who's going to be introduced to us right now meet irvine irvine caneers he apparently likes to get a wise out of people he's a dick and he decides to immediately make a party for himself with selfie under another a decision that i'm sure had nothing but strategy in mind in this playthrough school accepts irvine suggestion because he is of course an awful leader and because the result is again more fun character moments christus's interaction with squall here is probably one of the funniest moments in the whole game for now though well we're off to galbadia's capital dealing city we've seen part of it in the laguna flashbacks but now we'll be seeing it for real and yes despite our tremendous failure in the last mission we have now been entrusted with preventing the world from falling into galbadia's hands ffa story gets a lot of and i'm starting to get that more and more as we go but for now i do think that the story is more sensible and acceptable if you think of quite literally everyone as utterly incompetent for various reasons and that it's exploring what makes these people so bad at their jobs and helping to make the world so terrible whether it's immaturity uncontrollable emotions being corrupt or just well being an idiot so on to dealing it's a beautiful and very busy place and there's a fair amount to see there the design of the place is inspired by paris something that the big old gate should make obvious as it's based on the lark de triomphe we have to meet up with a guy named general carraway before we do though a somewhat annoying guard tells us that we need to pass a test this involves going to a place called the tomb of the unknown kin and finding the idea of a lost presumably dead student who went there it serves as something to break up holy exposition and get a bit of gameplay in but to be honest i want to see where the story goes so i only do what's required of me we'll go back there later anyway we give the guy a code and we meet up with the general seeing as he's clearly a high ranking figure in the galbadian government it's intriguing to know why he's in on this coup what does he gain that's interesting to me but instead we get another revelation this is actually with noah's house as well meaning that general caraway is renault's dad renault went off a while back to join with the resistance and they don't like each other there's not much further elucidation on this however i'm not a big fan of this revelation to be honest maybe because i was hoping that winona had more of an interest in motivation for being a part of the resistance and in the end though it all boils down to you dad this is not something that stands in lino's favor as a character [Music] anyway the plan is as follows one team will act as a distraction closing the gates on the source wizard's float as she passes under the ark just as the clock strikes eight at which point the sniper team will rise up on the top of a clock and have a clear shot at her we also find out that the sorcerer's name is a deer something that seems to strike a little memory bone in school again i can't help but thinking that the planet is very over what all his little details and so on so many things that can go on so many callaway running about the world and pretending he's the parade doesn't exactly help either again my mind wanders back to selfie and her suggestion to just blow up is it really a good idea to basically tell a sorceress that you're about to try and kill her before you do it hey-ho we're seed and we're obviously not here to question our orders naturally irvine and squall are going to make up the sniper team and quistis will lead selfie and zell in the causeway team but what if we know her well she's not seed callaway says that winona should really not accompany the seed on this mission and while they're still taking orders from her something that school reminds callaway of and probably the most active moment we've seen from him so far they're inclined to agree as we're all moving out winona comes in with her plan she's got this magical necklace you see if the sorceress can be convinced to put it on it'll nullify her powers we'll do this by um doing it somehow christus has had enough of winnower's and utterly roasts her before leaving her behind to wallow [Music] so the first step is getting everyone into position the causeway team are positioned at the gates while squall and irvine head to the parade and keep an eye on finns for now there's a pretty interesting dialogue sequence between them here as irvine muses on what they do and whether they should just kill anyone and never question orders it's another foreshadowing basically irvine is a dick and not a likeable character in the slightest but it is an interesting moment and squall never really answers him choosing to mull it over in his head as a leader he probably should have given him an answer still everyone's in position and then this happens quistis suddenly decides that she feels bad for bolique in renault just now in fact she feels so bad that as leader of the team she's going to go back to the house and apologize to her everyone says that we shouldn't leave their post but well they follow her anyway what do you think happens next back at the house caraway tries to explain to her noah but gets blown off he decides to try and lock her in by setting off a security system a time block that emits a loud beep until it sets being that we know has obviously lived here too she knows what that means and so she escapes somehow christus and company miss her as they're passing each other and they head straight into the room just as the door locks trapping them and the sound of that door shut in is also the sound of me suddenly losing a ton of enthusiasm that i had for this game look i get what the storyline is trying to do i get that these people are supposed to basically be incompetent teenagers and that because of this they screw up easily but this i mean it's just too much obviously the game's been building up to it but holy hell how stupid do you want to get how much more do you need i kind of got it already characters in games do do stupid things now and again and yeah they shouldn't be perfect they should be human but jesus christ this is one of the stupidest sequences i have ever seen in a video game and this is kind of the point where it stops being fun there's a great danger when you make a game like this that you reach that point and you would rather people just got their together and this is it the warning signs were there the father revelation the second overwatch plan but i do feel that this may be the point where final fantasy viii as a story kind of falls apart anyway we're now in control of winona who just has to climb some crates and stuff to get to the womb letter dear's getting ready in and what's her big plan to approach her dear and say that she has a gift for her hoping that she'll just put it on yet the stupidity doesn't stop we already pretty much know that a deer can read people's minds so needless to say we know it doesn't get far she's thrown back knocked out and possessed adeer goes off to do her speech with a dazed winner and president dealing by her side immediately she goes off script chide in the crowd for cheering the finn that they used to hate soul swisses who are once responsible for the world's troubles but all that's changed now and a deer is going to wall the world a concerned dealing tries to get his ambassador back on track and he's response is to give him the old t-1000 treatment dunkton president dealing ends up suffering the same fate as president xinhua thought he was going to be your main enemy nah the actual one just killed him a nice touch here is that all the while the crowd cheers even as a deer scolds them there's a slight implication that a deer already has limb under her spells too in the crowd spall and dervine can't help noticing that when noah's swaying around by her side as adir finishes her speech calls for a sacrifice and sets a couple of beasts after her irvine tries to get squall to move now but squirrel knows that they will have a better chance when the parade starts in a minute it seems to be another frustrating moment but i do actually think that it's one of the first signs of a bit of character improvement for the guy we know it does need to be saved but we need the opportunity squall is slowly becoming better at leadership back with the stupid idiots they have to find a way out of this room and do so by solving a simple puzzle this opens the secret door that leads to the sewers but enough of them the parade's starting and the sniper team finally has their chance as they rush past the parade we see that someone else is close to a deer's side it's cypher as we suspected he isn't dead at all he's just under idea's control and loving it no time to break this down now school and irvine takes the same path that we know it took obviously the thing to do is to take the hatch into the clock tower but first there's a small matter of saving winoa who's now come around the monsters in question get beaten easily although annoyingly i miss the guardian force that you can draw from them but now that we know it's safe we can carry on with our part of the mission there's a bit more good dialogue school explains to inaudible that cipher is alive but that he's with a deer and says that at some point he may well have to kill him but this isn't something he's actually happy about it's also at this point where squall and we now actually do start to warm up a little towards each other irvine meanwhile is kind of worrying about his job we leave them just as he says to school that he can't do it in the end like all the rest of them he may be good in training he may be a crack shot when dealing with targets but when it comes to killing people he's just another bloody kid the stupid idiots make their way through the sewers and finally get back to the gate just in time i haven't really stated but this is an awful part of the game while this is in when all the action is going on just breaks things up completely it's rubbish as the clock strikes eight and a deer's float goes through the gates low they do manage to close them the clock tower rises up and again we have a good moment for squall irvine still worries about taking the shot the implication of what it means to kill someone who is now for all intents and purposes ahead of state and squall for a change actually motivates him he takes on the leader role encouraging him and saying that he can do it even if he misses at last irvine lines up the shot takes a breath and fires for all his worries his aim is true the bullets headed right for the space between a deer's eyes however this plan was from the beginning adi is obviously aware that something's going on having gates shut on you will do that and blocks the bullet however it distracts the crowd and gives squally opportunity to rush down there and get closer first he confronts cipher who seems to relish his new role he thinks of himself as a knight an honorable person that is protecting his princess a deer this again is a consistent theme throughout the disc cipher is a distortion of a good guy taking the night roll is how he sees himself whereas squall is a mercenary a role that usually has negative connotations despite all this stupidity happening this is a good plot point and a well switch as it is the duel between squall and cipher doesn't last long two hits we are still kind of overpowered after that the party faces a deer if i'd drawn that gf i'd have a more amusing way to beat her that involves breaking her ai but while her high magic can smash the party a little it doesn't do much to squall we do win eventually or at least she stops the battle she's not beaten she just powers up some icicles and sends them flying in our direction one of them goes right through squall's chest and he collapses as renault watches in horror end of fmv end of the whole botched up plan to kill a sorceress and at last the end of disc one my word that was a lot to get through [Music] so where are we at with the game right now for the most part i enjoyed playing disc one a lot there's a lot of fun stuff to do with the gameplay and i really dig that side of the game i dig a lot of the breaking of traditional rpg gameplay conventions that ff8 does and i dig the lens that it goes to reflects that in story as well as gameplay i dig some of the neat twists and characterizations and i think that it's a freaking beautiful game seriously the cities the models all the little animations they're wonderful and i do get what they tried to do with the plot but at the end of the disc the whole stupid teenager's angle did become frustrating and i fear for the game if it continues on that way looking back through the script i see what's kinda happened as i was concentrating on gameplay i was loving it and when we moved on to story full-on well gradually things started to fall apart and most people that is pretty much everyone generally consider disc one to be the game's high point there's still three more to go we shall see what lies ahead i suppose but for now this video has already gone on way too long and we will have to end it here i didn't originally set out to do a multi-part series on final fantasy 8 but now well it turns out that i have quite a lot to say bye for now [Music] good lord why am i doing this again well it's the second video of final fantasy viii this time we're covering disc two all been good there'll be four videos one for each disc now the first video did go through a pretty big chunk of the gameplay happenings but there's still a fair bit more in that regard to go through as we go along with some analysis of our characters as hopefully they stop acting like stupid people all of the damn time but for now we go back to the plot we left our group in something of a sticky situation seeing as our main guy had an icicle through his chest and all that how's that gonna resolve itself well we don't know yet because we're starting disc two with laguna and the quiet life he plays around with a kid named alone who's the daughter of someone named wayne who nursed him back to health following his big old fall it's been two years since that happened they're in a place called wyn hill a very quiet town that's almost empty in fact laguna's main job is defending it from thoroughly average monsters the reason why the town is so barren is because most of the men are at war which is a sign that these laguna sequences aren't parallel they're flashbacks around this time well over 10 years back from the present there was a big war between galbadia who laguna and company belong to and a place called espar which we know little about we were attacked by their soldiers in the last flashback the nature of the world was changed by the wars although considering their status now we can clearly infer that galbadia won kiowas comes to visit laguna and we get some more revelations ward's now a janitor in a prison oh and the subject of julia comes up the girl who laguna wooed at the hotel way back and spent a night with apparently she always spoke of her true love who went to war and never came back laguna obviously and he knows him but she ended up marrying someone named general carraway thus giving us a link between the past and the present julia who we saw at the piano is rinoa's mother how this resolves itself isn't necessarily known but the breakup of this relationship seems to also be a part of the beef between winona and her dad we do a bit of patrolling and find that laguna's dreams of traveling the world and being a journalist are fading he actually wants to settle down everything is purposefully uneventful and he likes that wayne likes him a lot but worries that those dreams will take him away and finally laguna worries that one time he's going to wake up and all of this just won't be there he'll be somewhere else which is an obvious cue for this flashback to end easily one of the strongest written parts of the game so far it works out great beautifully done and a much needed moment of calm after the events at the end of disc one every character in this bit from laguna and kiosk to reign alone and even the residents of windhill none of whom care much for laguna are superbly fleshed out in an effortless way that you don't often get with jrpgs top marks of course in ffa you do have to take laura with the smooth and so it's followed by d district prison which is where our group is at actually the character item does continue to be good here it's just the level itself that's so hard but we'll get to that surprisingly when we come back we're with zel who's just waking up from the flashback not squirrel who isn't here we're all in jail we don't have our weapons we're probably going to be executed finns kind of look rubbish zell gets thoroughly abused by a warden and we know it gets taken away from god knows what finally we do get to see squill himself who is all alone in a different part of the prison miraculously his wounds completely healed the storyline reason is presumably that a deer healed him so he could be interrogated about seed who idea absolutely hates for some reason but this is also the big jump off point for one of the game's more popular fan theories the one which states that squall died when he took that spike to the chest and the rest of the game is his fever dream in the moments before exploration eh no point exploring that now we'll come back to it when there's more evidence to look at still death is important here the start of disc 2 is a knowing echo to how disc two of ff7 started with the big sense that something is missing the windhill flashback and starting out with zell does make you wonder for a second if the game has actually just killed off squall completely until you finally run into him again it's quite well done another intriguing setup with regards to the flashback is that obviously we know squall was in it to play in laguna as normal and zell was too but zell didn't play kiros he played ward who is separate from the others and working in a prison kiwas was played by irvine who we don't know the whereabouts of right now in fact it turns out that ward worked in this prison right here so zell knows quite a lot about the prison's layout and how it works how convenient and then while the group bemoan not having weapons zell suddenly remembers that actually he uses his fists to hit people all of this time and so he fools the guard into coming in and knocks him out in one hit again very convenient he gets the group's weapons back and we're about ready to begin the prison break first slow we beat the crap out of biggs and wedge again who were demoted after their encounter with us back in dollar and are now likely to be demoted once more poor guys before that low there's some revelations with squall and cipher who's doing a bit of good old-fashioned torture asking school what the purpose of seed is but school doesn't actually know anything beyond garden's role as a train in school and cedar a mercenary group he can't answer that not that cypher cares cipher still thinks of himself as the knight in shining armor even if romantic dream says different it's more of a mistranslation and he's a dear's protector not her lover he's still the classic good guy only he's an i didn't mention this previously but the two characters costumes and color coding make the world reversal very clear cipher's light coat is replete with christian insignia squall has his dark jackets and exes the small cipher rivalry is again where some of the game's strongest writing lies another point here is how personal things have become between them if you were going to logically choose someone to interrogate about seed first well you'd obviously choose questus she's been a member of seed longer than the others was even an instructor at one point and so surely knows more about seed than all the others do but cipher chooses squall because even though he's less likely to know the inner workings he wants to hurt him and because in cypher's eyes he is the good guy and squall is the villain anyway the big news is that a deer wants garden to be destroyed so she's ordered missiles to be launched at both balaam garden and trabia garden we haven't been to trabia but selfie was transferred from there and with that the breakout begins we go up and find squall who gets rescued by a bunch of mumbas and then we go down only to find we're underground and we go up again to bump into rinoa and irvine and yada yada miner plot things happen but we'll get to them i want to talk about how this is such an awful dungeon and what the hell happened to dungeons in this game seriously 90 of the prison is the same flaw copy pasted it's like the shinra hq staircase in ff7 only mandatory and with random encounters it's not the only time you get this either it's the same with the sewers with the tomb of the unknown kin did all the people who made really good dungeons before leave after ff7 cause lisa for the most part absolute shite even without encountering enemies this dungeon is a pain not just because of its repetition but how often you have to double back and yes there is a storyline reason it is a prison it's supposed to be disorienting like this but still it's very poor indeed even the boss is literally just a couple of enemies you meet throughout this section lewiston is strong but the gameplay very weak indeed to top it all off you can literally game over right at the end if you take squalor one way as the prison is moving i didn't but imagine not saving and having to do this again because you went left instead of right this shitty awful level couple of big plotfins that are missling the mumbas who rescued squall greet him with laguna laguna for some reason another link between the past and present also irvine wasn't captured with the others he evaded had his flashback and then was found by rinoa who was released from prison on the orders of general caraway anyway we're finally out of this and in the middle of the desert fortunately we have some jeeps but there is a crisis on the hands missiles are aimed at two gardens selfie in particular is very worried and just as we're getting things organized well the first set of missiles launched the ones aimed at trebia balaam is next we never had a shot at saving trabia and notably the group never fell into argument while the launch happened but maybe balaam can be saved squall being the leader breaks the party into two one led by himself to go to balaam and warn them and the other to go to the nearby missile base and stop or otherwise fought the launch to be led by selfie who as you might expect is in the mood to rip up getting in the missile base is easy enough we've got some uniforms and an army vehicle although ultimately i wasn't that stealthy there are a couple of ways you can play this bit that involve not really getting seen but being selfie i thought it best to start blasting as soon as possible because that's just what she does she hasn't had that much of the spotlight so far but selfie is like easily my favorite character in the game she's hilariously childish sometimes totally ill suited to a situation but still ends up actually getting done and she is so cheerful as well she gets all these funny little touches like back in the prison when irvine's having a big shootout with a seemingly endless amount of guards she's sitting there cross-legged like she's at a bloody picnic or whenever she bashes at electronics and somehow manages to get done all of her plans being something along the lines of blow everything up she's great and again i want to stress how brilliant all of these animations are that's one thing ffa time questionably has over ff7 in a big way ff7 had good stuff too but ffa damn they did well here especially on the ps1 anyway while we can't move the missiles away from balaam we can set their error ratio to the maximum meaning they are likely to miss and we also achieve the end goal of setting this place to self-destruct but we end up fighting this big old tank we win obviously but the hunk of metal blocks the way out just as the missiles launch and the base starts to blow up pins don't look good for selfies crew right now meanwhile squirrels lot have reached balaam which oddly is already in a state of panic nothing to do with the income in missiles mind the garden faculty are staging a coup and they want to find and kill sid this is all down to someone who we haven't met named norg the other boss of the garden the money man and so we end up fighting a lot of the faculty's monsters while trying to find sit we also run into fujin and wyjen again less still on cipher's side but apparently haven't found him yet and they're tasked with trying to get people the hell out of here in a somewhat outrageous double bluff seed have hit sid right in his office while pretending that they're hiding him somewhere else in garden in order to confuse the faculty and buy themselves some time according to sidler is one thing we can do there's something mysterious down in the basement that even he doesn't know about that could potentially save the garden going down there does feel like kind of a suicide mission but what the hell what else can we do and so yeah it's another mediocre dungeon this one based on an endless series of ladders at least we don't have to fight so much which is kind of odd but we'll get to that in a bit the dungeons by and large just aren't that great so far once again we're confronted with a panel of electronics that we stab at randomly and suddenly the garden goes flying you see balaam garden was built on top of a mobile shelter constructed by an ancient civilization known as the sentra we explored one of their ruins back in the second lagoona flashback and yeah centra i'm not sure if this was a conscious call back to ff7's ancient civilization etc or the ancients but there is no relation as far as i can tell anyway we set off the controls and all of a sudden this huge garden is moving it's now a ship and thanks to this plus the efforts of selfies group the missiles miss lairmark can end up not harming anyone of course the garden is now floating in the ocean and no one has the faintest clue about how you actually control the damn finn but at least we're not dead we'll just float aimlessly around the ocean until our supplies run out and then we'll starve to death it's all good after all this squirrel tries to get a bit of rest but is interrupted by rinoa who's new to the garden and kinda wants a tour we do that and once again in the library well we meet that girl the one who he saw in the infirmary right in the beginning and then saved in the training center strange she knows us but we don't know her and then we're called to meet with norg himself in the basement he's well he's not happy putting it mildly and he's also kind of inhuman there's a lot of exposition in the big nog chat he says that we were essentially played into taking on the mission to assassinate a deer by martine at galbaodia garden for whom our appearance there was somewhat convenient one of the more shocking reveals though that kind of comes out of nowhere isla dear is sid's wife huh well that might go some way to explaining why a deer hates seed so much seeing a seed is sid's baby ultimately low nog plans to deal with idea diplomatically by offering the heads of her would-be assassins on a plate that being us so we've gotta fight him needless to say this decision does not go well for norg and now he's thoroughly dead this clears up the civil war in the garden at least norgis or was a member of a tribe called leshumi who will presumably run into again at some point when we meet up with sid again the exposition continues sid knew full well who a dear was when he married her but finns went well at first and it's implied that she had a big hand in building garden and norgwell he was important in providing the money to get garden built but naturally all that money then had to be paid back which is the reason why seed basically became a mercenary group offering their services to the highest bidder this is why the garden faculty were so unhappy when we were all shipped off to serve with noah for a pittance which ultimately led to the situation we had when we returned to balaam it's all tons of dialogue although it does serve as something of a turning point as it is we encounter another ship we suspect galbadians at first but that's not likely these mysterious people come in peace and they're after someone a person named alone who is at the garden they want her because she is not safe there elona yep the same little girl from the laguna flashbacks who do you think she is now it's pretty easy to figure it out she's that mysterious girl who we keep bumping into and yes she is the reason why we keep having those flashbacks to laguna when squall meets her again she says that she wants to change the past considering all the things that have been laid on school already he is kind of unhappy about his role in this everyone's looking to him as a leader more and more and we know how uncomfortable he is with that but apparently he is alone's only hope as she goes with the other folks that's all we know and then to top it all off another attempt to just go and have a chilled walk and talk with renee is slaughtered by sid calling squall again and officially laying out the mission at hand the garden is now a mobile base with the sole purpose of defeating galbadia and the sorceress and squall is the leader of that everyone in garden is now under squall's command because squall obviously loves being the leader so much when it rains it pours and all that before anything else though our floating ship that we can't control finally crashes ashore at a place called fisherman's horizon miraculously the hulking great finn doesn't kill anybody although obviously we're going to have to go there and make our apologies well we'll get into fisherman's horizon soon but for now let's move on to some analysis one big thing to point out is that all these scenes can play out very differently depending on how you split the parties if you want the most dialogue and law then the best thing to do is take rinoa and quistis with you to bail them especially with noah as she's not exactly familiar with the place but everything plays out very differently if you don't take her there's a lot of branching paths in the game which is good for multiple playthroughs it's also worth noting how often you actually play as other people as it's quite different from ff7 where short of the odd battle and the parts where tifa and sid were in charge of the party you were basically always clowned by this stage of the game everyone has had a shot at lead in the group or lay flown solo with the exception of irvine and he'll get one too it works well especially if you think of ff8 as more of an ensemble than just a story that's based on one or two people although we'll see how that holds up now a big theme throughout this disc so far has been not just the continuing transition of squall from passive grunt to something of a leader but the transformation of seed itself and what its goals are throughout disc one we were always under contract for all of our jobs and tasks that didn't change until disc two when the party splits into two and goes to the missile base and balaam that's the first time we've done something that's not under a contract we did it because it's important to us what we have to do the game doesn't make a hubbub about it but it's the first time that we've done something for an actual cause the old ways of seedling naturally change with the death of norg but yeah things are at least for now a little more conventional good against steven and all that even if we still actually don't know anything about adio aside from her being sid's wife the changes in school are also carried off pretty well while he's still not comfortable with being a leader you notice the differences in conversations and how he talks to people unless he's thinking about it too much it's like he becomes more active without realizing it or discussions that would probably end up disintegrating into an argument do not going back to the split mission one touch i like is that it would be obvious to have everybody bickering just as the missiles are launched towards trebia that had happened in disc one for sure but it doesn't they're trying to get organized but they just never had the time to stop what happened there it's a sign of the group's grown cohesiveness and maturity we're about halfway through disc two already and the plot is still moving along fine story-wise the game has actually recovered quite well from the unending stupidity that happened at the end of disc one what hasn't recovered mind is the gameplay that's gone considerably downhill i already mentioned the dungeons so far they are very lackluster indeed the best one we've had so far is still probably the first seed exam if that even counts traditional ones are just copy-pasted rubbish and that's quite disappointing as far as the game breaking goes that's still sort of a thing but it's so straightforward that by this stage there's not much you really have to do soon everybody's got tons of hp and can do tons of damage and you only need three setups like that which you then just switch around your party depending on who you're controlling that's another big problem every character in ff8 largely starts out as a blank slate with only minor differences in stats so you can build whatever party you want but in the end they're all interchangeable so it doesn't matter all that much who you pick characters aren't important just setups the only other thing that really changes fins len is the limits all of which are indeed very different depending on the character you're using christus has her enemy skills rinoa uses her dog selfie gets to cast spells at random irvine uses ammunition that you find in the world zell hits the enemy with the help of fighting game style combos that's all different and good but it's not really enough and really by this stage you might not even be getting into fights anyway diablos the gf that you find in a lamp that sid gives you has two fully broken fins that you can learn ink half and after that ink none the first halves the random encounter weight and the second takes it out completely they're not difficult to learn and diablos is not a difficult fight if you've played the way i have once you've learned inc none well that's it as long as you have it on the only enemies you'll ever fight are bosses and other fixed encounters and i find that well baffling why include it it's almost an admission of how bad the dungeons are here useless and you can just run through them as quickly as possible without the added ordeal of fighting or that the system in the game is just in general quite broken you could say that well you won't gain levels anymore but gaining levels is on the whole bad because enemies level up with you there is literally no practical reason not to use this ability once you've learned it the only reason that i will ever take it off is to at least get the flavour of places we go to by seeing the battle scenes monsters and whatnot but honestly the battle side of gameplay by this point is just about over the only thing that's really there from now is to see just how much more you can break the fin and you know there is a limit to how much i want to spend playing cards and stuff like that it's not all bad mind we do have the story and all the character analysis and plot and all that let's just get into that fisherman's horizon is quite a cool place a man-built structure that functions as an island populated entirely by peace-loving mechanics the mechanics part is good of all the places we could have crashed into in the world it is very convenient that we crash into the place filled with people who can probably fix our up and get us moving mind you our reputation does precede us and we are unpopular for more reasons than cosmetic damages we are mercenaries and our presence immediately brings fear to these peaceful folks that we're gonna screw up somehow and bring some over when the first twin out of the mayor's mouth is when are you folks gonna leave that's not really a sign that you're welcome as it is however galbadian soldiers do come to the horizon interestingly though they're not after seat thereafter alone the girl who's making a stream of lagoona in fact we're almost an afterthought the galbadians act like arseholes say they're just gonna burn this place to the ground anyway even though the fishermen obviously know nothing and naturally we intervene and beat them off the galbadians also carry a beaten up piece of vessel known as the ironclad with them which as it turns out was also housed in a disguised selfie irvine and questus meaning that the full band is back together away school is legitimately thoroughly pleased to see that they made it back something that ronera comments on but because she's surprised that squall was concerned but because it's school once again shown that despite what he thinks he actually can take the lead as it is we're not done here there's plenty to do in fisherman's horizon while we're waiting for the ship to be fixed including one of the single us holiest moments in the game maya dope tried to deal with the galbadian soldiers the way he knew best through discussion and reasoning and it failed school can take this opportunity to condescendingly explain to him about how what he does is very necessary and that we should be able to look past each other's differences and all that like his brad paisley it's brilliantly prickish the guy nearly had his whole town raised to the ground but whatever it's an important lesson that he must learn when squall beats the absolute piss out of a g soldier with a complete overkill renzo kukan it means something ah squall you are such an needless to say mayor dobe doesn't have anything to say in response although i don't think it's because he's thinking about him i should stress that the way the scene plays out does make this reading feel like the correct one it's another bit of fun right and exploring one of square's many faults his complete failure to connect with people and not say things that may be logically correct but are emotionally [Music] aside from that fisherman's horizon is a big place with lots of little things to explore it kind of sums up the game's commitment to local flavour and extra dialogue virtually every waypoint in the fisherman's horizon quest comes with an entirely new set of lines for the town's npcs and this isn't even a long quest there's a whole storyline with the fisherkin who you see in the fmv when garden crashes into town like you'll easily miss if you don't go down a very hard to spot ladder right in the beginning you can also find martine here the ex-headmaster of galbadia garden he's actually been kicked out of there and is now contemplating early retirement at horizon and here's a big example there's this bit where you're in control of irvine only while he judges what musical instrument members of our party should play he's only useful in this one screen and yet at this time you can take irvine around the town and again there'll be an entirely new set of lines dealing with irvine walking around the place solo it's crazy attention to detail and you can easily miss tons of it as i did final fantasy 8 is maddeningly and conducive to video capture because of this anyway yeah musical instruments the rest of the group are trying to do something nice while we're waiting for things to happen partly to try and cheer scroll up a little partly to kind of work at getting school and doing noah together and also kind of for selfie as well considering that her home garden is very likely in ruins she's kind of down in the dumps irvine doesn't care much about that low and caesars has an opportunity to make a mac move on her because he fancies her i haven't mentioned it much but this is as good a point as any to stress that i do not like irvine and he is easily my least favorite character in the entire game hell i think i like general caraway's puzzle loving god more than i like irvine anyway this is another little puzzle where you get a set of instruments that go together for a fast piece and another that's best for a slow piece and there's multiple outcomes for the scene depending on what you choose the one that's good is very specific indeed it's a mixture of the two and it's really hard to get i didn't manage it and so the concert kind of goes a bit pear-shaped renault and squall end up having another argument because scroll is still struggling to make that big connection something deep within is stopping it we get little clues to it now it's obviously something connected to childhood and little flashbacks while squall is sleeping points to a huge loss in his childhood presumably of a sister alone wants to change the past completely in a literal way while school is carrying the burden and struggling to make that mental change [Music] and so we're done with fisherman's horizon not only have the mechanics fixed the boat up but they've shown us how to control it we can move again now this is actually a big moment it's the first time after a long stretch that we've really been able to relax or backtrack to old places we want to go to really the storyline hasn't stopped moving forward since we first went to timber we've been on a one-way path ever since through dealing city the prison all the flashbacks back to balaam garden and now to horizon that's a long freaking time now that the garden can be moved we can pretty much go anywhere it can traverse the ocean but it can also hover over ground as long as there's a nice low area like a beach that it can climb onto it's like a considerably better tiny bronco and so while it is suggested that we should go back to the town of balaam and see what's happening there we're obviously not going to do that straight away there's some things we ought to do it wouldn't be a final fantasy game without side quests after all first thing i do is clear up that tomb of the unknown king quest which kind of sums up the game's awful dungeon so far it's amazed where every screen is virtually identical and the maze part is entirely obviated because you can literally go right at every chance you get solving the little puzzles along the way and then once you find yourself back out of the tomb go back in and go straight to the center for the final room the reward for this is another gf brothers which is pretty much the last one i need to ensure that all three of my setups involve high hp high strength and hitting everything in the game like a freaking dump truck we'll still be getting more mind you speaking of gfs there is a couple of classic series ones we can get right now by going south to a place called the central ruins it's a big old tower dungeon that's mostly based around a puzzle and hey it's not all copy pasted it looks quite nice in fact shame it's optional anyway the centro ruins are mainly home to odin as soon as you get there you have 20 minutes to find him and defeat him the puzzle itself is simple enough and to be honest there's lots of time to fight odin if you've never had a fight against him in any ff game and then it pretty much goes like this you have a set time to beat him during which he will do nothing but he has very high defense if you don't beat him in the time he absolutely murders you with zantetsuken or iron cutting sword no matter what defenses you have this is instant death of course it's kind of easy for us to beat him in that time but odin is one of the few monsters from which you can draw triple magic which is one of the best junctions in the game naturally we do that for a bit too before beating him odin works differently to other gf's he doesn't learn any skills instead once you have him there's a chance that he'll interrupt a battle and just flat out kill your opponents with zantetsuken we won't see it much seeing as he doesn't do it against bosses but it's still cool to have a norse god on your side central ruins is kind of a home to ff's passive monsters the other gf you can win here is tonberry ah tom bowie my favorite enemy in the whole final fantasy series he's cute he wears a hoodie and his main attack is to slowly walk up to you and once he gets up close he stabs you to death lemmy would love this little guy who can come here and stop you bomb tombows also have another attack a counter called everyone's grudge which damages characters based on how many monsters they've killed in terms of having personally delivered the finishing blow used on renault here it's somewhat negligible she's not delivered many final blows when it's used on squall however it's a one-hit knockout i freaking love tom berries anyway this is kind of dull you just fight a random amount of tombowies ideally one shot in them with limit breaks before they can use the grudge i should note that in one of these fights i managed to hit the 999 mark with a critical hit on blasting zone the most powerful of squall's finishers that i have unfortunately i wasn't recording at the time which is a pisser after about 20 or so ton berries you fight the tombowykin he's bigger and actually aggressive although still not a difficult fight beat him and you get the tombow egf it's quite a tedious quest and the gf isn't even all that good in the end but i had to do it just because it's tombow to be honest with you onwards to more plot related areas at this stage you might want to pop over to galbadia continent and pay a quick visit to windhill the place we saw in laguna's last flashback maybe there'll be some clues there the monsters aren't there anymore as it goes but nor is laguna and nor is wayne the town seems a little friendlier towards outsiders than it was in laguna's day although it is still a case of being tolerated for a bit of asking around we don't actually find out a lot about what happened to laguna but we do find out that wayne is no longer with us having passed away a few years ago we don't know why though is that why we're having the dreams i guess we'll find out more in a later flashback other than that you can of course revisit all the other areas you can go and see how dolly's doing how timber's doing even head straight into dealing city without a care there's bits of new dialogue to be had all over and if you're interested in that then it's certainly worth doing along with various little side quests and what have you if you want to continue with plutlow you've got to go to baylem town as much as i could have you watch me screw around with bones dogs and cards for another 15 minutes we kind of should do that one last thing to note is that if you go to where galbadia garden was you'll find a hole in the ground there too that was obviously built on a similar shelter to our one and i guess that they figured out the sequel if you put two and two together and had martine being kicked out of there then it's quite likely that galbadia's garden is under the control of a deer by now as we reach balaam you might well notice that galbadia garden is here too thus bearing out what i just said the town's under galbadian control once again they're looking for a loan and threatening the town with violence even though it is pretty clear that no one has the faintest idea of what's going on we black like we have info to get in and try to do the same to get to the commander but we need to pay our respects to the captain first it's another rather humdrum puzzle bit with zealously obvious mandatory inclusion in the party this is his hometown after all on speaking with his ma we get a clue to the commander's identity she has gray hair and is wearing an eye patch meaning it's fujin and presumably she and wyjen obviously the captain managed to find scifi and get themselves a position you find wyjin after finding out that he's cooked fish in the dink's kitchen then you give that scent to a dog who chases him out and you end up fighting them and blah blah blah the fujin waijin fight can actually be tricky if you don't have your junctions set up properly but it's not much of a big deal [Music] the scene that plays out is kind of interesting fujin and wajin aren't interested at all in what adia is doing and let's stick in with cipher because they're basically his only friends it's all about loyalty which gives squill some thought loyalty is the one big thing that he's never believed in he doesn't think or even understands the concept of people just sticking with each other through thick and thin although it's gradually starting to make more sense one of those things that's not spelled out much like school not really caring about what happens to balaam really in the end we let them all go with the proviso that the next time we all meet that probably won't happen we're kind of at a loose end but selfie's recovered from her rest and there's one place that she wants to go we have to go north to trevia garden or whatever's left of it selfie has still been her usual cheerful self although it's clearly taken a bit of effort right now we've not really been north at all yet and there's a bunch of stuff we can see here if we want such as the sumi village where norg came from we'll get there but for now we're probably all curious as to what happened in the other garden even from the world map things don't look good and don't get in there it's plain to see that the garden was directly hit by those missiles trebia has what remains of a halo on it too meaning that it's possible that if anyone knew about it the garden could have flown away from danger selfie remains cheerful while exploring the garden's ruins there's still a lot of people around trying to make the best of the situation and selfie's excited to see her friends there's various little moments where selfie is encouraging people to keep strong and cheerful setting an example and then there's the graveyard where treby has been burying the dead lots of selfies friends are here too and she talks to them which is uh yeah kind of upsetting eventually though we all meet up in the basketball court at first finn's progress as you would expect selfie wants to be with us when we fight the sorceress because she wants her revenge that's fine enough and it certainly doesn't lead you to expect what comes next this is the game's live stream moment tons of plot revelation is inbound and it's going to come thick and fast but i'll try to stick with it and break it down as much as i can rinoa is the first to speak out and wonders why we actually have to fight or whatever if that's the only way this is more to do with a difference she seems to feel from the rest of the group that when they all fight it's as if they're possessed by something whereas she's more wondering if everything's going to be okay this little bit is sort of like the camera zooming out because we always get squalls in a monologue we tend to think of him as the outsider in a way because he concentrates on the little details that make him different from the others this isn't true renault is and always has been the outsider because she didn't have the upbringing of anyone else in the group everyone else grew up in garden garden takes in and teaches children from a very young age garden is all most of them have known except winona and although rinoa has fought she's experienced more than just fighting or learning how to fight renault's question isn't one the group can answer fighting just comes naturally to us for the group there is nothing before or after garden and seed except for one of us and funnily enough it's the one who's kinda just been tagging along this whole time seemingly only caring about guns and women and generally being rather none of the group remember anything from childhood other lingard but they weren't born there and yet they've forgotten how they got there all of them except for irvine [Music] there's a reason why irvine has in particular been very strongly after selfie and it's because of his memories irvine and selfie when they were very young were in the same orphanage once the connection between irvine and selfie is established memories start to jog quistis was there too andersell and squall you might wonder about gizelle being there seen as we've seemingly met his ma but the answer is of course that he was adopted all of them are close to the same age and they were all in the same place they're all orphans we do not know why they are orphans or whether it's never spelt out but all of our characters were born during a long and bloody war between galbadia and esther the answer probably lies low in wars leave a lot of orphans behind we see scenes from the orphanage as the group remembers there's another little tidbit when we see leon squall he's talking about sis again and how much he misses her sis is not so much connected to the reason why squirrels at the orphanage to begin with she was someone at the orphanage squall constantly shouts to the unseen matron asking when sis is going to come back and so forth also it turns out that cipher was at the orphanage and we see that in all this time the characters and the relationships between them haven't changed a lot zeal and cipher for example have always absolutely hated each other cypher used to pick on him all the time but if you ask them both they probably wouldn't be able to tell you why they dislike each other so much it's an example of their childhoods being rather stunted and broken whenever squall and cipher or cipher and zell see each other something just takes over from within it's why selfie's always naturally cheerful or why christus is more indecisive and was so flirty with squall in the beginning she thought she was in love at one point or that there was some deep connection between them they can't put their finger on it but it all comes from the orphanage the big question of course is why exactly does irvine of all people remember all this why does no one else remember and why didn't he tell anyone for irvine the difference between him and everyone else is clear guardian forces gfs are something we've only really discussed in gameplay terms up to this point but as with most anything in ff there is a big attempt to justify lemon's story and indeed it turns out that they play a pretty big wall irvine you see hadn't ever used a gf until he met us they didn't use them at galbadia garden selfie confesses that while they don't use them at trabia she did find one during a mission and used it for quite a while but the balaam students well they've been using them virtually non-stop balaam and seed are indeed the only forces in the world who use guardian forces as we've seen from gameplay guardian forces heavily augment a person's ability for us they've completely broken the game if you took those guardian forces away the now party wouldn't be much stronger than the average g soldier they latch on to people's minds essentially building a different more capable person it turns out however that they do have something of a negative effect on memories while the question of drop in gf's does come up during this chat we all know that's impossible we are utterly dependent on them but of course there is a morality issue here seed are meant to be more than just mercenaries guardian forces turn them into super soldiers artificially from a young age this should be one of those big things to really clue you in that sid kramer the headmaster at balaam and a fervent advocate of gf's is not exactly as nice or as bumbling a guy as he might initially appear as for irvine well it became awkward once he realized that we weren't clearly suppressing our memories of each other but instead none of us actually remembered a damn finn it's been building up to now up next on the revelation menu the identity of sis we know she's someone who was at the orphanage meaning she's roughly our age she stopped being less so perhaps a little older and she is of course inextricably linked with our group with squall in particular there's two people it can be really and if it were noah then i'd have probably turned the game off len and lair but of course it's alone we don't know about laguna but we know that wayne has been dead for years perhaps that explains why alone's been able to get into our heads in such a way also not being particularly combat oriented she isn't bound by gfciva in the couple of times that scroll and alone have met elon remembered him clearly what isn't yet explained is why adir wants her so badly and so we come to the final revelation that all of this has been building up to all these people went to an orphanage they all went to garden most of them to a garden built up by sid kramer with his wife adir and so back in the orphanage adir cramer was the matron she is a mother figure to them all something very important that they had all forgotten she wasn't a bully or possessive or anything either just a regular matron something clearly happened although none of us know what that is but it explains a few things going back to when we very first saw her when she took control of cipher was that really mind control or was it simply idea knowing exactly how she could control him taking him straight back to his childhood there's now a big family angle in cypher's protection of a deer too and his role as the knight when we fought a deer she spoke to us and dismissed us like we were naughty children and when she basically killed swole with an icicle to the chest she revived him to the point where the wound never actually existed a big part of that was undoubtedly motherly instinct and so not only do we all have a big childhood link to each other that's naturally brought us together but we have that link to our enemies and undoubtedly it is because of our enemies that we are together now it's important that we don't forget it now that the revelations are over and we are fully aware of the reason why we have to fight we know it feels even more likely odd one out and yet she kind of isn't in a way much like ff7 all of this squad are now fully broken in some way they all had stunted incomplete childhoods half of which they can't even remember renault is perhaps now something to aspire to a representation of a possible future not just for squall but for the whole of the group a way that they can be whole again this isn't necessarily something that makes her better as a character but it is a justification a reason for her to keep coming along with us and with that the revelations are done we will now travel to adir's house where perhaps we can find out more on just what happened to change lemaitre when we knew a deer cramer into sourceless idea next time anyway after all those plot points it is time to break it all down generally this is the big point where the themes of final fantasy 8 assert themselves surprisingly late on virtually in the middle of the game in fact orphaned children war babies the lack of a proper childhood and how it affects people makes them insular and untrusting trying to make people into something they aren't the effects that loss can have some of these themes are shared with ff7 although approached from a different angle ff7 explored the short-term effects of loss while ff8 deals more with the long-term and how people cope in a more abstract way not necessarily just lost through death there's subtle licks of it everywhere even down to how people reacted in the short time that cipher was thought to be dead when squall tried to reject the thought that in the end people just become a distant memory one thing that surprises people about air fft is that unlike a lot of ff games that are usually quite collaborative efforts the scenario of f8 was largely written by kazushige nojima alone the somewhat fragmented nature of the game certainly makes that surprising at times the plot can seem ridiculous school suddenly finding himself in such a high position and leading the garden is often one of the big negatives that people point out just for example but there is often justification squirrel was the only real choice for that job in all honesty who else could have done it but we'll get to that for now while we're not quite at the end of disc 2 it is perhaps a good idea to stop this video here and let all of these revelations sit when we return it will be time for our leader to go to war bye for now okay we're back when we left the group we just had the big plot reveal moment to briefly sum up everybody in the group except winona and including cipher were together as children in an orphanage adeer was our matron and alone was also there as cis although we didn't see her most of the party had forgotten this because of the guardian forces that we've been using since childhood in order to make ourselves into super soldiers but one person hadn't irvine and it's been bothering him for so long until now when finally he decided to tell us that's the cliff notes version the scene is one of the game's most famous or some would perhaps say infamous scenes unlike the livestream moment in ff7 it's not one that's popular i broke it down and analyzed it somewhat while it was happening but for the sake of moving it along i purposefully avoided problems until now because you know there are a few now i don't hate the scene like a lot of people do in the universe and the story that the game is trying to tell i think a lot of it makes sense not all but a lot one complaint against it is that in the end a lot of the revelations don't really matter much in that it doesn't particularly matter that alone was at the orphanage and at the end of the day despite knowing that idea is the matron we're still gonna fight her even kill her and that's perhaps true it's certainly valid to ask what's actually changed as a result of these revelations and truthfully not much has but then they do add very important backgrounds and motivation especially seeing as we knew nothing of a deer really if you think about it all we knew was that she was sid's wife and that doesn't explain why she's such a big bad villain what we know now doesn't either but it at least increases the level of curiosity [Music] the two big problems that do hurt the scene are very identifiable the whole guardian forces explanation and the role of irvine himself seriously why didn't he ever say anything let's go for the guardian forces first and how they eat your brain i think that for a lot of people playing this the negative effects of gfs can come completely out of the blue here if this is the first time you've heard about it in the game then it comes as totally out of left field whether you've heard about it depends on how much time you've spent chatting to people the issue of gfs causing brain damage does come up a couple of times but if you've not been talking to anyone you may not know that if you have there's still issues although it can at least illuminate some aspects of the plot such as how you should actually feel about sid cramer the man who raises these child soldiers and augments their brains again and this is a question i posed when we were first looking at seed what about all the people that don't make it sid is not a nice man in fact sid is a total scumbag it almost makes more sense for him to be the true villain of ff as opposed to a deer ff8 as we know strives for subtlety there is so much that you miss if you don't talk to people but this it's a bit too far even just one line that you had to see could have been enough you could have even done it in christus class right at the beginning and then it's well something that everyone can recall so you know that probably should have been there the other issue is that while you can justify the gf's being damaging to the folks who grew up in balaam when selfie says that oh she picked one up while she is in trabia that is a reach a big one way too much of one it's far too convenient and it cheapens the whole thing the gfin is kind of a consequence of ffa having to justify everything that happens in game play in story and when you're spinning that level of you wonder if it would be easier for everyone to have just you know forgotten back in the orphanage our characters are all around three to four years old most people don't remember or have very faint memories from that age not all mind some people remember a little more would it have been better for irvine to be that way or not to remember everything as he seems to but for him to just remember a little more enough to collectively jog everyone else's memory so that gradually lay piece everything together without having the whole gf fin i reckon that might have been better at least then you don't have to resort to such silly conveniences the gfin does more bad than good to be honest it introduces some bad contrivances and cheapens a few relationships zell and cipher for example doesn't matter as much when there's this big hand wavy reason as to why they don't like each other [Music] irvine of course is another problem perhaps the biggest one there's just no valid reason for him to bring up virtually nothing about the shared childhood he knows everything about until now again you could argue that there are very subtle hints that the way he acts with selfie is over familiar especially right after they've met but even there he's kind of equally over familiar with renault who has nothing to do with any of this so it doesn't register again would it have hurt to have just a flicker of recognition irvine as a character in our party is kind of on shaky ground as it is it's just too convenient that he ends up getting picked to join our party and even more so that he was then connected to the party the whole time but that's not the worst thing let's go back to dealing city the assassination attempt irvine and squall in the crowd with a deer right there for the world to see swall doesn't recognize her but irvine obviously does or should there needs to be a flicker of recognition for irvine that she is matron and there isn't at all even when irvine starts to choke something that again puts him on shaky ground because we wonder how he's galbadia's best sniper if he's so prone to choking why isn't it mentioned that the choking is at this point because irvine is tasked with killing matron a mother figure who he knows why doesn't it come up it's not like everything has to pour out len even irvine could blurt out matron and squirrel wouldn't know what the he was talking about but it would give us an important hint and then less of this whole thing would just come from nowhere i admire ffa's dedication to subtlety i really do but there are a lot of times where it just goes way too far and even that perhaps is not the worst thing what about the d district prison irvine was ordered to pick quinoa up from prison by general carraway and so he did that and apparently he initially planned to return rinoa to him until renault convinced him to help with breaking the party out of jail so yeah our childhood friend the one who knows all of this and is closer to the party than they truly know was kind of all set to leave us in prison to what and probably be executed it's only thanks to the one person who he comparatively barely knows that he came back and helped nice huh that's one serious freaking ball drop considering irvine's relationship to the party how the hell did that get in there was it just a mistranslation i mean you hope so because god damn irvine he's just very badly written and terrible as a character thinking about it after all his vomiting of plot exposition i have even less reason to like him than i did previously and i really didn't like him before i hate him now in the end la holton is what it is it's one of ffa's big turn-in points where all of our party gets a serious dose of characterization where the themes of the game actually come into focus it's not terrible but it's not without flaws and you know we're no further along after it and perhaps that is disappointing especially if you compare it to the live stream ff7's big moment where just about everything came together and the main character truly at last became whole mind you there are still obviously lots more plot points to come it should be noted by the way that the character who benefits most from this whole scene is undoubtedly squall it is in many ways his true breaking point and his admission that finns were kind of screwed up again it's subtle you might not notice it still but there is that one line admitting that no in actuality squall was not okay at all now you might have noticed that unlike quite a few people i have a lot of time for squall as a character and i'm interested in his development more than just about anything else and this scene is a big part of that as for how this scene will affect what's to come for that we must continue playing our next storyline destination is adir's house down south which obviously means we're going just a little ways further north and hitting up shumi village [Music] chumi is an optional place we don't have to go there at all in fact at pretty much any point in the game but it's nice to come here as a little stop gap in the midst of all the revelations and again there's plot points here that you might miss also it has a draw point where you can get ultimate one of the best spells in the game as it often is in ff although here that obviously means for junction and as we don't use offensive spells i don't think i've used an offensive spell since the start of disc one anyway shumi is a very pretty place indeed filled with kind and welcoming shumi's also a sculptor is working on a statue for laguna it turns out that at some point he wound up here after having to be taken care of again this is also why those moombas helped swallow out back in the prison shumi's eventually evolve into something else and most of them become moombas they obviously sensed a connection between laguna and squall we can help with this statue by collecting a few stones and going on a nice quest that's mostly designed to welcome us to shermy and get to know their nice non-human people it's a simple side quest but it's one that's very much worth doing it's a lovely place one of the best looking in the game another little stop for us is in dealing where it's worth paying a visit to general callaway at first he only asks us to take care of winona but he does offer some useful background that i've not yet gone into as has become clear there are a lot of connections to the sorceress war a time when galbadia fought esther who were under the control of a sorceress named adele esfar is somewhere on the eastern continent that we've not paid a visit to yet but it has disappeared from view galbadia ultimately won the war by making herself as powerful as she could possibly become and they did this by taking over just about every other city they could it's an important note on just how galbadia became so powerful they did it in order to combat a force that was presumably far greater and perhaps even more dangerous but in the aftermath well they ended up just becoming more and more of a militaristic dictatorship with the wise of a deer gaubadi itself isn't even really in control anymore they're in a very confused state anyway our next regular plot destination is in the southwest the centra area in other words adidas orphanages lay near a lighthouse we can go there but we can't enter why because just a little ways away galbadia garden is sitting and waiting and solely inevitable happens if galbadia garden is here that obviously means that cipher and adia are there too everything's been building up to another big fight and the planet is just not big enough for two massive floating ships running about it's time for war as the two gardens spot each other squall has to deliver an address and get his people ready for a fight you get to pick the orders although it doesn't change an awful lot it merely emphasizes the big task and the responsibilities that squall has to take literally head-on as balaam rams into galbadia gardens field where cipher awaits on the brig in a perfect mirror image as the fight begins competence is still very much struggling to assert itself apparently zell is asleep he's obviously not but for some reason that's been covered up we motivate troops and stop them from dawdling around we go to the quad where zell actually is and then to the front gate where we expect galbadian troops to attack from as far as control goes we start with zell's team including renault cell gives renault a win that he's borrowed from squall although we don't exactly know the significance anyway one of the silliest moments in the whole game follows the two gardens collide and a piece breaks off of the quart one that just so happens to have renault on it leaving her dangling and out of action considering what we know about twinoa and her willingness to fight and actually get done in spite of everything this kind of feels like a very cheap way to just get rid of her for the next bit that's not in line with what's been going on suddenly she's the silent movie damsel handing off the cliff waiting for someone to come and so having screwed the pooch yet again zell now has to go and find squirrel to tell him that renault is in trouble and hope that he doesn't immediately renzo kook in his ass squall doesn't take linears particularly well especially as the enemy are here and everyone else is fighting but news that they've breached the classroom on the second floor means that it can't even take priority now despite irvine as usual being a it's important to note how stacked the odds are against us balaam's primary force seed is a small group that's built for external missions and so the majority of people at balaam are just cadets young cadets galbadia garden doesn't have seeds instead they have a group who have all been trained for combat as a large mass basically it's an army and if you chatted with martine earlier you'll know that it's not really a garden anymore he and most of the other students were kicked out so that adio and cipher could use it as a base but even before that the place was essentially a military academy pumping out soldiers for the g army so you know we're not fighting fellow garden students here we're fighting g-soldiers paratroopers rocket bikers and the best of galbadia's army while one seed is potentially worth about 50 of them we only have a handful at our disposal cadets can only defend against them for so long fought in the second wave it's clear that balaam won't last another and so we make the decision to attack to ram straight into galbadia garden and swarm on them as much as possible scroll relays this to the garden in what certainly counts for him as an inspirational speech the strongest confirmation yet of his leadership oh by the way renault is still hanging there i really hope she's got some strong deals i suppose we should save her shouldn't we according to the group squall is the only one who can do this for reasons and so he goes to do so but on the way he ends up getting bullied by this one troop ultimately the fight sprawls out onto a rope thus beginning a really freaking annoying minigame where you punch and kick this guy timing blocks when necessary that is very easy to fail fortunately failure is not a game over after winning squirrel finally manages to save wino at least and they land on the front of galbadia garden thus beginning a really awesome sequence as they won through the battle we can see that the decision to attack was a smart one as balaam's cadets are getting the better of a galbadian force that didn't expect this aggression perhaps school speech had something to do with it renault returns that win to squall by the way it seems like it's yet another attempt to get the two together that by this stage might not exactly be needed especially when you know there's a freaking battle going on i mean priorities people finally we joined the rest of our party inside of galbadia garden the garden itself is surprisingly pretty sparse there's not many people here at all again this bears out the idea that most of the students were dismissed once siphoned a deer took over but it does mean that for the most part it's another quite boring dungeon where not a lot's happening and most of the screens are the same the main gimmick is that you have to find a couple of students milling around who are on your side and in possession of key cards so that you can gain access to the headmaster's room you also fight a gf along the way cerberus fujian and dwigen are here too but despite what we said last time they really don't want to fight as lord as they are to cipher they recognize just how much he's changed and they're not here to fight for a deer this is something of a depressing bit for them evenly usually eager to fight fujin is quite simply fatigued in the end we just leave them finally though we get to the master's room cypher is eager to fight while adier is relaxed and cocky cypher still sees us as the monsters and himself as the knight with the added impetus of having not forgotten his upbrining he knows who adio is which makes him all the more motivated to protect her the cypher fight is a bigger challenge than it was the first time even if there's three of us and one of him but ultimately he fails adir dismisses him as foolish and then descends into the auditorium once again she talks to us as though we were mere bugs to be crushed under her feet it is odd low in a way she actually does not bring up the past at all for as big a thin as it's become for us but we can't think about the past either we have to fight her again cipher still tries to defend her although he's less used now nothing can stop the big fight to the death which naturally we do win adi is tough but we can handle it but before she can be finished off something happens again adia steps back stricken hurt and notably different something quite visibly has been lifted after the battle she calls our names suddenly she's not sorceressa dear anymore she's a dear cramer our matron she praises us but is also greatly concerned about whether she was able to save alone but before anything else renault goes over to the fallen cipher and kisses him seemingly reviving him but then she collapses no one knows exactly what's happened and it's in this state of total confusion where disc two comes to an end before going anywhere else let's look at disc two some more i was a bit worried going in after the end of disc one and how silly finn's got at the end of that but you know what disc two actually comes together really freaking well for all the flaws there are in the orphanage scene it is the part of the game where the motivations do come together and most of the reveals are perfectly fine with the exception of irvine being the one to do it and those bloody gfs in any case it's followed by what aside from a couple of little bits might be the best sequence in the whole game the battle of the gardens is an absolute showstopper the fmvs are outrageous as are the action scenes yeah it's stupid for renault to be taken out like that it's also annoying for all the other party members to act like dicks and shout about her to school when not only does he have to think of everyone as leader but they could easily rescue her themselves and indeed probably should and it's silly pacing for an hour and squirrel to have a big old heart to heart while the battle's all around them but still there's those freaking rocket bikes jumping onto balum garden and when there's that you can forgive anything this game is worth playing for a good few reasons but the battle of the gardens is right up there a grand moment perhaps there's another reason why disc two is generally very good weirdly in many ways it feels like it could be an ending and that disc one and two could easily be their own game for most of that time we've chased a deer we've had the big moment when we realized who she was and then in the end we freed her although sadly it appears that one of us died in the conflict seriously final fantasy 8 could end here a fair few people would probably say that it should have ended here but obviously there are still two more discs they aren't filled with bonus content we're just getting started aren't we now there's more i could start analyzing right now particularly characters as a lot has changed especially with squall and renova but we're kind of in the middle of all of that so it can wait a bit for now let's get on with the story back in garden renault is in a coma no one can figure out what's happened to her at all squall is very upset about this but is trying not to show it and remain a leader and as for a dear well she's back at the orphanage the only thing we can do at the moment is go there talk to her and find out just what on earth happened how come she's no longer our enemy the orphanage well it's seen better days for vetoer where sid shows up after making squalor leader he basically disappeared even though his presence would have undoubtedly helped matters it goes to show that in the end well he's just a coward adio reveals to us the truth that she allowed herself to be possessed by another altogether more powerful sorceress named ultimisha who comes from the future she did this in order to protect alone who ultimisha desires to obtain in order to complete her plan to compress the world's timeline and bring herself fully to our present whenever we faced a deal in the past we weren't facing her we were facing ultimisha in her form the importance of a loan presumably comes from her special ability to take people back to the past again the subject of espha and the sorceress war comes up no one knows what happened to espar or its leader sorcerer siddell but tadeer believes that while she could possibly be possessed again by altomisha at any time the future sorceress is now attempting to join herself with adele who a deer believes to be still alive adele unlike a deer is apparently almost wholly evil if adele and ultimisha come together well that's when will most certainly hit the fan so um yeah that's a lot to take in pretty quickly this is the first time that we know the identity of our true antagonist and she kind of comes from nothing the same is said of the notion of time compression and how that affects our story it helps if you know a little bit about sorceress law generally the wall in ffa's world is that a sorceress cannot die until they have passed their skills essentially their soul onto someone else which is why adeer believes that adele is still around there's also the reasons for the time compression which currently come across as mumbo jumbo essentially it boils down to this ultimatum wants to shorten the timeline in order to create a world where she is the only sorceress who can exist consuming all others to create an all-powerful entity that no normal force could hope to match as a sorceress she can exercise a degree of mind control on regular people from dylan's populist to cipher but she can only completely possess other sorceresses most likely one at a time that's about all we can deduce for now with what we've got adia knows little else and does not know what happened to inera perhaps unsurprising seeing as she doesn't know who at all in the first place squirrel finds it hard to control his emotions right now and all he can do is go back to the infirmary to watch over in his body something that the game doesn't fully make clear but should be easy enough to grasp on the hints squall is desperate for rinoa to give him a sign while he is still uneasy about showing his emotions to other people it's so clear how much he feels for her and once again squall collapses we're back with laguna for our fourth flashback this flashback is short and on the surface is more comedic it's a look at laguna and kiosk's time in trabia filming a movie you can get a hint about this earlier on if you've been picking up the timber maniacs magazines from around the world lagoona did end up becoming a journalist after all and he wrote about his travelling experience as in said mag when you find them selfie records the contents of each mag in her diary which you can access in the computer in the classroom the one that you may well have not looked at since the very start of the game in other words it is useful though as it does provide some much needed color [Music] anyway laguna is shooting a film about a sorcerer sander knight and is tasked with defending the sorceress from a dragon who should be played by kiros unfortunately it turns out to be a very real dragon who we have to beat primarily in another rubbish timing-based fighting mini-game the flashback ends just as laguna spots a red light in the distance now this is all very comedic but there's a big and subtle hint here when lagoona wields a gunblade and assumes a stance with it it is the exact same stance that cipher takes with a gunblade the movie that they were shooting is the same movie that cypher saw when he was a child the one that inspired his ambition to be the night protecting the sorceress essentially the movie that made him another very intriguing connection indeed speaking of connection the main reason for the existence of this flashback is so that alone can speak to squall that mind link is still there and it's the only way that alone can reach him squall well he's changed a lot in truth the time compression altimeter sorceresses all of that stuff doesn't really interest him the situation where we know has brought his one true motivation to the forefront he cares about little else except we know being okay and coming back there's a few callbacks in this whole situation school's reaction is reminiscent of how he was when everyone thought that cipher had been executed there's direct references at one point squall comments about how talking to renault is like talking to a wall the exact thing he was when christus was expressing her feelings to him way back at the graduation the shoe's on the other foot now squall asks alone to let him into renault's immediate past so that things can be changed but it's hopeless you can't actually change the past and besides alone can't do that she doesn't know her even so squall's one plan is to somehow find alone and bryn winner to her so that somehow she can use her powers to bring her back somehow being the key word here even with the world in peril from some unknown potentially catastrophic force it's nothing in squill's mind compared to inaura even when a deer was explaining how disastrous the arrival of ultimisha would be for the world winoa was the only thing on his mind to the point where he literally had to be snapped out of his reverie that might be a shock perhaps even outrageous motivation for some especially for someone who is supposed to be the hero of this piece but then let me ask you this how heroic in actuality is squally and hot how heroic is he supposed to be i'm not going to analyze that yet it's merely something to ponder as the next chapters play out now the last time we saw a loan was when she was taken from balaam by a white ship one by a group calling themselves adir's seed presently said ship is our only lead adir knows little about it but believes it to be stationed somewhere on the central continent and has written up a letter that hopefully should convince them to help us that's all we know you've got to look for said ship yourself this can be a pain but it's not all that far from where we are as long as you search slowly and methodically it hopefully won't take lat long to find at least it didn't take me lat lon i have heard horror stories naturally the folks on the ship take a fair bit of convincing initially they will refuse to tell you anything about a loan whatsoever before offering the letter to the leader you can walk around a bit you can find out just who these people are they are adir's seats as in her children it wasn't just our party and no one else at the orphanage and matron cared for these orphans too before being possessed by ultimisha adeer was the captain of this ship but when she knew that she was about to be taken she made plans to protect alone by sending her to garden before leaving the ship altogether we also run into two people we've not seen in ages zone and watts aka the other members of the timber resistance the galbadians went after them following that disastrous mission but they escaped and wound up being taken in here all is cheery at first until the subject of winona comes up we promised to protect her and now she's in a coma zone who we've mostly seen getting stomach cramps and rushing to the bathroom is now calling squall a son of a and threatening to knock him out a jarring character shift no more of a sign of just how much has changed really things have gotten way serious since timber finally we meet with the leader give him a dears letter and convince him to tell us the story and as you might have expected by now alone isn't here anymore the galbadians did manage to find the ship in the end and gave chase ultimately trapping them here until something odd happened a nest far ship appeared and started fighting the galbadians now keep in mind that no one has seen an s5 ship or s-5 soldiers for 17 years at first they try to convince the seeds to abandon ship but naturally they refuse however alone comes out sees who they are and decides to go with them literally running and jumping onto their ship at which point the s4 ship retreated and so alone's in espar the big eastern continent we haven't been to yet indeed we haven't been able to go there the entire continent is blocked off by a huge mountain range meaning that there's no way for garden to make landfall we need shores for that looking at the map you might think that the trabia and s-far continents are connected and we could get in that way however the obvious path is blocked by a huge crater said crater is indirectly important to the game's law although not for reasons that would make sense currently even when we get to these reasons it might be a bit of a reach there is only one way into the continent and it's at fisherman's horizon a long disused railway lets stretchers out over the ocean from esparta galbadia only accessible to us at fisherman's horizon by the way in case you don't know fisherman's horizon is populated by a lot of former s-5 mechanics it's insinuated that the mechanics left this far but the scientists stayed behind now before we go there it should be noted that there's some big plot development in dealing city and like a lot of ffa finns it's the sort of plot development you may well never see because there is no reason to go to dealing right now nor is there anything new to do there however what's changed well adir isn't their leader anymore don't forget that instead cipher is it appears that he is still taking orders from a sorceress and there's only really one that it can be the galbadians are as militaristic as ever under cipher's command and have apparently just dredged up some huge esfar maid obelisk from the ocean that well no one knows what it does actually but it's kind of worrying in any case worrying is a key word actually cipher cannot after all influence the minds of a populist in a way that a sorceress can the people of dylan are concerned about the actions of their new leader and are wondering why there can't just be peace it seems that they've recovered from being brainwashed anyway short of going to shumi and drawing some more ultima or taking part in various other somewhat minor side quests there is little to do except go east obviously there are no trains running between fisherman's horizon and as far so there's only one thing that school can really do he puts renault on his back leaves the garden parked and starts walking a walk that is presumably a pretty freaking long way this walk seems completely ridiculous at first but it should be noted that if you've been keeping up with your timber maniacs mags you'll know that laguna actually traveled to espo in the exact same way the poetic nature of squall following in laguna's footsteps justifies the scene well enough as squad walks he talks to noah sure she's unconscious but this at least allows squall to talk to someone without his usual inhibitions it's quite an affecting chat really squall details his faults and how he is how he purposefully pulls his guard up around people so that no one wants to get close to him as a way of protecting himself from being hurt through losing those people that's what happened with alone and it's affected scroll ever since with renault fins are different slowly but surely squall is changing because of that it's a far cry from when they first met each question that squall throws to another isn't so much knowingly rhetorical but delivered with the slight hope that she'll answer it's quite a powerful moment honestly for me this is the moment that pretty much cemented how great a character squall actually is the arc that he goes on and how he develops is refreshingly different from a lot of rpg protags all the way through and again there's still that question how good is squall meant to be in truth he is still a mercenary is he the best leader around well no but he's not supposed to be people often complain about sid choosing him to be the leader but in truth there wasn't anyone else who could do it sid is a coward so he's not going to take the lead now that war is afoot the other potential candidates would have been quistis xu or dr kadawaki zhu and kadawaki have important roles already christus is the only one who we've seen in battle but we've seen just how awful a leader she is if zell had taken the lead well the game would probably be over by now maybe selfie could be cool if you wanted every city in the world destroyed by trains covered in glitter and packed with nuclear weapons i suppose but as awesome as she is she's not really a leader either and you know what i think about our resident stupid cowboy already so yeah squall is kind of the default choice he's not supposed to be a perfect leader far from it it doesn't come naturally to him and while he has gotten better at it he's never going to be a great leader and a big part of that is because in the end despite his perceived coldness he is purely motivated by people think about it how many times have you heard school say that he's doing something for the good of the planet he's certainly not doing this for the planet or to stop a sorceress it all comes back to ff8 at its core being an intimate story centering around two people it can be very ridiculous a lot of the time but that is a constant winona has had her own progression too and is nowhere near as bad a character now as she initially appeared to be but we'll get to that and of course there are those wholesaler actually squall isn't here at all and we'll get to that too anyway one finn does slightly blot this scene's copy book at the end why to squall finally reaches the espar continent guess who's there yep everybody else they all came along too which is obviously fine but what's annoying is that they got here first how did they do that when there's seemingly no other way to make it here aside from walking the track snatch a handcart while we were snoozing it's a logical irritance and the weird thing about ff8 is that the minor logical irritances are somehow far more annoying than the massive ones maybe it has something to do with the person they're riding with mind adir is now with us she wants to come in order to pay a visit to someone named dr odin you might recall that name from way back in disc one he was the guy who manufactured a necklace that could suppress a sorceress's powers a prototype of which renault was going to use in her ill fought out plan to stop the len possessed a deer adio is well aware that ultimisha could repossess her at any time she's with us because she hopes that the doctor can somehow stop this from happening she's also with us because well if altamisha does take her form again then she's with the people who are the most capable of stopping that no matter what the cost this also means that for the time been adir is a selectable party member one who's pretty good with magic as you would expect obviously we use her as it's nice to freshen up the party a bit i mean most of the time i usually just go with wino and selfie selfie is the one absolute constant because her banter is great and her character is awesome zell often gets a look into if i want some stupidity quistis doesn't get used all that much but it's certainly larifuno or selfie aren't available and over never gets selected and is perfectly free to off and die anytime he likes because he's the worst character in the entire history of final fantasy games our next destination is over a dried out lake that my goodness is a beautiful destination it's places like this that make me lovely old pre-rendered graphics so much the arid salt flats are truly desolate a sign of the hard journey you've got to take and there's an undead boss monster which provides a call opportunity for a deer who's just joined us to hit the damage cap by chucking an explosion in its direction finally we can go no further the salt stretches out as far as the eyes can see with no noticeable path through weirdly however there's a lot of static about even the odd symbol are we in front of a barrier suddenly in what is far from the craziest thing to happen on this disc a hole opens up in the middle of the air and we can climb towards it via an invisible ladder it's a fantastic sudden shift we move from the salt flats into a small scientific space until finally we hit an elevator on the long journey up the party muses on how there's no turning back now and indeed there quite literally isn't there's certainly no way that we can decide that actually we want to go all the way back to garden and complete the card club side quest instead we're stuck on this elevator taking us up to something that we do not know for all we know it's about to take us to the middle of a blast furnace finally however it stops and a window on the world opens in a game filled with pretty excellent graphics and fmv sequences especially for 1999 there is perhaps none that's as truly stunning as the s5 reveal all of a sudden you're greeted with this huge cityscape something that covers a massive chunk of the continent the biggest city we've seen up to this point is d-lin and espar makes it look like a deer's orphanage a platform speeds us through the city at a quite staggering pace and we get to see the architecture it's like a finished simcity 2000 project that someone took four years to perfect you can tell from the buildings and the general planning just how science-oriented the city is too it's advanced to a level far beyond anything else we've ever seen if this was still final fantasy vii and we were worried about the consumption of maiko then good lord this looks like it would have sucked up the entire live stream within a year as far as big is what i'm trying to say it's also as we'll soon see quite a challenge to actually get around of course there are more immediate matters espar doesn't get a lot of tourists by virtue of being hidden from vue for 17 years and we have no idea whether we're about to get a welcoming committee or a bullet to the head it doesn't feel like an oppressive city controlled by an evil mastermind but then you just don't know do you either way this feels like quite the inopportune moment to have a flashback which of course is what happens school and selfie go into dream time while ladies stands around and probably wonders what the hell just happened and why no one had told her that the party was narcoleptic so this is the fifth and final laguna flashback in case you're keeping track this is the current lagoona timeline as we know it we joined laguna and his crew kiowas and ward in d lin city where they were on leave during the sorceress war while there laguna had a brief romance with julia hartley rinoa's mother and later a famous sinner who sadly died in a car crash when ronaldo was aged about five in the second flashback we found liqueur at an excavation site where esfar were uncovering some huge crystal based structure ultimately es4 ambushed them on a cliffside and they all had to jump off laguna spent the next few months recovering in wind hill under the kale of wayne while also caring for wayne's adopted daughter alone that's what we can fit together before this flashback we also know that he ended up filming a movie in trebia and that he was cared for in shumi village where they look up to him as something of an icon we also know that he was on his way to espar and you can probably figure out why he was going there anyway laguna and his crew ward has since rejoined us having left his job at the prison although he is now mute thanks to the cliff full have been captured and are being set to work for dr odin so it seems that he's not a nice guy the guards can be kind of arsy too especially if you talk or not to do any work however we do get a chance to break out which well the logic bombs are flying why did laguna have his gun all that time now i know the understandable answer to that nobody wants to animate a whole different set of attacks and animations for this single battle against a nomak soldier who you're gonna kill in one hit especially not in 3d it'd take ages it was easier for people to switch their weapons in the older final fantasies and so they often did i get that there could probably have been a better solution mind you anyway we all come back together and we can break out thankfully this isn't another d district prison in fact this place is literally a couple of screens the next one gives us our first proper glimpse of dr odin and um what the hell is this what does he have a massive lord perseus tudor collar why does he talk with a german accent what is this dr odin is weird one of the characters in the game that really turned people off he's sort of like sid as it goes which is appropriate considering how heavily sid was influenced by odin's work dr odin is in fact the person who came up with the idea of using guardian forces in the first place more than that he's responsible for the use of magic in general or power magic as it's called which we use in conjunction with gf's at the cost of our long-term memory others like say g soldiers do use power magic as well but they tend to have it as part of a weapon whereas sorceresses and monsters just use magic naturally odin is a brilliant scientist to be sure although he is also one that lacks moles and has no qualms with experimenting on people combine this with his obvious heavy german accent and yeah you get the idea it's a rather disturbing connotation which then somewhat jibes with odin being mostly used as comedic relief anyway it seems as low odin's tyrion of his recent project which just so which just so happens to be a giant obelisk house in a crystal we've been hearing a fair bit about this and we finally have a name for it at last the lunatic pandora anyway he's moved on to a girl he's observing and clearly has some special powers as you might have guessed said girl is the whole reason that laguna and company are here after chasing odin around we find out where she is and go rescue her the building resistance in espar who are tired of the war and of their current leader's dictatorship sorceress adele decides to flock around the charismatic screw-up laguna as their new boss the man who can lead them to eventually overthrow in adele for good and finally alone and laguna share a quick and tender scene where they're reunited at last now we know of course that this didn't last but it's a good way to end this flashback and yes this is the last playable laguna section we'll find out why soon enough of course the laguna story is again one of the really good things about ff8 he's such a fun character and it's amusing to see the big similarities between himself and squall lagoona displays a lot of squall's flaws in a more comedic way he actually does struggle to get close to people but instead of purposefully shunning away from them he'll fake a limp instead it's like someone playing a parody version of squall in old comic theater he does have some tender moments though and as a leader he clearly motivates people really does attract them it may seem at times like he fails upwards into prominence but that's because he just takes chances now without thinking about the odds these are characteristics that squall could have but he chooses not to believe in them or outright suppress them a lot of the time the other interesting thing is how squall's own relationship with laguna evolves at first he dismisses him as a complete even as late as shumi he still thinks that he's something of an idiot funnily enough his thoughts on laguna seem to change once we know it goes into her coma as if it's making sense for him too and a lot of laguna's words come back to him he feels closer to laguna as time goes on especially now and so we wake up from the flashback we are now in s far good and proper and we are set to be taken to the presidential palace to meet dr odin not a place to meet a guy who is actually not the president but hey ho before that however it should be said that believe it or not we are actually getting very close to the end game all the main pieces are slowly falling into place and not long after this fins are about to get extreme they might even be about to get ridiculous there's a pretty large chance that the game's plot could go to a level beyond anyone's wildest imagination there's going to be an absolute ton of stuff to cover in other words and after this point there's no real way of stopping we're just going gonna have to tear through it and so the third part will end here will the fourth part be enough to end this saga currently i don't even know we'll just have to see on that one bye for now woohoo we're back right before we properly get on with things let's have a little bit of analysis i've been promising a bunch for in noah for a while now as it goes and i've still not gotten around to it like squall she's actually quite a bit better than people often make out for me although there are some frustrating fins there still as we know already she doesn't start out the best she used to act like a spoiled little rich girl and used to call people meanies which was quite irritating now the one thing that helps with that is if you understand that renault like everyone else is 17 years old there really is virtually no age variance in final fantasy party everyone is the same age more or less christus is one year older at 18 and that's it cipher is also the same age as us certainly as a young adult story that's for sure phineas renault and squall do leave terrible first impressions especially as they bicker with each other through the whole of disc one but finns do gradually change i often end up taking renault with me on missions because she's different to the rest of the party something that she openly admits to back in that orphanage scene she isn't afraid to be forthcoming about her feelings which marks her as different from the rest not just squall really everyone in our party has their own way of concealing their feelings selfies cheerful zeal is brash irvine has over exaggerated machismo and christus is more professional and sometimes flirty renault doesn't have that which makes her different and honestly a bit refreshing as i said before she kind of represents the future and someone who makes the best out of what she has even if she isn't quite as single-minded in battle as everybody else in the party is she's more well-rounded warts and all it makes her a good companion for squall at any weight has she proved herself in the party well definitely she did like when she got that idiot cowboy to turn back and actually help us out to be honest she's not a terrible character at all there's lots worse in the game than wino believe me the annoying thing about renault is less to do with her as a character and more how the plot uses her it seems that renault always ends up sidelined in big situations through no fault of her own i wish that the game did more with her at times as opposed to just having her stand on that one bit of ground that so happens to break off even when she collapses it appears that she was just the closest person in the vicinity these things don't make her a bad character just that the plot kind of screws her often and of course there's another big old fan theory the second biggest after squall is dead in fact but honestly i can't go into much detail with that right now but i will [Music] there are other issues worth addressing one other annoying thing about ffa is that honestly not a lot of the other characters have that much to do there are considerable pacing issues with the story in ffa which often make it appear to be a hodgepodge of scenes that were pasted together by a plot after the fact take paul old quistis for example she has had virtually nothing to contribute to the plot since her failure in dealing zell gets crumbs here and there he's had now since we were lost at balaam frankly the cowboys plot is as follows struggle to shoot a deer then be forced to go back to the prison by renault and aside from dumping a load of exposition on us that's literally it for the whole game selfies had some character development but i feel even that's one in out it's kind of annoying a lot of fate's character development is front loaded in this way and you wish that it was spaced out a bit more so that the supporting characters in your party felt more important and not like they were just there why anyway esval fortunately for continuation we start off with a deer finishing up explaining the current situation to the presidential aid at the palace in short shorter deer wants odin to fix her which he says shouldn't be a problem wants to see a loan which has agreed to after a bit of simple threatening and the proviso that odin simply observes renault for a bit the change in scroll is very notable whether we know it in such a vulnerable state he's actually become quite possessive and can't help but threaten anyone who comes into contact with her this is not a positive characteristic to develop again school's status as a hero is purposefully shaky he works a lot better if you try not to pigeonhole him into the traditional protagonist's role finally though we're told to go to la luna gate where we'll be able to meet alone in the meantime we should explore the city and my goodness again it can't be stressed what a sight it is particularly because it's so different from the mostly european architecture that we've seen everywhere else while you can just advance the plot it's worth looking around to get familiar with its layout it's an outer wind complete with walkways that make getting around quicker and skyways if you just want to say screw it and go to where you want to it also feels quite busy indeed there's always something about as far as layout goes it can be maddening and it is very easy to get lost it's worth a bit of knowledge though because it will be important later on we can also find out some facts for the futuristic trappings esfa is a democracy and a rather easygoing one with both residents and guards happily willing to chat to you even if they've not actually had that many visitors hell the president apparently isn't even around all that much wonder who he could be anyway the luna gate is outside of the city and it's highly recommended that you rent a car to get to antler highways stressing again how big s far is hiring cars is something i've barely mentioned because i just don't do it much but it's one thing you can spend money on at least that and the fuel for the journey it's good if you want a nice stress-free journey around the map but honestly i don't find them to be that useful until right now chocobos are also in the game too you get those through solving these really annoying puzzles in little dome-shaped forests dotted around the map they're good for a one-time use and they can move over shallow water that is basically it for them aside from one other unique part of the game that i will get to later on as it turns out alone is waiting for us in space we're using the luna gate to get up there yes s far alone have mustered space travel in this world and they do it using a huge curved gun that will shoot us up there in minutes and somehow not totally splat to us squirrels going up there along with selfie and naturally we know the rest of us are stuck twiddling our thumbs down here but then we know as dog angelo alerts us to some quite big happenings outside now as we know already galbadia has lunatic pandora it's this huge obelisk that houses a crystal and it can be moved around at present it's heading straight for espar it's a pretty intimidating sight as you can probably imagine now you might be asking what exactly this finn does well to explain i'm going to need to go into more storyline explanations of gameplay which this game does a lot and is often quite fun in this instance it's how the game handles monsters apparently the reason why ff8's planet is filled with monsters is because they fall down from the moon i'm sure there's lots of spluttering going on already about gravitational pull and so forth but look you're just gonna have to accept this all right that's why there are monsters just as pollution in ff7 makes monsters the moon makes zephyr fates i don't know why one of the big disasters that tends to face the universe in ever fate is something called a luna cry this happens when a large group of monsters are brought together on the moon and they drop down as one to earth essentially in the form of a tear drop hence the name one big luna cry 100 or so years ago was enough to wipe out the centre which is why their continent is nothing but ruins and we've actually semi seen a luna cry in the game already the flashback where laguna was filming a movie that got interrupted by a dragon ended with laguna spotting a red light in the distance that was caused by esfar during adele's wayne inducing a luna cry with the help of lunatic pandora the crystal pillar housed within it dropped from the moon during the twilight killed the centre and is capable of inducing a choir when it is aligned with the moon you know that crater that stopped us from taking the garden into the s5 continent that was where the luna kwai made its last landfall chances are most of the monsters we've been fighting come from that or they're hardier and have been around since the central days anyway espar decided to do away with it after adele's wayne came to an end and there's literally only one thing it's good for say you know exactly what galba do you want to do with it have you swallowed all of that law good because you'll need to it's going to get more extreme than that believe me anyway the pandora's arrival is obviously not good news and squall isn't here to just you know be competent and so zell takes his big chance to lead the party dr odin lays out a plan for us the target for the pandora is not as far but something called tears point constructed when adele plans to use the obelisk as a weapon once the pandora lands there then the lunar choir will be triggered and yeah that's bad there are three points in the city where it's possible for us to enter the pandora as it passes over us whichever one we make it to we've got to do it in time this is why it's a good idea to familiarize yourself with the city although it's not that hard to find where you need to go especially if you've got ink none shit's already hitting the fan soldiers are milling around and the atmosphere in s4 is changing zell impatiently takes all of this in he just wants to get in the pandora and start punching things because this is his big moment to be the hero we make it to one of the pickup points beat up on a couple of soldiers and find our way in zell quistis it's the big shot the do or die moment we make our way further in and then a robot ambushes us we don't get the chance to even fight it it grabs us and hurls us down a trapdoor the pandora quite literally spat us out and all we can do is watch as it leaves the city and heads for tears point the mission was a failure this whole thing is quite a big and needless to say rather down a moment for zell who has something of an interest in carrick talk because well it's purposefully quite static he's a broken character he is actually quite smart but he's never able to control his emotions to the point where he usually blurts out the utterly won finn at the worst time he doesn't have any patience that's where he starts and it's kind of where he stays such characters often tend to have that big moment where they grow up and this is kind of presented as that taking the reigns moment for zell but alas he falls short again he's screwed up one more time he just doesn't get any luck at the same time all of this is happening our other group have completed their journey into space or to be accurate a space station the aim for squall remains the same fix renault with the help of alone anyone who tries to interfere may well get a gunblade to the gut if they aren't careful seriously he's majorly heads up we get to have a look around for example we can see where they're keeping sorceress adele yeah that sorceress who could cause such a disaster if she's released is right there now you may be outraged immediately but it does make sense remember a sorceress cannot actually be fully killed they can lose their power in times of crisis but it must pass on to somebody else adele is not dead she's sealed and if you've got to seal her it's probably best to at least keep an eye on her i mean the president himself is out there supervising finns so clearly nothing bad at all is going to happen we can also look on the surface of the moon where monsters are starting to come together it seems that regardless of what the pandora does the world is due at luna quiet fairly soon we've obviously been killing enough monsters to warrant it finally though squall manages to meet with alone what can she do well she can not do a whole lot really it's not quite managed to get through squall's head alone can take people back to the past but the past cannot be changed in the end there's no way you can change what happened alone thought that maybe she could through squall but it was no good is there anything at all that can be done could at least a presence be felt that might be but it's kind of shaky and a long shot and even still alone doesn't know where noah so what can she do this plan was kind of flawed right from the start but even so school had to at least give it a go because there wasn't any other option and then well things start to go on all of a sudden there's an emergency in the medical bay where we know it is being kept what is said emergency well the good news is that rinoa is up and out of bed the bad news is that she's slowly swaying around clearly not herself and anyone who gets close to her tends to get force pushed at speed towards the nearest wall even squall himself when he tries to get close there's nothing we can do to stop what happens nothing anyone can do first winner unlocks the first seal to adele's tomb then she moves on don's a space suit goes outside just as the doors shut and unlocks the second and at the same time as all this is happening the luna cries triggered due to the events that happen back on the ground a huge wave of nothing but monsters is streamed down and adele with a smile goes down with it now i'm sure that you can look at the science here and start screaming about how none of this makes any sense and i'm sure it doesn't but look you're going to have to keep moving i know the game is getting very extreme and quite silly indeed but right in the middle of this and you just can't apply proper logic to these things in the end alone was pretty much a total red herring the issue was always with noah herself and what seemingly inside of her alone was more like an unsuspecting treat bringing us closer and winning we're nowhere closer is that a good plan well it certainly relies on a lot of luck on the part of whoever did the possession what if alone wasn't in space why was she in space anyway what if she was not right now of all the places in the world where she could have been anyway that will become clear for now we must evacuate this station's gonna blow the president himself tells us to take care of a loan before being whisked away and we must do the sag as for inora well she'll float out there in space until her oxygen runs out and then she'll die whatever possessed winona no longer has any need for her instead they possessed adele as soon as the second seal was broken obviously that's not good enough for squall while we're escaping he works with alone to access anything that she possibly can she can at the very least connect school telepathically to renault as she floats we see a couple of events from the past we even see irvine trying to take rinoa back to her dad orino requesting that zell borrow scrolls win so she can have one just like it and finally we do get to see the big moment what happened when she collapsed she passed a message to cypher whiteley when whatever was in a deer passed into her that ultimisha would be his new sorceress that it wasn't over and now she floats there left to die but in that moment while renault is essentially flashing back her whole life squall is able to keep her going to help her to turn on the emergency support and give herself a few minutes longer in a quite creepy scene we see when there are floating 2001 esque in space back to being herself but running out of air fast until that message comes and at this point squall having donned a spacesuit himself when he was hoping to stop winona from releasing the second adele seal we'll go out there with her because there's not really any other place this can go it's all about renault finally the pair of them do float together in space what now though both of their supplies will run out and then they'll both die but then all of a sudden there's something of a miracle or something very convenient a ship that we can enter there doesn't seem to be much on it but there is air once we know and squall find a way in they can breathe again the day has been saved once we're out of the spacesuits we know wants a big old hug from the hero who's just saved her squall is a bit more pragmatic sure we can believe again but we are still lost in space and we kind of need to find a way to get control of this fin or at least establish communication with the ground plus there's more monsters firing about waiting to be killed again one of those little dungeon puzzles that actually do come at a decent time soon as we've had little bit story and cutscene for the past 30 minutes or more basically you kill these propagators in pairs according to their color otherwise they revive once you've done that you can get into the cockpit properly and establish contact with the ground apparently we're on a ship called la ragnarok latest lost contact with years ago the monsters that were roaming the ship had something to do with that according to the locks ground control will have little trouble bringing us in but in the meantime school and renault have some alone time together and after what is quite frankly a hell of a lot of exposition and convenience there does come a moment where it's all a little worth it yep it's the eyes on me moment the one where squirrel and renault do have a proper heart to heart as the game's main theme plays kinda corny maybe but even through all the ridiculous events it nicely brings finns back to just these two people now look i'm a sucker for a good love story and no matter what final fantasy 8 is a good love story the eyes on me scene is very touching with renault trying to hold on to school for as long as she can the past and the future aren't what's important she just wants to be there in the present with him that's important it becomes especially important when the folks on the ground ask us who's actually on the ship when we answer there's a shock when they find out who noah is the other person aside from school or sorceress we know as they call her and yeah that's not bollocks renault is now a sourceless as i said just now in a time of great crisis a sorceress can lose her powers and they can be passed on that's what happens to adio and ultimisha in galbadia garden you do not have to be born a sorceress to become one and so that's how rinoa became a sorceress and indeed how she came to be possessed by ultimature estar as you might have guessed do not like source swisses and as soon as the ragnarok touches down renault is to be taken away to their sorceress memorial for immediate stasis forever this in the end is why noah wanted to stay right here she doesn't exactly want to be a source receiver and she knows that this is the end for her and squall and so when we touch down that's what happens we know it goes quietly and squall well there's not much he can do at least that's what he thinks it's something of a downbeat situation for everyone involved just as we know and squall we're basically on the verge of declaring their undying love for each other in the end he is left to mill about le ragnarok alone until selfie shows up anyways followed by quistis zell and irvine they made it here because you know of course they did after everything's been explained quistis has her first important plot moment for two discs she gives squall a right dressing down and asks him exactly what the hell he's doing and why on earth he's letting noah get taken away like that sure the group have done louis noef in a hell of a lot to annoy an effect of the garden when they screwed up but here well it's important after all the heavy stuff that's just happened it snaps squall back into focus obviously we're not going to let renault get sealed up forever we're going to break her out as soon as we actually figure out how to fly this fin but what do you know selfie gets it working just fine apparently it's dead simple this is a jrpg after all anyone can suddenly turn out to be a pilot especially if they're a young teenage girl this of course means that we can now fly around the map in a big old airship the ragnarok is ours for keeps but first geez we definitely need to break down all of the that just happened this is definitely at the very least the start of the point where for a lot of people final fantasy 8 goes completely and irreversibly off the rails believe it or not it's only going to get more ridiculous from here and yes i do see a lot of the problems there's issues with the whole lunar cryphin and how even in the world of jrpgs it completely stretches believability and the extremities of lunar physics and there's issues with whatever plan ultimisher had assuming that she was the reason why renault was comatose all of this time how was making her comatose the best way of going about it doesn't that totally leave everything to chance what if they never found alone what if she wasn't in space what if what if what if there's just so many fins what if the ragnarok wasn't just floating there either seriously that comes off like the hitchhiker's guide when arthur and ford managed to get on a vogue on ship despite the destruction of the earth to me yeah this might just be the silliest moment of the game even if it's not the most ridiculous it's all just way too much and two based on conveniences the thing that saves it is naturally the eyes on me scene at least that's something at the end of it there's also the wonder of just who the president is who we meet very briefly i'm sure you all have your ideas as to the president's identity but it's not time to reveal that yet we also still don't know much about ultimatum aside from well she's evil an evil sorceress from the future and this adele's evil too following the bait and switch at the start of this disc we really need some more info maybe ultimisha was the midwife when school's great-great-great-great-grandson was born there's plenty more ways i could dissect this sequence but in the end you just have to throw your hands up and move on we'd be here for a long time and this is the fourth video now that we're in the ragnarok it's easy to fly around and go to all the places you've been if you so desire and make no mistake there's a lot of side stuff that's not getting shown here there's more action at shumi there's a hell of a lot more card related stuff although truthfully on this stage the walls of the card game had gotten so messed up from playing and abandoning cards in different regions that i just gave up on the exercise the amount of thought that went into the game is so staggering it's untrue you can even go back to balaam garden although there is very little reason to hell half of the npcs there have the same dialogue they had before school left with renault on his back and it's kind of disappointing that the garden is such a total non-factor in the end game we can also check out s far city and see what finns are like there following la luna kwai and yeah it's different the buildings are still there but just a little different color and the atmosphere is now very sombre there are noticeably a lot less people about a child who is saw at the shopping mall with her mother is now on her own and there's monsters tough monsters after all of the stuff that i did in disc one this is around about the time that the game finally properly caught up with me and things i hadn't accounted for started causing me a lot of grief and so it was time to go to the woodshed meaning it's time to look at gameplay for the first time in ages yes time to perfect those junctions actually it is quite an appropriate time the thing with the ragnarok is that you get it very late in the game seriously once we break we know out of that memorial we'll very soon be going to the lunatic pandora i'm sure you could figure that out already but in any case the pandora is basically the point of no return and no that point isn't in disc four once you go there there's no reason to turn back and ultimately no way to and so you are meant to fly with the ragnarok for a while it's time to get your party ready just before that let's wrap this up we do go to the sorceress memorial and the scientists who are there don't offer us a lot of resistance just as the seal is about to be engaged squall breaks it and we know it falls out of the chamber it's another powerful moment as finally scroll into another get their big hug this is pretty much the scene that you see on the front cover of the game by the way as we leave esfahr's finest guards block the way however a huge man in official looking clothing walks up he doesn't say a finn but his gestures speak volumes and because of this man the guards let us passed finally we're all together again renault is still worried about being a sorceress especially seeing as she's with seat the group who were created in order to protect the world from sorceresses that is the point of our existence in the end zell makes that clear and gets a shout from squall for his trouble we know it doesn't feel as though she wants to be around people in case ultimisha gets a grip on her maybe we should go somewhere quiet maybe we should go to a deer's house you don't get much quieter than a continent that's only populated by two people anyway let's not do that quite yet let's talk about gameplay how do you go about making your party good for the end game obviously for most people the answer is going to be use a guide seriously there's so many freaking items so many things it seems like you have to do so many ways to refine magic so many combinations that when the enemies actually do start to kick your skin it's easy to just throw your hands up and let a guy take care of him you can get some of the toughest gfs in the game at this time i went out of my way to pick up bahamut who lounges at an abandoned research center right in the corner of the map if you want to make sure that your gfs have learnt all the abilities that they need head to cactual island and fight some cactuars you might miss a lot but you'll gain tons of ap if you want to power level then head to the island closest to heaven where you can fight ridiculously tough enemies so long as you've got a good setup weirdly there is also weapons you can fight ultima weapon after getting bahamut which will get you the best gf in the game however i didn't this was never meant to be a full 100 completionist one keep in mind that this is my first full run for the game after all ultimately preparing for the end game was more about having what i absolutely needed and in the end that comes to getting the best junctions ultimately this can be figured out through trial and error and in the main refinement you fight to armas in the plains of espar they drop regen wins which we find into full lives by far the best junction for your hp the one that will actually bring your character's health to the maximum range you need good status effect protection which at this stage means you need to be protected against confused which is always the absolute worst status effect so get a hundred of those and stick them on your status defense as far as other essentials go you absolutely need meltdown it's not a difficult spell to get but it's brilliant meltdown is not only an excellent vitality junction up in your defense but when cast it takes most enemies vitality down to zero percent and that's very important against some of the upcoming bosses and then you'll want to get older i ended up drawing this in a later battle but costing aura on a character means that they have a much greater chance of being able to use the limit without having to have their hp really low limits are something i've only dabbled with until now as it goes but they're very important in the big battles and once you get the aura spell going they're a huge difference maker it's time to break them down scrolls wins the cooking is simple you time critical hits in a combo using a bar and there's a chance that he'll do a finishing move at the end you should recognize the first move of these the rough divide it's the exact same move that squall used on sifa in the opening video and sifa's fireball slash combo is actually his limit break as well the deadliest of these is lionheart which you only get once you make his ultimate weapon and adds another multi-hit combo to the mix it's hundreds of thousands of points of damage enough to kill virtually anything but surprisingly squall's limit break is not the most effective in the game on account of lionheart being a totally random and uncommon trigger there are more effective ways of dealing death selfie our favorite takes the leaf out of kate siff's book she uses slot-based random magic casting a spell that doesn't have to be in your inventory a random amount of times can be weak can be devastating the end if it comes up is obviously the best attack of them all like kate siff's game over it's an insta victory against literally any opponent in the game that's not undead or a multi-form boss however it is staggeringly rare quistis uses blue magic a set of unique spells that she learns through picking up certain items for monsters basically this is ffa's version of enemy skill some of the spells are useless but there's some special ones the mighty guard is arguably the best defensive spell in the game micro missiles is a free nasty gravity attack and then there's her ultimate blue magic shockwave pulsar the pulsar is interesting as it's the only attack available to us that can actually break the damage cap in one hit unfortunately it's a bloody annoying grind to actually get and again there are better ways of doing damage on the whole selfie and quistis have the weakest limit breaks of the main party by far this leaves us three characters with better limit breaks than squall and yeah irvine's one of them irvine's quake is simply to take his gun and use special ammo to blast the out of enemies you control the amount of shots by tapping r1 for each of them if you're using quick ammo and you've got irvine at max strength this is guaranteed to deal six figure damage especially against a meltdown opponent the only disadvantage is that you're limited to 100 shots in each battle because you can only carry 100 rounds of any ammo or indeed any item at once then there's rinoa at first her limit break involves abilities that you train her dog to use by reading up on them in magazines and then setting them to be learnt as you walk around the angelo cannon wants a special mention seeing as rooney literally puts angelo on her pinwheel and fires him at the enemy it's awesome but after becoming a sorceress renault has the absolutely terrific angel win using this puts her in a berserk state where she casts offensive magic that's five times more powerful than it would be normally at no cost to her supply the damage is so powerful that even gravity-based spells that normally take off half of an enemy's health can kill however what you should do is put a single meteor spell on her get rid of all the trash spells she might have you're okay to keep any stronger ones like ultima for junctioning as limits bias towards weak spells and then she'll use meteor constantly seeing as meteor hits a group of enemies 10 times whenever it's cast a fast renault with high magic and a meltdown opponent can deal close to a hundred thousand hp of damage each time guaranteed until even the enemy dies or she does devastating but the king of the limit breaks well that cell zell uses the duel in this state you input fighting game style commands for a big old combo you learn these commands out of combat kin magazines but you can actually enter them at any time so long as you know the command however the highest damage attacks and longest combo strings do not concern us what concerns us is the armageddon fist basically you just spam zel's two most basic combo attacks punch wash and booyah to hell and back for the whole of the dual period punch booyah with a max strength cell and a meltdown opponent it's not pretty the damage can get close to seven hundred thousand hp for a single duel the armageddon fist can one shot the single strongest enemy in the game that god back in d district prison learnt it and you should learn it too do not with zell by the way the free flashback characters have limit breaks too special mentioned to laguna for desperado where he hooks a rope up to some unseen plane or whatever and manically fires shots at all opponents but i love wards especially as it's just an extension of his main attack which is chucking a massive spear at his opponent ward is a fat mute dragoon and he's great limit breaks are pretty great too it's interesting though that all the dudes have physical limits and all the women have magical ones usually with a heavy random factor to boot there's obviously lots more you can do you can level up to 100 and use bonus abilities to actually get a meaningful stat increase with each level good if you're power leveling you can grind out 300 ultimates all that stuff but really this is the important stuff that managed to get me through the rest of the game getting the really good junctions and making sure those limit breaks are popping also making sure squall and selfie have their ultimate weapons selfies is definitely important as it gives her 255 hit accuracy same as squall there's a reason why she's always been in the party it's not just her personality winoa being a sorceress will handle the magical needs and with that we're basically all set okay next storyline destination adia's house on talking with the matron first we find out something we should have probably figured already adir isn't a sorceress anymore as a matter of fact she hasn't been one for a while her powers passed on to inaudible garden afterwards renault and school have a pretty important chat overlooking the field the big one where noah states her woe is that ultimisha will possess her again and when that happens squall will have to kill her this time low squall stops it and says that no matter what happens he'll be there basically he says the same words that appear in the intro video and states that he will be his knight the whole knight concept is further played on by a deer that the knight doesn't merely exist to protect the sorceress but they also help to keep a sorceress in touch with reality if a sorceress doesn't have a knight then they can lose touch and go bad as adele and ultimisha have it's all part of one of the big themes of the game that you can't do everything on your own and that you need to trust others anyway this is our last proper interaction with a deer for now we have to go elsewhere back to es far where the president has requested our presence who do you think that is sure enough once we get there we run into kiosks and ward in official clothing and a long-head dude in less formal wear finally squall meets with the espar president laguna loire as ever laguna kind of failed upwards into power through plans that are crazy on the surface but always seem to work out sorceress adele could not have been beaten by normal means instead lagoona lured her into the memorial for a loan and pushed her into the chamber he was elected president in the fallout and has been working hard since then it seems like there's a lot of things he didn't know until recently when alone finally got back into contact with him he doesn't talk about wayne's death which makes me think that he only found that out very recently speaking of elon she's now at the pandora garbadian's finally managed to capture her in the wake of the crash landing ultimisha still needs her ability in order to go back to the past fully and achieve her goal of time compression anyway there is a plan to stop ultimisha and who boy is a doozy we're going to crash into the pandora and rescue alone and then we're going to defeat sorceress adele after adele's defeat her power will only be able to pass on to another and so when ultimisha triggers time compression we'll be there to go through it and get close to ultimisha in the future so that we can defeat her it's absolutely ridiculous it's crazy on a level which i cannot hope to justify beyond stupid nonsensical the stupidest plot point of the whole game and yet i can't hate it because unlike all the space stuff it's in character you can pick apart every single hole in this stupid plan it's not hard but the plan is kind of laguna all over isn't it this is the guy who thought that jumping off a cliff would be a good idea the guy who beat a sorceress by pushing her into a sealed chamber his plans are completely ridiculous and always have been and sure our party could probably stand to be a bit more gay for the plan which is basically well you'll just travel through time how i do not know but you know there aren't all that many other ideas ultimisha is in the world's future no matter what we have to stop her in the present yes this could be too much considering everything else in the game though i don't know maybe it's appropriate they were just running on a win and a prayer laguna doesn't make up detailed logical plans he thinks up ridiculous ones on the hoof and trusts that everything will work out there is one final important piece of the whole puzzle by the way one that isn't outright stated but if you chat to people you'll know it seems as though rayne died in childbirth kiowa states that squirrel looks a lot like his mother wild ward through his expression says that he's glad he doesn't take too much after his father the gooner himself says that there is so much more to say but not yet so yeah that's the big final revolution of the squall lagoona work that wayne and laguna are squirrel's real mother and father truly making alone his adoptive sister it perhaps makes sense considering how actually similar they are gives a reason why squall wouldn't just splutter to hell at his ridiculous plan because in the end they're pretty damn close to each other anyway we are now about to enter the point of no return and yeah that means it's probably a good place to stop there's quite a bit more analysis and such to do before we actually finish the game and way too much plot left to simply go through it in the rest of this video five videos it is then yay bye for now white oh we're basically at the end game now when we left we were headed to the lunatic pandora it's finally time to wrap this up this is the last proper part before that there is a couple of little things that i want to analyze first up i've said it before but how the hell is this game divisive i knew that going in but jesus this is the most divisive game i have ever reviewed final fantasy games always inspire discussion but even the slightest mention of ffh will spawn pages of it filled with those who love the game and those who utterly hate it i've seen it myself not just in the first part comments but in threads that have spawned from it on places like neogaf you don't often see the game in the middle of people's final fantasy lists it's either at or near the top or down at the bottom my own opinion of the game is kind of complex so i'm saving it but i do understand both sides if you embrace the love story side of the game and if you gel with squall as a character you may well fall in love with it as i said before i have also seen lots of people who love how our open ffa's gameplay system is and how things are available to you so easily but that's also a valid criticism in that the reason for it is because the game is so broken and the junction system just doesn't work and it's hard to ignore the flights of fantasy that the game takes that it comes up with these completely illogical fins and then tries to justify it with time compression as if that makes sense sometimes people's criticisms do get a bit skewerth like when people say that squall doesn't have any kind of arc as a character when his arc is probably bigger than most any other ff protagonist but still there are some strong negatives against the game even still though i'm not sure if all that justifies ffa being such an emotional topic there is something weird about this game something that just pulls you into writing tons about it maybe because it's so different from every final fantasy game that came before or since for my part i came into ff8 expecting to do a single video and look at where we're at now these differences will become even clearer as we do reach the ending but it's hard to sum up even now the ways that the game tries to integrate gameplay with story the relationship between cypher and scroll as a reversal and distortion of the traditional protagonist and antagonist the makeup of our group and how they're all so purposefully similar to each other important pieces of the story's puzzle being hidden away and the usage of realistically proportioned characters in order to mainly tell the story for animations and gestures these are all things that final fantasy 8 tried to do very differently compared to anything they'd done before not also forgetting the fact that this is so very much a young adult story aimed at a specific market in a way that again i don't think any other final fantasy had been before since even if not all of that works it's certainly an interesting journey for those reasons alone right well on we go then to the pandora we crash into its barrier and with the help of ragnarok's guns open a hole up that we can squeeze through selfie's at the control center she's having the time of her life seriously this is the best moment ever for her we make it through and touch down on the obelisk where straight away we meet up with fujin and wyjin it seems that they're still defending cipher even if it's out of nothing but friendship and loyalty and it's now time to make good on the promise we made in balaam as with the first fujian and writing battle this one can be a problem if you're not prepared sufficiently however we are so they fall and once again they make the tactical decision to retreat just as we enter the pandora we run into another duo biggs and wedge they're not happy although this time it's not because they've seen us and in fact our presence barely registers they're more annoyed at the grunt work that they have to do in this big monolith filled with monsters in fact they're so annoyed that they say it and decide to go off and have a drink this scene is quite symbolic actually it's the end of the g army in our story and basically the end of galvadia's involvement the g army have been replaced by monsters from the luna quiet inside the pandora and they've had enough we fought our last g soldier the first time we tried to get into the pandora this should clue you in on something even though galbadia managed to get the pandora here and help set off the lunacy they haven't actually directed anything for a long time and now as far as galbadia itself goes there's only cipher left and possibly fujin and rygen too this isn't a triumphant moment it's a last stand and part of the reason for coming here is to finish them off the pandora is an odd little dungeon most of it is optional and the only reason to go around it much at all is if you did a lot of the optional stuff that was around in laguna's second flashback when the crystal pillar was being excavated if you did then there is some good treasure around if you didn't well sodium just move on with the plot the main interest in finlo is the monsters they're all piss easy and die in one hit with barely any experience gained the justification is that these monsters are all totally new and that it's basically their first battle therefore they're absolutely no match for us you wonder why this doesn't apply to the monsters outside that touchdown after the luna choir mind you i guess you could say that those ones could have got busy cutting down estar's soldiers and the like but it's a stretch something like that though is where you have to balance between the story and the gameplay considerations our next big fight is with the robot who dumped zealand company out of the lunatic pandora last time around this is pretty much fujian and dwigen's last wall of the dice this time when we actually face the finn yeah it tends to blow up kind of quickly shame we didn't just engage it in combat first time around quite frankly i mean we were all junctioned we could have destroyed the bloody thing and then at last we come into contact with cipher fujian and drajin are here too and they're holding alone cypher commands his friends to fight us once again and they decide to let alone go and she promptly runs back to la ragnarok at last they've truly had enough fujin drops her usual speech and talks to cipher normally in order to convince him that it's over and to stop the act because they're his friends they want to help him it's quite a strong scene and a great development for these two side characters fujian and dwigen are a fairly underrated portion of the game to be honest one look at cipher should also tell you something about his own mental state his once splendid white coat is now tattered and torn there's truly nothing else behind him now well aside from his fascination with ultimisha in the end pride along with control won't let him stop he dismisses his friends although not without a salute and we have to fight him for the last time the final cipher fight starts with a pretty outrageous moment so long as you have odin the summoning of zantetsuken everything plays out as it often does with odin ready to cut sifu in half but then cipher's blade cuts him in half odin's steel cutting sword flies up and into the hand of an unseen individual this sets up cypher pretty damn well for one final awesome encounter which well you don't get if you're prepared cipher himself is still just kind of weak honestly the best thing about him is that you draw aura from him and that's what i spent the battle doing until the unnamed figure from earlier is suddenly summoned at which point he knocks cypher for six if you know final fantasy then you know that this is gilgamesh it is in fact the same gilgamesh from final fantasy v where he was an antagonist after being caught in the interdimensional rift at the end of said game he ends up here after coming through a portal gilgamesh is a recurring character in final fantasy but this was his first proper appearance in the series since the fifth game this appearance is kind of a cool easter egg now that odin is gone and he is gone gilgamesh takes his role he appears randomly in battles to help you out with one of four attacks including zantetsuken he can also deal big damage with masamune another common ff sword and excalibur if you're unlucky he'll use excalibur a cheap knockoff of the latter sword which deals a single point of damage to all enemies and of course if you never actually got odin in the game you don't get any of this at all and you just fight cypher normally and so it appears that cipher is finally done rinoa is a little conflicted about this and kind of walks away but he's not done in fact he sprints back up and sensing the opportunity captures renault off-screen at which point zell comes in seemingly all away from the ragnarok to tell us just that even though she walked off screen seconds ago a bit silly but whatever disc free ends just as cipher is about to shovel another into the arms of the weight in adele but we're still right in the middle of everything so there's no time to stop the presence of another source was to possess wakes adele stroke altimeter up and she embraces renault meaning of course that we finally have to fight adele it's a fairly gruesome sight this can be a tricky battle again because you're on a time limit adele drains health from winona and if she dies then the game is over you also have to be careful not to actually hit manoa so no spells that damage everyone in fact you absolutely should not do what i did here which was to stick or on squall and use renzokucan i was lucky in that lis suenzo didn't have a finishing blow if it had well i'd have probably killed renault as it is it just killed adele instead with wino are freed from adele's grasp alone sends her back in time so that ultimisher can cast the time compression spell before quickly bringing her back at least that's what i think happens the plot is so crazy right now that truthfully i'm not too sure in any case the time compression begins a long fmv sequence at the end of it we have this weird fight where basically we go against several different generic sorceresses through many ages and surroundings it's not a difficult fight it's just kind of long i suppose that through doing this we are kind of fulfilling the role of seed and the goal of ultimatum seed were made to combat aggressive sorceresses and we're doing that ultimisha also wishes to be the one single all-powerful sorceress and after time compression is over she now is at last the spell is completed and the party find themselves in the future just outside ultimisha's castle the final dungeon [Music] well i don't really know what to say about the plot going on again it does kind of make me understand why people get so annoyed with the game it really does get a bit too much with all the time compression stuff the alone bit we know are suddenly getting captured again how many times is that now there's some great fmvs and set pieces of that there is no doubt but the plot that hands them all together does become quite weak and ultimisha is well we're gonna be fighting her aren't we short of seeing her personality when she was controlling a deer there's so little that we know is she just a throwback to the final bosses in older final fantasy games the really big monsters that we didn't know a lot about who were the cause of other goings-on as opposed to being more like the kefkas and sephiroths was cipher the true primary antagonist this whole time hmm there's more ponderings and there's that other theory too we'll get to it just before we head off to that final dungeon i'd like to talk a little about the game's music while generally it's of the same high quality of most noburu matsu soundtracks it's still quite different in a way there's less emphasis on individual character themes more on big unifying melodies that you often hear repeated throughout the game it's constructed differently from other final fantasies in that regard although there are some notable themes that repeat for characters such as lagoona's man with the machine gun or we know as my mind the soundtrack isn't as typically catchy as a lot of the ff soundtracks but it's definitely moody and no less of a soundtrack forlat and the cornerstones of the series such as dungeon themes battle themes and boss themes are really freaking great all of the time and yet it's still kind of an underrated soundtrack by some maybe due to the couple of missteps there are not many people tend to like the world map theme or the s5 theme still it's strong work regardless and as we get to the end of the game i thought it deserved something of a mention [Music] so here we are then ultimisha's castle now we can go outside if we wish there are some portals that take us back to the world map you can also find ragnarok again you have to go to a chocobo forest in the central continent find a chocobo so you can get over shallow water and then you can get the ship back mind you the world is a wholly different place now oh by the way if this is the first time you've caught a chocobo you're treated to an explanation of something called chocobo world which might confuse you this was a mini-game that you could play on something called a pocket station with your save it was kind of like sony's answer to the dreamcast's vmu you walk the chocobo around fight enemies and you can gain unique items and even a gf or two for the main game by using it however the pocket station was never released outside of japan chances are most folk have never played it although it is available on the steam edition that i'm playing anyway right now you can barely go anywhere all the towns are naturally locked off due to time compression because well it'd be rather silly if you could quickly stop a timber for a bit and talk to someone about the resistance against galbalia who hasn't had a speech updated since like disc one balaam garden well isn't even on the map there is someone on the wagnock who can sell you supplies if you need them and you can still use the plane to get around if you feel like you need to level more or get more spells and so forth and you can still obtain odin bahamut and eden from their locations if you haven't already other than that this is the end of the game the world is empty there is nothing but the last dungeon i've complained a lot about the quality of the dungeons throughout the game that most of them seem to be rather lazy cut and paced efforts the sewers the district prison galbadia garden and so on even though there's only a few screens in them the lunatic pandora in the end is a good example of that i can see what happened now all of the big effort into making dungeons went into ultimisha's castle considering that most of the last disc is this dungeon yeah it's worth it a truly fantastic huge dungeon that's filled with stuff to do the main gimmick of the castle is that while in there most of your commands are sealed off you literally only start with attack there are seven bosses inside the castle and you can unlock one command for each one you beat and it's possible to go straight through everything and head to ultimish's master room if you want and trigger the final battle although chances are you would lose also you split into two parties and use these weird points to switch between them this is only actually used in one of the dungeons puzzles but it is also helpful if you want to quickly switch to the second party who start just inside the entrance and get out of the castle if you want to save as far as unlocking commands go well it depends items are good to have as is magic you definitely want ways of healing yourself available as quickly as possible if there's any gf's that you missed you can also draw them from the bosses in the castle it kind of depends on how you play there was one hairy moment i faced one boss with my second weaker party who i wasn't able to heal after putting the junctions on them with only attacks and limits at my disposal and the boss had high defense against physical attacks fortunately quistus's micromissiles and irvine's shot got me through just about it was pretty hairy as you get more commands the bosses become fairly easy seeing as you use the same strategy against all of them you start with meltdown and then bash them with physical attacks perhaps using aura for limit breaks against some and there is also a special puzzle that summons omega weapon the single strongest enemy in the game whether you do that or not it's a damn good dungeon where you kick backhand just enjoy the excellent graphics surroundings and music finally though after going up a spiral staircase and traversing a long bridge you reach the master room ideally with all the commands unlocked will we get the big evil speech that we've all been waiting for now that we're finally facing ultimature of course we have already had some we did have all that she spouted when she was in control of a deer after all she certainly knows us calling us locusts that swarm across generations which to be fair we kind of did do when we were going through this compression eventually though she does keep fins short it's time for the big fight and if the final dungeon itself was pretty damn good the final boss fight itself that's even better the fight starts as follows the first form is simply herself and she casts high-level magic against three party members she picks at random if and when a party member is knocked out they will be absorbed into time if not revived after a turn and another member will replace them the battle only ends once all members are defeated in the end you will very likely be left with your three actual good fighters the ones you've junctioned as it is squalls started with zell and christus by his side for the first form zell and quistis had nothing on them so they died quickly which brought irvine and selfie into play and hey this at least meant i could start doing proper damage irvine died just before the first form finished the mass so long cowboy [Music] after a bit of a beating altemisha decides to cash out of the battle temporarily and bring in a new force guiva you may know that name already back in the battle of the gardens renault returned swall's win that zell had borrowed that said rin had a sort of image of a lion on it and you could actually give it a name griever is squirrel's ultimate idea of a gf that ultimisher creates from that written in order to fight the party now it is also possible that you gave squadron a silly name when asked to which might cheapen the dramatic power the scene can have grieva's attacks are mainly physical but he also has the powerful shockwave pulsar at his disposal you may well want to heal after that one after beating on grievous a little bit ultimisha decides to go into second form and junction herself with grieva creating this quite repulsive looking beast it wouldn't be a final battle without all of these stages after all ulti grieva means business she can summon monsters cast ultima use very nasty physicals it's best to get rid of her quick in storyline getting rid of her means overcoming griever this manifestation that was born out of squall's mind essentially overcoming his own issues in the final battle there's no better cure for that than wenzel kukan but of course it isn't over once ulti grievous is done we get the true form of ultimature right in the middle of time compression a creepy theme is introduced which then suddenly kicks into a remix of the classic final fantasy boss theme possibly the best music in the whole game this is the toughest battle of the lot for various reasons she can cast hell's judgment on the party which reduces everybody's hp to one she can also entirely deplete your stocks of magic even if they're junctioned which can have a very nasty effect on your characters suddenly a really powerful character is a weakling she also has a spell called apocalypse and if you haven't healed properly after hell's judgment yeah that's game over once her lower half is revealed you can actually draw apocalypse from her and cast it if you wish it will hurt her after a lot of healing and battering as well as when noah gets him knocked out ultimisher starts a final speech it's actually a fairly somber statement in full she says reflect on your childhood your sensation your words your emotions time it will not wait no matter how hard you hold on it escapes you and she only starts saying this once the hp is gone but she says it in segments and you have to keep attacking especially because she herself can still attack during this time even if she does at this point seemingly accept her fate the speech is never finished and is the last bit and with one last attack ultimisher is defeated thus ending one of the greatest final boss battles in the whole of the final fantasy series seriously this entire final dungeon yeah the best gameplay was definitely saved until last although old tamisha is defeated our characters are stuck in the void with seemingly no way of escaping they can only cling on to the one idea that laguna had that if you think of a place where you want to be then that's where you'll eventually end up it seems like the majority of our characters do find a way except for squall he's still struggling against himself we get a long look at this internal fight in particular as he tries to remember with noah the scene where squall first met renault is constantly replayed but distorted each time with squall unable to remember anything clearly there's plenty of images in this montage some of them quite shocking i mean you've probably all seen that one image of squirrel with a big hole where his face is supposed to be haven't you squall is trying to get to where he needs to go but he's still finding nothing but gray bleakness for rinoa the white is replaced by the field and a feather is something that both winoa and squall can cling onto she sees him in the field but squall doesn't hear her and in the end there is still one more place squall needs to go as time compression falters we go back to the orphanage years ago with a young squall and a matron leader who stumbles upon ultimisha or what's left of her she is thoroughly beaten but she cannot die not until she passes her powers on and so she does to a deer afterwards adida runs into the adult squall who tells her that she must form seed the end of the story is the beginning of this story it seems that ultimish's plan to become the all-powerful sorceress and warlord of time was always fated to end this way and will always end this way in creating her plan in order to get revenge on those who want sorceresses in the past she sealed her own fate back in the field finally with school appearing close to death the feather brings him back time it seems has been restored to where it was as we move into the ending sequence properly you get to see how various people's storylines finish seifer is now free of his sorceress fascination and is having fun fishing with fujin and ryden as bathun garden passes over his head it's a great symbolic shot in which he's become the fallen angel basically laguna remembers when he proposed to reign as he pays a visit to her grave with a loan and in the end well the folks at the garden have a bit of a party with everyone docking off as usual and we know outside with squall who we do not see until the very end mind you it's possible that he could have just been the one holding the camera everything's all fine at least for now ultimisha is still in the future but we know how the story ends and that's how this story ends roller credits so final thoughts final fantasy 8 is undoubtedly a very interesting game there's nothing all that much like it either in the history of the series itself or in jrpgs generally it's been a long ride and yeah there are flaws in how ridiculous the storyline gets and sometimes how everything seems to be hung together by strands of spittle but for all those issues i would be lying if i said that i didn't enjoy like 90 percent of my time spent with final fantasy 8 and if i said that i didn't grow to love the journey and warm to its characters most of them anyway i highly recommend playing final fantasy 8 if you haven't not necessarily because you'll think it's a brilliant game as more than any other game i've ever reviewed there is a definite your mileage may very stickle on it this is a game you either love or hate but as a manual for storytelling and in particular combining story characters and gameplay it's filled with so many ideas a lot of them are rough but they're novel many of them would not be taken up by square after this and ff7 not to mention the proto-industrial ff6 final fantasy 9 which was developed at the same time as ff 8 was presented and seen as something a lot closer to the series roots final fantasy 10 the first ps2 entry into the series that started development as ff 8 was released would do its own thing as such there's lots of things about ff8s that represent a road not taken in design making it a unique entry in the series that should be experienced and can be appreciated no matter how much experience you have with final fantasy or jrpgs as a whole square tried to create a game that would appeal to everyone from the most dedicated rpg fan to the casual in many ways it's like a jrpg sandbox where you can use junctions to build any character into exactly what you want them to be and you can pretty much start doing it from the get-go it's not exactly the most stable system put mildly but some people love that experimental side of the game either way it's hardly a game that you can just be about personally it's certainly not something i regret it hooked me in pretty quickly annoyed me at times but ultimately yeah i kind of loved it but well we're still not done what about that ending and what it really means and what about those two theories that always come up when people talk about the game squall is dead renault is ultimisha i've waited until the game itself was finished to talk about them otherwise i'd have had to talk about them in stages which would just be annoying especially when the ending itself is such an integral part to both theories so yeah let's break them down right squall is dead first this is a fan theory that seemed to develop in the mid-noughties from forms and what have you but ended up gathering a fair bit of steam in short the theory posits that squall died when a deer stuck an icicle through his chest and the rest of this game is his pre-death dream personally i'm not a big fan of this theory and i don't really buy it but it's worth going through its main points the whole thing is available to read at schoolisdead.com the first point is of course what happens to squall's big wound after squirrel realizes it has healed it's not mentioned for the rest of the game people assume that a deer healed squirrel so he could be interrogated although that doesn't hold because school is a new member of seed and fuss could not reasonably be expected to know much maybe though a deer healed him due to a matron tendency that could still be there not to mention that it wouldn't have been the right time for him to die i do understand the theory it comes from the usual routine that every death or knockout in battle is non-canon but any death in cutscene is something that iris obviously demonstrated in the last game but did squall actually die there one other thing worth noting is that it's not the only time that we see adia's ice spikes the ice strike is actually her limit break you can use it when you play as a deer it does a fair bit of damage but it's not an insta-kill attack or anything so was it there there's certainly doubt about that another point to lefiri is that there's lots of weird fins all over the place once you get into disc two moombas shumi's floating gardens how can this be real surely it's all a dream i don't like this part because it seems like trying to apply real life logic to a jrpg which you just can't do what about all the monsters wondering about before squall takes the icicle to the chest those are acceptable but moonboss aren't come on now you just can't be consistent with that it's not like ff doesn't have a history with friendly people who aren't necessarily human either there's also the facts that fate becomes a constant theme in the game especially after disc one perhaps but that doesn't necessarily equal dead protagonist sure it's said that squall is fated to be the leader of seed even though he's just a cadet but as explained there's literally no other choice be honest i think sid's just buffing sprawl upload being fated to fight scifi and a deal is also explained too really even if gfs and other greater forces are a big part of that then there's the establishment of cypher and renault in disc one as the actual relationship thus making squall and renault which doesn't really get going until disc two the dream relationship with a touch of the vanilla sky about it whereas renault and cipher doesn't get that much of an air in after disc one at least if you ignore when it does at the end of disc two which the theory does it also relies on characters never changing from the moment they're introduced which they clearly do we know that we know when cypher had a flynn and that's how she became aware of seed and where noah speaks of possibly being in love in the aftermath of cipher's death which is a perfectly natural reaction to loss by the way it doesn't mean that the love is actually genuine quistus even goes into lists at the orphanage in fact thinking that something's love when it actually isn't there's just not enough there to make that relationship concrete honestly now the ending is naturally where the theory is strongest the whole sequence where squall was lost in the abyss and a lot of different memories flashback everything from cipher to d-lin to renault at the party who constantly appears in distorted images this could be interpreted as schwall losing touch with his memories finally as he reaches the end of his dream and then in leander and our finally finds school and he appears to be dead until the feathers fly up we don't even get a proper sight of school at all until the final shot of the whole game whether we know and squall out on the balcony there's no denying that squall being dead is one way to interpret this whole thing especially with some of the shots that appear or indeed a lot of the other fmv shots seemingly centering around the events of disc one perhaps still there is a general problem that i have with the theory as a whole in that i don't think it particularly improves the story at all doesn't oh it was all a dream just seemed kind of unsatisfying that's the sort of ending that usually comes in for massive criticism when it's employed and rightly so frankly the whole thing being a dream if that was the intention makes the story feel like a bit of a waste of time and kind of cheapens the whole experience i guess that's why i just don't jive with school is dead all that much i feel like if that was the case and square had made it obvious then people would care for ffa a hell of a lot less than they already do on to the second one lin renault is ultimisha this theory posits that renault being a sorceress is destined to become ultimisha in the future as all of the friends she has die she loses her night and loses her grasp on reality she becomes angry at the way sorceresses are treated and takes her revenge now this theory to me is a bit more interesting some say that square have openly said that the theory isn't correct although i can never find exact proof of that it's said in ffa's book that sorceresses have a lifespan as long as a normal person but also that a sorceress cannot die until they have passed their powers onto someone else so that still seems a trifle open-ended square have also paid a bit more lip service to the theory in one of the dissidia games where ultimisha's weapons share renault's weapons names it's an older theory then scroll is dead first coming up sometime in 2001 the theory is mainly based around foreshadowings a deer saying that squirrel must fight till the end even if it will bring tragedy in others or we know saying that it's okay if she ends up being killed by school and only by school while dealing with her newfound sorceress abilities there are also certain similarities between renault and ultimisha wins play quite a big part in both of their designs they have similar facial structures and so on and one of the big points is the summoning of guiva in the final fight a guardian force that ultimisha creates from squirrel's written and one latter noah knows about too indeed she's the only other person who knows about guiva because she wanted her in just like it is it significant also that ultimisha in her sorceress form has lion's feet we know it is ultimisha certainly gives the ending a different sort of twist if it's true that renault is fated to become ultimisha then the end of the game is actually quite downcast especially for a final fantasy game most of the time ff games like to wrap things up on a more positive note rather than saying that ultimately once school is dead and all of these other people are we know we'll live on and ultimately cause this particular world crisis which school and company will resolve in the future by killing her but then final fantasy 8 does do a lot of things differently to other games in the series it also certainly helps with the weakest part of ultimisha her complete lack of character development and it does rather work thematically with the game's themes about fate maybe this connection is what square we're going for with altamisha's final somber lines that are so todd with how her character behaves through the rest of the game it's not often that final fantasy's antagonists get that sort of final speech hm i quite like the theory i think if it were the case it would definitely add an extra layer to the game but do i believe it not sure there's not really any kind of smoking gun to be found either here or with squall is dead and a theory is in the end just a theory a lot of the evidence is open to different interpretations and some of it could just be coincidental either way they're fun to speculate on and they can be fun to argue about so long as no one gets too hectic about it but then this is final fantasy 8 we're talking about so obviously they do and with that well that about wraps it up i'm not sure if there's all that much more i can say except of course to thank you for joining me on this rather epic five-part journey it's certainly been one hell of a ride and even if ff8 isn't a game that i have as much experience with as i do with ff7 hopefully i was able to do right by it bye for now thanks for watching this video if you like this video then please do like it you can also subscribe to the channel check me on my facebook or my twitter or indeed my patreon if you'd like to see things like google hangouts or skype chats or review requests and all that good now for this video i would like to thank the following adam schaefer andrew dalton andy capp audi soli conformist dustin cooper gary pinkett george newton graphen blackpool guy middleton ian roberts james it james loveridge jason jason leach jason stevens johan erickson john scott keith barlow kyle f ello blind lee noise manager sim.net mark heslop mark johnston mark whittington martin pataki nanette macron ola falben pete morris peter siddorn filter prog potter margell rachel maxwell romeo wyan wyatt coleman sean zoltek seth robinson simon gulliver taylor almond leone natural tanyo jae tristan squote v shardi and yuka operator

Channel: Kim Justice

Views: 165,176

Keywords: kim justice, final fantasy viii, ff8, ffviii, final fantasy viii review, kim justice final fantasy, final fantasy viii story, final fantasy viii reaction, final fantasy viii walkthrough, final fantasy documentary, final fantasy viii longplay, final fantasy viii gameplay, kim justice review, kim justice video, kim justice documentary, kim justice games, final fantasy ps1, playstation, squaresoft, squall, rinoa, seifer, ultimecia, selphie, irvine, quistis, zell, laguna, edea

Id: PxsX1XOmES4

Length: 227min 43sec (13663 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 13 2021