Final Fantasy VIII Classic Jobs Part VII

I wanted to play roughly half of disc 3 for this update. It's hard to say where that division is, really, so I decided to go up until I got the Ragnarok. That's probably more than half of disc 3, a lot of which is either aimless wandering or "story". It was played over August 19th to 25th.

First, we needed a bit of a story dump to pick up after the end of disc 2, with Edea regaining her faculties.

This was also a nice opportunity to play some cards. I thought to get the Edea and Seifer cards from these folks...

...and also did a fair chunk of the CC Group quests. I don't even fully know why, as it's not as if I'm 100%ing the game on this playthrough. Oh well. It's kind of fun.


I don't believe there was a way for me to go any further than this right now. I wasn't able to find Dr. Kadowaki with Rinoa's situation. And speaking of Rinoa's situation, I was quite forgetful about the order of having to check on Rinoa, speak to Edea, and find the White SeeD ship. At one point, all of those were given directives at the same time. I ended up piloting the Garden around Centra for what had to be over an hour. I strongly dislike the world map music ("Blue Fields") in this game.


Eventually I figured out the way forward. This meant having a bit of Laguna time.
In the last update, I got a bit ranty about some of the worst story beats of this game but also talked about the interesting subtle detail of Irvine remembering Edea. There was another one of those I came upon recently: Seifer wants to be the sorceress' knight, and he holds his gunblade like this:

Seifer's whole life was inspired by Laguna's movie. Neat, right? I hadn't realized that previously.
Still this game has just terrible gameplay and story, but as I've said, there are certainly some aspects to appreciate.

Squall is one of those things I dislike, mostly, and I think that's clear from what I've said so far. Something I find puzzling is this:

Like, why did they need to include Squall speaking 10 periods? Is he walking up to the button panel and like staring at it in deep thought for several seconds? In any normal, reasonable game, a menu would pop up with the floor choices... but somebody producing this game thought it was really important to show that when Squall enters an elevator, he says lengthy ellipses before selecting his floor. "The way this guy uses an elevator is an important element of his characterization as a person who doesn't say things."
And his poor teammates. What are they thinking at this juncture?

Anyway, we found the White SeeD ship eventually. I was able to use the Holy draw point, which is nice, but it seems I forgot to pick up Girl Next Door earlier so that's a bit disappointing.


Okay, on to Esthar. I had the option of using Edea here, but I'm hesitant to stock her with anything since she goes away eventually. Thus, I just kept my team of Squall the knight, Quistis the thief, and Irvine the white mage for a while.

This decision remains rooted partly in the idea that my black mage GFs - Quezacotl, Shiva and Ifrit - all have their abilities. However, it also matters that my knight and thief can deal reasonable damage without consuming a resource.
When Selphie and Irvine meet up with everyone else just before this part, they specify that there's nothing noteworthy to the north or south, so the game tells you to go east. I find this amusing because this is what's north:

and this is what is south:

Great scouting, team. Although really there's also nothing to the east:

but it's still silly that they chose any direction at all.

This salt flat area was boring. I don't recall meeting new and interesting enemies and I don't think there were any noteworthy draws. Eventually we encountered the boss here, Abadon. I noticed pretty quickly that I had a lot of trouble damaging it with weapons, including Irvine's Shot limit break. However, Squall tells us that this boss is undead. I decided to try out Irvine's white magey Recover command against it.

This made the fight rather quick.


There was a little Laguna segment here. I'm glad I could manually assign characters for Kiros and Ward, and just sort of kept things the same.

We went to Esthar. It's an interesting environment but very little actually happens there on the first trip. It's just exciting to access the shopping mall, where I picked up some magazines and such. Very quickly the folks here decide to send you into space.

At this point, I procrastinated a bit. I went to every single map in the Esthar region to check for draw points (none of which did much) and I grabbed this goody:

I actually remembered everything I needed to activate the Doomtrain GF with this. Alexander did not yet have access to Med Lev Up, so it wasn't happening yet, but I knew I'd need Malboro Tentacles. I happened to encounter a Malboro on the way around, so I stuck around hoping to encounter more. The first one was easy, because Odin showed up.

Subsequent Malboros were not that easy. For one thing, I had terrible luck encountering them. I must've killed dozens of Mesmerizes waiting to encounter more Malboros.

When I took this screenshot I had 66 Mesmerize Blades. This number eventually crept into at least the 80s.
The other issue with Malboros was, of course, Bad Breath. My white mage has Ribbon and thus no issues with negative status, but if a strong ally aimed at the white mage the fight was over.

That pictured battle actually ended with me running away. To try and mitigate issues with Bad Breath, I reconfigured Squall the knight's junctions, moving Reflect from HP to ST Def. Eventually I think I beat two more Malboros and got tentacles from both, so it was fine. The HP provided by Drain seems fine for now regardless.


We went to the Lunar Gate and an irrelevant dog showed up. Where exactly was this dog coming from? It is a mystery.


From here, Squall and Quistis were headed into space with Rinoa, while Zell and Selphie were escorting Edea. Irvine was... doing nothing in particular?

Now I recall that the game's final area - and its final fight - encourage the use of more than three characters. Because I have four jobs available and I've been able to swap their junctions, I have four characters worth of junctionable spells. I knew eventually I'd probably want to be able to have all six characters in battle-ready shape. I swapped things a bit for this part, and I had Rinoa set up as a knight, Squall as a white mage, and Quistis still as my thief. Zell was configured as a black mage, but I thought: I should probably identify another job for Selphie and start outfitting her for it. I decided - and this decision may have some consequences - that a white mage was my most important character to have two copies of. I figured I'd eventually want an extra knight too, as their physical offense has obvious value, but I didn't commit to that yet.

What this means is that if I've got two fully-outfitted final parties at endgame, they'll be like this:
Knight + White Mage + Thief
Knight + White Mage + Black Mage

Thus... I did some refining and divided up the white mage GFs and started getting Selphie set up as a white mage!

More immediately, my party on earth is Selphie the white mage, Zell the black mage, and Edea with no junctions.

They didn't encounter a Malboro... but there were more Mesmerizes.

Next up was the initial visit to the Lunatic Pandora. I... don't remember why we wanted to go inside? But we can. This is another one of those little subplots that, while it contributes nothing to narrative or characterization, is kind of neat. The design of the city lends itself well to the little timed sequence here.

In previous playthroughs, I think I used Enc-None to get in. That's not an option for me, so I had Zell throw out Thundagas to end some of the fights pretty quickly and ran from a couple of others.

I think I've come to realize that this is basically an optional dungeon, although that isn't super clear when you're playing. In part because we got in, used two draw points for Meteor and Holy, and then I think I accidentally walked into a later boss and got thrown out of the Lunatic Pandora about as quickly as possible. What was the point of that?


Then came all of the space stuff. Some of the imagery is very cool but narratively I don't know why a country would put all of us randos in space.

I remembered that there was a rare card up here. I believe it's the Alexander card that Piet has for some reason. I think I had over 30 minutes of saves and reloads getting this, because I am terrible at the gigantic list of rules people play with in space. After many of these reloads, Piet abolished the random rule! This still didn't make matches easy given the presence of same and plus, but it was better. It didn't take long from then to get Alexander.

I thought this line was funny:

I had only recently set Rinoa to be a knight and Squall to be the black mage.

Eventually a bunch of craziness happened and Rinoa got possessed and the Lunar Cry happened - another big setpiece that is entirely irrelevant to gameplay and almost entirely irrelevant to the game's plot... but somebody wanted to animate it for some reason.

There's quite a stretch here where I took occasional screenshots but really it's irrelevant to the playthrough so let's just skip ahead to when we were rescued by literally floating into an abandoned ship completely inexplicably abandoned in space and in the exact place two people happened to float to untethered and distant from both their planet and their original destination. There is no greater deus ex machina that isn't a literal bolt from the heavens. Actually, this is clearly less probable than a bolt from the heavens solving a crisis. The writing went from bad spy film in high school to fever dream pretty quick.


 
^ who let this happen?

Okay, I was saying something about being relevant right?
Well, things actually got pretty interesting once Squall and Rinoa were on the ship. Rinoa is very low-levelled compared to Squall, and this makes the fights with Propagators quite dangerous. We muddled through the first one I fought - a purple one - and Squall kept restoring Rinoa since she took a fair bit of damage as she attacked. We ended the fight like this:

This ended up being a bountiful opportunity as I found the other purple Propagator - in fact, I didn't fight a single unnecessary battle here. I realized I could keep Squall in critical and Rinoa would cover him. She could use Defend to take 0 damage from almost everything, while he could be the offense using Renzokuken. It wasn't 100% stress-free, especially at the start of battles, but it was a good system.

This strategic use of Defend and cover is reminiscent of strategies that are widely used against Minotaur in Final Fantasy V. This game hasn't traditionally felt like it had much strategy to it - just set yourself up into a game-breaking stat build or GF and roll over the game. It felt good to play this way.

After the purple fellas, I did the two red Propagators.

Next, the yellow ones. I figured I'd do green last since one was clearly sitting still no matter what.
 
This got more and more comfortable as we went along. I got a good screenshot here of Rinoa's defensive cover in action.
 

With that, we were on our way back home.
 
Squall remembers that at some point clearly off-camera between disc 2 and disc 3, he fell in love.

As a great leader would say: "whatever".
We're back on earth with a pretty awesome-looking spaceship. We seem to have lost our friend Edea.


This means, among other things, we can get the last few GFs! Let's see, first there's Doomtrain to think about...

And then there's this green fella here:

We'll deal with them next time.


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