Final Fantasy VIII Classic Jobs Part VI
Aug. 19th, 2024 10:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freshfeelingThis update is based on gameplay from August 14th and August 18th, from Fisherman's Horizon through the end of Disc 2. Starting at FH, I recalled that the mayor has the Quezacotl card for some reason.
Then I rescued the mayor from... our friends? Around this point I ended up with a full set of -aga tier elemental spells exclusively for my black mage, too. Junctioned Blind and Silence spells are still pulling a lot of weight.
Squall re-established that he is not interested in Rinoa at all, because that is what the game repeatedly presents. Squall's friends deny this.
I intentionally put everyone on the wrong song, resulting in Zell tapdancing wonderfully to a jig. Then there's the part where the game tells you that you can't select Selphie. I always thought it was unclear why but that there was subtext that she was exhausted from intercourse with Irvine - sort of a reverse Buffy/Angel scenario. Now I'm thinking maybe I was wrong; if that was the implication, it's not as heavy-handed as I remembered.
With my newfound freedom, I spent a couple of literal hours on sidequests. On my route circumventing the inter-continental railroad, I wandered into Deling City, but there wasn't much to do here besides getting Rinoa's card. I also did one chocobo forest in Centra, which I have never found fun or useful.
Next up, I really wanted another thief job GF, hoping for Abilityx4, and I knew Tonberry was available around this time. It took me quite a while to find things in this mostly featureless world, but I made it. I used the little Tonberries to get 100 Death spells stocked for both my black mage and thief.
I started with roughly 80 Meltdown spells that I had drawn off of the Tri-Face under Balamb Garden earlier. I got a rhythm for beating Tonberries reasonably quickly since we're operating under the 20-minute timer. Rinoa as my black mage would start with one cast of Meltdown to reduce its defenses, and Squall the knight would use 3-or-so Renzokukens to defeat the Tonberry. Irvine the white mage was there to heal in the wake of the Tonberries' occasional Everyone's Grudge counter attacks. With this, each Tonberry battle took roughly 2 minutes.
It took a few trips because of the 20-minute timer, but eventually the King Tonberry showed up. We fought him essentially the exact same way, and it took longer but wasn't very difficult.
He is a cute little guy now. Does he remain king? Am I the king? Tonberry politics are mysterious.
Our thief has access to more abilities now, including Auto-Haste and Alert.
I debated whether to get Odin while I was here or not and I decided that I should... mostly because he is one of the game's best sources of Triple spells, which have excellent potential in terms of junctioning stats. At first, I didn't remember the route, with so many ladders and winding paths and puzzle elements. I got to Odin with ~13 minutes remaining and my knight, who couldn't draw Triple, accidentally defeated him with ~11 minutes remaining. Oops. I didn't think he'd be that easy.
Stocking a higher-potency spell like Triple is hard for characters with low magic stats anyway! I chose to restart. This time, I brought a thief, white mage and black mage, all of whom could draw Triple. My plan was for at least the white mage and black mage to get 100 stock of Triple, and the thief to get as much as they could by roughly the 4-minute mark, then attack to win. This worked out marvelously.
My mages both had 100 stocks of Triple, and my thief had 40-or-so. I ended up swapping the white mage and thief's stock, figuring I could get the rest for the white mage when I battle Cerberus later.
Right now, the stats happened to look like this. Here is Irvine the thief:
Here is Squall the knight (who I have been keeping as a knight for the express purpose of him using Defend so other characters gain a higher proportion of experience):
And Rinoa, who is currently spec'd as a black mage:
The next thing on the sidequest agenda was the Shumi Village. I did the whole rock sidequest. Besides the Phoenix Pinion, which is actually pretty nice, there wasn't a ton of point to this. Rinoa the black mage was able to draw from the Ultima draw point twice, though.
That text for Squall reads a lot more like late-game Squall than early-mid-game Squall. It's like he cares about something. Despite the obvious grammatical error it's probably the best-written Squall textbox in the game so far.
We awkwardly circumvented the inter-continental railroad again and found Galbadia Garden by Balamb Town. I didn't really remember the order of events in the game and thought this was the part where we were supposed to fight but apparently that isn't the case.
In Balamb Town, we are forced to have Zell in the party. I believe I had Squall as a knight, Zell as a thief, and Rinoa as a white mage. Finally I was able to win Zell's card off of his mom.
Raijin was a good fight. There were no particularly good draws but the steals were nice.
Fujin allowed us to get the Pandemona GF. We stole some more Str Ups. The steal from Fujin was actually a Megalixir! Somehow we ended up beating Fujin and Raijin at nearly the same time; I thought I had been focusing on Raijin a lot. Oh well.
Pandemona is aligned to the knight job, but won't actually unlock any new features or abilities that Brothers didn't already offer.
Again, I haven't played this game in ages and there's a lot I don't remember, so trekking up to Trabia seemed a bit out-of-nowhere to me. While I was up there I thought I should see what snowfield enemies I might find, only to find that it was mostly just more Bite Bugs. Eventually we fought a Snow Lion, too, but besides being a huge blob of HP it was a very uninteresting and unprofitable battle.
Then came the game's maybe-stupidest plot point. God.
"Eagle river?!"
Augh. This game.
Around the time I was playing the D-District Prison part of this game, I found myself curious if that part of the game stood out to others as an example of bad game design. I searched a little and came upon a GameFAQs topic and a Reddit thread about "worst parts of this game" which some people took to mean locations and narrative beats and others took more generally to mean aspects in general. Indeed, D-District Prison is widely considered a very bad part of this game, but it was also amusing to see how many people brought up this Dharma & Greg weirdness of almost the entire team growing up together and forgetting about it, but then one person remembering and telling them but only way later.
This is just so stupid.
They introduce this idea of GFs consuming your memories but Quistis was 5 in the orphanage and 10 when she came to Garden but didn't recognize that Headmaster Cid was literally her foster dad and she knew three of the other kids. And someone was like, "it's less dumb when you realize that in planning it was just Irvine, Squall and Seifer who were there" and although that negates some of the anachronism and tones down the silliness of the premise, it still doesn't mean anything, or do anything. It's stupid. And connecting the GFs to memory just brings into question why they do remember some things. And Selphie's little "I junctioned a GF and forgot about it" thing. Augh. Why. They could've just not.
It might not even be the worst part of this game's story, either!
Oh, I should say, though, that there was one positive aspect of this being part of Irvine's story (such as it is) though! I only realized on this playthrough and as I read through a few ancient FF8 threads justifying this crap that the reason Irvine couldn't shoot Edea during the parade is because Irvine - and only Irvine! - knew her as his former Matron. It makes Irvine's role in the team and failure as a sniper a little bit more interesting and relevant. The language used during the earlier assassination plot didn't particularly suggest it, but in retrospect it's a neat idea.
Anyway: Those kids ended up becoming my knights, thieves, white mages and black mages... so let's focus on that.
The next part is another one of those disjointed-but-independently great segments where the Balamb Garden and Galbadia Garden fight each other. Things like this and most of disc 1 remind me of the way a Mission Impossible film (or a modern James Bond film) is written, by setting up amazing stunts and scenes and then a plot is hodgepodged around them, and character as a concept is largely irrelevant. This can sometimes be quite successful! I deeply enjoy Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol though it may be a semi-accidental masterpiece.
The story is still stupid but this segment of gameplay and visual design is excellent. The characters have gone full-on-idiot though, talking about their jewelry and crushes while their home is a battleground all around them, with literal screens of wounded children. Why is the freakin' doctor with six lines in the game giving Squall the tide-turning inspirational speech?
Sorry. Knights, thieves, white mages and black mages. Right.
We entered Galbadia Garden. Fights here were nice and varied, with new enemies like Death Claws here. The first one I encountered had Reflect to draw, but I wasn't able to capitalize on it and the subsequent ones didn't have Reflect. I have 100 Reflects stocked on my knight but not yet on my white mage.
As usual for recent parts of the game, Squall is a knight, Irvine is a thief, and Rinoa is a white mage. This is mostly because all of my black mage GFs (Quezacotl, Shiva and Ifrit) were from the beginning of the game and have learned all of their abilities. Irvine was mugging a lot of items here and, with Triples junctioned to strength he's fairly strong now.
I really enjoy the part where you fight the hockey team. As I approached this part, I wasn't sure whether that was a real memory I had of this game or something I imagined. I think it's hilarious. Normally I might benefit from their Blizzaga and Water spells but I'm already full of those. I used Scan on them too, since I think this is the only spot to meet them. (Funny: I haven't been doing that with bosses or anything.)
We cross a basketball court during this part too, and it's almost too bad we didn't also encounter the Galbadian basketball team. Wendigos in this game have kind of a neat basketball-ish attack though.
I ran around fighting enemies and getting keycards. There was nothing else interesting until I ran into Cerberus. Here, Rinoa my white mage stocked Triples until we had 100, which meant we were maxed for the thief, white mage and black mage.
Cerberus was actually fairly tough. Its Tornado spell only did 200-300 damage to Rinoa and Irvine, but did considerably more to Squall the knight, enough to two-shot him. Eventually Rinoa the white mage used a Shell spell on Squall to help him survive. She also stopped drawing Triples occasionally to use Dispel on Cerberus, to keep his tail down and prevent him from wiping us out. It wasn't too hard besides that.
Cerberus the hound of hell joins as a white mage GF, since its typical behaviour is a powerful buff. With that, we have all four of our white mage GFs! This is the first job with this distinction. Cerberus doesn't actually enable anything new at all, at least not until we get Tool-RF.
I was curious after the fight why Tornado rocked Squall so hard compared to the other characters. I knew Rinoa could junction spirit and had Auto-Shell, but I was surprised Irvine had any real resistance. It turns out that Bio and Aero are literally the only spells with elements that my thief can have access to, so he had 80% resistance to wind damage. I hadn't really paid attention to that. I wonder if that will ever come in handy again?
Next, we fought Seifer and Edea. We actually ended up doing the Seifer fight twice, because after my first attempt we met a Tri-Face who super quickly confused Irvine and Squall and then Irvine wasted an Elixir on it. That was my last Elixir and I decided that was worth a reload.
Seifer doesn't have much worth drawing for me, and it happened that he brought Irvine to critical a lot, so on both attempts it ended fairly quickly in part because of Dark Shot. I went with Dark Shot because status ailments have so much utility in this game and have a reasonable chance to affect bosses (at least so far).
Besides that, a favourite thing for me was that Squall, as my knight, was able to use his Defend command to reduce the damage from Seifer's powerful Demon Slice attack to 0; there is definitely some epicness to that.
Even Edea herself didn't have a whole lot of exciting things to draw. Irvine stole a Hero (book?) from Seifer and we drew Alexander from Edea when she engaged. Irvine happened to take her down with Dark Shot, too. He had no particular hesitation about shooting her this time.
We didn't do any setup with Alexander yet, although it actually will provide a few new assets to our team's knight. Instead we saved right at the break between disc 2 and disc 3.
The worst may be yet to come.
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Then I rescued the mayor from... our friends? Around this point I ended up with a full set of -aga tier elemental spells exclusively for my black mage, too. Junctioned Blind and Silence spells are still pulling a lot of weight.
Squall re-established that he is not interested in Rinoa at all, because that is what the game repeatedly presents. Squall's friends deny this.
I intentionally put everyone on the wrong song, resulting in Zell tapdancing wonderfully to a jig. Then there's the part where the game tells you that you can't select Selphie. I always thought it was unclear why but that there was subtext that she was exhausted from intercourse with Irvine - sort of a reverse Buffy/Angel scenario. Now I'm thinking maybe I was wrong; if that was the implication, it's not as heavy-handed as I remembered.
With my newfound freedom, I spent a couple of literal hours on sidequests. On my route circumventing the inter-continental railroad, I wandered into Deling City, but there wasn't much to do here besides getting Rinoa's card. I also did one chocobo forest in Centra, which I have never found fun or useful.
Next up, I really wanted another thief job GF, hoping for Abilityx4, and I knew Tonberry was available around this time. It took me quite a while to find things in this mostly featureless world, but I made it. I used the little Tonberries to get 100 Death spells stocked for both my black mage and thief.
I started with roughly 80 Meltdown spells that I had drawn off of the Tri-Face under Balamb Garden earlier. I got a rhythm for beating Tonberries reasonably quickly since we're operating under the 20-minute timer. Rinoa as my black mage would start with one cast of Meltdown to reduce its defenses, and Squall the knight would use 3-or-so Renzokukens to defeat the Tonberry. Irvine the white mage was there to heal in the wake of the Tonberries' occasional Everyone's Grudge counter attacks. With this, each Tonberry battle took roughly 2 minutes.
It took a few trips because of the 20-minute timer, but eventually the King Tonberry showed up. We fought him essentially the exact same way, and it took longer but wasn't very difficult.
He is a cute little guy now. Does he remain king? Am I the king? Tonberry politics are mysterious.
Our thief has access to more abilities now, including Auto-Haste and Alert.
I debated whether to get Odin while I was here or not and I decided that I should... mostly because he is one of the game's best sources of Triple spells, which have excellent potential in terms of junctioning stats. At first, I didn't remember the route, with so many ladders and winding paths and puzzle elements. I got to Odin with ~13 minutes remaining and my knight, who couldn't draw Triple, accidentally defeated him with ~11 minutes remaining. Oops. I didn't think he'd be that easy.
Stocking a higher-potency spell like Triple is hard for characters with low magic stats anyway! I chose to restart. This time, I brought a thief, white mage and black mage, all of whom could draw Triple. My plan was for at least the white mage and black mage to get 100 stock of Triple, and the thief to get as much as they could by roughly the 4-minute mark, then attack to win. This worked out marvelously.
My mages both had 100 stocks of Triple, and my thief had 40-or-so. I ended up swapping the white mage and thief's stock, figuring I could get the rest for the white mage when I battle Cerberus later.
Right now, the stats happened to look like this. Here is Irvine the thief:
Here is Squall the knight (who I have been keeping as a knight for the express purpose of him using Defend so other characters gain a higher proportion of experience):
And Rinoa, who is currently spec'd as a black mage:
The next thing on the sidequest agenda was the Shumi Village. I did the whole rock sidequest. Besides the Phoenix Pinion, which is actually pretty nice, there wasn't a ton of point to this. Rinoa the black mage was able to draw from the Ultima draw point twice, though.
That text for Squall reads a lot more like late-game Squall than early-mid-game Squall. It's like he cares about something. Despite the obvious grammatical error it's probably the best-written Squall textbox in the game so far.
We awkwardly circumvented the inter-continental railroad again and found Galbadia Garden by Balamb Town. I didn't really remember the order of events in the game and thought this was the part where we were supposed to fight but apparently that isn't the case.
In Balamb Town, we are forced to have Zell in the party. I believe I had Squall as a knight, Zell as a thief, and Rinoa as a white mage. Finally I was able to win Zell's card off of his mom.
Raijin was a good fight. There were no particularly good draws but the steals were nice.
Fujin allowed us to get the Pandemona GF. We stole some more Str Ups. The steal from Fujin was actually a Megalixir! Somehow we ended up beating Fujin and Raijin at nearly the same time; I thought I had been focusing on Raijin a lot. Oh well.
Pandemona is aligned to the knight job, but won't actually unlock any new features or abilities that Brothers didn't already offer.
Again, I haven't played this game in ages and there's a lot I don't remember, so trekking up to Trabia seemed a bit out-of-nowhere to me. While I was up there I thought I should see what snowfield enemies I might find, only to find that it was mostly just more Bite Bugs. Eventually we fought a Snow Lion, too, but besides being a huge blob of HP it was a very uninteresting and unprofitable battle.
Then came the game's maybe-stupidest plot point. God.
"Eagle river?!"
Augh. This game.
Around the time I was playing the D-District Prison part of this game, I found myself curious if that part of the game stood out to others as an example of bad game design. I searched a little and came upon a GameFAQs topic and a Reddit thread about "worst parts of this game" which some people took to mean locations and narrative beats and others took more generally to mean aspects in general. Indeed, D-District Prison is widely considered a very bad part of this game, but it was also amusing to see how many people brought up this Dharma & Greg weirdness of almost the entire team growing up together and forgetting about it, but then one person remembering and telling them but only way later.
This is just so stupid.
They introduce this idea of GFs consuming your memories but Quistis was 5 in the orphanage and 10 when she came to Garden but didn't recognize that Headmaster Cid was literally her foster dad and she knew three of the other kids. And someone was like, "it's less dumb when you realize that in planning it was just Irvine, Squall and Seifer who were there" and although that negates some of the anachronism and tones down the silliness of the premise, it still doesn't mean anything, or do anything. It's stupid. And connecting the GFs to memory just brings into question why they do remember some things. And Selphie's little "I junctioned a GF and forgot about it" thing. Augh. Why. They could've just not.
It might not even be the worst part of this game's story, either!
Oh, I should say, though, that there was one positive aspect of this being part of Irvine's story (such as it is) though! I only realized on this playthrough and as I read through a few ancient FF8 threads justifying this crap that the reason Irvine couldn't shoot Edea during the parade is because Irvine - and only Irvine! - knew her as his former Matron. It makes Irvine's role in the team and failure as a sniper a little bit more interesting and relevant. The language used during the earlier assassination plot didn't particularly suggest it, but in retrospect it's a neat idea.
Anyway: Those kids ended up becoming my knights, thieves, white mages and black mages... so let's focus on that.
The next part is another one of those disjointed-but-independently great segments where the Balamb Garden and Galbadia Garden fight each other. Things like this and most of disc 1 remind me of the way a Mission Impossible film (or a modern James Bond film) is written, by setting up amazing stunts and scenes and then a plot is hodgepodged around them, and character as a concept is largely irrelevant. This can sometimes be quite successful! I deeply enjoy Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol though it may be a semi-accidental masterpiece.
The story is still stupid but this segment of gameplay and visual design is excellent. The characters have gone full-on-idiot though, talking about their jewelry and crushes while their home is a battleground all around them, with literal screens of wounded children. Why is the freakin' doctor with six lines in the game giving Squall the tide-turning inspirational speech?
Sorry. Knights, thieves, white mages and black mages. Right.
We entered Galbadia Garden. Fights here were nice and varied, with new enemies like Death Claws here. The first one I encountered had Reflect to draw, but I wasn't able to capitalize on it and the subsequent ones didn't have Reflect. I have 100 Reflects stocked on my knight but not yet on my white mage.
As usual for recent parts of the game, Squall is a knight, Irvine is a thief, and Rinoa is a white mage. This is mostly because all of my black mage GFs (Quezacotl, Shiva and Ifrit) were from the beginning of the game and have learned all of their abilities. Irvine was mugging a lot of items here and, with Triples junctioned to strength he's fairly strong now.
I really enjoy the part where you fight the hockey team. As I approached this part, I wasn't sure whether that was a real memory I had of this game or something I imagined. I think it's hilarious. Normally I might benefit from their Blizzaga and Water spells but I'm already full of those. I used Scan on them too, since I think this is the only spot to meet them. (Funny: I haven't been doing that with bosses or anything.)
We cross a basketball court during this part too, and it's almost too bad we didn't also encounter the Galbadian basketball team. Wendigos in this game have kind of a neat basketball-ish attack though.
I ran around fighting enemies and getting keycards. There was nothing else interesting until I ran into Cerberus. Here, Rinoa my white mage stocked Triples until we had 100, which meant we were maxed for the thief, white mage and black mage.
Cerberus was actually fairly tough. Its Tornado spell only did 200-300 damage to Rinoa and Irvine, but did considerably more to Squall the knight, enough to two-shot him. Eventually Rinoa the white mage used a Shell spell on Squall to help him survive. She also stopped drawing Triples occasionally to use Dispel on Cerberus, to keep his tail down and prevent him from wiping us out. It wasn't too hard besides that.
Cerberus the hound of hell joins as a white mage GF, since its typical behaviour is a powerful buff. With that, we have all four of our white mage GFs! This is the first job with this distinction. Cerberus doesn't actually enable anything new at all, at least not until we get Tool-RF.
I was curious after the fight why Tornado rocked Squall so hard compared to the other characters. I knew Rinoa could junction spirit and had Auto-Shell, but I was surprised Irvine had any real resistance. It turns out that Bio and Aero are literally the only spells with elements that my thief can have access to, so he had 80% resistance to wind damage. I hadn't really paid attention to that. I wonder if that will ever come in handy again?
Next, we fought Seifer and Edea. We actually ended up doing the Seifer fight twice, because after my first attempt we met a Tri-Face who super quickly confused Irvine and Squall and then Irvine wasted an Elixir on it. That was my last Elixir and I decided that was worth a reload.
Seifer doesn't have much worth drawing for me, and it happened that he brought Irvine to critical a lot, so on both attempts it ended fairly quickly in part because of Dark Shot. I went with Dark Shot because status ailments have so much utility in this game and have a reasonable chance to affect bosses (at least so far).
Besides that, a favourite thing for me was that Squall, as my knight, was able to use his Defend command to reduce the damage from Seifer's powerful Demon Slice attack to 0; there is definitely some epicness to that.
Even Edea herself didn't have a whole lot of exciting things to draw. Irvine stole a Hero (book?) from Seifer and we drew Alexander from Edea when she engaged. Irvine happened to take her down with Dark Shot, too. He had no particular hesitation about shooting her this time.
We didn't do any setup with Alexander yet, although it actually will provide a few new assets to our team's knight. Instead we saved right at the break between disc 2 and disc 3.
The worst may be yet to come.
<< First | < Previous | Index | Next >
