MAGE |
FOR |
HIRE |
So while we were wasting time with kidnapping a fake
president, Watts was actually advancing the plot – he’s discovered that Deling himself
really is going to Timber, and he intends to visit the TV Station. The team
connects a few dots at this stage – the Timber TV Station is the only place,
apparently, that can handle radio transmissions, and Galbadia likely secured
the communications tower in Dollet in order to carry out a mass broadcast. It
seems that radio waves have been disrupted for many years now, forcing the
world to use cables instead, which have a more limited range.
(I’m not sure the tech presented here holds up in the modern
era, and maybe didn’t at the time either…)
Selphie suggests/jokes that Deling plans to broadcast about
peace and love, while Rinoa says that they could hijack the broadcast to
declare Timber’s independence. I don’t see how this plan makes any sense – just
saying something doesn’t make it so, unless you are incredibly rich and powerful,
and have a lot of dumb followers. Even if the Forest Owls broadcast that claim,
they’re six people with three mercenaries – how, precisely, are they going to
enforce this declaration?
After seeing Zone, Watts, and Rinoa squat in a corner to
discuss strategy, Squall queries their contract. Rinoa presents him with a
couple of contracts, one of which is written in incomprehensible legalese,
while the other can be seen above. The SeeDs are unimpressed, but Rinoa brushes
off any complaints and decides to split the party as they head on into Timber.
Meanwhile, some of the Galbadian soldiers eagerly prepare to
bully the population in their investigation into terrorist activity, whether by
interrogating all the local teens, or tossing people into jail. Their leader, a
more reasonable man, attempts to talk them out of it, but goes ignored.
This section of the game gives you access to a town that
also serves as a minor dungeon. You can interact with the locals and visit
shops and other buildings of interest, but Galbadian soldiers will attack you
in the streets. The encounter chance is fairly low, so you’ll probably only
have seven or so fights during your visit, aside from a couple of mandatory
battles (one of which is only mandatory if you start the right conversation).
Once you’ve found your way to the TV Station, you can come
across this rather unsettling screen. I’m not sure how legible it was back on
the old PS1, but it’s certainly difficult with the low-quality PC edition,
especially since it’s moving in the game:
The phrases are occasionally jumbled, but they include: IWILLNEVERLETYOUFORGETABOUTME,
IAMALIVEHERE, and BRINGMEBACKTHERE. These spooky messages are foreshadowing for
Sorceress Adel, the imprisoned antagonist of Esthar’s backstory, but she won’t
really become a feature of the story for a while. For now, this screen is used
to discuss the radio interference that has affected the airwaves for seventeen
years.
While the group talks about this, Watts arrives, announcing
that Deling is already in the studio. Rinoa realises that they can’t just storm
the station, so she tries to devise a new plan. Rather than assist in her
brainstorming, Squall just advises her that he’ll follow whatever her orders
are. This frustrates Rinoa, who snarks at how easy life must be when you don’t
have to do the thinking yourself. Squall retorts with a jab at her actual
chances of achieving anything, and the two have an argument about how serious
Rinoa really is about all this. You get the option to soften Squall’s delivery,
but it ends up the same way – Rinoa runs off, and Selphie takes her place in
the party.
I think this is a pretty good little conflict between Squall
and Rinoa. Squall’s personality is pretty abrasive so it doesn’t make sense for
Rinoa to just automatically like and agree with him in all their encounters,
and here we actually get to see them clash. Both of them have reasonable points,
but neither of them understands the wider picture. Squall is correct in that
the Forest Owls are not exactly running their resistance in a professional
manner, but his delivery is purely dismissive and negative, rather than
suggesting ways to improve matters. Rinoa, meanwhile, is correct that Squall
doesn’t appear to actually care about their struggle, but she started the
dispute by insulting the SeeDs for following orders as per their contract, and
she does indeed not treat matters as seriously as she claims.
However, the broadcast finally begins, and the SeeDs turn
their attention to the big screen. Now I’m going to go on a quibble rant here,
so feel free to skip these paragraphs. President Deling went to the trouble of
having his army attack Dollet in order to secure the communications tower,
which was apparently achieved just the day before. On the day after, he
immediately rushed to Timber and they got everything set up in time for him to
deliver this speech to the world.
Now, Deling has gone to this trouble in order to spread this
message as far as possible, but he has not actually done any advertising at all
to prepare the world for it. Presumably there aren’t different time zones, as
the expectation appears to be that this one live broadcast will be enough to
spread the word to everyone. He also launched an offensive against Dollet in
order to then spread a message of alleged peace, though he wants to intimidate
the other world leaders with the sorceress as his ambassador, so I suppose that
doesn’t really matter? But why would he need the sorceress to intimidate people
when he already has the biggest military and controls half the world? And who
isn’t already controlled by Galbadia anyway? Esthar isn’t, but would their TVs
even show this broadcast? And how does this broadcast override everyone’s cable
TV anyway?
Presumably this is part of the sorceress’s way of manoeuvring
herself into Deling’s government, but she could probably just have had herself
declared as his advisor without any need to mess around with communications
towers and world-wide broadcasts. Her goal is to secure Ellone, who is being
hidden somewhere by Garden, and use her strange power to achieve Time
Compression (let’s go into that later). She uses the military to bully towns
into handing over Ellone, but there’s still no need for this false peace treaty
business, as taking over Galbadia is apparently as easy as killing Deling in
front of a mind-controlled crowd.
I love FFVIII but
I think that a lot of the story gets overly complicated to the point that it no
longer really makes sense. Ultimecia’s plan is ultimately a fairly simple one –
possess a sorceress in Ellone’s era, capture Ellone, and then use her power to
initiate Time Compression. Carrying it out isn’t guaranteed to be easy, of
course, but a sorceress who can affect the will of crowds of people could
probably abuse that power to sneak herself into Garden undetected, unless they
have some sort of sorceress detector. There’s no need for her to take over the
world’s primary superpower and initiate a global conflict, not to mention
initiating a Lunar Cry so she can take over an imprisoned sorceress in place of
the one she’s already controlling.
Anyway. In summary, President Deling announces that he wants
to hold a peace conference, and that the sorceress will serve as his
ambassador. At this point, Seifer breaks in, beats up most of the guards, and
then takes Deling hostage. Quistis charges in after him, warns the guards to
stay back, and addresses the Timber team by speaking directly to the camera,
anticipating Squall’s reluctance to get involved as she directly states that
they have permission to intervene.
You might expect to have an action sequence where you fight
your way into the TV Station, but no – you go straight into the next story
section. Zell loses it with Seifer, and after Seifer casually insults him, Zell
demands to know if Seifer is being taken back to Garden. Deling is naturally
very interested to hear who’s responsible for taking him hostage, and an
unimpressed Seifer drags Deling off and tells Squall and Quistis to sort things
out.
This is where we sort-of meet our main antagonist at long
last. The screen is covered in a blue-violet filter, and the sorceress appears
from the darkness to speak to Seifer. She calls him a scared boy, and invites
him to follow her and become a man. This eventually seems to get through to
him, and he releases Deling and follows her, both of them disappearing just as
she magically appeared before.
With their mission to the TV Station a total failure, the
group runs for it, only to find that the Forest Owls base has been discovered
and destroyed. They hide out in the house of another resistance group’s leader
until the commotion has died out instead, and try to gather their thoughts.
Quistis tells Squall that Seifer was outraged at Garden setting three “rookie” SeeDs
against the entire Galbadian army, and declared that he would go to Timber
himself. Quistis apparently dismissed this claim at the time, only to find that
he actually meant it later on.
There’s an amusing little exchange here where Rinoa says she
feels sorry for Seifer, while Squall thinks to himself that Seifer would hate
that, and even laughs at the notion. Rinoa is outraged, not aware of exactly
what’s amused Squall.
The following conversation underlines Squall’s dismal
worldview. While Rinoa is concerned for Seifer, Squall doesn’t believe in hope.
He just settles on the worst possible outcome to avoid being disappointed, and
advises Rinoa to do the same. She takes this somewhat childishly, calling him a
meany and turning her back on him.
Once things have calmed down, the group catches a train to
the East Academy Station, figuring that their best course from here would be to
follow the SeeD guidelines and seek shelter at the nearest Garden. On the way,
Zell, who’s been uncharacteristically downcast, admits that he’s afraid that
Garden will be attacked because of his outburst at the TV Station. Squall says
that Garden may indeed be attacked, and could even lose to the Galbadian army,
at which point Rinoa steps in again. She berates Squall for being so callous
towards his comrades, but Squall continues to dismiss her worldview.
However, before they can get into too much depth, Squall,
Quistis, and Selphie all pass out, and we rejoin Laguna and his comrades in the
past. They appear to have come across a strange site of some sort, and they
head on down to investigate.
They swiftly come under attack from Esthar soldiers. I can’t
remember when Esthar was first mentioned in the main story, or if it’s even
come up at all beyond some side references, but the Esthar soldiers all wear
strange bug-like Power Ranger outfits and never speak in these sections, giving
them a mysterious and alien feel.
Speaking of which, the excavation site is built around a
crystal formation of some kind, with some striking locations and a couple of
unusual monster types as well. The relevance of this location to the
overarching plot is both debatable and not important for a while yet, but it’s
good to see it make an appearance so early on.
While you’re looking around the facility, you can find a
couple of keys (and immediately lose them), activate a trap, and use a
detonator to move around some boulders. Doing so will give you a few extras when
you visit this pillar again in the future, though it’s not the end of the world
if you miss these features.
On that subject, there are quite a few things you can miss
in FFVIII, especially once you cross
a certain plot boundary in Disc 3. This is something that I feel should be done
fairly sparingly, if at all. By all means, have extra conversations and
dialogue to spice up the game world during different plot junctures, but don’t
gate off things like Guardian Forces and locations, unless you’re going to give
players access to them after the end credits roll. Even FFXIII got this wrong, and it had years of Final Fantasy experience to look back on. But then it had many
other issues that could have been avoided, so let’s not go down that rabbit
hole.
The Excavation Site is probably the longest uninterrupted
series of fights and exploration in the game since Dollet. In Timber, I rarely
had any random encounters, and my expected battle sequence at the TV Station
never happened. Here, though, you’ll get pulled into combat a fair amount,
especially if you’re trying to work out all the little secrets hidden around
the place. Alternatively, you can just race through and initiate the finale of
this area without getting too sidetracked.
So how’s combat holding up, with maybe five or more hours
done? Well, to be quite honest, I don’t think it’s doing particularly well. FFXIII gets a lot of valid criticism
that it withholds features of the combat system for far too long, and that’s
true, but the combat from Chapter 3 onwards does require you to react to enemy
attacks and make use of the Stagger system to bring fights to a speedy
conclusion.
In FFVIII, though,
here we are several hours in, and quite honestly, you’re better off just
spamming Attack and dozing off. Sure, you can use magic, but it’s not really
all that powerful compared to attacking, and carries the downside that you’ll
need to restock, especially if you use those spells to buff your stats. You can
debuff enemies, you can abuse Limit Breaks, you can spam Guardian Forces, but
really and truthfully you don’t need to, and haven’t needed to for all the game
up to this point.
I always felt that there was a strict trade-off for Final Fantasy’s various turn-based
combat systems, in that the basic fights got tedious, but you would get
memorable and epic boss fights in return. When FFXII introduced its own largely automated battle system, that was
reversed, with basic fights becoming less of an issue (it formalised the
attack-and-doze-off system and enshrined it as the only way to play), while the
boss fights became uninvolving as a result. Really, when it came to boss fights
in FFXII, I only really needed to be
within a reasonable level or gear range for a fight, and just interrupt to
manually heal now and then.
FFVIII was my
first of these games, so I didn’t think too deeply on it. I was mostly just
excited to be experience an epic TV/book series in a game format, where I could
walk around and do my own thing from time to time. The Junction system gives
you some flexibility and there are some interesting ideas to explore, but
there’s a heavy redundancy to most of it. Sure, you can get some crazy stats
near the beginning of the game, but the reward for that is… an even easier
game?
There are some endgame dungeons and fights that make things
a lot trickier to handle, and that’s great, but if FFXIII can be criticised for having a very basic combat system for
the first couple of chapters, then you don’t have to look far to find the same
elsewhere in the series.
Back in the world of FFVIII,
Laguna, Kiros, and Ward continue their exploration of the crystalline tunnels
and find themselves cornered on a cliff overlooking the sea. The last Esthar
soldier manages to use a plot ability to take Kiros and Ward down to one
hitpoint apiece, wounding Ward to such an extent that he begins to lose his
ability to speak. Laguna tries to keep the group’s spirits up when he spies
some ships down in the water, and he tosses his friends over the edge so they
can get on board. When he gets cold feet and tries to climb down carefully
himself, he loses his grip and falls from the cliff.
At this juncture, the SeeD group in the present wakes up,
and Quistis notes that everyone seems to be quite familiar with this sort of
vivid vision/visit to the past. Squall immediately dismisses it again, stating
it a waste of time. I know that the writer wanted to avoid answering these
questions so early on, but there are far less clumsy ways of doing so. This
kind of experience would be mind-blowing, but nobody really seems to care. They
just treat it as though they saw a dog ride past on a skateboard, and carry on
with their lives.
Rinoa briefly apologises to Squall when the others head on
through the forest, saying that she feels that she went too far. While she’s
probably correct that she didn’t discuss it in the most constructive fashion,
attacking him rather than questioning, Squall just waves off the apology but
makes no effort to meet her midway. While Squall gets told off at several
points in the story, it’s often at the points where he’s making at least a bit
of an effort (such as the concert on Disc 2). I’m not sure he deserved the
apology here, or to get away with just acting like he was in the right all
along.
We’ve covered a fair bit now, so let’s copy the main party and take a break from the action ourselves. See you next time!