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Chapter 40: Even Terrible Things Must Come to an End
Pulling this rope makes Omega appear. However...
i
mage
We only have 60 seconds to make it to him. Let's switch to the other party.
HEEERE WE GO
Omega starts out with LV5 Death. But we have Death junctioned to our defense, despite being level 100 and affected by it.
First, Meltdown him severely. He has max defense and max most all stats. Then, Aura up.
Two ways for Rinoa to go here. Using Angel Wing isn't the best, because she is uncontrollable for the duration of the Limit. However, her + Meteor can do a lot of damage. Ideally, you'll want to just have Missile use Wishing Star.
And Quistis using Shockwave Pulsar. She'll be doing this nonstop.
To do a lot of damage, about 24,000. Omega has 1,161,000 HP at level 100, and is always at max level in the US version of the game (on PSX, not on PC, where it varies with your level).
Best to just use a Holy War or have Missile give us Invincibility status. With high Speed and Auto-Haste, you'll be running circles around him. Either way, we chose the lowest damage-dealing characters, and so this fight will take a... long time.
Either way, Omega Weapon isn't nearly as strong as people say he is. He does have a special trick up his sleeve, but he doesn't use it very often.
Sucks that Rapture doesn't work.
Megido Flame is scary. It deals 9,998 damage, so if you're below 9,999 this ends the fight. His unique attack is Terra Break, which deals 12 hits randomly among targets and ignores Vitality. He will also use Light Pillar every now and again. However, unlike Ultima Weapon, Omega's attack pattern is more or less predictable.
While you could use Holy Wars/Heroes in this battle, I just used Invincible Moon.
Poor Omega Weapon.
No world ending for you. This was Terra Break, and it's useless when we're invinicible. Terra Break is also physical, so if you use Defend you will survive (so, well, two characters will survive).
Much everything Omega uses can be defended against besides Megido Flame and Light Pillar (for the first, simply have 9,999 HP and keep it at max throughout the fight; for the second, simply revive the character).
OF THIS GAME.
(not really)
Ultimecia: SeeD...SeeD... SeeD... SeeD, SeeD, SeeD!
You can only be a proper foreigner if you spell your c's with k's.
Ultimecia: Swarming like lokusts akross generations. You disgust me. The world was on the brink of that ever-elusive 'time kompression.' Insolent fools! Your vain krusade ends here, SeeDs. The price for your meddling is death beyond death (and what the fuck is that? - Ed. Note). I shall send you to a dimension beyond your imagining. There, I will reign, and you will be slaves for all eternity. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! (Did Motomu Toriyama write this game? - Ed. Note)
She'll pick three random party members ? very annoying. This first form she's weak to her own Demi skill. She likes to cast Edea's Maelstrom skill, which reduces your HP by a good chunk, over 50%. I retried this fight a few times and she always picked two people with no Junctions. Fuck her.
Next, she summons her GF, ?Griever?, which we named The Plot. And then The Plot proceeded to place Doom on Selphie, the only person who could revive. That's not gonna work.
So I restarted to get at LEAST two people who had Junctions.
Anywho, The Plot isn't very tough. It can Draw magic from you, as well as your willpower to even play this game, but it doesn't have a lot of HP.
Especially when we send comets into the Plot.
Final Fantasy VIII Tunes ? The Legendary Beast
And then I proceeded to get wiped out by Shockwave Pulsar. Retry... again.
In a world where I survived that...
Final Fantasy VIII Tunes ? Maybe I'm a Lion
Unto the Plot!
This game is beyond bizarre. This is form 3, with Ultimecia junctioned to the Plot. She now has about 176,000 HP. She'll summon Helixes every now and again. They more or less don't do a whole lot, but if two are allowed to live she'll use Great Attractor. This attack ignores Vitality and does a lot of damage.
If you let a KO'd person dawdle for a while, they are absorbed into time, and replaced with another party member. Bye bye Squall.
Overall, though, form 3 isn't too bad. It'll cast some spells, maybe attack you a bit. Just use Aura, keep Meltdown on, and occasionally throw out an Invincible Moon.
I guess she might be dead, right?
Final Fantasy VIII Tunes ? The Extreme
Not at all.
All existence denied.
By the way, that's gonna haunt your nightmares.
Form 4 has 278,000 HP.
She can also blow away Magic from your stock. What a fucking bitch.
She has a unique attack that knocks your HP to 1. Easily remedied with Full-Cure.
Nothing some Missile comets can't fix. The typical strategy here is keep your HP up after Hell's Judgment happens, and you'll be okay.
The final boss has her own unique spell, too, Apocalypse. It's the strongest spell in the game. We can use it against her, but only sometimes. We have to be able to successfully draw and cast it, which can be difficult.
Reflect on your childhood... your emotions, your sensations, your words... Time... it will not wait... No matter how hard you hold on, it escapes you.
but it's again, not a tough fight.
So many explosions. So much unnecessary pizzazz. It's pretty gross that Ultimecia was hanging down naked, tied up underneath her last form.
: Is it over? Let's go back to our time!
: Shut up! Just calm down and think of where we need to go.
: I wanna go there. Where ? and I promised.
: Let's go home! Where are you, ??!
: (Where am I?)
I don't even know what's going on right now.
Final Fantasy VIII Tunes ? The Successor
: You don't have to worry. The boy won't go anywhere.
: Matron, stand back.
: It's okay. There's no more need to fight. That sorceress is just looking for someone to pass her powers onto.
Ultimecia: I can't disappear... yet...
: Is this the end?
: Most likely.
: You called me Matron, who are you?
: A SeeD... from Balamb Garden.
: SeeD? Garden?
: Both were your ideas. Garden trains SeeD, and SeeD are meant to defeat the sorceress.
: What are you saying?
: Please return, you do not belong here.
Who's he?
: Nobody. You don't need to know. The only ? permitted here is you. Do you know where to go back to? Do you know how? Will you be all right by yourself?
: If I call out, they will answer.
: Which way do I go? I can't make it back alone...
Final Fantasy VIII Tunes ? Ending Theme
Watch Squall have a really bad drug trip.
Squall wanders a vast desert for a while.
Which then just becomes a small platform.
Meanwhile, Rinoa is desperate to find him, but cannot.
(Just to remind you that Squall is dead)
See the ending.
Rinoa, because this game is a shitty romance, finds him after his bad drug trip. THIS IS THE ENDING IF YOU LIKE TO YELL A LOT:
AND EVERYTHING BECOMES ALL BETTER
SEIFER'S FISHIN
SO ARE THOSE TWO
SEIFER'S CONTENT
SO IS LAGUNA
RAINE'S OK
JUST KIDDING IT'S A FLASHBACK
I KNEW WE WOULD GET MARRIED SOMEDAY
IT WAS JUST A MATTER OF TIME
JUST VISITING YOUR GRAVE TO SAY HI
HEY SORRY FOR FUCKING UP THIS GAME'S STORY
I AM A COMPLETE IDIOT
BUT WAIT WE'RE NOT DONE YET
Final Fantasy VIII Tunes ? Overture
WATCH THE REST.
SELPHIE'S VIDEOTAPING THINGS
IRVINE'S TWIRLIN AROUND
QUISTIS IS GETTING READY FOR HER PORNO SHOOT
I'D LIKE TO HAVE YOU TWO IN A PORNO TOGETHER, SAYS CID
IRVINE SAYS, ?CAN I JOIN IN FOR A THREESOME?
ZELL'S PREPARING FOR HIS GAY PORN CASTING COUCH TO SEE HOW MANY DICKS FIT IN HIS MOUTH
IT ISN'T MANY, THUS DASHING HIS HOPES AND DREAMS OF BEING THE NEXT BIG GAY PORN STAR
HOLD ON GUYS I GOTTA GET READY FOR THIS SHIT, FUCK, THIS IS GONNA BE SOME REALLY GOOD PORN I'LL MAKE SURE TO PUT ON MY ANGEL WINGS IT'S GONNA BE GREAT
achem
well
this was a thing. Let's talk business.
Final Fantasy VIII is a good game, at the end of the day. It's not great, and it's heavily flawed. The best way to summarize the game is to call it a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces were thrown together in a very slapdash manner, nothing quite fitting right. This can be seen in virtually every part of the game aside from its visuals, which are all-around excellent.
Musically, the game is great in places and weak in others. The majority of the town themes, Timber aside, are pretty dry musically, as are most of the dungeon themes (which are few, and are really just Find Your Way from the Fire Cavern repeated over and over). Its score is best when dealing with sorceresses, fighting with Laguna, engaging in boss battles, or running from things, but I don't think it's an excellent soundtrack overall. There's something it seems to lack ? either the melancholy of VII's soundtrack or the heart and charm and perfection of IX's soundtrack, and I can't quite put my finger on it. Obviously, VIII was the step Square made towards orchestral work, which can be felt to this day in the fantastic classical work in XIII and XIII-2, but here it seems Uematsu was trying to find his footing and ended up coming out worse for the wear because of it.
Gameplay-wise, we once again run into the jigsaw-puzzle effect. Junctioning is a great idea in theory, but allows you to break the game open in the first two hours, erasing any difficulty the game once had. Paired together with GFs that give you game-breaking abilities equally early, the overall experience comes off incredibly one-sided for the player. Drawing is an incredibly tedious, mostly worthless mechanic when anything you'll ever want barring GFs can be refined or made in some other way; it ends up being a rather annoying, useless mechanic. Even allowing enemies to level-scale with you is still offset by game-breaking abilities and overpowered Limit Breaks. The game is built to rip open, but that ultimately makes it a very rote experience; you can artificially add difficulty, but why bother when there's none already there?
Triple Triad, despite being a fun card game, is mired in a lot of RNG bullshit if you want to ever play the game without ridiculous rulesets. Because of that, I actually feel that it's not as great of a minigame as I had heard it was. It's a mess, much like Junctioning can be (and the majority of what you'll ever learn about Junctioning comes from a tutorial at the very beginning of the game only accessible in the first classroom).
FFVIII's worst offender is its story. In my opinion, it's the worst story in the franchise and that's not because of any one bad writer, or because of a Datalog, or whatever other complaints people throw at the games made by Square today. FFVIII's story is the epitome of the jigsaw-puzzle effect. It tries and fails to throw in about a billion different story ideas at once: Child soldiers, war, magic, sorceresses, magic amnesia, contrived romance, rivalry, technology, alternate races, time travel, acid trips, and other such ideas. The problem with this is that none of these ideas mesh into a cohesive whole. The first disc is easily the best part of the game because it's tight-knit: You have a goal, you're introduced to all your characters, you're a mercenary-for-hire uncovering the secrets of a nation bent on conquering the world and at the heart of it all is a magic-wielding sorceress who is manipulating the populace.
With these cards played right, it could have been a good story. It could have spanned four discs. Instead, things became superbly convoluted; time travel is introduced, the romance between Squall and Rinoa erupts out of nowhere (the analogy of Squall ?losing a toy and then crying over losing it? is pretty apt here), witches seem to pop in and out of the story for no reason at all and there's no consistent antagonist making the whole journey seem worthwhile. As a player who grew up with Final Fantasy, and returned to the older games time and time again, I've left FFVIII by the wayside because none of these plot elements come together, or work at all. You feel no emotions towards the Sorceress-of-the-Moment enemy; not Edea, definitely not Adel, and most assuredly not Ultimecia. Had the story focused on Seifer being the primary antagonist, there would have been something there; we knew who Seifer was, we knew the dynamics he had with Squall and the party, and it gives some gravitas to the journey at hand.
Instead, we're left with a constantly-morphing central villain and no real time to give a shit about any of them. This also bleeds into the central story of the game: Rinoa and Squall's romance. Throughout the game, we're treated to Rinoa whining at Squall, Squall saying nothing but thinking too much, and we're expected to believe that she's falling for him (because, I guess, she thinks she can change him). Even when she's about to die, hanging off the cliff of the Garden, he only rescues her because everyone else bitches at him to do so. It is really only when she's taken away from him that his interest in her begins to appear, but by then you're left wondering... well, why? We're repeatedly shown that Squall has zero interest in her, and it's only when she's gone that he suddenly falls in love with her and is willing to do anything, including breaking the logic of the game itself (by using Ellone to someone physically teleport him through time), to save her.
It's a love story where the first page is written, then about two-hundred pages are blank, and then it's the very end. It's an example of how not to write a romance. It's also an example of how not to write characters in general. Characters have to evolve gradually, unless there's a specific reason why they must accelerate their development (i.e., traumatic event, life-changing moment, etc.). While they tried to make Rinoa's possible death one of these ?life-changing moments?, it would only have worked had Squall shown her even a modicum of interest at any point beforehand. Overall, it's a textbook example of taking a character, flipping a 180 on them, and then expecting the player to believe it. Perhaps a good deal of us, when we first played the game at young ages, bought into it... but it doesn't hold up over time.
And, ultimately, the game doesn't have a lot that holds up still. It's a game that was sandwiched between one that broke new ground for the genre, FFVII, and one that more or less perfected the genre, FFIX. It's a game that somehow feels less than the sum of its parts, because its parts are thrown together in the worst way possible.
However, it's still fun, which is what I can say about nearly every game in the series, so kudos to Square for that.