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It begins!
The opening cinema depicts our main character and his rival sparring. They wield the most awesome and impractical weapons of all time: Gunblades. Blades that are guns.
Our hero, however, is not fairing too well. This is Squall, and players tend not to like him that much due to bad first impressions.
Honestly, though, his rival, Seifer? Even bigger manchild.
Pretty sure slashing your opponent's face is going a little too far in a sparring match!
Squall wakes up in an infirmary, and we get to name him. Can't really go with that many silly names considering you only get seven letters.
Quick plot summary: Squall and Seifer are mercenaries-in-training at an academy called a "Garden", and graduates are called "SeeDs". Seeds and gardens, get it? We live in a video game setting, so naturally our weapons of choice at Garden include Whips, Nunchuks, Gunblades, and FISTS.
And the lovely number who's picking up Squall for class is Quistis, his teacher.
This is what the Garden looks like.
First things first! When you have control examine Squall's desk here.
Turn the computer on and select "Tutorial" to download Squall's Guardian Forces, or GFs. GFs are the summons that frequently appear in Final Fantasy. This time they're more like glorified armor sets. That you can name. You'll get these automatically later, but to break the game you gotta set them up now.
We get two GFs. The first is Quezacotl, which is a shortened form of Quetzacoatl, an Aztec lightning god. He's the new kid on the FF block. The second GF we get is Shiva, a series veteran.
Oh, and on your way out talking to this guy lets you pick up some cards. These are used in FF8's big mini-game card game, Triple Triad, which we could play now, but these cards are crap. We're gonna need better ones.
Near the entrance to Garden you'll find a Draw Point. FF8's magic system is very different from basically any other game in the series - You don't have MP and you don't learn spells. Instead, spells are basically consumable items that you get from Draw Points, or you can Draw them from enemies.
Because they're consumable, people had this really bad habit of thinking they needed to spend dozens of hours drawing hundreds of spells out of enemies for their characters. DO NOT DO THIS. It's completely tedious and there's a much better way to get magic.
Quistis gives a tutorial on how to Junction GFs, but I'll keep it brief for you.
Basically, GFs are like a piece of equipment. Having a GF Junctioned lets you Draw or cast magic, and lets you summon the GF in battle if you equip the command for it. Yes, the game just started and we already have two summons that you can use as much as you please. There's no MP in FF8 and there's no limit on the number of summons you can perform per battle. That may sound overpowered already, but if you REALLY want to let the game balance have it, we're gonna need magic.
GFs also have numerous abilities and effects that they learn if you complete enough battles with the GF junctioned. Each enemy you beat earns you AP, and earning enough AP grants the GF the ability. You can choose which ability you want to learn next.
The abilities you REALLY want to get first are the Refinement, or RF abilities. Both Quezacotl and Shiva have one. Refinement lets you turn items into magic spells, which is much faster than spending hours Drawing it, and if you know where to look, you can get some really overpowered spells right off the bat.
The Fire Cavern we're headed to for a field exam is off to the east...
But forget that for now, let's relax on the beach instead!
Killing fish monsters is relaxing, right? These enemies are normally a little tougher than your characters can handle at the start of the game. They have lots of HP but don't do much damage.
So we let our GFs handle it instead. The way summons work is, the character must wait for the blue bar there to empty before the summon happens, and while the blue bar is there, the GF takes incoming damage instead of the character. If your GF gets killed, you'll need to rest in a bed and come back to revive them. (But let's be real, GFs never get killed. They level up just like you do, and they get buckets of HP when it happens.)
As usual for FF, the summon animations are a good 30 seconds or so, so get used to seeing them.
These fish enemies die in two summons, three tops. It might be faster to smack them until they open their fins, lowering their defense, but eh. Why are we fighting them, you ask?
Because for some messed-up reason, each one gives THREE AP instead of just one like most enemies. That's a lot for such an easy battle, this early in the game!
After a mere five battles with these guys, both GFs get their Refinement abilities.
Shiva's Refinement ability can turn items into Ice or Water magic. And hey, those fish enemies drop Fish Fins, which refine into 20 Water spells apiece! Naturally we make 100 Water spells. I didn't even have to Draw a single spell!
Here's what we do with magic: GFs also possess abilities that allow the character to junction magic to stats. Here we see Quistis junctioning the Water spells to her Spirit stat, raising it from 7 to 21. The more magic junctioned, the higher the stat gains, which means if she were to cast Water now, her Spirit would actually go down. What we have is a Final Fantasy game where magic is best used as equipment and not as an attack. Interesting.
Spirit is just magic resistance, however. Shiva can learn the ability that allows the character to junction magic to Strength, so I fought the fish nine more times to allow her to get it. It sounds like a lot, but it isn't that bad, you can do all this in less than an hour.
Each spell gives a different amount of points in each stat, and Water is pretty great on the Strength stat. 100 of them raise Strength by 20, which allows the character to do way more damage than the game expects. I junctioned Shiva to Squall to allow him to get the STR boost. He used to do 50 damage or so per hit, now he's doing 200. Awesome.
Quezacotl learned another ability too, this time a new command: the Card command.
The chance to hit an enemy with this command is equal to the percentage of HP they've lost. If an enemy has 200 max HP, and only 80 remaining, the chance to hit is 60%. What does Card do, you ask?
It turns the enemy into a playing card. Oh geez, can you imagine if Konami had made this game?
Not only can you use these in Triple Triad, carding enemies (..."carding"? Did I really just type that?) doesn't earn you any EXP, but you still get AP and items. This is a good thing. In FF8, enemy levels are based on the average level of the party, so leveling up yourself makes your enemies stronger. Since magic junctioned to stats is a flat boost and not a multiplier, it's best to keep your level as low as possible. When enemies cross certain thresholds, however, their attacks and item drops can change, so at least keep that in mind.
Anyhow, we should probably advance the plot, so we head to the Fire Cavern.
The test is to make it to the boss and defeat it. You're prompted to select your own time limit, the idea being that you have to judge how long you think you'll take to beat the boss, based on what you know about yourself. Or you just not kill the boss until time's almost up.
Actually, this is rather dumb. Ten minutes is MORE than enough time and players would naturally want to get in and out as quickly as possibly, but if you want the highest grade on this test, you need to finish with less than eight seconds left. You want to beat this test in EXACTLY ten minutes, even if your skill level lets you do it in six, like mine does. Not that this grade is of critical importance to me, but that's one lousy test! Why can't I give myself even less time?
The inside of the cavern has fire element enemies, like you'd expect. For those unfamiliar with FF time limits: That timer ticks away ALWAYS. Whether you're in battle, a menu, a LOADING SCREEN, time keeps on ticking.
The enemies are worth turning into cards, however, because they're really good in Triple Triad. I wonder who even decides what the stats of each card are for the game? Do the numbers just appear on the card or something?
Some enemies have stupid low health, like the Buer enemy here. One thing you're allowed to do is Draw a spell out of an enemy and cast it in the same turn, which I use here because I have such low magic and the enemies resist their own spells. This way I can take off smaller chunks of health. Also, sometimes when you Card an enemy, you'll get a rare card instead of the enemy's card. Buers can give the Krysta card, an enemy we won't see for quite awhile, and it's a great card. It's rare that this will happen, though, so I wouldn't farm it.
The boss turns out to be Ifrit, another FF regular. Being the first boss of the game, he was already nothing special.
At low health he'll up the ante with some stronger physical attacks in addition to some Fire magic. He also has a funny reaction if you summon Shiva against him, since apparently they're buddies or something in...some FF continuity, hell if I know.
However, Squall's boosted Strength made very short work of him. I didn't even get the chance to test out the Limit Breaks! Guess I'll go over that later. Ah, but how does Squall do 250 damage with each hit, you ask?
That is because Squall, and Squall alone, can do more damage to enemies if the player hits R1 with the correct timing, just as he's hitting the target. Yeah, remember Super Mario RPG? Unfortunately, Squall's the only character who can do this, since hitting R1 represents Squall pulling the Gunblade's trigger to add an explosive bullet to the enemy getting sliced.
Ifrit joins us, and he comes with the ability that lets a character junction magic to STR, so now both of our characters can junction those Water spells to STR. He'll later be able to refine items into Fire magic. Oh, and you know that timer? It's STILL GOING as long as you're on the naming screen, but you can never get a Game Over since you've already won. If you care to get a top grade on this test, let the game sit on this screen for another five minutes. I'll talk about the purpose of the grade later.
Ifrit also gave us his card. Somehow. I don't get it, if the cards are enemies transformed then how can we have an Ifrit card? Did another Ifrit get turned into a card? Whatever, the Ifrit card is great for the card game, so I'm happy to have it.
Anyhow, that's that! In the next update we'll return to the Garden for the real examination...AFTER some card games!