Tuesday, March 10, 2015

TEXT PLAY: Final Fantasy VIII (SquareSoft, 1999; Playstation): Issue #028: Half-Way Point

Well, I'm officially halfway through this game, and I'm starting to think that maybe it's not as bad as I've been lead to believe.

I should add, though, that that's not saying as much as some parties might think, as the bar's been set pretty damned low, so being pleasantly surprised now that I'm forming my own opinions isn't what one might call a difficult task.

So, anyway, when we left off last time, we'd just cut Seifer's legs off at the knees, at which point, the Sorceress magiced a hole in the floor to escape into the room below, an auditorium, according to Squall. Naturally, we have to go after her, which turned out to be easier than I made it, I guess. For some reason, I was thinking the auditorium we were looking for would be bigger than it turned out to be, so I started looking for the entrance on the first floor. No luck, of course. Turns out, it's on the second floor and only about the size of the one in the middle school I went to.

When Squall and the others come in, they instantly know something weird's going on when the Sorceress isn't there yet. Turns out she must have gone back to revive Seifer or something, because when she comes crashing through a sign that was apparently not affected by her magic portal, Seifer walks on in almost right behind her, looking like he's not so bad off after all.

The Sorceress says she knew this day was coming and that she's gonna wipe the floor with us because we're SeeDs and in her way as a result. We'll have to deal with Seifer again first, though. The strategy guide I'm using said his HP was lower but his attack was stronger. That was half true, anyway. Seifer wasn't really that much better a fighter than he was in the last fight a minute ago, game time, but his health was indeed lower after just getting his ass handed to him.

After Seifer goes down for the second time in one day, we get a shot at the Sorceress. I was expecting this to be a harder fight than it was. Funny thing, this. Turns out that our old nanny Edea is weak to the Sleep magic I've got junctioned to Squall's sword in spite of being possessed by an evil demon from the future, so it was a relatively easy task to keep her asleep while everybody stocked up on Demi spells. A few hits from Diablos alongside regular weapons makes this way easier than I'd expected.

All of this is making it sound like I'm a better player than I really am. If I'd realized I'd be doing what I'm doing what I'm doing when I bought the computer I'm using, I'd be doing this in video to show that I actually kind of suck at most of the games I play for this. As is, though, I've been buying computers with the intent of being a writer more than a video person.

Once Edea gets sufficiently slapped around, there's a burst of energy or something that comes out of her head, after which she comes to her senses. The side effect is that Rinoa's in some sort of coma. And somehow, Seifer managed to get up and walk away again, too.

Now that Edea's momentarily not possessed, she calls the remaining party members by name and says she was waiting for this day to come even though it scares the hell out of her now that it's finally here, and she's not sure if that's good or bad. As Quistis tells us that something's terribly wrong with Rinoa, Disk Two of four ends, and Disk Three starts with Squall waking up in his bed again, wondering if it's finally over. It's not, of course, but for the moment, all our supposed hero can do is go check on Rinoa, who's still in a coma a couple hours after getting knocked into one.

While he's in the infirmary, Quistis calls Squall to the command deck to assign a party to actually go into the orphanage and talk to Edea now that she's not the Sorceress for the time being. But that's for next time, because I've been up for too long and my sleep cycle's gotten more than a little off lately. On the way to Squall's quarters to save, I came across Zell, who asked about Rinoa, then said she'd snap out of her coma eventually. Yeah, because people in comas never die without coming around, right?

But we'll get to find out about all that later. Until then, there's one thing I've been kind of wondering about for awhile now and didn't really think too much about until I sat down to play this session. Where the hell has Cid been in all of this? I know his health wasn't exactly great after all that business with the missile attack and Norg at the beginning of the disk, but the implication is that it had been at least several days, in game, between then and when we finally got to Trabia Garden. One would think that by then he would have been well enough to at least have somebody take him around in a wheelchair to look at the damage to Trabia. After all, this whole Garden business, and especially Balam Garden has been the guy's whole life for at least as long, and probably longer than any of the main characters have been alive, and now one of the three has been blown the hell up and the remaining two are actively at war with one another. Worse yet, all this is the doing of none other than his own wife, and the guy is nowhere to be seen.

Maybe it's because Cid somehow reminds me of my own dad in some small way, and I'm thinking back to when he had his hip replaced a couple years back. Soon as he was well enough to be up and around in anything like a meaningful way, he was having my mom, and me when I was available, put him in the car and take him out to look at things out of town, or over to his mother's house to see how she was doing. From what I could tell, Cid wasn't quite that bad off, healthwise, and yet, he told Squall not to give him reports on what's going on, and he's seemingly not been interested in what has been most of his life for a long damn time for awhile now. Maybe that'll change at the orphanage, but we'll find that out next time. For now, it's time for me to sleep and maybe get back on a better cycle again.

See you soon, hopefully, folks!

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