Rinoa is no Gavrilo
Princip, I'll clue you that much right now.
Rinoa's grand plan when she and her
fellow Forest Owls hired SeeD was to kidnap the president of
Galbadia, a dude named Vizner Deling, presumably to demand that he
free the nation of Timber from Galbadian control. Given what I know
of real world presidential security, that's not what one would call
an easy task, even with a well thought-out plan. If you're expecting
the Forest Owls to have one of those, you'd be wrong, and probably
disappointed when we get into what the plan really is.
Before we do that, though, I'm going to
throw out a few ideas that Rinoa and her friends seem to have passed
over in favor of their Plan A. They could have gone to wherever it
was he was going to talk to him directly. They could have swapped
him out with a body double at one of the stops along the way. In his
review, Spoony joked about having one of the party members using one
of their summoned monsters to derail the train. Hell, in the game,
Zell even kind of suggests this next one: using a rocket launcher to
blow up the locomotive and getting to Deling while he was stranded
along the way.
But no, the Owls decided that all those
ideas were dumb, and the better idea was one that involved running
around on top of moving trains, hacking into the systems to decouple
the cars, and replacing the real presidential car with a hastily
remodeled fake one with an equally hastily made animatronic president
inside. I'm gonna say right now that I think Zone and Watts may be
Galbadian plants, because, well, Zone keeps getting those
debilitating stomach cramps I mentioned last time, and Watts keeps
ducking out because he says he's just the team spy and nothing else.
On top of that, they're Rinoa's top advisers, and they let her go
into this thinking it was a good idea.
This is not to say that the other Owls
aren't gibbering idiots, too, because it seems that none of the
others tried to talk their fellow Owls out of this, either. That's
one thing we're going to have to get used to from here on, folks.
Most of the characters in this game tend to act like they're about 30
points shy of an average IQ for people their age.
The good news is that I'm good enough
at this that I can pull this off perfectly and raise Squall's salary
level by one. Granted, 4000 gold isn't much better than the 3000 we
were getting before, but it does add up over time.
Of course, it really helps that the
security and control systems on the Galbadian rail system are
remarkably easy to hack. The player, as Squall, is given the
difficult task of entering two sequences of four-digit codes into the
car-coupling system to unlock them so the others can switch the
tracks around to splice their own cars in while taking the one with
the presumed president in it. The first car requires three codes,
the second needs five.
Something I don't get is how nobody
figured out that this might be a trap. Not only were the electronics
on this train absurdly easy to disrupt, I don't think there were more
than ten people total on board, including the people running the
train, the security people, and the president himself. Given all
that, one would think at least one of these rebels would have
considered the possibility of this being a trap.
But none of them did, and surprise,
surprise, it's a trap. The Galbadian Secret Service had handily
beaten the Forest Owls at their own game and replaced the real
President Deling with a high-tech X-Files type zombie body double,
complete with an infection of the
Thing, which promptly mutates into a hideous beast. Sure, it's
got Berserk and Zombie spells, but this is one of those things where
it's late as I'm working on this, and I needed to make it quick, so I
just used a Phoenix Down to kill the boss's second form. It's really
a shame that I rushed it, too, because Zombie is a rather useful
spell to junction to either defense or offense in a few parts of the
game.
After the fight with the Fake Zombie
President Monster, Rinoa, Squall and the others reconvene in the
meeting room of the Owls' base car, and Rinoa and her cohorts act all
surprised that the whole thing was a trap, and that they'd pretty
much blundered into it willingly. As they discuss what their next
move is going to be, Selphie and Zell have a rare intelligent moment
and decide that they want to know what the exact wording of the Owls'
contract with SeeD is. There's a bulletin board with clippings from
a resistance newsletter that Squall can read. I don't think it's
mandatory reading, but it does come in handy, as it explains how
Deling came to power in Galbadia and that he's not popular even there
because he's a dishwater approximation of Hitler, surrounded by his
own zealots and sending all those who oppose him to a concentration
camp. We also find out that only two countries, Galbadia and a place
called Eshtar, have ICBMs and could end the world with them.
By the time Squall's read all that,
it's a good time to talk to Rinoa. She says she has a plan, but is
good enough to show Squall her contract with Balam Garden first.
Basically, we're stuck with these idiots for the rest of the game,
because our assignment is to help the Owls until either we all die or
Timber is freed, whichever comes first. I'd call it just a case of
rookies getting shit assignments, were it not for the fact that we've
seen that both the Garden and SeeD seem to have this way of getting
their jollies by killing its own people and the folks who would hire
them.
Once that detail is worked out, our
team of slow-boaters start connecting dots as to what's going on with
Galbadia. Turns out, Deling had already made it to Timber. He needs
to use the TV studio there because it's the only one left in the
world that can do over-the-air broadcasting, since all the others
have long since switched over to cable-only signals for an
as-yet-unexplained reason. They're going to tie the studio into the
broadcast tower in Dollet, because it's the only one powerful enough
to send out a worldwide signal. There's going to be some big message
from Deling to the rest of the world, and somehow, it's just presumed
that all the people in the world are going to just know when to turn
their TVs on and set them to that one specific over-the-air channel
that otherwise hasn't worked since the end of the war that Laguna,
Kiros and Ward were in in the dream sequence.
And all this does set up a few
questions and observations that I'm going to close with. Something I
never really took the time to think about until now is that it seems
like there are only five people in the Forest Owl resistance cell,
and the only two who are worth a damn go unnamed. Rinoa, who does
get a tiny bit interesting shortly, seems like she's just there to
fund the group, while Zone and Watts seem the sorts who are so
useless to the group that it's hard not to finger them as double
agents for Galbadia. Not that the two nameless members are much
better. It's just that they actually do a thing or two that's almost
worthwhile while we know them.
Add to that Rinoa. I've had some shit
ideas in my time, I will not deny that. But I've also had, and still
do, really, some good friends and family who are willing to come and
talk me down when I start behaving like I'm going to act on some of
my dumb ideas, whereas Rinoa doesn't seem to have that. I'm just not
sure if they've talked me out of too many of them or not enough,
sometimes. All I know is that I did not get where I am today all on
my own.
And finally, the whole business of the
TV broadcast that the Galbadians are going to do. I actually have
some first-hand knowledge and experience with that sort of thing.
Granted, it's all pretty basic, when you get down to it, but I still
have it, and that's got to count for something, I would hope.
See, when I was in high school, what
passed for the local public access channel had its studio in the same
building I was taking classes in. Interestingly enough, the station
was called OWL-TV. There was even a media production class that I
took as an elective my senior year. It was very similar when I went
to college, where I majored in journalism, albeit of the print sort.
Both those studios were wired into the local cable systems. The
university radio station was broadcast directly from the student
union.
It's the same way for my uStream show.
I can broadcast live from my computer, which is connected directly to
the Internet. With all that in mind, my question is this. If the
people in the world of Final Fantasy 8 were only going to preserve
one over-the-air TV studio, why would it not be the one in the same
town as the only broadcast tower, just so they could know what a
complete system looked like in case they ever needed one?
But since I'm up writing this way past
my bed time, I'm going to end with that one little nit amongst many
that people like me tend to pick about this game. Until next time,
have fun, stay safe, keep gaming, and DFTBA.
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