Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Playing: Final Fantasy Tactics] Let's Play (2024)

Omicron said:

I expect the game will have some kind of mechanic forcing us to use two parties like it did in VI and VII, which would be inconvenient because right now Quistis, Selphie and Irvine have no GFs and thus garbage stats and no abilities, but whatever, we'll take it as it goes.

Eh, can't be too inconvenient, I'm sure they'll just die instantly due to the mechanics of the fight that you will surely see shortly!

Right?

Omicron said:

T I M E K O M P R E S S I O N

Omicron said:

...Ah, I see, so you won't see it. What a hell of a party draw, you lucky son of a gun.

Omicron said:

…

But before we do, I'd like to pull back a little, because I know that some FF8 vets reading this are boggling and gnashing their teeth at everything I just said, and I need to actually address it before they have a collective aneurysm (love you guys, I would too if I were in your position).

Remember when Ultimecia said "I'll start with you three"? It sounds like it's just a thin excuse for how we only fight with three characters despite all six being present in the scene, right? She just points to our Mandatory Limited Three-People Party and says "You first." Makes perfect sense.

Well, no. You see, in Japanese, Ultimecia says instead (translated more literally): "So, who will come first? Who will fight me? Hmpf, it matters not, the end will be the same! I will choose!"

I will chose.

Omicron said:

When Edea says she'll choose her opponent, she means it.

Omicron said:

This is a gruelling process of watching Selphie, Irvine and Quistis try their best with absolutely no resources, and being erased from the timeline one by one until the main party is back online! Of course, the game doesn't have the degree of adaptability to adjust the ending based on who 'dies' there, so whether or not someone gets absorbed into time won't change their ultimate fate, but it sure doesn't feel that way watching it happen.

So yeah, this is exactly the mechanic I was expecting to get a nice little talk about... and you managed to skip it entirely through sheer luck. Himbo Omi strikes again.

And when first quoting this, I considered why not just have something similar to FFV where dead party members from the final battle get a little "oh no they dead oh look they came back"... but I guess considering the final cinematic used instead of ingame scenes, that wouldn't have really worked unless they wanted a bunch more work and a Disk 5 that exists entirely for ending variations.

Omicron said:

Griever.

The winged lion.

She summoned Squall's edgy OC fursona.

I just… This is so much.

This, right there, is when I thought, for one brief moment, that my theory was finally and truly validated: Ultimecia is Rinoa, has to be Rinoa, because how else would she have Griever as a GF? How would she even know its name? Where would it even come from?

And once again, Scan is where the answer lies.

Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Playing: Final Fantasy Tactics] Let's Play (2)​

"In Squall's mind, the strongest GF."

This may be slightly ambiguous wording. But if you once again look at the JP script, everything becomes clearer, for better or worse:

Sorceress Ultimecia: "I will summon the one you believe is most powerful. The strongest you believe he is, the stronger he becomes."

She literally Drew Griever from Squall's mind. He made up an OC so powerful, it is the ultimate GF. The implications are… What? Are all GFs just 'ideas'? When we Draw Siren from Elvolet, are we pulling some unformed memory of idea in its mind and turning it into a pseudo-sentient being? Is that why GFs can exist as thought-forms within people's brains rather than needing a physical place to exist? Is the reason you lose memories from GF use because of how much your brain's power you use to sustain the existence of the idea that is the GF?

Ghostbusters.

This is just Ghostbusters, Ultimecia read Squalls mind and went "WHAT DO YOU FEAR MOST WHAT IS THE STRONGEST" and he, edgy dipstick that he is, somehow instantly thought of his OC GF Griever who is totally the best and the strongest and beats all the other GFs.

Omicron said:

The music changes. So far, the boss music for this fight had been Premonition, the 'sorceress battle theme' so to speak, which shares a melody with Liberi Fatali and played during both Edea battles and against the 'sorceresses from beyond time.' A dramatic tune, but one we've heard quite a bit by now.

Now, instead, scare chords sound what sounds like a warning, and drums roll in the distance as the next attack begins. That music, The Legendary Beast, will play for the remainder of the Griever fight, and it has distinct military overtones that are a perfect fit for a monster drawn from Squall's imagination.

And since Omi didn't link any of these boss themes (other than Maybe I'm a Lion's remix), I'll do the honors I suppose:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UypEmBr9Gg

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oW61WM0DDUA

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYpkDvfY5n4
Comes with complementary boss footage, for anyone interested!

Omicron said:

That was Griever's best move.

It was also Quistis's ultimate Limit Break. Aside from Degenerator (which doesn't work on bosses), the strongest move Quistis has access to is Shockwave Pulsar. It is learned from Dark Matter, an extremely difficult to get item, and it plays out with the exact same animation. Why is Griever's strongest move Quistis's own ultimate LB? Who knows.

Clearly, Squall just implements anything he thinks is cool back into his OC, even now. So at some point, Quistis used Shockwave Pulsar and he instantly thought "holy shit what an awesome move Griever should totally have that as his super special ultimate" and then there we are.

Omicron said:

What does Scan say?

Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Playing: Final Fantasy Tactics] Let's Play (3)​

Oh, yeah. Look at her gown: the entire bottom of the 'space' field is part of her robe.

Goddamn that is a really dope gown and model, what a final boss.

Omicron said:

She will not get to cast it. Ultimecia's repeated Hell's Judgments make it incredibly easy to tap Limit Breaks, and while I am not playing this fight as hard as I could, I am still running the setup that I devised for the Omega Weapon. Meteor Rinoa hits the Meteor button for tens of thousands of damage, splitting damage between Ultimecia and her lower half, and breaking the Draw-Cast Apocalypse sequence. Like her previous phase, we've blown past her mechanics.

And so, in true FFVIII fashion, proper junction and strategizing is insanely OP.

Omicron said:

Young Squall, rushing on to find Ellone. And shortly behind him, Edea, calling out to the running child.

There are many, many missing pieces to the picture that is Final Fantasy VIII. And this is one of the last ones the game will provide us before leaving the rest unresolved. To tie off that dangling plot thread - to close the loop.

AND NOW

THE MOMENT EVERYONE IN THE KNOW HAS BEEN WAITING FOR

Omicron said:

There is Squall, at Edea's house, in the past.

This is, to my immense frustration, the singular moment on which hinges the entire plot of the game.

THE SUDDEN STABLE TIME LOOP TO EXPLAIN LITERALLY EVERYTHING IN THE PLOT

Omicron said:

Exeunt Ultimecia.

What a villain! What a bundle of promises and unfulfilled potential.

In many ways Ultimecia is the opposite of Sephiroth. Where the white-haired bishie had a very clear backstory, psychological stakes, and new reveals regarding his true heritage dispersed across the game, but personally became a total cipher halfway through the game and just vanished from the narrative, Ultimecia is a constant presence, her schemes hounding our heroes' every steps, hiding her identity, possessing our friends, suggesting a complex backstory of persecution and revenge, only to ultimately look at the camera and say "I am a generic evil witch who wants to rule/destroy the universe and be worshipped by all in the hell I'll create."

Her final speech suggests, hints at a sense of real pathos - childhood memories lost, the inexorable flow of time, time that escapes no matter how hard you hold onto it, a desperate attempt by a grieving sorceress to do the impossible and make time stand still… But it doesn't land, because it doesn't connect to anything, we know nothing of what Ultimecia has loved and lost, she has always only ever acted like a petty, vengeful, contemptuous witch who cares for nothing and no one but her own power.

The flair, though! Never before had we seen a villain's final form embody the Big Crunch, personally become the singularity into which all of space and time will collapse, our heroes only managing to withstand that impossible pressure through their bonds to one another. What a character design! And those last moments, of Ultimecia having been defeated, staggering weakly, muttering that she cannot disappear yet, and passing on her power to one another, is the most human we've ever seen a post-final fight FF big bad act.

And yet it all leaves a sour taste in the mouth. She wrote too many cheques she couldn't cash. There is something there, and even outside of the 'Rinoa from the future' meme, trying to put it into a broader shape only makes me more frustrated.

Yeaaaaah, Ultimecia has a lot of flair, but she absolutely feels like a victim of the game being cut short at some point or another in development. Possibly also a victim of the potential Rinoa connection being severed.

Omicron said:

And so the loop is closed.

This is the key to everything.

Why do the kind-hearted Cid and Edea, who have never shown an inclination to treat the orphans they take care off callously, decide to begin training them as superpowered child soldiers to combat the sorceress threat?

Because a boy from the future told them they would.

Why is Cid so eager to have a gunblade specialist among his SeeD graduates?

Because he knows the boy from the future who shows up after defeating the sorceress carries a gunblade.

Why does Ultimecia's power exist in the past?

Because she went back and gave it to Edea before dying.

Why are SeeD waging a war across generations, why does Ultimecia curse their names, why does she refer to the 'fantasies' of the evil sorceress and her own persecution?

Because Cid and Edea set into motion a self-perpetuating order of Sorceress Hunters who are waiting for the day Ultimecia shows up to try and bring her down.

…

I hate stable time loops as a narrative device.

See Also
Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Playing: Final Fantasy Tactics] Let's Play

Omicron said:

We have spent the entire game wondering about Cid's personality, his history with Edea, and the creation of SeeD. Why does Cid, who looks like a bumbling kind-hearted father figure, create an organization of child soldiers? Why does he teach them to use GFs that risk erasing their memories? Why did he build an organization dedicated to hunting sorceresses if his wife was one? Why did Edea willingly participate in the creation of an order meant to oppose her own kind? How did we go from a little orphanage by the sea, dedicated to raising a mere handful of kids in a peaceful place, to an enormous organization at the bleeding edge of military technology and paramagic, with dozens of staff and hundreds of students?

Because the plot literally told them to. There is no prime motivation. There is no darkness in Cid's heart. The subtle indications that Edea and Cid always had a kind of attraction/obsession towards militaristic approaches to child-rearing, perhaps rooted in the trauma of the Sorceress's War, that was just pure illusion. The inherent moral ambiguity of creating SeeD, the strange dichotomy between Cid's fatherly demeanor and his ruthless child soldier school, the question of why anyone would dedicate their lives to fostering an order of Sorceress Hunters, it's all cleansed and made neat in this one move: he has to, because he already knows he will.

They're two kindly caretakers for a small local orphanage who are one day told by a boy from the future that they will create an organization dedicated to fighting sorceresses called SeeD, which will operate out of Gardens, have at least one gunblade-wielding operative of particular importance who is one of Edea's current wards, and who will fight a very important battle against a particular sorceress in the future.

So they set out to do what the future told them they needed to do.

This singular twist actively bleeds out every remaining once of shadow and moral ambiguity within Final Fantasy VIII's backstory. Nobody ever did anything wrong, except Adel and Ultimecia. Even the moral compromises which Cid did eventually take while creating SeeD are explained by his need to rely on NORG.

In the end your parents always loved you and never did anything wrong.

Stable time loops can certainly work as a narrative device, and I'll give that this one is at least decently constructed... but yes, it also does kind of take all the moral ambiguity out of Cid and Edea and Garden. For all the jokes of "War Criminal, Child Soldier Training Cid" early on in the LP, everything just falls to the side as this Robin-Williams looking old guy goes "yeah you told me to do it in the distant past or something", and then between that and blaming NORG (oh hey other plot point that gets completely dumped) just sort of absolves him of all responsibility.

Omicron said:

What follows - the game's final cinematic, its resolution and epilogue, all pre-rendered FMV - lasts a staggering 16 minutes. Even by today's standards, an 18-minute pre-rendered cutscene might raise an eyebrow! By the standard of the time, this is just - I'm pretty sure this was a non-significant amount of dev time and occupied a solid chunk of the final disc? Maybe more than the gameplay did?

Goddamn, that is a lot of pre-rendered cutscene. Hideo Kojima eat your heart out.

Omicron said:

For my money, this scene is the creepiest a Final Fantasy game has ever been. The walk after Jenova's escape beats it for spook factor, but this had me genuinely unsettled; I felt a chill at a few points watching Rinoa's image distort and fade as the music started glitching out. I felt like I was watching both reality and Squall's mind break down at the same time. Which, hey, is what is happening, no?

Part of why I felt that scene so unsettling was that I wasn't even sure what was happening. My grip on the reality of the scene was as shaky as Squall's own. And I don't count that as a demerit; confusion can be a powerful scare tool. And it wasn't hard to come up with answers - time compression erasing those moments in time, accelerating the memory erasure from the GFs, or blending together all moments of Squall's history until he couldn't tell them apart or make sense of them, or remember what truly happened…

…

The thing is that this confusion is not intentional. It is entirely an artifact of the English localization losing two lines. To quote Ultimecia, highlighting the lines that got dropped, rather than merely rephrased, in EN:

Your very existences shall be absorbed by the algorithm of time compression!!
You will feel agony as your thoughts are ripped apart and all your memories fade away to nothing.
There won't be a thing you can do, think or even feel!
That's the world I'm going to send you to!
There will be absolutely nothing you can…
…No, you'll be able to worship me, the sole existence for all eternity!!

This is not supposed to be ambiguous. Time Compression explicitly tears apart the mind and destroys memories, exactly as is happening to Squall right now.

So. That's great.

Sounds to me like the characters weren't the only ones getting hit with Time Compressions.

The translators, it's a joke about the translators and deadlines.

Omicron said:

​

SEIFER.

SEIFER IS FISHING.

OF ALL THE CHARACTERS, THIS IS THE ONE WE GET TO SEE FIRST!

BUT OF COURSE OMI

ISN'T THIS THE MOST IMPORTANT CHARACTER YOU WANTED TO SEE A RESOLUTION TO FIRST?

Omicron said:

I love her and need an entire side novel about her adventures with Raijin and Seifer.

FFVIII ReMake I'm telling you all

We'll get an entire DLC starring this bumblefuck trio, and the internet will explode with Fuijin popularity as she deserves.

Omicron said:

His face fades from the Laguna of today, with faint wrinkles around his mouth

old man wrinkles Laguna scares me, for some reason. It just feels wrong for the guy who's perpetually a dumbass child talking about the power of friendship to actually get old.

Omicron said:

Cut to credits.

…

"Wait," I hear you say, "don't tell me they're pulling that shit again, what the hell, what about our entire party that got stranded in the Time Hole, do not tell me Seifer and Laguna are the only ones we get an epilogue for?"

Okay but like

Can you imagine if they did it again?

Just "thanks for playing, party got fucked I guess lmao~"

Omicron said:

It's Selfie's Camcorder Adventure.

Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Playing: Final Fantasy Tactics] Let's Play (4)​

Selphie once again proving herself to be best girl.

Omicron said:

Then Selphie points to Zell, who has, finally, after seventy hours of game, obtained his reward.

Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Playing: Final Fantasy Tactics] Let's Play (5)​

He's stuffing himself full of hot dogs.

Look at our man, he did it, he really accomplished his goal after all this time.

I mean or the cafeteria staff looked at this level 100 super SeeD who just saved the world and went out and made sure he has his own private Hot Dog stock so she doesn't accidentally shatter the entire cafeteria in a fit of rage when he can't get any, either or.

Omicron said:

She and Squall lean in, and give us the first on-screen kiss of the 3D FF era.

Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Playing: Final Fantasy Tactics] Let's Play (6)
Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Playing: Final Fantasy Tactics] Let's Play (7)
Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Playing: Final Fantasy Tactics] Let's Play (8)​

The End.

Look say what you want about the rest of the game, these credits feel like a pitch perfect ending to me. Sappy and basic bitch, sure, but it works.

Omicron said:

Final Fantasy VIII is about time. Which is why it's ironic that it truly feels like time is what it needed more of. There is a very specific and narrow path to its ending which the game mostly nails - Lunatic Pandora Raid to Ellone rescue to Adel battle to Time Compression initiated to walking through the future to confronting Ultimecia to the ending to the epilogue - and if you just stay entirely focused on that path you might even not notice how everything else falls apart at the end.

Yeah, just as came up a bit ago, it feels like there's some clear rushing in the last chunk of Final Fantasy VIII. Disk 3 and Disk 4 are extremely short, to the point that if it weren't for the massive AMVs (holy shit man 18 minutes of ending credits FMV?) it probably would have been on 3 Disks instead, or at least should have been.

Omicron said:

Okay.

Let me address the elephant in the room, because I have been joking about this entirely too much to not be taking it seriously on some level.

Ultinoa Trutherism

It has become my understanding, since finishing the game, that "Ultimecia is Rinoa" is a popular fan theory, popular enough to get a nod with Dissidia naming Ultimecia's weapons after Rinoa's, but one that is also explicitly disproven by canon and the developers' words. I am genuinely grateful to everyone who was able to keep a lid on it and leave me to think this was just my brilliant idea I'd come up with it myself rather than wink wink nudge nudge hint that it was a popular (disproven) fan theory.

Sometimes when you watch a blind Let's Play you get to look at someone reinventing The Moon Landing Didn't Happen from first principles.

From the moment you first said "Rinoa = Ultimecia", the spoilers thread was full of people alternating between "is this a bit, does he know" and "wait is Omi seriously managing to accidentally stumble into one of the most infamous debunked theories?" Suffice to say, I find it hilarious to discover it was apparently the latter.

Omicron said:

I will, as usual, be doing a wrap-up post summing up my overall thoughts on the game as a whole. I don't know how long it'll take, or how much steam I'll have left for it, but I have many things to say about the game that I hope to put together once my brain isn't completely scrambled by Total Final Fantasy VIII Immersion. Please look forward to it, but in the meantime:

And I and everyone else will be eagerly looking forward to it.

Egleris said:

Care to defend this statement with actual arguments? It's fine if you don't want to, I'm not trying to start a fight, but I am incapable of understanding how you could have come to such a conclusion. And I am the one who thinks FFV is better than FFVII, which I repeatedly stated is better than FFVIII; however, the idea that FFVIII isn't superior to FFVI in every single measurable respect is impossible for me to wrap my head around.

While it's obviously a matter of taste in the end (and personally I'm soft on FFVIII because it was one of my first Final Fantasy games), I feel like between the fact that Omi clearly had quite some annoyance wrapping himself around the combat system, and the fact that most of your suggested solutions were some variation of "play the game intentionally non-optimally or with restrictions to keep it interesting", that really does point to FFVIII being a fairly flawed game.

Granted, the last three games have had some level of broken system power creep (Espers letting you powerlevel stats if you juggle them + just teaching literally everyone the most powerful spells in the game in FFVI, FFVII being generally not that hard but also you can pull off ridiculous unecessary combos with materia to break things, and FFVIII's... everything with the junction system), but of the three I think FFVIII clearly leans into becoming the most frustrating because of how tilted the balance can be. Enemies with level scaling, juggling your junctions, some bosses or enemies suddenly pulling out "I win unless you pre-planned for this" cards like Bad Breath). By comparsion, FFVI/FFVII mostly fall apart because the player just overpowers the game at some point and the challenge is mostly gone, FFI/FFIII/FFIV aren't too breakable because of how their designed, FFV doesn't fall apart until near the end unless you super grind, and FFII is in fact a game in the Final Fantasy series and we'll stop there because despite also having childhood nostalgia for it, I'm absolutely not going to bat for its messy systems lmao

And of course, this is talking exclusively about gameplay, not things like the setting and story. If you ask me about those aspects, I think FFVIII knocks it out of the park quite regularly? Yeah things start to fall apart towards the end, but let's be honest almost all of these big fancy RPG games have lategame issues where they wrote checks they can't cash because the dev team suddenly has 2 weeks before launch. There's still a pretty solid core of Squall's character development and love story with Rinoa, the side cast characters are all plenty identifiable and lovable (more than I can say about some characters in FFVI or FFVII)... it's an overly ambitious game, sure, but I think it falls more into "overly ambitious but it's cool that it tried" rather than "overly ambitious and godawful for it what were they even thinking".

Well, we'll see what Omi has to say in his final wrapup eventually, I'm sure. I feel confident in thinking he at least enjoyed the party members quite a bit.

RubberBandMan said:

I respect the FF series for being willing to start from scratch each mainline series, to really try something new each time, but I have fond memories of tinkering with the junctioning system, of mastering it to be functionally invincible, without having to level grind. I wish they played with this sort of system to radically alter stats when you wanted, of magic doing more then being a thing you cast with MP or ATB charges, and actually had an impact on your character and what you can do.

And that they tried it again, in a game without ATB and it's fucked up stupid system that should have been in the ground long before it went 3D, I hate hate hate it.

Once again, I am hearing the words "We need a Final Fantasy VIII remake, complete with revamped junction system". Please Square Enix, pleaaaaase stop playing with your pretty boy Sephiroth and the rest of your FFVII toys for just a few years and give some love to the other games.

...What's that? FFIV After Years? That one sequel novel to a game Omi hasn't played yet that is absurdly godawful? FFVII Remake is already controversial for quite a few people?

...On second thought maybe we should let FFVIII lie.

Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Playing: Final Fantasy Tactics] Let's Play (2024)
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