Thursday 25 September 2014

Let's Play: Final Fantasy VIII - Part Sixty One

 Part Sixty

 Masterpost

 Day Twenty Three: Space SeeD


 Lady, this is not the time.

 There is a comatose teenage girl and you want to show your brother the moon?

 What the hell is wrong with you?

 You're just the queen of terrible decisions, aren't you?

 And to my amazement, Zog just goes with this.

 Saving Nina was a desperate enough situation to merit going into space, but not skipping over seeing the moon.

 They could have just looked at it afterwards, surely. With Nina.

 Oddly, I'm actually reminded of something that one of the characters from Gundam Wing once said, mostly because it's entirely the opposite of what Ellone here says.

 The character was Duo Maxwell, and he professed a preference for viewing the Moon from the Earth because it didn't look as appealing from the space colonies. He lived on a space colony his entire life up to that point, and according to him it was like a graveyard viewed from his home.

 Now, multiple things could be going on here.

 One, this is Ellone's first trip to space (probably) and therefore she presents a perfect counterpoint to Duo Maxwell. Both think the grass is greener on the other side of the space fence, as it were.

 Two, this space station is probably further away from the moon than L2 was. Since L2 was at a Legrange point and I'm pretty sure that this space station is just in geo-stationary orbit. (At least, it bloody well better be, because according to Jules Verne's maths the journey to the Moon would have taken about five days via space gun and that's clearly not how long this journey took.)

 Three, this moon has monsters on it.


 Not only does this moon have monster on it, but periodically an event called the 'Lunar Cry' occurs.


 No, not that kind of Lunar Cry. This is an event where a bunch of monsters descend from the moon and land on the planet below.






 Okay, you Nintenerds are starting to get kind of annoying.

 To be fair, it does bear mentioning that Majora's Mask came out after FFVIII. There's no excuse from the whole Clefairy angle though.

This isn't the first time in game that the event has been mentioned. Edea brought it up when the Lunatic Pandora was hovering over Tear's Point.

 According the Averaged Sized Controller, the ''lunar world is a world of monsters" and asks Selphie and Zog if they didn't learn that at school.

 Hmm, I don't approve of chastising characters for apparently not knowing things that the game has made no attempt to demonstrate in over forty five hours of gameplay.

 The best we have is the bit where Nina thinks a lion is a monster and Zog corrects her by saying that it isn't, even though it kind of is because of how the human mind works in relation to scary things that can eat you.

 But that is entirely it.

 (Yeah, I did know this was coming, which is part of the reason I focused on that conversation for so long. This play through isn't super blind.)

 We also learn what made the massive crater in Centra, and why everything there is a ruin.

 Lunar Cries happen on a fairly regular basis, and the monsters landed on the planet at Centra over a hundred years ago. This destroyed the city (although apparently not the out of town shopping centre) and left a massive crater that looks pretty damn cool on the world map.

 It also explains the rather classical style of the remaining buildings, that was all the rage back in the Victorian era, which a hundred years ago would have been equivalent to in this world.

 For something of such monumental importance, you'd think that it would have come up at some point before. No one has ever mentioned this prior to Edea bringing it up.

 Another dude in the control room called Piet is confused when Zog talks to him, saying that he thought that he wanted Ellone to see Nina.

 Now, this is where the whole 'queen of awful ideas' thing comes in.


This looks very '2001 A Space Odyssey', by which I mean ominous.
 Somehow, Nina is opening up the 'let's avoid having to model blankets' bed by herself while comatose.

 Then she gets out of bed and starts lurching away.

 This causes a red alert, although it's not entirely clear why until Zog goes to check if Nina is okay when there's a call for all units to head to the med lab.

Moloko video effect equals bad.
 We can only be grateful she's not dressed like a mirrorball.

 However, the bad news is that she's throwing anyone who approaches here only using the power of her mind, or some kind of untoward magical powers. Much like Edea did when she was possessed by Ultimecia.

 ... Ah. I think I know where this is going.


 As you can see from the screenshot above, Zog has no luck stopping her.

 He doesn't try violence, but it wouldn't have done him any good anyway.

 It doesn't do any of the guards any favours.

 She slowly lurches her way to the control room, where she throws som technicians around and deactivates the first level seal of Adel's prison.

 Zog attempts to stop her, but gets thrown to one side again a she doesn't even bat an eyelid.

 As Nina lurches off, Selphie draws atenttion to the surface of the moon where all the monsters are gathering on one spot and milling around in a monsterous fashion.

 This, according to Piet, is the beginning of the Lunar Cry.

 He also tells Zog and Selphie that the second seal on Adel's prison is on the prison itself, so if Nina is intending to release Adel, she'll need to go out and unseal it manually. Obviously, she needs to be stopped.

 But do you know what might help ith that, Piet?

 Reactivating the seal she just deactivated.

 She didn't break it, she just turned it off.

 Turn it back on, and if she does manage to get to Adel's prison, then she won't be able to open it. She'll have to come back.

 Which would give you ample opportunity to stop her, or possibly to lock her out of the space station until she runs out of oxygen and passes out.

 Or dies. Which would be unfortunate, but these are desperate times.

 Talking to a crew member on the way to where Nina is planning to get a space suit leads to another FMV cutscene of what's going on in the Lunar Cry.


 In stills, it looks a bit weird, but it does look pretty good in motion.

 I do have a couple of things I want to say about the monsters inside the protuding atmosphere of death, but that will have to wait until Part Sixty Two. See you then.

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