FFVIII – Part 2: Squall and Quistis

Summary: Dipping our toes into the new environment of the Garden School.


A hospital?

-Oh. That introduction where the crusader and the biker were fighting leads directly to this. The biker is lying wounded in a bed.

-A woman named Dr. Kadowaki is tending to him. He gets the chance to respond that he’s hurt or that he’s fine. If this game is giving me dialogue choices, I’m choosing to make this guy as unstoic as possible.

-Name time. Squall! I wonder if there’s any familial relation to Cloud, or if Square Enix just likes naming characters after weather.

-Maybe this didn’t follow directly from the intro. He says his wounds were from training with a guy named Seifer, and the intro didn’t look at all like training.

-Seifer is apparently kind of a bully, or someone at least who provides conscious or unconscious peer pressure. Not sure.

-Squall’s teacher is Quistis.

-Quistis walks in.

I immediately love her character design and clothing.

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Walking the Grounds

-They leave the infirmary together.

-Mechanically, this is pretty neat. I can control Squall to a degree. I can walk forward, and when I walk forward more dialogue happens.

-Squall’s trying to be all mysterious and cagey about his backstory, but Quistis just laughs at him. I like her.

-We pan across the grounds. This seems to be a school – and not an elite special forces SOLDIER-style school either.

-Wtf is that?

Modern art?

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B-Garden - Classroom

-Quistis is the teacher, and Squall takes a seat.

-Seifer’s there, and he IS the crusader-looking dude. Maybe the intro happened then?

-Test day coming.

-The music is pleasant and relaxed.

-The classroom looks high-tech, so that prediction is wrong. This game will stay at least partially modern – although there were swords involved, so still having that fantasy element too.

-I got control of Squall. A brief look at the status screen.

The options and menu terms tell me just how little I know about this game, but I have some guesses:

“Junction” - Perhaps similar to the “Band” attacks in FFIV: The After Years, where you could do special attacks in conjunction with party members.
”Guardian Force” - Espers/summons?
”Card” - The game’s version of a bestiary, where I can review details of different enemies like their weakness and loot drops.

-There’s a tutorial, but I’ll hold off on reading that for now. Everything there would be out of context. When I come across a battle I’ll read the battle tutorial, items for item tutorial, etc.

-Squall can access a classroom computer terminal.

-“Balamb Garden Network” interface provides tutorials. Balamb Garden must be the name of the school.

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Next time: digging into the Balamb Garden Network Kiosk.