Yes, another final fantasy 8 post. I cut this off from the previous installment and I have to use it because there is one joke in it that I like at all.
I wanted to get into the game’s story a bit. Because I already wrote all this, so it would logically follow that this is what I want. In fact the story is really grim: it is about a bunch of kids at school being trained to kill kids from another school. You don’t realize they’re kids because they look to be in their 30s, except for Quistis who looks closer to 40, but the instruction manual insists all are 17 and 18 years old. Quistis just looks old because, as I indicated last time, she is possessed by a 30,000 year old malevolent hate spirit and I suppose she is holding up rather well, overall.
The heroes soon get assigned to kill the president of Galbadia, the nation/city/tiny isolated village on a huge empty world map that the other school is from. But then that school forgives them when the president teams up with the evil sorceress Edea, so then the kids try to kill the sorceress. They fail and somehow end up fighting against the school that forgave them earlier anyway*.
Then the sorceress Edea forgives them because they are all orphans and she was actually their muppet-baby-like nanny from years ago, and actually married to the principal Cid of the school that trained them, whose original purpose was to train kids to kill Edea who Cid is married to. The real enemy is actually Rinoa, the hero’s love interest, who is, after Edea (the orphanage sorceress), next in line to inherit evil from a different sorceress, Ultimecia, from the future, who wishes to be reborn in the past and therefore present. So then everybody goes to the future to kill Ultimecia, including Rinoa, her reborn self from the past, who has become more powerful but resisted becoming evil, but not Edea, the first sorceress, who is also not evil but doesn’t seem any worse for having received enough power that her husband started an army with which to kill her and therefore useful to have on your own side in a fight. And then I wonder why not let the evil sorceress give evil power to everybody since they seem to shake off the evil without losing the power fairly consistently and within a short time frame. By the way when I said the story was grim I meant uncomfortably ridiculous.
And you have a hard time wearing a complete sweater. We all have deficits to work on.
One of the secondary heroes, Irvine, is from the Galbadia school and the only cowboy in the world, complete with a big stupid hat and riding chaps, which typically goes unmentioned because in addition to lacking other cowboys, the world also lacks both horses to ride and cattle to herd. There are chocobos, strange large yellow birds, but you only ever see Squall riding one and his regular leather pants seem sufficient. Also, from my recollection, despite taking approximately forever and being out of character with everything else in the game, completing the side-quest that gives you access to the chocobo doesn’t actually confer any manner of benefit, since there is no place for the bird to go apart from places that your space ship can already land next to, and you need the space ship to find the bird.
Irvine, despite being from the other school, doesn’t seem bothered massacring his former, conveniently-anonymous helmeted comrades. Which I could also tie into Star Wars 7 but hopefully I won’t because by now that movie is two months old and nobody is going to care. Though it must be said that Finnegan only switched sides in the first place after he saw his chum get shot by the guy he later broke out of prison.
Irvine is the love interest of Selphie, who dresses for the complete opposite weather that Irvine does. Also, even though in 1999 nobody said “selfie” to refer to uninteresting photographs of yourself, Selphie in the game is still adequately annoying. I don’t feel like getting a picture of selphie! I don’t need a picture of everything I describe! And I’m telling me that, not you! Although sometimes I call me “you.”
This is the world map. Notice that there are only about 15 land marks on it, which are the only points you can engage with. And that is fine; you can’t expect to go everywhere in the world. What is annoying is that the game makes not the slightest effort to imply there is more to the world than the places you can enter. Of course having a superficially place-filled world that you could not go anywhere in would also be annoying but that only feels bad on my side. This here looks bad on their side. The two southern land-masses seem to have one destination between them.
Late in the game you come to esthar, which looks like this. And it’s great. In the context of a first generation low resolution playstation role playing game it is great, I mean. You have to travel on the highway a while before magically switching to the “inside the city” view. You can see neighborhoods and roads beneath the highway. You feel like there’s stuff going on. That’s exactly what the other cities should do.
Although even this abruptly ENDS at nothing instead of tapering off into less densely populated areas.
And earlier Irvine claims to have searched the entire continent looking for the city while his associates take a Gogurt break (on railroad tracks). The city is holographically hidden from view, but the game text outright states that there is nothing in existence that you cannot see from the world map, and that the speed you move on the world map is not artistic license to keep it from taking weeks to walk from town to town. Gosh that’s the third thing I hated about Earthbound. It’s supposed to be so modern and hip and with it but only the main characters have houses and only one town has a school and I didn’t actually finish it because I only rented it once and didn’t care much and thought it was ugly anyhow.
Also apparently it has the world’s biggest game box and costs twice as much as the next most expensive cartridge on the secondary market, if you are insane enough that you think playing a console rpg on native hardware without speed acceleration when you don’t have to isn’t the world’s biggest empty time-sink and worth spending extra money and living space for the privilege of and also on tracking down a 24 year old super Nintendo system that still works AND the last remaining gamepads that nobody ever stepped on. As if this is more honorable to the Nintendo company in some way than emulating the game, even though it isn’t because Nintendo doesn’t get a cut of resales and has re-released numerous games like this one as pay downloads that it gets FULL proceeds from, that are a fraction of what the games cost new in the 1990s, which was a fraction of what resellers are sometimes charging for them old in the 2010s. Hooray for a hipsterism based economy! We honor the cutting edge technology of our youth by treating it like the antiques of our grandparents’ youth! We honor the advancements that astounded us in the past by treating improvements on them with the obstinate backwardism of an author who takes it as a point of pride to still use a typewriter!
I know somebody who criticizes me over my use of the commercial applications photoshop and fl-studio for artwork and music when there are free alternatives with ostensibly the same capabilities. But the commercial software does what I need in efficient, non-backward ways that I already understand, and typically have larger existing support bases. I know people who can explain to me how to use that stuff. I pay extra for convenience. You don’t buy a super nintendo game on a cartridge in 2015 for convenience. A typewriter is superficially more efficient than a computer to somebody accustomed to typewriters, but a typewriter does not have the same capabilities.
And then six paragraphs about how much I hate Fisherman’s Horizon, Shumi Village and Trabia, the most boring and endless mopey, exposition-only areas in any video game, and the stupid boring card game that for whatever reason needs to be played the most in the most boring areas of the main game. I need convenience NOW to make up for all the time I wasted on THIS kind of stupid garbage back when I had time. And I need even more convenience because I wrote all those paragraphs and will never use them.
That’s no way to talk to somebody who has it all figured out!
(I put the paragraphs here)
I suspect this might be funnier without the fourth frame, which makes it sad. Somebody else suggested it was better without the fifth. So I compromised and ruined it twice by including both.
It has the potential to be accurate but for the moment it is not.
page 43 of part 1 of the bimshwellian comicoid, partially redrawn, from that. Alright, I spent a few days on this, can you even tell? I keep thinking “i can reuse the old parts that work and correct the things that don’t” but if I change one part I have to change the whole thing. I had solid lines and colors, but I did NOT know how I thought monster imp legs worked. And I didn’t know how the fleshy non-bone side of arms worked. I still do not know but I am better at faking it. It may be enough to make the text stop infringing on the frames it does not originate from. But if I go in there to fix one thing, I inadvertently start looking for others.
In the interest of honesty, I like the character Squall, from the video game Final Fantasy 8, that I alluded to the notorious moodiness of in a previous item.
However, I am aware of the popular criticism that he is a self-centered and terrible hero and I think it is funny. I think it is funny but ultimately it is someone else’s joke. “Maybe I’m a Lion” is not something that Squall ever says but it is the title of some music that plays during one of his heroic moments near the end of the game, possibly based on the composer misreading Squall’s last name “Leonhart” as “Lionheart.” Although Squall also can acquire a replacement sword-gun that is called Lionheart. You’d have to be a complete nerd to know what any of the music is called, of course; even somebody who knows his last name is Leonhart and that his sword is Lionheart and that welsh rarebit is his favorite type of rarebit wouldn’t necessarily have studied all the backstory on the soundtrack, so anyone I want to think I am clever probably does not.
Popular culture commentary in illustrated form is never going to be for me since I take too long to draw things and do not reach the right conclusions that will have people know what I am trying to say, unless I personally do not agree with those conclusions, which means I will not be properly invested. And while on this occasion I managed to care enough about the biggest movie of the year while it was still in theaters, I tied it to something else from 15 years ago and even worse, offered a criticism, which means fans, the only people who would care, would not,
unless they missed my point, meaning they would be uninterested in anything else I did that couldn’t be interpreted as a dumb fandom homage, and I should not have bothered if I wasn’t getting money, and I wasn’t. This was by far the most popular “art” I ever put on the crumbumblr website, and yet it still wasn’t all THAT popular, and didn’t lead to any engagement with my other pictures. It won’t mean anything unless I keep drawing star wars junk, and the more I do, the less of me there will be in it and the less of me there will be in anything. The same as happened when I got conscripted into the “furry” gang. Nobody cares about thought or effort, just well-polished compliance. And as a result I became an angry person incapable of being positive or making friends, and even my compliance was shunned, and with it having no personal meaning to me, I only got more angry, and probably have written the same thing here about twice a year since 2011, which I forget, because I only write it to stop thinking about it, which means if the topic comes up again it will be fresh. Fandoms are a trap. And there is less immediate incentive to free one’s self from a fresh trap than an obviously old and sour trap.
The same person who forwarded my picture also forwarded this. I cannot well coexist with the 50 thousand people (assuming most of them both “like”d and “reblog”ged, therefore accruing a score over 100,000) for whom a drawing of chummy, angle-bodied, out of costume, ostensibly star wars characters but who knows, in a void, doing nothing, was the best thing they saw all week. This might as well be the cast of Streptococcus Paiella. Hey how about the next Star Wars movie is just a 3 hour Dawson’s Creek reunion, would you like that? You, as a fan of interesting characters, thought the ideal course of action was to reduce them to boring fans of themselves. That is to say, boring but POSITIVE, socially COMPLIANT fans of themselves. And an army-sized group agreed with your decision despite the mumbling fake-humble introduction you gave it. More people openly endorse turning interesting into mundane than the entire population of Monaco. How am I losing to this? I lose because I seek approval from people who approve of rubbish.
Back to my main afterthought, dismissing Final Fantasy 8 just because one character is moody and noncompliant misses the whole point of why the game doesn’t work. I did own and use a copy of the game when it was newish, unaware of the criticisms of others, and discovered afterward that mine, while numerous, differed. Alright, so why am I letting them control how I refer to it in retrospect?
Even people in the game complain about how moody Squall is! Which doesn’t excuse it, but that means, if that is your sole criticism, you need to say more than that. His whole character development is that he learns to stop being as much of a jerk but without making any implausible leap of temperament or pretending to be happy in his miserable video game sword murder quest. So him being a jerk is not the reason the game is dumb, and ultimately not even true!
I think Squall’s less conflicted “friends” are lacking in emotional depth and send mixed messages. They hassle him to go on unusual journeys and then complain when he does. He tries to leave them behind, and they they know it, and instead of stopping him they magically get in front of him and mock him for leaving, and drag him back into their toxic psychological abyss. They would toss Squall in a ditch and laugh if he wasn’t good at murdering. Also I suddenly have an odd premonition that I should warn you I named Squall “Cupcake” on my most recent play-through.
Or Quistis would, anyway. Quistis is the most manipulative and entitled person around. In recognition of that, the game’s writers gave Quistis a fan club. In recognition of rubbish, Wikia writers wrote about it.
And through that I have learned that there are actual Quistis fans, and it shocks me that they can’t find a real person to treat them so poorly.
Thanks for standing back and telling me I FAILED, you who has never tried anything that looks challenging, such as putting that word into a sentence. I’m sure dresses made out of salmon meat are actually very trendy where Quistis comes from so I doubt she is standing against a crowd with that fashion decision. At least her crony, Zell, (the one in the middle) legitimately wants to be helpful and just lacks any personal ambition, but Quistis is a wretch.
But again, bad characters aren’t at fault. I was looking through my old screenshots for this and it just reminded me of QUISTIS everywhere. The fault is on the hokey writing, that would be funny if the characters were not supposed to be more realistic than previous games in the series. But I can live with them. The problem with the game is that it is a big glossy box of unfulfilled promises that somebody clearly intended to fulfill at some point in the process. I can see a framework for a very good game, and having that frame so empty in the end is more frustrating than something that is just lazy, like its contemporary Legend of Dragoon, and more likely to have a player dwelling on it 15 years later. Of course it helps if that player is out of touch with games that came afterward and looks for any opportunity to connect a new experience to it in an attempt to grasp some sense of belonging in a culture they hate but bafflingly want to be liked by, so long as they don’t know what else the likers like.
It looks as if I compared my dissatisfaction with final fantasy 8 to my dissatisfaction with Star Wars in one of my oldest existent website entries, and without clarifying, so apparently I need to do that now or risk writing something even longer than this when I am 45ish. And it looks like I, again, went with the crowd and blamed everything on a few characters, Jar Jar Binx and whiny bowl haircut Anakin, even though fault truly lies with bad writing, running time that exceeds content time, and the few good things being promptly forgotten or killed. And I more than likely knew that when I wrote that. But I lacked the foresight to consider “15 years from now none of the people pretending to like me, that I pretend to be likable by them for now are still going to bother.” Eh I thought I would be comfortably wealthy and widely respected for my bold opinions on current topics and uniquely profound artwork by 2006.
Finally, somebody who UNDERSTANDS me!
I am not even going to pretend I know anything about cooking. I think it might push this series more in the direction I want it to go if I am honest about what I do not understand, also.
I should also be honest that I am terribly amused when somebody gets poked in the nose.
And initially the item was square-shaped and being removed from an oven, and I like this dialog line better with “oven” in it, but since I didn’t at any point show it going into the oven, I could not make that work with the pot I have already shown being fixated on. It shouldn’t even be important enough to mention but I literally have too much anxiety to sleep lately over dumber things than that. The fact that I did not previously draw an oven into the same room was thankfully of less concern to me.
Also I keep forgetting to mention that the first book can be bought from here. Or rather I wanted to make a longer post about it, but I also wanted to wait until after I made another post explaining that weird “maybe I’m a lion” post, so that they are buried together, and I have been unable to find a shovel big enough.