The Shrine

<div style='font: 12pt "Cooper Black"; text-align: left; '>First, i guess it wasnt really a replay, because as i've said earlier the first time i played through the game i rushed to the last castle only to find out that my guys were weak weak weak and i couldnt find a way to get out. This was back in '99 when the game came out, i got frustrated and never picked the game back up. Now, i've realized that you dont even need good lvls on your chars as you need good magic for the junctioning. My guys in my replay were string as shit the entire time because if i cam across an easy boss that had a good junctioning magic i would simply take 15-20 minutes to draw 300 of it out of them. I did this with Triple from Cereberus, Aura from Seifer, Full Life from Fujin (or maybe Rajin), Meteor from some boss in the castle, and Flare from one of the bosses in the final castle. For mid game i did it a few times for things like Thundaga and Life from some random battles.

That leads to my second point, while i found the junctioning system cool, it is a broken system. They should have some limit on the number draws you can take from someone at the very least. My guys never stopped to randomly fight and were all lvl 25-35 by the last castle but still had 9999 life and Squall had 200+ str which was made it more than easy enough to melt through the last castle.

Speaking of the last castle, i think that that level is rediculous. I hate using guides but I had to print it out for this one because i was tired of running around aimlessly. Killing bosses and unlocking your locked attributes is a good idea but you really do have to do it in a particular order or you can be caught by surprise and killed rather easily. Since SAVE is one of the abilities locked, it forces you to start over, which can be very annoying. In addition, without the Encounter-None ability i would have been tearing my own hair out. The amount of time they spend making you run around the castle i am suddenly not surprised that i was frustrated the first time through the game when i didnt have Encounter-none. The last castle alone took about 10% of my total play time, which i think is too much. When you finally get to the last lvl all you want to do is fight the last boss, not deal with 8 mini-bosses and various 'impossible to figure out without a guide' puzzles first. This would have been a great idea for a lvl in the middle of the game some place, IMO.

The boss fight was one of the cooler ones in any FF with the music, visuals, and boss/es look. It was an easy fight, but fun. I still do not like being introduced to the last boss at the end of the game, though. Yes, Ultimecia was spoken of during the game, but you dont actually see her and talk to her until the end, which doesnt make as big an impact as a Kefka or a Sephiroth. I like the boss lvl'ing along with you in the game which is one reason why i vote for KefKa being a great villain. He was crazy, and some people dont like that, but he was also a wuss in the beginning seeking ultimate power which is not really too far off from your own party being pansies at the start and growing to godliness.

All in all the ending was a treat, also weird, but fun to watch and pertinent to the story line. I understood the loop that Matron's SeeD and Garden idea came from Squall which would lead to a neverending cycle and that is kinda cool. The film during the credits was funny and better than the actual ending ending.

I'd have to say that FF8 still ranks behing FF6 and 10 as my favorite FF. Its a close race between it and FF7 for third. I did enjoy it, and was glad i played it over again. Now i'll have to fire up FF9 (the last FF i havent beat.... besided FFX-2 and FF11 which i dont think count) and probably CC after that.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>First of all, I can't really speak about the battles because I have never been to that place without having the No Encounters skill. Even so, I did not fight 8 mini-bosses in the dungeon, only ever between 3 and 4, and I don't remember them being at all difficult to find. I don't remember it being that long either (I think the dungeon as a whole took me 20-30 minutes each time through). There were a few puzzels I couldn't figure out, and one I did happen to figure out was Omega (who easily kicked my ass, I think he is even more difficult than the end boss). Needless to say, I was probably quite a bit more handicapped than you on the last fight so I rank it up there as probably the #2 toughest boss fight I have played and won, #1 is still probably Bloody Mary from Terranigma, and #3 is probably whatever the name of that boss at the end of the Encephalon in Xenosaga (though it is possible that some in FF10 ranked up there, but I had Wakka so powered up that not much gave me any difficulty). My strategy focussed around Aura, haste, curing, Meltdown, and limit breaks.

As for saving, you can always use the one save point at the beginning of the level at any time, and the level is the type that has many different passages and none lead too far from the beginning except the final one towards the end which leads to Ultimecia and he final save point which is the only one effected by the lock I think, and that one is further from all the challenges than the one at the enterance. I do not think it was the intention of the developer for first time players to unlock everything in the final dungeon, I've gone through it a few times and even I have only ever unlocked a few. It is something for "completest" players to do, and Final Fantasy 8 has A LOT of extra stuff in it, it could take someone up to 70 hours to get everything if they did it all efficiently (I'm up to 50 hours now, longer than I have ever spent in a Final Fantasy game).

As for Ultimecia, I am not sure if you missed Odine and Edea's dialogues completely through disk 3, but they explain that Ultimecia is the real name of the sorceress who Squall and Co had been fighting all along; that Edea had been possessed by Ultimecia; this is explained at the very beginning of the disk. Later on Odine explains that Ultimecia sent her consciousness back in time using his Ellone emulation machine, but since Ultimecia's ultimate goal was to re-unite with Sorceress Adel (as Seifer says at the end of the disk) she needed to go back further, but since the Ellone machine could only send her back so far, she required the real Ellone to go back to the time of Adel. As the story goes, at the very end, she did go back in time, possessed Adel and used time compression to bring her physical self (as Adel) to the future and combine herself into one sorceress with ultimate power (since originally in her time Adel had been completely lost, floating in outer space somewhere beyond the knowledge of anyone existing at the time). Later on in disk 3 during a flashback scene Ultimecia possessed Rinoa (Seifer refers to her as Ultimecia) gives Seifer some orders, and that was to use the Lunar Cry to bring Adel's body back down to the planet, since she discovered the true whereabouts of Adel at some point during her stay in Squall's time. Ultimecia (Rinoa) just before the Lunar Cry went into space: unlocked Adel and possessed her. Later on after the plan is formulated, the company travels to the Lunatic Pandora where UItimecia is located, Seifer blurts out the whole plan, and a battle takes place. Ultimecia at this point uses an absorption spell which would combine Rinoa with Adel which would allow for the sorceress to reach her full strength (There is a whole series of mythological references to the origin of the sorceresses throughout the game, originating with a God called Hyne who was defeated and forced to divide his powers among the sorceresses, who would pass their powers on down through lineages, by Laguna's time only two remained, Adel's and Edea's, and those two were all that remained during Ultimecia's time as well, only Adel's part, and presumably the more powerful part, was lost). Utlimecia is present throughout the entire game, you just don't know the extent of her nature until the beginning of disk 3 (similar to Lavos in Chrono Trigger, or Krelian in Xenogears, another villain whose name and purpose you don't even really know until you're abut 80-90% through the game, but finding out brings a ton of meaning to events that happen throughout most of the game). There are a ton of things you can pick up each time you play the game, it's a game that can be played again because of this, and it's not a particularilly long RPG either; I found that the parts that I thought took me a long time (like the prison complex which I thought took forever) only took me a few minutes the next time through. Mainly the reason why I decided to replay the game was because of disk 3, all this new stuff that I learned, it was a similar thing to fight club (most of the first part of the movie makes no sense until the second time you watch it, some people still don't get the movie after seeing it many times); I always call it the Fight Club of the FF series.

There are skills you can get to find hidden draw points, and this in combination with No-Encounters will allow you an easy way of finding very easy to acquire magic, you can stock up on Ultima, Flare, Full Life, and Aura without much difficulty. This is something I discovered on my third play through the game. Even without that stuff you can still get that magic, just search around on the Ragnarok for the Islands closest to heaven and hell, each Island you land on has its own name.

On the boss music, a lot of people consider this one to be the best song in the series; but personally I like the Piano stuff the best, like the Piano version of Squall and Ellone's theme "The Oath" or the Piano version of Julia's song "Eyes on Me" (there are like 5 versions of this song in the game). I think "The Oath" might possibly be my favourite music in any RPG.

On the ending, it generally ties up the stories of the characters. The weird stuff that you might not have understood was that everyone got sucked back into time compression after defeating Ultimecia, because her power now no longer existed and couldn't hold the physical presence of all the characters in the world any longer. Before going into the Lunatic Pandora, Laguna talks about "anchors" which characters would have to use to get back, in other words, something they cared deeply about and could clearly remember. At the end, Squall couldn't seem to find his, he keeps trying to find some place he and Rinoa had, but the visions are always blurry. He first ended up back in his childhood, but couldn't stay there because there was already a squall in that time. In the end it shows him passing out, and then Rinoa comes and seemingly the whole spell seems to unravel and light and the world seem to replace the Time Compression world, and then at the end it shows Squall and Rinoa on the balcony, happily ever after =)


Anyways, one thing about Final Fantasy 8 is that there are a number of cool fan made music video's for it. Check out "Television" by "Stabbing Westward" and make sure to type in "FF8" or something similar along as a search term with it. That's just one, there are dozens of them.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>And yes some of the puzzles are ridiculous. I had a friend who was trying to play Eyes on Me for the music puzzle and he was really saddened when he learned the solution is just to hit all the keys. The last dungeon is needlessly long which is why I don't try to kill all the bosses, and you can get yourself in trouble (like fighting the iron giant boss without Meltdown or draw) but in general I don't see most bosses as impossible to beat. The first to unlock is surely spells (so you can heal) and then after that it's not that important which order you do your abilities in.</div>