Let's Play: Final Fantasy VIII - Part Twenty Eight

 Part Twenty Seven

 Masterpost

 Day Twelve: To The Plot Expository!

 It's time for another boss battle!

 Yay! I love getting no experience after a difficult fight!

Fun fact: the reason it's blue and not green is because red, blue
and yellow are the primary colours in Japanese painting.

 Wait... what is he doing?

 Is he...

 Oh god, he is.

 He's telling me how to defeat him.

 Dude, this is not Zelda, Garden is not the Colour Dungeon and you're not a Giant Hardhat Beetle! You don't even look like one, you just look ill.

 Which makes sense, he's been in the basement for ten years.

 Bosses like this can either make perfect sense, or no sense at all. NORG here falls into the latter category. The Giant Hardhat Beetle in Link's Awakening was a test, NORG is trying to kill you.

 Does the guy have to vocalise every damn thought or something? What possible purpose does telling the people he's trying to kill his strategy serve? And why is there a traffic light system in place for this anyway? Is he honour bound to only use magic when the light is red or something?

 By the way, here's a tip.

 Make sure everyone is at pretty high health and use Carbuncle. Then just leave the lights alone.

 With Reflect up, he pretty much cannot hurt you.

 Yeah, you can't use healing magic, but it's not much of a problem. Use his weakness against him and the machine will soon go down.

It's a shame, this was a pretty machine.

 Once you've stripped him of his cocoon, the man himself will fight you.

I could make a crude joke about him being popular with the ladies,
but ew.

 Aero the living crap out of him, and don't forget that you can't use healing magic on the team or you'll heal NORG.

 So with relatively little difficulty, NORG goes down.

 But before he does, make sure to draw from him. You'll get a new GF called Leviathan.

 I called mine Sharky, although strictly speaking, the original biblical Leviathan was probably based on a crocodile.

 Since I picked Irvine to come with Zog and Nina, I get to chuckle at his Valley Girl-esque dialogue as he asks them what's going on.

 Zog tells him to forget about it, and Nina dislikes that because the financial backer of his home just tried to kill them so he could suck up to the Sorceress.

 Zog, being Zog, doesn't think that it's worth talking about because Nina doesn't know what's going on either.

 Ugh, he's such a whiny brat.

To be fair, you are pretty wooden.

 Pretentious, too. Give him an acoustic guitar and stick him in a coffee shop and he'd fit right in.

 He's keen on seeing Cid after that excitement, so now it's wandering around time.

 I had them go to the first floor where the Trepe fans seem totally cognisant of the number of monsters she's killed, but not that she was caught in a self destructing missile base, and the guy who got Zog in trouble by asking him to show off his gunblade got Zog in trouble again by asking him to show off some magic.

 Mr Aki was not pleased by this in the slightest, and Zog lost a SeeD rank.

 Grumble.

 I checked the classroom computer again and learned that Raijin likes insects. There was also this:

I do like me some edible flowers.

 It's not hard to work out who requested that last one, is it?

 It also turns out that the school forum got shut down because the students were using it for the exact type of thing that teenagers use forums and message boards for.

After this, I checked his office only to find out he wasn't there. 'Come see me in my office later', he lied.

 At this point I put my thinking cap on and tried to work out where he'd gone. Considering that I only knew where one of the other named adult characters with plot relevance was, I went to check out the infirmary.

 Where he'd been crying.

 This is the man happy to train child soldiers. Just so we're all clear on this.

 We finally manage to find out what the heck NORG is. Apparently he's a member of the Shumi tribe, and Cid describes him as a 'black sheep' which doesn't say much. They could generally dislike him for any reason, from the child soldiers to the needless yelling and living in a basement.

 More pertinently, Cid says that he met him while he was trying to find a way to fund the Garden and not only did NORG provide the initial investment, he's also the one who came up with the mercenary idea in the first place.

 Apparently everything wrong with SeeD is NORGs fault, not because the idea of training child soldiers is twisted and evil in the first place, or anything

For a guy who trains children to kill, Cid has some
 pretty high faluting ideas about what's 'true' and 'right'.

 His entire logic for the programme in the first place was to train people to defeat the Sorceress in some kind of final battle.

 Originally, this was a plan he pursued with his wife, Edea, who had been a Sorceress herself since childhood. It was initially her idea, but he's the one who became obsessed with it. He was concerned that they may end up fighting her, but she was confident that that would not be the case.

 Hey, she's a Sorceress, not a prophet.

 Next time Zog and Co. will be asking Cid what to do next, and we'll be moving on from exposition-ville. So make sure to join me on Thursday for Part Twenty Nine.