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

 Part Sixty Five

 Masterpost

 Day Twenty Four: I Hope You're Not Scared Of Needles (Because Vaccination Is Important)

 Nina's a lost cause, I've come to accept that.

 I may have to try and bring her level up to around everyone else's at some point, but I'll grind my way over that bridge when I get to it.

 So, we're off on a sidequest run for the next few days.

First things first, however, I needed to rejunction all of my characters.

 It took over twenty minutes.

 This time it wasn't the game's fault. I'd split all the junctions between Nina and Zog, so I had to spread them out over three people again.

 It was a pain. They really do need to streamline the whole junctioning thing. Giving us the ability to swap magic around while sorting out junctions would be very much appreciated.

 I'd like some programmable junction profiles too.

 They do give you some preprogrammed ones, but they're really basic and don't sort out the magic problem for you.

 After that was done, I got into the Ragnarok and started zipping around the world in search of supplies for upgrading the party's weapons and varying sideuests.

Looks cool, doesn't it?

  Quick question, why doesn't Esthar want this back?

 Considering the current crisis, the ability to zoom around the continent and fight monsters and help people would be super helpful. Not to mention that they'd be well within their rights to take it back, it does belong to thhem in the first place.

 Also...

 Members of the Esthar military died in that thing.

 Any nation who lost military personnel in such a fashion would probably want their ship back so they could build a memorial in those people's honour.

 Instead it's been handed over to a bunch of foreign teenagers who can use it for whatever they want to. What if they decide to go 'screw it, let's side with Galbadia'? One of them is Galbadian, and they're all mercenaries.

 A group of people not known for deciding to stick it out in an unwinnable situation regularly.

 While zipping around, I went to check out the massive crater that Nida kept freaking out about, but wasn't where the Lunatic Pandora was. Since Selphie wasn't intimidated by it at all (but this could be because she's mildly, and lovably, unhinged rather than Nida being easily spooked) I flew straight over it to see what was on the other side.

 The answer?

 Absolutely nothing that made Nida freaking out over the crater worthwhile.

 It was just that cliff face that the film Laguna was bafflingly cast in was filmed on.

Very New Zealand-y

 On the otherside is just Esthar, so that explains how he ended up there, even though it doesn't explain the weird energy readings, since the barrier/hologram thing isn't actually around here.

 It's just a cheap way to keep you from getting into Esthar too early.

 Grrr.

 Speaking of Esthar, I needed to head to the continent and to Tear's Point specifically in order to find some of the supplies I need to upgrade the party's weapons to their best versions.

 A lot of them require these things called 'Star Fragments' which you can get by killing Iron Giants.

They look like this.

 They're like an evil version of The Iron Man (The Iron Man, not Iron Man. I'm sure you can tell the difference).

 This was the first fight of the session, and unsurprisingly, Odin showed up and killed it.

 I'm not going to lie, I'm starting to find it mildly annoying when he does that. No, I'm not still bitter that he never helped me with the  Malboros, how very dare you imply that.

 These things are pretty tough, but not to the point that you can't just GF them to death.

 Also, in the process of doing that, I managed to max out Zog's level.

 Much to my delight, it does appear that exp. that would have gone to him is split between the other two, which should make this whole process a lot easier.

 (Yeah, I probably am going to max out everyone's levels. Except possibly Nina. I might as well, it's not as hard as at sounds.)

 After collecting all of those supplies, I decided it was time to track down a new GF. This one is on Cactuar Island, because it is in fact a Cactuar.

Not jus any Cactuar, though, a Jumbo Cactuar.

 With a moustache.

It's a little sad how rarely I joke in this series.

 Once you're on Cactuar Island, finding him is pretty easy, he pops up on the overworld map and you just need to throw yourself at him.

 Getting onto Cactuar Island was harder than I had initially anticipated. I'd seen this place repeatedly when I was just exploring on the Garden, but when it came time to actually do something on it, I just couldn't find it.

 Eventually I did and started the battle with the aforementioned Jumbo Cactuar.

 Holy crap, this took an excessively long time.

 Part of that is that he managed to knock out both Sharky and Thomas and even though I specifically used Haste and Double to try and speed up his defeat he kept negating all my hard work by knocking out my characters. Usually Zog, who after Sharky went down, was the best option with his Water spell.

 I'm really not exaggerating about how long this fight took.

 As far as I'm aware, this particular fight took over half an hour to complete.

 A lot of that was stress, since the git could knock out every character in my party in one hit using 10,000 needles. Which includes Zog, who, during my twenty minute junctioning party, hit the maximum HP of 9,999.

 It does massively piss me off that it could do that to an entirely maxed out character.

 To make things worse, the thing starts to think about running away once you've taken its HP down, meaning that you now have to kill it quickly or you're going to have to spend another half an hour beating this thing up again.

 I managed it, and for my trouble gained a new GF.

 I named it Togemon, because what else would you name a fighting cactus?

You're looking depressingly not huge.

 Much to my disappointment, Togemon no longer has the moustache.

 Which is a real shame.

 Join us next time for more sidequesting antics in Part Sixty Seven.