Let's Play: Final Fantasy VIII - Part Eighty Four

 Part Eighty Three

 Masterpost

 Day Thirty Six: It Was Published as 'The Red Man' in the UK

 We're back!

 Let the boss amble continue.

 Well, after I've finished junctioning everyone.

 Ugh, it's not fun, let me tell you. You need to junction everyone with a view to being their best from practically the beginning of the game. Basically, once Seifer has left your party, you need to be in 'we can rebuild them' mode through the entire game. Switching junctions about is all well and good, but there are a handful of times (such as this and the Laguna and Co. sections) where only having three viable junction profiles is a massive detriment to gameplay.

 Once done, I could get back to the job of finding bosses and killing them.

 Fun times.

 There's a puzzle in the castle that I really like, but I'll have to cover why that is later on.

 For the moment, here's a picture of the part I'm talking about.

Woo, puzzle.

 So, all you have to do is have one party on the left and the other on the right to lift them up to the blacony on the left there.

 Much to my surprise, there wasn't a boss battle in the next room. Just a key for the floodgate.

Well, this is disappointing.

  Why on earth would you make your storeroom this awkward to get to? Does Ultimecia hate her servants? Or, considering that she doesn't appar to have anything, do she like making her own life awkward for no reason whatsoever?

 In order to get to the lift on the right, one party has to go all the way around to the gallery and then over a bridge thing to get to it.

It's a nice view.

 Yes, that is a save point, which is why, combined with the fact that getting there was awkward, I thought there was a boss in there. Not that this would have done me any good, I can't save.

 The awkwardness isn't even for protecting something valuable, there's nothing valuable in there.

 The key sure isn't, but we'll get to that in a minute.

 The next place I went was the dungeons. Which isn't as dramatic or as exciting as it sounds.

Eh, I've seen worse.

 To the left is the dungeon, to the right is the armoury.

 The dungeon is a single room and it's not very large. It also has two doors and a single dessicated corpse.

Who is this person, how did the die, why are they here?

 This is a lame dungeon. A couple more corpses would have been great.

 You may have noticed the key hanging from a skeletal arm.

 One wonders how that works, was their arm propped up in that position until rigor mortis set in and then the prop removed?

 Also, I see this alot on tv and in movies (particularly anything pirate related) and I wonder if this ever actually happens in real life. And if it does happen in real life, what are the sorts of time frames we're talking about? How long is the window between them being dessicated and being skeletons and falling apart?

 Anyway, I digress, taking the key causes another boss to appear.

 He's basically a recoloured Iron Giant. Which means he has the duckface mouth that makes me feel mildly uncomfortable.

He's imaginatively called 'Red Giant'

 He's resistant to most things, an will happily scoff at you when you try.

 However, use Meltdown on him successfully and the guy will stop scoffing and you can hit him really hard.

 Hit him enough and he drops his sword. Which... isn't a smart move, if we're being totally honest here.

 Once he dies, he bucks the trend of the other bosses and doesn't explode. He just loses his colour and drifts away into sparkly dust.

 Considering he's a machine, exploding would make sense for this one yet he's pretty much the only one who doesn't.

 Defeating him allows us to use the key to get out of the dungeon. Yes, the key to the dungeon was in the dungeon.

 Not only is this nonsensical in world, it's mildly baffling from a design standpoint. It's like there should be a challenge or puzzle in here, but there isn't.

 At the very least I would expect that I could leave through the other door, but the key only opens the door I came through. So, all in all, it's been something of a massive disappointment.

 From here I headed to the armoury on the right.

I wasn't expecting it to be this literal.

 Is that a Vysage?

 I think I've brought these up before, they're just a head and hands sticking out of the ground.

 Once the battle starts, we'll have a better idea.

 Yes! It is!

 Not too hard to kill, but once you do...

 Are all the Vysages like this? Do they have bodies under th ground? I like to think they do, and the ones that are the hands with something else between them are just really shy.

 I like the design of this. I think it's actually kind of a shame that the Hollows in Bleach don't look more like this.

I'm gonna call Gargantua a 'he', because look at those shoulders.

 This would be a massive shame with Grimmjow, but these are sacrifices one has to make, unfortunately.

 This guy's not super hard, as there is a trick to defeating him.

 Cast Zombie on him and then Full-Life and he goes down super easily. He's probably the only boss in the game this works on, he's definitely

 After this I started running around trying to find the lock for the floodgate key I found in the store room.

 It took me five minutes before I realised that the lock is actually in the dungeon foyer area.

 I felt a fool.

 Although not as much as when I ran into a Torama with Zell, Quistis and Selphie that cast Death Lvl5 on them and killed them all in one go because I forgot to junction Death to their status defence.

 It makes me so mad I need to eat pancakes.

Sugar and lemon juice. Classic.

We'll be back once I've eaten these in Part Eighty Five.