Timber, all though named after the woods it used to be surrounded by, is an area revolving around trains. The base of the resistance group, for instance, is a train. The contact took the group there and I was told to go wake up “the princess”. She was in one of the rooms at the back and it turned out it was Rinoa, the girl Squall met at the party. She was actually there to recruit a team personally.
With her awake, the plan was explained. The Galbadian president is going for a train ride, so the resistance plans to abduct him, with some clever use of their base and track switching. For this, the president’s guards needed to be avoided and some codes needed to be entered in order to override the car couplings.
I love the train design of Final Fantasy VIII
In any case, the train part was done and I went to the president. It turns out he’s a fake, and a zombie at that, or at least his second form was. After drawing some Berserk and Zombie spells from him, I did what I do with all undead enemies in this series – killed him with one shot, by using a Phoenix Down on him. Back in VII, the undead boss was Gi Natak. Phoenix Downs also worked on him, but X-Potions were much more reliable.Even though it was all supposed to be really simple, I managed to fail once at the second uncoupling. At the second attempt, I managed with a lot of time to spare, but the failure probably affected my SeeD rank. SeeD rank? Well, this is the way you get money in this game. Your rank grows if you complete objectives fast enough or by solving tests in the menu. It drops if you take too long or fail at stuff. The higher the rank, the higher your salary, which you periodically get. Since the enemies don’t drop money, this is pretty much the only way to get Gil in this game.
The boss was dead and the mission was over. We got back to Timber, where the second part began. The Galbadian forces were preparing for a transmission via the Timber TV tower and we needed to get there.
Before this this, which I decided to do in my next session, I took some time at a save point to solve all the SeeD exams up to level 10. This is the highest I could go at my current character level.
