Final Fantasy VIII [11] – More Downtime

The garden flew, and then it crashed in the ocean. It still worked fine, but the problem was, no one knew how to control it. After this, the game makes it seem like quite a long time has passed. Everyone’s bored, not knowing what to do or where to go next and Squall is getting slightly annoyed.

Since the game wants downtime, I decided to take some downtime myself. I started walking around the garden, playing the card game with everyone I could, turning the extra cards into items. Eventually, I used the various Refine abilities to make a stock of higher level spells for each party member. By “each party member”, I mean the three active slots I can have, of course, not the actual player characters.

I basically got my party to around 1500 health each and upped their damage to around 300-400 on average. It’s not extremely overpowered, but considering they’re all at around level 15, it’s pretty decent. I didn’t get to train my GFs yet though.

The chance for that appeared soon. Once I made a round around the Garden, I was summoned to the B1 level by a staff member. Cid was already there, arguing with the Garden master. Master? But I thought Cid was headmaster. Well, the next part was extremely confusing. A lot of stuff was said in a very short time span and a lot of it was not at all clear.

There was this Norg guy. He wasn’t human, looked yellow and overweight and was hooked to a huge machine. He’s the master of the Garden and Cid is working for him. Also, Cid is Edea’s husband. Edea is what the sorceress is called, by the way. ALSO, the master is a coward and wants to turn in the team involved in the assassination, as well as the headmaster, to Galbadia, hoping it would appease them. I had to fight him, naturally.

Final Fantasy VIII, Master NORG battle.

Master NORG was easy to deal with, especially considering the two monsters I had to fight earlier.

Apart from the gimmick that was simple to follow, the fight was not hard at all, especially compared to the last one against the two monsters. I just had to hit the two orbs in order to make them go back to blue and then focus on the boss. The orbs would switch from blue to yellow and then to red, at which point they would start casting powerful spells, but it never got to that.

Anyway, the fight was over and I went to see Cid at the infirmary. He tried to explain everything, but it was still a lot of information to take in. Basically, SeeD and the Gardens were created to fight sorceresses. Edea was one and she knew it since birth, as did Cid. They married and decided to from the Gardens. Eventually, something changed Edea. As for Norg, he was just a rich guy who provided most of the funds for the Gardens. Eventually, he pushed the administration into using SeeDs as mercenaries and it wall went to hell. Now that Edea has turned evil, the SeeD’s true mission is active again.

Final Fantasy VIII, White SEEDs

White SEEDs

You might also like:When I got out of the infirmary, Xu reported that a ship was approaching. It turns out, it was a SeeD ship. Apparently, Edea has a personal ship full of SeeD’s and they were assigned to protect Ellone, so they came to pick her up. I went to get her at the library and had even more information thrown at me. Ellone and Squall know each other, but he doesn’t remember, for some reason. The dreams the group had are also reals and are actually visions of the past. Laguna is also very much real. Other than that, she didn’t say anything else. The white SeeDs took her and Squall went back to moping.