Now that I only had the final bosses remaining, there really wasn’t any reason left to further postpone leveling up. My intention was to do it strategically, though.

First of all, I needed Cactuar and Bahamut. Cactuar has the Str, Vit, Mag and Spr Bonus abilities. These abilities increase their respective attribute by one on each level increase, as long as they are bound to the character. Bahamut has the Ability x 4 ability, which allows me to bind up to four abilities to a character, meaning I could bind all four bonus abilities.

There is a fifth bonus ability, though – HP Bonus. I decided to skip that one, simply because I could easily junction health and even use other methods of increasing it, such as the Devour command ability.

Now, since I could only attach all four abilities to a single character, I decided to level one character at a time, by killing the other two and leaving them dead. The obvious first choice was Quistis, for one amazing reason. Her desperation move is Blue Magic and one of the spells she can learn is Degenerator. Degenerator outright kills a single enemy, with no exceptions. This ability makes Quistis the perfect character to level first.

MPV, right here!

I got her to yellow health, bound all the GFs to her and killed of the other two party members. Then I landed Ragnarok and the Island closest to Heaven and started doing random battles, making sure my strongest spell is bound to her Speed stat. This way, I could easily kill any enemy I encounter with a single hit, before it could even act. Since the enemies on this island are all level 100, this meant getting up to three or even four levels per battle. Suffice to say, Quistis was level 100 in no time.

Of course, I had some trouble and needed to save my game often in order to be able to reload, but all in all, this was by far the fastest available method of leveling. Once Quistis was at 100, it was time to level another character. I junctioned Cactuar and Bahamut to Squall, but kept Quistis alive and at critical health. This time, I could go with an even safer tactic. I could now bind Iniative to Quistis, meaning she would always attack first, so there was almost no danger anymore. I think the average level of my party affects the amount of XP the party gets, though, so Squall took a bit longer to get to 100, but still insanely fast.

After Squall, it was time for Rinoa, but it seemed it all went even slower, due to Squall being level 100 and me not being able to replace him with a lover level dead character. Sadly, it seems I made a mistake by leveling Squall second. Luckily, it’s still quite fast, so it’s not a huge mistake.

Anyway, I didn’t get Rinoa to 100 yet. She’s at about 50 now and I expect her to reach her max level some time tomorrow. If I get the chance, I intend to max out another character to. From what I understand, I will be forced to use all of my characters for the final battles, so they all need to be maxed out anyway.

The Shumi Village is an optional area with an optional line of two quests. The first quest could’ve been done as soon as I was able to travel around with the Garden, but I forgot about it then, so I decided to do both quests now. The Shumi are Norg’s people. They aren’t human and their biology is very different to that of humans. They start out as regular Shumi and, after a while, evolve either to Elder’s such as Norg, or to Moombas, the little lion guys that I’ve met throughout the game.

The elevator ride is long, annoying and has to be repeated several times.

Next up, I used the elevator to go down and start up on the first quest. The Shumi took care of Laguna, Ward and Kiros after their cliff drop years ago. They have a tremendous amount of respect for Laguna, so they want to make a statue of him. For that, they need special rocks which I had to gather. I was the one to do this because the village elder wanted to give me a gift, but couldn’t unless I do something for them.The first thing I did was to pay 5000 gold at the village entrance to access the draw point which contains Ultima. Ultima is by far the strongest spell I can junction to anything, so 5000 gold per draw is definitely worth it.

In any case, all the rocks could be found around the village, one by one, so I’ve spent some time gathering them. None of it really gave me any trouble, since I remembered the locations from my first play through. The reward for gathering all the rocks was to see the Elder’s hand. Lucky for me, I also got a souvenir as I was leaving – a Phoenix Pinion. This one, if I remember correctly, summons the hidden GF Phoenix, which resurrects all of my fallen party members.

There was a lot of running back and forth, but it was worth the final prize.

The next quest involved the statue again. The Sculptor lost interest in completing it, so I had to first convince him, and after that the Artisan as well as the Attendant to help him. The Attendant was simple enough, but in order to convince the Artisan, I had to go all the way to Fisherman’s Horizon to get a special item. The reward for this quest was a Status Guard, which teaches any GF the ability Status Defense x4. Definitely worth it!

My preparation for the final push to the game’s ending began, and the first thing I decided to do was to gather up all of the GFs.

For some reason, I went for Cactuar first. To get it, I needed to defeat Jumbo Cactuar on an adjacent to the Esthar continent. I entered the battle unprepared and forgot to remove my Card command or to add an Item command to any of my characters. What happened was inevitable. Squall was the only character with the ability to resurrect in any way and he got killed first. Since Jumbo Cactuar has an attack that outright kills you, doing 10000 damage, it was game over pretty soon.

10,0000 Needles kills anyone, for obvious reasons.

Next up was Odin. Odin isn’t a true GF, meaning he doesn’t exist in the GF menu and can’t be junctioned to a character. Instead, he just appears at the start of random battles and gives you an instant victory. I’m not sure if it can happen in boss battles, but it definitely happens quite often against regular enemies. In order to get him, I had to solve a timed puzzle at an optional area of the Centra continent and then defeat him in battle.On my next attempt, I was ready. The difficulty of Jumbo Cactuar is that his health goes up insanely fast compared to your level. Since none of my characters were above 20 at that point, though, I really didn’t have that problem. It still took me a while to empty his 64 000 health pool, but I eventually did it.

Odin never attacks, so this fight is just a time race.

At the same area, there was another GF to get, this one extremely useful. After I got Odin, I’ve spent some time fighting the only enemy that appears in the area – the Tonberry. Killing about twenty of them causes their king to appear. Winning that battle causes him to join the party as a GF. Tonberry has the useful “Call Shop” ability, which allows me to shop from anywhere. He also has the ability to reduce prices and add rare items to various shops.

Next up was Bahamut, which can be acquired at the start of an optional area in the southwest corner of the map. It takes getting through two battles against Ruby dragons and then defeating Bahamut himself to get him, but it’s worth it. This one, like Cactuar, is also much harder to get at a higher level, but again, I didn’t have this issue.

Bahamut was way easier than Cactuar

Since I was already at the ruins, I decided to try and get the strongest GF of the game – Eden. Eden can be drawn from Ultima Weapon, which is an optional boss at the bottom of the ruins. This is definitely the toughest boss I’ve fought up to this point, but after a few attempts, I managed to beat it. It hits much harder than Cactuar, but its health is slightly lower. Eden is a GF with no 9999HP damage limit, reaching over 20 000 damage easily at higher levels, which makes getting it very worth it.

Ultima weapon uses Cloud’s ultimate weapon from Final Fantasy VII

The last one I was missing is Doomtrain. In order to get this one, I needed the Solomon’s Ring, which can be found at tears point, bellow Lunatic Pandora. Once I got the ring, 6 Remedies+, 6 Steel Pipes and 6 Marlboro Tentacles, using the ring caused the GF to appear and be added to my party. Probably the hardest part was getting the Tentacles, since the only place to fight Marlboros was at the Islands closest to Hell and Heaven, where they were at level 100.

What I tried was to use Initiative and Mug on one of my characters to steal the tentacles and then run away from combat, but it simply wasn’t working. Eventually, I got lucky and Odin got triggered in a Marlboro battle. Since it was level 100, I got 8 tentacles from that single battle. As for the other two items, Remedy+ is made from 6 regular Remedies with the MedLVLUp ability, while the pipes can be stolen from Wendigos.

In any case, I had all the GFs I could get without having the PocketStation mini game.

At first, Squall listened to Rinoa and let the Esthar soldiers take her, even though it was tearing him apart. Once he met up with the rest of the team, though, they managed to seriously change his mind. I immediately went to the Sorcerer’s Memorial near Esthar, were Rinoa was about to be frozen. I got her out and the group was back together, for a while at least.

I have to say, this whole conversation works.

Rinoa wanted to see Edea’s house, so I went there next. Squall and she had another nice moment where the quote from the intro cinematic is finally used. Basically, Rinoa has a recurring nightmare where she can’t find Squall anywhere, so he promises her he’ll be there, at Edea’s house so that, “if she comes there, she’ll find him”. Zell interrupts the moment saying they got a message from Esthar, inviting them to the president’s palace to discuss their plans. The group finally meets the president.

Surprise! The Esthar president is Laguna. His aides are Ward and Kiros. As official as that sounds, Laguna is still the same “moron” from the first dream sequence. He loves to talk, never plans anything and doesn’t really understand things. He’s a nice guy, though, so I guess that makes him an OK leader. He lets Odine explain the plan. I’ll give it my best shot…

They haven’t aged a day!

Ultimecia is a sorceress from the future. In her future, everything is destroyed and only she exists. She wants to get to the present, but she needs Ellone’s ability for that. We can’t kill her, though, since she’s actually in the future and only uses hosts in the present. There’s a trick to get to her, though – time compression.

Basically, we get to Adel, since Ultimecia will be using her now. We kill Adel and Rinoa accepts her powers. Rinoa then lets Ultimecia into her mind and Ellone sends Rinoa further to the past. She then pulls Rinoa out, which somehow causes the future and the present to merge, so the group has access to Ultimecia’s body, so they can finally kill her.

I have no idea how that works, I even have no idea if that’s the whole story, because I couldn’t remember all of it, but I think I got the gist of it. Suffice to say, Final Fantasy VIII gets extremely complicated before the end.

In any case, everything that needed to be done before the final area has been done. All that now remains are the optional quests, items and areas, which I will definitely have to visit if I want to stand a chance of beating the final area. Compared to the rest of the game, the final area of Final Fantasy VIII get’s insanely hard.

The lunar station team consisted of Squall, Rinoa and Irvine, though Irvine didn’t have any use during these events. The Space part is where the story gets seriously weird. First of all, the president is up there and I meet him several times, but he’s always in a suit, so I don’t actually find out who he is until later.

Secondly, I’m suddenly told that this is where they keep Adel, the sorceress who ruled Esthar during the war and was overthrown sometime after Laguna’s imprisonment there. This whole idea seems pretty cool. They can’t kill her, probably because her powers would just transfer someplace else. Instead, they keep her suspended, or frozen, or something, in orbit around the planet. The station was built and deployed solely to monitor Adel and respond if anything unexpected happens.

There was a lot of FMV during the part in space.

Thirdly, I am told that the planet’s moon is infested with monsters. In fact, that’s where all the monsters on the planet come from. Periodically, similarly to how tides are caused by the moon, the planet causes a monster “bloom”. The amount of monsters dramatically increases; they somehow pile up and grow, and then finally fall down to the planet. This is what’s called a Lunar Cry and, if I understood this correctly, it happens at Tear’s Point, where Lunatic Pandora was heading. Pandora is somehow connected to the moon.

A lot of these things aren’t very well explained and are sort of just dropped on the player, so I can’t say I love the storytelling here, but the concepts are definitely pretty cool. The world of Final Fantasy VIII is, I’d say, much more alien compared to any other in the series, except perhaps Spira of Final Fantasy X, which is what I like, a lot.

Anyway, soon after we land on the station and I talk to Ellone, who is also there, Rinoa wakes up in a trance, under some sort of power. She trashes around the station with no one able to touch her, exits into open space and manages to free Adel. Then I have a series of events which advance the story and make me realize Rinoa is now under Ultimecia’s control and I’m forced to save her. It’s a lengthy series of scenes, but you don’t get to play much during them, so there isn’t to much to write about.

Irvine, Ellone and the station staff leave with an escape pod, while Squall remains behind to save Rinoa, who is drifting in Space. There’s another bunch of sequences where Squall really grows as a character,before they both finally remain alive, on an abandoned spaceship.

Ragnarok – The coolest airship of the franchise.

The ship is infested with monsters that revive one another. I had mixed feelings about this part back in the day. On the one hand, it was the first time I encountered non-random encounters. The monsters are actually visible in the field and the game switches to battle once you “touch” them. On the other hand, it took me a while to figure out the idea behind revival. Plus, I was weak on my first playthrough, which wasn’t the case this time around.

The revival mechanic is quite simple, really. There was a total of ten monsters, divided into same-color pairs. If you kill one, the other revives it after your next battle. This means the monsters forming a pair need to be killed one after the other, with no battles between these two. Basically, I had to figure out which colors are easiest to reach and eliminate them first, which then made the rest simpler.

I also used the opportunity to stock up on higher level magic, since the monsters can be mugged for wizard stones. I didn’t have to do it for too long, though, since I already had a nice supply available.

Once I was done clearing the place, I could access the cockpit and land the ship down to the planet, with the help of people on the surface. Squall and Rinoa had a nice moment there with actual music with vocals accompanying them. Once that was done, it’s revealed that Rinoa is in fact a sorceress and will be taken by Esthar soldiers once Ragnarok, as the ship is called, lands.