Board 8 > what is going on in that ffviii intro (playthrough/spoilers)

(+) Yeah! (+)

You can indeed get Rinoa's card from her dad, but you have to lose Ifrit to him first (he'll tell you as much). Then you have to travel all the way to FH and beat Martine to get your Ifrit back for some reason.

Zell's mom has his card. Selphie's friend at Trabia Garden has her card. Laguna has the Squall card, and he's on the Ragnarok now. Oh yeah, make sure you talk to Laguna, Kiros, and Ward in case you haven't figured out a certain plot bomb yet.

Dr. Odine has the Ward card, and he's probably still in Esthar, I'd guess.

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Outside of end game can't you only get the Laguna card when you first visit space? You only get that small opportunity when you first get there to challenge Ellone.

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shane15 posted...

Outside of end game can't you only get the Laguna card when you first visit space? You only get that small opportunity when you first get there to challenge Ellone.

Correct, you can only get the Laguna card outside of the very end of the game during your time in space.

It's also an incredible pain in the butt because literally every rule is active.

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oh right a quick pointer

if someone asks you to mix rule sets and you'd rather not, you can just keep refusing to play and eventually they'll stop asking

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SeabassDebeste posted...

wait so the queen of cards subplot isn't over, right? what's the actual next step? i beat quistis and it didn't trigger anything

You've finished the Card Club quest, the Queen of Cards is a different person with her own questline. (They went hard on the cards in this game!) I think she'll be in Balamb Town if you haven't met her already. She controls the rules and some rare cards can only be gotten through advancing her quest, but as said earlier it's pretty convoluted and annoying.

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The easiest way to do her quest is to have her go back and forth between Balamb and Dollet. That way you don't have to keep chasing her around the globe.

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I forgot how involved the card stuff is. I literally printed out pages of checklists of the cards in the '90s and put them in a binder, and then accidentally deleted my save file and never started again.
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Hmm

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oh thanks for the bump

i'm just not sure how much work will be involved to go further into the card game rabbit hole

it sounds nice to have everyone's character card, but after getting pasted like 5 times straight by edea (and losing good cards every time, causing me to reset the console), i'm suspecting there is at least like a 2-3 hour commitment in order to get to the card queen and get her to install reasonable rules

am i wrong here

aside from card game and the GF sidequest, is there anything else i must do before continuing on with lunatic pandora?
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....it's been 5 months, how is your playthrough still going, lol.

Actually come to think of it, did you ever finish FF7...

SeabassDebeste posted...

aside from card game and the GF sidequest, is there anything else i must do before continuing on with lunatic pandora?

don't think so

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Get Odin from the Centra Ruins

You can also grab a few other GFs first if you'd like, but Odin is the only must.

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MartinFF7 posted...

....it's been 5 months, how is your playthrough still going, lol.

Actually come to think of it, did you ever finish FF7...

i average under 2 hours recorded game a week <_<

but yeah, i finished ff7 in about a month. it was the beginning of quarantine and i had way less other stuff to do then, and honestly it was a much more conventional game so i poured in many more hours in a short period of time!

Leonhart4 posted...

Get Odin from the Centra Ruins

You can also grab a few other GFs first if you'd like, but Odin is the only must.

yeah, i definitely wanted to visit the centra ruins

where should i hunt other GFs?

also any comment on the time-worthiness of the card games is welcome!
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Spend as much time as you want with the cards, it should be easier to get a few of the other characters than Edea's but yeah follow a guide for QoC if you wanna do that.

Centra Ruins is the only non-card thing that would need to be done before progressing with the plot, but you can also attempt a few other GF quests right now that you can discover by flying around the map (they are available afterwards too though). They're generally straightforward but you might want tips on how to acquire Doomtrain. Have you been collecting any magazines btw?

If you want GF location hints, look for places you can access with Ragnarok that you couldn't with Garden. To be precise:

1. On a little island to the east of Centra.
2. A research centre located way in the middle of the ocean to the south-west of the map. Two GFs here, after you get one re-enter and go deeper to get another.
3. After you get Odin go back into Centra Ruins for another GF
4. The Occult Fan magazines give hints as to how to get a GF. Tears' Point in Esthar is where you get a crucial item for this one.

That's all the ones I remember!

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You can also get Tonberry in the Centra Ruins, but you have to beat like 20 Tonberries first. Get Odin first though because it'll get rid of the timer.

If you search the little Islands south of Esthar, you can sometimes see something green poking out of one of them. If you fight it and beat it, you'll get the Cactuar GF.

Then you can find the Deep Sea Research Center at the lower left corner of the map, and you can get a couple there, including Bahamut. Just going to warn you that the enemies there are no joke. And if you want to try to complete the dungeon, bring Zell.

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There are also some little goofy quests that ultimately dont matter that much, like the painter in Dollet, helping the sculptor in Shumi Village (I forget if you already did the stuff there), some stuff in Winhill, the mystery of Obel Lake, and solving the UFO sightings that you may have come across once in a while

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The Shumi Villiage reward is a really good one but if you play cards you can get pretty much anything important that way. THe UFO one is worth doing though for a 1 time only card.

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IIRC Seabass isn't big on random sidequests but yeah if you feel like it try the stuff just suggested for some more peak FF8 weirdness.

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Yeah, FFVIII has some weird little sidequests with good rewards, but they're totally skippable.

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More

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Better to just finish the game than worry about side quests, though I would say the Odin one is the closest to mandatory.

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been a rough few weeks for this, but i wi return to it!
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so i went to odin's little castle. love the design here, dislike the tonberry enemies (which don't even give exp?!)

there's a little bit of rote push-the-switch backtracking, which i honestly enjoy. at the end, it results in a duel with the pretty awesome-looking odin, and i'm not sure he ever even lays a hand on me. i wind up stealing a luck-J scroll...

... but i'm not sure i even have him in the GF menu. what gives?
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he shows up randomly at the start of normal battles.
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Yeah you'll see him before long :)

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Yeah, you can't summon him normally. He has a random chance of showing up at the start of a battle.

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Odin, like Phoenix and the Chocobo World GFs, isn't summonable and comes when he feels like it. IDK what they did with the Chocobo World ones in the remastered version actually.

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In the remaster you can only get the items via Angelo Search

The non-remaster PC version actually lets you play Chocobo World though

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cactuar get

the 10k needles is one thing i remember from discussing this game way back when. arduous fight!

is there a healing pod on ragnarok or will i have to waste a tent/go back to the balamb garden to heal?

(edit) also re: deep sea lab, i see nothing southwest of centra?
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wow

beset by an enemy right after TURN BACK, ALL FORWARD IS DEATH...

... and odin immediately appears and wastes them

amazing!
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Tents are incredibly cheap. I don't understand your aversion to spending money!

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Whilst clearing out my attic I found my FF8 guide i used whilst playing the game back in 1999...man those were the days. Before decent Internet lol



''Everything you'll need to succeed"

It doesn't even have any of the optional stuff, like at all lol.

Had a look through the beginning and it suggests that meeting Ellone in the Infirmary at the very beginning of the game may differ depending on how you responded to Dr Kawodaki (My head hurts etc). Lol. Still, got a lot of nostalgia reading through it.

FF8 was my very first RPG (its now my fave game of all time)

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Damn what a good looking character. Too bad final fantasy art direction sucks these days

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i got into the lab and slaughtered a dozen+ anaconduars, but i can't figure out what angle i should touch the light from

enc-none doesn't seem to work, huh
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SeabassDebeste posted...

i got into the lab and slaughtered a dozen+ anaconduars, but i can't figure out what angle i should touch the light from

enc-none doesn't seem to work, huh

Don't move while the light is on. It triggers battles.

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SeabassDebeste posted...

i got into the lab and slaughtered a dozen+ anaconduars, but i can't figure out what angle i should touch the light from

enc-none doesn't seem to work, huh

Don't move when the light is shining.

Beat me to it

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ok so i got to the center, and a ruby dragon challenged me... over... and over... and over...

the dialogue now appears always to be the same - "why do you fight?" - and both options (none of your business/to protect something) keep resulting in more fights that lead to the same conversation

battles are getting tedious. rinoa and zell are both dead so i am just casting meteor and recovering repeatedly until the dragon's HP is low enough to Card

anything i'm missing?
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keep pressing down

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there's a hidden third option that's blank iirc
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aw yeah bahamut get

that was a very cool enemy. i thought i'd have to do it alone with squall (neither magic nor item is junctioned), but bahamut had full-life available to draw, so i just did that to revive zell and rinoa at the beginning, then a few more times later

everyone's offense was the same: drawing on bahamut's own flare attack. his megaflare hurt though.

how do i refine all my favorite magics to junction that i've just used? shell, reflect, protect, etc?
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Support Mag RF is the one you need. Not sure which GF has that one off the top of my head.

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Leonhart4 posted...

Support Mag RF is the one you need. Not sure which GF has that one off the top of my head.

i do have that ability. guess i just don't have enough shell stones or whatever materials to refine!
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Protect and Shell don't junction that well anyway! You have better options.

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After leaving deep sea research you can go back for a difficult dungeon. Ultima Weapon is at the bottom and there is a GF to draw from him. The enemies along the way are pretty difficult as well so it's not for the faint of heart and the save point near the bottom is invisible so you'll want to use Siren's Move/Find ability to find it and save before the boss.

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also bring Zell

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i've got zell and rinoa, yeah

i also have enc-none which thankfully actually works here, though maybe i should get a taste of it?
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You might get some forced battles depending on the decisions you make as you descend

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yeah, been getting a lot of em. grendels, behemoths, now ruby dragons... and i can't run from em! starting to use card when i can now.
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There are certain forced encounter spots in that dungeon, although that goes away if you can manage to defeat the boss.

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ya go my FF8

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