Thank you so much for your response! I always appreciate the feedback. You highlighted a few ideas that haven't been mention by anyone else. As long as you don't mind, I'd like to repost your comment along with my reply on my Qhimm Forum page. And please, anyone reading this, please DON'T CONTINUE if you plan on playing this mod and don't want any spoilers.
I couldn't agree with you more regarding the pacing of Disc 3. Disc 2 slows down a lot until it ramps up at the Garden Battle. But from the beginning of Disc 3 things happen too fast. Starting from the orphanage with Edea to the Lunar Station it feels like breakneck speed, and it all happens with very few moments for the necessary exposition to allow things to make much sense.
If I had it my way, I would have loved to add a few extra scenes with the team confronting Seifer as he raised the Lunatic Pandora from the sea (ideally at the Deep Sea Research Facility). This would have helped to transition the story from confronting Edea to pursuing Seifer into Esthar.
I'm so glad to hear that you like the changes to Rinoa and Cid. There is definitely more that I had hoped to write, and I’ve got lot’s of notes that never made it into the mod. Of the three characters I changed the most, being Seifer, Rinoa and Cid, only Rinoa had room for a complete story arc. For Rinoa, I was personally surprised at how well the story was able to accommodate the alterations from my mod.
But for Cid, I recognized early that his story essentially ended with the orphanage scene, and that he wasn’t going to get much resolution beyond reuniting with Edea. Also, keep in mind that the tension between Squall and him began earlier. When Cid revealed what he knew about Ellone, Squall threw a fit right in front of Cid, and afterward Squall considered quitting SeeD. So, from my perspective, at the orphanage scene Squall demonstrated an improvement in self-control from before. And even though Cid’s language was harsh, if you listen to his words, he was trying to give Squall a lesson in leadership. In Squall’s position, he no longer had the luxury of being selfish. He needed to consider the well-being of those under him (and possibly those of the whole world) when deciding what to do about Rinoa. And remember, this is coming from Cid, someone who just spent the last 10+ years of his life building an army for the primary purpose of killing the woman he loved. He’s serious about this issue. Squall isn't just angry at Cid because he thinks Cid's being unfair or controlling, he's angry at the situation because he's afraid Cid might be right. And unlike Cid, he's not yet mature enough to make the hard decision to sacrifice someone he's starting to love. Not even for the good of the entire world.
There’s a lot going on in this scene, and it’s one of my favorites.
If I could have added a scene for Cid, it would have involved providing some closer surrounding Squall's position at Balamb Garden. In the vanilla story, Squall simply abandons his responsibilities without telling anyone. In my version, either Cid should have officially retained leadership of the Garden and allowed Squall to make his own decision about what to do with Rinoa, or Squall should have confronted Cid and decided to resign in order to pursue Ellone and help Rinoa. Whichever, this should have been a defining moment when Squall began to strike out on his own and make decisions for himself, possibly for the first time in his life.
There’s another point to consider about my methodology for this project. When rewriting most scenes, I spent a lot of time analyzing and even taking notes on the character's animations and body language. The animations for this game are very detailed and expressive, and they provide a ton of characterization for the main cast. (This is a dramatic improvement over earlier titles, and for me, it’s one of the highlights of the game.) Whenever possible, I did my best to let the character’s body language dictate the tone of my writing, rather than try to force it the other way around. More than once Cid brought out some of Squall's strongest emotions. This was my main motivation for most of the tension between them. Squall's body language dictated that he cared a lot about everything Cid had to say, whether he agreed with it or not. (Squall punches the wall in front of his superior officer and the rest of his team. Think of what it would take for you to do that in a meeting with your boss?) This was just one of the ways I attempted to produce something that honored and respected the original work.
