The Final Fantasy series has many memorable places. From Elfheim in the very first Final Fantasy, Midgar in Final Fantasy 7, to Limsa Lominsa in Final Fantasy 14, each found a place in the fans’ hearts, who celebrate the details and little idiosyncrasies that make these locales special. However, if one place deserves more recognition than the rest, it is Balamb Garden from Final Fantasy 8, not only because it is beautifully designed, but for being a hell of a weird school.
Before anything else, let’s get the obvious out of the way. Balamb Garden turning into an airship and escaping from a missile attack was absolute cinema. The place was not only designed to be a training camp for mercenaries. It is a moving base that allows them to establish new strategies and reposition, depending on the necessities of those in charge of it. I easily consider it one of the coolest airship designs in the franchise, along with Final Fantasy 10‘s Fahrenheit and some of the Final Fantasy 12 military airships.
As we start playing Final Fantasy 8 and watch Quistis escorting Squall out of the infirmary, we have our first glimpse of the place this gloomy-looking teenager calls home. A panoramic shot starts from the ground of the school and rises to focus on the impressive magnitude of the building. Balamb Garden has a design that makes it feel futuristic, but also divine. The curvy structures bring to mind a specifically late ‘90s idea of how the future would look. On the other hand, because of the golden details on the building and the long trails of light coming out of the immense glowing halo on top of the school, Balamb Garden resembles a giant angel. It was built to be a peaceful place — too peaceful for an institution that turns teenagers into mercenaries.
Matching the calmness that the design of Balamb Garden portrays, we have the school’s theme song. One of the fondest memories I have from being a kid is walking around the central area of Balamb Garden, seeing those fish statues spouting water, and listening to the lullaby-ish theme song. The problem is that it keeps playing in your head forever. Once it comes back to my mind, I’m forced to look up on YouTube for a 3-hour-long “Balamb Garden” song video. The only way to make it stop playing inside my head is to have enough of it.
Balamb Garden is fascinating as a location as well as an institution. First, it accepts kids from five to fifteen years old to turn them into mercenaries, but it looks like a giant church. There are a lot of military schools in RPGs, like in Trails of Cold Steel, but none look less militaristic than Balamb Garden.
If you access the Balamb Garden Network using one of the in-game terminals, you learn that the motto of the institution is “Work hard, study hard, and play hard.” I’m sorry, but I never had the impression that those teenagers training to be mercenaries are “playing hard” — only Zell. However, considering that the training center, where students find living monsters they can kill, is the only place in the entire school accessible at any time during the day, maybe that’s what they mean by “playing.” While training is the most important aspect of a student’s life in Balamb Garden, their diet is terrible, since students are devouring so many hot dogs that the staff have nothing else to say besides “No more hot dogs today.”
Students are controlled by a tight set of rules, which, on one hand, we should expect from a military school, but on the other seems weirdly funny. First, there’s no dress code in the school, but they can’t leave their dorms in the evenings, unless it’s for training. A student may be expelled if they fall behind in their curriculum, for violent acts, and for… “sexual promiscuity.” It might not look like it, but Balamb Garden is really worried about its students’ sex life. The school officially suggests that students “take time to think things through before starting a relationship.” (After all, the real danger of being a student of Balamb Garden is romantic relationships, not fighting with gunblades and cutting each other’s faces like Squall and Seifer were doing in the intro cutscene.)
From the delicate futuristic design of the building to the contradictions and questionable actions of the institution, there are many aspects of Balamb Garden to celebrate. We all like to make fun of Squall, but Balamb Garden reminds us that there’s more to Final Fantasy 8 than just good looks.
