When did the Lunar Cry happen? We settle the debate

There’s a piece of Final Fantasy VIII lore that the internet can’t seem to agree on: When was the Lunar Cry that destroyed Centra?

This came to our attention through musician Amanda Lepre, who was streaming FF8 and keeping extremely detailed Pepe Silvia-level notes about the timeline of the game to try piecing everything together. They pointed out that there are two different timelines given for the Lunar Cry in the game:

• An operator at the Lunar Base says that the Lunar Cry that wiped out Centra occurred “over a [sic] 100 years ago.”
• The Information section in the Tutorial menu says that “Centra was destroyed 80 years ago by the Lunar Cry.”

So which is it? Even the Final Fantasy Wiki points out the discrepancy. Evidently, the Final Fantasy VIII Ultimania book released in Japan also says over 100 years ago, but Amanda, not willing to rely on outside canon, wanted a definitive answer from the text of the game itself. What’s up with that “80 years ago” in the Tutorial menu? Was it an error?

Or maybe, could the original Japanese version say something different? I had nothing to do on a Monday night, so I decided to settle this the only way I know how: WITH RESEARCH.

First up, this is the scene in the Lunar Base.¹ In the Japanese version, this line translates to, “That’s a scar from the Lunar Cry that happened over 100 years ago.”

So far, so good! The English localization matches this line almost exactly.

Now what about the Information screen?

The Japanese text roughly translates to something like, “This civilization arose in Centra approximately 4000 years ago. The people of Centra migrated to other continents and founded the Holy Dollet Empire in the west and Esthar in the east. Through the remains of the Holy Dollet Empire, they repeatedly split and reunited, creating the world as it is today.”

We get more context in the Japanese version about Centra’s role in shaping the modern political world. But hold on: There is nothing here about Centra being destroyed 80 years ago! That line seems to have been added to the English translation as a replacement for the stuff about the Holy Dollet Empire.

I have no clue where the 80 years figure comes from. I went through every single entry in the Japanese information section, and that “80 years ago” figure isn’t mentioned anywhere else. I guess one of the localizers thought this would be helpful context for players (it is), but when it came to the actual information, they just… guessed? I don’t know!

I sort of love that a piece of the English-language FF8 timeline may have been made up this entire time but the backstory is so complicated as-is that nobody’s been able to sort it out. Well, okay, “made up.” The whole game is made up too, it’s a work of fiction, you get what I mean.

I don’t think it’s worth caring too deeply about lore discrepancies, especially in a game that is more about emotions than fact like Final Fantasy VIII. I’m a big Trekkie, and I have long ago accepted that internal consistency in sprawling fictional universes is less important than telling a compelling story. So I’m not willing to raise a stink that the localizers for FF8 got some of the fine details slightly wrong on a bit of optional lore not tied to the heart of the narrative.

But with the information we now have, I am comfortable saying the Lunar Cry did in fact wipe out Centra over 100 years ago, and the English localization of the Centra Civilization information page is

1. It was surprisingly hard to get to this point without playing through 30 hours of the game in Japanese. I had to find a Japanese save file for FF8 that leaves off on Disc 3, then access the debug room so I could jump to an arbitrary point in the game. The debug room has tons of options for starting at various scenes, but shockingly, there is no option to go to the Lunar Base! The closest I could get was the Lunatic Pandora boarding sequence immediately before the Lunar Base. Thankfully, if you fail that sequence on the first attempt, that sends you right to the Lunar Base scene. The next option in the debug room, chronologically, was the scene where Squall catches Rinoa in space. Maybe the fact that the debug room completely skips over the Lunar Base is because it’s all scripted and linear, kind of like how there’s no option to jump to the Waltz for the Moon sequence. Maybe one of the broken or empty debug rooms had something at one point. ↩︎