Dollet: the SeeD field exam

Story mode. Written for a first playthrough and kept free of spoilers — it will not tell you what happens here, only what the game is asking of you.

Read this bit before you start, because it is the one thing in the early game that can genuinely cost you something.

Before the tower: check your Draw command

Make sure at least one character has a Guardian Force junctioned and the Draw command on their menu.

At the top of the communication tower there is a boss. There is a Guardian Force inside it, and the only way to get that Guardian Force is to draw it out of the boss while the boss is alive. Kill the boss without drawing and it is gone.

Whether it can be recovered much later was contested — six sources said yes, on the last disc; one said never. The game’s own data settles it: exactly one other enemy in the game carries that Guardian Force, and it is in the final dungeon. So missing it here is not permanent, and it is still roughly forty hours of play away. Since checking one menu takes ten seconds, check the menu.

This is not a summon you can shrug off. Losing it costs you a whole junction slot type and three of the refinement abilities the game’s economy runs on.

The town

There is a thirty-minute clock on this mission, and it is generous. You will not run out by exploring.

There are two draw points — one in the town square, one on the ground floor of the tower before the lift. Both hold status magic, which is worth more junctioned than damage magic is at this stage.

A few small things affect your exam grade, and they are worth knowing because they are counter-intuitive:

• Talking to people costs you points. Every NPC conversation is a small deduction.
• There is a dog in the square. Dealing with it is worth ten points.
• There is a shortcut off a cliff. Do not take it. Five points.
• Do not hide in the pub during what comes later. Twenty points.
• Kills you land yourself count. Kills your summon lands do not. If you are farming the score, put the summons away.

None of this affects the story. Skip the whole paragraph if you do not care.

The tower

Two guards, then something much larger arrives and takes over the fight.

Draw from it. Draw from it first, before you start hitting it.

It has no elemental weakness at all — the game’s own table gives it normal damage from every element in the game — so junctioning an element to your attack for this fight is wasted effort. One widely-copied source lists it as weak to six different elements. It is not weak to any of them.

Getting out

You now have thirty minutes to reach the beach, and something enormous is going to chase you the whole way.

You are not supposed to beat it. You can, and it is a real fight with a real reward, but the mission is asking you to run.

If you want to try: it takes 150% damage from Thunder, which is its only weakness, and it repairs itself when you knock it down. How many times it repairs is argued — three, four or five, depending on the source, and at least one source suggests the scripted chase lets it repair without limit while a proper battle caps it.

One thing is settled and saves you a wasted turn: Demi does nothing to it. It is one of thirty-two enemies in the game flagged immune to Gravity, so no amount of Magic stat will make that spell work.

Otherwise, run. Hold both shoulder buttons to escape encounters and keep moving.

Game Notes

There is a number in this area that explains why FFVIII guides are the way they are.

The machine that chases you has, depending on which guide you open, 5,872 HP, or 5,492, or somewhere between 5,072 and 5,770, or approximately 5,000. There are forum threads about this. People have argued about which figure is correct.

None of them is correct, because the question is malformed. Reading it out of the game’s own files: it has 5,072 HP at level 1, 5,770 at level 10, and 5,872 at level 11. Three of those four published figures are points on a single line and the fourth is a rounding of the first.

Every author was right. Every author fought it once, at whatever level they happened to be, wrote the number down, and printed it as a property of the machine rather than a property of themselves.

That is the defining problem with writing about this game, and it is not really the writers’ fault. Every other Final Fantasy lets you say “this boss has X HP” and be done. FFVIII quietly makes that sentence meaningless, and then does not tell anybody.

So here is the reading habit this game demands, and you will use it for the next forty hours: when two FFVIII guides disagree about a number, do not ask which one is right. Ask what level they were.

How this page was made

Researched across 2 community walkthroughs and written from scratch — no source’s wording appears here.

How we decide what to print

Completionist mode. Full spoilers, in play order, with every permanent loss called out before you reach it. 10 entries below are marked where our sources disagree with each other — we have not picked a winner for you.

Spoilers from here.

Siren — the real missable, and the argument about it

Draw her from Elvoret while it is alive. There is no post-battle pickup, no shop, no refinement and no card route. Every source agrees on that much.

What is at stake if you lose her: Mag-J, ST-Atk-J, ST-Def-J and ST-Def-Jx2; Mag+20%, Mag+40%, Mag Bonus; L Mag-RF, ST Mag-RF and Tool-RF; and Move-Find, the party ability that reveals hidden save points. One source adds that Tool-RF is what makes Dark Matter, which is what teaches Quistis her final Blue Magic.

Is there a second chance? Yes — settled from the game’s data.

Position	Sources
Yes — draw her again from the first sub-boss of Ultimecia’s Castle on Disc 4	Final Fantasy Wiki (two pages), Jegged (GF page and missables page), Almar’s, a GameFAQs accepted answer, The Crimson Gamer
No — permanently unobtainable	Game8
Unstated — “a long wait”, or restart the game	Gamer Guides, Jegged’s own walkthrough page, VGKAMI

Exactly two enemies in FFVIII carry Siren in a draw list: Elvoret, and Tri-Point in Ultimecia’s Castle. Tri-Point holds her in all three of its level bands, so the second window does not depend on your level either. The six are right and Game8 is wrong.

Note that Jegged contradicts itself: its Guardian Force and missables pages name the Disc 4 source, while its Dollet walkthrough tells you to reload if the boss dies without her. The Wiki qualifies its own “yes” — miss both windows and she is gone for good, and that qualification survives the correction, because Tri-Point is the last source in the game.

No source we found supports obtaining the Siren GF by card refinement. The Siren card exists and is held by the Dollet pub owner on a later visit; Card Mod turns it into three Status Atk, which is an item.

Elvoret — settled

1,563 HP at level 1, 3,300 at level 10, 3,523 at level 11. Published figures of 3,523, 2,872 and “2,667–3,300” are three readings of that one curve.

10 AP. Zero EXP.

The elemental correction

Source	Claim
Gamer Corner Guides	Weak to Fire, Ice, Thunder, Wind, Water and Holy; immune to Earth and Poison
ffextreme	Weak to Wind
GameFAQs boss guide	No elemental weakness; immune to Poison

The game’s table gives Elvoret one modifier: immunity to Poison. All eight elements do exactly normal damage. The boss guide is right and the six-weakness list is wrong — and it is the kind of wrong that costs a player a turn junctioning an element that buys nothing.

Note it is also flagged as flying, which is the mechanism behind the Earth claim: the elemental table says Earth is normal, but a flying enemy cannot be hit by Earth anyway. Both sources are describing something real; only one of them is describing the elemental table.

Draws: Thunder, Cure, Double and Siren — six sources agreed and the data confirms all four. Only the first two step with your level: Thundara and Cura at 20, Thundaga and Curaga at 30. Double and Siren are in all three bands. This is the first Double in the game.

Mug it. Six G-Returner at every level band, against three to six from the kill depending which slot rolls. The steal is the better half of this fight and no source says so.

Biggs and Wedge before it: 5 AP each and zero EXP — settled, and worth noting because they are ordinary-looking soldiers scored as bosses. The kill gives Elixir ×2 and Cottage ×2, which one guide conditions on defeating both simultaneously and another lists unconditionally. Mug gives three of each instead of two, at every level band.

Their draw lists are fixed at every band too, and they differ: Wedge holds Fire, Thunder, Blizzard and Cure. Biggs holds Fire, Thunder, Blizzard and Esuna. One guide flags that Esuna as a missable draw and the data backs it — it is on Biggs, and Esuna this early is worth considerably more than two Elixirs.

X-ATM092 — the curve, settled

Your level	HP
1	5,072
10	5,770
11	5,872

Published figures: 5,872 · 5,492 · “5,072–5,770” · “approximately 5,000”. Three of those are points on this line and the fourth is a rounding. This is not a factual dispute and never was.

50 AP. Zero EXP. 150% damage from Thunder, immune to Poison, and flagged immune to Gravity — one of 32 such enemies in the game. Demi is a dead turn.

Draws: Fire, Blizzard, Cure, Protect. The first three step a tier at 20 and again at 30; Protect is in all three bands.

Mug gives two Elixirs, at every level band. Its drop table is empty. That resolves what looked like a source contradicting itself: the monster database reporting two Elixirs was reading the steal list, and its own location page listing accessories was reading the kill. Both entries are about different tables. It also means two Elixirs are available here for one Mug, which no walkthrough mentions, and that no accessory appears anywhere in either table — so whatever hands over the Power Wrist, it is not this enemy’s battle reward.

What is genuinely unresolved about it

• Repairs before it can be destroyed: five sources say five; one says four knockdowns then an explosion on the fifth; one says three. One source draws a distinction that may reconcile them — during the scripted chase it repairs without limit, and the cap applies only in a real battle encounter.
• Repair trigger: 20% of its HP, or 25%, or a flat 1,000 damage. One source notes 1,000 damage is roughly 20%, which reconciles two of the three.
• Total damage to destroy it: 10,144 to 11,744 across all cycles. Single-sourced, and arithmetically consistent with a ~5,800 HP enemy that heals twice.
• Where it can be killed: one source says only on the bridge; a forum poster reports killing it on the cliff section, and is disputed in his own thread.
• The reward: four sources say one random accessory from Power Wrist, Hypno Crown, Orihalcon and Force Armlet. One says a random GF-ability item. Neither is in the drop or mug table, so neither can be confirmed or denied from the data — what is settled is only that the battle reward table is not where they come from.
• The AP: 50 per battle, or 50 per knockdown-and-escape, or up to 250 across the chase, or “0 or 50”.

The scoring

Five categories: Judgment, Conduct, Attack, Spirit, Attitude. Judgment comes from the Fire Cavern, not from here.

The categories are agreed. The numbers are not, and the disagreement is wide enough that we are not going to print a table and pretend. Four sources give four incompatible bracket sets for Attack alone; Conduct tops out at 80 in two sources and 100 in two others; two sources let categories go negative and two do not. One guide attributes SeeD rank entirely to the in-menu written tests and describes no field scoring at all.

What is agreed and actionable:

• Kills landed by a Guardian Force do not count toward Attack. Three sources.
• 75 enemies defeated is the top Attack band. Four sources.
• Escaping from anything except the scripted chase costs Spirit.
• Attitude starts at 100 and only falls. The deduction list is consistent across three sources: −1 per NPC conversation, −2 for talking to a guard after the fight, −1 for approaching the tower early, −5 for the cliff shortcut, −10 for failing to save the dog, −20 for hiding in the pub.
• Destroying X-ATM092 is worth a 100-point bonus, though one source says it does not affect rank directly and another says it does.

Weapons Monthly, March

Awarded after the tower sequence. It carries the remodel recipes for Revolver, Metal Knuckle, Nunchaku and Chain Whip — the first magazine in the game with a mechanical consequence rather than a journal entry.

Draw points

Silence in the town square, behind a planter near the fountain — four sources agree, one says it only appears after visiting the tower, and one outlier reports a Thunder point here that nobody else has seen.

Blind on the tower ground floor, left side, before the lift. Nine sources agree on the location and not one of them says whether it refills. That is a fair summary of the state of draw point knowledge for this whole game.

Game Notes

The Siren argument is worth sitting with, because it is a good example of how a community reaches a wrong kind of consensus.

Six sources said you get a second chance on Disc 4. One said you do not. The six outnumbered the one, so the six looked right — but notice what none of them had: an account of somebody actually drawing her from that sub-boss after missing her at Elvoret. What the sources had was each other.

The draw lists now name their spells, and the answer is a two-line query: two enemies in the entire game hold Siren. The six were right. Being right by weight of citation and being right are different things, and this time they happened to coincide.

They still do not coincide on the rest of the claim. Nothing in the data says that sub-boss is reachable, or repeatable, or that a party arriving there will have a Draw command free — those are all questions about the castle, not about a draw list. So the practical advice does not move: draw her now. The second window is forty hours away, sits in the last dungeon in the game, and costs you a junction slot type and three refinement abilities in the meantime.

The useful lesson is about what kind of question a dispute is. “Does this enemy hold this spell” was always a data question that everybody was answering by counting guides. “Can you get back there” is not, and no amount of decoding will close it.

How this page was made

Researched across 9 community walkthroughs and written from scratch — no source’s wording appears here. 10 are marked where sources disagree with each other — we have not picked a winner for you.

How we decide what to print