I’m a bit late to the party due to having bonus subscription time from adding a PS4 license to my account awhile back (during last summer’s Amazon promotion), but yesterday, I finally hit the last Veteran Reward tier. I’d been sitting on a Time Card to bump my account to the tier for over a month now, chomping at the bit to get this one. That’s sort of funny in a way, since Final Fantasy VIII is one of my least favorite titles in the series (of the mainline titles there are only two that I prefer it to). I won’t digress (I could talk your ear off about how FFVIII had so much potential) any further than that, though.

I have to say, I think this is the best of the attire from other Final Fantasy titles, in that it seems to look good on pretty much everybody. It’s been very rare that I’ve used these pieces for glamour (with only the Strife Vest and Guardian Corp Skirt getting any real mileage for me). With the Leonhart stuff, though, I knew I wanted to use it immediately. I’d had plans for a few days to rework my caster glamour with it, but that ended up not working as I had hoped it would. I thought the jacket would work well with the Star Velvet Bottoms, and while it wasn’t terrible, it really didn’t create the look that I thought it would in my head.

Not to be discouraged, though, I moved over to Machinist, since my last Aiming glamour was a bit of a placeholder anyway, and the look more or less put itself together.

Glamour Components
Head: Scintillant Circlet of Aiming (Jet Black) | Body: Leonhart Jacket | Hands: Bogatyr’s Gloves of Aiming | Legs: Makai Markswoman’s Quartertights | Feet: Bogatyr’s Thighboots of Aiming

Honestly, that’s not really true. While this look happened immediately (since it shares everything except the body piece and the addition of the circlet with my last Aiming glamour), I tried really hard to do something different. I feel like I’m in a bit of a rut with Aiming glamours in particular—the 1-2-3 combo of the Bogatyr’s Gloves and Thighboots with the Makai Quartertights works so well for me that I can’t seem to get away from it. That bugs me quite a bit.

So I experimented with a lot of things. I thought the Expeditioner’s Thighboots would complement the jacket well (and, honestly, they do), but I couldn’t find a pair of gloves that I liked alongside them. I also realized that the Makai Markswoman’s Longboots would work well with it, too, given the brown leather on them that keys off of the Nomura-issue extra belts. Those required a pair of pants, but I couldn’t find a pair that I was happy with. The Leonhart Bottoms themselves were mostly fine, but they really don’t fit Alahra’s normal style, which kept me from committing to them. The Falconer’s Bottoms were the other main contender, but they didn’t dye black in a way that worked with the rest of the pieces.

And that led me ultimately to come back to where I started. The look works, and I’m quite happy with it if I look at it outside of my being tired of using the same core look for Ranged DPS yet again. For the time being, I can’t see any other jobs that I’ll use the Jacket for, but I might consider it for Red Mage in the future, since I know I want to start making less “bookish” caster glamours for it. Right now, I don’t think our available gear choices lend itself to the sort of look I have in mind, but I’m hopeful we’ll get a wide range of new gear for Stormblood that will let me come up with something.