Why FF8 is a Great Game (Despite its Many Flaws)

[Music] final fantasy 8 is not my favorite final fantasy game that honor belongs to final fantasy tactics however final fantasy 8 might still be the most important game in the franchise to me i imagine my feelings towards this game are somewhat similar to the way that a lot of final fantasy fans feel about seven for many final fantasy vii was not only their introduction to the franchise but to japanese rpgs as a whole it was incredibly popular and it pushed the boundaries with its stunning cg cutscenes the systems of the game were very accessible fun and they encouraged experimentation and the industrial setting was also perfectly tailored to a more mature audience and played around with many elements that the genre wasn't known for at the time it's no wonder that the game has the legacy that it does and why square to this day are still desperately attempting to recapture that lightning in a bottle however final fantasy vii was not my first final fantasy i was introduced to the franchise when i walked into my basement one fateful day and saw my brother and his friend playing through what i now assume to be a burned copy of the final fantasy 8 pizza hut demo disc which featured a kick-ass midi song that i and many others would go on to use in their neopets shop [Music] for those who don't know final fantasy 8 is a very divisive game it had the undesirable task of trying to follow up final fantasy vii and instead of playing it safe when developing the sequel square decided now was the time to try and experiment with many of the core elements of the genre as well as to push forward with some of the concepts that made seven so good emphasizing the cg cutscenes again and trimming away even more fantasy elements to make way for a modern aesthetic as you might know or have guessed final fantasy 8 was not lightning in a bottle it's a very strange and flawed game and it's one of the only jrpgs i still play through to completion fairly regularly i had to overwrite numerous save files on the steam version just to get footage for this video so let's talk about final fantasy viii i'll first try to summarize the major criticisms that most people have with this game and after that i'll dive deeper into the parts of the game that i really enjoy despite all the mess to start getting into those flaws allow me to set the scene for you the experience of someone playing this game for the first time around the time that it was released upon starting a new save of final fantasy 8 you are first shown this beautifully rendered cutscene unlike anything you've ever seen before complete with a choir and orchestra and a lot of strange imagery that doesn't really mean too much yet it only really serves to get your brain juices flowing about what sort of game it is that you are about to play and it's not even clear until afterwards that at least some of what you saw may have actually happened and is likely the reason why squall or whatever you named your main character ended up in this infirmary as for the rest of what you saw you are going to be waiting a long time for those answers a mysterious girl calls you by your name before disappearing only to be replaced by a second girl whom the player is also meeting for the first time after a slightly overwhelming dump of exposition you learn that you are essentially a cadet in some kind of military academy your teacher questus is here to remind you that you have still to complete your mandatory homework of enslaving a local deity or guardian force to use the proper terminology she offers to come with you to ifrit's cavern so you can quickly finish this up and be allowed to go on the class field trip spoiler the field trip is juno beach on d-day buckle up so you settled on this quest and right as you are about to step into the field you instead encounter the first major problem of this game before you have even had a chance to experience combat you are instead given the first of many many tutorials about the new system that final fantasy 8 uses the junction system we are roughly 15 minutes into a new game and most of the game's major criticisms stem from this right here the junction system is in reality a multitude of smaller systems all working in tandem to function as final fantasy 8's build customization and progression system the game's method for dealing with magic summons and other combat actions are also married to this system although that won't become clear on your first playthrough until you finally get a chance to experiment with it on your own however final fantasy 8 is intent to not let you do anything other than sift through menus until it is utterly convinced that you can pass an exam on the junction system if the developers were looking to make you feel like a problem student who needed his teacher to come help him after class then the game has succeeded i imagine this is where final fantasy 8 lost or confused most of its returning fan base because if you aren't utterly determined to sit down and learn all of these menus and all of this new terminology right from the get-go then you are likely just going to skip through these tutorials as fast as possible just so you can actually see what the game feels like first i think most players would have been content if quistis telling us how to use the gunblade was the first thing that the game attempted to teach us but holy hell the amount and length of these tutorials in the beginning section of final fantasy 8 is utterly daunting the game does later attempt to have characters teach us small things in battle which is great but for the most part it's going to be throwing terminology abbreviations menus and sub menus at you the pacing here is what makes the junction system feel a lot more difficult than it actually is what they probably should have done was just give squall and questus a basic set of junctions to start and then after you obtain ifrit from the fire cavern explain how to junction him and some magic onto your newly acquired strength stat and that's it have some faith that your players can understand what's actually going on here and clean up those damn menus so other than the bloated tutorials what are the actual problems of the junction system well the problems lay in its differences from traditional rpg systems and the first of those differences is how the game treats magic unlike in final fantasy 6 or 7 you do not acquire new magic through espers or materia it is instead drawn directly from enemies or from draw points it is treated almost like a consumable item no mana or mp required alternatively you can cast magic directly from an enemy instead of stalking it beforehand which potentially saves you a turn in combat however magic that you store on your person can be junctioned to a specific stat to increase it essentially allowing you to build your party with whatever archetypes that you had in mind the problem comes with how incredibly tedious this is drawing magic from enemy takes a very very long time as it has to stalk all the way up to 104 full effect when junctioning different magic to a stat you have no idea how effective it's going to be until you simply try it as not all magic is weighted equally depending on the stat for instance cure magic is best junction to hp or vitality and certain offensive magic seems to have arbitrarily better values when used on strength this creates a problem where the excitement for discovering new unidentified magic on an enemy is quickly replaced by the tedium of drawing it out over many many turns into a stack of a hundred only then to potentially realize that it is no better than any of your current junctions junctioning magic also creates a dubious little mind goblin for many players as casting magic that is junction to a stat obviously makes that stat decrease over time as well as diminishing that neat stack of 100 that you saved up some players will deal with this by simply not casting magic at all unless it is cast from an enemy or can be easily replaced and therefore not missed this all sounds pretty bad but the system was designed for a reason it gives the players a way to improve and customize their party members without actually having to grind for levels final fantasy viii veterans know that the best way to get magic is not through combat but by refining items and cards into magic when you figure this out then the game becomes fairly easy and that is due to a third problem which is how the game handles leveling up leveling up in final fantasy 8 is a double-edged sword this is because when you level up in this game the enemies level up alongside you you heard that correctly almost every enemy in this game scales to your level on paper this system was implemented to eliminate the need for grinding what a wonderful concept what it actually did was create two different kinds of playthroughs of final fantasy viii there is your standard first time play through where you enter into the game not really knowing what's going on with all these new systems leveling up either on purpose or on accident whereby within a few hours you will hit a brick wall the brick wall in this case is a boss who is simply too difficult for you to conceivably defeat as you have either neglected your junctions or have simply leveled up far too much the second playthrough is the veterans playthrough where you now fully understand the game systems realize that leveling up is the enemy and will instead choose to empower yourself through the junction system turning cards into items items into magic and junctioning that magic to become completely unstoppable trivializing the difficulty i think it is pretty clear that neither of these two were the intended outcomes of implementing this scaling leveling idea it becomes a problem to be avoided or ignored it actually doesn't solve anything all that it has done is replace level grinding with magic grinding making the system almost redundant the last problem that many people have with the game is with its story and characters i cannot comment on these flaws too much because i personally don't fully understand most of the criticisms in the end liking a story its setting or its characters is all a matter of taste however i can understand why certain elements of the story would fail to resonate with a wide audience or even alienate people that were looking for a more straightforward narrative final fantasy 8's story is very weird and notably it takes an incredibly hard to describe turn at the start of disc three that was definitely going to lose some people for those who didn't finish the game the whole way through you straight up go to space at one point and there is also a time paradox which the entire story hinges upon as it tries to deal with themes like fate and destiny this of course is ignoring the all-important amnesia subplot and the mystery of the random sympathetic bouts of narcolepsy that is affecting your party which causes them to have dream-like visions of characters that are far cooler than they are and all this of course being wrapped around what is ostensibly a love story it is the focus of the game after all needless to say this strange amalgam story was not going to be everyone's cup of tea one of the most frequent criticisms you will find is with the game's main character squall people tend to call him annoying brooding or emo which is true to a degree not the emo thing though i'm not really sure where this comes from maybe it's the clothes people tend to read his dialogue in a particular way his overuse of ellipses or throwaway lines like whatever by the way that's a translation thing squall does definitely start out far more introverted and brooding than other protagonists but i think that in the end it really serves to highlight his arc which i will cover eventually the other characters also tend to get written off as being fairly unmemorable but again it really comes down to taste as i think they actually get far more to do in the story than most other rpg characters of that era each having their own moments and seeing as how i have run out of bad things to talk about i think i should begin my counter-attack and explain in gruesome detail why i love this horrible mess of a game i will first state that my purpose here is not to try to convince you that final fantasy 8 is a good game or that you are wrong if you dislike it instead i simply want to highlight why many people still enjoy this game and that there is some merit to a lot of the ideas that final fantasy 8 came up with at best i would encourage maybe giving the game another chance alright let's get the easy stuff out of the way the stuff that most people can agree kick ass about this game if you have only played a bit of final fantasy 8 or have heard anything about it through osmosis then you likely know about triple triad or are aware of the game's soundtrack as much as i want to i am not going to be covering triple triad in depth as it is something i have already talked about at length in my final fantasy 14 video it's also a bit of a running joke to refer to final fantasy 8 as the game with triple triad in it for those who don't know it's a fairly simple to learn card game that lets you collect cards either by converting enemies or by playing against a myriad of npcs within the game as i hinted at before the reward of winning cards can be used to easily empower your characters which incentivizes you to keep playing and luckily enough and especially with the addition of optional rules the game is fun enough to be worth playing in its own right it is essentially the gold standard for mini games within games but it's not really much of a selling point for final fantasy 8 on its own but that song is really catchy and speaking of final fantasy 8's soundtrack is easily a contender for the best in the franchise excluding 14 which i think has a somewhat of an unfair advantage being a long-running mmo i don't think anyone is going to argue that nobuo's music is anything other than the best in the industry with final fantasy 8 soundtrack in particular he tried a few new things that would go on to become staples in the franchise the first two songs you hear are the opening overture followed by liberty fatality and are an absolute knockout one two punch liberty fatality marks the first time that nobuo would combine both choir and orchestra which clearly paid off and it's why you hear it featured so heavily in live performances for both final fantasy and video game concerts alike the game also features the first pop song in the franchise with eyes on me a love song with vocals performed by fei wong that was intended to take advantage of the cd technology and also became the best selling song from a video game in japan at the time also i'm not really sure why no one else has ever tried this before but final fantasy 8 also just features that song that plays outside the house [Music] seems like a strange thing for no one to have tried to capitalize on before or maybe square just has the copyright or something on a personal note final fantasy 8 soundtrack is not my favorite of the franchise as that honor belongs to final fantasy crystal chronicles similarly to my feelings on the game though it might still be the soundtrack i think about the most and it plays a pretty big factor into why i get excited to pick this game up again replaying final fantasy 8 means looking forward to playing as laguna whose regular battle theme is just the best fight me in the comments i also get to look forward to the various musical themes based on succession of witches which is by far my favorite villainous theme song and is tied in my head with final fantasy 10's hymn of the faith as the best light motif of the franchise to close my thoughts here i mentioned in my final fantasy 14 video that a game only needs to have a single decent boss battle with a slapper of a boss track to pique my interest and final fantasy 8 has that and a ton more going on for it i guess now is as good a time as any to bring up the junction system again oh boy so i have written this script a number of times now and this was originally going to be a very short video centered entirely on the junction system and the merit i see in it but in the process of replaying the game i found myself getting a little too excited to talk about the story more on that later to start explaining why i like the junction system i'll need to tell you about this little guy here the t-rex are or the much better named rko dinos in the japanese version if you have played this game you likely remember him as the big [ __ ] dinosaur who kicked your ass in the training ground of balum garden or in the forest just outside if you were incredibly unlucky i don't know what it is with final fantasy games but they seem fixated on the idea of sticking big ass reptiles near the start of the game it's almost like a serious tradition sometimes the game in question will explicitly tell you to run from these monsters as fleeing from a difficult encounter is a valid option and a decent lesson to teach the player early on other games will merely imply the danger based on the placement of the monster near weaker enemies and they will teach you the hard way if you try to fight them these enemies almost always stick out because of how absurdly challenging they are compared to everything else you have faced up to that point and this also cleverly plants the sub goal of coming back at a later point in that game to finally defeat this enemy thereby demonstrating how much stronger you have become perfect rpg gameplay in my opinion however for more adventurous players especially those who have played the games before they may try to find a way to kill this creature early on gaming the system so to speak in order to acquire early benefits or simply to challenge themselves this situation however is a little different in final fantasy viii when you meet with questus in the balum garden training center she directly mentions the t-rex r asking if squall has ever fought one which you likely haven't by this point she assures you that defeating one is easy as long as you are able to junction sleep magic onto your attack this is obviously a new concept in this game as it is part of the junction system but the ramifications of what she mentions here won't really mean much until you finally see a t-rex are for yourself this thing is designed to kick your ass even with level scaling the earliest version of this thing has over 10 000 health and can deal hundreds of damage per hit there is no way that you are killing this thing on accident you need to learn how to junction to beat it for comparison's sake a grat the most common enemy you encounter here has only about 200 health at its lowest level and is lucky to hit you for 30 damage however if you are looking to find that sleep magic that questus mentioned then you can draw it from them how convenient this tiny section in the training grounds is in my opinion the best teaching tool that final fantasy 8 has to offer and i really wish that they made this section a little longer unlike with the previous tutorials in this game here you finally get a chance to experiment on your own with an explicitly stated goal that potentially means even more to a player if they have become determined to kill this tough-as-hell dinosaur it's not as easy as quistis first made out either even at a hundred sleep magic junction it can resist your attacks and so you are going to want to junction your strength so you can quickly work through that mountain of health and if you are feeling risky you might even try to take advantage of a low health squall to try and limit break as often as you can making it go by even faster the sense of mastery over the game systems and the satisfaction of seeing this bastard die for the first time is incredible and it is one of my favorite teaching moments in any video game hence why i bring all this up [Music] this is the potential i see in the junction system not the mind goblins created by not having a perfect stack of 800 magic but a system that is just complex enough that it allows me to feel as though i can break the game even if it is by design i will probably die by this statement but i think that final fantasy 8 is one of the most replayable rpgs ever made just like the t-rex are there are other moments built into the game that almost beg you to challenge yourself like the huge reward you get for defeating the spider tank during the attack on dalit city as a small tradition of my own when i go back to play final fantasy 8 i sometimes make it my goal to kill the t-rex r as quickly as possible something like an informal speed run usually this will take me around 2 hours or so from the start of the game depending on how distracted i get with triple triad and it still feels satisfying for me to do as i remember being intimidated by this thing when i was a kid and if i'm feeling really cheeky flashing lights warning i'll treat myself and hit another one with a early degenerator you're right questus that was easy [Music] unfortunately there are still aspects to final fantasy 8's gameplay that i cannot fully defend while i don't tend to experience the same mind goblins as other people i know why they exist i didn't used to but now i tend to use magic quite frequently during my playthroughs especially in the early stages it's not too difficult to acquire a huge stalk of items that can be refined into more magic and so i will use magic even if i haven't junctioned most people including myself on my first playthrough do not play like this typically players junction magic to every available stat and will refuse to use magic out of fear of reducing those stats and even if you did play the game like i do now there is still a problem learning to master the junction system means learning how to avoid using the draw command i almost never use the draw command with the exception of the very start of the game or to draw guardian forces this is indicative of a large problem story wise your ability to draw magic is one of the most significant things that your character can do and yet it is one of the most tedious things ever put into a game and so you will try and avoid it in the steam port of the game they decided to add the ability to straight up give yourself a stupid amount of magic like 100 of everything you can find in disc one it's nuts obviously this [ __ ] with the progression of the game and it's not a great solution honestly if they wanted a one button solution i would have just added the ability to tweak how much magic that you can draw from enemies in easy mode if you will as it will still allow new or returning players to learn the other systems i want to reiterate that the point of the junction system as well as the scaling difficulty of the enemies was to do away with traditional level grinding in a very bizarre broken and unintended way they almost achieved that when i play the game the only time that i grind for experience is at the very beginning just long enough for quetzalcoatl to learn card mod and shiva to learn how to refine ice magic i can then play as little of or as much of triple triad to refine as much magic as i want depending on my goal for that playthrough which usually takes about an hour and a half at most after that i can leisurely stroll my way through the entire story one of the key features of the junction system not often talked about is the ability to freely swap all of your junctions between characters this is actually a huge thing as a large part of the story has squall delegating the party into squads which you will often switch between other final fantasy games sometimes attempt this but it can suck with varying degrees of ass depending on how much you use those specific characters sometimes leaving you with a character that you have never even used before in final fantasy 8 though you can easily use every single character and it allows for the story to experiment in creative ways giving you access to guest characters giving you a whole new party with each member having their own limit breaks and having your party be split up over two locations at various points in the game and so you can see why something like the junction system needed to exist here in order to separate your character's avatar strength from leveling so that these story moments can even work in the first place also you may now be getting hints as to why i rewrote this script so much as i cannot seem to avoid getting into the story no matter what i bring up so let's try to not put it off any longer and get into what i really wanted to share about this game i will first address the nostalgia that i have for this game which probably plays the largest factor into why i replay it so often it can be hard for me to separate what i genuinely enjoy about final fantasy viii and its story versus what i've grown accustomed to because it's what i grew up with i did not play final fantasy 7 or 9 at a formative age so i tend to look at those games far more critically than i do with eight and even recognizing that it can still be difficult to tell when i am being unfair in other words this is all just my opinion so please take everything that i say in this video with a pinch of salt also it is fair to say that there will be major spoilers from here on as i will be discussing certain characters and events in depth let's talk about party dynamic this is a thing in rpgs and it has to do with how the main characters of the game relate to each other and to the plot unlike in other rpgs in final fantasy 8 your party is not made up of a ragtag group of random adventurers and mascot characters with disconnected backstories instead the bulk of your party are members of a paramilitary group called seed spelled with a stylized d which is not actually arbitrary but intended so that you can read it backwards as ds some of you already know what this stands for you know if you know but if you don't feel free to ask in the comments this setup is a great framing device and it allows for you the player and squall the aspiring squad leader to simultaneously meet the members of his would-be team in order you meet questus who starts out as squall's instructor and also clearly has unrequited feelings for him and so agrees to step down as an instructor so that she can be assigned to his team for an upcoming mission the next two zell and selfie are two cadets whom squall worked with during his trial mission and graduated alongside him renoa the only non-seed member starts out as the head of a small resistance group called the forest owls and is the client who hires seed thereby enlisting squall's team and the final member is another seed specialist a sniper who is assigned to your team to carry out an assassination on a sorceress more on that in a bit the dynamic here does wonders to satisfy a nagging question i often find myself asking when i play games with a large cast of characters that question being why is everyone here i typically ask myself this question subconsciously anytime that a major plot threat is resolved in his story is there still a reason why each of the characters are invested in the main plot would it make even more sense if a character simply just left and did their own thing a good example of a game that does not answer this question well is final fantasy 12. the bulk of the story in 12 is centered around the characters of ash and bosh who are not the main characters the actual main character vaughn is a fish out of water who is only circumstantially related to the other characters with the exception of his friend pinello who might even have less of a reason to be in the party than him the two of them are essentially strung along by a series of serendipitous events that keep them in the party long enough that it would simply become weird if they just left and the other characters treat vaughn almost like he's a nuisance as he has to constantly ask questions about the basic history of the world on behalf of the player just so that we're informed time for one of my iconic bad analogies but he's like if in star wars luke skywalker didn't even meet obi-wan or knew anything about the force and halfway through the film darth vader was revealed to be a good guy and a complete stranger with no connections to luke at all why is vaughn still here i guess he can swing a sword good and he doesn't like the empire but that describes a lot of people in that setting in contrast final fantasy 10 does a great job of establishing its team dynamic once again our main character is the odd man out an almost literal fish out of water titus's only real connection to the party is through oren who is also one of yuna's father's best friends and a legendary guardian the rest of the party has a direct connection through yuna by being one of her guardians and helping her on her quest or is her blood relative the game however gives titus the chance to interact with these party members on his own before these other connections are revealed and the mystery of how titus even arrived in spira is both interesting and related enough to the quest of the main party that they are also invested in discovering more about him this is where titus is meant to be the answers to his mystery lay somewhere at the end of this journey however my favorite of these dynamics is final fantasy 8's by far what starts out simply enough as squall's first mission as a leader aiding a small resistance group from a city called timber quickly spirals out of control when cipher who was sort of like the school bully and also squall's rival is captured by the sorceress idia when he attempted to attack the president of galvadia live on television creating a political nightmare that threatens to not only upend squall's mission but potentially start a devastating war with one of the most powerful militaries in the world then you discover the real purpose behind scene which was to fight against sorceresses like idia putting you in the middle of a conspiracy to assassinate her before she can seize control of galbadia's military there is a constantly evolving reason why the characters are directly invested in the plot outside of just merely following orders slight tangent but my favorite of these reasons is the previously mentioned mystery of the shared narcolepsy like many things in this game if you haven't played it then it's kind of hard to explain before your mission even starts squall and his team suddenly pass out on the train heading to timber whereby they have a shared dream about a group of galbanian soldiers named laguna kiros and ward who are fighting in the timber area when the dream ends they all realize they saw the same thing but have no clue as to why it even happened at all these visions continue to follow squall and anyone who joins his team throughout the game giving added context to some of the factions and locations you encounter in the game as well as clearly demonstrating that there is something supernatural targeting their group laguna also just kicks ass he is a [ __ ] amazing character he has a sick battle theme and is probably the most regular and relatable dude in the entire franchise i'm doing it again but if this were an episode of a sitcom these visions would serve as the b plot and while they don't really feel terribly related at first they are interesting enough to string you along and it also plants the seed in your head about whether or not the party will ever meet up with laguna in person and this has a pretty neat payoff near the end of the story with that tangent over i want to talk more about squall and his character arcs i really like squall as a protagonist i can see more of myself in him than i do with most other video game protagonists i hope that you are now picturing me as a brooding teenager who dresses in chains and dark clothing what i will say is this when creating a protagonist for your rpg you have two choices that you can make you can have your protagonist say mostly nothing that way you can much more easily project yourself into the shoes of that character as that character is never at risk of saying or doing anything that would otherwise interfere with your ability to see yourself as that character you can safely imagine what those characters are saying in their head without having to try and figure out what they might be like in person or you can go ahead and do the complete opposite thing and create a much more well-defined character one who speaks and acts with their own agency which is a much riskier choice by far as you can easily alienate players by having your protagonist say or do something that a player would not do in a given situation however this character has far more potential to embody the specific themes that the story may be trying to convey squall is clearly the latter of those two you can narrow down his character pretty easily into two major arcs the first is him embracing his role as a leader and the second is his romantic relationship with ranoa it's important to keep these two arcs in mind as the squall we meet at the start of the game hardly seems capable of being a leader in fact he starts out as a student a follower he is also shown to not really be interested in romance of any kind he is highly introverted has inner monologues and seems bothered to even have to deal with other people he is also surrounded by people who seem to understand him better than he understands himself and are essentially able to trick him into caring about things he otherwise wouldn't he doesn't know who he is yet the only reason he dances with ronoa at the start of the game is because of how forceful her personality is she is essentially a foil to him in this scene this introduction is important because again the squall we see at the end of the game hardly seems like the character we met at the beginning the options to choose dialogue that are outright dismissive the ellipses whatever are slowly phased out of the game as squall is thrust into situations where he is forced to be a leader i think it is also important to distinguish that squall doesn't want to be a leader he is being made into one he is just a seed if you will planted into the role of a leader whether he likes it or not and whether he can grow into a successful leader is up to him his decision is whether or not to embrace that role the internal monologue he has is useful to the player as it lets you see that the character isn't rapidly changing into something that he wasn't before however that isn't what everyone else sees they can only see squall the most capable person in any given situation he is the character that is most fit to be a leader among all others as we see time and time again demonstrations of failed leadership we see cipher who is too cavalier to even follow basic orders quistus who fails to even maintain order with her own students and even headmaster sid who eventually buckles under the weight of a crisis and has to rely on squall to save balumgarden this is why i like squall not because i'm edgy but because i can empathize with him far more than i can with other protagonists we have all been thrust into a situation in which we have felt that we weren't in control anymore and watching squall struggle and then eventually succeed over his own problems makes him more heroic and relatable someone that we want to aspire to be a leader squall's second arc might even be more important to the story depending on your interpretation of events one thing to point out is that while squall does eventually become more confident in himself as a leader eventually learning to rely on others and not to try and solve everything himself at some point his lack of confidence returns and it's when he starts to become more attached to ranoa i want to clarify that i do not like love stories i never have and i don't even have a great reason as to why i won't imply that i hate them but i can't name a single romance film that i like off the top of my head and in books or games that feature it it's usually my least favorite part it's probably because a lot of romance comes off as forced or unnatural or at worst it's just sexual attraction between two good looking characters for me real love does not look like it does in the movies it's far more complicated i could probably count the number of love stories that i genuinely enjoy using one half of one hand and final fantasy 8 is one of those exceptions i've read people's criticisms of the love story saying that it also feels forced but i can't agree with that it does have this scene with a very sappy love song but it's not like we're seeing the two get married the climax of their love story is essentially the two of them realizing that they do actually love each other but it's complicated the song itself is an in-universe reference to laguna and julia squalls may be dad and renault is definitely mom who we know did not end up together this scene is filled with apprehension about what comes next and more importantly how we got here feels pretty natural especially considering the very fantastical circumstances it's not as though there wasn't 30 hours of bumbling from these two dummies before we got here whether you like this or not this is undoubtedly the legacy that final fantasy 8 left behind well this and triple triad final fantasy 9 and 10 would go on to focus more heavily on a romantic subplot as a major part of its story with 10 even channeling the sappy love song energy in one of its most famous scenes [Music] for my money though the romance worked best in eight as it is clearly the focus of one of the game's major themes this game features a ton of love stories mostly failed ones that end in tragedy there is questus's unrequited love for squall as i mentioned which pays off in a great scene that i have to mention because it's one of my favorites right after ranoa and squall return from space and squall fails to convince renault not to put herself in stasis for everyone's protection quistus then has to remind the dummy why he even jumped into space to save her in the first place in which squall basically goes it's one of the most sobering and adult moments in the franchise and it has the subtext of questus saying you [ __ ] broke my heart you piece of [ __ ] now go save your girlfriend rinoa herself had a crush on cipher at the start if you can remember which she admits to after it is revealed that cipher was executed for his attack on the president this of course also comes after she admitted that the only reason she danced with squall at the beginning was because she was looking for someone although there was probably something else there too later on we also learned that idia and sid were married which sort of recontextualizes that whole sorceress assassination thing that sid ordered and of course there is the horrific story that is laguna's love life which i won't even get into when you establish a setting in which love almost invariably leads to tragedy it makes the one that might actually work out feel all the more special and worth fighting for it's a strong motivator to continue the story to say the least alright this section has already grown into a monster but i still gotta address the elephant in the room which is all that [ __ ] that happens when this [ __ ] starts shooting baskets and all that [ __ ] that happens right at the start of disc 3. some of you may have seen this coming i don't want to further bog things down by explaining the entire story but allow me to briefly describe the two major plot twists in the game for those who don't know so disc one concludes with a battle against the sorceress idia whom you've been tasked with assassinating before she can take over all of galbardia despite winning the battle the fight concludes with you failing to kill idia catching an icicle and then waking up in prison at the start of disc 2. it seems at this point that they are setting up edia to become the ultimate villain of the game which would seem pretty obvious considering the amount the game and the promotional material focuses on her so then you might be surprised to hear that the game actually tries to step away from this idea and that all starts right here with this infamous basketball scene the first major twist of the game it is revealed by irvine why earlier in the game he had hesitated to take his shot against idia which could have killed her without the need to engage her in a fight what originally just seemed like nerves in the first moment of irvine's character development he instead reveals that he couldn't shoot her because she is the woman who took care of them all when they were children you see the entire cast of the game minus renault but including cipher and another character i won't even get into were all orphans who stayed at the same orphanage and edia was their caretaker it is revealed that every single character has amnesia including idia and the reason for this is likely due to the fact that members of seed draw their powers from guardian forces who in turn take their memories the reason irvine remembers this is because he had never used guardian forces until he joined up with your team i believe the purpose of this bombshell of information is to make you question the nature of guardian forces and sorceresses how does a demonstrably caring woman come to nearly kill the children she raised and how do those children almost assassinate their surrogate mother without realizing it there is something clearly unnatural at play here a new mystery most people get caught up on how incredibly convenient it is that none of the characters remembered each other but what this scene does do is alter the character's motivation and plan of attack moving forward they no longer want to kill these sorceress they would save her if it is at all possible the beginning of disc 3 then is the aftermath to this setup where after you finally defeat idia in your rematch at the end of disc 2 the game pulls the trigger and has her regain her memories or in this case control over her own body she reveals halfway through the game that all of her actions were not her own but she was actually being controlled by another character that we haven't even heard of yet the sorceress living in the future ultimatia again another twist that feels almost completely out of left field and made all the more unbelievable considering the game's hyper focus on idia up to this point i would be lying if i said that when i got to this point on my original playthrough that i wasn't also scratching my head wondering what the hell this game was even trying to do at this point in the story there are so many unanswered questions and those that get addressed are given very confusing answers a lot of people that i knew who played this game mentally checked out at this point or just straight up quit playing and it's not really hard to see why and while i recognize that this all could have been handled a lot better i do appreciate what disk 3 was trying to do it tries to recontextualize the initial threat of the game as being just a symptom of a much much greater threat that you aren't even sure how to face yet for those who stuck with it this is the part of the game that gives you the bulk of the world building and it goes on to inform us how sorceresses and magic operate in this setting it also does actually resolve most of the plot threads and gives us a conclusion to laguna's story if you made it to disc 3 then i would definitely suggest sticking around to the end as there is some crazy [ __ ] that happens and by the time that disc 4 starts there are very few unanswered questions with the last major one being the true motivations of the villain and that is where i get incredibly controversial and start to talk about a fan theory the renowa is altemicia theory if you are aware of it oh boy get excited so this is gonna be the king of all tangents i know that fan theories aren't for everyone and that this isn't an iceberg explained video but this theory covers the version of events that i interpret when i play the game and i promise that there is actually a point to all this in the end anyways i guess consider this as a warning if you are still here then here we [ __ ] go the ranoa is ultimicia theory is one of the few fan theories that i holy subscribe to i usually dismiss fan theories offhandedly as they typically require me to make far too many assumptions about things that aren't actually in the game or they disregard whole swaths of it entirely which is just not very interesting to me i make an exception here because this theory actually fits in more details than the actual canonical english translation of this story ultimicia does not get a lot of screen time in final fantasy viii but you do actually learn about what she is attempting to accomplish she lives in a bleak war-torn and apocalyptic future and her goal is to complete something known as the compression of time it is explained that this would combine the past present and future into a single moment the canonical reason for this is because ultimicia is attempting to prevent her own downfall as there is a destiny about a legendary seed that will come to defeat her and so she seeks to prevent this fate from ever happening via a timeline loophole unfortunately that's all you really get with altemisia you can assume her controlling idia was an attempt to have her destroy seed altogether but in the end she fails and paradoxically she ends up traveling back to bestow her sorcerous powers to idia in the past setting off the events of the story to begin with it's explained that all sorceresses need to pass on their power before they can die and even if you take this statement at face value it was made clear earlier that only specific women can inherit the power of a sorceress if the big bad guy isn't idia or even adele because they weren't around in the future it stands to question who the hell is altemisia well if you go through the game a second time with the idea that ronoa might actually be certain details of the story start to line up which otherwise have no reason to be there so squall wears this ring with a lion design on it much like many of his accessories there is a point in the game in which zell tricks squall into giving him this ring because renault asked him to she just seems to like the ring for whatever reason during the middle of a pitched battle ronoa gives the ring back to him and asks squall if it has a name by default this ring's name is griever which squall gives back to her and tells her that she can keep it enter altemisia who during her final battle decides to summon a guardian force of all things which doesn't really make a whole lot of sense to me as to why a sorceress would even need a guardian force if they can use magic inherently they are the only humans that can do this in the lore so it seems very strange for the developers to add this detail into the final fight if it meant nothing but also it clearly means something as the guardian force she summons is a lion creature that has the exact same name as whatever squall decides to name his ring or griever by default this is why this theory was born as this whole thing begs further examination and writing it all off as a coincidence is almost silly there is a connection between squall and altemisia it's just not well explained the basic theory states this then that if altemisia was using a guardian force would she not also be affected by the amnesia that affects everyone else who uses them if so is it possible that ultimisha forgot the real reason why she wanted to compress time confusing it with a paranoid destiny about her eventual destruction if you choose to believe that ranoa is ultimicia then you have a pretty good answer as to where she first heard about this destiny of hers as this was a nightmare that ronoa described to squall just before they set out on their final mission this turns ultimisia into a very tragic figure a woman who inherited powers she didn't ask for and can't even control powers that are feared by every single person in the world if she used guardian forces she would eventually forget what was important to her potentially even being forced to fight against her friends after years of fighting against the entire world all that she would have to remember those people by would be physical mementos small inconsequential things that no longer carried the greater context of why they mattered at all that could very well be her motivation to compress time it would allow her to escape her destroyed future and let her live in a single moment that she managed to cling onto a moment of greater significance than the rest while renoa would want to return to a world where squall still existed altamecia would only remember the need to compress time into a single moment to escape her fate she cannot remember the motivation just the ambition this consequently creates a reality in which she is slain by the very person she was attempting to see which might have actually been the ending that she was looking for from the start honestly reading some of the dialogue near the end of the game makes this theory almost seem a little on the nose but i also realize that confirmation bias exists the canonical altimeter is the story of a woman who desperately wanted to change destiny only to paradoxically set forth a series of events that would eventually lead to that destiny it fits well within the themes of the game but i like the theories version a lot better the game leaves off with the idea that love transcends all as it is heavily implied that squall and renault's promise to each other is what allows her to find and rescue squall in the end the risk you take in loving someone is the grief you feel when you lose them and so a grief stricken renowa who has been transformed into a monster of sorts makes sense as the villain of this story i want to double down and state that i know that this isn't actually part of the game and that this theory was debunked by one of the writers slash director for the game however i don't care not to throw shade at the guy but if we took the writer's word as gospel when it came to their own creations then the wizards at hogwarts would be [ __ ] on the floor or whatever other crazy [ __ ] that jk rowling has said and deckard from blade runner would be a replicant it's not the writer's job to tell you how to interpret a story after it has been released when you write your story to have a mystery or imply that there is greater depth to something even though there really isn't you allow for the person experiencing your story to fill in the blanks with their own interpretation who then creates a personal connection to your story a well-made book or game will contain many of these and it's why you see so many fan theories for well-liked franchises that have incredibly loyal fan bases think game of thrones or dark souls in the same way that some people interpret squall to be a brooding over-emotional brat i see an introverted teenager with a lot on his mind neither interpretation is incorrect to me ronoa is ultimicia because as a concept for a villain i find her to be incredibly interesting and i would love for someone in the future to create a character based on that concept and so despite the narrative or even the game of final fantasy viii not really being as tightly put together as some of its contemporaries there are still enough small details and moments of genuine quality in this game that help me to overlook some of its weaker elements and each time that i play this game i find myself discovering more things that i had somehow missed on previous playthroughs for those wondering by the way there are mods out there that people have come up with that trying to solve the gameplay and balance issues i myself have always thought about what i would do if given the chance to tweak the systems of the game or flesh out some of the ideas in the story but you know what for nostalgia's sake even if given that opportunity i would probably stick to the original anyways to quickly summarize final fantasy 8 is better than 7 because it has laguna bye bye all right i hope you found at least some of what i talked about here to be interesting entertaining or at the least informative my long-winded rant is officially over and if you've managed to make it this far through the entire thing then i cannot thank you enough please leave your comments or criticisms if you have them this was a very different type of video than what i was used to making and it is much more in line with me ranting and raving at my friends about some obscure subject that they don't care about at all this really is the iconic seance rant i tried my best to make this a shorter video but after writing and rewriting it multiple times it kept changing into something else entirely as it turns out i had a lot more to say about final fantasy 8 than i thought i did i'm really scared that i might learn that maybe i'm just not capable of making shorter videos but who knows thank you again for watching and there are more videos to come i love you bye bye

Channel: Seán C.C.

Views: 395,421

Keywords: Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy 8, Final Fantasy VIII, Review, Deep Dive, In-depth, Why FF8 is a great game, Why FF8 is great despite it's flaws

Id: kCAHaxMRwVI

Length: 58min 1sec (3481 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 21 2022