Looking Back: Final Fantasy 8

Looking Back: Final Fantasy 8
By Jesse Shearer  (AKA Jesse S.; JMShearer)

With Noah Antwiller, better known as the Spoony One online, having recently resumed his extremely popular Final Fantasy 8 review/Let’s Play, at least briefly, it seems an opportune time for me to write an article on the subject I’ve been considering for quite some time.

See, even though Final Fantasy 8 is hardly my favorite game ever, or even in the series, it still holds a special place in my memory.  It comes to this place as a catalyst in my subconscious that made me reconsider my life as a gamer.  And even then, it was one scene in the game in particular that did it.  This will be about that scene.

First, though, a bit of personal history, if I may.  When Final Fantasy 8 originally came out, I was busy working on the first of two undergraduate degrees and somehow managed to miss it when it was the “current” installment in the series.  After having completed a bachelors’ degree in what the university gracefully calls “Liberal Studies” and being unable to put it to use, I went back to school to get an associates degree in something a little more practical.  While working on that second degree, some five years after Final Fantasy 8 was released, I somehow managed to make time to play it, and that’s when I first witnessed “The Scene.”

“The Scene” of which I speak is roughly a third of the way into the game.  By this point, Squall and crew have been to war, involved in two botched kidnappings, a piss-poor assassination attempt, and thrown in jail as a result, where the game’s main villain tortures them while she bombs their home towns and works on her plot to destroy the universe.  At this point, as they survey the devastation at the boarding school where one of them presumably grew up, Irvine, the team’s loverboy character, suggests taking the character who grew up there back to the orphanage where all but one of the party members were kids.

There is a ton of reasons why this bugs the hell out of me.  Probably the easiest thing to begin with would be what could be called the “Justice, Duty, and Revenge” angle.  Now, granted, I’ve said before that I’m not entirely sure that Final Fantasy 8 was ever intended to have as broad a release as it did.  All the same, the things I’m trying to touch on here are all thoughts and feelings that I’ve heard are pretty universal to the human condition, no matter what culture an individual was raised in.  So, I’m wondering, do none of them say, “Hey, in a truly just world, people don’t do to one another what the Sorceress did to us!”?  They don’t think it’s their duty as warriors to prevent the destruction of the world, and very possibly the universe?  None of these characters wants revenge for being jailed and tortured, rightly or not, while their home towns were attacked, destroyed, or taken over?

Apparently not, because they all agree that the better use of their time would be to run off to get hugs from a nanny that all but one of them has forgotten about, assuming they ever had reason to know about the nanny in the first place.  Which leads us to my next big issue with this.

In this game, there is lore stating that the use of Guardian Forces, the power-granting summoned monsters in Final Fantasy 8, have this way of causing a form of amnesia as a result of prolonged use.  I’m no expert on mental disorders and would never claim to be, but upon giving this some thought, it seems to me that it would at least be possible for there to be fragments of memories, little psychic turds, if you will, that these things leave around.  From the standpoint of the story, probably the best part of that is that these things wouldn’t have made any really major changes necessary in spite of making the story slightly better.

The way I see it, they could have worked in these little nagging memories that keep cropping up over people that maybe they shouldn’t remember at all.  Some of these could be explained away easily enough.  Squall, Seifer, Zell and Quistis, for example, had been together at Balam for however long before the game, so such things amongst them could be written off that way.  And nobody’s going to have errant memories of Rinoa, because she grew up with her rich family in Galbadia before starting a resistance cell in Timber.

With all that in mind, let’s say hello to Selphie Tilmitt, shall we?  This nice young lady has elected to go on the Dollet field exam at Balam.  Upon transferring to this new garden, she literally runs into Squall on her first day there.  Even if we assume that what the game will later establish about the GFs eating memories to be true, isn’t it at least remotely possible that one of them would have a flash of “Don’t I know you from somewhere” disease?

Something similar could have happened later on in Dollet, during the field exam.  Even if Zell and Squall think they don’t know Selphie when she turns up at the transmitter tower, couldn’t one of them have idly said “Typical Selphie… hey, wait, how do I know that?”

And there are moments like this that could have happened with Irvine, too.  Nobody kinda recognizes him when he’s introduced at Galbadia Garden?  No “Why is he so familiar”?  No “Still after the girls, I see?”  Not even the slightest hint of any connection at all?

One of the biggest wasted opportunities to hint at this almost familial connection most of the main heroes are supposed to have comes when Squall, Irvine, and Rinoa are in the clock tower just before they try to do the sniper hit on the Sorceress.  They could have had Squall go to Irvine when he froze up and say something like “Look, I know you can do this, and it’s not just because Headmaster Martine says so.  I don’t know how, why, or when, but it seems like we’ve been in situations like this before, and I’ve seen you pull them off.  And if I’m right, you know just as well as I do that even if you somehow miss, I’ll be there to back you up.”

But no.  This one just gets pissed away with Squall pretty much saying “Just take the damned shot, maggot!  If you miss, I’ll go take the Sorceress out with my sword.”

Anyway, after all of that, our ever-so-brave heroes are off to get hugs from the nanny that only one of the five people formerly in her care even remembers, and only then, only vaguely, until it all gets mentioned.  And that’s all it takes to get them to abandon, at least temporarily, what should be a crusade against an evil witch who wants, at a bare minimum, world domination.

The first time I saw this scene play out, I began thinking to myself “This is bullshit.  And what’s worse, I think something like it happens in all the games like this I’ve played recently.  How much of my life have I wasted on this crap, anyway?”

I’ve tried several times to get past that point in the game, and haven’t had much of anything like success, because I can say firsthand that the Spoony One has it right when he says that most of the game is just meaningless busywork, with rewards that are barely worth the effort put into getting them.  It just seems pointless to continue playing this, or any other game, really, when faced with things that really are pretty much meaningless, even in the context of the game.

I should say, of course, that there is one reference to GFs causing amnesia early on in Final Fantasy 8, but to find it, you’ve got to navigate through  things that really are complete and utter trivia and tutorials that the game will force you into anyway later on.  Even then, it only says that “in theory, GFs *might* cause amnesia and research into the matter is ongoing,” essentially making it a throwaway line.  And to find any of this, you have to be willing to put in at least ten extra minutes at Squall’s computer terminal in the classroom at the beginning of the game, going through things that are, for the most part, available through the menu screen and forced tutorials throughout most of the game.

Once I realized how much there was that made it hard to want to keep playing, adulthood in the real world set in, and it changed just about everything.  I still play, of course, but not as much or in the same way as I used to.  I’ll still go back to the good old games that don’t insist on slapping me around or kicking me in the crotch with a steel-toed work boot for playing them when I have time to kill and no other decent way to do it.

New games and consoles, however, have suffered because of my altered view.  Sure, I have a PS2 and a Wii, but I wouldn’t have come into possession of either had it not been through other people.  A buddy of mine offered me a deal on the PS2, and somebody at work put my name into a contest for the Wii.  I’m glad I have both these systems, and I do appreciate the favors, but they’re systems I would never have gone out to get otherwise, as next-gen games and systems just don’t excite me any more, nor have they for a long time.

At any rate, Final Fantasy 8 was kind of an epiphany for me.  It was the game that made me realize that my gaming days, as I had known them up to that point, were coming to an end.  It’s nothing I feel particularly bad about.  Such changes must come, after all, like it or not, and I think I’m a better person, if only slightly, because of it.

So, in the end, I really must say thank you, Final Fantasy 8, for making me reconsider my gaming career.  As bad as it was, some good has actually come of it.

And that’s my take on Final Fantasy 8.  Thank you for your time.  I appreciate having people read my work.