Ah fuck, are you telling me FF8 is the prequel to RWBY? How could you do this to me I thought we were all friends here.
I mean, it certainly suggests a compelling reason for why the moon is Like That, if someone had the bright idea that maybe they could stop the Lunar Cry by shooting the everliving fuck out of the moon (which would proceed to only make things worse), and we already have the battle high schools and geopolitical instability in spite of a world full of monsters...
Truly I am cursed to never fully escape the specter of RWBY.
With all that in mind, Ultimecia. As the main villain and final boss, she is thematically the antithesis of 8's themes and thus Squall's failure state:
A lonely woman who made an "evil sorceress" persona so that no one will ever see anything more vulnerable about her (and her implied tragic childhood just like Squall's), to the point where her very face falls away and her human half is entirely subservient to her sorceress half at the end of her boss fight. She has no one and so she is no one.
Even we will never know Ultimecia.
So I've been thinking off and on of Ultimecia being a narrative foil to the protagonists due to her complete lack of connections with others, and I like the
idea of that, but for it to work I think we really needed something else as a more present threat we could connect to. Like the obvious example is Adel, if she was freed earlier in the story and we spent some time as a more present antagonist, who we learned more of over time and who we interacted with more - she'd probably be fun to have as a villain who tries to recruit the party! And while she's busy villaining it up, Ultimecia remains a vague but present outer threat, and we need to stop Adel before Ultimecia is able to try and merge their powers.
Or failing that, some time where Seifer serves as Ultimecia's knight, so that he can serve as her mouthpiece and point of interaction with the party. With him, you could probably lean into the idea of it being a toxic and parasocial relationship - Seifer is
obsessed with Ultimecia, with the idea of her, while she doesn't give a fig about him and barely recognizes he exists. Give us more scenes to show his gradual mental decline, to reinforce the effects of such a one-sided relationship, and show how even though Seifer is devoted to her, he still does essentially the same thing that the SeeDs hunting her were doing, judging her by her reputation as The Sorceress over any facet of her personally.
And after either of those, have the characters draw attention to how they never knew anything about Ultimecia, truly, besides the persona she constructed go face the world. Give Squall a moment to reflect on how this could have been his fate, mirror his freakout after Seifer's eulogies and show how he's grown and learned to open up. Tie the bow on the concept, rather than leave us theorizing on whether or not her lack of characterization was intentional or simply a lack of resources.
It all comes back to time, the bones of something were there, they just never had a chance to get proper development.
this thread is an ATB hate safe space
in that it's a safe space to express hate for ATB
Okay good because I'll never stop hating ATB. It's a blight on game design made by people unreasonably ashamed of the very genre they're making.
The more I think about it, the more I start asking myself questions like: "Is the reason Ultimecia talks so little to the protagonists that, if she directly said 'In the future, SeeD's mission to combat evil sorceresses becomes twisted and perpetuates the persecution of all sorceresses, leading to my suffering and desire for revenge and freedom,' rather than leaving it partially implicit, then the characters would realize the issue at hand and work towards solving it in the present, which they can't be allowed to do by the needs of a stable time loop?"
It's not ideal!
And the more I think about it the more I realize this could have been solved by making it a parallel timelines situation. Ultimecia comes from the Bad Future, and that SeeD could still bring that to pass if left as is, but the protagonists have the chance to avert this reality and allow for a brighter future to exist.
It just. You wouldn't need to change all that much to make that work, and it makes the events of this game much less dark and meaningless very quickly!
). But yeah, as it's almost the only fic I have written, I suppose it shows how much I have loved this game and well, as people have noted, there are a bunch of things to explore in it (like Fujin and Raijin which didn't have enough screentime to my taste and works a little bit on their past, Seifer redemption arc, what the fuck is going on with the monster on the moon, what the Garden will become, (and no, I totally forgot about Norg if I remember right), what about Hyne, cetera...).
