The ones that are imported 1:1 are also modified accordingly to fit the local worldbuilding. Cloud of Darkness is a particularly powerful demon rather than a fundamental force of the universe, dragons and dragon gods are all aliens and magical constructs imitating those aliens rather than a menagerie of beasts and assorted summon types, Krile is a member of the PC race that looks like kids rather than a precocious actual child on the front lines, etc.
For a free expansion intended to entice you to pay for what comes next? Agreed actually... entirelt because it leaves off on the cliffhanger setup for Shadowbringers
For a free expansion intended to entice you to pay for what comes next? Agreed actually... entirelt because it leaves off on the cliffhanger setup for Shadowbringers
XIV imports Triple Triad from VIII more or less wholesale, with the caveat that rule variants are idiosyncratic to each individual rather than by region and it's not a route to power, just a diversion
Most bosses have a small but statistically significant chance to drop their triple triad card, which makes getting a good deck easy
Elvoret is therefore probably the descendant of a "pure blood" Elnoyle from the moon that eventually weakened from a few generations of cross-breeding and the lack of evolutionary pressures of living on a moon full of nothing but other vicious monsters wanting to kill and eat it before it kills and eats them.
Welcome back, class, to Final Fantasy VIII. Today is our final exam:
The End
Our party stands before the gates to Ultimecia's chambers, or her throne room, or whatever that small building sitting at the end of a bridge away from the rest of the castle is. Which is… interesting, considering that she's neither dwelling at the heart of the castle, or at its highest peak, but removed from it, especially considering how empty and ruined the castle is? But there's not much to draw from that at this time. (EDIT: I'm an idiot, this is obviously the room where the Junction Machine Ellone was installed, which is why it's separate from the castle and why Ultimecia is there.)
Right now, our party is still in the configuration we gave it for the Omega Weapon fight - probably overkill for the final boss, but at this point I don't want to spend another ten minutes in the menu re-junctioning everything, I want to push through. I expect the game will have some kind of mechanic forcing us to use two parties like it did in VI and VII, which would be inconvenient because right now Quistis, Selphie and Irvine have no GFs and thus garbage stats and no abilities, but whatever, we'll take it as it goes.
We enter the final room.
And there we stand in front of the final Sorceress, Ultimecia. She stands on an elevated throne, the entire group facing her. It's a nice group shot.
And now it's time for the funniest reveal in the game. As she sees us enter, Ultimecia starts ranting, repeating the word 'SeeD' while waving her arms, in the way of someone who is just so damned sick of hearing about SeeDs…
Sorceress Ultimecia: "...SeeD… SeeD… SeeD… SeeD, SeeD, SeeD!" Sorceress Ultimecia: "Kurse all SeeDs! Swarming like lokusts akross generations. You disgust me. The world was on the brink of that ever-elusive 'time kompression.' Insolent fools! Your vain krusade ends here, SeeDs."
TIME KOMPRESSION.
No, really. They gave her an inexplicable accent where all her hard 'c's become 'k's. Why!? This isn't trying to reflect anything in the JP script as far as I can tell, the EN translator just decided it would be funny if she talked like that for some reason! I don't even know what that's supposed to sound like!
Is this because she's a descendent of Odine using his technology???
There's no explanation. She's just Like That.
Sorceress Ultimecia: "The price for your meddling is death beyond death. I shall send you to a dimension beyond your imagining. There, I will reign, and you will be my slaves for eternity. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA."
[She stands up from her throne.] Sorceress Ultimecia: "Whom shall I exterminate first!? I'll start with you three!"
[Ultimecia rises from her seat, and her wings spread; she begins to rise into the air and opens her arms. Cue battle music.]
That Ultimecia model is, uh, definitely something. She is apparently wearing nothing but a robe fastened by a single button. I don't think it really qualifies as 'cleavage' when the neckline goes down below the navel.
Honestly FF8 has an interesting dichotomy where the script isn't particularly horny but the models definitely are? Like for an anime-styled story set in high school centered around a romance, there are no sex gags (which is extremely welcome, I do not think manga/anime have ever benefited from those, especially as the characters are themselves underage for the most part) or pervert characters or anything of that caliber, Irvine's horndog behavior is limited to flirting obnoxiously rather than like, peeping or other clichés of that caliber, and there is just the one weird subplot with the Girl Next Door magazine. Meanwhile, however, you look at the models for Shiva, Siren, Edea, Adel If You're Into That Kind Of Thing, and now Ultimecia, and it's like… Someone was definitely having a day in the animation department.
Unfortunately Ultimecia's sartorial choices can't distract us overlong from the fact that this opening monologue was kind of nothing. I mean, it's definitely better than the last encounter with Sephiroth at the end of the world, but… 'a dimension beyond imagining'? 'Serve for eternity'? 'Locusts swarming across time'? What does she mean?
Well, more on that later. Right now, we have a battle to win.
This is, I think, our first explicit acknowledgment that part of the reason for time compression is to gather the power of all sorceresses across history into herself. This will not be the last vital piece of information hidden behind Scan.
Almost surprisingly, we start the battle in fairly mundane setting - we're battling a human Ultimecia inside her throne room.
It won't stay that way for long.
Ultimecia is a powerful sorceress, attacking with high end spells like Holy and the -aga line.
Unfortunately, our party's magic resistance is incredibly high, so these spells fail to do more than a few hundred damage out of a 9,999 pool. As always, we open with Doomtrain - especially effective because Ultimecia, like all human opponents in the game, is weak to poison damage. With Vit-0 applied, Ultimecia's defenses are down and we follow standard procedure - Meteor/Darkside/Zell on backup.
It's a deadly onslaught, leaving Ultimecia almost no time to show off her most powerful moves like Maelstrom, which inflicts 65% HP damage and inflicts Curse, disabling Limit Breaks. But of course, this was merely the beginning.
Ultimecia rises into the air, trailing motes of light (ignore the purple effect; the game kind of has a problem where the status effect indicator for Vit-0 is a purple tinge, which badly damages every boss's color palette), and says:
Sorceress Ultimecia: "The most powerful GF… You shall… SUFFER! HAHAHA!"
She raises her hand, and a sphere of light shines in it. She hurls it at the ground, light engulfs the battlefield, and something emerges from the ground - we enter phase 2.
…
But before we do, I'd like to pull back a little, because I know that some FF8 vets reading this are boggling and gnashing their teeth at everything I just said, and I need to actually address it before they have a collective aneurysm (love you guys, I would too if I were in your position).
Remember when Ultimecia said "I'll start with you three"? It sounds like it's just a thin excuse for how we only fight with three characters despite all six being present in the scene, right? She just points to our Mandatory Limited Three-People Party and says "You first." Makes perfect sense.
Well, no. You see, in Japanese, Ultimecia says instead (translated more literally): "So, who will come first? Who will fight me? Hmpf, it matters not, the end will be the same! I will choose!"
I will chose.
Here's what happened when I reloaded my last save after finishing the game and started the fight a second time:
The fight instead begins with Rinoa, Irvine, and Selphie. Irvine and Selphie have no Junctions; their attacks deal a laughable 200+ damage per hit and, short of scoring a Limit Break, they can't hope to achieve anything - oh, and Maelstrom inflicts Curse, so they can't even do LBs. Instead of a one-sided slaughter, this fight is me eating shit while desperately trying to have Rinoa pull triple duty for a team of hapless incompetents.
When Edea says she'll choose her opponent, she means it. The game randomly starts the battle with three characters, and doesn't even necessarily include Squall.
This, I suspect, is another reason why @Egleris suggested the scheme I used earlier of junctioning GFs to characters, rather than to 'packages'; because if you roll into the final battle with all your GFs 'optimally' junctioned to three characters, you are incredibly likely to get your shit pushed in, whereas if you've gotten used to how each individual character plays with the junctions that you've assigned them, it's much easier to adapt to this shift in circumstances.
Now, what happens if those hapless jobbers are taken out? Well, if you raise them immediately, all's good. If not…
…a cherub appears over them, light shines, and a dissolving animation plays. That character permanently disappears from the battle, and the message "Absorbed into time…" plays. Then, one of the remaining characters steps in to fill the void.
The ludonarrative implications there are fascinating: Even if the game picks the worst possible team for you, all you have to do to get your A-listers back on the field is to just… Let the jobbers get crushed and absorbed into the timestream, implicitly permakilling them in the final battle so you can get that win. The difficulty hasn't really changed that much; but the tone of the battle definitely has! This is a gruelling process of watching Selphie, Irvine and Quistis try their best with absolutely no resources, and being erased from the timeline one by one until the main party is back online! Of course, the game doesn't have the degree of adaptability to adjust the ending based on who 'dies' there, so whether or not someone gets absorbed into time won't change their ultimate fate, but it sure doesn't feel that way watching it happen.
…
But the thing about randomization is that sometimes you just roll a double six. As it so happens, I rolled into this fight and Ultimecia picked Squall, Rinoa, and Zell, ie my A-Team bearing all my junctions. So I just went through this fight completely oblivious to the randomization mechanic, and did not become aware of it until after I finished the game and started looking up details of the game's mechanics, then reloaded an old save to be sure people weren't pulling my leg.
The game fired a shot at my head and I just happened to be bending down to pick up a quarter and never even knew it had fired or missed.
So. Phase 1 is over. Now the real fight begins. Ultimecia has announced her intent to summon 'the most powerful GF.' What could she possibly mean? The ground shatters, and in a flash of light, the throne room vanishes, the castle is gone - we float in an infinite sky on a chunk of rock and before us stands our opponent.
Griever.
The winged lion.
She summoned Squall's edgy OC fursona.
I just… This is so much.
This, right there, is when I thought, for one brief moment, that my theory was finally and truly validated: Ultimecia is Rinoa, has to be Rinoa, because how else would she have Griever as a GF? How would she even know its name? Where would it even come from?
And once again, Scan is where the answer lies.
"In Squall's mind, the strongest GF."
This may be slightly ambiguous wording. But if you once again look at the JP script, everything becomes clearer, for better or worse:
Sorceress Ultimecia: "I will summon the one you believe is most powerful. The strongest you believe he is, the stronger he becomes."
She literally Drew Griever from Squall's mind. He made up an OC so powerful, it is the ultimate GF. The implications are… What? Are all GFs just 'ideas'? When we Draw Siren from Elvolet, are we pulling some unformed memory of idea in its mind and turning it into a pseudo-sentient being? Is that why GFs can exist as thought-forms within people's brains rather than needing a physical place to exist? Is the reason you lose memories from GF use because of how much your brain's power you use to sustain the existence of the idea that is the GF?
Who fucking knows! The game sure doesn't. It just throws that idea out there and lets you just, figure it out. Can you really just create an endgame super-monster because Squall believed in it really hard?
Well. Let's put a pin in that.
So, Griever as a boss fight. How does it fare?
Well, for one thing, and continuing the theme started by Ultimecia Drawing him from Squall's mind, Griever can draw from our spell lists, which is hilarious. Always love it when an opponent gets access to the same toy box as the player and pulls a funny reversal. This doesn't matter much to the final outcome - stealing a single Berserk and casting it on Squall is momentarily annoying, but we have Esuna and Remedy to deal with that.
There is something a little more bothersome, though.
Griever is capable of destroying our spell stores. Just. Bye-bye Curaga, no more healing. Oh, you had that junctioned? Too bad, sucks to be you.
That's genuinely just… Mean? And annoying? This isn't like the dungeon, this is mid-fight, you can't exactly adapt to 'lmao you no longer have a Strength Junction.' There's only one thing to do: Kill Griever as fast as possible before it can ruin our strategy.
Luckily, our damage is still extremely high, and we still have Doomtrain. We unleash an onslaught of attacks and Meteors on the beast, and have things well in hand.
Then Ultimecia tells her new pet to show us its true power.
The music changes. So far, the boss music for this fight had been Premonition, the 'sorceress battle theme' so to speak, which shares a melody with Liberi Fatali and played during both Edea battles and against the 'sorceresses from beyond time.' A dramatic tune, but one we've heard quite a bit by now.
Now, instead, scare chords sound what sounds like a warning, and drums roll in the distance as the next attack begins. That music, The Legendary Beast, will play for the remainder of the Griever fight, and it has distinct military overtones that are a perfect fit for a monster drawn from Squall's imagination.
Ultimecia: "The GF's true power… Allow me… To show you…! Griever! Make them bleed!"
This is when Griever unleashes an attack called 'Shockwave Pulsar.'
Our characters are seized within glowing white force fields, then raised up into a sky that resembles a stormy nebula, at the heart of which is a spinning pulsar. They hover there helplessly, as the star explodes into black and white energy, casting shadows from each character.
It is incredibly stylish, and incredibly deadly. That attack takes out Squall, puts Zell into crisis, and only Rinoa escapes mostly unharmed, likely because of her high defensive stats.
That was Griever's best move.
It was also Quistis's ultimate Limit Break. Aside from Degenerator (which doesn't work on bosses), the strongest move Quistis has access to is Shockwave Pulsar. It is learned from Dark Matter, an extremely difficult to get item, and it plays out with the exact same animation. Why is Griever's strongest move Quistis's own ultimate LB? Who knows.
Now it's time for me to retaliate.
Zell's Meteor Barret (which is probably supposed to be Meteor Bullet, rather than an inexplicable FF7 reference) has an incredibly cool animation where he jumps into the air, gathers energy between his hands, then soars down into a diving punch that pierces through the opponent, then explodes. I love it.
Note how Griever's defeat is associated with falling white fever, which are associated with Rinoa.
A couple more hits in, and Griever starts to fall. Beams of light shoot out of its body, explosions wrack it, it seems like it's going to explode like all the other bosses before… Instead, though, it flies backwards as if knocked out of the air, and then turns into…
A ball.
That dark sphere (most likely meant to evoke a black hole; several aspects of the ending and Time Compression gesture towards cosmological concepts like entropy, contraction, and singularities without ever fully cohering into a real theme) hovers there in the air for a moment.
The music ends. Silence falls. Then the drums kick in, and Maybe I'm A Lion starts playing for the first time.
Ultimecia: "I shall junction myself… Unto Griever!"
Ultimecia Junctioned unto Griever.
The parallels between Ultimecia's toolkit and our own aren't stopping. After first using Griever as an offensive summon (disappearing from the battlefield while she does so, as we do) she is now using GF junction to achieve greater power. Her offensive power is considerable, with Tornado dealing 1000-2000 damage to the full party, but that's only the start. Ultimecia-Griever has advanced mechanics where she spawns Helix monsters that have high evasions, and the more Helices are on the screen, the more powerful her attacks are; with one, she unlocks Ultima, then with the second Meteor and starts using her ultimate attack, Great Accelerator - another cosmological reference. With this attack, Ultimecia tethers several planets and smashes them together into the party, dealing colossal damage.
Unfortunately we're not going to see any of it. Rinoa just cast Aura on Squall, and he's in a mood to show who has the real lion's heart here.
The first Limit Break/Meteor combo wrecks so much of Ultimecia's health that her form is torn apart, her tail falling into the void and leaving her only with the upper torso of Griever and her own form fused to it.
In this new form, Ultimecia falls back to Quake and Tornado, lesser spells that don't deal enough damage to matter. We basically just steamrolled over her special mechanics, and now…
The music ends. You know the drill. Beams of multicolored light shoot out from Griever's body as it begins to tremble. Ultimecia lets out a rattle of pain, and looking up, her form begins to dissolve into the sky.
She vanishes into shards of light, and falling stars rain above the party.
Could it be… Over?
No. Shit hasn't gotten cosmic enough. After Angel Kefka and Safer Sephiroth, there is no way Ultima-Griever, as imposing as she was, was the final opponent.
And then… Darkness. And in that darkness, light begins to stream from afar. Garbled, distorted voices, the lyrics of Liberi Fatali, echo in the void.
I noted, during the Adel fight, that at the end her death animation played in a very specific way, where her face seemed to dissolve, but not immediately the rest of her head, leaving a hollow, faceless skull - for only a brief moment, but a very striking animation still.
And here is Ultimecia now. With the same appearance. The same hollow skull, with a light pulsing within. Her face - her identity - erased. Less a person than an idea.
Ultimecia: "I am Ultimecia. Time shall compress… All existence denied."
Safer Sephiroth eat your heart out. This is one of the coolest FF final boss designs of all time, except for the ridiculous, ridiculous wings on top of her head.
Ultimecia opens the battle with Hell's Judgement, her own take on Heartless Angel, instantly reducing the party to 1 HP. She follows this up by destroying Zell's supply of Firaga, thankfully not one of his most important Junctions.
Thankfully, we still have Megalixirs left over from the Omega Weapon fight, and Zell brings everyone back to full health before she can wipe us out. I follow by going into my traditional tactic and summoning Doomtrain…
And a message appears: 'GF defense has been destroyed.'
We cannot summon GFs against Ultimecia. She will instantly destroy them before they can be summoned.
That… is definitely a nasty mechanic to surprise us with, especially on top of her ability to destroy junctioned spells.
What does Scan say?
Oh, yeah. Look at her gown: the entire bottom of the 'space' field is part of her robe.
I have looked at her full model stripped from the game's screens and it is just, enormous, 90% of it just being this gown - they modeled her so that Ultimecia is fully part of the night sky, a being coterminous with space itself, the stars part of her robe. As we speak, she is enacting time compression, merging all of reality into herself. Time, space, the stars themselves, everything.
…
But look at her bottom half. Taking a picture wasn't easy - it's only targetable for a brief portion of the fight and I didn't think to Scan it in time - but allow me to just pull up a reference image.
The top half of Ultimecia is a highly stylized nightmare of blades and flesh, faceless, winged like a twisted angel. The bottom half is just… A woman. Eyes closed, hair hanging down loose, her arms folded, cradling herself, naked and utterly vulnerable.
There is Ultimecia, the final sorceress that will compress time. And there is Ultimecia, the scared human yearning for some kind of safety or respite. Unconscious? Asleep? Maybe like… dormant memories?
We unleash our most powerful attacks at Ultimecia, and she retaliates with another Hell's Judgment, once again bringing the entire party to her knees. Then, she Draws - but not from us. The higher half of Ultimecia draws from her bottom half, and the spell she draws is Apocalypse. A power greater even than Ultima or Meteor.
She will not get to cast it. Ultimecia's repeated Hell's Judgments make it incredibly easy to tap Limit Breaks, and while I am not playing this fight as hard as I could, I am still running the setup that I devised for the Omega Weapon. Meteor Rinoa hits the Meteor button for tens of thousands of damage, splitting damage between Ultimecia and her lower half, and breaking the Draw-Cast Apocalypse sequence. Like her previous phase, we've blown past her mechanics.
Again, Ultimecia begins to speak.
Ultimecia: "Reflect on your… Childhood…" Ultimecia: "Your sensation… Your words… Your emotions…"
She casts Holy, though it does little damage. In return, Rinoa hits her with the Meteor again.
Ultimecia: "Time… It will not wait…"
No Limit Break this time, Squall hits her with Darkside for another 9,999 damage.
Ultimecia: "No matter… How hard you hold on. It escapes you…"
Rinoa casts Meteor again. There's no follow-up attack. Ultimecia merely starts to say:
Ultimecia: "And…"
She never finishes her sentence.
Zell deals the last blow.
Light surges from Ultimecia, power running out of control, and she tilts her head back, and the pulsing light at the center of her black hole of a face becomes a pillar of light, streaking out into the void. Everything contained within her - space, time, everything she sought to absorbed, released as streams of light wash over the party. So tremendous is the power unleashed by her destruction, it even briefly distorts the TV's own image.
Everything turns white.
Now, at last, the fight is truly over. But Ultimecia's story isn't - not quite. The game has a follow-up in mind, a little like it did with Sephiroth's final clash in Cloud's mind, but a very different kind.
In that white emptiness, the party members start appearing, walking, moving with distorted after images, seeming to struggle to see or hear one another; their speech bubbles have a distortion effect when they appear and disappear, suggestive of an echo.
Irvine: "Is it over?" Irvine: "Let's go! Let's go back to our time!" Zell: "Shut up! Just calm down and think where we have to go." Selphie: "Careful guys! Don't pick the wrong time!" Quistis: "Whatever you do, don't fall into a time warp!" Rinoa: "Time… Place… Who I wanna be with… I wanna go there! Where Squall and I promised."
I really like it when games do these visual tricks with dialogue boxes to suggest things that would normally require either narration or voice acting.
Rinoa approaches the screen, and touches her necklace, calling out Squall's name.
But Squall isn't in that white void anywhere to be found. Instead, he is in the dark.
Squall, mentally: "(...Where am I?)" Rinoa: "Squall! Where are you going!"
And then, in that darkness of tangled time, Squall sees a figure pass that isn't any of his friends.
Young Squall, rushing on to find Ellone. And shortly behind him, Edea, calling out to the running child.
There are many, many missing pieces to the picture that is Final Fantasy VIII. And this is one of the last ones the game will provide us before leaving the rest unresolved. To tie off that dangling plot thread - to close the loop.
There is Squall, at Edea's house, in the past.
This is, to my immense frustration, the singular moment on which hinges the entire plot of the game.
Edea: "Excuse me. Have you seen a little boy?" Squall: "You don't have to worry. The boy won't go anywhere." Edea: [She raises her hand to her mouth; it's not clear if that's a laugh.] "I think so, too. Poor thing…"
Suddenly, purple smoke erupts at the other end of the garden; Squall draws his gunblade.
Edea: "...The sorceress?" Squall: "Yes, Matron. We had defeated her… Matron, stand back."
[Ultimecia approaches with slow, staggering steps.] Edea: "It's ok. There's no more need to fight. That sorceress is just looking for someone to pass her powers on to." Edea: "In order to die at peace, a sorceress must be free of all her powers. I know… for I am one, too. I shall take over that sorceress's powers. I do not want one of the children to become one."
[Edea approaches Ultimecia.] Ultimecia: "I… can't… disappear yet."
Ultimecia rises into the air, and her powers erupt as rays of light entering Edea's body. Then she falls to her knees, and disappears in a cloud of purple smoke. Edea kneels, and says:
Edea: "Is this… the end?" Squall: "Most likely."
Exeunt Ultimecia.
What a villain! What a bundle of promises and unfulfilled potential.
In many ways Ultimecia is the opposite of Sephiroth. Where the white-haired bishie had a very clear backstory, psychological stakes, and new reveals regarding his true heritage dispersed across the game, but personally became a total cipher halfway through the game and just vanished from the narrative, Ultimecia is a constant presence, her schemes hounding our heroes' every steps, hiding her identity, possessing our friends, suggesting a complex backstory of persecution and revenge, only to ultimately look at the camera and say "I am a generic evil witch who wants to rule/destroy the universe and be worshipped by all in the hell I'll create."
Her final speech suggests, hints at a sense of real pathos - childhood memories lost, the inexorable flow of time, time that escapes no matter how hard you hold onto it, a desperate attempt by a grieving sorceress to do the impossible and make time stand still… But it doesn't land, because it doesn't connect to anything, we know nothing of what Ultimecia has loved and lost, she has always only ever acted like a petty, vengeful, contemptuous witch who cares for nothing and no one but her own power.
The flair, though! Never before had we seen a villain's final form embody the Big Crunch, personally become the singularity into which all of space and time will collapse, our heroes only managing to withstand that impossible pressure through their bonds to one another. What a character design! And those last moments, of Ultimecia having been defeated, staggering weakly, muttering that she cannot disappear yet, and passing on her power to one another, is the most human we've ever seen a post-final fight FF big bad act.
And yet it all leaves a sour taste in the mouth. She wrote too many cheques she couldn't cash. There is something there, and even outside of the 'Rinoa from the future' meme, trying to put it into a broader shape only makes me more frustrated.
But this is not the end yet.
Edea: "You called me Matron. Who… are you?" Squall: "A SeeD. A SeeD from Balamb Garden." Edea: "SeeD? Garden?" Squall: "Both Garden and SeeD were your ideas. Garden trains SeeDs. SeeDs are trained to defeat the sorceress." Edea: [She stands up and takes a step away.] "What are you saying? You're… that boy from the future?" Squall: "Matron." Edea: "Please return. You do not belong here."
[At this point, Young Squall appears.] Young Squall: "I can't find Sis." [Edea turns and crouches to hold his hand.] "...Am I… all alone? Who's he?" Edea: "Nobody. You don't need to know. The only Squall permitted here is you." [She turns to Squall.] "Do you know where to go back to? Do you know how? Will you be alright by yourself?" Squall: [He does the SeeD salute to her.] Squall, mentally: "(...I'll be all right, Matron.)"
[Young Squall and Edea begin to fade, the screen to turn dark.] Squall, mentally: "(Because I'm not alone.)"
And so the loop is closed.
This is the key to everything.
Why do the kind-hearted Cid and Edea, who have never shown an inclination to treat the orphans they take care off callously, decide to begin training them as superpowered child soldiers to combat the sorceress threat?
Because a boy from the future told them they would.
Why is Cid so eager to have a gunblade specialist among his SeeD graduates?
Because he knows the boy from the future who shows up after defeating the sorceress carries a gunblade.
Why does Ultimecia's power exist in the past?
Because she went back and gave it to Edea before dying.
Why are SeeD waging a war across generations, why does Ultimecia curse their names, why does she refer to the 'fantasies' of the evil sorceress and her own persecution?
Because Cid and Edea set into motion a self-perpetuating order of Sorceress Hunters who are waiting for the day Ultimecia shows up to try and bring her down.
…
I hate stable time loops as a narrative device.
I could go on for a while about the more profound and subjective reasons why (they have to do with agency and the feeling of having wasted my time watching several hours of a literally pointless story), but it's not really why they're bothering me here. Here, I think I can instead propose a more objective reason for my dislike:
We have spent the entire game wondering about Cid's personality, his history with Edea, and the creation of SeeD. Why does Cid, who looks like a bumbling kind-hearted father figure, create an organization of child soldiers? Why does he teach them to use GFs that risk erasing their memories? Why did he build an organization dedicated to hunting sorceresses if his wife was one? Why did Edea willingly participate in the creation of an order meant to oppose her own kind? How did we go from a little orphanage by the sea, dedicated to raising a mere handful of kids in a peaceful place, to an enormous organization at the bleeding edge of military technology and paramagic, with dozens of staff and hundreds of students?
Because the plot literally told them to. There is no prime motivation. There is no darkness in Cid's heart. The subtle indications that Edea and Cid always had a kind of attraction/obsession towards militaristic approaches to child-rearing, perhaps rooted in the trauma of the Sorceress's War, that was just pure illusion. The inherent moral ambiguity of creating SeeD, the strange dichotomy between Cid's fatherly demeanor and his ruthless child soldier school, the question of why anyone would dedicate their lives to fostering an order of Sorceress Hunters, it's all cleansed and made neat in this one move: he has to, because he already knows he will.
They're two kindly caretakers for a small local orphanage who are one day told by a boy from the future that they will create an organization dedicated to fighting sorceresses called SeeD, which will operate out of Gardens, have at least one gunblade-wielding operative of particular importance who is one of Edea's current wards, and who will fight a very important battle against a particular sorceress in the future.
So they set out to do what the future told them they needed to do.
This singular twist actively bleeds out every remaining once of shadow and moral ambiguity within Final Fantasy VIII's backstory. Nobody ever did anything wrong, except Adel and Ultimecia. Even the moral compromises which Cid did eventually take while creating SeeD are explained by his need to rely on NORG.
In the end your parents always loved you and never did anything wrong.
Except teach you to junction GFs without warning you about the consequences, but that never went anywhere since the first huge twist and was never brought up again, and I think the game forgot about it entirely.
But that's not all! We can go one step further! A 'good' stable time loop doesn't only create the answer to its antagonist; it also creates that antagonist in the first place. Edea knew she was meant to create an order of sorceress hunters, and so she did, and that role was eventually revealed to them. That order defeated Ultimecia, today. But they did not stop existing. They were not dissolved, because they also knew that the Ultimecia which they had defeated now would also arise in the future. And so Edea created an organization which, across generation, carried on the idea that they are meant to defeat Ultimecia, the final sorceress that will one day arise.
And then one day, Ultimecia is born - or whatever her name was - into a world that names her, a sorceress, as an enemy of SeeD, and she fights against their persecution, she grows up and loses things, she becomes obsessed with time, grief, power, with people's hatred, with their 'fantasies' of what a sorceress is, she decides she will give them exactly what she wants.
She becomes, as @EarthScorpion suggests, obsessed with embodying the legend of the sorceress. She raises a gothic castle in the sky that she has so little use for it's actively falling apart, because that is the appropriate abode for a sorceress. She shuns everyone, dwelling in empty rooms, her only companions a bunch of animated furniture and jewelry like Disney's Beauty and the Beast, because a sorceress is apart from humanity. She wages war against SeeD, because SeeD was made to combat sorceresses. She proclaims herself the enemy of all.
One could even perhaps imagine that she was not born Ultimecia, or Artemisia, that she was born under a different name, a name that has been long forgotten.
The final sorceress is named Ultimecia, and so she becomes Ultimecia.
…
We don't know any of that, though. The backstory for Ultimecia doesn't exist, at least not in this game. And I have a strong suspicion as to why, which we'll get to at the very end of this post. All this above is merely rank speculation based entirely on the general plot beats of a stable time loop. Squall's visit to the past creates both the means by which Ultimecia will be defeated, and the reasons she will arise. That's how these stories work.
I don't have to like it, though.
Squall is in the dark again. At first, his "Become I'm not alone" sounds confident. Then, it is repeated, sounding doubtful. Then, it becomes rationalization: "If I call out, they will answer." But when he shouts, "Where is everyone?" there is no answer. He calls out all their names, one by one, and there is no reply.
Squall: "(...Am I… alone?)" Squall: "(Rinoa? I want to hear your voice.)" Squall: "(Which way… do I go? I can't make it back… Alone.)"
The voice and image distortion effects are still playing.
The camera pans up, looking at Squall from a bird's eye view, and then zooms out, leaving him alone, in the dark.
This is the last in-engine shot in the game.
What follows - the game's final cinematic, its resolution and epilogue, all pre-rendered FMV - lasts a staggering 16 minutes. Even by today's standards, an 18-minute pre-rendered cutscene might raise an eyebrow! By the standard of the time, this is just - I'm pretty sure this was a non-significant amount of dev time and occupied a solid chunk of the final disc? Maybe more than the gameplay did?
It's not just a long cutscene, though. It is also artistically ambitious, bold, and trippy as hell. It's a staggering flex from the animation department, and all of it is incredibly confusing because of two missing lines from the English release.
I really, really invite you all to watch it, because while I will be bringing it down, watching it is something entirely different. Trying to find a version of the ending FMV isolated gives me a lot of results I'm dubious of - stuff like 'upscaled' and '4k,' so I'm just going to link a timestamped version of the last video from the No Commentary Walkthrough I've been referring to whenever I need to browse some footage for something my screenshots couldn't capture.
We begin with Squall in a desolate place, his face distorting under the effects of time compression.
The distortion ends, and he finds himself in the same desert with cracked soil that we briefly glimpsed in the OP. Alone and lost, he starts walking, without a clear direction. Night falls; he's still walking. Visibly exhausted, he sways on his feet… And then he reaches the end of the desert.
A dark cliff, overlooking nothing.
He turns around, and there is no desert anymore. He is merely standing on a tiny chunk of rock, suspended in the void, much the same as the one they fought Griever on. Exhausted, he falls.
Elsewhere, Rinoa is running, racing across a field of flowers, only it's night-time, not the beautiful sunny skies under which we saw that field before; she's looking frantically for Squall, and clutches the lion ring.
Squall, sitting on his tiny rock at the end of the universe, looks up, and sees white feathers drifting. He sees a glimpse of white wings, and Rinoa's back.
Rinoa is standing in the field of flowers, turning away from him. He's standing now; he calls out her name - though the cutscene is entirely unvoiced and has no subtitles (an artistic difference from VII, which used subtitles during its final FMV), his model is lip-synced so that you can clearly read what he's shouting - and Rinoa turns around to look at him.
But her face is distorted, as if through water.
The screen flashes to the graduation ball, and to Squall's first memory of Rinoa, watching her standing in the middle of the room, a moment before she turned around and saw him, smiling at him.
Only her face is a blur.
The same shot, that first memory of ever seeing Rinoa, that mischievous smile and pointed finger, plays over and over, with Waltz for the Moon playing, skipping, restarting, the picture each time a little more distorted, each time accompanied by record scratches or mechanical sounds of glitching, until the music itself begins to distort, until other memories start to overlap with it and be just as blurred and distorted, until Rinoa's face begins to darken and hollow out like she's being burned out of a picture, to melt like water.
Until the memory proceeds to the next shot, the next beat, the one where Rinoa actually approaches him, and she's not there. He's staring at the empty place where she should be. The memory skips, repeats, as if trying to find Rinoa, she appears in blurs, in frame inserts, over dancers disappear, she is walking towards him but her face is but shadows without features.
Then all of a sudden it's everything else and everyone else: The Dollet raid, Irvine's introduction, meeting Selphie, and Rinoa again, standing at the deck of the flying Garden overlooking the birds and plains and turning to Squall, but she's blurred again. It all goes faster now, Squall falling from the parade carriage, an explosion I think is supposed to be the missile base (though he wasn't there), Deling City, faster, until this inexplicable shot.
We see this shot start through the closed triumphal arch in Deling City and then move forward, so it could be literally moving through to the presidential palace, but it looks more like Garden's architecture?
And the reason I'm drawing attention to it is because behind Distorted Rinoa I would like to draw your attention to the… statue? Of Rinoa? At the back of the room? I mean it definitely looks like Rinoa, and I don't remember any statuary of women in vaguely, possibly crucified-like positions featured in the game before? What the fuck is that?
But it's already gone. Images of Rinoa play, overlapping, distorting, dissolving, discordant sounds playing as she and Squall circle and circle around each other and…
There's a shot that goes by too fast and which I wasn't able to capture, so I'll have to pull it up off the wiki instead.
This is our only pre-rendered FMV shot of Ultimecia in the entire game. It is a literal blink-and-you'll-miss-it frame insert, and appears three times (with slight changes in the exact close-up framing), inserted between shots of Rinoa turning and disappearing.
Huh.
Rinoa disappears, and in her stead, a distorted window into other moments, a vision of Edea, the Rinoa who emerged from the sealing device, and then, shocking, these two shots (once again, one of them went by far too fast for me to catch it so I had to pull up a picture):
Squall, his identity erased, his face replaced by a black hole like Ultimecia's own. Rinoa, her helmet broken, her cold body drifting through space, something which never happened.
Squall weeps, eyes wide, and fades into a great light. A white feather falls on the ground in the middle of a great void. The music dies.
…
For my money, this scene is the creepiest a Final Fantasy game has ever been. The walk after Jenova's escape beats it for spook factor, but this had me genuinely unsettled; I felt a chill at a few points watching Rinoa's image distort and fade as the music started glitching out. I felt like I was watching both reality and Squall's mind break down at the same time. Which, hey, is what is happening, no?
Part of why I felt that scene so unsettling was that I wasn't even sure what was happening. My grip on the reality of the scene was as shaky as Squall's own. And I don't count that as a demerit; confusion can be a powerful scare tool. And it wasn't hard to come up with answers - time compression erasing those moments in time, accelerating the memory erasure from the GFs, or blending together all moments of Squall's history until he couldn't tell them apart or make sense of them, or remember what truly happened…
…
The thing is that this confusion is not intentional. It is entirely an artifact of the English localization losing two lines. To quote Ultimecia, highlighting the lines that got dropped, rather than merely rephrased, in EN:
Your very existences shall be absorbed by the algorithm of time compression!! You will feel agony as your thoughts are ripped apart and all your memories fade away to nothing.
There won't be a thing you can do, think or even feel!
That's the world I'm going to send you to!
There will be absolutely nothing you can…
…No, you'll be able to worship me, the sole existence for all eternity!!
This is not supposed to be ambiguous. Time Compression explicitly tears apart the mind and destroys memories, exactly as is happening to Squall right now.
So. That's great.
…
Cut to Rinoa, walking across the barren plain.
Eyes On Me starts playing again, with full vocals.
She finds Squall, unconscious on the ground, and kneels, lifts his head, brushes his hair, and whispers his name.
Just like Squall once found Rinoa's unconscious body and broke down, she breaks down over him. Is he dead? It's not clear. But the music rises, sweeping, and with it, light - the sun breaks through the sky suddenly, like a beam of pure light from the Heavens, piercing the clouds, and there is no longer the cracked barren ground of a plain but the field of flowers where Squall promised he would wait for her.
The clouds roll away, pushed like a blanket, replaced by blue sky and the faint, wispy clouds of a bright day of spring. Rinoa looks up, awestruck, and then down at Squall's face, and her expression changes to - surprise? Marvel? Relief? It's not clear. But the camera pans up before we can see more, it sweeps across the sky, where white feathers blow along with the flowers, and…
Okay it's incredibly funny to pick this one.
SEIFER.
SEIFER IS FISHING.
OF ALL THE CHARACTERS, THIS IS THE ONE WE GET TO SEE FIRST!
How is he - fuck. What happened to him? How long was the timeskip to whenever the hell this is happening? What even happened after the Lunatic Pandora? The last time we saw Seifer he was literally throwing Rinoa to the ground in front of Adel, and this is how we meet him again?
I guess he made it out of time compression and landed… Somewhere? And realized he cared about Fujin and Raijin at some point? Fuck, this is such a shortcut.
It's a cute scene, though. Seifer is seething and malding about his inability to catch fish, then he turns around to see Raijin celebrating and Fujin chuckling, as Raijin just caught a huge fish, and-
…wait a fucking minute, what happened to Raijin's melanin. When did he turn pale? Well never mind, we don't have time to interrogate that! Seifer is incensed by Raijin's success, tosses his fishing rod to the ground…
Fujin, who has so far only allowed herself a sensible chuckle and is otherwise perfectly stoic, stares unflappably in Seifer's direction while Raijin prances around.
Then she kicks him into the water.
I love her and need an entire side novel about her adventures with Raijin and Seifer.
Seifer, seeing this, actually bursts out laughing. And as his laughter dies down, his expression settles into something almost… Affectionate? Sensitive? It's the first time he doesn't have 'smug' painted across his face. It's a touching moment, and one sold entirely on the basis of Fujin and Raijin's own character, because God knows Seifer himself hasn't earned it.
Then a shadow passes, and Seifer looks up in wonder… Balamb Garden is flying above.
Seifer's expression at its passing could be easily read as… Fondness, longing, regret. Any or all of these.
We move on to someplace else, to rolling green hills, and a man in a simple white shirt looking at them.
Laguna looks down at his hand, and the ring he is wearing. His face fades from the Laguna of today, with faint wrinkles around his mouth, to a younger face, one night, in the same place.
Raine is there. She approaches him, and he quickly hides something behind his back. She says something, he acts flustered, gets embarrassed, turns around and tries to leave. She tries to catch up, he finds his courage and turns around, and takes her hand, and before she's quite realized what he's done, he has passed a ring around her finger, and reveals his own.
She pulls him into an embrace, and they hold onto one another as the camera pans up towards the moon - then fades to day, looking at the same moon, and pans down, back to present day Laguna, who approaches a tombstone set into the hill.
Raine Loire. They, too, were married, if only briefly.
Laguna looks fondly at the grave, and then away, to the hill, where a few familiar figures are standing.
Kiros and Ward, in the background.
Ellone waves to him, he smiles and waves back, and they took look up as the Garden passes over them, carrying with it a wind of rose petals.
Cut to credits.
…
"Wait," I hear you say, "don't tell me they're pulling that shit again, what the hell, what about our entire party that got stranded in the Time Hole, do not tell me Seifer and Laguna are the only ones we get an epilogue for?"
And thankfully, dear reader, I am happy to say that is not the case.
As a matter of fact, the framing device for the next bit of resolution may be my favorite yet. It plays during the credits, side by side with them, but it is an entire narrative FMV, which is why I included it when measuring this ending cinematic at a staggering 16 minutes.
It's Selfie's Camcorder Adventure.
Girl, I am begging you, plug this in, the battery icon is giving me anxiety.
Balamb Garden is having a party. Presumably, they are celebrating saving the world, which I imagine is going to keep business flush for the next few years, assuming SeeDs are still working as mercenaries, which… Hm. Well. We know they still exist generations in the future, so… Let's not think about this for now.
The scene is just, great? Harmed only by its small resolution (I really wish I had a less blurry version). Everyone (except Squall) is here, everyone's having fun. Irvine is dancing in front of Quistis (badly), probably trying to impress her, Quistis smiles at the camera, Irvine photobombs her then tries to pull her into a ance and gets knocked away for his trouble. Quistis moves over to talk to Headmaster Cid, who calls for Edea to join them - she is once again wearing the black dress she used to wear at the orphanage and is letting her hair down, having abandoned Edea's aesthetic (to everyone's chagrin).
It's an incredibly charming scene, full of little touches of life, that I'm pretty sure must have been completely mocapped. Irvine, realizing that he's still being filmed while being all flustered around his old Matron, pounces on Selphie and grabs the camera; she makes off with his hat, and Irvine is now the one filming as she does poses with Quistis.
Irvine unwisely loses focus of Selphie and Quistis to instead film a group of three female students in uniform, who all giggle and wave at him, producing one of Selphie's rare moments of visible upset.
You done fucked up.
Then Selphie points to Zell, who has, finally, after seventy hours of game, obtained his reward.
He's stuffing himself full of hot dogs.
Well, they're pan - the quirk of the localization which changed them to hot dog can't go as far as somehow changing Square's own bleeding edge CGI cutscene - but the resolution is honestly low enough that you can't really tell. He's shoving tubular-shaped bread things into his mouth, it looks enough like a hot dog that I doubt anyone would be able to tell the difference.
And he's not alone! Look! The Pigtail Girl is there!
Unfortunately, Zell is victim of his own hubris. Trying to simultaneously talk to the library girl and eat as many hot dogs as possible, he nearly chokes on his favorite food, and Selphie, Quistis and Library Girl have to rescue him by tapping on his back until he spits it out.
Realizing that everyone is looking at him funny, Zell jumps and scares off Selphie and Quistis, then turns around and realizes that Irvine is filming his misfortune, and tosses a pan at him.
The camera winks out briefly, and Irvine is filming Selphie again; she looks breathless, but then she sees something, and excitedly points to the balcony door.
The camera follows her gaze…
There is Rinoa, looking at something off to the side, behind the door. She lifts a finger, pointing it at someone… And the battery dies before we can see more.
This is where the credits end. But, just like VII, there is one last, brief cutscene before the game truly ends, and this time, it's not one that takes place 500 years in the future. This time, it's happening right as the last cutscene ends.
The camera flies in close to the Garden, flying over the sea, and up towards Rinoa, leaning against the balcony. She looks out to the water, and then up at the sky, where she sees a shooting star. She smiles, turns to the camera, lifts a finger, and…
Shot and reverse shot.
She and Squall lean in, and give us the first on-screen kiss of the 3D FF era.
The End.
…
This is obviously a much more conventional ending than VII's. And I am going to come out as a basic bitch here, but I like it much better. The intense experimental acid trip of the early opening, followed by the powerful emotional beat of Rinoa finding Squall inside the Time Compression and the world reasserting itself, the bits of joy in the world after them, the epilogue that gives you one last moment with all these characters… This is good. This has left me satisfied. I am content.
Final Fantasy VIII fails in the generals and succeeds in the particular. At the end of it all, it knows that the mechanics of time compression, the details of its backstory, the true motivation of its villain, the scope of the world, are all the points on which it trips. The characters, the emotional feel of their relationships, whether Squall will forget Rinoa or she will find him in time, everyone hanging out with each other in Balamb Garden, Squall and Rinoa sharing a kiss, that's where it can't fail, where its secret lies. So it decides to end on a high note, and it better, because if it tries to pull a VII twist ending it would only cast in sharp relief all the little ways in which it fails.
But no. Here you are, spending one last evening in Balamb Garden with your friends, and it becomes easy to forgive. Why the game felt the need to do that weird movie cliché where a character ambiguously died or maybe not but then you reveal they're fine with the last shot, I don't know, but it's a well-trod idea.
The last shot is of Balamb Garden flying into the moon - not literally, but the camera pulls away as the moon fills up all the screen, and… Why?
Sure, Final Fantasy VIII's moon is magnificent, the devs are rightly proud of it. But it feels like it's framed in a way that centers the moon as especially important, and it… Isn't? Adel wasn't on the moon, she was on a space station at the Lagrange Point. The Lunar Cry was very impressive, but it ended up not really mattering. Hyne's body buried on the moon was just a legend, and the world of monsters a point of background detail. We never set foot there. It dominates every shot of the sky across the entire game, and it's just… Not that big a deal.
…
Final Fantasy VIII is about time. Which is why it's ironic that it truly feels like time is what it needed more of. There is a very specific and narrow path to its ending which the game mostly nails - Lunatic Pandora Raid to Ellone rescue to Adel battle to Time Compression initiated to walking through the future to confronting Ultimecia to the ending to the epilogue - and if you just stay entirely focused on that path you might even not notice how everything else falls apart at the end.
Like Seifer. It's not even that Seifer doesn't have a redemption arc, I understand there not being enough time for that. It's that he doesn't even have an 'acknowledge I was beaten' arc. A 'consider I might have been wrong' arc. We last saw him as War Crime Committer Extraordinaire, chief of the Galbadian forces, who took part in the missile launch that destroyed Trabia Garden, the Galbadia Garden/Balamb Garden assault, and the unleashing of the Lunar Cry. He was running on fifty hours no sleep and his bloodstream was probably mostly caffeine, and his reactions to his only friends telling him 'please reconsider' was 'lol. lmao.' Then we beat his ass, and he off-screen captured Rinoa and tossed her at Adel to literally consume, fled off screen, and then next time we see him he is… Chilling with his buds, still having a bad temper but actually being capable of mellowing down a little and looking longingly at Garden.
Something is missing here, and it's, like, again, not even a redemption arc, so much as literally Seifer saying anything to the extent of 'huh maybe I was wrong' or getting his ass beat and Squall saying 'we'll send you to Fujin and Raijin to patch up and maybe they can knock some sense into you,' because again, the last time they tried to do that he told them off, he just skipped the part of his arc where he has any second thoughts whatsoever. This guy is probably wanted in this setting's version of the Hague!!!
Which goes hand in hand with… Seifer has his own posse that seems to mirror (I swear I was saving that comment for later before @StormyEyed made it but I got preempted) Laguna, Kiros and Ward more than they do Squall and any one of the five people in his party; is that supposed to be anything? Should he have a backstory more developed than 'war orphan'? Who knows! His face is on the cover with Squall and Rinoa and he's Rinoa's ex-something, it seems incredibly obvious that there was a love triangle planned at some point, but then they just… Dropped that?
I'm not going to belabour the point for every other detail, Seifer was just a convenient, 'high-value' example. NORG vanishes despite a plethora of hints that he was supposed to evolve and feature again, we don't even see a suspicious Moomba in a final cutscene or anything, this is literally a plot thread that was forgotten, or rather, that didn't have time to get finished. Squall and Laguna's relationship is left at 'we'll need to talk later'; if you're spectacularly pedantic about only acknowledging text and not subtext you could even say Laguna being Squall's father is not made explicitly canon, though that would frankly be idiotic, it's extremely obvious. Honestly that one is fine, even, sometimes leaving things unspoken is fine, my least favorite part of Dishonored 2 is Emily calling Corvo her dad. Adel has so little screentime for her backstory it's a legitimate question whether she should have been the true villain of the piece. The Lunar Cry just kind of happened and then we forgot about it. That subplot about Squall's ring was dropped at some point. Should Zell not have had one conversation with his mom about being adopted? No? Wait, actually, let's follow up on that-
The GF memory erasure was used for one of the biggest twists in the game and then never mentioned again except for a throwaway gag by Squall. Everyone made the fateful decision to keep memory-eating spirit beasts fused to their souls and the game hasn't tried to draw a single drop of pathos from it in forty hours. It's completely unmentioned leading into the final battle, it's never resolved, we just don't talk about what GFs even are ever again except when Ultimecia summons one from Squall's edgy OC fursona.
Let me put this differently:
The climax of the entire story is Squall losing all his memories of Rinoa and feeling his mind come apart and dissolve, only to rescued at the last moment by Rinoa's love, and the GFs aren't part of it. It's completely unrelated. It's a separate, different memory erasure linked to Time Compression.
I understand that the GFs act as a metaphor for forgetting the innocence of your childhood and your old friends and the peace you had before 'war' (adolescende/adulthood and all the trials that come with it) but they made that metaphor very literal and never addressed it again.
Look. I said I wouldn't go over every little point of detail. It's just, it feels like the ending is too short even though the game as a whole is incredibly long? My playtime on it is at least ten hours more than VII, perhaps more, and I never dealt with chocobo racing even once. And yet, the ending feels incomplete - plot beats left unresolved, time compression going by too fast, a sudden segue into Ultimecia's Castle that really feels like it was designed before figuring out why the plot would take us there and why it would look like a run-down castle…
We never went to the moon. I am absolutely convinced that, at some point in the drafts, the moon was meant to be the final or perhaps penultimate dungeon, the signaling of its importance and the fact that it's inhabitable, all the monsters are there, and legends say God is trapped there are just too much but - not enough time. Not enough man-hours, or disc space.
…
Okay.
Let me address the elephant in the room, because I have been joking about this entirely too much to not be taking it seriously on some level.
Ultinoa Trutherism
It has become my understanding, since finishing the game, that "Ultimecia is Rinoa" is a popular fan theory, popular enough to get a nod with Dissidia naming Ultimecia's weapons after Rinoa's, but one that is also explicitly disproven by canon and the developers' words. I am genuinely grateful to everyone who was able to keep a lid on it and leave me to think this was just my brilliant idea I'd come up with it myself rather than wink wink nudge nudge hint that it was a popular (disproven) fan theory.
Sometimes when you watch a blind Let's Play you get to look at someone reinventing The Moon Landing Didn't Happen from first principles.
With all that said.
Let's go back to Griever. The ultimate GF, drawn from Squall's mind. Squall merely thought very hard about his cool OC, and that was enough to produce a GF powerful enough to threaten the universe. What?
It's an eject button is what it is. I do not buy this for a moment.
Here's the thing: We have this whole thing about Rinoa wanting to make a copy of Squall's ring. Squall telling her about his lion imaginary monster, the first person in whom he confided in. The sight of that winged lion was what sparked her will to live while drifting across space. GFs may take away your memories, but what remains after them? The GF itself. Even after you've forgotten everything else, that power stays with you still.
If Ultimecia was Rinoa from the future, Griever would make so much more sense for being the last thing she still has of Squall even after forgetting him entirely. A GF constructed or drawn from memories long gone by a being that has lived for generations and forgotten her past. She is on the cusp of defeat, so she reaches for 'the most powerful GF,' the idea that the boy she loved once shared with her, the last thing she remembers of him, the sight that saved her from death in space, and she conjures that being into existence.
I'm not saying that's the case in the game as released. It's being made clear by Scan and the JP script that Griever is in fact drawn from Squall's memories on the spot as a bit of improvisation by Ultimecia, who is definitely not Rinoa but just some sorceress born in the future.
What I am saying is that I started 'Ultimecia is Rinoa' as a joke, then I seriously thought about it and started thinking it was a compelling possibility, and now at this point, I am fully Ultinoa-pilled: I 100% believe that Ultimecia was intended to be Rinoa at some point in the writing process, only they ditched that idea partway through (perhaps they didn't have time to properly sell it, perhaps it was deemed too depressing), they course-corrected to Ultimecia being Some Generic Evil Witch, but the building blocks of the initial reveal are left scattered across the game, making it easy to read the game as 'Rinoa is Ultimecia' being some advanced secret truth you can read between the lines to discern. It's not; but I absolutely believe it's a relic of an earlier draft of the plot.
And the thing is, I think I have evidence for this! The game's lavish FMVs are the most resource-consuming part of the process and I am almost certain at least some of them would be done before the script is finalized, and resource-intensive enough to not be scraped.
Ultimecia's only pre-rendered model being seen in a rapid, Fight Club-style overlap with Rinoa's face as she disappears? Squall's black hole face like Ultimecia's final form? The vision of a dead Rinoa drifting through space (which never happened and can't really be a 'memory' of Squall's)? Griever's existence? Ultimecia's final plea to hold onto time and fading memories? The helpless, sleeping, naked woman from which the faceless time-consuming Ultimecia Draws her ultimate power?
Here's my theory: At one point, the game's story wasn't meant to be a stable time loop. It was supposed to involve the ability to change the future, or perhaps parallel timelines or some such. One Rinoa, dead in space. Another Rinoa, becoming the villain. Another Rinoa, our own, saved from either of these paths. But then, either because of time constraints, changes in scripts, or simply second-guessing their initial plans, the writers went back. Maybe they thought Ultimecia being Rinoa was too dark. Maybe it simply became incompatible with their decision to enforce a stable time loop: If Ultimecia is Rinoa from the future, then that means even knowing that, every single one of Rinoa's friends somehow failed to keep her from becoming the ultimate evil, because that is the mandate of a stable time loop: The future cannot be changed. Knowledge of it only leads to you accidentally reinforcing it.
And that'd be a pretty dick move to pull on them!
So no, I don't think Ultimecia is Rinoa. But I do think she was meant to be, at one point in time, and the artifacts of that early change remain scattered throughout the narrative, and contribute to how messy it all is.
But they're not the primary reason it's so messy.
The primary reason, I believe…
Is Time.
…
I will, as usual, be doing a wrap-up post summing up my overall thoughts on the game as a whole. I don't know how long it'll take, or how much steam I'll have left for it, but I have many things to say about the game that I hope to put together once my brain isn't completely scrambled by Total Final Fantasy VIII Immersion. Please look forward to it, but in the meantime:
The game is done. We've reached the end, and everything is up for discussion, and I welcome your thoughts.
Definitely one of the most flawed games in the franchise, even if it's got its strengths. It tries very, very hard to match its ambitions...but in both gameplay and story it kind of overreaches and falls flat in several ways.
On the whole, it's one of the weaker entries in the franchise up until this point. I'd put it above 1, 2 and maybe 3, but that's it.
The clouds roll away, pushed like a blanket, replaced by blue sky and the faint, wispy clouds of a bright day of spring. Rinoa looks up, awestruck, and then down at Cloud's face, and her expression changes to - surprise?
It was also Quistis's ultimate Limit Break. Aside from Degenerator (which doesn't work on bosses), the strongest move Quistis has access to is Shockwave Pulsar. It is learned from Dark Matter, an extremely difficult to get item, and it plays out with the exact same animation. Why is Griever's strongest move Quistis's own ultimate LB? Who knows.
If we're running with the theory that, at one point in development Griever was meant to be Rinomecia/Ultinoa's memories of Squall turned into a weapon why did they give it Quistis' ultimate move
If we're running with the theory that, at one point in development Griever was meant to be Rinomecia/Ultinoa's memories of Squall turned into a weapon why did they give it Quistis' ultimate move
So, I have been waiting for this update to say this:
Final Fantasy 8 is not a stable time loop, it is freaking rats nest of stable time loops layered on top of each other.
More than I realized, because I had not seen that the plan was to throw Ultimecia back to Adel's childhood.
How did that impact the past? Was that possibly the source for how Adel learned to "junction" others for their power?
Then we have the Laguna flashbacks. Those technically are not the main time loop, they are a separate loops Ellone creates to try and change her father's past.
After that is Squall's self made man loop. Where he somewhat ineptly creates the merc group he now leads, and maybe the future problem that he faces.
Then inside of that we have the other halves of the Ellone loops, and the space time trip. The way Squall saves the girl he has discovered he loves.
I cannot really lay the blame for Ultimecia on him though. I think that it could actually be a stable loop established after a non-loop start. There is no actual loop to the time Squall saves Rinoa. There is nothing that happens to trigger itself to happen, time can seemingly be changed.
(what follows might as well be fanfic, but I'm inspired at the moment)
So, why can't a sorceress grow in power and decide to create Time Compression in the distant future. Perhaps one where Adel did not have the ability to junction other sorceresses, and was merely the despot of the time.
Where the son of the man who overthrew Adel grew up and junctioned with GFs from the research of Esthar's madman after leaving the orphanage, gaining the power to allow his adoptive sister to aid their father in the past. The first time loop, a change from a prior timeline where Laguna merely died and Ellone was nothing more than a pet project of that researcher that found a way to save herself.
Then the Time Compression is possible. The sorceress from the future still gets the machine, but now instead of being restricted to a prepared Adel that knows of time travel she faces an alternate timeline where she can grab the matron of the orphanage, who is already a sorceress herself.
The first loop isn't too different, but it is a desperate battle that is only barely managed. Squall
(stopped there)
Okay, I'm going to need a chart for this, and unfortunately I'm a chart making type of writer so there is a real danger of me making one. So I need to stop myself now.
It does not help that the Griever junction (which I did know about) helps with my "transformative junction" ideal.
... That said @Omicron , I hate how you made the "Ultimecia is Rinoa" theory make sense, but you have to understand how we all reacted when you arrived at it from first principles.
To quote myself from the spoiler thread at the time:
*Reads Omicron's latest post*
*screams loudly*
How/when do we break it to him that "Ultimecia is Rinoa from the future." is a genuine thing that existed long before this LP?
