/vr/ - Retro Games

The thing with FFVIII story is the plot going retarded after the first disk. The characters are not that bad.

>>6039168
...whatever.

>>6039227
/thread

>>6039168
He is also the best looking guy here.

>>6039236

>>6039168
People keep memeing that he's an emo faggot, but when you actually look at what happens in the game he's one of the most alpha FF protags ever. Downtalking FF8 as well as Squall is one of the worst memes in gaming.

Squall's alright, but doesn't come close to the real deal.

The only thing I get hung up on Squall with is that for the first disc — which honestly is like, the best-paced first "act" of any Final Fantasy or possibly even any JRPG — they essentially want you to actually roleplay. Like Squall does have certain tendencies, but they also let you make choices that actually reflect your own personality or, if you will, the personality you want Squall to have. You can either be a straight-laced, professional SeeD, a more free-wheeling cadet on the Zell side of things, or somewhere in-between. Like you can choose to be social or just generally loose, or play things close to the chest.

After Disc 1, this is kind of dropped. Squall gets railroaded into one personality, and the meager choices you do get don't really reflect anything at all anymore because Cid just cuts you loose. You still get judged by the game at times, but it's basically just combat-related aside from the missile base (which reflects more on Selphie) or the occasional hopelessly abstract parameter like "you get slightly higher score if you use a dog to sniff out some guy." So clearly the Garden still cares on some level, but this is neither explored in the post-Disc 1 game nor is it consistent. How about docking Squall a rank when his mission suffers because he's wasting time pining over Rinoa? Why don't I get the option to be stoic and not a typical embarrassing teenager? For that matter why does Disc 1 feel like an entirely different game that had actual love and care put into the player experience? But now I'm getting into more of a general complaint.

>>6039174
>>6039276

I don't really get the whole thing about everythng going weird after the first disc. Sure, it does, and I've heard of all of the stuff like the theory that Squall dies and everything after Disc 1 is a dream, to explain the strange events in the story after he gets stabbed with Edea's ice shard. Here's my problem:

Everything is strange and unexplained in general anyway. I don't notice such a stark contrast because the entire thing is so nonsensical. The first disc clearly is more focused in a "mission" sense, because you're after the president and then Edea, and the whole thing comes down to the "squad" assembling and finding the best way to carry out smaller missions toward the larger goal, but it's also so silly and wacky that I can't say I take the events after the first disc less seriously with a straight face.

>>6039168
whatever

>>6039289
Same problem with the TV show Lost: the promise of it. Final Fantasy VIII presents to you a game world that's just believable enough to get you interested, and implicitly sets you up to unravel its mysteries or, at the very least, gives you just enough breadcrumbs to help you form your own sensible conclusions about them with a reasonable level of fantasy involved. Like obviously this is a game with fucking magic in it, so you expect wacky shit. But you can still have a fantasy game be "realistic" as long as it coheres with its own closed system of logic.

For example, the game sets the rule that calling on the power of Guardian Forces is detrimental to your mind. It then demonstrates to you that different characters have, in fact, experienced memory loss. So whether or not you think this is a poor premise, the game is at this point playing by its own rules (if in a somewhat bloodless, "et cetera" fashion). And from that point you'd expect the characters to react in some way to this like, "Maybe this isn't a power we should abuse." Like maybe one character refuses to actually summon the GFs because they're afraid of losing their mind, or just anything that demonstrates a level of consequence to this revelation. They could all say, "Well, it sucks that we're destroying ourselves, but this is a necessary sacrifice if we're going to save the world." But instead, the game handles it by saying, "Let's just try super-duper hard not to forget each other anymore, gang!" So now you have this little nugget of lore that means absolutely nothing, because the game isn't playing by its own fucking fantasy rule that it went to great pains to set up.

>>6039168
His entire character can be summed up by the Weezer song "Why Bother?"

>>6039307
Kek to the power of kek

>>6039168
Squall is a good kid.

>>6039337
Good post. There's so many bits in FFVIII that just get brought up then swept under the rug with no consequence, it makes it hard to care about anything when the story itself doesn't appear to.

>>6039168

>>6039174
It's not the first disc, it is when you get back to the garden in the second disc. First off NORG is a stupid character. Why would Cid go him for funding anti-sorceress mercenary training schools when NORG would backstab him the first chance he got when he attacked the sorceress? Why didn't he just work with President Laguna and Esthar seeing as how they had a common objective and Esthar was willing to make a space station to contain a sorceress? And Cid himself was also written as a coward who backed down and put everything onto Squall. Sure it was his wife and there should be some hesitation, but forcing Squall to become the leader of literally everything. That's when things start to take a nose dive.