Thematics: Final Fantasy VIII

Welcome to Thematics, where everything’s made up and the plot points don’t matter.  That’s right, they’re like armor in a Nippon Ichi game.  Today we’ll be looking at that perennial favorite of any conversation, Final Fantasy VIII.  The follow-up to the greatest game ever circa 1999, Final Fantasy VIII had more or less infinite expectations behind it, and so had to blow everyone out of the water with its gameplay, character building, cast, villains, and of course plot, especially since Final Fantasy VII had quite possibly the first video game plot with both the concepts and scripting to make serious literary analysis worth anyone’s time.  So naturally, FFVIII had a complex theme requiring hours of in depth examination of the script, character relationships, and overall plot arc to divine.  Or wait, I have that wrong.  It loudly proclaims itself “An epic story based on the theme of love, set in a massive new world”.  Huh.  Well that was easy.

If you don’t just assume these are all purely spoilers, you are a silly person and I mock your value system.  Also, how did you make it through to the present without playing FFVIII?

It takes a very deluded fan of Final Fantasy VIII to pretend the game is anything but very flawed at the least, and any non-deluded fan will readily admit that the romance with Rinoa is at the heart of what doesn’t work.  FFVIII uses a very limited perspective, and aside from a handful of scenes here and there could actually be said to be in the first person.  As such, not only is the sudden shift in outlook and direction from Squall incredibly surprising because his inner monologue, which we’ve been entirely privy to, never conveyed this depth of feelings for the gal, but in fact all indications are that he thinks of her as a vapid stalker.

The trouble is really less that the introverted emotionally damaged kid thinks other humans are idiots who won’t leave him alone than this actually being a valid interpretation of Rinoa as a character.  By all indications, her starting point as one of the myriad ‘revolutionaries’ in Timber is basically “I want to get back at daddy for being SO MEAN”.  From here, she then decides to hang around the trained mercenaries and fight with them on their missions because… Squall’s cute?  Given the gap in their training and fighting prowess, this of course kicks off a rescue romance, though thankfully this is diluted by the party split early in disc 2 (in that there’s only two or three spots where you can logically HAVE Rinoa get captured and need saving).  But really, she doesn’t get into danger because she’s not as badass as the kids who’ve been training to fight and use magical powers since before puberty.  Rinoa gets into danger because she runs off on her own and without listening to anyone else on plans that look good until you take any amount of time to actually look at the details.  Even in the end, when she’s gone through quite a bit of trauma being possessed by Ultimecia, her basic character never changes; she runs off to be frozen because she can’t think of anything else to do and never thinks to discuss the matter with her friends or anyone who knows anything about sorceress powers, both of which she has easy access to!  In fact, she pretty well gets her way in the end, with Squall largely catering to her whims.

The sad part is, I can see what they wanted to do here.  It’s clearly established in the story that Squall’s particular trauma stems from abandonment issues, and if we allow that he does, for whatever reason, love someone, then he would indeed do fairly spectacular things rather than abandon them to their fate.  Similarly, the extreme degree to which Rinoa pursues the relationship was probably meant to serve as explanation for the whole thing; Rinoa won’t give up on him, and over time he comes to accept that she won’t ever just disappear one day, so it’s okay to love her back.  It all looks great until we remember that there’s no deeper reason for Rinoa to pursue Squall rather than any number of slightly less attractive badass guys you’d find in a school full of mercenaries, or that by all indications Squall outright dislikes the girl until suddenly he can’t stand to lose her.

But let’s back up a minute.  Final Fantasy VIII proclaims itself “based on the theme of love”, not “a love story”.  And love can be applied in a number of different circumstances.  For simplicity, I’ll be referring to C.S. Lewis here, and broadly talking about love in four different contexts: Storge, the love of affection as between family; Phileo, the love between friends and comrades; Eros, the love of romance (which I already talked about here); and Agape, the unconditional love, as between a messiah and the world.

So you’ll note I’ve already introduced the first and most important application of these other loves in the game, Storge; Squall’s foundation as a character comes from the sudden and traumatic absence of his ‘big sis’, Ellone.  And immediately we can start to piece together the issues behind Final Fantasy VIII.  Despite being the definitive character in Squall’s backstory, the two share five scenes together.  The first, during Squall’s track into the training facility, is a very brief glimpse of Ellone fleeing monsters, in which she is gone after the scene and Squall tries to figure out why he knows her.  The second, when searching for her to send off with the White Seeds, is after he has ‘met’ her as Laguna, and trying to confirm they’re the same person and thus what exactly he’s seeing in those visions.  The third contains all the meat; Squall has remembered how and why he’s met Ellone, and questions her about leaving him.  This is cursory; you’re interrupted by RInoa’s possession.  The fourth, moments later, is Squall begging Ellone to use her power to connect him and Rinoa so he can try and save her.  And the last is a brief hi/bye moment as the team prepares for Time Compression.  So we should be asking… what happened here.  Where’s the reunion?  The sense of catharsis for a young man who’s spent most of his life missing this woman.  Anger or confusion at his abandonment.  What about Ellone herself?  She by all rights should realize who Squall is, and had known him his entire life up until the point she left.  Yet she always seems to be just passing by, with no particular imperative to talk to him or make herself known.  The answer, of course, is that Rinoa derailed the entire plot thread.

There are other cases like this in the game, which will follow, that are less directly derailed by the Eros plot.  However, while things are less severe, it’s still reasonable to state that what went wrong with FFVIII’s plotting and use of themes was that the casual, romantic definition of love quickly swallowed up the entire main plot, the the exclusion of many dangling threads and, consequently, explorations of the love theme that seemed intended.  In fact, while I doubt there was an intent to actually follow the Lewis terms and dissection of the theme, it is clear that a more holistic presentation of love was the original intent for the game, and the degradation into almost exclusively a boy meets girl who he has to save a lot affair was something that happened mid-development.

There’s a word in Japanese that you see bandied around by English-speaking otaku, nekama.  It has a TV Tropes entry.  Often translated as comrades, in simplest terms it’s used to describe the simple, innocent friendships between children.  No ulterior motives, no backstabbing, no trying to manipulate.  People in similar circumstances just enjoying life in each-other’s company.  Punnily, a very romantic take on childhood that seemingly pervades the culture.  If you’ve actually played Final Fantasy VIII, you know how this idea goes.  Not only are the main cast comrades in the sense Americans would use the trope, fellow fighters in the same unit, bonded by the battlefield, but great pains are taken to show the main cast are, indeed, a nakama, growing up in the same orphanage.  Setting aside how poorly executed that plot twist was, because going on about how easily it could be fixed isn’t the focus of this article, the entire scenario is seven shades of Phileo.  Where this goes wrong from a thematic standpoint, of course, is… we can see in Squall’s head.  And only his head.  And in his mind, by all evidence, he doesn’t feel that bond of friendship with them.  That they grew up together is a coincidence that doesn’t mean much here and now.  And in fact, there’s only one or two throwaway lines later in the game that show any growth here.  They exist, but it’s easily missed.

But from a plot perspective, this scene serves an entirely different purpose.  Here we establish that the Evil Sorceress, who nearly killed us all on the previous disc after our failed “kill her with stealthy bullets to the head then crash a car into her and use swords” plot and who we’re going to fairly literal war with in the next scene, is our shared mother figure, the head of the orphanage.  Unlike the other aspects of the orphanage scenario, this does have some emotional impact.  Squall obviously respects and cares about her as much as anyone else, and is obviously unhappy that he’s still obligated to fight her.  Unfortunately, she’s not in her right mind during the early parts of the game and doesn’t recognize the heroes, so nothing emotional can happen there.  There is, however, her large speech at the very start of Disc 3… which much like the Ellone example, is more exposition than emotion, and after that she largely drops out of the plot, because this is also the precise point at which the plot of Final Fantasy VIII becomes all Rinoa, all the time.

Those are the major threads that are introduced then left to die in the post-Rinoa hellscape.  There are, however, more missed opportunities to be found.  Many fans note that Quistis’ character arc drops off the face of the earth very, very early, and her crush on Squall, as well as the later discoveries thereof, could easily have been an avenue of discussion on the matter.  The remainder of the main cast do have romantic interests, and as such could be used to make different observations not covered by the primary relationship between Squall and his succubus.  We’re shown that Fujin and Raijin have a damn near unshakable bond with Seifer, but we have no idea how this happened or what motivates each character to stick together beyond the fact that it’s hard to imagine anyone else WOULD.

Then of course we have Laguna.  He has his own romantic subplot of course.  It’s cute, and they kinda make a thing of it throughout his chapters.  He’s also Squall’s father.  He of course got busy with adventuring to rescue Ellone, and then got caught up in Estharian politics.  He knew Raine was dead, and probably had every reason to think Squall had also died.  It’s also pretty obvious, though, that his own friends had worked out who Squall was, and yet… nothing.  At no point in the game do Squall and Laguna directly interact aside from a single scene in which he exposits on how to fight Ultimecia.  Hell.  Going back to our four loves, Laguna is fairly consistently portrayed as having an astounding empathy with others, and goes to extraordinary lengths to help basically everyone he ever meets.  He probably falls short of true Agape, but damn if there’s not some strong messianic roots there.

But instead of dwelling on failures and wasted potential, we’ll end on something I thought worked well.  It’s really a functional demonstration of self-sacrificing Agape, and it’s one of my favorite moments in the game.  Ultimecia has been defeated.  Time, compressed nearly to singularity, begins to heal as Ultimecia’s magic breaks down.  Squall, lost and having never quite developed the same bonds with his comrades as they with each other, ends up in the right place in the wrong time.  He finds himself at the orphanage, his younger self running up to see if its his sis.  As Edea comes after the younger Squall, Ultimecia appears, seemingly having followed Squall and unable to do anything but suffer so long as she possesses the powers of a Sorceress.  And so, Edea accepts her powers, both to let her pass in peace and to avoid inflicting the fate of a Sorceress, the discrimination and loneliness, upon any of the children.  Perhaps not the best example, but it really works and does more to show us who Edea is than anything the game’s done to this point.

And there you have it.  A theme lost in a pile of poorly thought out motivations and letting the easily understood get in the way of solid concepts being properly expressed.  The real shame is less that the game falls apart when analyzed thematically than that it let itself be overtaken by the weakest exploration of its real theme, when it’s really quite rare for a work to explore love holistically as FFVIII was clearly meant to do.  But I guess we’ll always have those hidden games of Triple Triad under the moonlit skies deep in the training center jungle.