Final Fantasy VIII

(contains minor implied spoilers)

Final Fantasy VIII is a game trying to be about love that is really about war, history repeating itself, and the glorification of shallow romance–Final Fantasy VIII is bland at best (with a dash of socially-destructive narcissism), and intellectually hopeless. Sorry Square! Close but not quite.

My conclusions as to the game’s meaning:

  1. German scientists are smart and know everything, even things that haven’t happened yet–or, plot devices are great when you’ve painted yourself into a corner and there’s no time to write yourself out, and if a scientist with a German accent says it, players will believe it.
  2. A man will eventually be some lucky woman’s knight in shining armor, a woman will eventually become an evil sorceress/ex-wife (hmm, male chauvenism here?), and both their lives will consist of dwelling on the past and self-pity since shallow romance is assumed to be the only good thing in life (a pathetic default m.o. for existential materialists the world over).
  3. War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing. (of course, you have to read into the game fairly excessively to even see a theme that deep…)
  4. If you add enough incongruous facts to a game’s plot, people will believe it makes sense and is brilliant, even if the game plays like a stark and overly-drawn-out silent movie and has relatively few locales or characters.

Plot Theory Page (SPOILERS)



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