What Final Fantasy VIII gets right about the details of teenage life
School Days
This week, we kicked off a new Special Topics In Gameology mini-series, and the theme this time around is School. Anthony John Agnello led us off with a look at the high-school dramatics at the heart of Final Fantasy VIII. The game itself is one of the more divisive Final Fantasy entries, but Anthony’s reading rang true with many commenters—even those who don’t love the game, like jakeoti:
Squall is one of my favorite Final Fantasy characters, for basically all the reasons Anthony went over. He annoyed me to no end at the start, but I was also just hitting that point in my life where I felt more like an adult. But seeing Squall mature made him an absolute classic addition to the lineup of Final Fantasy characters. He’s someone who feels, well, feelings, but doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want respect from anyone or for anyone, just for himself. And then there’s the speech moment. Right before the battle of the two Gardens, Headmaster Cid asks him to give the rallying cry to his fellow students, and he does. To all of them, he’s resolute and strong, but seeing him nervously question if he can even do it, getting inside his head for it, it’s one of my favorite moments from the game and from the series as a whole. (It’s also really carried by Nobuo Uematsu’s typically excellent composition.)
TheLastMariachi had some similar thoughts:
Looking back at the game later on in life, a lot of its plot points/twists were just too damn convenient or contrived for me to take seriously. I did really enjoy seeing so much of Squall’s internal dialogue, in which he reveals that he’s a talented, seriously deluded young man who’s terrified of loss and being hurt while putting up that tough, lonely exterior.
Squall’s a jerk, no doubt about it, but a lot of us were at that age, putting up tough fronts while being so enveloped in our personal pain or failure that we fail to see the friends we have or the opportunities/possibilities that lie waiting in front of us. When he starts to realize that, he begins to take his natural talent for leadership and put it to good use, while not neglecting the people who stuck by him throughout the story. Compare that to Seifer, who basically bought into his childhood dream at the cost of his free will and sanity, dragging his friends along (who clearly never wanted to take things as far as he had but stuck by him regardless). Even then, Seifer still gets a shot to redeem himself, which he actually takes!
The plot might not hold up to scrutiny, but those developments are interesting, and the theme of coming into one’s own and growing as a person, not in spite of, but because of pain and struggle is a timeless one.
Speaking of Squall’s inner monologues, Unexpected Dave had some thoughts on why they’re yet another perfect fit for the game’s teenage fantasy:
Another thing that this game nailed is how easy it is to get distracted, and sucked into your own head as a teenager. I loved how Squall’s inner monologue would often overlap another character’s dialogue. Cid or Laguna would be delivering some key bit of exposition, but it was hard to read as Squall’s thoughts about Sis or Rinoa would keep getting in the way. No matter how much you want to focus, you can’t do it.
Venerable Monk recalled the way the game filled in the little details of its characters’ high-school lives: