Final Fantasy VIII/Nightmare Fuel

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Is Squall faceless for any reason at all?


Ok, by now we know that Final Fantasy is scary.

Pretty much none of the games are safe: yes, the first three games in the series were relatively tame, but then came Final Fantasy IV and shit hit the fan. The cheery Final Fantasy V was milder than what went before and what came after, but still scary nonetheless. Final Fantasy VI upped the ante, and about Final Fantasy VII, well... let's not even get started on that subject.

Final Fantasy VIII may or may not be as fright-rife as its predecessors but when it does aim to make players scream, BOY does it live up to their standards. The same goes for Final Fantasy IX, the sequel both in name and scares.

  • Adel. The fact that she's a giant man-woman who has the face of and moves like a monster is creepy enough, but it gets worse when the lifeless body of Rinoa is attached to her chest and she thrusts it upward to suck Rinoa's life away. And if all that wasn't enough, when you defeat her, the ending cinematic displays her face getting blown off before she falls on her knees to dissolve.
    • To make her even more creepy is the fact that when you first visit the Timber Tv Station, there is a big screen on the building with a lot of red text, some of it makes out sentences like "IWILLNEVERLETYOUFORGETABOUTME", "IAMALIVE", and "BRINGMEBACKTHERE". This is highly implied to be Adel sending signals, and she is probably the reason that the broadcasting systems haven't been working for the past seventeen years, which is around the time when Laguna and co. sent her out in space.
  • FACELESS SQUALL (pictured above). It's like a Freeze-Frame Bonus that pays off with heebie-jeebies. It's not clear, but the image is part of a sequence of hallucinations taking place in time compression, and some of the other images imply that Squall's memories are becoming confused. At a guess, it's symbolic of emotional emptiness and/or loss of identity. It is also quite possibly an expression of It's All My Fault, given the preceding scene where he participates in passing Ultimecia's power on to Edea and that Ultimecia's own final form has this very same trait.
  • The Lunar Cry. Just....this immense giant blood red cloud of monsters extending outward like a spear of hellish death...
  • Most of Disc Four. You kill Adel and time begins to compress, taking you through a trippy sequence in which you have to slay various sorceresses at different points in time, while the background melts, ending with a particularly freaky-looking sorceress. You finally end up at Edea's House in the compressed time world, and after stepping outside, you find the beach littered with the dead bodies of SeeDs, and see Ultimecia's Ominous Floating Castle in the dark, cloud-filled skies above. Her castle even has Ominous Pipe Organ music. Damn. Not to mention the music that plays during the sequence before arriving at The Very Definitely Final Dungeon. A dissonant five-note sax ostinato and creepy ambience are all you need to convey the feeling that the world is fucked.
  • Speaking of which, the final battle with Sorceress Ultimecia. Boss starts out human, like usual. Summons her own Guardian Force, Griever to fight you in the second round, ok. Third phase is a Fusion Dance, still ok. Then you get to the fourth and final phase. Ultimecia's mutated into a giant multicolored monstrosity whose upper half HAS NO FACE, while the bottom half is the "real" Ultimecia, hanging upside down and practically naked (and covered in icky-looking veins). You're fighting, literally, on the edge of oblivion, and all the while Ultimecia is absorbing existence right under your characters' feet.

I am Ultimecia. Time shall compress...ALL EXISTENCE DENIED.

  • "Rinoa was lost in space... forever."
  • The startlingly creepy way Edea gets up from sitting. It makes sense, given that she's possessed by Ultimecia. It happens twice -- first before the parade and again at Galbadia Garden.
  • The whole time compression. Think about it. Watch as our heroes have the floor dropped from under them, after fighting Adel, in a wormhole-type structure. Dropping into the ocean from what looks like the thermosphere (out of nowhere -- they were on the planet), sinking, then resurfacing through the "other side" and continuing back up through the air (where the hell did the ocean floor go?!) into a vortex of seagulls. Seagulls. And that's just happening to Squall and company -- what did everyone else go through? Try wrapping your mind around what exactly is happening.
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Final_Fantasy_VIII/Nightmare_Fuel?oldid=2007711"