Final Fantasy VIII/WMG: Difference between revisions
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*** It only says a Sorceress must pass on her powers ''before'' she dies, not that they can only pass them on ''when'' they die.
* Most likely, a lot of power is lost in the process of the sorceress being defeated and her power transferring to the next sorceress, particularly in the case of Ultimecia getting the crap beaten out of her in time compression and traveling through time to pass her powers to Edea. There's also no guarantee that Ultimecia is necessarily the ultimate recipient of Rinoa's sorceress power - it's never stated for certain that any character is the "last" sorceress.
* The FF8 think tank on [[
** Doesn't serious number crunching require... I dunno... some serious numbers to mean anything? As for the power she's actually using to compress time, yes, most of it scatters across time. Or rather, was ''already'' scattered across time, in the form of the sorceresses she hijacked with the Ellone machine.
== The game takes place on the same planet as [[Final Fantasy III]]. ==
Let's take it point-by-point:
* The geography, seen [
* The Floating Continent in III is said to need maintenance to remain airborne. At the time of III, only one person knows how to do this. In VIII, there is an ancient ruin at the bottom of the ocean, right below where the floating continent would be.
* In III, there is a crystal tower in the eastern part of the Northern continent. In VIII, the Crystal Pillar is the focal point of the Lunar Cry. As shown in Centra, the Lunar Cry can have a devastating effect on the landscape. Where the Crystal Tower was in III, VIII has an unexplained crater which fans sometimes attribute to a previous Lunar Cry, meaning the Crystal Pillar was probably located there at some time in the past.
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** Not true. The elemental crystals in III are never destroyed, and are perfectly intact at the end of the game.
*** They might be intact at the end of III, but the time involved in making the floating continent collapse into the sea, mentioned above, could permit another "Flood of Light" to occur, a few thousand years later. The new breed of Dark Warriors could come up with an unconventional method which would necessitate destroying all the Light and Dark Crystals in order to banish the Void once and for all.
** By that logic, one could assume that Guardian Forces are born from the shard fragments. Their abilities are derived from a few Job Classes. If the Summons purchased or won derived their power from the Crystals, Light or Dark, it would help explain how each shard is now a creature. It's fairly similar in concept as to how Crystal Shards each held a different class in [[Final Fantasy V]].
* The hands of the clock tower in Ultimecia's Castle point to VIII and III.
* You can say Unei's mastery over dreams is in tandem with Ellone's power to transfer one's consciousness into the past.
* Ellone (nicknamed Elle) shares a similar plot role with Aria (named Elia in the Japanese version), both being [[Barrier Maiden
* The lowerworld of ''[[Final Fantasy III]]'' is trapped in stasis as a result of the imbalance of light and dark energies. In ''[[Final Fantasy VIII]]'', Ultimecia locks the world in singularity in order to to more easily take advantage of the power of other sorceresses.
* The orphanage reveal: They are played out in both games almost exactly the same. American players frequently point this scene out as being "out of place" or an [[Ass Pull]] because up until 2006, they had no frame of reference to place the significance of the scene in.
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*** The theory isn't about ''Squall'', though, it's about ''Rinoa''. The bigger issue here is that the [[Stable Time Loop]] and all the talk about fate and inevitability flies in the face of the supposed 'happy ending' that the characters create, as they completely fail to stop Ultimecia ''before'' she is created and instead only stop her from doing the worst thing imaginable, ''after'' she develops a grudge against SeeD and humanity. For all the talk about Nakama and the Power of Friendship and Love, respectively, they hardly make a ''dent'' in Ultimecia coming about. Personally, 'Rinoa is put into cold stasis due to her Sorceress powers for an unspecified period of time, and her hatred of what went wrong twists her into Ultimecia' makes slightly more sense than 'Squall and Rinoa live happily ever after, but Rinoa ends up passing on her powers down the line until some other woman ends up becoming an evil Sorceress because humans fear what they can't understand. By that point, it's [[Somebody Else's Problem|someone else's problem]]'.
**** ...how is "Squall and Rinoa being together ultimately proves destructive because Rinoa goes crazy from losing Squall and becomes the monster they fought to defeat, forcing Squall to kill her" in any way a better or happier ending than "Squall is on the road to getting over his issues and, yeah, Ultimecia will rise sometime in the future but we already know she'll lose because Squall and company will travel into the future to defeat her"?
** Wait, what? What does Ultimania state ''exactly''? That Sorceresses have normal human lifespan, that Rinoa is not Ultimecia, or '''both'''? The last time [[Silent Reverence|I]] played the game and discussed it with a friend, we found interesting that at one point in the game Rinoa is encased in Esthar in a Adel-esque fashion ''because of the sorceress powers''. Then Squall took the path to rescue her and she made it a point during a later discussion (can't remember the point of the game) that in the end she expected him to do so. Had Squal ''not done so'' (as he originally wasn't), Rinoa could have been in suspended animation for whatever time is needed, developing a (justified) grudge against [[SEE Ds]] and longing for the Knight Who Never Came. And there is a specific crisis point, close to the end of Disk 2, where Rinoa's mindset seems to be much alike what Ultimecia is stated to
*** That assumes that "sealing" a sorceress the way Esthar does stops them from aging, and there's no evidence that's the case. In addition, the FFVIII world's model for time travel doesn't seem to allow for alternate timelines, what with the [[Stable Time Loop]] - everything that happens, time travel shenanigans and all, happens in a single timeline, instead of anything being altered or any branch timelines forming as a result of future characters' influence on the past.
*** I doubt anything ages when it's placed in suspended animation inside of a cryo-capsule. Besides, Adel managed to survive up in space without food or water, first and foremost, and she was already old enough (at the point in which she was sealed) to consider getting an heir. If the sealing ''didn't'' stop a Sorceress from aging, it would raise the problem of how Adel can even ''move'' after seventeen years of inaction. All she'd be fit to do at that point would be to pass on her powers to the next person in line.
* That and most of the remaining evidence is circumstancial and requires some serious [[Alternate Character Interpretation]].
* Rinoa said she could see what was going on in Ultimecia's head while she was possessed. Shouldn't Rinoa have been able to figure it out from that? But she says nothing about it.
** Edea also had quite a bit of exposure to Ultimecia's thought processes and also doesn't say anything to indicate that Ultimecia is Rinoa or that there might be any issues that would come from Squall being Rinoa's knight; if anything, she encourages them.
** Additionally, Ultimecia has no problems trying to off Squall and Rinoa both several times each, something that she shouldn't want to do if she's the future Rinoa having a [[Suicidal Cosmic Temper Tantrum]] over losing Squall. Arguing that she's too crazy to recognize either of them doesn't really fly since she ''is'' aware enough to recognize Squall as "the legendary SeeD destined to face me" and, if not sane, at least functional enough to get herself made Galbadian ambassador and put into a position from which to take over.
== Squall becomes Ultimecia. ==
Reading into Ultimecia's last lines before her defeat suggests abandonment issues very much like Squall's... and as Squall's epic [[Heroic BSOD]] in the end FMV sequence illustrates, he's not the sanest guy around.
* ....''[[Face Palm]]''
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== Rinoa is Ultimecia in the past. ==
Before you tell me that we already have that one, let me explain. See, the theory discussed above and the one that often comes back during discussions about FFVIII is that Rinoa outlives Squall and therefore becomes evil, but as stated above, it doesn't work considering sorceress have normal lifespans. So I thought about looking at the theory the other way: in the future, Ultimecia becomes a sorceress, she goes insane due to not having found a knight, and decides to start the time compression. However, in order to successfully achieve her plan, she needs to go back in time (and the game does mention that she needs some way to influence the past). This is how she creates Rinoa, a version of herself centuries in the past. Rinoa doesn't know this, either because Ultimecia erased her memory to avoid suspicions, or due to some other contrived magical glitch. [[Karmic Death|Karma comes back to bite her in the ass]] when her past version joins the SeeD [[Temporal Paradox|to destroy her.]]
So essentially, Rinoa doesn't become Ultimecia, she always was, but she doesn't know it. By the way, following that logic, Adel is probably another past version of Ultimecia as well, and the whole brainwashing thing makes even more sense: Adel was obviously evil, and that led to her... him... it being frozen and sent into space. So to prevent this from happening again, she made sure Rinoa doesn't remember her original purpose (she doesn't have to as it is stated in the game Ultimecia only needs to temporarily take over her body for the time compression to work). Heck, that may even explain the importance of love in the scenario: Ultimecia made Rinoa hunt for a knight to make sure she wouldn't go insane after becoming a sorceress and be stopped before Ultimecia could possess her.
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== Ultimecia is [[Kid From the Future|a descendent of Squall and Rinoa]] ==
It preserves everything truly tragic about the "Ultimecia is Rinoa" theory, while actually being plausible! So that's where Greiver came from.
* I always liked this idea. I'd imagine she was their grandchild or something and that she had already killed their older versions. We already know that the Guardian Forces destroy/erase your memory if you use it too much. Even Selphie that had only used Guardian Forces only recently as she transferred to Balamb had started losing some of her childhood memories. It is way to plausible to not be true, that the Guardian Forces had something to do with Ultimecia. Remember, she WAS using a Guardian Force herself that she seemed fairly familiar with. So Ultimecia must have forgotten a lot about her past.
** While she may be a decsendant her being their grandchild is impossible. Edea explains Ultimecia exists many generations into the future, making it impossible to simply wait and deal with her when she shows up. So far into the future that details about their battle with Ultimecia become faded enough that Ultimecia doesn't have enough information to actually win as she could have easily done had she known a few things straigth out (if she'd known Squall was her nemesis she'd have just killed him during the parade instead of saving him for interogation but she doesn't figure it out until her next battle with him).
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*** In the English dialogue what Edea says is that almost all sorceresses in history have been "hand-in-hand" with a knight, and that most sorceresses without knights have ended up using their powers in evil ways. She also says "A knight will present you with peace of mind. He will protect your spirit." She doesn't say anything about passing the stress on to the knight.
*** Uh... just what else do you think "A knight will present you with peace of mind. He will protect your spirit." ''means''?
*** "Having a knight around to protect you will help you feel safer and less stressed out." I certainly don't see anything in the statement "present you with peace of mind and protect your spirit" that necessarily implies directly passing psychological strain from one to the other leading to the insanity that the WMG is suggesting.
*** Because you're taking it too literally, that's why. You don't have to go through some magic ritual to transplant your stress to someone. You just have to lean on them too much and let them take the brunt of it.
== The GF Selphie found when she was a kid was Shiva. ==
When GF's are hanging around loose in a place of their own choosing, they seem to gravitate towards places associated with their
== [http://squallsdead.com/ Squall Is Dead] ==
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== Ultimecia was born ''because'' Squall and co. defeated her. ==
Okay, try to bear with me. I found this one on [[
* Isn't that what ''actually happens?'' [[Esoteric Happy Ending|The ending of the game as is]] [[Inferred Holocaust|isn't exactly a happy one, after all.]]
** Not really. Between Adel, Edea, and others implied before them, this never happened. [[Wild Mass Guessing|No reason to believe that fear of something so distant from people would propagate like that so far into the future.]] Nice Fanon/Fanwank, though.
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* Small correction: Squall was impaled, but ended falling about... a meter, maybe a meter and a half. He only fell from Edea's charriot, which wasn't tall at all.
== Squall and company were sent to help the Forest Owls because they were literally
Sure, they might have passed the exams and proven martial prowress, but you've got Squall who is totally apathetic, Selphie who.... we don't know what's up with her, and Zell, who's too spastic to be reliable on the battlefield. Not quite the "professional" image you want to present. So let's put them on this [[Failure Is the Only Option|hopeless]] mission in a backwoods area where they really can't embarrass us!
Naturally, this being a jRPG, the reject brigade saves the entire universe.
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However, [[Chekhov's Gunman|the White SeeD]] have been fighting a war of attrition across generations to try and stop this, and they actually come close to winning because [[Orcus on His Throne|Rinultimecia has been occupied with her studies, and only rarely gets involved with the battle herself]], normally leaving it to the monsters summoned in repeated Lunar Cries.
Just as she nears her goal, though, Rinultimecia suddenly realizes that Time Compression would be really, really bad - i.e., a [[Negative Space Wedgie]] of horrific proportions - and alters her plan at the last minute to using Junction Machine Ellone so that she can [[Sharing a Body|Junction herself to her]] ''[[Sharing a Body|original]]'' [[Sharing a Body|self]]. However, [[Future Me Scares Me|Rinultimecia Terrifies Rinoa]], which results in something kind of like an [[Angst Coma]]. This is when Rinoa's passed out/possessed in Disc Three. Rinultimecia has a stronger will, which means she can move their shared body around, but not enough so that she can [[Uncanny Valley|move it fluidly]], resulting in the [[Zombie Gait]] when Rinoa gets up and moves. However, because she can't communicate effectively with Squall or Rinoa to explain what she's doing, everything goes horribly wrong ''almost'' [[Yank the Dog's Chain|when she gets the chance to reunite with her love]]. Only having what information is available to them, the [[Five-Man Band]] surmises that Ultimecia is a villain who must be stopped, but [[The End of the World as We Know It|Time Compression]] is the only way that they can [[Time Travel]] to the future and put her down. Once they achieve Time Compression and arrive to kill her, Rinultimecia starts down the road to a [[Villainous Breakdown]]. And hey, given that the man she spent who-knows-how-many-centuries trying to reunite with is now actively trying to execute her, [[Justified Trope|can you really blame the poor girl]]? Still, she sends out her [[Non-Malicious Monster|servants]] to escort the group to her so that she can try to explain in person. In an effort to try and discourage them from fighting, she sealed off their abilities, and the heroes took this completely the wrong way. Come the final battle, Rinultimecia has resorted to using force on the heroes so that she can make them listen to her and, if need be, [[Memetic Mutation|befriend]] [[Defeat Means Friendship|the hell out of]] [[
Rinultimecia [[Sequential Boss|tries everything she can think of to calm the heroes, or at least Squall, down]]. She creates Griever, the Squall's ideal of strength and pride, as a sort of [[Trust Password]], but Squall doesn't take the bait. She ends up resorting to [[Disney Death|temporarily removing the other heroes from the timestream]] to get Squall alone, but he mistakenly believes that his [[True Companions]] have been [[Killed Off for Real]], and [[Unstoppable Rage|flips out]]. Upon realizing that there's no way to make Squall recognize who she is, [[Despair Event Horizon|her heart finally breaks completely]], accepts that [[You Can't Fight Fate]], and lets her once and future husband-to-be [[Mercy Kill|put her out of her misery]] after [[No Ontological Inertia|ensuring that all of her magicks will undo themselves upon her death]], [[I Want My Beloved to Be Happy|allowing Squall and past-Rinoa]] to live [[Happily Ever After]].... [[Tear Jerker|but only]] [[Stable Time Loop|for a time]].
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