Note: The following letter represents the views of the author (Squall Leonhart), and the content therein does not necessarily reflect the opinions of Luna Manar or any of her associates, not that she has any. In other words, I have no control over the characters in my head, so don't blame me because none of this was my fault. Thank you.

05-02-04

Dear Squaresoft,

I know you're Square Enix now, but that name looks sort of lame, and you were Squaresoft when FF8 was released, so that's what I'm gonna call you.

This is Squall Leonhart. You know, the main protagonist of Final Fantasy VIII. I know this letter is a little late, since the game came out six years ago, but I have a busy schedule and it took this long for me to get to the bottom of my list of priorities, which is kind of where you're sitting.

I'm writing because I have a few personal problems with FF8 I'd like you to address. Well, a lot, really. Realistically I know writing to you isn't going to change a damn thing, but Rinoa says it's good therapy. Whatever. Here goes nothing.

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The Ten Fatal Flaws of Final Fantasy VIII
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Problem #1: Concept Artists on Crack

First off, let's talk about my character design. Exactly whose idea was it to make me some sort of metrosexual Angel clone? I'd really like to know, because whoever it was is a moron. People like me aren't pretty. I'm an asocial, self-absorbed asshole and I have no reason to give a damn what other people think of my appearance. Unless it's part of Garden Code that everyone destined to fall in love by the end of the game has to look like a Hollywood poster child.

Speaking of over-budgeted bad movies, take a look at my outfit and ask yourself seriously if someone like me would ever wear it. In fact, I blame my agoraphobia on whoever decided to dress me simultaneously for a leading role in Top Gun and Hot Shots. My life has been a living hell because you made me attract too much damn attention when it's the last thing I want. There's no way I can tell someone to leave me the hell alone when my clothes practically scream to be noticed. You made me look like a hypocrite. Thanks a lot.

And what's with the Charlie Brown getup you put on me as a kid? Forgetting for a moment that I spent every one of those flashback scenes pretending I was Strong Sad, it just looks ridiculous. You're trying to paint me as a child of fate, here. Charlie Brown doesn't need fate to screw up his life, he does that perfectly all by himself. I know I'm not exactly the self-substantiating rock of perfection, but at least I don't let some black-haired bitch in blue psychologize my fat head by explaining all my faults to me.

I'd also like to point out that you made about a quarter of my dialogue unpronounceable. When are you going to figure out that it is phonetically impossible to verbally express an ellipsis? Nice touch using Boreanz to voice me in Kingdom Hearts, by the way. You screwed up. I don't sound anything like him. My outfit is terrible in that one, too. It's okay though, that whole game is insane. It's like what happens when you sneak a cup of sugar into Selphie's morning coffee (don't ask).

All in all, my character design is a lot like fruitcake. It's a clash of the good, the bad and the just plain stupid served on a silver plate in large, unappetizing portions.

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Problem #2: Stupid CEOs and Cooked Book Crooks

Tell me something. What the hell is a fat, ugly midlife-crisis pushover like Cid Kramer doing ordering me around? He's really not a very convincing Garden Headmaster at all. The guy hasn't had an hour of military experience in his life and all of a sudden he's running a special forces academy? Sure it's his brainchild and all, but he probably couldn't do a mile on a NordicTrack, so there's no way he could have any idea how to manage a school where grueling calisthenics is part of everyone's daily routine. Even if he did, do you honestly think people would take orders from a fat loser with a bad back who spends his time sitting at a desk on the top floor and giving inspirational pep talks that aren't very inspirational? He doesn't fit the office. Not to mention, he's an idiot. What doped up twink puts a wet-behind-the-ears 17 year old fresh out of SeeD boot camp in charge of the entire Garden? I understand what you were trying to do. You had to pile the pressure on me because I'm the main character and I'm supposed to have a lot of responsibility thrown on my shoulders, but think about it. Is there a less believable plot twist you could have put in there? Kim Possible would have done a better job of running Garden. Of all the characters to stick in the Headmaster's chair, you had to choose an Oompa Loompa reject. Is this a Japanese humor thing I'm just not getting? Actually, don't answer that. I don't care. It's still stupid.

NORG is another one. What is it with you and making fat stupid people run things? All right, granted NORG has business smarts and a giant mechanical clamshell with lots of firepower he can crawl into whenever he gets tired of waving his arms around like a lunatic, but even with this armor, the guy is so disgustingly obese I bet he can't walk on his own. He's like one of those 1,200-lb people you see on Ripley's Believe It Or Not who needs five guys on steroids to carry him to the bathroom just so he can piss. How is he supposed to be in control of the Garden if he can't even move? Cid says NORG gets to call the shots because otherwise he'd cut funding for Garden, but it'd be just as easy to turn it all around on the sorry bastard and tell him that unless he funds Garden and runs it the way Cid wants it run, no one will ever come down to feed his ugly face with the starch it needs to stay blubbery. Jabba the Hutt had more mobility than this guy. He's so pathetic, no one in their right mind would ever believe he could successfully manage to run a business, blackmail the CEO, and command dozens of red-robed minions to do his bidding all at once. He's just not intimidating enough. Yeah, he's got this heart-chilling wail he uses to scare people into doing what he wants when he's unhappy, but you know what else does the same thing? Babies! NORG is nothing but a giant, fat baby with a lot of money and a magic-wielding cradle. The fact Cid manages to let himself be puppeted by this guy makes him look even more pathetic.

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Problem #3: Tainted Love

Rinoa. You know I had to get around to this one. My love interest, right? So, I'm not gonna complain too much because it could be worse—you could've just left me to die miserably on a floating chunk of rock in the middle of nowhere. Someone had to save my ass. But ignoring the obvious theme of Love Conquers All, stand the two of us side by side, compare pros and cons and show me a concrete reason this match actually works. Someone as nice as she is has no earthly business being attracted to a jerk like me. Better me than Seifer, of course, but that's beside the point. The girl hates her dad's guts and compared to me, he's an angel of love and mercy. Not to mention, Rinoa's the queen of half-baked. She can't come up with a solid game plan to save her life (apparently that's my job). Me, I'm a protocol nazi. I do everything by the book if I can help it. She spends the entire game getting in my way, and somehow this is supposed to make me like her more? Is this one of those reverse psychology things?

Oh yeah, and her butt is too big. Just kidding. Actually, I think the fact I see it walking away from me so often is what pisses me off about it.

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Problem #4: Guardian Forces

You know what's stupid? Giving every living creature in a game the inherent ability to cast magic except the heroes. Based on some battle system designer's divine reasoning, we need the assistance of godlike summon monsters to have a limited capacity to arcanely blast things to kingdom come, while everybody else has their own personal inexhaustible supply of magic. I guess I shouldn't complain because the sheer brute force the GFs themselves pack and the fact you can use the junction system to turn yourself into Superman kind of tips the scales a bit, but I still say the logic here is excruciatingly flawed. First of all, we're supposed to be the good guys. We should be exemplifying good behaviors, right? So why is our whole magic system based on stealing? Yes, stealing. You call it drawing, but the fact is you're taking something from other beings without their consent. It makes practical sense, of course, because I doubt a snow lion with you in mind for lunch is gonna hand over a few Blizzagas for your benefit, even if you say "please," but, fountain of creativity that you're reputed to be, couldn't you come up with a better way to go about acquiring magic?

Secondly, where do we store all this magic that we absorb? The game would have us believe we have eight or nine pages in our brains with which we neatly catalogue all the spells we steal. I know it's a game and the point here is to come up with a battle system that involves some level of strategy, but outside a game environment it doesn't make a lot of logical sense. How would it sound if someone came up to you and randomly told you he had forty-five Holies stocked? Is there a method of measuring mentally stored magic that enables the person stocking the spells to know exactly how many he has? Do the GFs play secretary and make a daily report on how much of what spells you have? There has to be a more intuitive way to do this. You'd need dice to make it any more complicated.

The concept of the GFs itself is a pretty bad one if you ask me. GFs make you stronger, but you pay for it by losing your long-term memory. Has it occurred to anyone yet how significant a loss that is? It's like having Alzheimer's when you're 17. When everyone figures this out in the game, we all just go "oh well!" and keep on using GFs like it was nothing. Yeah, using. Like drugs. The price they exact is very high, but we've all become so dependent on them we can't stop. Kind of disturbing when you look at it that way, isn't it?

One last thing about GFs. I'll admit most of them are decently badass. One thing I wanna know, though. Do you have any idea how stupid I look summoning an oversized green Pokémon wannabe? Just checking.

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Problem #5: Transportation

Five words on this subject.

Me on a chocobo. No.

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Problem #6: Geography and Astronomy

I hope you realize that, assuming the FF8 world map is roughly the same size as that of Earth, you made me walk about half the length of the Atlantic Ocean with Rinoa on my back in one day. I guess that's why they call it fantasy.

If the moon was really that close to the planet, there would be entire days where everything was in the shadow of a solar eclipse, right? Is that by any chance the reason it was dark out the entire time we were in Deling City? Or did that detour really only take a few hours?

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Problem #7: More Loopy Leaders

If you fouled up assigning the heads of staff at Garden, you completely blew it when you decided who was going to be president of the two largest and most powerful countries in the world. Vinzer Deling is another fat bald guy in a suit and tie. All through the Forest Owls mission, Vinzer is built up to be a Big Bad Wolf who has the power to, on a whim, put you on public display, brutally execute you in front of your kids, then empty a few rounds into your dead body for good measure. That's a pretty damn good bad guy if you ask me. The problem is, we never get to see him until he dies, and what little dialogue he squeaks out before Edea-possessed puts him out of his misery doesn't convince me that he's for real. More like a real pansy. He let himself be manipulated by Ultimecia until he was right where she wanted him, and when his usefulness had expired, she disposed of him like the garbage he was. Yeah, Ultimecia has incredible powers of mind control—just look what she did to Seifer—but it still doesn't excuse the fact you built up some great hype on him and delivered a DOA, literally. His body double was a regular nightmare by comparison. What a disappointment.

Before I talk about the next, and worst, decision you ever made in designing FF8, I want to be clear about something. First, I just want to check, you do understand that Laguna is too much of a dimwit to ever run a country, don't you? You did sort of write him to be the ultimate insult to males—check that, humanity—so it would stand to reason that you'd only put him in charge of the most powerful country in the world as a joke. I hope you don't expect me to believe he actually runs the place, because I don't. I doubt many of the players do, either.

Even if it was a joke, it wasn't a very funny one. Honestly, I think you did it because you couldn't think of a better excuse to keep Laguna from going back to Raine so I could grow up to be mentally disturbed. Actually, come to think of it, it's probably a good thing I wasn't raised by Laguna. You think I'm messed up now, just imagine what I would've been like if I had that guy as a father figure. Back to the point, though, if this is a joke, I'm not laughing. Half of me wants to believe you didn't know what the hell you were doing when you decided Laguna was gonna be my old man and then arrange it so that I had to live the guy's doofy life and then talk to him about it as if I cared before I could save the world. If you're really that moronic, at least it was nothing personal. But the rest of me wants it to be intentional. If I know it was meant to be a joke, I don't have to take it seriously.

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Problem #8: Triple Triad

Is there anything more absurd than a card game in the middle of a crisis? Let me get this straight. We get kicked out of Garden if we get caught playing in class, but as long as imminent doom is looming overhead it's OK to ask me if I prefer Plus or Same? Are you insane?

Sometimes I think you came up with my character just so you could dress me up like Michael Jackson, stick me in a world full of idiots and laugh at my reaction.

Escaping from prison? Stay a while and let's go a few rounds. Oh no, the Garden is under attack. Let's play CARDS! Ultimecia is about to destroy the world, but wait up, you haven't acquired Leviathan, yet!

I swear, nothing is more proof positive that I live in an artificially constructed world of polygons with bitmaps for brains than this. What makes it all worse is that you can actually force me to win the Queen of Cards side quest. Did you catch that? Queen of cards. As much as slash fiction writers would love to think so, I am not a Queen! Stop turning me into moron fodder, you money-grubbing son of bitches (to quote the only intelligent thing a well-known idiot once said).

I have to give you credit for one thing. You never made Rinoa play cards with me on the Ragnarok. That's a plus. Or maybe it's just the same.

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Problem #9: Odin, Gilgamesh, and Seifer

Just when I thought you'd done something right, you had to go and screw with this one, too. The whole rivalry thing between Seifer and I, that was great. Perfect. Right up until the last fight. Then you managed to trash the whole thing in a matter of twenty seconds. Well, twenty-five, if you count the stupid little victory dance.

Look, Seifer was there to be my rival, get it? Rival. That means he and I, one-on-one, have to face each other at some point and duke it out until one or both of us bites the dust. You spent the whole damn game building up to that moment in Lunatic Pandora, and what do you do? You let Gilgamesh defeat Seifer for me! It's so anticlimactic, I can't believe even you even considered it. You just couldn't find another place to squeeze Gilgamesh in there, so you snatched away what was probably one of the most telling points in the entire game from Seifer and I and gave the mic to a semi-GF that's not even necessary to beat the game. That's just fantastic. I suppose if the player doesn't like it, they can go through the game without doing the Odin side quest, but Odin's badass, so chances are not many people are gonna want to do without him. Which leaves me and Seifer with unfinished business that will likely never be settled. Maybe being the designers on high, you see a greater purpose in that, but from way down here it just looks like you took a sledgehammer to the only perfectly symmetrical plot arch in the game.

Story of my life. Thanks for nothing. Losers.

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Problem #10: Ultimecia

I guess it makes sense that I talk about the end of the game last. But it's not because I'm doing things in chronological order. I'm talking about Ultimecia last because I almost forgot about her. I almost forgot about her because of my Final issue with Final Fantasy VIII—the mastermind behind all the chaos isn't even named until the middle of disc 3. Considering half of Disc 4 is filled up with the full motion video of the delusional state of my mind, that's nearly the end of the story. It's not like you expand much on Ultimecia, either. All we know by the time we fight her is that she's from the future, she's using a machine designed by Dr. Odine to time travel, she has a speech impediment, and she wants to wipe us all out. I guess we're just supposed to take your word for it and go. Either that or we were actually supposed to derive some insight into her character by listening to Edea call us children and woo Seifer and generally act like she was either on an acid trip or experiencing a flashback. I know I couldn't make any sense of it. Maybe she said something more profound in the Japanese version, but since everything in the FF8 world appears to be written in English, it's pretty clear the general population—including me—doesn't speak Japanese, so I wouldn't be able to understand a word of it, anyway. I think Ultimecia may have been trying to tell us something right before she died, but whatever it was, I don't think she got to finish it, because we sort of ran out of patience and had to kill her. At least in that sense, I can sympathize with her otherwise two-dimensional character.

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That about wraps it up. Don't bother writing back.

Sincerely,

Squall Leonhart