Insert another credit, because it’s time for your weekly video game news and you’ve just hit the Game Overview screen.
With every Final Fantasy game there exists great (and not so great) teams of heroes bent on saving the world from some sort of evil force. While we could take a look at those heroes, let’s instead take a look at the evils that motivate these heroes to do what they do.
It should be noted that this feature will be full of spoilers.
Week 1 – Garland
Week 2 – Emperor Mateus of Palamecia
Week 3 – The Cloud of Darkness
Week 4 – Zeromus
Week 5 – Exdeath
Week 6 – Kefka
Week 7 – Sephiroth
If you look up the word narrative disaster in the dictionary, guess what you’ll see a picture of? Yeah, Final Fantasy VIII.
Following the previously unrivaled success of Final Fantasy VII in the States, Square decided to keep a lot of the same quasi-futuristic and more realistic atmosphere in place for their next epic endeavor. The cartoony/anime-like character models were scrapped for more anatomically correct (hands instead of blocks!) and realistic looking character models and the storyline became a love story…or tried to become one…
If you thought I hated Cloud Strife, wait until you hear what I think of Squall. He’s a vapid, empty shell of a character whose catchphrase could arguably be “…” and whose emo-whining takes up every other opportunity he has to talk, yet, for some strange reason, Rinoa is strongly drawn to him. I’m gonna go out on a limb and compare it to the awkward, unbelievable romance portrayed in that mess of a movie, Twilight.
So we have a marionette of a main character, what should we do with the villain? Make her even less interesting and more of a motivation-less villain than Sephiroth was.
Ultimecia is some sort of time traveling witch from the future seeking to collapse time into one point. She posesses the body of the Sorceress Edea to accomplish this. Ultimecia hates SeeDs for some random reason. End of characterization.
There’s more to it than that, I think, but not much more. She’s just evil so that the good guys can have something to fight. Way to go Square, you guys really worked hard to make this one seem worth fighting…
Evil Rating:
She looks mean and hates us, but why?
2/10
Cool Rating:
Hotter than Kefka? In fact, the first female antagonist, if I’m not mistaken, so she gets brownie points for that.
6/10
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