In Final Fantasy VIII, there is a massive bridge spanning Galbadia continent to Esthar continent. It is totally impractical to build a bridge between continents, and it’s especially wild to think that Squall slung an unconscious Rinoa over his back and walked halfway across the bridge to get to Esthar. Phew!
But in reality, how long IS it? Is it really that impractical? Yes, yes it is.
First place to start: let’s assume the worlds of Final Fantasy VII and VIII are roughly the same size. This is gonna make it easier to figure out a rough size comparison, because people have actually tried to figure out the world dimensions in 7.
Our best clue, as explained on this forum thread, is an in-game sign that says Midgar is 51 miles from Kalm.
Marking up this world map from Neoseeker, the distance between Midgar and Kalm is about 49 pixels. That maps out to roughly 1.041 miles per pixel at this scale.
By the way, have you noticed that the world in Final Fantasy VII has a name (Gaia) but the Final Fantasy VIII world doesn’t? Bullshit. For the rest of this post I’m gonna refer to the planet from FFVIII as Super Happy World.
Now we’ll use this map of Super Happy World from the Final Fantasy wiki. I’ve cropped it in similar proportions to the Gaia map with a thin margin of water around the land1 and scaled to the same width…
This line is 154 pixels long, which comes out to 160.29 miles.
How long is that, exactly? Well, assuming Squall is walking 3 miles per hour with no sleep, and assuming his starting point at Fishermans Horizon is halfway across, it would take him about 27 hours to cross the bridge. That’s true love right there.
Now let’s compare it with a list of the longest bridges that span over water according to Wikipedia:
| Bridge name | Location | Length |
| Horizon Bridge | Super Happy World | 160.29 mi |
| Lake Pontchartrain Causeway | Louisiana, United States | 23.83 mi |
| Manchac Swamp Bridge | Louisiana, United States | 22.80 mi |
| Runyang Yangtze River Bridge | Jiangsu Province, China | 22.16 mi |
| Donghai Bridge | Shanghai to Yangshan Port, China | 20.2 mi |
Horizon Bridge is nearly 7x longer than any bridge ever built over water in the history of the earth.
- An earlier version of this post adjusted the map dimensions incorrectly and undercalculated the length of the bridge by 28 pixels. We regret the error. ↩︎