I realized recently that I really enjoy apocalyptic fiction. Not post-apocalyptic, where everything is destroyed and you’re rummaging around for nails and bug meat or whatever is supposed to be fun about Fallout. I mean apocalyptic, the time when the apocalypse is actually happening, when the boundaries and laws of the world are in mid-collapse and everyone is figuring out how to fight it or adapt to it.
There’s a lot of examples I could point to, but the moment that stands out for me was in 2012, when Mass Effect 3 and The Dark Knight Rises dropped within a few months of each other. I remember, as a twentysomething staying up far too late at a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises, thinking “This feels kinda like Mass Effect 3” when the bridges around Gotham were detonated and the heroes seemed to have actually lost this time.
There’s something compelling to me about the idea of watching everything fall apart (in fiction!). Under a state of extreme urgency, everyone’s priorities and values get crystallized. It makes for an absolutely crackling story as every character and organization chooses their hills to die on. I think that’s why I enjoyed Mass Effect 3 so much even though I know it got a lot of hate: We’d had 80 hours of people lining up their values and feelings; the third game in the series was 40 hours of knocking all those dominoes down and forcing our characters to show growth or eat it.
There’s a lot of stories like this, arguably most disaster movies. Final Fantasy VIII is ALMOST one of those stories, but we show up a couple hours too late.
After Time Compression happens at the start of Disc 4, we’re whisked into the nightmarish future world where Ultimecia reigns supreme, the world has been torn to pieces, and SeeD has finally been defeated. We got only a glimpse of it, but the cliffs outside the old orphanage are littered with the corpses of White SeeD members who tried to stop Ultimecia but failed.
I want to hear more about that story! This is the ultimate mission that the squad of elegant men was established for. I want to see what Ultimecia’s reign of terror looked like. I want to see the last stand of the SeeDs like it’s the fucking Reapers attacking London. Was Balamb Garden still around at this point? Are we talking a hundred years? A thousand? A million?
And more than that, it has thematic importance for the story! Squall has a line about how they’re “fighting across generations,” which is SUCH an evocative idea that ties into the rest of the game. FF8 is more obviously a game about love across generations, and now at the end of all things, it’s also a story about a battle that unfolds across potentially hundreds of years, all centering here on an abandoned orphanage that has a surprisingly important role in the fate of the universe. There’s something so rich that could’ve been done here. The game rhymes across every timeline.
Ultimately (Ultimecialy), I think it’s for the best that we don’t have too much in the way of expanded universe lore dumps for FF8. After all, this is a single screen of the game and it was interesting enough to prompt an entire post about it! It is okay for things to live in our imagination rather than getting, I dunno, an entire OVA about where Ultimecia’s name came from. But I am so, so curious about what the bad alternate future in FF8 looks like.