FFVIII completion + book roundup

[marmolita]

Hello I am here with two topics today: 1) I finished FFVIII! and 2) I read some books recently and have Thoughts(TM) and this really seems to be the best forum for posting these sort of thoughts!


First, FFVIII. I spent a while grinding magic so that my stats would be good enough to go into Ultimecia's castle, and eventually I got so bored of grinding I figured fuck it, we'll do it live. I spent a couple days doing the first few battles in the castle, following a guide from the internet because I do not have the patience to explore (and the first time I tried exploring, I didn't find ANY of the bosses I needed to fight, and instead found my wait straight to Ultimecia's door, oops).

Then the other day I did the last boss to unlock my powers, and checked the time. 8:15pm. Well, my kids' bedtime is 8:30, but I figured, I'll go find Ultimecia anyway, she's just going to kill me immediately on my first try (as happened with every other boss up until then).

However, she did not kill me on the first try. In fact, I killed her on my first try, and then we watched all the ending cutscenes, and I did not get my kids to bed until close to 9:30 because they stayed up watching it with me! So, here are some thoughts I had immediately upon completing the game:

• The ending is quite the experience and makes very little sense.
  
• The scene of Rinoa's introduction repeating with her face blurred and messed up freaked my kids out (and me as well).
  
• What exactly happened to Squall in time compression? Did he experience every possible timeline overlapping, and that's what the no-face Rinoa was about? And then he passed out? Very unclear, my kids thought he was dead.
  
• Why does Ultimecia have Griever? How did Squall get his Griever ring?
  
• Edea clearly knew Squall was the SeeD from the future so why does fandom talk like maybe it could've been Seifer and it just had to be a gunblader?
  
• If Edea was already a sorceress when she got Ultimecia's powers where did she get her own from? Why was she able to give all the power to Rinoa?
  
• Why is the last scene a big shot of the moon, as if we don't know the moon is still full of monsters!
  
  Anyway now I've been working on various fic for exchanges and for FFVIII bingo so we'll see what comes of it!
  
  
  Moving on, let's talk about some books.
  
  
  We'll start with the bad, Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros. This book was recommended to me by a friend who knows I like both fantasy and romance, and she said it was a page-turner, so I picked it up from the library. The description sounded similar to another series I'd read recently, The Aurelian Cycle by Rosaria Munda, which I had liked okay but felt it was a little clumsy in its attempt to deliver some sort of political message. The characters in The Aurelian Cycle were good and the worldbuilding was good and the writing was pretty good, it just went back and forth a lot between "revolutions to overthrow monarchs are good" and "actually maybe the monarchs were good for something" and "equality is good" and then "but even though they tried to make it equal they failed." I think, ultimately, the message of The Aurelian Cycle was "all forms of government suck, we can just try to make the next one suck less than the previous one," which is valid, but for a YA novel perhaps not necessarily going to make the impression intended.
  
  ANYWAY, that's not what I came to talk about. What I actually wanted to talk about was how Fourth Wing was almost the exact same setup but not as good. Also, how Fourth Wing is the rare book where I feel like it would have been a THOUSAND times better without the sex and romance, which is a weird thing coming from me, a person who has literally written a romance novel, and writes smutty fanfic on the regular. The problem with it is that the romance was done so clumsily, with no buildup of tension, and the sex felt like someone said, "Your book isn't sexy enough, put sex into it."
  
  It wants to be enemies to lovers, but given that when the "enemy" was introduced we got an entire paragraph telling us how blisteringly hot he is, there was no question he was the love interest. I predicted every single plot twist in the book waaaaay before it was coming, and I spent SO much time rolling my eyes at the ridiculous romance content. Which begs the question: why is this book so popular? I really don't know. The ACTUAL plot was pretty good, and the worldbuilding was interesting, so it's got that going for it, but The Aurelian Cycle was also pretty good on those points and without Fourth Wing's failings.
  
  In any case, I decided not to read the rest of the series on that one. And instead, I picked up...
  
  Scholomance, by Naomi Novik
  I just binge read this entire trilogy in like three days. Now THAT was a page-turner. I wasn't sure I was going to like it based on the description, but I got sucked in really fast and incredibly invested. Orion was 100000% blorbo bait for me and I definitely bit. The worldbuilding was excellent and the magic system was fascinating, and I really liked that there were plot twists that I did not see coming.
  
  The third book didn't quite pay off the way I had hoped it would? Like don't get me wrong, the plot was fascinating and the worldbuilding was fascinating and I was binge reading just as fast as the first two, but given how absolutely obsessed with Orion I became in the first two books, it was frustrating how much of a back seat he took in the third and how little agency he had. Still, though, I really enjoyed these and would absolutely recommend them any day.
  
  Note to authors: the way to Lita's heart is with a good guy who excels at murder.
  
  
  I probably have more to say about all of this, but I gotta go to my tang soo do class, so I am off!

Comments

[rionaleonhart]

Congratulations on finishing Final Fantasy VIII! The ending really is an experience. That time compression sequence is so unsettling.

Don't quote me on this, but I think what I've heard is that Ultimecia manifested Griever from Squall's imagination. She basically draws Griever from Squall's mind. The English text when you scan Griever is 'In Squall's mind, the strongest GF. Through Ultimecia's power, continues fighting without vanishing', which is a little unclear but would fit that interpretation.

I'm so glad your kids got invested in this game!