Defending Squall Leonhart

"I like sparring with my rival and dancing.  I'm a Virgo, too."

 

Did you play Final Fantasy VIII when it first came out?  Were you between the ages of 13 and 19?  Bonus question:  Was Final Fantasy VII the "game that got you back into video games"?

 

If you answered yes to all three of the above questions, you probably hated Final Fantasy VIII.  And at the time, you probably had some pretty good reasons that were further justified by the protesting masses of the internets:

 

The junction system SUCKS!

 

I hate drawing magic!

 

SeeD SUCKS!

 

This game is boring!

 

I don't want to play a "love story"!

 

The only good thing about this game is LAGUNA!  (Obviously not a complaint, but comes into play later.)

 

and of course, the big one...

 

Squall is the worst FF hero EVER! (Because he isn't Cloud...!)

 

No one liked Squall, the protagonist of Final Fantasy VIII.  He was whiny, had no friends and got his kicks by getting into fights with his rival and crying about it afterwards.  His favorite line in the game (both spoken and in his thoughts) was "...Whatever."  (Yes, it always included the ellipses beforehand.)  On the surface, he had a great thing going.  He lived away from home, he was good-looking, the master of an entirely ridiculous and apparently hard-to-use weapon (the GUNBLADE...yes, it is what you think it is...half-gun, half-sword), and he had a hot teacher who wanted to jump his bones.  And yet, he was still a little bitch.

 

The hot teacher

 

But I am here to tell you something that will either blow your mind or make you press the Back button on your browser to look for more Mass Effect porn fan fiction.

 

Final Fantasy VIII didn't suck as much as we thought it did.

 

In fact, Squall Leonhart is quite possibly the BEST Final Fantasy hero ever.

 

Squall Leonhart wasn't an asshole.  He was merely a product of his environment - which consisted entirely of assholes.  Yes, Squall wasn't the problem in Final Fantasy VIII.  It was every other damn character in the game that ruined his life and made him seem like a dick - including fan-favorite Laguna.

 

Before I go any further, spoilers are abound.  Got it?  Good.

 

So let's begin with Squall's personal life.  Orphaned at only days old, he and his adopted older sister Ellone were sent to an orphanage that was established to house the children who lost their families in the Sorceress War.  Squall stuck closely to his sister, who was well-loved by everyone, but otherwise was a pretty normal and shy kid.  But then one day, when Squall was around five or six, Ellone disappeared from the orphanage without a good-bye.  Crushed from being abandoned by the only person he ever loved, Squall became bitter and distanced himself from his peers, afraid of being heartbroken again. 

 

Squall was never adopted, and instead, the husband of the woman who ran the orphanage brought Squall to his...military school.  Oh boy.  That was a great idea, bringing a broken, loner kid into a military environment at the age of six, right?!  Well, it turns out that the orphanage ended up being a front where basically all the kids were either dumped into military school or assigned to a navy fleet, so with that we have Edea and Cid Kramer, some of the first assholes who ever graced young Squall's life.

 

Squall grows up in Balamb Garden, the elite military academy, and is a promising student, even admired by his peers.  He just strives to do his job and doesn't want to stand out.  He makes it a point not to be dependent on anyone else, and thus not be depended on. 

 

However, his instructor, Quistis Trepe, just will not leave him alone.  She constantly encourages him to open up to her, pushing the boundaries that a normal student, let alone a military student, would be uncomfortable with.  It turns out that Quistis is just toying with Squall to see if her feelings for him are as a teacher or something more...but she never just comes out with it.

 

At 17, Squall achieves the rank of SeeD, the mercenary force that Balamb Garden employs around the world.  This is the Garden's main form of income.

 

For his first mission, Squall is stuck in a squad with a too-peppy pyromaniac and the problem child from your 5th-grade class that needed to be hooked to an IV of Ritalin and reacted to everything with a fist pump.  They both spend their mission time either annoying Squall by jumping and dancing around him declaring how happy they are to be in SeeD, or by childishly demanding that he open train doors for them, take charge, etc.  It turns out that their first mission as SeeDs is to be the bitch of a small-town resistance group rebelling about the big, bad government that took them over.  The resistance group is run by a 17 year old girl appropriately nicknamed "The Princess", who basically starts belittling Squall's military lifestyle and attitude as soon as they meet, despite her being the one who hired him.  No one understands her struggle, her drive. Oh, and she is also the only child of the General of the Big Bad Government's army and her gorgey, perfect momma died in a car accident when she was a kid. 

 

Meet Squall's love interest, "The Princess" Rinoa.  Oh boy.

 

Hijinks ensue, and Squall ends up eventually teaming up with Quistis and another douche lord, Irvine Kinneas, who is supposed to be a sniper but doesn't actually shoot anyone in the game.  Balamb Garden is thrown into terrible danger by the actions of Squall's rival, Seifer, and eventually Garden's headmaster, Cid, just sort of gives up and tells Squall that he is in charge of defending the Garden, protecting all of the students who inhabit it, and still keeping an eye on his bitchy client who hired him.

 

Squall is 17.  He has probably been a SeeD for about a week at this point.  There are numerous students who have been SeeDs much longer and have far more military experience.  Hell, one of them, Quistis, is in your damn party.  But Cid decides that this is just a great idea and then disappears.  Does that not give Squall the right to be a little frustrated?  Does it not give Squall the right to throw a hissy fit on the command deck of Garden?  It turns out that Edea has decided to get possessed by an evil sorceress and tear shit up with Seifer at her side, and Cid didn't want to be put in the "awkward" position of killing his wife.  So he asked Squall to take care of it for him.  Cool.  He doesn't inform Squall that Edea is his wife until far later though.  Actually, Squall finds out on accident, and then gets even more distressed.  Good job.

 

Besides a team of selfish assholes who demand Squall make all the decisions of the group (seriously, the only dialogue your team members give you is "Do it Squall" or "Only you can do it, Squall!"), and a rival who hates your guts for absolutely NO reason, Squall really has no other contacts in the world at this point.  His disappearing sister, Ellone decides to make Squall pass out at random times to force his consciousness into the past (her special power) so that she can try to get him to change it.  When his consciousness is sent into the past, he takes the form of a soldier named Laguna who is basically an incompetent moron.  Squall begs her to stop doing this to him, and she only concedes after she figures out she can't change the damn past.  She never decides to reveal herself to him as "his" Ellone and she doesn't bother telling him that Laguna is - wait for it - his dad.

 

Squall has a dad?  Oh yeah, and he's quite alive and well.  In fact, Laguna is the president of the most advanced nation in their world.  Laguna basically abandoned Squall's mom on a chase to retrieve a kidnapped Ellone, without knowing that his mom, Raine, was pregnant.  Once he got Ellone, instead of going home with her, he sent her back to their village and decided to stay and run the country since they decided he would be a cool prez.  Ellone of course came back to a dying Raine, and then she and Squall were sent off to the orphanage.  While Ellone knew of Laguna's existence this whole time, no one bothered to tell Squall.  And yes, Laguna eventually became aware of Squall thanks to Ellone.  But instead of reaching out to his son, he decides to still just chill in Esthar.  Asses!

 

Eventually, Squall travels to Esthar to try to find a cure for Rinoa, who has fallen into a coma.  It is of course only after she practically dies that he decides he may have feelings for her, and she seemingly gets a little less bitchy.  He and Rinoa are shot into space, where she ends up going psycho under her possession by a sorceress and he watches helplessly as the whole base tries to kill the one other person in his life he could possibly put up with.  This happens a few other times in the game, too.  Rinoa becomes a sorceress, which means she is public enemy #1.  This ends up driving Squall a bit crazy.

 

In the end, the final battle resides in the future, where this crazy bitch sorceress Ultimecia behind all this mess has been trying to "compress time" so she can be the one and only ruler of existence.  That's all.  The ultimate motive behind the founding of Garden and SeeD was to hunt sorceresses (Cid let that factoid drop between when he decided to hand Garden over to Squall and when he told her his wife was a sorceress), so guess who gets roped into going into the future and destroying her?

 

Ultimecia just ends up throwing a lot of shade around and Squall kills her, because at this point he is just tired of being treated like a dick for being a SeeD. 

 

After a wicked-cool time-traveling sequence where Squall creates a time loop, the game ends and Squall ends up being the savior of the world, even though he really didn't want to and was basically forced into it.

 

Now isn't that so much more realistic and badass then say, silly little Cloud Strife who wants to fight to do the right thing and save the dying planet on behalf of the little flower girl who died and touched his emo heart?