Maybe I'm a Lion

*Spoiler Alert* Warning: The following contains major spoilers from Final Fantasy VIII. Considering that the game was released in 1999, I think we're probably in the clear.

A couple months ago, I got the urge to replay Final Fantasy VIII. I made it less than an hour into the game before I realized I was too busy for it. I wanted a refresher on the story, but I also just wanted to experience the gameplay again. Alas, I settled for watching the walkthrough on YouTube and just reminiscing. Instead of replaying it, I just watched it like a movie and skimmed the strategy guide for nostalgia's sake.

I was going to blog for my birthday in July, but time got away from me. Again. Anyway, I turned thirty-one, with no fanfare whatsoever. Just another year older.

It's no secret that I've been plagued by existentialism for a while now. I believe that has more to do with my environment than with getting older. But my environment is age itself. The long nights watching over a wealthy retirement community, with no one to talk to, and without even sunlight to keep me company. Escorting EMS whenever someone falls down, has trouble breathing, or experiences chest pains. Escorting funeral services when need be. No, it's not that I feel old... it's that I'm over-exposed to the scenes that await us all one day... pondering how I've spent my time thus far, and what I have left to accomplish in this mortal coil...

So as I've been watching the epic story of Final Fantasy VIII unfold on YouTube, and especially around my birthday, I have been thinking back to my younger Self, the one who played this game the first time, in 1999.

You see, the story of FFVIII revolves around six characters, all either seventeen or eighteen years old...

You know what? The plot is waaayyy too complex to summarize. I tried, and it sounded jumbled and rambling, so I deleted those paragraphs. Let me put it in an extreme nutshell: after layers of revelations and twists, it is revealed that what's really going on is that Sorceress Ultimecia from the distant future has been projecting herself back in time, possessing other Sorceresses in order to find a young woman named Ellone, the MacGuffin of the story, whose unique ability to send people's consciousnesses back in time can allow Ultimecia to travel even further back, where she can achieve Time Compression, a mind-bending dimension in which only she can possibly exist, where she can then reshape the universe according to her will. (All Final Fantasy games seem to involve a main villain whose ultimate goal is to erase existence itself as we know it.)

The characters use the symbiotic entities known as Guardian Forces (GFs) to "junction" their abilities, which is where they get magic, etc. The price for using GFs' powers over the long term is a gradual form of amnesia. Therefore, these teenagers don't remember until later in the story that they were all students at the same orphanage as each other, as well as Ellone.

At the start of the game, the characters are all student mercenaries (called SeeDs, though I never understood why the "D" is capitalized) at one of three Gardens, institutions that lend their services basically to bide their time until fulfilling their destiny of defeating the Sorceress. And so it is that the Garden's SeeDs grow into great warriors with their junctioned Guardian Forces.

Looking back, actually, there are a lot of parallels to the story of Harry Potter. But that could be an essay in itself.

Squall Leonhart, the main character, is stoic and detached. Over time, we find out that his cold and distant personality is a defense mechanism resulting from abandonment issues; when they were all toddlers at the orphanage, Ellone was taken from their company and placed into the protective custody of the White SeeDs so the Sorceress couldn't find her. Everyone had looked up to the slightly older Ellone as a big sister of sorts, though Squall was much more profoundly affected by her disappearance than were the others.

The story actually has a lot of heart. A lot of yearning, wondering, and a prominent theme of friendship. For a video game, it could be very touching at times. Of course, now they're all basically interactive films, but this was 1999. It had a pretty darn good script for 1999. While this was before incorporating voice actors, this was one of the first games to use motion-capture technology for many of the cutscenes.

There's also a pretty well-told love story, and I'm leaving out a ton of significant points, but...

In the end, the six main characters (with the help of several other forces) put the pieces into place to lure Ultimecia into executing the steps in her plan, but interrupt the process before Time Compression can be completed. In this bizarre limbo world, they find, confront, and defeat Ultimecia. For each of them to return to their own time, they had previously agreed on a reunion time and place to focus their thoughts and feelings on: the orphanage, present-day. They all disappear from the destabilizing Time Compression, but Squall misses the mark a bit. He instead turns up shortly after Ellone's departure from the orphanage, and meets himself as a young child.

By this point, seventeen-year-old Squall had finally come out of his shell, fallen in love with Rinoa, and embraced the friendship of the other SeeDs. There's more to it than this, of course, but basically Squall has a chance to tell his younger self something--anything--but doesn't. He could have reassured his childhood self that things will turn out okay, could have told him not to give in to loneliness and despair, but he doesn't. He doesn't change a thing. Because he knows that everything already did turn out okay. Now, he just has to get home to the right time before the window of opportunity closes. He doesn't spare his younger self any pain, because all's well that ends well.

Something about that scene is very touching and thought-provoking, but then again I've always had a thing for time travel.

As for myself, I've been thinking a lot about 1999-2000 lately. The younger Me from my freshman year in college. So full of naive idealism, so full of energy and vitality and zeal and...

I want that feeling back. Things have become progressively cynical and hopeless the past several years, and I want to rekindle the spirit of being eighteen again, with the whole world ahead of me but with the maturity and wisdom of being in my thirties.

Back then, the world was my oyster. The sky was bluer, the air fresher, the grass greener, every note of music somehow more succulent. I know it's "just a game," but I listen to the soundtrack of Final Fantasy VIII perennially (although especially in April, for that refreshing spring flavor) and try to rejuvenate my attitude.

I keep reflecting on the "then-and-now" of myself as Squall's age, when I first played the game in 1999-2000, to the me of the present. How are we different? And which of those differences are improvements and which are not?

So, if I encountered the 1999-2000 me, what might I say to him? That's a real thinker. It's something I've been thinking about a lot lately. Would I just do as Squall did, and leave everything unsaid, in good faith that everything turned out all right after all?

Yes, Final Fantasy VIII is just a video game, so it may seem fatuous and nerd-ish of me to wax sentimental about it, but the story does have a few elements well worth taking to heart. And, for me, the soundtrack will always be a distillation of eighteen-year-old vitality, back when the sky was bluer. It was a slow night at work, so I was able to goof off: I got on YouTube, and tonight I finally finished watching it (it's very, very long).

It's not just another episode of Tim's Mindless Nostalgic Indulgence. I'm thinking about what I would say to my younger self if I came out of Time Compression and met him. I'm thinking about how to fix a broken and dispirited future, not relive a bygone, glorious past.

No more staring into the abyss. No more pondering the elderly I see every night. Tonight, I empower us all to be young and awesome. Be spirited.

Be a lion.