I like frogs

Although I am more inclined to talk about myself than any other important issues in the world, self-centered little prig that I am, I am sure that you have all been waiting for me to wield the mighty powers of my incredibly useful English degree in order to write highly educational seminars on grammar, punctuation and sentence structure via my blogs!

Congratulations my friends, foes and unassuming passerbys! Today is the day that you have been waiting for!!!!

Let's talk about [B]ellipsis[/B]!

Ellipsis have two main functions, three if you count the third.

Function 1: Trail off.
If you are writing about somebody who is drunk or about to fall asleep or something, he might say something like, "Garland used to be a good knight until..." And then it can be presumed that the rest of the story is either too boring to finish or too irrelevant to continue to explain to the reader.

Function 2: Short-cut designed to leave out information that is either irrelevant or redundant.
If you are reading a story and one character is recalling details of an event that have already been well explained or established, a character might say, "Garland used to be a good knight until..." And then it can be presumed that the character will reveal no new information. The reader already knows exactly when Garland turned into a bad knight and precisely which event triggered that conversion.

Function 3: In text citation. Same as 2, essentially, but for academic purposes. This isn't relevant to Final Fantasy. It should be banished from this web page.

Anyway... <improper use of ellipsis
WHAT THE HECK MAN? What in the world is it that caused Garland to become a bad knight? It's the whole reason all the disasters of Final Fantasy came about! How is that such a snore that it makes some Conerian scholar nod off? How has it already been explained? What? Is it that four chumps washed up on shore all naked and carrying dull circles? Is that what did it?
Nothing drives me to the edge like a misused ellipsis because, as we can all see quite clearly, it can cause an otherwise perfect storyline to collapse into confusion and mystery that lasts for the rest of time and sequels!

And so it has come to pass that this is the greatest line in Final Fantasy and, possibly, any RPG ever made!
Because the game's plot is both well explained, well embedded in mystery and a perfect mixture of complexity and simplicity, that tantalizing mystery has served as a catalyst for the imagination of every player who truly appreciates Final Fantasy for what it is - a real-time interactive fanfic.
Er... I think.

Most players have their own ideas about Garland and Chaos and the turn to the dark side. We all agree that the Light Warriors were prophecized to stop it all, but we all keep the cause of Garland's hatred to ourselves. That part of the plot is ours. Our little secret. Our personal fantasy within Final Fantasy. And it is for that reason that none of the other Final Fantasy games will ever measure up to the first. The other games are completed by writers; their stories are perfectly intact, and the elements that come together to make up the plot will always have trite elements that make us grimace with distaste.
Final Fantasy itself, the one without a number, is perfect. It is perfect for all of us because we all understand it because we all wrote it. Garland's hatred speaks for the hatred we all feel, the forces that have imprisoned us, that drive us to our own personal insanity, that we long so much for a hero to come and destroy. We want our orbs to shine! We want to be free of our Fiends, yet everything we do is painstakingly designed to fight against the thing that we desire most.
How hurt and tortured was Garland that he chose an immortal life trapped in a time loop over freedom and humanity?
Did Princess Sara break his heart?
Did he accidentally discover the dark orb and become a slave to the power of the Fiends when he overconfidently ventured into a rundown temple north or Coneria?
The man was as strong as an ogre and, as far as his sprite can tell us, didn't need weapons to waste a black mage with a single critical hit; could he have simply become disenchanted with life in the castle? Was his transformation a result of letting anger take control of his heart (like Anakin Skywalker, if you must have an example).
Or are all the Final Fantasy worlds the same? Was he merely a tool used by a lopsided universal ying/yang, a physical reaction occurring as naturally as a plant going to seed in order to equalize the powers of good and evil in the world?

I don't know.