If you pick Magus, you are a loser

[RedPouch]

Re: Zeal Conversation
What I got out of his statements at the beginning of the fight was:
- He doesn't consider Zeal to be a mother to him
- He has utter contempt for her, and sees her as trash
What more would you expect him to think about her? That would be what I would expect him to be thinking. Having him explain to her how she made him feel would be extremely out of character.

That's a really black & white notion of how the conversation could go. Seriously, there's so much more that could have been done with that and beyond. I find his rather dull and uninteresting dialogue to be the result of weak writing and/or laziness. However I'm told that Magus' character actually is shown to have more attachment to his mother in the Japanese version and that more interesting dialogue ensued, but of course we don't get to see that.

W/o tabs and hitting the magic cap Dark Matter and Flare do near identical damage, and Magus's Fire 2 will do ~140% of the damage of Lucca's.
Also note that Flare has a very low multiplier compared to Luminaire, to keep the spell balanced against Lucca's high magic stat much like Magus & Dark Matter.

Yes, I know this. I don't mean to be rude but I've basically already stated this twice...

First disclaimer is that in line with my general displeasure with FFVIII I haven't played it through since it first came out like 10 years ago, so any finer plot details I may be a little off.
At the start of the game he has many thoughts along the line of 'good and evil are only a matter of perspective', and a generally very logical and balanced world view (imo). However, after Rinoa comes on to the scene all of a sudden he just seems to get so stupid. That scene where the two gardens are fighting and he abandons his post of commanding the whole show to go save a girl. When that happened I just wanted to quit the game because I didn't want to be an accessory to it. Combine that with the jumping out to space with no hope of return and a myriad of other crap I don't remember and you have a character I really don't like in the least. Now, having an impulsive love-struck character isn't exactly a new idea, and I usually don't like them for that matter. But what makes Squall so unbearable to me is that in the start of the game he was a character I liked and identified with, and in the end he was a character I disliked strongly.
Of course this isn't happening in a complete vacuum. It is a common character cliche that the tough, quiet logical one becomes the love struck idiot. It seems like at this point it's just a generally accepted fact. I am what would typically be classified as a 'tough, quiet logical one', and the prevailing attitude that I will just 'meet the right person' or 'grow out of it' is something I am sick and tired of. And when I see a character that is this attitude personified, well I tend to have a very violent reaction. (As you can see for me this is something that has a lot of baggage.)

Haha. This basically sounds like how I feel about Magus. Still, feelings of love and affection can open new doors and change some people. Granted it's an overused cliche, but it's not recycled anymore than Magus-like characters. Either way, both to me are poorly written characters taken from an archetype recipe book that some idiot in japan purchased for the equivalent of $10 USD.

I'm getting SO4 soon, I'll be sure to make a thread propping him up as soon as I know who he is

Well he's just as expected, uninteresting and poorly-written as any other Magus-type character in these JRPG/anime genres, except he strangely has less development than Magus despite the fact that SO4 is a modern game [go figure on that one]. I imagine that a legion of fanboys are lining up to boast Arumat's "badassness" as we speak or have already done so just because he has [wait for it!] long, white hair, acts cold, talks down to others, and hey, even wields a scythe! Oh, and he's also riven by inner tragedy with a depressing past and vows to avenge it in some manner. Can't forget that one. That one will "surely" make him more of an interesting character. I guarantee that this character is the primary factor that made any money for Tri-Ace through SO4.