Quote Originally Posted by sora_lion_heart View Post

I don't see this. Although I agree that it was stupid to have them all grow up together and not remember, there was plot a good twist.

It tells how they were raised and accepted into SeeDs. It explains further about the use of GF's and we get very little information about them except they are good for winning battles. It explains the transformed Matron to Edea and not leave us with how the heck did she know Cid. Also it added that Matron wasn't bad it was Ultimecia. People misunderstood that part as it was such a rush into a background. It also gives a good incentive as to the past, Squall and Raine, Seifer and Zell and so much more. If you are looking at how does this tie into the earlier parts of the game, you got it. It unravels all about the past. If you are wondering how it effects the game afterwards, it does that too. It shows Ultimecia controling Edea from a different time (the future). It leads to the time lapse and where you go far into the future.
Except you really don't learn anything new about the party except they knew each other back then. All the supporting cast is pretty much exactly the same as they are as adults. Seifer picks on Zell, Irvine has a crush on Selphie, Quistis is a rule nazi, and Squall dresses like Charlie Brown and whines about Ellone. Of anything only Squall gets any real fair treatment from the flashbacks of their childhoods, the rest of the cast are non-entities. Hell the only thing important about Edea's revelation is you find out the supposed villain is connected to the party to cause some badly written drama that is quickly thrown out the window since your party decides to take her out anyway. The Edea=Matron twist is just to make some silly angsty drama for the party that actually doesn't change anything in the story and barely registers for the characters growth. Especially since Squall seemed to be the least bothered by the whole deal.

The thing is, the whole revelation could be cut out and it would not actually affect the story as a whole. The party dynamics mostly stayed the same after the revelation and the whole GF things is completely dropped. Edea could have easily been just a poor hapless victim with no connection to the party and it really wouldn't have made a difference cause the scene in question does nothing to foreshadow Ultimecia as much as it simply foreshadows that we don't have the whole story on Edea and that frankly was an obvious element from the get go of her introduction. The whole scene is created to give a BS connection between the party and an excuse to try to get the player to feel conflicted. It comes and then disappears and no one talks about it again. No explanation as to what people have been doing since the orphanage closed and many of them moved to Garden, it didn't change party dynamics cause everyone is basically a carbon copy of their past selves except Squall, nor does the story ever try to play with the idea of the GFs stealing your memories.

They are all plot elements loosely hinted to and dropped after their revelation cause the whole thing was basically a terribly ploy to get some cheap emotion out of the player and lace the plot with silly soap opera drama that didn't need to be there. The whole scene feels like an episode of "All My Circuits"