Heroes Don't Need Plans

[Anzai]

That's actually one of my biggest pet peeves about story telling in general. Have a plan? Got your trout together? Oh, you are obviously a bad guy.

Ah yes, one of my most loathed parts of storytelling. Often enough it is practically expected for the 'heroes' to behave as complete imbeciles, and have everything fall into place for them.... Then be praised for their stupidity. While as VeloZer0 pointed, out anyone who is able to keep their thoughts together may as well be having a bright red flag with enlarged black text proclaiming 'I AM A VILLAIN' floating above their head.... As a planner myself, this trend is annoying when it comes to stories. It becomes outright infuriating with gaming which gives a feeling of the player doing the idiot hero's survival planning for him.

Snow's main problem wasn't his "no plan" attitude. The problem with Snow was that he was a smurfing idiot who wasn't punched nearly enough by Lightning. Seriously, half the main party is insufferable. And yeah, VIII did it differently, which is something I like about it a lot.

This is partly spite talking, but it's just sad that Lightning stopped at merely two punches.... Back on topic. Part of what I loved about FFVIII is that yes, they can actually plan! I always felt that the planning to assassinate Sorceress Edea alone put the game on a higher magnitude of organization compared to previous FFs.

Considering Forsaken Lover has gone far enough to call the planning 'beyond retarded', I must offer a rebuttal. For the sake of argument I'll be ignoring villainous plot armor or the anti-climax of things working out on disc 1. The failing point was not the plan being ignorant, otherwise they never would have made it up to infiltrating the area and trapping Edea during her parade... leaving the Sorceress a sitting duck. Hm, I can't recall all the types of ammunition in the game, but one with magic piercing properties doesn't come to mind... Given who we're dealing with that makes for an insufficient attempt at a killshot. Especially after Irvine choked to cost the operation the full element of surprise. The backup plan to brute force the situation actually went surprisingly well. Limit Breaks correspond to lowered HP as I recall, becoming most available in critical HP. Thus we can infer they at least gravely wounded Sorceress Edea.

So why back off? Assassinations are meant to be quick and dirty, annihilate the target before anyone can interfere. We could chalk it up to cut-scene incompetence, but I'd say the real problem was a severely wounded team leader and the impending horde of the Galbadian Military making an armed response to the assassination. Even with the inside job, ever since the gates went down it was a countdown to a trip to mookville followed by a guided tour to prison. While Squall was off in dreamland we no doubt missed any attempt at an extraction plan or another backup plan.