IX VS. VII and VIII

[Bolivar]

Of course not FF VII, but I'm not sure about VIII.

FF VII is one of the biggest selling games ever made.

However many fans of the game admit its because they though Sephiroth looks awesome.

Who? Who has actually stated "the only reason I liked FFVII is because I thought Sephiroth looked cool"? When I made a thread asking why people liked it, the #1 reason was STORY.

Point being, FF VII has those kind of sales because a lot of people are superficial. And again, not all the fans are like this, but there are a good number of them.

This is an attempt to explain why people cannot possibly have a different opinion than you do for legitimate reasons. The inability to relate to different people and perspectives is a clear indicator of underdevelopment as a human being.

And Vivisteiner, your points are duly noted. However, as sappy as the love between Squall and Rinoa was in FFVIII, the love story between Zidane and Garnet was IMMENSELY cornier. Okay, maybe that's an exaggeration, but I would still say it was cornier. That's what gets me about IX fans and self-proclaimed "old-schoolers", that everyone usually overlooks how IX prominently featured a love story, and it was at some times more unbearable than VIII's. The only difference is that it wasn't on the logo.

The problem people have with the Squall-Rinoa relationship is because they fit together like Paine fits with Rikku and Yuna...that is to say, any real person of Squall’s disposition would have strangled Rinoa in the first disk.

He goes through the second disk slowly but surely chipping away his solitary resolve but even during the Garden Battle against Galbadia he demonstrated a distinct lack of focus - He might have grown to care more about Rinoa but he didn’t put that above everything else.

But then...WABAM!
Disk 3 comes, she is in a coma and NOTHING else matters but him being with her.

Now Zidane and Garnet’s romance is much more smoothly integrated into the plot. Zidane plays the part of the flirty suitor and Garnet responds with a dignified distance. She isn’t outright harsh to his advances but she’s not receptive to them either.

However, as time goes by and each of the two develop, they grow closer and closer together. Zidane comes to realize Garnet is more than just a crush - she’s the woman of his dreams. Garnet comes to realize just because she’s destined to be Queen doesn’t mean she can’t rely on others.

Both Zidane and Garnet have to finish developing their own characters before their love story can reach its conclusion.

This fact is distincty lacking in FFVIII....Squall and Rinoa’s characters only evolve through the love story. Th elove story is not the peak of their progression...it’s the only way they do progress. You wind up with two characters who have distincty less personality than Zidane and Garnet who both perfected their progression before they truly “got together” if you will.

And your connection to the stages of grief/depression was very interesting, I give you points for that. But c'mon, for Zidane to be all cocky and defiant, then all of a sudden turn into Mr. Self-Loathing, even being mean to Vivi and Eiko, then all of a sudden being Mr. Upbeat again, it was all very unbelievable,

He wasn’t cocky. He was pissed off and confused. Confusion and sadness often spawn anger...Garland was the person Zidane could dump all his rage on. He spend shis entire time in Bran Bai confused and angry, walking passed the other characters in a sort of daze. He finally gets the dreadful truth revealed to him and of course responds to it by getting pissed off.

But to add to all of it, the reason why he goes back to Mr. Positivity, is because he's reminded of his friends!!! Awww, isn't that special...

Kinda like Cloud in the Lifestream? Kinda like the only thing that could keep Squall and the others together through time was love and togetherness?

Again, IX is one of my favorite games of all time, not just FF, but make no mistake, this is the Walt Disney installment of the franchise.

Tell me, in what Walt Disney production did you see a war-torn city with a girl wandering around asking where her parents are? See a woman moving around, asking who is there because her eyes had been burned out? How about untold scores of people getting vaporized or eaten by eidolons?
More people are killed in FFIX than any of the other FFs short of maybe FFVI.

First off, the argument can go either way about the two games, but the loves story was featured prominently in both. I'm not going to try to put up an argument about VIII's, but I will say that the game makes it clear from the very beginning that Squall is a character who says one thing but thinks another.

Also, I can understand how you might think Zidane/Garland scene is believable, but the facts clearly go the other way to me. Up until the point the screen went black, Zidane had been acting the same way he had throughout the entire game, defiant and sarcastic to the bad guys, then all of a sudden he starts asking questions.

And I just wanted to mention, Cloud got out of the lifestream when he finally "found" himself and, as MLK would say, the truth set him "free". And yes, in VIII they needed the power of love and friendship to stay together at the end, but that worked, because Laguna was a corny guy.

Finally, I just want to say that your standards for defining a child's movie/game are ungrounded. PLENTY of dark moments happen in Disney movies, Bambi's mother dies, and that was pretty damn sad.

Your kill counts are a little off, too. More people died in the Shinra building than in the entire game of FFVI. Sorry, I had to get that out.