Quote Originally Posted by The Crystal View Post

That's what I meant, but it seems you missed my point. I wasn't talking about the escalation in conflict, but the plot-twist that comes out of nowhere at the end of the story, and the confusing time-travel/loop aspect.
Many FFs have those things, so it's not fair to blame only FFVIII for it.
I don't consider the other FFs to be nearly as bad (well IV is really guilty of this so VIII isn't really alone and XIII is just plain... bad) but I really felt VIII did it in a way where it just felt half asses. Other games have bad plot points but often or not its just poorly executed or its a scene that should be taken more for comical reason. VIII is pretty much poor execution and just head scratching "wtf?!" moments. Its all still very entertaining, I was never bored but I never was able to take the game serious anymore after the second disc because the plot just spiraled down towards absurdity imo.

Other games pull some really stupid plot twist here and there but VIII was the one that tended to do it early and often compared to a majority of the FF games.

And the game does explain why TC is important to Ultimecia and why she felt the need to do it. It's all there, in Ultimecia/Edea's speech in Galbadia, Odine and Laguna's explanation about TC, and the Scan you can use on her during the final battle.
I should have made that more clear. I know its important cause she basically wants to conquer everything and become a god, but the game gives no real inclination as to why. Ex-Death is a malevolent incarnation of man's evil and wants to use the Void to rule the cosmos, Ghestahl wanted world domination, Sephiroth felt it was his birthright to become a god, Kuja wanted to defeat Garland, and so on and so forth.

Ultimecia basically shows up and says she's going to compress time to become a god but there is no reason as to why. Even Ex-Death has a logical reason to do the crap he does, even if his Freudian excuse is simply that he is irredeemably evil. Ultimecia lacks any real backstory, and while I feel that Dark Bahamut has come up with a decent idea for why she is the way she is and in fact makes her quite sympathetic, I must point out that the evidence is circumstantial at best and heavily needs for the interpretor to look at her dialogue from a sympathetic "victim" standpoint.

On the other hand, I feel you can also look at it simply as the "I R EVIL" speech it does come across. Her speaking of persecution always gave me the opinion she was simply speaking of it in a casual manner, not in the "You persecuted me specifically" and more of a "you persecuted sorceresses, my people". Because of this, I am skeptical of any theory of her motive being revenge or self-preservation as I feel she is far too narcissistic and arrogant to be doing her actions to save herself from some threat, especially when her dialogue shows over and over again, that she pretty much considers everything around her to be dirt.

Though I am not one to count a spin-off title as canon, Ultimecia in Dissidia does give her personal reason for TC, and it was simply because she wanted to be a god, worshiped forever by her frozen domain. I feel this better reflects what we see in VIII. That she was simply an atypical megalomaniac with a god-complex, who just happened to have a time theme. There is very little justification for TC as she really doesn't have much of a defined motive. She wants to become a god? Fine but why? and why would TC be the option and how the hell did she discover or create the notion to even do TC, how does she even start? Every question just leads to another question and just shows that none of this was really thought out or the writer just assumed the player wouldn't care.