By imperial decree, your humble artisan presents a metacritical reaction to Gam Dove’s criticism of Final Fantasy VIII. If you want to help steer the ship of our virtual state, join the Patreon now.

ALERT LEVEL 2: Widely known spoilers for a 25-year-old game ahead …

Pop culture oracle Game Dove took it upon herself to read Final Fantasy VIII like a Triple Triad tarot on YouTube. In her video, Game Dove accuses FFVIII of lying to its players—about its villain, its setting, its stakes, and most of all, its core premise. But while the video makes some sharp observations about the contradictions baked into the game’s world, it draws all the wrong conclusions from them.

The problem isn't that FFVIII lies. The problem is that Late Moderns expect our truth hand-delivered, prepackaged in empirical rigor and psychological realism. What too many players have missed is that Final Fantasy VIII doesn’t operate on those terms. So it doesn’t lie, it operates the way myth does: through symbol, recursion, and revelation.

What Game Dove fails to see is that the deepest revelation in Final Fantasy VIII is not that “Garden is a failure.” It's that Squall succeeds precisely by rejecting the false structures of Garden and embracing the foundational reality that undergirds all true heroism: sacrificial love.

Game Dove wants to argue that Garden failed because it tried to shape Squall into a vessel for its preconceived notions of heroism, but its methods were manipulative, its teachers inept, and its mission obscured by deception.

Fair enough. Sid Kramer isn’t exactly Obi-Wan Kenobi. He doesn’t guide; he abandons. He doesn't prepare; he orchestrates and then vanishes. Garden is a military-industrial daycare center whose primary export is emotionally stunted teen mercenaries.

But that's not a flaw; it’s the point.

Garden is portrayed as a failed institution because it reflects our failed institutions. The player isn’t meant to trust it. The manipulations, the secrecy, the exploitation of child soldiers, the use of GF-induced amnesia: All of it mirrors our world, where Prussian model state education chews up the young to serve ends they don't understand and aren’t told.

Modernity has no knights, only functionaries.

Game Dove criticizes Garden for using lies to maintain control. But again, what modern institution doesn’t? Governments, schools, media, and corporations all do the same. Final Fantasy VIII isn’t lying to the player. It’s exposing the lies we take for granted.

Squall’s arc is often misunderstood because it doesn’t follow the tidy flow chart of the Hero’s Journey™. He doesn't “grow” so much as collapse inward, get reassembled by love, and reemerge. That’s no mere literary progression. It’s crucifixion and resurrection.

Game Dove notices that Squall only succeeds when he abandons Garden’s mission, but this isn’t an indictment of Squall’s destiny. It’s a refinement of it.

Like Frodo bearing the Ring, Squall must suffer alienation, confusion, and disillusionment before he’s even capable of making a choice that matters. Garden didn’t prepare him to be a hero. It made him desperate enough to look for something real.

And what he finds is Rinoa.

Game Dove mocks the “power of love” angle, but mockery doesn’t refute the fact that it works. Squall doesn’t become a leader because he studies tactics or takes command. He becomes a leader when he decides, for the first time, that someone else’s well-being matters more than his own pain.

Again, Modern audiences are conditioned to expect the hero to rise from the midpoint slump by obtaining some piece of knowledge he needs to win. So they’re understandably confused by what Squall does. Instead of being told some game-winning piece of information, he undergoes a moral transformation.

That crucial element is what gives FFVIII the second-best story in the series to my reckoning. The central conflict isn’t defused by learning and applying a technique; it’s resolved by one character enterting into relationship with another. Squall doesn’t save the world because he’s a student. He saves it because he stops being one. He steps outside the systems that failed him, takes up his cross, and follows the only path that’s ever saved anyone: love, even unto death.

Game Dove also raises the idea that Squall is destined to defeat Ultimecia, and that this renders Garden irrelevant. That’s another misread.

Destiny in Final Fantasy VIII isn’t a prophecy. It’s a prison. The time loop that begins with Ultimecia’s fall and ends with Edea founding Garden is the game’s real main antagonist. It’s not that Garden enables Squall’s victory. It guarantees the next Ultimecia.

By training children as weapons, erasing their memories, and encouraging their detachment from human relationships, Garden produces Ultimecias. And every time Squall fulfills his “destiny,” the loop closes again. That’s why the final scene doesn’t show the defeat of evil in some apocalyptic confrontation, but Squall smiling at Rinoa under the stars. That moment isn’t sentimental. It’s eschatological.

Because only love breaks the loop.

Game Dove briefly comments on Seifer, but again she misses the mythic overtones. Seifer isn’t a failed student. He’s the knight who serves the wrong queen. He’s Percival in reverse: faithful, powerful, but misled. In another world, he would’ve been the hero. In this one, he’s the tragedy that underscores Squall’s triumph.

Seifer is what Garden creates when its students accept their roles without questioning the system. Squall is what you get when one of them doesn’t. Seifer has the strength to overthrow nations, but not the heart to resist evil. That’s the warning the game offers its audience: Institutions will mold you into the perfect servant of power unless you choose to love instead.

Game Dove’s conclusion—that FFVIII keeps secrets because it’s lying—is half right. The game is full of secrets, but it’s not lying; it’s inviting.

This is not a game to be understood in linear, purely rational terms. It’s a vision of time and fate viewed through the warped lens of broken systems and redeemed by moments of grace.

In other words, FFVIII may be the most “demoralized Japanese salaryman unwittingly crying to Christ for salvation from bugman materialism” game ever made.

Final Fantasy VIII is confusing to Late Moderns because the world it describes is confusing; just like modern adolescence. But it’s hopeful for the same reason: because grace is mediated, not through systems, but by persons. Squall defeats Ultimecia not because he masters Garden’s techniques or because he fulfills a prophecy, but because he refuses to become what the system made him.

He saves the world by becoming more authentically human.

And that, not power levels or plot twists, is the deepest truth FFVIII has to offer.

But you be the judge. Watch Game Dove’s video here: