Are the cast of FF8 annoying or relastic?

Well really if anyone was put in that situation they world complain alot teens or not but I didn't fine that they whined alot not for me to get annoyed

But would we really want them to be robots? I like it when characters get annoyed in storylines it brings out there character what they are like. I would be really bored if all of them found it all easy and didn't worry at all.
 
The sad truth is that most teenagers are whiny and annoying. We've all been there at one point in our lives.

Not only was the dialogue in FFVIII irritating at times (E.g. Squall’s constant “whatever” conundrum), but the characters were borderline stupid at times. To this day I become slightly annoyed when I reach the Delling City mission and Quistis decides to
completely abandon her post during a slightly important assassination plot in order to say “I’m sorry” and clear her conscience.
. I mean, wtf.

Not only that, but the creaters got a little bit lazy early on in character development. I mean...every character with the exception of Rinoa has the exact same story. o_O
 
Umm...a little behind realistic and annoying. All of them have realistic characteristics. I felt that, as much as I friggin' adore her, Quistis had the most unrealistic personality, oh and Zell.

Now I gotta play FF8 again. Happy now OP? :C
 
I think, when it comes to video games like Final Fantasy, 'realism' takes a back seat out of necessity and calls in it's bastard child: fidelity (or if you want to use the joke term some authors use, the axiom of appearing to be true).

For FF8, I always interpreted the characters and their development as the developers' intention to tell a story through psychology rather than outright talk about it. These characters are all teenagers and essentially, with the exception of Rinoa, are child soldiers.

When I first played the game it wasn't obvious but when I got a bit older and replayed it, the fact sank in and I was downright horrified. It explains so much about them that it was scary. These characters were all kids plucked out of childhood and trained to be soldiers. We're talking a lot of psychological conditioning here. When you look at it like that, something like Selphie's optimism and cheerfulness isn't just her personality--it's obviously a defense mechanism her brain threw up to deal with the situation.

The same goes with Squall's aloofness. The game specifically hammers it to your face that he ISN'T really a cold jerk. He's a sad, confused kid who's expected to behave like an adult and he doesn't know how. I always thought Squall was behaving the way a kid thinks an adult behaves. He's mostly silent because he doesn't have something to say or he doesn't think what he has to say is right. The game shows us what he's thinking but he isn't saying them--like any kid his age.

I know for sure that I never talked about what I thought when I was 17. I didn't think people would take me seriously because I was a kid.

And of course they occasionally act stupid--they're teenagers, that's what they're supposed to do. I'd think they were unrealistic if they weren't stupid. Stuff like Quistis abandoning her post or Rinoa going to meet the sorceress in Deling, or even Irvine choking up like a n00b are far more realistic reactions than if they all just did things right and the plan went perfectly.

You see, the plan laid out was very good and would've likely succeeded--if the agents involved were adults. Calculating, trained, mature and stable adults. People who've done things like this before, who know how to work under pressure and have experience in controlling their feelings. Instead, the characters we played were teenagers, most of which were only on their second mission--one of which wasn't even an official agent, just a student, and the other was not even ever in the military. They very nearly bungled it because they got nervous, frightened and borderline stupid.

Exactly like teenagers would be in any situation that demands a cool head.

For me, that's fidelity. The developers preferred to stay true to the essence of them being teenagers thrust into a situation that is supposedly the field of adults, and have them be a little stupid, rather than make them over-competent. It'd be completely un-realistic if they had pulled it off without a hitch.

And them being teenagers and not having fully been 'broken into' the regime of keeping emotions out of the equation when dealing with things so weird, explains their interactions and how they progress through the story. Frankly, in certain places they're all fumbling through the story because they're not sure. They're trained and able to look out for themselves but they're inexperienced and lacking in confidence.

They're caught between adulthood and childhood and that's a wonderful portrayal of what teenage years feel like. It's a clusterfuck, it makes you into a stupid, whiny, immature person who doesn't know what they're doing half the time, and anyone who says they were never like that is likely lying.

And you also have to keep in mind that these characters, Squall especially, have been through some emotional training. They've learned a lot about war and tactics and fighting and survival...but how much do they know about life? They all have naive notions of 'everything will be ok' or that things are simple and the game constantly hammers them with the reality that no...things aren't ok and one problem follows the other and you have to deal with that.

Squall in particular has always struck me as being emotionally ruined. He's been dealing with grief in all the wrong ways, isolating himself from others and evidently his focus on his training has made things worse. He's a typical child soldier, unable to function in society as anything but a soldier. It's made painfully obvious when his feelings for Rinoa start getting obvious.

Seriously, he doesn't know what to do with them.

It's one thing to be in love for the first time and be completely and utterly awkward like most teens are. It's quite another to not even understand that you're in love--or even just crushing on someone because your emotions have been in the 'off' setting for several years. It took Rinoa going into a coma for Squall to realize just what his feelings meant and I'd say pretty safely it him him like an anvil.

Which made him act like a stupid idiot--exactly like a teenager would do if he'd had a personal Blue-Screen-of-Death moment.

So to conclude my wall-of-text opinion, you have to take this stupidity of the characters as part of their realism. It's what makes them realistic. It feels annoying because you understand that it's realistic and you don't really like it. I don't think anyone wants 100% true realism in games because that ruins the escapism and the immersion. You're just not comfortable with the realization that you were quite a bit like that as a teenager yourself.

At least, that's how I think about it...
 
I thought they were very realistic. They're teens, for heaven's sake! I found that many times they acted above they're age. For the place and situation they were in, they acted just as one might in that position.
 
Realism in MY Final Fantasy? LE GASP. :surprised:

However, in this case...yes, they were portrayed realistically. They're teenagers; what'd the complainers expect, for them to be whine-free? [Not that I'm saying they whined a whole lot]
How would they feel if they were in Squall and co.'s shoes? Wouldn't that...unnerve them a bit? It's not every day that the fate of the world lies on a bunch of people in their late teens' hands.
 
Squall is a social misfit, and he hides away from others because he's scared to loose people who are close to him. It's normal to have a fear, and it's probably more normal to have the feelings like you don't belong within a social group, than automatically becoming Mr poplaur and winning all the girls and being liked by everybody. Because that sounds like everybody's dream.

Squall is real like Rinoa, expect a little different. Rinoa goes through situations which end up causing her fear and anxiety. She's naive and innocent and sometimes acts like a child. But we've all gone through moments, where we feel like just grabbing on to somebody and crying because we were scared. If Rinoa defeated Edea during the parade and the world was saved, then Rinoa's character wouldn't be real. Instead she screws up and makes mistakes. She's completely normal.

Selphie acts cheerful and happy, but inside she hides her emotions. Inside she's a little depressed and she masks that sadness with happiness. Sometimes being hyper and loud can be annoying to some people, and most fans of FF8 feel that way about her, that's she's annoying. But when Irvine flirts on her and she tells Squall about her emotions, and when the Garden crashes into FH and she can't hold the Garden festival she shows her deeper and inner self. It's normal to hide everything with a smile. I think Laguna does this too.

Zell we might be too.... carried away. But most of us have been bullied during school or the workplace. So Zell is still pretty relateable.

Quistis's personality is rare however and guess she's the only one that doesn't have a sense of a realistic personality. She's super intelligent, good in battle, and all the males fancy her. Quistis seems the most fantasy like.
Because we would all love to be smart and admired by almost everybody. That's why I love Squall going with Rinoa, because then Quistis would be a total Mary- Sue. Just prefect.

Also, annoying is real. Sometimes people are annoying, so even if the FF8 characters are annoying, that's still pretty real. It's a normal human trait, because not everybody can be admired by every single person. It's just impossible.



 
Obviously it's not too realistic since in real life teenagers can't summon large monsters and fight sorceresses from the future. But I thought the characters were realistic and believable. I still facepalm every time I get to the part where
Quistis abandons her post to apologize to Rinoa
and it was weird how
everyone except Rinoa grew up at the same orphanage
.
 
At first I found Rinoa to be very annoying, but then I myself am annoying just like her: I cling to people, especially those with whom I care, and get all irritating just as she is. I also like how she gets more mature when she becomes a sorceress: it's a very heavy burden to be carried, and she must take care so that her power does not overcome her and make her evil.

Squall might have been a little emo and brooding all the time, but remember: all he wanted was a family, he saw Ellone as a sister and suddenly she had to leave for the White SeeD ship to be protected from the sorceress (Ultimecia). He asked for her and looked for her and could never find her, and that made him avoid relationships with others in fear of losing them just like he lost Ellone. He didn't have his mother to raise him since she died after giving birth, and his father was too busy getting rid of Sorceress Adel, an almighty sorceress who posed a danger to the entire world. He, of course, didn't know about all these things, but the sole absence of his parents and the departure of his sister made him what he became. It's a natural reaction to such things.

It was natural that Irvine wasn't able to shoot Edea. After all,
he still remembered her fondly as the matron who ran the orphanage all of them except Rinoa lived at, and it was easy for him to recognize her. It was as though he was going to kill his own mother.

Zell and Selphie are the most hyper characters of the cast. Zell has been bullied a lot at B-Garden, especially by Seifer, who used to call him "Chicken-wuss", even back when they were all at the orphanage. He acts naturally and doesn't seem to care about what others think of him, and that's something people lack. Selphie -- it was just her personality, although she is actually a bit depressed: she tries not to show it so others won't be worried with her.

But I still find Quistis overly mature for her age. She might be a prodigy, but still much more mature than average people her age. It's true that she left her post so that she could declare her confused feelings for Squall, which she thought it was love, but it was in fact brotherly love. Remember:
GF cause memory loss. None of them remembered living together until Irvine, who had never junctioned GFs until he joined the party, reminded this fact to them.
 
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