So you’ve defeated Adel without using any GF attacks; you’ve beaten up a dragon by swinging a sword once a minute; you’ve stayed awake through Laguna talking to you; and you’ve somehow managed to thwart the game designer’s attempts to royally screw you. Now you’re at Ultmacia’s Castle. Think you have what it takes to beat her? Well if you have every GF, they know every move and are all at level 100, your characters are all at level 100, are maxed out on the best spells, and equipped with the best weapons, and you are maxed out on all restorative items, then you might have a snowball’s chance in hell.
The first problem with being able to beat the game is in your characters. Prior to getting to the castle I was always moderately aware that the characters were weak and there was pretty much nothing you could do about it. But at the end it becomes painfully obvious that they are all just worthless pieces of garbage. They literally can’t do anything except attack unless they have a GF equipped to them. GFs boost your character’s stats and make it possible to use magic and items as well as summon the GFs themselves. If the characters are that fricking debilitated without the GFs, why do you have to use them at all? Why don’t you just play as the GFs? It’s like everyone is on life-support or something. In short, if you want your characters to be worth a damn, you will need to acquire as many GFs as you can. Now where do GFs come from? They come from sidequests. I’ll be the first to admit that I get easily distracted by sidequests; provided one thing, I actually find the sidequest. In Final Fantasy VIII you have to scour the entire world to find them and most of them are really cryptic in their locations and/or dead-end once you do find them. Why the hell would you rack your brain over trying to find sidequests? Well it doesn’t even matter because once you’re in the castle you can’t really do any more sidequests or even shop for things that you need because some dipshit decided it would be a great idea to put barriers around all the towns.
This is a good time to bring up the second problem which is your characters’ items and magic. As I just said, you can’t shop anymore which means that all items you will be getting from now on will be from winning battles and stealing from enemies, that is if you have the correct GF to steal. If you don’t already have it then tough shit. (And the funny thing is you still get paid money for doing your job, money you can’t even spend.) Your weapons will also no longer be upgraded because you can’t purchase the upgrades. Normally you would find the correct parts from winning battles and then use them to upgrade characters’ weapons at a shop. This is moronic because a lot of the parts you can’t even find. Presumably they would come from some enemies you haven’t fought. There is something like seven generations of upgrades but most of my characters only made it to the third one even after going through the entire game. Who wants to go around searching for these elusive enemies to get weapon parts? Even when you do find an enemy that you know has a part you want, there’re no promises that you will actually get it after the battle. Now the problem with the magic is that you will need a lot of it and you will need the best spells. Since you never learn spells, you have to collect them from enemies and “draw points” that are scattered all around the world. You don’t know what spells are where and it just turns into yet another shitty gimmick to get you to run around aimlessly for hours on end.
The third problem is of course the boss itself. The bullshit starts the second the battle begins. Instead of having the three people in your active party show up in the battle, this stupid bitch picks three characters at random for you to use in the fight. So actually preparing for the boss by equipping all of your GFs to your active party members is completely useless because you‘ll end up getting like one character that‘s decked out for battle and then two characters that are useless because they aren‘t equipped with GFs. You could always spread your GFs around but then you just have six OK characters instead of three good characters. The boss also has four stages which is stupid. Why do Final Fantasy bosses always have to have all these stages? Why can’t it just have one fucking stage and then after you beat it the shit ends and you know the game is over? (After I beat the third stage I seriously thought it *was* over. It wasn’t. What a cruel joke.) Your only effective offensive weapon, (GFs), are only useable in the first stage. After that, If you try to summon them they instantly die. Speaking of dying, when one of your characters gets KO’d and you leave them that way for more than a few seconds you get a message on the screen that says “Absorbed into time.” Then the KO’d character disappears and you can’t use them anymore. Absorbed into time? What the hell does that even mean? Could Stephen Hawking maybe explain that one to me? When the character gets absorbed… whatever, another random player from your group appears to take their place. WOW! How magnanimous and benevolent of the game to allow this to happen! For the first time ever in the whole stupid game you actually get to toggle characters while in battle. This is still asinine because you don’t have any legitimate control over it and which would you rather have; your characters die/disappear and cycle through until you run out and have a game over, or be stuck with only three characters that you can revive consistently for an indefinite amount of times?
Since GFs don’t work in this battle you’ll be using the next best thing, magic. I hope you have a lot because it takes a lot to do any damage as well as a lot of time. As you’re playing along and casting spells you will get messages from time to time on the screen that say something like “Irvine’s Fira blew away.” In layman’s terms that statement means that Irvine just lost all of his Fira spells and can no longer use them. So basically what you’re telling me is that I have like a bag of magic spells and every so often a gust of wind comes by and blows one away and it sails away on the breeze like a leaf in autumn? My ass! That doesn’t make any sense at all. I could understand if it was blowing away items, but magic? How the hell do you blow magic away? It’s like they were so out of ways to make this totally impossible for you that they had to resort to completely illogical guerilla tactics. This is horrible. It’s only a matter of time before everyone’s Cure and Revive spells get nailed, and then what? You’re up shit creek. Theoretically this means you could play through the whole battle, get to the last stage and then lose just because a random number generator made you lose your last bit of revive spells. Not only do you lose random spells constantly but your characters’ stats incidentally go down too. This is because the way a GF allows you to boost your stats is by allowing you to equip spells to them. Equipping a spell to a stat makes the numbers of that stat go up; the more powerful the spell, the higher the numbers go. Should the equipped spell “blow away” the stat returns to it’s normal crappy digits. With all of this stuff going on, the final battle is reduced to a war of attrition. Those are fun right? People love those! I literally played for four hours in a row trying to beat the last boss of Final Fantasy VIII. That’s not four hours of trials, that’s a single try. Yeah, it lasted four hours. Can you imagine sitting down to fight one boss that you know is going to take at least four hours to beat. Why would you do that? I beat the first three stages and made it to the final stage but to make the long story short, after going through all of that I just didn’t have the resources to continue fighting so I died. After four hours and then losing, I wasn’t upset at all. I was actually relieved. The game just wasn’t fun at all anymore, only a grueling and mind-numbing trial that I was glad to be free of. Even If I knew of a way to beat Ultimecia I wouldn’t try it again. That’s how horrible it is. This is the only way you should ever play FF VIII… 
