Nightmare Fuel / Final Fantasy VIII

The Faceless just got a brand new meaning!

Final Fantasy VIII may or may not be as rife with scares as its predecessors, but when it does aim to make players scream, BOY does it live up to their standards.

As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

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• The first main mission the group gets after becoming true SeeDs is to help a resistance group intercept a train car the Galbadian President, Vinzer Deling, is riding in order to kidnap him. Well, upon successful completion of the mission, it's revealed that it's not the real president on the train and instead a body double who acts very strangely, with an incredibly odd and almost inhuman manner of speech. Not helped by the fact that after a short, easy fight, he turns into an undead monstrosity called Gerogero, who's a dead ringer for a Tyrant with its bloated right half and a visible clump of organs. Still not an incredibly difficult fight, but not very fun to look at.
• FACELESS SQUALL (pictured above). It's like a Freeze-Frame Bonus that pays off with heebie-jeebies. The image is part of a sequence of hallucinations taking place in time compression, and some of the other images imply that Squall's memories are becoming confused.
  • Hell, the whole endgame hallucination is disturbing. Squall is lost in an endless expanse, and the distorted music and images don't help things. It ends with a shot of Rinoa's space helmet shattering, signaling Squall's worst fear - losing his loved ones.
• Edea/Ultimecia ruthlessly impaling Squall with blades of ice (leading to the infamous "Squall is Dead" theory), complete with ominous organ music and a rather gruesome sound effect. The lack of voices actually adds to the creepiness.
  • For added suspense, this is where the disc ends!
• Before Squall & company's final battle with Edea in the Galbadia Garden, the party enters the auditorium to which a demonic version of Fithos lusec wecos vinosec plays (it's actually Adel's theme) before Edea comes CRASHING DOWN THROUGH THE PANE GLASS CEILING and floats down before a podium. And the glass shattering is very loud, likely to get a jump out of most players.
• The Lunar Cry. The buildup, turning the moon into an enormous disembodied red eye with a milky white pupil... and then this immense giant blood red cloud of monsters bursting outward like a spear of hellish death...
• Devour. Your party spontaneously discards all notion of humanity and vores anything and anyone in battle for sheer power.
• Most of Disc Four. You kill Adel and time begins to compress, taking you through a trippy sequence in which you have to slay various sorceresses at different points in time, while the background melts, ending with a particularly freaky-looking sorceress◊. You finally end up at Edea's House in the compressed time world, and after stepping outside, you find the beach littered with the dead bodies of SeeDs, and see Ultimecia's Ominous Floating Castle in the dark, cloud-filled skies above. Her castle even has Ominous Pipe Organ music. Damn. Not to mention the music that plays during the sequence before arriving at The Very Definitely Final Dungeon. A dissonant five-note sax ostinato and creepy ambience are all you need to convey the feeling that the world is fucked, along with showcasing the literally-chained castle whilst said bgm continues until you reach said castle.
• Speaking of which, the final battle with Sorceress Ultimecia. Boss starts out human, like usual. Summons her own Guardian Force, Griever to fight you in the second round, ok. Third phase is a Fusion Dance, still ok. Then you get to the fourth and final phase. Ultimecia's mutated into a giant multicolored monstrosity whose upper half HAS NO FACE◊, while the bottom half is the "real" Ultimecia, hanging upside down and practically naked (and covered in icky-looking veins). You're fighting, literally, on the edge of oblivion, and all the while Ultimecia is absorbing existence right under your characters' feet.
  I am Ultimecia. Time shall compress... ...All existence denied.
• The aptly named "Creeper" enemies in the sewer levels of Deling City. Lets see, a living, breathing, moving shadow? Check. Souless red glowing eyes? Check. A creepy Slasher Smile and long clawed fingers? Check. A slithering animation and creepy Evil Laugh ? Check. Yep, it's a mobile example of Nightmare Fuel.
• In the third Dream sequence where you play as Laguna, you go downstairs, and you will notice, that the entire wall the staircase is on is absolutely riddled with bullet holes, but Laguna doesn't comment on it. This is Ellone's old house, and we know her parents were gunned down by soldiers, meaning that it must have happened in that very room.
  • The sequence where Ultimecia awakens Rinoa on the space station. The moment you arrive you see Rinoa just lurching forward out of the door like a zombie and no matter how many times Squall approaches her. He will just get thrown backward leaving his only option to follow Rinoa.

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