8 Exact Moments Video Games Went Off The Rails

The Final Fantasy games have always played fast and loose with basic concepts like time, space, and well...everything in between, but an internal logic runs through each game, acting as the gravity holding players onto the runaway asteroid each experience turns into.

Final Fantasy VIII is the exception to this.

At the end of Disc One of this much-beloved JRPG, moody man of the hour Squall gets spiked through the chest by villain Edea, and falls to his apparent doom.

As a player you're sent into a state of panic and desperately scramble to find the next disc, only to final load things up and find....that he's completely fine?

The last time I checked the human body doesn't exactly respond well to having an ice shard so big it made the Titanic sweat lodged into your chest. Even stranger is that from this point on, the game seems to nosedive into the fantastical, offering up flying schools, time-bending narratives of witches looking to compress reality, and a fever dream cast of characters who veer into wild extremes at any given moment.

By the end of things, what was a simple tale of teenage angst seems to close with all of reality being turned to toothpaste.

Now it's not uncommon for Final Fantasy games to get weird, but this one moment and its cascading effect on the plot has left many fans wondering if Squall actually died at the end of Disc One, and that the events after are his brain trying to make sense of things in his final moments.