Why Ultimecia is a pain in the ass

Ultimecia, the end boss for FFVIII, is a pain in the ass for a few reasons, the most important one being that she has about six forms for you to slaughter. Not only is that a problem, but she levels up with you; for example, in my crazy gamer scramblings, I decided to level all of my characters in FFVIII to 100 (or close) in the hope that I could just one-shot the final boss.

Ultimecia's castle of crunchy death pits looms on my screen, and I enter the battlefield pretty confident that I can Angelo Cannon my way to victory within minutes.

Hmm. How very wrong and assy of me to think this, I discover, as Ultimecia randomly selects three of my party members to annihilate first. A few minutes in, I am wondering why my beefcaked characters are hardly doing damage to the slutty pixel witch---wait...I bet she levels up with you.

Well, now that more disappointment has set in, one of my characters dies. It's probably Zell, so I continue trying to use my uber fast summons to pwn some sorceress.

Uh oh!

What the hell? Zell has been dead for about two rounds and I am about to phoenix down him when a cherub swoops onto my screen and takes his corpse away. In his place is someone else, probably Irvine, who is another useless character.

They took ZELL? Oh come on, he wasn't so useless that I wanted him gone forever. Sadly, Square made it so that if you don't tend to your dead almost immediately, they are taken away for good, and your numbers dwindle.

So, let's recap.

Ultimecia randomly chooses characters to start off with, she levels up as you do, she has too many forms, and once a character has died for more than thirty seconds, you lose them forever.

But wait--guardian forces (summons) are your most powerful tools besides Invincible Moon and Squall's gunblade techniques. What else could they do to make this a bitch of a fight? That's right, make it so that all forms past two poof kill guardian forces the second you call them.

Eventually, I killed her. It took over an hour, I think, and a lot of crazy decisions.