Votes later, but hey, it's 4 am and I'm not terribly tired, may as well explain the reasoning behind the Failure Bracket. While, obviously, I took suggestions for the games here (the first match is taken from Snow and Jim, respectively, while the latter is me picking and choosing from a half dozen or so solid contenders chat gave me), I wouldn't have taken a scene I couldn't see the reasoning behind, since this is just a bonus match I picked out, not a tourney I took noms for.
So, in order.
Cecily and Cathe- I honestly didn't remember what was in this scene when I was looking for it. When I watched it, I honestly couldn't think of a scene I thought was worse on its own merits (some manage to be worse due to being wildly out of place, or sheer cliche, or outright trolling people, but anyway). Quite apart from the game not laying out enough story to justify Shion's actions here on an emotional level (ie why the fuck does she care THIS MUCH about two little realian girls she hasn't seen in 10 years), the real offensive bit here is that it's the culmination of Shion's immense attention whoring self pity act. Her insistence on acting like a victim, bitching out people for the slightest offense, and doing everything in her power to hinder what any sane person knows has to be done, is a continual plot thread throughout the game. the trick being, of course, that it's all bullshit; she CHOSE to go to Miltia, to bust KOS-MOS out of Vector's lab and reunite with the party, to dig deep into truths she was warned, repeatedly, would be difficult. Essentially, she's not a person having an emotional reaction to an understandably difficult time, she's a spoiled little girl pouting because the universe isn't bending to her whim.
(though yes, Sergius's speech there is pretty indulgent and I consciously chose to leave it in for maximum suffering.)
Orphanage- I like the idea behind this scene. Not only a chance for characters, seemingly tossed together by the whims of fate, to bond before a full out war that may well be... if not the END of the world, then certainly of society as they know it, should they fail. The added level that their enemy is, in fact, a women who was like a mother to all of them reinforces the themes of the game and could be played for a great deal of story worth (they do less with it than they could, but we don't know that during the setup.) the coincidence of it all is, ultimately, not that much greater than them being a team to start with; after all, it's well established that Garden is made up primarily of orphans from the previous Sorceress War, so why shouldn't a bunch of Garden mercenaries have lived together in their youth? No, the part that fails is the GF stuff. Even if you'd established it harder earlier on, it's just a stupid plot point. Why even bother with it? It's brought up here, then never really used again. The idea of finding new weapons that don't eat your brain is immediately dismissed, it's never brought up significantly later, it's just this random thing in the middle of a scene that, for a lot of people, was already a bit too much. the really bad part here, though, is that it could so easily have been done without it. Y'know what you have to do? Have quistis go off to the White Seed ship as a kid and come back as an instructor later. That's it. I mean, really. A majority of people form few significant memories at age 5. Friends you had that young, if they subsequently leave, are not people you'll recognize as a teenager/young adult. And half the crew already WAS shipped off ridiculously young. Zell was adopted, Selphie and Irvine went off to the other gardens, and... well. Squall and Seifer already act like people who've been fighting and making peace and butting heads since they were small children. Deleting the silly memory games just lets you write in that much more to their rivalry and complementary nature. So as long as you don't randomly have Quistis being there, the scene can play out more or less the same but with natural human memory patterns, not random magical bullshit.
Justin Pity Party- Nothing to add here. The start of the sequence is entirely out of character and tosses the only positive aspect of Justin's character (his optimism/pro-active nature) in favor of moaning over a girl it took him 15 hours of gameplay to realize was attractive, and the latter bit is, as some have put it, the world bending over to reward idiots.
Anise- In a vacuum, the Anise stuff makes sense. She's all of 12, a powerful man has her parents under her thumb, she's in a very bad position. The trouble is, Anise at no other point in the game acts 12. She's not only mature and competent for her age, but mature and competent in general. She's capable of handling herself in dangerous territory, acting on her own initiative to help the party, etc. Note how she's basically Jade's go-to person when he needs to know something will get done. So, basically, the whole thing is, again, highly out of character, and coupled with both the easy forgiveness the party shows her (while, earlier in the game, a crime of similar scope and consequence resulted in massive shunning, despite having reasons no less valid in a vacuum and considerably more reasonable when considering Luke's character) and people rather liking the character she got killed... yeah.
