Not to be taken seriously. OR IS IT?

Squall: Hi, I'm the protagonist, even though I'm a completely unlikable emo asshole who hates everyone. Also my weapon of choice is probably the stupidest thing ever put into a video game.
Seifer: I'm an unlikable loud asshole who hates everyone, let's fight for no reason!

They do so and end up with scarred faces, which are apparently supposed to make them look cool or something. A few pointless cinemas play to the tune of elevator music and they get sent on their first mission, which just amounts to fighting a few groups of wimpy soldiers and then waiting around in the town square for a few hours. The excitement is palpable, especially since you're forced to walk back and forth talking to Zell and Seifer over and over and over again until the game finally lets you proceed (a trend which will be repeated many, many times throughout the game)

Seifer: This is boring, let's go off-mission!
Squall: I have no will of my own so I must comply.
Selphie: Hi, I'm the obligatory cute girl who never does anything. Nice to meet you.

They end up making idiots of themselves and Quistis, of all people, has to bail them out.

Quistis: Squall, Zell, Selphie, you pass, have a steady paycheck. Everyone else, disregard the previous sentence.
Squall: Wait, wait, wait. Our unit disobeyed orders, botched the entire mission, put our fellow students and dozens of civilians in harm's way, and we're being rewarded instead of punished?
Quistis: Yes. Except for Seifer; he technically gave the order to go off-mission so we're just going to blame the entire incident on him.
Squall: Well, that's kind of asinine. ...So, when do I get paid?
Quistis: Every 3000 steps.
Squall: Couldn't you come up with a less annoying system?
Quistis: No.
Squall: Whatever.
Zell: Hey look at me, I'm acting like a fucking eight year old!

Squall gets sent on another mission and meets Mary Sue-- err, Rinoa

Rinoa: I'm the leader of this resistance force, in spite of this I'm really airheaded and flirty.
Selphie: And your minions are a couple of one-joke characters from a 70's cartoon.
Rinoa: Yep. Anyway, let's solve these tedious button pressing puzzles and capture the president!
Squall: Whatever

It doesn't work.

Irvine: Hi I'm a generic gunslinger character, if you couldn't guess that from my cowboy theme. Let's go shoot the sorceress in the head.

That doesn't work either since Irvine is an IDIOT and chokes at the critical moment. The rest of your team is no better, either; they're supposed to be highly trained, elite soldiers and they abandon their post in the middle of a high profile assassination mission to apologize to some dumb bimbo they barely know? What the fuck!

Irvine: Well damn, my only real contribution to the plot and I couldn't even get it right!
Squall: Fuck it, I'm just going to run up and hack her head off.

Despite being more powerful than God through two hours of spell gathering and junctioning, Squall loses the fight to an icicle in the shoulder. Never mind that the very same character just dropped lightning bolts and icebergs on his head throughout the entire battle sequence.

Squall: Now we're in jail. This sucks.
Zell: Hey look at me, I'm acting like a fucking eight year old!

Through events I don't care enough to recall (though I faintly remember a scene of Squall hanging over a whirlpool of sand) they escape and return to Galbania Garden

NORG: Rarg blarg, I am NORG and I run this school! Also, I am a disgusting creature.
Squall: What? You RUN this school?
NORG: Rarg blarg, yes, Cid is secretly my pawn and he's rebelled against me for no apparent reason. FIGHT!
Squall: Wow, the designers really pulled this story element out of their ass.

NORG, like every boss before him, is defeated with little effort due to the horrendous game balance

Cid: Hey Squall, you run the school now. Congrats.
Squall: So Garden's chain of command works like that one episode of Star Trek? If you don't do your job you get paid and if you kill your boss you get promoted?
Cid: Yeah. Despite this you still earn the wage of a 16th rank Cadet.
Squall: So what are you going to do? It must be something important if you're abandoning your duties here.
Cid: Actually, I'm not going to do a damn thing for the rest of the game.
Squall: Wow, you're a dick.
Cid: Oh yeah, the school can fly now. Really slowly. Have fun crawling around the map slower than you can walk.
Squall: A flying school building? Seriously Square, did you even think about what you were writing or did you just run out of time after making all those FMVs and have to bash a bunch of half-baked "cool" ideas together into a working plot?

A whole lot of NOTHING happens for 75% of Disc 2

Seifer: I am now arbitrarily the Sorceress' bodyguard despite attending a school where I train to KILL the sorceress for most of my life! Beware my generic underlings!
Fujin: Ey mang, I cut you! I cut you good!
Raijin: RAGE.
Squall: Wow, your minions are an offensive stereotype and a robot. Does every secondary character in this game rely on a single gimmick to be "interesting"?
Quistis: Well to be fair, the main characters do too.
Squall: Touche.

Another pointless battle ensues

Seifer: I'll be back to annoy you many times! For I am the obligatory rival character!
Squall: Yeah, and I'll beat you with one Renzokuken then too. Dumbass.

More eye candy cinematics play as they fight Some Other Garden, which is apparently under Edea's control. Never mind that this makes no real sense considering the entire mission of Garden is to KILL the Sorceress. Rinoa, being generally stupid, winds up hanging off the edge of the Garden by one arm.

Quistis: Hey Squall, Mary Sue's in trouble, go rescue her.
Squall: Who's Mary Sue?
Quistis: Sorry, Rinoa. Anyway, go.
Squall: You do realize that I'm responsible for the lives of everyone in Galbania Garden and that abandoning my post would result in dozens, if not hundreds, of unnecessary casualties. ...Right?
Quistis: Forget these nameless pawns, get your ass in gear!
Squall: Wow, you're an asshole. But I have no will of my own so I must comply.

After a lot of cinemas and another tedious mini-game, Squall and Rinoa share an awkward moment and then set off to fight the Sorceress again. On the way through Some Other Garden they find out that the school has a mutant hockey team, which is probably the funniest part of the entire game simply for being so absurd and out of place. Not to mention that it makes Garden - the alleged GOOD GUYS - look like they run some fucked up Mojoworld where they genetically engineer warriors to injure and kill one another for their own amusement.

Edea: I return again to look ugly and generally provide little menace!
Squall: Feel the wrath of Zell's ultra-spammable comboes, evil fiend!
Edea: Blast! Square could only fit four discs in the case, so my Contrived Plot Device Icicles can't be used to needlessly drag the game out for ANOTHER ten hours!

After defeating the Sorceress again Rinoa is taken out of the party for the next several hours of the game. This is really annoying since you have to spend a significant amount of time redistributing all of her spells and GFs, especially since huge enemies with tens of thousands of HP now start spawning everywhere you go.

Edea: We must get Rinoa back even though she has no personality, the worst Limit Break in the game and hasn't done anything interesting or useful throughout the entire plot!
Squall: Why are YOU here? We're trying to kill you!
Edea: As it turns out I'm not really the bad guy. It's some sorceress from the future who had possessed me and is now doing the same to Rinoa.
Squall: Whatever.

After a few key events Edea leaves forever, taking all the spells you gave her with her. You get so pissed that you don't play the game for at least a month.

Squall: Er, now we're in space and the moon is full of monsters? Why couldn't we just cure Rinoa on Earth, exactly?
Quistis: Because then we'd have no excuse to show off another eye candy cinematic, of course.
Squall: Oh.
Rinoa: ROOOORRRGGHH, I HAVE AWAKENED. CHEESY AFTER-IMAGE EFFECT GO!

Rinoa turns the whole damn ship inside out with her Satan-powers, which, of course, just ends up exposing her to the void of space and leaves her with about 20 seconds to live.

Squall: I arbitrarily decide to save her by stealing a space suit with less than a minute's supply of oxygen.
Zell: ...
Quistis: ...
Squall: I'm about to leap to my certain death here and you're not even going to try and stop me?
Zell: Hell no!
Squall: Wow, you guys really are assholes.

In what is arguably the most contrived piece of writing in the entire game, Squall and Mar--RINOA just happen to find a lost-for-centuries spaceship that's close enough to save them both from certain death.

Squall: Someone up there must love us, huh?
Rinoa: No shit. You've gotten away with being an asshole, endangering hundreds of lives, being outright treasonous and now leaping to your certain doom, and you're no worse off for any of it.
Squall: Yeah, and the one time I actually TRY to act like a responsible leader, I get berated for it. Well, we'd better get back and try to tie up all the loose ends in the plot at the last minute.

They fight a bunch of monsters and return to Earth

Laguna: Hi, I'm the guy you've been having all those irrelevant dreams about. Go fight Abel so we can stop Ultimecia.
Ellone: I'm what you get when you cross-breed a Macguffin and a plot hole the size of Texas!
Squall: That's it? That's the big revelation I sat through several hours of irrelevant dream sequences for?
Laguna: Yep.
Squall: Well, this game is just one huge disappointment after another. But I've already wasted 30 hours of my life, so I might as well see it through to the end.

Irvine: Hey, I remember something - we all grew up together!
Squall: What?
Irvine: Yeah, we all lived with Edea in this run down crapshack, and Seifer was there too!
Squall: ...What?
Irvine: What do you mean "what"? This is important!
Squall: Not really. It came out of nowhere and changes absolutely nothing in the storyline. Plus we're never going to speak of it again after this point, so why even bother bringing it up?
Irvine: ...I don't know.
Squall: Exactly. All this scene accomplished was to show more of Garden's complete and utter incompetence; you'd think that an organization devoted to killing the Sorceress would have the brains not to recruit, train and then send one of her fucking stepchildren to pull off the hit, much less FIVE of them!

They go to defeat Abel, who is incredibly easy once you figure out his gimmick. This takes the party to the future which, like in every movie about time travel, is dark, shitty and run by an annoying Albino.

Ultimecia: I AM THE MAIN VILLAIN. I AM THE MOST POWERFUL BEING IN THE UNIVERSE AND I WILL COMPRESS TIME.
Squall: Do you even know what that means?
Ultimecia: WHAT?
Squall: Time-space compression is a term used to describe processes that seem to accelerate the experience of time and reduce the significance of distance during a given historical moment.
Ultimecia: ...
Squall: Unless your big evil plan is to give us a more efficient means of travel, communication or economics, it doesn't make any sense.
Ultimecia: Well, that totally destroys my entire motive.
Squall: Yeah. Shall we get this over with, Ms. Lamest Final Boss Ever?

Ultimecia, despite being INCREDIBLY POWERFUL, falls to a single Lionheart, the single most over-powered attack ever put into a video game.

Ultimecia: Now face my ultimate Guardian Force, SHITHEAD!

Everyone laughs

Mary SueRinoa: Isn't that what you named your necklace?
Squall: Yeah. Take that, major villain's pride.

SHITHEAD also falls remarkably easily.

Ultimecia: Behold my final form, Lightbulb Head!
Squall: I'd use the Rain Flush, but since this isn't Mega Man, I'll just have to settle for casting Meltdown and then spamming Limit Breaks like every other boss in the game.
Ultimecia: Well, this game's about as one-sided as a boxing match with Glass Joe.
Squall: Yeah, no shit.

Everyone returns to the past as time un-compresses itself except for Squall, who is left trapped in the future

Squall: Woe is me. I shall write some poetry about how much this sucks.

Squall returns home via the biggest Deus ex Machina ever.

Squall: I arbitrarily decide to stop being an emo asshole... Hey look at Zell, he's acting like a fucking eight year old!