When I first found myself playing as Laguna, I thought something had gone wrong with the game.

I was thirteen years old. I'd never seen a game suddenly switch playable characters before. I didn't understand what was happening; I was as confused and alarmed as the characters. It felt like a glitch to me. The only comparable experience I'd had was the jarring wrongness of encountering Missingno in Pokémon Red.

For the benefit of anyone who hasn't had that particular experience: Missingno is a glitch you can encounter in Pokémon Red and Blue if you perform a certain sequence of actions. It behaves like a Pokémon; you can battle and catch it, although catching it can damage your save file, so it's not recommended. Encountering it has the benefit of duplicating items in your inventory, so a lot of people sought it out intentionally, including me; I wanted more Master Balls! But, when I actually saw it, I regretted looking for it. It felt so powerfully wrong to be confronted with something that clearly wasn't supposed to exist in the game.

I refused to save during that first Laguna dream, because I was so afraid that my playthrough had been messed up somehow and I would never go back to playing as Squall. I was very attached to Squall, and I wasn't prepared to be this guy instead!

There's something a little magical about videogames when you're a kid, before you really grasp that everything in there was intentionally programmed in, and there's only so much they can feasibly contain. There were whole unfathomable worlds in those discs and cartridges. My brother and I would obsess over glitches in the Sonic the Hedgehog Master System games and try to uncover the secrets behind them. There were no secrets; they were just glitches. But we were convinced there had to be some hidden meaning, some secret room they were pointing to, something for us to find.

As an adult playing Final Fantasy VIII, when you take the role of Laguna, it's a weird event, but you accept that it's just part of the story. When I was a kid, though, it felt like the game had suddenly decided to make me someone else by itself. The game could have done anything; the story could have gone anywhere. It was frightening! I wanted to be Squall again! But there was something thrilling in it.

I warmed up to Laguna in the end, if you're wondering, once I'd realised that I just went back to being Squall after the dreams! While playing Laguna's sequences, I'll often find myself smiling fondly at what an absolute loser he is.

There's an interesting and easily missable line in the Laguna sequence at the start of disc 2, the one set in Winhill; I only came across it on my most recent playthrough. As Squall, if you ask (...Where am I?) twice, Laguna thinks, (I know there's something here, but I don't know what it's saying.)

I was excited to realise that Laguna can actually tell that Squall is trying to say something, rather than just having a vague sense of some sort of presence! It'd be interesting if they could actually establish a way to communicate during dream sequences. Maybe I'll try to write fanfiction about this at some point.

• Go back to the dormitory.