I think they tried to do too much with it. If you don't know what I mean, Ultimecia is actually Rinoa and that lion boss is actually Squall. There's this enormous theory for how the ORIGINAL story ended and splitting into different universes and timelines. The storyline you played through is just one of the infinitely-many time loops that spawned from the ORIGINAL story. If you haven't read it yet, you should. I'm not saying it's a good ending, but you won't regret reading about THE REAL STORY. You'll never look at FF8 the same way afterwards.