I’m gonna start this off by getting right to the heart. What Final Fantasy VIII is all about, is the reconciliation between the self and its relationship with time. This relationship and its characteristics refer specifically to the changes in the self’s relation to time as historical advances are made to the interconnectivity of physical places, communication, and people as byproducts of the increasing demands of world-wide capitalist economy and its impacts on culture.
The concept of the annihilation of space by time, or time-space compression, is an idea posited by Karl Marx in 1857 that continued to be applied, articulated, and changed by writers and theorists as a global economy continued to form through modern history, which created the incentive to overcome both the spatial and communication barriers by which space between people, places, and thought had been previously manifest. These advances include things like transportation (railroads, cars, jets), communication channels (fax, radio, phone), and most recently online communication, or construction of non-physical spaces based on information transfer and delivery.
Keep in mind the fundamental striking changes to the world design of VIII from past games includes all these things that are shown to the player right from the start—trains running automatically between locations, rental cars available to the player, as well as the narrative’s emphasis on satellite, radio, and cable-based communications, and most importantly, the online forums and pages running on the school’s closed network servers.
Final Fantasy VIII’s fundamental design was actually heavily inspired by internet forums, as scenario writer Nojima recently discussed his experience with using a personal computer to search for online discussions about previous games he’d worked on for the first time, and how impacted he was to see all kinds of criticisms on his use of character death and tragedy and the “overuse of flashbacks” as a narrative device, all of which directly affected the decisions made during the narrative development of VIII. It doesn’t just stop there either, as VIII is really the first game to begin a trend in the series where the narrative is made of hints and clues at hidden information, context, and details to serve the main storyline, something directly designed to bolster online and forum discussions among players. Do you remember the datalog of FFXIII? Did you ever realize that whole thing began with VIII? The ‘tutorial’ section of the menu has sections among sections detailing not just the various unexplained aspects of the game systems, but information about characters, locations, plot events, and the history of the world that go mostly unspoken during the game, key terms with which to read the several intended playthroughs of the game and to put pieces together with others.
I wholly believe that the direct exposure to other people and places via the internet as an extension of previous historical accelerations and compressions of time and their subsequent erasure of borders and discreet identities in time and space directly informs the themes, message, and the narrative and mechanical design of Final Fantasy VIII.
“We are entering a space which is speed-space…[a] time of electronic transmission…and therefore, man is present not via his physical presence, but via programming.”
NARRATIVE 1 - VHS
I think a lot of people will agree that the narrative and plot of FFVIII has a unique flair to it. It took me some time to realize how to describe it, but I think I’ve reached something I’m satisfied with. The plot of FFVIII, from the beginning, feels compressed, with events happening of wildly ranging content, tones, fictional genres, compiled together in tight bouts of non-sequitur editing. What it really feels like, is an old, worn-out inherited VHS tape that’s seen years of use and rewriting between various films and programs, to the extent that you can no longer tell where one film ends and the next begins. Storylines and cinema modes blend together, events unpredictable in nature only loosely related to the ones immediately surrounding them dissolve with the seams between so worn out that the lack of cuts itself is jarring (note the cinematics’ consistent, heavy use of dissolves) and characters appear to change fundamental roles based not on character or plot developments but on the tape’s runtime itself, dictated by the speed of the dream, as if resembling a worn-out existential footprint of a person’s interests and entertainment dispositions over a long period of time. The plot of FFVIII grabs from ranges of Hollywood films between Star Wars to minutes of Jurassic Park to Saving Private Ryan, Aliens to hints of Harry Potter (unreleased as of ff8’s release), Titanic, etc. Each section feels iconic, but they all feel like different, unrelated works stitched together, bound by culture and speed.
What effect does living in that kind of existence have on a person? Final Fantasy VIII has large swaths of time the player can experience, if they so choose, between important plot events, where nothing important happens and time seems to feel like a paranoid stand-still, as if frozen between actions but never at rest, where players are pulled along mainly by interest in the trading card game system. But when plot events happen, they happen fast, in intense succession, one after another. Final Fantasy VIII is a story about young people, especially Squall, being consistently overwhelmed by events they have no control over, by a world that deems all the elements of discrete eras of history as totally equivalent, permitted to happen simultaneously.
Unlike a typical narrative’s sense of time where at any moment that the present takes place the threat of the unknown would come from the future, the characters of VIII are attacked from all sides, so little is their grasp on both the grand scope of time and the minuteness of its intervals. VIII is a story where enemies become mothers (your own), and not in the Luke Skywalker sense. Relationships are given unknown meanings, and then immediately dropped, recontextualized, and then decontextualized. No form of understanding about the nature of this world is stable. It is a dream where your own personal reality rewrites itself so fast and frequently as everything changes and morphs all around you.
“When we think of speed, we say it’s the means of getting from here to there fast…But I say no to this. It’s a milieu, a milieu in which we participate only indirectly through the videotape machine after recording, through information science and [programmed] systems.”
MECHANICS 1 – Deconsolidation and Assembly
The act of dealing with that world, where everything is connected to the point where nothing is any more relevant than anything else, is to acknowledge its implicit existential anxiety and death anxiety.
More than anything else, I think, the makeup of Final Fantasy VIII’s world and mechanics design is that of a consolidated, disassembled world, where everything remains clumped together in chunks, but nothing is really pre-built for the player. The content, from quests to acquirable resources are concentrated in select points along the map. Rather than spread across the map so the player is led to find the Necessary Keys ala Dragon Quest, as it were, they are in distinct points the player is meant to remember and return to should they seek those properties. Even the system of magic itself implies that magic, the most important resource of this world, is located along concentrated areas that spurt out from physical locations, or from the monsters who originate from the moon. Item drops only come from specific monsters and have very specific uses, and monsters themselves are often limited to specific continents or areas. But it isn’t just content that’s consolidated, the rules of the game themselves are. Each new Guardian Force (summon) acquisition and new type of magic has the power to fundamentally change how the game works for the player and the psychology of the battles and exploration, exactly the same as how Triple Triad’s (card game side mode) rulesets change as you travel.
You might have heard the complaint that Final Fantasy VIII is easy to break, but in truth, you cannot break Final Fantasy VIII because you cannot break something that is not yet assembled. The assembly of its elements is entirely up to the player, with what you do in the game, what you find, what you explore, how you allocate things, and what affordances you define each element with. And none of these decisions are permanent; the game can be rewritten any time and as many times as you choose.
CONTEXTUALIZATION – Putting VIII into Perspective of the Series
Put simply, the identity of Final Fantasy is that it attempts to encapsulate everything that can be said regarding a theme using both fantasy and role-playing mechanics within a single game. They are a lot like the Star Wars films in how those films cover an extremely broad and encompassing range of visual, cinematographic, and mythological elements taken from various sources and put together to form a narrative that explores narrative. Final Fantasy games are all encompassing works of the same kind; each game is both the first work and the last work in a series that explores the art of game-driven narrative.
I would like now to break down each game in the series until VIII and paint them as a specific type of Final Fantasy with regards to how each approaches its interpretation and style of roleplaying to demonstrate the path taken to get to VIII's approach.
1 Final Dungeon Fantasy
A game mainly driven by individual dungeons that require the player to explore and plan routes through several times until coming away with the most important treasure, a narrative key, that applies itself in some way to the overworld, itself a large dungeon. This form of dungeon diving heavily tests resource management and planning as well as managing encounter based risk and reward.
2 Final Campaign Fantasy
A game that serves a narrative campaign about rebellion first and foremost, and requires the player to consistently return to a specific location as they seek the resources and keys necessary to develop a resistance strong enough against an empire. Rather than resource management, the behavior of the player is heavily tracked and used to shape the growth of the characters nonlinearly which requires appropriate use of spells and weaponry to modify characters temporarily and permanently to approach the challenges.
3 Final Exploration Fantasy
A story centered around a freewheeling party exploring both a shifting world and their own shifting selves. Tasks are found on volition and approached through an economy of mechanical roles.
4 Final Theater Fantasy
A game that defines all mechanics and roles of its participants by and for narrative, and allows the player to be the discoverer and actor of their interplay.
5 Final Television Fantasy
A game about approaching challenges by not just trying different classes and mechanical roles but by combining their aspects and seeing their effects. An episodic costume narrative directed by the player with a party as cast members in on-going production.
6 Final Opera Fantasy
An extension of the fourth game's theater, developed into a full multi-character parallel storied narrative where each character is less defined by role and more by personal quirks and distance from the former games' magic, never being able to take ownership of it.
7 Final Everything Fantasy
7 is like a culmination and convergence of so many things and ideas. It feels like it contains so many settings, story genres, and pieces as an urban fantasy. From sidewalks and ceos, mythical creatures, crazed scientists and test subjects, caves of natural wonder, haunted mansions, a “princess”-like and a “knight”-like, lost magic cities, amusement parks, giant robots, kaiju, space, special soldiers, secret agents, aliens, I mean the list just goes on, and it all works because none of these things take up too much of the time and the pace is fast enough to be riveting but with deep enough character writing and psychology between the turnarounds to keep consistent interest on a main through-line.
Final fantasy VII is the fantasy of everything, contextualized by the concept of the lifestream, where all life and concepts flow through the planet in a physical, manifested way. Anything can happen because it’s part of the same stream of planetary existence, like a wave that comes and goes.
8 Final RPG Fantasy
How do you go past “everything”? What do you look toward once you’ve created a story about the concept of “everything”? The answer VIII arrives at, is to look at the container itself, the RPG wrapper that houses the content of the game. Whereas VII asked what are all the things we can put and keep in an RPG, VIII asks what is an RPG? How does an RPG present and deliver its ideas?
To play Final Fantasy VIII is to create questions and follow lines of thought. The game itself houses multiple choice tests (as the main characters are students) that help determine the salary level the player receives. Each of these tests is not only designed to test the player’s understanding of the game, but to give them ideas for things to experiment with, questions to follow up on and experiment within the game’s almost carelessly open and flexible system.
Each character is a momentary collection of spells that determine what they’re good at. Each spell a question of how to make a character either stronger or more resistant. And each potential of each spell is determined by what god-creatures you’ve pacted with or spotted and fished in each battle. But, the decisions you can make for what you want to be good at are also determined by what GFs you have found and what abilities you've invested in. For example, you might prioritize HP and junction cures to HP, but then you find that you're rarely doing limit breaks because limits are tied to low HP, and have their own kind of system for chaining limits by manipulating windows. You would be ignoring a system of the combat and never hitting your characters' true potential, not to mention having slow battles. But, then you get the spell Aura, which lets you do limits at higher HP. But you find that with that high HP, you don't really ever heal high enough to take advantage of it because your magic stat is low. And when you do heal, your max hp diminishes anyway. You have a specific idea about how HP and healing works, until you get an ability that instantly heals an ally to full without any resource limit, and suddenly you have a completely different understanding of opportunity costs, statistical uses, and how spells can be used. There's many abilities in the game that offer (or threaten) to change the way the game can or should be played, and each stat has its own little functions worth discovering.
Even the difficulty of the game is entirely dependent on how much time one spends digging into the game, with enemies leveling up with the player’s party and the speed of level-ups being on a linear scale, rather than exponential (1000 exp to level up at all times, regardless of current level), which puts a pressure on the player to keep their builds up against the speed of the game's power scale. You might think to avoid killing creatures and gaining experience and focus entirely on getting spells, which many do to "break" the game, but this prevents you from being able to draw higher level magic as your level (and magic ability) determine your capabilities with that. Without high enough levels, enemy monsters won't even have high level magic on them to take from at all, and without killing monsters and only ending battles in other ways, you'll never get the monster parts and drops to turn into either magic or new weapons, and neither will your GFs learn new abilities and stat relationships or develop summon compatibilities. Although you can bypass some of that by delving into the card game, another system of intricate and shifting rulesets, which leads me to my next point.
MECHANICS 2 - Neuroplasticity
All the (consolidated) parts of Final Fantasy VIII, although scattered and very missable, are not any of them necessary toward completing the game because the system is designed to work around missing components.
You can ignore triple triad and focus on drawing magic and making builds from monster drop items. You can make your GFs focus on summon damage and boosts over junctioned stats and play the game carefully using summons and summon items, or you might never use those items at all. You might prioritize disposable high damage items over high level magic and build characters around that.
You might have one character build defensive and manipulate them to stay in low health to get limit breaks off of them. Doing that implies that you have access to a defense boosting GF, which are missable. You can plan a party around anything given what stat junctions you have available. You might have a party that's weak or strong against various elements at random times depending on what the auto junction system chooses for you, or you might be in complete control of the elemental and status properties of everyone around you.
Even the pocket playstation peripheral, something I thought was a downside of the game as without it certain items and summons can't be obtained. But having a better understanding of the game let me realize that it's entirely in the spirit of the game since everything in the game is an optional, circumventable thing that helps you define what kind of rpg you're playing. It's not a complete, self-contained "final fantasy", I thought, if it has these things outside the game. But, it doesn't need to have it, and besides, what ambition to have a separate monocolor tiny game screen with the potential to bring game altering items into the game that you can acquire by adventuring while outside.
To add onto the chocobo pocketstation game point, what it is is a tiny little random dungeon navigator and battler with small events that can help you level up a small chocobo in the real game and grow a summon in real time, while it nets you items from all over the game, even when you wouldn't be able to get them normally. Sometimes these items can help you get lategame GFs early. But this doesn't break the difficulty curve as it would in a normal rpg, because the game is balanced not around standard difficulty but on a risk/reward system where danger is beneficial, all boons are expendable and disposable, and everything around you is on the same growth curve as you.
All this to say that, while I think Final Fantasy had been leaning toward this direction for some time with V's class change system, VI's magic learning system and VII's materia system, but VIII is the first to fully embrace a difficulty designed around broadness. Instead of a series of challenges that test you on your ability to use available resources, growth choices made, or special items and weapons found via exploration, VIII is all about improvisation and just seeing what you can do and how you can play with it. This is reinforced by both a growth structure based on impermanence and redefinability and a world and system structure of circumventable machinery, where the pleasure is in the rewiring. It's the emphasis on how, not on performing optimally but on enjoying the act and actually paying attention and recognizing the struts, rails, and artifice of the play. In that sense, the game might be the first and only truly mechanically Brechtian RPG.
NARRATIVE 2 - Characters Who Exist Between the Frames
Given the state of impermanence and redefinability of the game’s mechanical construction, in a world where everything is permitted to exist at once in one concentrated mass dilated over a stretch of bending time, characters live and breathe in the spaces between time. If timecode dictates the law of this world the way it does relationships, events, and reality, then it is between units of time that characters find their existence.
The key visual motif of this game is the fade. Locations, characters, and places in time are introduced by fading, cascading shots. It is a visual dilation between disparate moments, a morphing of person to place, the inner to outer and back again, and it is constant across this game’s narrative framing.
Yet the characters when introduced are always given these very specific, quiet moments. Beautifully rendered short, intimate cg, completely voiceless, pointmark each new character’s introduction to the story. It’s such a unique feeling watching these, like learning about somebody without hearing them say anything, an interview of gestures, small movements, and diegetic environmental sound. It’s these moments that stand out throughout the game as in the heat of narrative choice, climax, and expositions where characters are put through the wringer and make mistakes, change, remember things, forget things; characters have developments in this game so quickly sometimes or have stunning redefining moments and reevaluations that it sometimes does feel absurd, surreal, and many have criticized this style of narrative development, but it's entirely appropriate for this game’s theme and story, a story where young adult development is characterized by the existential speed of the present, the claustrophobia of the past and the future closing on you at both sides, the baggage of the parent, the realization of your own eminent death, the reconciliation or lackthereof of a society and history that feels alien and unmalleable, of time itself that seems hostile and alive. To live here is to have surrendered yourself to it, to be a participant of the self-annihilation of its very existence, so there is no self, really, to separate from the out-of-control plot spiraling across the drama of all ages, except for only those that can be captured by these tiny, seemingly trivial moments, these small things that carry so much meaning about a person. And isn’t that ultimately the way you’ll be remembered? When a person is gone and all their life is part of the lives of all the other people’s lives, we remember those small bits, right? The way they move their hair or gaze into the sky or stumble on some rocks. It’s the moments between that can breathe.
MECHANICS 3 - Bargaining with Time
Much has been said about the drawing system of Final Fantasy VIII. I stand by that it is one of the most misunderstood mechanics in all RPG history. The regurgitated complaint is that it's slow, it's a waste of time, it's repetitive, and lastly that it's a required exercise in tedium as a replacement for traditional experience based stat growth. Such complaints or that the idea that the game was unplayable before the option to speed up time in the remaster (or that it improves the game) are untrue, and can be dispelled easily with an idea that might explain the mechanic better.
Imagine if each enemy in the game had only a limited amount of spell stocks, for example, if the bats at the start of the game had just a limit of 15 fires, and perhaps the triwing miniboss had 50 fires, blizzards, and thunders each. The expectation of “grinding by drawing” would be dead, and by explicitly disallowing players the opportunity to ruin their own enjoyment of the game by abusing a mechanic for “optimal growth and spell stocking” the game would have a much better sense of natural pace. And I mean, when you think about, even with that limitation you STILL could grind endlessly and pick up as many spells as you want, because the enemies are still random encounters you can grind. So what’s the difference, why does allowing a player to get ~infinite spells from a single encounter make it any worse than allowing a player to get a limited amount of spells from an infinitely repeatable encounter? The difference is player psychology, and how players perceive the game is to be played based on pre-established conditions of the genre. I’ve never seen a player of an rpg complain that a game demands that they grind by allowing infinite enemy encounters to occur in a designated area, because it’s understood unless the player explicitly desires a statistical advantage through repetitive actions, they are not meant to walk around and battle endlessly for optimal growth and item/resource availability.
But that still leaves the question, why design the game that way, why design it so that each enemy is an endless dispenser of spells and that spell stock is the foremost determiner of character statistic ability?
To answer this, first, what is drawing spells? Why have a magic system set up like this at all? I think the main benefits of this mechanic in terms of player emotion are that:
1- It gives each individual battle the ability to permanently change, for better or worse, your character’s potential capabilities, weaknesses and strengths. In other terms, their invisible, implied ambiguous class. Of course, there are no character classes in Final Fantasy VIII, and they haven’t been in the series at this point since V, but there are still minute decisions to tool and retool every character in the game based on available resources that can instantly completely change how your characters act, fight, and interact in terms of battles. Every single battle in the game has the potential to change this, either by having the player spend lots of magic spell stocks during the fight for casting and thus losing their junctioned stat strengths, or by acquiring an unknown amount of new spells, or even discovering an unknown spell altogether that gives new potential both as an ability to cast during battle and as an ability that might redefine or change your strategies completely. One of my biggest problems with many JRPGs is there is too much inconsequential time spent in battle, and that time actually feels inconsequential. Sure, technically experience points are consequential since they can permanently change your characters for the better once you get enough, but gaining experience is always the same reward (the only variable being amount), and always in the upward direction, and is always applied the same way by the game system. Spell stocks all have different stat relationships based on the spell, which itself is a form of discovery that’s pretty fun.
2- It creates a decision-making point. In each battle, you have the option to spend a character turn being useless for the sake of acquiring resources, and doing this consecutively leaves you open for more attacks by the enemy. You cannot predict the exact quantity you’ll receive each turn, so there’s a bit of a gamble involved, and it creates a risk/reward system of staying longer or choosing not to end battles to get more out of them. Drawing is also a skill. It’s not an option available at all times; it costs a full menu slot of which there are only four available and this never changes during the game (a big change from VII’s everything-window resizing itself), and the game makes this point from the beginning by starting you off with 4 available command skills in addition to Draw.
Additionally, the outcome of a successful Draw is dependent on magic stats/junctions, so there is incentive to do things like specialize characters for drawing, have mages geared toward drawing, or even make your characters physical stats weaker so as not to end battles too quickly. There is also the fact that your character level determines Drawing success/failure, and a lot of spells have a minimum level to acquire, which also actually means if you want to take advantage of battle spell drawing you cannot keep yourself intentionally underlevel (though you don’t have to take advantage of it; there are other ways of playing the game), and that if you have a specialized draw character, you still want to keep their level up, and in this game experience is primarily determined by who gets the last hit in battle, which means you still want them to attack every once in a while…
At the same time though, Draw is still useful as a command for characters with weak magic stats. You could always cast a Drawn spell instead of stocking it, kind of excitingly using the enemy spell against themselves right away in the heat of battle, and the power of that spell isn’t determined by character magic stats since it’s not really being casted from that character. Instead spells casted this way are given random strength, which could be useful in fights where physical fighters can’t use their attacks, need to get an elemental weakness out, or do anything spur-of-the-moment.
At the same time though, there is a huge flaw with the implementation of this mechanic, and I think it’s responsible for the reason this mechanic is misunderstood as something expected to be abused to the point of “making the game boring”. And that’s that, for about half of the game, the enemies simply don’t do enough damage per turn to create a legitimate threat to the player’s risk of standing around, drawing. Because players don’t feel a risk or danger, the only real risk until enemies become stronger is the passage of time, which is where the concept of perceived intended grind comes from. The game is not difficult enough in general to necessitate wasting your time with excessive drawing anyway, yet players cannot know that when starting the game or anticipating the next challenge. To be frank, the root of this issue stems from the ATB system and Final Fantasy’s approach to enemy design at this stage in general: from VI on, FF games had battles that were more about performance, expression and a horizontal power system where you could defeat enemies in multiple ways, which would actually help define the characters and their journeys, as well as create the cinematic character-driven narrative layer to the moment-to-moment gameplay. Making the enemies too hard would limit player incentive to experiment, and would lower the potential ways to solve encounters, so lowering the minimum requirement for defeating enemies makes sense. When the ATB system gets involved, though, you get the situation where if the player doesn’t truly go for ending the fight quickly and just does the minimum physical attack, the battles can very easily stall, where nobody does much damage, and the thrill of engagement is all but gone. This unfortunate result, combined with Final Fantasy’s popularization of prioritizing lengthy/showy battle animations over quicker alternatives or text, and the fact that all battles open in completely separate scenes from the exploration scene, disorienting the player if the battle takes too long (upon which re-orientating yourself by moving around to get your bearings will likely create another battle with step-based encounters), ALL are kind of the reason 70% of post FFVII JRPGs can feel like a slog to play. But that digression aside, adding the Draw system onto that low-risk and time-(in)sensitive battle foundation makes the first half of the game not live up to the risk in the risk/reward system the game is setting up.
Later games do have this element in them actually, FFIX basically has the Draw command in the form of a Steal system. It used to be that enemies had only one item players could steal, but in IX enemies have a whole table of items with harder and rarer to steal things at the top, which are really enticing since items and equipment have lots of functions in that game, similar to the magic system of VIII. Although in both games you can forgo a turn for the risk of getting hit more for the chance of scoring something good that can permanently change or increase your abilities in the game, the difference is that in IX the things enemies hold are actually limited! Look at that!
Then, in XII, you have a somewhat different thing but still a battle risk/reward subsystem where you can fight consecutive enemies by aggroing them and increase your chances of getting items and equipments and drops the higher your enemy chain is, and the more you fight and get more enemies involved the higher the risk gets for aggroing a strong enemy or overwhelming yourself in numbers. Continuing to reason 3…
3-It’s sick as hell. I don’t know what it is, and normally I don’t even care much for battle animations and particle effects, but the Draw animation is just super cool to me, and just conceptually, the idea of extracting magic essence from enemies and using it yourself in myriad ways is dope.
And if we go back to my previous point of the lack of pressure in damage turning the main motivater of risk to time, as much as I dislike it, in a game about dealing with time, with a sense of time that’s simultaneously instantly fast and endlessly frozen, isn’t it kind of apt? The anxiety of the draw state, the gambler’s addiction of staying in place just to get more, the fact that moving forward with the game and finishing encounters is something the player has to decide and actively cause, not just passively wait for things to end, well it all kind of fits thematically, I think.
One last addendum I'm gonna add here is that the way money is made in the game is also based on time, since you get a salary based on the time spent moving around in the game. Since the salary amount is determined only partially, minimally by battling, and mostly on quizzes taken that test and encourage experimentation with the game systems, it creates another horizontally structured optional progression path.
NARRATIVE 3 - Space as Final Respite, or: The Scarcity of Quiet
With my view of this story being explicitly about teenagers coming to terms with a hostile world defined by the simultaneity of time, the climax of the story is its calmest point.
I don’t want to give away too much about it in case there are readers who haven’t experienced it. But I will say that it’s a sequence that seems to come out of nowhere, has several twists, and barely explains itself. Yet it absolutely works.
Everywhere on the surface of the world of this game, there is the feeling of restlessness. Like I said before, the story sequences are accelerations of what feel like events occurring miles apart in time, the moments between them, to me at least, feel like environments defined by a freeze-frame energy. Everything is either a calm-before-the-storm, or the fallout right after a catastrophe, and in most cases, both. At rest, there is no rest, except for in space.
That being said, the scene in space technically is neither peaceful nor calm in its context. It’s very tense. BUT, it’s the one chapter in the game where the two main characters can just exist, and live by their own volition, separate from the propellants of time. The motivating factors behind Squall and Rinoa are very pure, and in that sense, it’s a rebellion against the forms of logic that construct the space the narrative defines itself in. It’s a hug in the void, interrupted only by a dragon.
MECHANICS 4 - You Are Still Playing the Game When It’s Shut Off
Final Fantasy VIII is built for external discussions. The storytelling style being based around events and relationships hinted at, the proto FFXIII datalog, the way junctioning allows for different players to have completely different play styles and setups, the fact that the card game rules scatter around and spread in unique, random ways along the towns and areas you play it at, leading to completely different rules ecosystems across the world in each save file. But I think the most interesting parts to this fact are two things.
First, the sidequest design in this game, specifically the ones you find on the overworld, and the way they’re populated along the map feel way more “you read this on a forum or heard it from a friend” than anything in the series prior, like with the invisible monkey stuff or the lake (if you know, you know), but it has a certain flavor all its own. There’s surprisingly very few of them and they’re all sort of funky in the sense that they feel abruptly distinct and don’t make sense until you ‘get’ them. It feels very protogenic to the kinds of things that would spread in early 2000s game design and sensibilities (in my opinion).
Second, with the inclusion of money being determined by something distinctly outside of the gameplay loop (optional exams), to the point that they’re in a section of the menu labeled ‘Tutorial’, I think is the game kind of encouraging the player to engage the game outside of the game and to think on their own by burying sorts of layers within the game’s construction. I think this is the first Final Fantasy where I felt the systems of combat, exploration, and character growth were distinct among themselves within the game, and could feel where each one ended and started. It’s the first Final Fantasy where I went out of my way to hunt down specific type of enemies based on their habitats to find a specific item. It’s also the first Final Fantasy where I went out of my way to construct a specific type of weapon I read about in a magazine and where going to a store meant more than just spending the gold I had for what they had on offer.
NARRATIVE 4 - The End on Tape
Potential spoilers for this section if you have not seen the ending.
“Reflect on your...childhood…your sensation...your words...your emotions.......Time...it will not wait...no matter...how hard you hold on...it escapes you...and......."-Ultimecia’s final words
What place does mortality have in a world where everything exists at the same time; if in the Vonnegut sense, you only need to look in a certain direction to see someone gone still standing, still doing what they’ve always been doing?
I read the ending in a particular way that I’ll try to explain. Squall finds himself transmitted by some signal into a cracked endless desert. In the Baudrillardian sense, this is the desert of the real. The crossing of all time, the eradication of distance between discreteness, and the overbombardment of information and signal—the noise of their reality of life—has created in its diametric the frayed husk of an opposite reality. No sound can be heard, and no signal perceived; no truth distinguishable from a soup of signs, signifiers, and contexts, there is no context found here at all, it is the Desert.
The hero wanders alone, unable to hold on to what mattered to him most. Unable to hold on to himself. Without context, without other things to compare itself to, the self disintegrates. The land shrinks until there is nowhere left to wander, because the act of wandering itself loses context, loses meaning, loses discreteness in relation to other things.
The signal/noise dichotomy is best represented by the violent montage sequence, the meshing, cutting, liquifying, re-editing as the picture itself fails to hold on to memory, fails to filter memory, fails to understand memory. And with neither memory, context, or structured/discernable reality, death comes without life beginning, and life arrives without death completing it, intermittently and together.
And the only solution to the hero’s purgatory of time, mortality, and context, is, as completely corny and as silly as it sounds, it’s just love. It’s just what matters to people, to be held and accepted. That’s the signal. It’s a beautiful image, with the clouds parting and the flowers coming back, when the two find each other again despite all odds. Because even if this whole loop will start again, Edea will begin SeeD, will become the sorceress, time draws in on itself, the characters are divided without knowing each other, and everybody is lost and alone in a sea of anxiety and noise, and the war comes from every side of time again, this one moment will still be there, and the game is asking the player to recognize the importance of that feeling. It ends with acceptance of that feeling across time, even for Seifer, who finally feels at ease with himself without actually changing, and especially Laguna, who finally gets to express what he’s always wanted to. A lost kind of love that’s continued across generations connected by a song and unspoken feelings.
Finally the whole thing culminates in a video recording of a celebration where everyone is present. It’s almost as if this one piece of footage, this is all that is allowed to exist outside of the loop that the timeline of the game is predicated on. Unlike the other forms of information transmission and transportation the game is fixed on, I think this one final tape shows a reality where everybody is at ease, being themselves, in the moment (and the headmaster’s Robin Williams face has suddenly fully transformed into a Phillip Seymour Hoffman). It’s an immortalization of the many lives that were there, granting them separation from the other many signals, noises, contexts, and realities of present, past, and future times. It ends only when the machine does, as the battery dies, the viewpoint is switched to Rinoa’s, and Squall is allowed to exist once more, present in the moment seen to Rinoa, flying toward a Lunar exit.
A send-off to 1999 and the entire millennium before it, as RPGs, rendering technology, and fiction storytelling on the digital medium won’t ever be quite the same.
My Own Timeline
I wanna take this part and talk a bit about my relationship with this game, and with games in general, over time.
I grew up at a time when PS1 games had just fully phased out and were unavailable in stores. I never had much money as a kid so getting games was a very infrequent thing, until the next gen consoles would come out and make the previous generations games discount and I could play catch-up.
Most of my relationship with games at that time was over the internet, watching videos of others older than I explaining about games and their relationships with them. Much can and has been said about the early years of YouTube and video game discussion, the immature humor, the overstretched personas, the ridiculous rants, embarrassing skits, and how generally mean spirited a lot of it was. But when I was a kid, that's all I had to go to to learn more and engage in what was absolutely the most fascinating topic out there, video games I cannot play.
Playstation 1 games, especially, felt like they were mystic artifacts, there was always an air of magic to them. I think my very first exposure to final fantasy was the FF8 intro cutscene. I thought the quick shots in that trailer-style intro were scenes from an actual movie, I remember googling for a place to watch the full thing. Then I remember finding Midgar and images depicting FF7's industrial black city and wondering how the hell it all fit together. The boxarts were always so intriguing and cinematic, but the resolution on my screen and old images and maybe just my dumb baby head would read into them the completely wrong way. I thought FF7s box was depicting a hero with a giant sword approaching a dark castle. I thought it was amazing. I could barely see or understand gameplay screenshots and just went off of text descriptions of it, and it always sounded more interesting and out there than the limited worlds being rendered in real time on my PS2. Besides 2000's Wikipedia and fan wikis I only had YouTubers to go off of for any context about these strange things that seemed so much better than the games I was playing then.
And who else to convince me of the superiority of the past than the growing number of men on the internet reminiscing about the games of their youth? And I fell for it, I just believed older games were better than anything next gen. I like to think of this now as a kind of big brother effect I experienced. I didn't have any older siblings and was an only child for a long time, so I sometimes feel jealous when I hear of others' experiences with older siblings passing down or sharing in video game experiences. Since I had no guide in the world of games, looking back now it kind of felt like I was relying on online video creators for a kind of parasocial game-themed relationship.
By allowing those kinds of people to be my guides in childhood escapist experiences, I had unknowingly allowed myself to swallow whole-sale all kinds of things, things that were not so good, and I just believed in the opinions others had for experiences I didn't have myself, for games I never played or movies I'd never watched. Most of my experience with Final Fantasy VIII for the longest time was with The Spoony One's review series on the game. It's funny to me now looking back and seeing how completely wrong most of his points about the game are, how he misreads its design choices and intentions, and kind of just complains.
Yet I can't really bring myself to hate it. I guess part of me just grew up in that culture, much as I disapprove of it now, and when I sit down and watch something like it from that time period I still find it kind of relaxing. Just to sit down, settle in, and listen to someone take me on a personal comedic journey that edits between gameplay footage, historical context, criticisms and anecdotes, and anything else that could happen on a screen. It's crazy, even if literally all of the content within that structure is horrible, it still feels comfortable somehow just through its format, its structure. I can't come to hate the things that taught me about all the games I wouldn't have been able to wonder and dream about, learn about, and eventually bring myself to try to experience on my own, even if I reject its message and outdated grossness.
That's the internet though, isn't it? The place where the past and future exist simultaneously, all directions to be experienced all at once. The turn of the millennium, the birth of the forum, the voices turning, all things must pass and all things must come, now at the same time.
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“We program a computer or a videotape machine to record a telecast in our absence, to be able to watch it the next day. Here we have a discovery: the olden space-time was an extensive space, a space where duration of time was valued. Whatever was short-lived was considered an evil-something pejorative. To last a short time was to not be present; it was negative. Today…new technologies lead us to discover the equivalent of the infinitely small in time. In previous times, we were conscious, with telescopes, of the infinite large, and with microscopes, of the infinitely small. Today, high speed machines, electronic machines, allow us to comprehend the same thing in regard to time. There is an infinitely long time which is that of history, of carbon-14, which enables us to date extremely ancient artifacts. Then, we have an infinitely short time, which is that of technology’s billionths of seconds. I think the present finds us squarely between these two times. We are living in both the extensive time of the cities of stories, of memories, or archives, or writing, and the intensive time of the new technologies. That’s the ‘program of absence’, that’s how we program our definitive absence, because we’ll never be present in that billionth of a second.”
All quotations about speed/time by Paul Virilio.
The concept of the annihilation of space by time, or time-space compression, is an idea posited by Karl Marx in 1857 that continued to be applied, articulated, and changed by writers and theorists as a global economy continued to form through modern history, which created the incentive to overcome both the spatial and communication barriers by which space between people, places, and thought had been previously manifest. These advances include things like transportation (railroads, cars, jets), communication channels (fax, radio, phone), and most recently online communication, or construction of non-physical spaces based on information transfer and delivery.
Keep in mind the fundamental striking changes to the world design of VIII from past games includes all these things that are shown to the player right from the start—trains running automatically between locations, rental cars available to the player, as well as the narrative’s emphasis on satellite, radio, and cable-based communications, and most importantly, the online forums and pages running on the school’s closed network servers.
Final Fantasy VIII’s fundamental design was actually heavily inspired by internet forums, as scenario writer Nojima recently discussed his experience with using a personal computer to search for online discussions about previous games he’d worked on for the first time, and how impacted he was to see all kinds of criticisms on his use of character death and tragedy and the “overuse of flashbacks” as a narrative device, all of which directly affected the decisions made during the narrative development of VIII. It doesn’t just stop there either, as VIII is really the first game to begin a trend in the series where the narrative is made of hints and clues at hidden information, context, and details to serve the main storyline, something directly designed to bolster online and forum discussions among players. Do you remember the datalog of FFXIII? Did you ever realize that whole thing began with VIII? The ‘tutorial’ section of the menu has sections among sections detailing not just the various unexplained aspects of the game systems, but information about characters, locations, plot events, and the history of the world that go mostly unspoken during the game, key terms with which to read the several intended playthroughs of the game and to put pieces together with others.
I wholly believe that the direct exposure to other people and places via the internet as an extension of previous historical accelerations and compressions of time and their subsequent erasure of borders and discreet identities in time and space directly informs the themes, message, and the narrative and mechanical design of Final Fantasy VIII.
“We are entering a space which is speed-space…[a] time of electronic transmission…and therefore, man is present not via his physical presence, but via programming.”
NARRATIVE 1 - VHS
I think a lot of people will agree that the narrative and plot of FFVIII has a unique flair to it. It took me some time to realize how to describe it, but I think I’ve reached something I’m satisfied with. The plot of FFVIII, from the beginning, feels compressed, with events happening of wildly ranging content, tones, fictional genres, compiled together in tight bouts of non-sequitur editing. What it really feels like, is an old, worn-out inherited VHS tape that’s seen years of use and rewriting between various films and programs, to the extent that you can no longer tell where one film ends and the next begins. Storylines and cinema modes blend together, events unpredictable in nature only loosely related to the ones immediately surrounding them dissolve with the seams between so worn out that the lack of cuts itself is jarring (note the cinematics’ consistent, heavy use of dissolves) and characters appear to change fundamental roles based not on character or plot developments but on the tape’s runtime itself, dictated by the speed of the dream, as if resembling a worn-out existential footprint of a person’s interests and entertainment dispositions over a long period of time. The plot of FFVIII grabs from ranges of Hollywood films between Star Wars to minutes of Jurassic Park to Saving Private Ryan, Aliens to hints of Harry Potter (unreleased as of ff8’s release), Titanic, etc. Each section feels iconic, but they all feel like different, unrelated works stitched together, bound by culture and speed.
What effect does living in that kind of existence have on a person? Final Fantasy VIII has large swaths of time the player can experience, if they so choose, between important plot events, where nothing important happens and time seems to feel like a paranoid stand-still, as if frozen between actions but never at rest, where players are pulled along mainly by interest in the trading card game system. But when plot events happen, they happen fast, in intense succession, one after another. Final Fantasy VIII is a story about young people, especially Squall, being consistently overwhelmed by events they have no control over, by a world that deems all the elements of discrete eras of history as totally equivalent, permitted to happen simultaneously.
Unlike a typical narrative’s sense of time where at any moment that the present takes place the threat of the unknown would come from the future, the characters of VIII are attacked from all sides, so little is their grasp on both the grand scope of time and the minuteness of its intervals. VIII is a story where enemies become mothers (your own), and not in the Luke Skywalker sense. Relationships are given unknown meanings, and then immediately dropped, recontextualized, and then decontextualized. No form of understanding about the nature of this world is stable. It is a dream where your own personal reality rewrites itself so fast and frequently as everything changes and morphs all around you.
“When we think of speed, we say it’s the means of getting from here to there fast…But I say no to this. It’s a milieu, a milieu in which we participate only indirectly through the videotape machine after recording, through information science and [programmed] systems.”
MECHANICS 1 – Deconsolidation and Assembly
The act of dealing with that world, where everything is connected to the point where nothing is any more relevant than anything else, is to acknowledge its implicit existential anxiety and death anxiety.
More than anything else, I think, the makeup of Final Fantasy VIII’s world and mechanics design is that of a consolidated, disassembled world, where everything remains clumped together in chunks, but nothing is really pre-built for the player. The content, from quests to acquirable resources are concentrated in select points along the map. Rather than spread across the map so the player is led to find the Necessary Keys ala Dragon Quest, as it were, they are in distinct points the player is meant to remember and return to should they seek those properties. Even the system of magic itself implies that magic, the most important resource of this world, is located along concentrated areas that spurt out from physical locations, or from the monsters who originate from the moon. Item drops only come from specific monsters and have very specific uses, and monsters themselves are often limited to specific continents or areas. But it isn’t just content that’s consolidated, the rules of the game themselves are. Each new Guardian Force (summon) acquisition and new type of magic has the power to fundamentally change how the game works for the player and the psychology of the battles and exploration, exactly the same as how Triple Triad’s (card game side mode) rulesets change as you travel.
You might have heard the complaint that Final Fantasy VIII is easy to break, but in truth, you cannot break Final Fantasy VIII because you cannot break something that is not yet assembled. The assembly of its elements is entirely up to the player, with what you do in the game, what you find, what you explore, how you allocate things, and what affordances you define each element with. And none of these decisions are permanent; the game can be rewritten any time and as many times as you choose.
CONTEXTUALIZATION – Putting VIII into Perspective of the Series
Put simply, the identity of Final Fantasy is that it attempts to encapsulate everything that can be said regarding a theme using both fantasy and role-playing mechanics within a single game. They are a lot like the Star Wars films in how those films cover an extremely broad and encompassing range of visual, cinematographic, and mythological elements taken from various sources and put together to form a narrative that explores narrative. Final Fantasy games are all encompassing works of the same kind; each game is both the first work and the last work in a series that explores the art of game-driven narrative.
I would like now to break down each game in the series until VIII and paint them as a specific type of Final Fantasy with regards to how each approaches its interpretation and style of roleplaying to demonstrate the path taken to get to VIII's approach.
1 Final Dungeon Fantasy
A game mainly driven by individual dungeons that require the player to explore and plan routes through several times until coming away with the most important treasure, a narrative key, that applies itself in some way to the overworld, itself a large dungeon. This form of dungeon diving heavily tests resource management and planning as well as managing encounter based risk and reward.
2 Final Campaign Fantasy
A game that serves a narrative campaign about rebellion first and foremost, and requires the player to consistently return to a specific location as they seek the resources and keys necessary to develop a resistance strong enough against an empire. Rather than resource management, the behavior of the player is heavily tracked and used to shape the growth of the characters nonlinearly which requires appropriate use of spells and weaponry to modify characters temporarily and permanently to approach the challenges.
3 Final Exploration Fantasy
A story centered around a freewheeling party exploring both a shifting world and their own shifting selves. Tasks are found on volition and approached through an economy of mechanical roles.
4 Final Theater Fantasy
A game that defines all mechanics and roles of its participants by and for narrative, and allows the player to be the discoverer and actor of their interplay.
5 Final Television Fantasy
A game about approaching challenges by not just trying different classes and mechanical roles but by combining their aspects and seeing their effects. An episodic costume narrative directed by the player with a party as cast members in on-going production.
6 Final Opera Fantasy
An extension of the fourth game's theater, developed into a full multi-character parallel storied narrative where each character is less defined by role and more by personal quirks and distance from the former games' magic, never being able to take ownership of it.
7 Final Everything Fantasy
7 is like a culmination and convergence of so many things and ideas. It feels like it contains so many settings, story genres, and pieces as an urban fantasy. From sidewalks and ceos, mythical creatures, crazed scientists and test subjects, caves of natural wonder, haunted mansions, a “princess”-like and a “knight”-like, lost magic cities, amusement parks, giant robots, kaiju, space, special soldiers, secret agents, aliens, I mean the list just goes on, and it all works because none of these things take up too much of the time and the pace is fast enough to be riveting but with deep enough character writing and psychology between the turnarounds to keep consistent interest on a main through-line.
Final fantasy VII is the fantasy of everything, contextualized by the concept of the lifestream, where all life and concepts flow through the planet in a physical, manifested way. Anything can happen because it’s part of the same stream of planetary existence, like a wave that comes and goes.
8 Final RPG Fantasy
How do you go past “everything”? What do you look toward once you’ve created a story about the concept of “everything”? The answer VIII arrives at, is to look at the container itself, the RPG wrapper that houses the content of the game. Whereas VII asked what are all the things we can put and keep in an RPG, VIII asks what is an RPG? How does an RPG present and deliver its ideas?
To play Final Fantasy VIII is to create questions and follow lines of thought. The game itself houses multiple choice tests (as the main characters are students) that help determine the salary level the player receives. Each of these tests is not only designed to test the player’s understanding of the game, but to give them ideas for things to experiment with, questions to follow up on and experiment within the game’s almost carelessly open and flexible system.
Each character is a momentary collection of spells that determine what they’re good at. Each spell a question of how to make a character either stronger or more resistant. And each potential of each spell is determined by what god-creatures you’ve pacted with or spotted and fished in each battle. But, the decisions you can make for what you want to be good at are also determined by what GFs you have found and what abilities you've invested in. For example, you might prioritize HP and junction cures to HP, but then you find that you're rarely doing limit breaks because limits are tied to low HP, and have their own kind of system for chaining limits by manipulating windows. You would be ignoring a system of the combat and never hitting your characters' true potential, not to mention having slow battles. But, then you get the spell Aura, which lets you do limits at higher HP. But you find that with that high HP, you don't really ever heal high enough to take advantage of it because your magic stat is low. And when you do heal, your max hp diminishes anyway. You have a specific idea about how HP and healing works, until you get an ability that instantly heals an ally to full without any resource limit, and suddenly you have a completely different understanding of opportunity costs, statistical uses, and how spells can be used. There's many abilities in the game that offer (or threaten) to change the way the game can or should be played, and each stat has its own little functions worth discovering.
Even the difficulty of the game is entirely dependent on how much time one spends digging into the game, with enemies leveling up with the player’s party and the speed of level-ups being on a linear scale, rather than exponential (1000 exp to level up at all times, regardless of current level), which puts a pressure on the player to keep their builds up against the speed of the game's power scale. You might think to avoid killing creatures and gaining experience and focus entirely on getting spells, which many do to "break" the game, but this prevents you from being able to draw higher level magic as your level (and magic ability) determine your capabilities with that. Without high enough levels, enemy monsters won't even have high level magic on them to take from at all, and without killing monsters and only ending battles in other ways, you'll never get the monster parts and drops to turn into either magic or new weapons, and neither will your GFs learn new abilities and stat relationships or develop summon compatibilities. Although you can bypass some of that by delving into the card game, another system of intricate and shifting rulesets, which leads me to my next point.
MECHANICS 2 - Neuroplasticity
All the (consolidated) parts of Final Fantasy VIII, although scattered and very missable, are not any of them necessary toward completing the game because the system is designed to work around missing components.
You can ignore triple triad and focus on drawing magic and making builds from monster drop items. You can make your GFs focus on summon damage and boosts over junctioned stats and play the game carefully using summons and summon items, or you might never use those items at all. You might prioritize disposable high damage items over high level magic and build characters around that.
You might have one character build defensive and manipulate them to stay in low health to get limit breaks off of them. Doing that implies that you have access to a defense boosting GF, which are missable. You can plan a party around anything given what stat junctions you have available. You might have a party that's weak or strong against various elements at random times depending on what the auto junction system chooses for you, or you might be in complete control of the elemental and status properties of everyone around you.
Even the pocket playstation peripheral, something I thought was a downside of the game as without it certain items and summons can't be obtained. But having a better understanding of the game let me realize that it's entirely in the spirit of the game since everything in the game is an optional, circumventable thing that helps you define what kind of rpg you're playing. It's not a complete, self-contained "final fantasy", I thought, if it has these things outside the game. But, it doesn't need to have it, and besides, what ambition to have a separate monocolor tiny game screen with the potential to bring game altering items into the game that you can acquire by adventuring while outside.
To add onto the chocobo pocketstation game point, what it is is a tiny little random dungeon navigator and battler with small events that can help you level up a small chocobo in the real game and grow a summon in real time, while it nets you items from all over the game, even when you wouldn't be able to get them normally. Sometimes these items can help you get lategame GFs early. But this doesn't break the difficulty curve as it would in a normal rpg, because the game is balanced not around standard difficulty but on a risk/reward system where danger is beneficial, all boons are expendable and disposable, and everything around you is on the same growth curve as you.
All this to say that, while I think Final Fantasy had been leaning toward this direction for some time with V's class change system, VI's magic learning system and VII's materia system, but VIII is the first to fully embrace a difficulty designed around broadness. Instead of a series of challenges that test you on your ability to use available resources, growth choices made, or special items and weapons found via exploration, VIII is all about improvisation and just seeing what you can do and how you can play with it. This is reinforced by both a growth structure based on impermanence and redefinability and a world and system structure of circumventable machinery, where the pleasure is in the rewiring. It's the emphasis on how, not on performing optimally but on enjoying the act and actually paying attention and recognizing the struts, rails, and artifice of the play. In that sense, the game might be the first and only truly mechanically Brechtian RPG.
NARRATIVE 2 - Characters Who Exist Between the Frames
Given the state of impermanence and redefinability of the game’s mechanical construction, in a world where everything is permitted to exist at once in one concentrated mass dilated over a stretch of bending time, characters live and breathe in the spaces between time. If timecode dictates the law of this world the way it does relationships, events, and reality, then it is between units of time that characters find their existence.
The key visual motif of this game is the fade. Locations, characters, and places in time are introduced by fading, cascading shots. It is a visual dilation between disparate moments, a morphing of person to place, the inner to outer and back again, and it is constant across this game’s narrative framing.
Yet the characters when introduced are always given these very specific, quiet moments. Beautifully rendered short, intimate cg, completely voiceless, pointmark each new character’s introduction to the story. It’s such a unique feeling watching these, like learning about somebody without hearing them say anything, an interview of gestures, small movements, and diegetic environmental sound. It’s these moments that stand out throughout the game as in the heat of narrative choice, climax, and expositions where characters are put through the wringer and make mistakes, change, remember things, forget things; characters have developments in this game so quickly sometimes or have stunning redefining moments and reevaluations that it sometimes does feel absurd, surreal, and many have criticized this style of narrative development, but it's entirely appropriate for this game’s theme and story, a story where young adult development is characterized by the existential speed of the present, the claustrophobia of the past and the future closing on you at both sides, the baggage of the parent, the realization of your own eminent death, the reconciliation or lackthereof of a society and history that feels alien and unmalleable, of time itself that seems hostile and alive. To live here is to have surrendered yourself to it, to be a participant of the self-annihilation of its very existence, so there is no self, really, to separate from the out-of-control plot spiraling across the drama of all ages, except for only those that can be captured by these tiny, seemingly trivial moments, these small things that carry so much meaning about a person. And isn’t that ultimately the way you’ll be remembered? When a person is gone and all their life is part of the lives of all the other people’s lives, we remember those small bits, right? The way they move their hair or gaze into the sky or stumble on some rocks. It’s the moments between that can breathe.
MECHANICS 3 - Bargaining with Time
Much has been said about the drawing system of Final Fantasy VIII. I stand by that it is one of the most misunderstood mechanics in all RPG history. The regurgitated complaint is that it's slow, it's a waste of time, it's repetitive, and lastly that it's a required exercise in tedium as a replacement for traditional experience based stat growth. Such complaints or that the idea that the game was unplayable before the option to speed up time in the remaster (or that it improves the game) are untrue, and can be dispelled easily with an idea that might explain the mechanic better.
Imagine if each enemy in the game had only a limited amount of spell stocks, for example, if the bats at the start of the game had just a limit of 15 fires, and perhaps the triwing miniboss had 50 fires, blizzards, and thunders each. The expectation of “grinding by drawing” would be dead, and by explicitly disallowing players the opportunity to ruin their own enjoyment of the game by abusing a mechanic for “optimal growth and spell stocking” the game would have a much better sense of natural pace. And I mean, when you think about, even with that limitation you STILL could grind endlessly and pick up as many spells as you want, because the enemies are still random encounters you can grind. So what’s the difference, why does allowing a player to get ~infinite spells from a single encounter make it any worse than allowing a player to get a limited amount of spells from an infinitely repeatable encounter? The difference is player psychology, and how players perceive the game is to be played based on pre-established conditions of the genre. I’ve never seen a player of an rpg complain that a game demands that they grind by allowing infinite enemy encounters to occur in a designated area, because it’s understood unless the player explicitly desires a statistical advantage through repetitive actions, they are not meant to walk around and battle endlessly for optimal growth and item/resource availability.
But that still leaves the question, why design the game that way, why design it so that each enemy is an endless dispenser of spells and that spell stock is the foremost determiner of character statistic ability?
To answer this, first, what is drawing spells? Why have a magic system set up like this at all? I think the main benefits of this mechanic in terms of player emotion are that:
1- It gives each individual battle the ability to permanently change, for better or worse, your character’s potential capabilities, weaknesses and strengths. In other terms, their invisible, implied ambiguous class. Of course, there are no character classes in Final Fantasy VIII, and they haven’t been in the series at this point since V, but there are still minute decisions to tool and retool every character in the game based on available resources that can instantly completely change how your characters act, fight, and interact in terms of battles. Every single battle in the game has the potential to change this, either by having the player spend lots of magic spell stocks during the fight for casting and thus losing their junctioned stat strengths, or by acquiring an unknown amount of new spells, or even discovering an unknown spell altogether that gives new potential both as an ability to cast during battle and as an ability that might redefine or change your strategies completely. One of my biggest problems with many JRPGs is there is too much inconsequential time spent in battle, and that time actually feels inconsequential. Sure, technically experience points are consequential since they can permanently change your characters for the better once you get enough, but gaining experience is always the same reward (the only variable being amount), and always in the upward direction, and is always applied the same way by the game system. Spell stocks all have different stat relationships based on the spell, which itself is a form of discovery that’s pretty fun.
2- It creates a decision-making point. In each battle, you have the option to spend a character turn being useless for the sake of acquiring resources, and doing this consecutively leaves you open for more attacks by the enemy. You cannot predict the exact quantity you’ll receive each turn, so there’s a bit of a gamble involved, and it creates a risk/reward system of staying longer or choosing not to end battles to get more out of them. Drawing is also a skill. It’s not an option available at all times; it costs a full menu slot of which there are only four available and this never changes during the game (a big change from VII’s everything-window resizing itself), and the game makes this point from the beginning by starting you off with 4 available command skills in addition to Draw.
Additionally, the outcome of a successful Draw is dependent on magic stats/junctions, so there is incentive to do things like specialize characters for drawing, have mages geared toward drawing, or even make your characters physical stats weaker so as not to end battles too quickly. There is also the fact that your character level determines Drawing success/failure, and a lot of spells have a minimum level to acquire, which also actually means if you want to take advantage of battle spell drawing you cannot keep yourself intentionally underlevel (though you don’t have to take advantage of it; there are other ways of playing the game), and that if you have a specialized draw character, you still want to keep their level up, and in this game experience is primarily determined by who gets the last hit in battle, which means you still want them to attack every once in a while…
At the same time though, Draw is still useful as a command for characters with weak magic stats. You could always cast a Drawn spell instead of stocking it, kind of excitingly using the enemy spell against themselves right away in the heat of battle, and the power of that spell isn’t determined by character magic stats since it’s not really being casted from that character. Instead spells casted this way are given random strength, which could be useful in fights where physical fighters can’t use their attacks, need to get an elemental weakness out, or do anything spur-of-the-moment.
At the same time though, there is a huge flaw with the implementation of this mechanic, and I think it’s responsible for the reason this mechanic is misunderstood as something expected to be abused to the point of “making the game boring”. And that’s that, for about half of the game, the enemies simply don’t do enough damage per turn to create a legitimate threat to the player’s risk of standing around, drawing. Because players don’t feel a risk or danger, the only real risk until enemies become stronger is the passage of time, which is where the concept of perceived intended grind comes from. The game is not difficult enough in general to necessitate wasting your time with excessive drawing anyway, yet players cannot know that when starting the game or anticipating the next challenge. To be frank, the root of this issue stems from the ATB system and Final Fantasy’s approach to enemy design at this stage in general: from VI on, FF games had battles that were more about performance, expression and a horizontal power system where you could defeat enemies in multiple ways, which would actually help define the characters and their journeys, as well as create the cinematic character-driven narrative layer to the moment-to-moment gameplay. Making the enemies too hard would limit player incentive to experiment, and would lower the potential ways to solve encounters, so lowering the minimum requirement for defeating enemies makes sense. When the ATB system gets involved, though, you get the situation where if the player doesn’t truly go for ending the fight quickly and just does the minimum physical attack, the battles can very easily stall, where nobody does much damage, and the thrill of engagement is all but gone. This unfortunate result, combined with Final Fantasy’s popularization of prioritizing lengthy/showy battle animations over quicker alternatives or text, and the fact that all battles open in completely separate scenes from the exploration scene, disorienting the player if the battle takes too long (upon which re-orientating yourself by moving around to get your bearings will likely create another battle with step-based encounters), ALL are kind of the reason 70% of post FFVII JRPGs can feel like a slog to play. But that digression aside, adding the Draw system onto that low-risk and time-(in)sensitive battle foundation makes the first half of the game not live up to the risk in the risk/reward system the game is setting up.
Later games do have this element in them actually, FFIX basically has the Draw command in the form of a Steal system. It used to be that enemies had only one item players could steal, but in IX enemies have a whole table of items with harder and rarer to steal things at the top, which are really enticing since items and equipment have lots of functions in that game, similar to the magic system of VIII. Although in both games you can forgo a turn for the risk of getting hit more for the chance of scoring something good that can permanently change or increase your abilities in the game, the difference is that in IX the things enemies hold are actually limited! Look at that!
Then, in XII, you have a somewhat different thing but still a battle risk/reward subsystem where you can fight consecutive enemies by aggroing them and increase your chances of getting items and equipments and drops the higher your enemy chain is, and the more you fight and get more enemies involved the higher the risk gets for aggroing a strong enemy or overwhelming yourself in numbers. Continuing to reason 3…
3-It’s sick as hell. I don’t know what it is, and normally I don’t even care much for battle animations and particle effects, but the Draw animation is just super cool to me, and just conceptually, the idea of extracting magic essence from enemies and using it yourself in myriad ways is dope.
And if we go back to my previous point of the lack of pressure in damage turning the main motivater of risk to time, as much as I dislike it, in a game about dealing with time, with a sense of time that’s simultaneously instantly fast and endlessly frozen, isn’t it kind of apt? The anxiety of the draw state, the gambler’s addiction of staying in place just to get more, the fact that moving forward with the game and finishing encounters is something the player has to decide and actively cause, not just passively wait for things to end, well it all kind of fits thematically, I think.
One last addendum I'm gonna add here is that the way money is made in the game is also based on time, since you get a salary based on the time spent moving around in the game. Since the salary amount is determined only partially, minimally by battling, and mostly on quizzes taken that test and encourage experimentation with the game systems, it creates another horizontally structured optional progression path.
NARRATIVE 3 - Space as Final Respite, or: The Scarcity of Quiet
With my view of this story being explicitly about teenagers coming to terms with a hostile world defined by the simultaneity of time, the climax of the story is its calmest point.
I don’t want to give away too much about it in case there are readers who haven’t experienced it. But I will say that it’s a sequence that seems to come out of nowhere, has several twists, and barely explains itself. Yet it absolutely works.
Everywhere on the surface of the world of this game, there is the feeling of restlessness. Like I said before, the story sequences are accelerations of what feel like events occurring miles apart in time, the moments between them, to me at least, feel like environments defined by a freeze-frame energy. Everything is either a calm-before-the-storm, or the fallout right after a catastrophe, and in most cases, both. At rest, there is no rest, except for in space.
That being said, the scene in space technically is neither peaceful nor calm in its context. It’s very tense. BUT, it’s the one chapter in the game where the two main characters can just exist, and live by their own volition, separate from the propellants of time. The motivating factors behind Squall and Rinoa are very pure, and in that sense, it’s a rebellion against the forms of logic that construct the space the narrative defines itself in. It’s a hug in the void, interrupted only by a dragon.
MECHANICS 4 - You Are Still Playing the Game When It’s Shut Off
Final Fantasy VIII is built for external discussions. The storytelling style being based around events and relationships hinted at, the proto FFXIII datalog, the way junctioning allows for different players to have completely different play styles and setups, the fact that the card game rules scatter around and spread in unique, random ways along the towns and areas you play it at, leading to completely different rules ecosystems across the world in each save file. But I think the most interesting parts to this fact are two things.
First, the sidequest design in this game, specifically the ones you find on the overworld, and the way they’re populated along the map feel way more “you read this on a forum or heard it from a friend” than anything in the series prior, like with the invisible monkey stuff or the lake (if you know, you know), but it has a certain flavor all its own. There’s surprisingly very few of them and they’re all sort of funky in the sense that they feel abruptly distinct and don’t make sense until you ‘get’ them. It feels very protogenic to the kinds of things that would spread in early 2000s game design and sensibilities (in my opinion).
Second, with the inclusion of money being determined by something distinctly outside of the gameplay loop (optional exams), to the point that they’re in a section of the menu labeled ‘Tutorial’, I think is the game kind of encouraging the player to engage the game outside of the game and to think on their own by burying sorts of layers within the game’s construction. I think this is the first Final Fantasy where I felt the systems of combat, exploration, and character growth were distinct among themselves within the game, and could feel where each one ended and started. It’s the first Final Fantasy where I went out of my way to hunt down specific type of enemies based on their habitats to find a specific item. It’s also the first Final Fantasy where I went out of my way to construct a specific type of weapon I read about in a magazine and where going to a store meant more than just spending the gold I had for what they had on offer.
NARRATIVE 4 - The End on Tape
Potential spoilers for this section if you have not seen the ending.
“Reflect on your...childhood…your sensation...your words...your emotions.......Time...it will not wait...no matter...how hard you hold on...it escapes you...and......."-Ultimecia’s final words
What place does mortality have in a world where everything exists at the same time; if in the Vonnegut sense, you only need to look in a certain direction to see someone gone still standing, still doing what they’ve always been doing?
I read the ending in a particular way that I’ll try to explain. Squall finds himself transmitted by some signal into a cracked endless desert. In the Baudrillardian sense, this is the desert of the real. The crossing of all time, the eradication of distance between discreteness, and the overbombardment of information and signal—the noise of their reality of life—has created in its diametric the frayed husk of an opposite reality. No sound can be heard, and no signal perceived; no truth distinguishable from a soup of signs, signifiers, and contexts, there is no context found here at all, it is the Desert.
The hero wanders alone, unable to hold on to what mattered to him most. Unable to hold on to himself. Without context, without other things to compare itself to, the self disintegrates. The land shrinks until there is nowhere left to wander, because the act of wandering itself loses context, loses meaning, loses discreteness in relation to other things.
The signal/noise dichotomy is best represented by the violent montage sequence, the meshing, cutting, liquifying, re-editing as the picture itself fails to hold on to memory, fails to filter memory, fails to understand memory. And with neither memory, context, or structured/discernable reality, death comes without life beginning, and life arrives without death completing it, intermittently and together.
And the only solution to the hero’s purgatory of time, mortality, and context, is, as completely corny and as silly as it sounds, it’s just love. It’s just what matters to people, to be held and accepted. That’s the signal. It’s a beautiful image, with the clouds parting and the flowers coming back, when the two find each other again despite all odds. Because even if this whole loop will start again, Edea will begin SeeD, will become the sorceress, time draws in on itself, the characters are divided without knowing each other, and everybody is lost and alone in a sea of anxiety and noise, and the war comes from every side of time again, this one moment will still be there, and the game is asking the player to recognize the importance of that feeling. It ends with acceptance of that feeling across time, even for Seifer, who finally feels at ease with himself without actually changing, and especially Laguna, who finally gets to express what he’s always wanted to. A lost kind of love that’s continued across generations connected by a song and unspoken feelings.
Finally the whole thing culminates in a video recording of a celebration where everyone is present. It’s almost as if this one piece of footage, this is all that is allowed to exist outside of the loop that the timeline of the game is predicated on. Unlike the other forms of information transmission and transportation the game is fixed on, I think this one final tape shows a reality where everybody is at ease, being themselves, in the moment (and the headmaster’s Robin Williams face has suddenly fully transformed into a Phillip Seymour Hoffman). It’s an immortalization of the many lives that were there, granting them separation from the other many signals, noises, contexts, and realities of present, past, and future times. It ends only when the machine does, as the battery dies, the viewpoint is switched to Rinoa’s, and Squall is allowed to exist once more, present in the moment seen to Rinoa, flying toward a Lunar exit.
A send-off to 1999 and the entire millennium before it, as RPGs, rendering technology, and fiction storytelling on the digital medium won’t ever be quite the same.
My Own Timeline
I wanna take this part and talk a bit about my relationship with this game, and with games in general, over time.
I grew up at a time when PS1 games had just fully phased out and were unavailable in stores. I never had much money as a kid so getting games was a very infrequent thing, until the next gen consoles would come out and make the previous generations games discount and I could play catch-up.
Most of my relationship with games at that time was over the internet, watching videos of others older than I explaining about games and their relationships with them. Much can and has been said about the early years of YouTube and video game discussion, the immature humor, the overstretched personas, the ridiculous rants, embarrassing skits, and how generally mean spirited a lot of it was. But when I was a kid, that's all I had to go to to learn more and engage in what was absolutely the most fascinating topic out there, video games I cannot play.
Playstation 1 games, especially, felt like they were mystic artifacts, there was always an air of magic to them. I think my very first exposure to final fantasy was the FF8 intro cutscene. I thought the quick shots in that trailer-style intro were scenes from an actual movie, I remember googling for a place to watch the full thing. Then I remember finding Midgar and images depicting FF7's industrial black city and wondering how the hell it all fit together. The boxarts were always so intriguing and cinematic, but the resolution on my screen and old images and maybe just my dumb baby head would read into them the completely wrong way. I thought FF7s box was depicting a hero with a giant sword approaching a dark castle. I thought it was amazing. I could barely see or understand gameplay screenshots and just went off of text descriptions of it, and it always sounded more interesting and out there than the limited worlds being rendered in real time on my PS2. Besides 2000's Wikipedia and fan wikis I only had YouTubers to go off of for any context about these strange things that seemed so much better than the games I was playing then.
And who else to convince me of the superiority of the past than the growing number of men on the internet reminiscing about the games of their youth? And I fell for it, I just believed older games were better than anything next gen. I like to think of this now as a kind of big brother effect I experienced. I didn't have any older siblings and was an only child for a long time, so I sometimes feel jealous when I hear of others' experiences with older siblings passing down or sharing in video game experiences. Since I had no guide in the world of games, looking back now it kind of felt like I was relying on online video creators for a kind of parasocial game-themed relationship.
By allowing those kinds of people to be my guides in childhood escapist experiences, I had unknowingly allowed myself to swallow whole-sale all kinds of things, things that were not so good, and I just believed in the opinions others had for experiences I didn't have myself, for games I never played or movies I'd never watched. Most of my experience with Final Fantasy VIII for the longest time was with The Spoony One's review series on the game. It's funny to me now looking back and seeing how completely wrong most of his points about the game are, how he misreads its design choices and intentions, and kind of just complains.
Yet I can't really bring myself to hate it. I guess part of me just grew up in that culture, much as I disapprove of it now, and when I sit down and watch something like it from that time period I still find it kind of relaxing. Just to sit down, settle in, and listen to someone take me on a personal comedic journey that edits between gameplay footage, historical context, criticisms and anecdotes, and anything else that could happen on a screen. It's crazy, even if literally all of the content within that structure is horrible, it still feels comfortable somehow just through its format, its structure. I can't come to hate the things that taught me about all the games I wouldn't have been able to wonder and dream about, learn about, and eventually bring myself to try to experience on my own, even if I reject its message and outdated grossness.
That's the internet though, isn't it? The place where the past and future exist simultaneously, all directions to be experienced all at once. The turn of the millennium, the birth of the forum, the voices turning, all things must pass and all things must come, now at the same time.
--------------
“We program a computer or a videotape machine to record a telecast in our absence, to be able to watch it the next day. Here we have a discovery: the olden space-time was an extensive space, a space where duration of time was valued. Whatever was short-lived was considered an evil-something pejorative. To last a short time was to not be present; it was negative. Today…new technologies lead us to discover the equivalent of the infinitely small in time. In previous times, we were conscious, with telescopes, of the infinite large, and with microscopes, of the infinitely small. Today, high speed machines, electronic machines, allow us to comprehend the same thing in regard to time. There is an infinitely long time which is that of history, of carbon-14, which enables us to date extremely ancient artifacts. Then, we have an infinitely short time, which is that of technology’s billionths of seconds. I think the present finds us squarely between these two times. We are living in both the extensive time of the cities of stories, of memories, or archives, or writing, and the intensive time of the new technologies. That’s the ‘program of absence’, that’s how we program our definitive absence, because we’ll never be present in that billionth of a second.”
All quotations about speed/time by Paul Virilio.
I can barely form a coherent thought about what I just finished but I feel weirdly seen by Final Fantasy VIII and its protagonist in particular as this understanding of specific feelings of capitalist alienation that I've been unable to articulate for the longest time. I don't have any official diagnosis and especially do not want people I barely know armchair diagnosing me online but Squall's struggles to process the most basic social interactions in terms of anything other than capitalist obligations like school or work, "shut up and get the job done" mentality, and specific jaded outlook are core parts of myself I never expected to see reflected in this fashion. While I narrowly prefer the basic bitch choices of VI and VII in terms of Final Fantasy games, this surreal response to the cultural zeitgeist of the latter game and weird as fuck (complimentary) use of Marxist theory (specifically the "annihilation of space by time" described in Grundrisse and expanded upon over a century later by David Harvey) in the same way that most RPGs use religious/mythological concepts solely because it sounds cool is a game that will no doubt have a special place in my heart from now on.
ff8 is a game that is very hard for me to compile my thoughts on, but i thought i might as well try now that it's been a bit since i've finished it
i can get 8 not being somebody's favorite final fantasy, but this is such a beautiful piece of art to me that it feels like most of the game's bad reputation is just a mass gaslighting campaign perpetuated by early 2000s gaming magazines and kept alive by people who are scared of earnest emotionality in their video games. not everything that happens in this game is necessarily logical and it does have its flaws—the main antagonist is good but far from the series strongest and the disc 2 twist, while not nearly as bad as anyone has ever made it out to be, is delivered a little bit clumsily—but i feel like that's in service of being such an emotionally resonant game that it can barely be seen as a downside. the story of squall and rinoa is so beautiful to me in a way that so few love stories between a man and a woman can be for me and there were multiple points where i started to tear up a bit just because of how much i loved my experience with 8's story and characters.
when it comes to ff8's gameplay the junction system is unironically one of the few times that the atb battle system has been even remotely enjoyable, and while it isn't as strong mechanically as materias from 7 and the tutorials conveying the system in game aren't the best, i think it's a bit sad how having to engage with the mechanics differently is enough to put people off to the game's combat. with just a little bit more time in the oven and an audience more willing to engage with change, the junction system would probably be one of the most celebrated battle systems in any square enix jrpg with dickriders at the level of smirk and press turn from smt, and maybe in general final fantasy 8 would be more celebrated for the amazing game that it deserves to be seen as.
also gunblades are raw as shit and are by far the coolest weapon that any square enix game has ever had don't @ me
i can get 8 not being somebody's favorite final fantasy, but this is such a beautiful piece of art to me that it feels like most of the game's bad reputation is just a mass gaslighting campaign perpetuated by early 2000s gaming magazines and kept alive by people who are scared of earnest emotionality in their video games. not everything that happens in this game is necessarily logical and it does have its flaws—the main antagonist is good but far from the series strongest and the disc 2 twist, while not nearly as bad as anyone has ever made it out to be, is delivered a little bit clumsily—but i feel like that's in service of being such an emotionally resonant game that it can barely be seen as a downside. the story of squall and rinoa is so beautiful to me in a way that so few love stories between a man and a woman can be for me and there were multiple points where i started to tear up a bit just because of how much i loved my experience with 8's story and characters.
when it comes to ff8's gameplay the junction system is unironically one of the few times that the atb battle system has been even remotely enjoyable, and while it isn't as strong mechanically as materias from 7 and the tutorials conveying the system in game aren't the best, i think it's a bit sad how having to engage with the mechanics differently is enough to put people off to the game's combat. with just a little bit more time in the oven and an audience more willing to engage with change, the junction system would probably be one of the most celebrated battle systems in any square enix jrpg with dickriders at the level of smirk and press turn from smt, and maybe in general final fantasy 8 would be more celebrated for the amazing game that it deserves to be seen as.
also gunblades are raw as shit and are by far the coolest weapon that any square enix game has ever had don't @ me
While I cannot in good conscience call it perfect, or even the best Final Fantasy game, Final Fantasy VIII is indeed a contender for my favorite video game. It is an acquired taste, but should you be a part of the very specific audience that it is aimed at, then there truly is nothing else like it.
FFVIII is best described as abstract: it doesn’t have as solidly defined a setting as some of its contemporaries, its gameplay is much more open-ended and left up to the player’s discretion in terms of strategy, the narrative is loose at best, and its themes and message are an odd hodgepodge of several interconnected ideas and theories rather than a single, concrete point. What FFVIII does have to offer is raw feeling, a poignance about its atmosphere and what it conveys with its storytelling that resonates profoundly if you’re willing to play by its rules (or are naturally dispositioned towards some of its ideas to begin with).
The plot, on paper, is simple enough: in a colorful high-Fantasy-turned-science fiction setting, we follow Squall Leonhart, a child soldier turned mercenary who has little ambition or purpose in life other than to become a competent, respected SeeD (for-profit mercenary). When a mission he and his team are hired for goes awry, Squall finds himself in the midst of a global conspiracy involving an ongoing global war and a mysterious, maleficent sorceress at the helm of it all. Most of the story involves Squall’s struggle to understand and accept his role in the global crisis as well as understand himself, and his growing bond with secondary protagonist Rinoa Heartilly (a member of a resistance sect poised against the ruthless imperialist nation of Galbadia).
From there... things get weird.
The plot is compelling in its own right and features a few fun (if not sometimes contrived or predictable) plot twists, but ultimately takes a backseat to the purpose it serves: establishing, developing and growing Squall and Rinoa’s characters. While plot events often have substantial narrative weight, most of what you’ll gleam from them (and want to look for) is what they tell you about the characters and the insight into their psyches. FFVIII addresses a great variety of topics that all interlink together in a tight-wound web of themes, ranging from trauma to war to time to family, all of which reflect heavily on the characters’ emotional development and personalities. Character writing is truly where FFVIII shines, and the little pieces of interaction between the cast are what will stick with you more than the bombastic action sequences. It’s a rare feat for a simple conversation or flashback to be more memorable than a fully-animated FMV sequence, but these small moments of interaction and connection are what I find myself thinking about the most often and remembering the most fondly.
Beyond our two protagonists, FFVIII has a somewhat small but lovable and memorable cast, set aside from most other Final Fantasy titles in that they’re mostly believable everyday people. As such, their characters are often not as complex or layered as the series makes a habit out of committing to, but FFVIII manages to make simplicity work in the most endearing of ways: some of the game’s most charming and enduring characters are the Momma’s-boy Zell Dincht who lives at home with his mother and has a passion for mixed martial arts, the smug and conceited teacher Quistis Trepe who acts as Squall’s mentor, and the cocky country-boy Irvine Kinneas who transfers to Squall’s team as a sharpshooter. Some of these characters transcend the convention one might associate with their description, while others embody them so wholly and blatantly that they become brilliant. FFVIII’s cast might hold hidden depths, or they might really be genuine with who they are and exemplify it to the fullest.
FFVIII’s gameplay is a controversial topic, and most often why people disparage the game if not for a dislike of Squall’s distant personality. This is understandable: it’s quite intricate and unconventional, and rarely does the game do a good job of explaining how to use it to the fullest. FFVIII retires the JRPG standard of mana meters and spell learning in favor of magic being dispensable items that can either be used in combat, or equipped (“junctioned” in game terms) to the player’s stats rather than armor or accessories, replacing level grinding as the proper method to grow characters’ stats. Said magic can be refined from cards won in the game’s Triple Triad minigame (the most efficient way of earning magic, despite the game never clarifying this) or “drawn” from enemies during combat as well as specific points in the world map. Junctioning is performed via Guardian Forces, equippable summons that each carry unique abilities and characteristics of their own. It’s true that FFVIII’s complex systems can be overwhelming and disorienting for those used to a conventional JRPG experience, but if learned and understood the amount of customization and optimization is unparalleled especially for the time period. Even if the story and characters don’t appeal to you, if you have any investment in JRPG gameplay for the sake of gameplay then it doesn’t get better than FFVIII’s complex statistic management systems.
Finally... the music. It’s incredible, one of my favorites in any game, and is worked into the storytelling in a very unique way. The scenes which take place in the present day have a sweeping, fully-orchestrated sound whereas those that take place in flashbacks to the distant past have a high-tech futuristic sound, a fun inversion of the standard one might expect from or associate with conventions of the genres.
With all of this being said: FFVIII is a unique game that caters to a very specific audience, and it banks entirely on whether or not you “get it.” If you do, you do, and if you don’t, you don’t. It’s very possible it may not simply be for you, but the best way to find out is to jump in with an open mind (and a willingness to lead the game’s systems!).
For me...? It means more to me personally than I can say, and I can only hope you’ll find as much in it as I have.
FFVIII is best described as abstract: it doesn’t have as solidly defined a setting as some of its contemporaries, its gameplay is much more open-ended and left up to the player’s discretion in terms of strategy, the narrative is loose at best, and its themes and message are an odd hodgepodge of several interconnected ideas and theories rather than a single, concrete point. What FFVIII does have to offer is raw feeling, a poignance about its atmosphere and what it conveys with its storytelling that resonates profoundly if you’re willing to play by its rules (or are naturally dispositioned towards some of its ideas to begin with).
The plot, on paper, is simple enough: in a colorful high-Fantasy-turned-science fiction setting, we follow Squall Leonhart, a child soldier turned mercenary who has little ambition or purpose in life other than to become a competent, respected SeeD (for-profit mercenary). When a mission he and his team are hired for goes awry, Squall finds himself in the midst of a global conspiracy involving an ongoing global war and a mysterious, maleficent sorceress at the helm of it all. Most of the story involves Squall’s struggle to understand and accept his role in the global crisis as well as understand himself, and his growing bond with secondary protagonist Rinoa Heartilly (a member of a resistance sect poised against the ruthless imperialist nation of Galbadia).
From there... things get weird.
The plot is compelling in its own right and features a few fun (if not sometimes contrived or predictable) plot twists, but ultimately takes a backseat to the purpose it serves: establishing, developing and growing Squall and Rinoa’s characters. While plot events often have substantial narrative weight, most of what you’ll gleam from them (and want to look for) is what they tell you about the characters and the insight into their psyches. FFVIII addresses a great variety of topics that all interlink together in a tight-wound web of themes, ranging from trauma to war to time to family, all of which reflect heavily on the characters’ emotional development and personalities. Character writing is truly where FFVIII shines, and the little pieces of interaction between the cast are what will stick with you more than the bombastic action sequences. It’s a rare feat for a simple conversation or flashback to be more memorable than a fully-animated FMV sequence, but these small moments of interaction and connection are what I find myself thinking about the most often and remembering the most fondly.
Beyond our two protagonists, FFVIII has a somewhat small but lovable and memorable cast, set aside from most other Final Fantasy titles in that they’re mostly believable everyday people. As such, their characters are often not as complex or layered as the series makes a habit out of committing to, but FFVIII manages to make simplicity work in the most endearing of ways: some of the game’s most charming and enduring characters are the Momma’s-boy Zell Dincht who lives at home with his mother and has a passion for mixed martial arts, the smug and conceited teacher Quistis Trepe who acts as Squall’s mentor, and the cocky country-boy Irvine Kinneas who transfers to Squall’s team as a sharpshooter. Some of these characters transcend the convention one might associate with their description, while others embody them so wholly and blatantly that they become brilliant. FFVIII’s cast might hold hidden depths, or they might really be genuine with who they are and exemplify it to the fullest.
FFVIII’s gameplay is a controversial topic, and most often why people disparage the game if not for a dislike of Squall’s distant personality. This is understandable: it’s quite intricate and unconventional, and rarely does the game do a good job of explaining how to use it to the fullest. FFVIII retires the JRPG standard of mana meters and spell learning in favor of magic being dispensable items that can either be used in combat, or equipped (“junctioned” in game terms) to the player’s stats rather than armor or accessories, replacing level grinding as the proper method to grow characters’ stats. Said magic can be refined from cards won in the game’s Triple Triad minigame (the most efficient way of earning magic, despite the game never clarifying this) or “drawn” from enemies during combat as well as specific points in the world map. Junctioning is performed via Guardian Forces, equippable summons that each carry unique abilities and characteristics of their own. It’s true that FFVIII’s complex systems can be overwhelming and disorienting for those used to a conventional JRPG experience, but if learned and understood the amount of customization and optimization is unparalleled especially for the time period. Even if the story and characters don’t appeal to you, if you have any investment in JRPG gameplay for the sake of gameplay then it doesn’t get better than FFVIII’s complex statistic management systems.
Finally... the music. It’s incredible, one of my favorites in any game, and is worked into the storytelling in a very unique way. The scenes which take place in the present day have a sweeping, fully-orchestrated sound whereas those that take place in flashbacks to the distant past have a high-tech futuristic sound, a fun inversion of the standard one might expect from or associate with conventions of the genres.
With all of this being said: FFVIII is a unique game that caters to a very specific audience, and it banks entirely on whether or not you “get it.” If you do, you do, and if you don’t, you don’t. It’s very possible it may not simply be for you, but the best way to find out is to jump in with an open mind (and a willingness to lead the game’s systems!).
For me...? It means more to me personally than I can say, and I can only hope you’ll find as much in it as I have.
"Give me the best story told in flashbacks of a good-hearted man who inspires a musician, falls in love, goes off to fight in war, is involved in the downfall of a political leader, and is finally reunited with his son after his lover's death."
Forrest Gump
"I mean, the best story told in flashbacks of a good-hearted man who inspires a musician, falls in love, goes off to fight in war, is involved in the downfall of a political leader, and is finally reunited with his son after his lover's death."
Final Fantasy VIII
"Perfection."
____________________________________
If you'll excuse the corny meme transcribed awkwardly into text, I just wanna say that Laguna is not only the true main character of FFVIII, he is the best main character in the FF series. Endearingly goofy and relatable, he also has some of the best character development squeezed within relatively little screentime (and secondhand accounts from people who've interacted with him).
And if you'll excuse me jumping excitedly from point to point, I have to draw a parallel with another movie (or book, if you prefer): Battle Royale. The entire premise of the story - addressing deliquency among the youth by sending one randomly-selected class a year over to murder island - is such monumentally stupid policy, but it's still an awesome movie because of the way it really explores the character and motivations of everyone in that class through the lens of extreme circumstances. See also exhibit B - Gantz - for a manga whose strength lies in viewing how each character copes with being called into extreme danger, and whose quality arguably plummets once a logical 'plot' starts to reveal itself.
I tend to view FFVIII's much-maligned reveal (you know the one) in much the same way as the above two examples. Ok yeah, it's contrived! But it throws the actions and personalities of every party member into sudden context. These are all orphan child soldiers (which we already knew) carrying various mental and emotional scars which they can't begin to work through because they have no memory of what scarred them in the first place. Quistis' inappropriate behavior towards Squall - and Squall's reluctance to reach out and form any kind of connection - makes more sense. As the only one who still has a memory of their orphanage days, Irvine's reluctance to shoot at Edea makes more sense. And my favorite of the bunch is actually Zell - the kid who deep down is kind of a big dorky nerd but acts loud because he also desires to be cool. He's always the first to protest when the party decides to go against orders, but Seifer knows how to play him like a fiddle ("fine, stay here. I don't want any boy scouts.") It also manifests in him being the de-facto Mr. Exposition when he's in your party, giving you plenty of information about where you're going, resulting in an (optional) subtle bit of character development from Squall who goes from "Thank you Mr Know-It-All Zell" to "I should give this guy more credit".
And that's what I like about the game - big romance aside, the character work isn't grand and sweeping and theatrical - it's just a lot of little moments that subtly shade each person's character. There's isn't a whole lot of point to much of it, but that's what the vast majority of dialogue is like anyway - a lot like what hanging out with friends is like. I do have to say that FFVIII is helped immensely by possibly being the first FF with a truly excellent localized script. It still has its blemishes, but it nails a lot of the nuances that make the subtle character work possible. This is the first time I'm playing the game as a dad, and young Ellone's no-filter "Uncle Laguna says yoo dress weird but you're a nice person!!" is 1000% something a little girl would say.
The intimate character stuff is good, but let's not ignore that the large-scale stuff is phenomenal. This is actually the first FF game I played so I could be speaking with my nostalgia shades on, but this game is probably the one with the best-directed cutscenes, perhaps ever. Practically every setpiece left me with my jaw hanging when I first played it in '99, but even now, between the beach landing at Dollet, the clash of the Gardens, the first glimpse of the city of Esthar, and the scenes on Lunar Base, I'd be hard-pressed to single one out as a favorite - perhaps the creepy Sorceress Parade, with its absolute banger of a soundtrack complete with dancers doing the moves from Michael Jackson's Thriller.
Mechanically the game is controversial, but there's a lot of fun to be had once you get to know its ins and outs - there are so many ways you can tweak your playstyle that will lead to a very different experience of the game. I just finished a self-imposed 'bigamy challenge' where each character stays with the same two randomly-chosen GFs, and it forced me to get really creative with how I approached combat - especially since only two characters had any way of boosting their strength.
Finally, I love FFVIII's world and its lore. It doesn't spell everything out, but you do have access to a ton of optional information that adds context to what you're doing. And - fitting for a game that is all about fate - almost everything is connected to everything else, just waiting for you to talk to the right person and make the right connection. The fact that the movie starring Laguna as the sorceress' knight is the inspiration for Seifer's romantic dream - and ostensibly the reason he uses a gunblade - is something I only caught this time, and the game is all the richer for it.
I know that this review overlooks a lot of flaws - but I know they exist. Perhaps the best way to summarize the issues with the game is that it's kind of a mess. The writing, the pacing, the mechanics, the way the lore is presented - it's all kinda messy. But it's a mess with heart, it's a mess with substance, it's a mess that - like its characters - reveals more and more layers as you peel away the surface, and its a mess that does so many things so exceptionally well that I can't help but love it.
FFVIII is one of the very few games that I've done a complete 360-turn on. The flashy graphics and fantastic cutscenes made a huge impression on me at first. Then for a while I found the game to be rather cringe, the mechanics needlessly complex, and the game generally unrefined compared to its cousins. After four completed playthroughs, the 360-degree turn is complete: it sits second on my list of favorite FF games, a position that is entirely subjective but also entirely earned.
Forrest Gump
"I mean, the best story told in flashbacks of a good-hearted man who inspires a musician, falls in love, goes off to fight in war, is involved in the downfall of a political leader, and is finally reunited with his son after his lover's death."
Final Fantasy VIII
"Perfection."
____________________________________
If you'll excuse the corny meme transcribed awkwardly into text, I just wanna say that Laguna is not only the true main character of FFVIII, he is the best main character in the FF series. Endearingly goofy and relatable, he also has some of the best character development squeezed within relatively little screentime (and secondhand accounts from people who've interacted with him).
And if you'll excuse me jumping excitedly from point to point, I have to draw a parallel with another movie (or book, if you prefer): Battle Royale. The entire premise of the story - addressing deliquency among the youth by sending one randomly-selected class a year over to murder island - is such monumentally stupid policy, but it's still an awesome movie because of the way it really explores the character and motivations of everyone in that class through the lens of extreme circumstances. See also exhibit B - Gantz - for a manga whose strength lies in viewing how each character copes with being called into extreme danger, and whose quality arguably plummets once a logical 'plot' starts to reveal itself.
I tend to view FFVIII's much-maligned reveal (you know the one) in much the same way as the above two examples. Ok yeah, it's contrived! But it throws the actions and personalities of every party member into sudden context. These are all orphan child soldiers (which we already knew) carrying various mental and emotional scars which they can't begin to work through because they have no memory of what scarred them in the first place. Quistis' inappropriate behavior towards Squall - and Squall's reluctance to reach out and form any kind of connection - makes more sense. As the only one who still has a memory of their orphanage days, Irvine's reluctance to shoot at Edea makes more sense. And my favorite of the bunch is actually Zell - the kid who deep down is kind of a big dorky nerd but acts loud because he also desires to be cool. He's always the first to protest when the party decides to go against orders, but Seifer knows how to play him like a fiddle ("fine, stay here. I don't want any boy scouts.") It also manifests in him being the de-facto Mr. Exposition when he's in your party, giving you plenty of information about where you're going, resulting in an (optional) subtle bit of character development from Squall who goes from "Thank you Mr Know-It-All Zell" to "I should give this guy more credit".
And that's what I like about the game - big romance aside, the character work isn't grand and sweeping and theatrical - it's just a lot of little moments that subtly shade each person's character. There's isn't a whole lot of point to much of it, but that's what the vast majority of dialogue is like anyway - a lot like what hanging out with friends is like. I do have to say that FFVIII is helped immensely by possibly being the first FF with a truly excellent localized script. It still has its blemishes, but it nails a lot of the nuances that make the subtle character work possible. This is the first time I'm playing the game as a dad, and young Ellone's no-filter "Uncle Laguna says yoo dress weird but you're a nice person!!" is 1000% something a little girl would say.
The intimate character stuff is good, but let's not ignore that the large-scale stuff is phenomenal. This is actually the first FF game I played so I could be speaking with my nostalgia shades on, but this game is probably the one with the best-directed cutscenes, perhaps ever. Practically every setpiece left me with my jaw hanging when I first played it in '99, but even now, between the beach landing at Dollet, the clash of the Gardens, the first glimpse of the city of Esthar, and the scenes on Lunar Base, I'd be hard-pressed to single one out as a favorite - perhaps the creepy Sorceress Parade, with its absolute banger of a soundtrack complete with dancers doing the moves from Michael Jackson's Thriller.
Mechanically the game is controversial, but there's a lot of fun to be had once you get to know its ins and outs - there are so many ways you can tweak your playstyle that will lead to a very different experience of the game. I just finished a self-imposed 'bigamy challenge' where each character stays with the same two randomly-chosen GFs, and it forced me to get really creative with how I approached combat - especially since only two characters had any way of boosting their strength.
Finally, I love FFVIII's world and its lore. It doesn't spell everything out, but you do have access to a ton of optional information that adds context to what you're doing. And - fitting for a game that is all about fate - almost everything is connected to everything else, just waiting for you to talk to the right person and make the right connection. The fact that the movie starring Laguna as the sorceress' knight is the inspiration for Seifer's romantic dream - and ostensibly the reason he uses a gunblade - is something I only caught this time, and the game is all the richer for it.
I know that this review overlooks a lot of flaws - but I know they exist. Perhaps the best way to summarize the issues with the game is that it's kind of a mess. The writing, the pacing, the mechanics, the way the lore is presented - it's all kinda messy. But it's a mess with heart, it's a mess with substance, it's a mess that - like its characters - reveals more and more layers as you peel away the surface, and its a mess that does so many things so exceptionally well that I can't help but love it.
FFVIII is one of the very few games that I've done a complete 360-turn on. The flashy graphics and fantastic cutscenes made a huge impression on me at first. Then for a while I found the game to be rather cringe, the mechanics needlessly complex, and the game generally unrefined compared to its cousins. After four completed playthroughs, the 360-degree turn is complete: it sits second on my list of favorite FF games, a position that is entirely subjective but also entirely earned.
FF8 is like NIN's The Fragile, an insanely ambitious, huge, sprawling, and extremely different game to the smash mega-hit that preceded it, and not unlike FF7, it was very controversial. Thankfully, both the Fragile and FF8 seem to have gotten their due amount of love in recent years. Squall kind of looks like late 90s Trent Reznor too if you think about it...
Anyway, I am nearly at the finish line, but like FF7, I have hit a point in the game where I know my personal rating isn't going to change, and to me FF8 is a 5-star game as affecting and stunning as FF7. I might do a big writeup on how much I love it once I've actually beaten it, but for now I'll say that the amount of spectacle, visual variety, and really incredible emotional depth has turned me from a Final Fantasy VII fan into a Final Fantasy fan flat out. If IX and X are as good as this, and I have reason to believe they are, then I'm going to give even more of these games 5 stars.
With FF8 I've noticed a lot about the story mentioned by people who are incapable of Having Fun, and perpetuate the STUPID ass "Squall is dead" theory. BOO!! I hate that shit. To be honest though, I don't think the story was any more insane than Final Fantasy 7's, both are extremely grand and operatic narratives that are carried by a deeply human and colorful cast of characters. That is the strength of this series as I've found it: drop characters you want to see win in an insane and twisting plot. I think that's cool!! I want my fantasy game to be over-the-top and larger than life! I live a boring, consistent real life and it sucks ass!!
Suffice it to say, I fucking LOVE this game!!! The junction system is the most fun I've had experimenting with an RPG since Morrowind, figuring out the most interesting ways to break the game or alternatively, make it really challenging. I can see why this one is really divisive but I love this insanely ambitious game even when it is being messy. I don't really give a game a 5 if I think it's "mechanically perfect," because that's stupid. I give a game a 5 if I lay down at night thinking about it, if I'm at work thinking about it, and if I can't help but bring it up in conversation because I am so fixated on it, and FF8 is absolutely a game I can't stop thinking about or excitedly booting up to try new junctions, or play more triple triad.
Anyway, I am nearly at the finish line, but like FF7, I have hit a point in the game where I know my personal rating isn't going to change, and to me FF8 is a 5-star game as affecting and stunning as FF7. I might do a big writeup on how much I love it once I've actually beaten it, but for now I'll say that the amount of spectacle, visual variety, and really incredible emotional depth has turned me from a Final Fantasy VII fan into a Final Fantasy fan flat out. If IX and X are as good as this, and I have reason to believe they are, then I'm going to give even more of these games 5 stars.
With FF8 I've noticed a lot about the story mentioned by people who are incapable of Having Fun, and perpetuate the STUPID ass "Squall is dead" theory. BOO!! I hate that shit. To be honest though, I don't think the story was any more insane than Final Fantasy 7's, both are extremely grand and operatic narratives that are carried by a deeply human and colorful cast of characters. That is the strength of this series as I've found it: drop characters you want to see win in an insane and twisting plot. I think that's cool!! I want my fantasy game to be over-the-top and larger than life! I live a boring, consistent real life and it sucks ass!!
Suffice it to say, I fucking LOVE this game!!! The junction system is the most fun I've had experimenting with an RPG since Morrowind, figuring out the most interesting ways to break the game or alternatively, make it really challenging. I can see why this one is really divisive but I love this insanely ambitious game even when it is being messy. I don't really give a game a 5 if I think it's "mechanically perfect," because that's stupid. I give a game a 5 if I lay down at night thinking about it, if I'm at work thinking about it, and if I can't help but bring it up in conversation because I am so fixated on it, and FF8 is absolutely a game I can't stop thinking about or excitedly booting up to try new junctions, or play more triple triad.
What the junction system introduces in customisability, it performs in sacrilege to the idea of characters progressing toward mastery. Having to 'draw' spells makes every individual just the sum of what is available to them on the threshold of an action; a compound or assemblage that comes into being moment-by-moment. Nobody is innately anything, they're all just ordinary. I can understand why this upsets some, not because it is a bad system in itself, but because the game is already so cold and strange. The human proportions given to the character models, and then the way they're rendered in sharp fragments, makes it all feel strangely distanced. The cutscenes as well work less to pull us into the world and impress us (as other Final Fantasy titles do), and more to establish that there is something already going on with these people, something we have to work to catch up on. The most compelling animations set the tone, with emphasis given to either moments of intimacy like holding hands or dancing, or just settling on the yearning across the cast's faces. There is something inscrutable about the closeups, but then looking itself is the action in the style of Sirkian melodrama. The emotion isn't given to us directly, instead we're left with a solemn affect that's basically classical; read across bodies and faces; gestural, but always restrained. It is well known that Erik Satie's three Gymnopédies appear across countless JRPGs throughout the 1990s, and here Nobuo Uematsu resists quotation to instead mine the composition's distinctive warm melancholy. Like a sunshower on a Sunday afternoon. The pre-rendered backgrounds blend familiar architecture with the speculative, which keeps it grounded in an ambiguous temporal and geographic register. Final Fantasy VIII is a high school soap opera and messed up science fiction thing with wormholes, amnesia, and a very literal interpretation of Marx's "annihilation of time by space", all in this gloriously austere package. Less broken than kind of aloof, and to me at least a genre masterpiece.
revisiting this masterpiece with some close friends at a pretty emotionally vulnerable place this winter was an experience i'm not likely to forget any time soon. more than anything, i'm grateful to have had the ability to revisit such a teenage-dependent game as a burgeoning adult and value its world, characters, mechanics and stories through more experienced eyes.
i'll start things off making enemies - final fantasy gameplay has never been as engaging and exciting as it was in final fantasy viii. the difficulty of the game and how your time with it plays out is entirely dependent on your engagement, and ideas like junction-based stat boosts and enemy level scaling are GREAT ideas that keep this game feeling fresh every time. you don't HAVE to grind out magic draws, you don't HAVE to avoid levelling up, you don't HAVE to learn all those gf skills, but each time you approach the game again you're presented the option to vie for a different composition, a different strategy, a different flow of battle. last time i grinded to lv. 100 and maxed things out and it actually made certain boss encounters really intense - and i mean like, drop zell to minimal hp and hope to god i pull off limit breaks over and over to perfection intense - and i LOVED it. triple triad with friends was a joy and shifted a minigame i was aversee to engaging with something i enjoyed so much that i actually played the game with a real deck when we visited eachother last month.
uematsu's score is indicative of the tone of the title itself; experimental, off-kilter, and boundlessly passionate. "force your way" is the be-all end-all main boss theme in the series, "blue fields" is uncanny enough to leave the wilds feeling a tinge unkind and mysterious, and the various incarnations leading into the final reveal of the faye wong-featuring "eyes on me" gets me, corny as it may be, blubbering on a regular basis, THE definitive squaresoft pop ballad; "suteki da ne", eat your heart out.
i'm not really looking to open up specifically about how and why squall's story of self-expression and admittance of loneliness and aimlessness touched me on the intimate level it did, but i'll say this much - like raiden or shinji ikari, i feel these are characters widely misunderstood by people looking first and foremost to be entertained by the art they engage with, instead of being asked questions or challenged to reflect on experiences of their own. not every beat of ffviii's story is perfectly executed, but there's no squaresoft title in which that does happen (even in its predecessor, my favorite game of all time).
the critical re-evaluation of final fantasy viii by a younger crowd is a joy to watch. out with the old, finger-pointing youtube critic personas of yesteryear bitching and moaning about change and art. in with the new.
i'll start things off making enemies - final fantasy gameplay has never been as engaging and exciting as it was in final fantasy viii. the difficulty of the game and how your time with it plays out is entirely dependent on your engagement, and ideas like junction-based stat boosts and enemy level scaling are GREAT ideas that keep this game feeling fresh every time. you don't HAVE to grind out magic draws, you don't HAVE to avoid levelling up, you don't HAVE to learn all those gf skills, but each time you approach the game again you're presented the option to vie for a different composition, a different strategy, a different flow of battle. last time i grinded to lv. 100 and maxed things out and it actually made certain boss encounters really intense - and i mean like, drop zell to minimal hp and hope to god i pull off limit breaks over and over to perfection intense - and i LOVED it. triple triad with friends was a joy and shifted a minigame i was aversee to engaging with something i enjoyed so much that i actually played the game with a real deck when we visited eachother last month.
uematsu's score is indicative of the tone of the title itself; experimental, off-kilter, and boundlessly passionate. "force your way" is the be-all end-all main boss theme in the series, "blue fields" is uncanny enough to leave the wilds feeling a tinge unkind and mysterious, and the various incarnations leading into the final reveal of the faye wong-featuring "eyes on me" gets me, corny as it may be, blubbering on a regular basis, THE definitive squaresoft pop ballad; "suteki da ne", eat your heart out.
i'm not really looking to open up specifically about how and why squall's story of self-expression and admittance of loneliness and aimlessness touched me on the intimate level it did, but i'll say this much - like raiden or shinji ikari, i feel these are characters widely misunderstood by people looking first and foremost to be entertained by the art they engage with, instead of being asked questions or challenged to reflect on experiences of their own. not every beat of ffviii's story is perfectly executed, but there's no squaresoft title in which that does happen (even in its predecessor, my favorite game of all time).
the critical re-evaluation of final fantasy viii by a younger crowd is a joy to watch. out with the old, finger-pointing youtube critic personas of yesteryear bitching and moaning about change and art. in with the new.
my halfway point impressions on FF8! I hate to say it but I think Channel Awesome superstar TheSpoonyOne was wrong about this game!
they did it again!!! another slam dunk!! Squall is one of my favorite protagonists and the contrast between him and Rinoa makes for such an interesting character interplay. I also love the supporting cast, such an alive world!!
my roommate had described FF7 as the feeling of playing with your action figures as a kid, as anything could go and anything could happen. I've been thinking about this comparison while looking at FF8's themes of growing up and maturation. The shift to detailed models really enhances that feeling of growing up and having to face responsibilities. It's amazing how personal and thoughtful such massive games can be. This is a special franchise.
Also the card game goes crazy. I love building a killer deck, turning cards into bones and turning the bones into powerful magic. This is the kind of game I LIVE for.
they did it again!!! another slam dunk!! Squall is one of my favorite protagonists and the contrast between him and Rinoa makes for such an interesting character interplay. I also love the supporting cast, such an alive world!!
my roommate had described FF7 as the feeling of playing with your action figures as a kid, as anything could go and anything could happen. I've been thinking about this comparison while looking at FF8's themes of growing up and maturation. The shift to detailed models really enhances that feeling of growing up and having to face responsibilities. It's amazing how personal and thoughtful such massive games can be. This is a special franchise.
Also the card game goes crazy. I love building a killer deck, turning cards into bones and turning the bones into powerful magic. This is the kind of game I LIVE for.
I'm impressed by how daring FF8 is as a game, it's too experimental and ambitious, even for its time. It's weird in gameplay, story and also in its music it's weird, and I love it, it's just what I needed.
I hate to admit it, but I identified a lot with Squall, my high school self is still inside me after all and will never leave, and this whether I like it or not influenced a lot in how I enjoyed the story, so whether you like this story or not depends a little bit on your personality and your age in a way, I think... Well, the truth is that the story is very weird no matter where you look at it, I think what made me like it were its characters. Each character feels very human in a way, even in their interactions and dialogue. The story is entertaining mainly because of seeing how it is that said characters perform in the different events throughout the game, especially Squall, who is a misfit most of the time, and it's fun to see how he always confuses his companions by the way he is, or to see how he disappoints and annoys them... I thought it was a cool detail too how the decision dialogues make what your companions have to say fit very adequately to what a real person would say. Maybe a lot of times the characters can seem silly or flat, but looking at it from the perspective that they're just teenagers (if not kids) in the middle of all the conflict, I don't know, it all makes more sense than it seems at first glance. As I mentioned before, the story is pretty weird, though by the third disc it all made sense to me and somehow clicked and I liked it too much, maybe not one of the best stories, but certainly one with a lot of memorable moments. I guess it's important to keep in mind at all times that despite how realistic and serious the game can be at times, it's still a Final Fantasy game, so it's common to see out of the ordinary vehicles, characters and situations, for better or worse.
I'll save the gameplay for last this time as I plan to talk in depth about that because of how "complex" it is, so I'm going to talk about the music and graphics. And wow, they are really of a very "fine" quality to say the least. Speaking of the music, it was very different from the rest of the other games, especially in how varied it is. It's definitely a weird soundtrack, but it's one that I really liked. The battle theme and boss theme are very "different" from the rest of the series, but I think they've become my favorites. Sometimes more traditional themes are present which are always very memorable and relaxing themes. While sometimes we have songs that seem to belong to a different game, and I love them.
On the graphics at first I got the impression that they were bad, in fact worse than FF7, but once I got further into the game I realized that they are actually a huge improvement. The models look better in every way, they are no longer deformed humans but have a more realistic complexion, and the same goes for the monsters, which look great, all added with very well done animations for characters and monsters that, it's just awesome, it shows as a very high budget game with a lot of attention to detail for its time. Even the interfaces look very polished, and menu navigation is more fluid and responsive than ever. I like how in battles the command menu is very clean and minimalistic compared to previous titles, you can even hide the command menu by pressing "Select", which I really liked. The prerendered backgrounds now look more detailed and better done in general, I guess because the development team already had more experience in making them, which allows for a more diverse and different set of scenarios, it just looks great, and this looks very well complemented when the game mixes CGI cinematics with real time models, it looks amazing.
Now yes, regarding the gameplay this time the gimmick that has as FF game to distinguish itself from the other titles is the Junction System, which in short is a rare combination between the Espers of FF6, the Materia of FF7, and in turn serves as a class system, and to finish off, also serves as a replacement for armor and accessories, as here there are none. That's right, it sounds incredibly weird, and it fascinates me. For starters, the attributes of our characters depend on this, because how much attack or defense a character has is determined by the magic and the amount of it that we link to those attributes, for example, if we want to increase our base HP, linking a healing magic would be the most preferable. In addition to the stats, we can also link magic to our attacks or our defense against enemy attacks, for example, if we link ice to the attack, our attacks will be of that element and will inflict more damage to fire enemies, or on the other hand, if we link a status alteration magic to the attack, we can do things like every time we attack an enemy, we have a 50% chance of putting them to sleep. But well, in order to have these abilities, we have to make Junction with a guardian (a summon, like Ifrit for example) and the abilities or attributes available to modify depend on which Guardian it is, for example, a Guardian specialized in magic can give us the ability to make that every time we level up the magic attribute goes up 10% more than normal, but another guardian can unlock the command to defend, for example. I love it, this offers a huge degree of customization, I said it resembles FF7 Materia as the guardians have their own level independent of the character, so they are very "portable", and makes you can have strong characters even if their level is low.
Speaking of how to get magic, this time it is not learned by leveling up or buying it from stores, instead it is drawn from enemies, which makes it exciting every time we encounter an enemy to know what kind of new magic we can get from them. Magic can also be obtained from transforming objects if we have the ability to do that unlocked. Although in this system a problem can arise, and that is that many can get too distracted trying to steal 99 magic from enemies to have the stats at the maximum or to never "lack" that magic to have stock to spare, which is not really necessary in my opinion, because doing that is the equivalent of grind in a traditional RPG, It's something that only needs to be done if you really need it or if you're struggling a lot. Certainly by its very nature it is quite easy to break, and I like that, because if you want to make the game easier the same game gives you the freedom to do so and allows you to have the highest stats and not have to worry for the rest of the game about it. You can literally play the game the way you want and you set the difficulty to your own liking.
Another thing I should mention to finish covering this aspect of the game is that all enemies are at your level. Which means, the stronger your character is, the stronger the enemies will be, and therefore, the better the magic you can get from them. To be honest, it's an idea that I like a lot, as it made the battles against some bosses very interesting most of the time, the bad thing is that I think that on the other hand some bosses are very easy as they have a quite... pacifist behavior, I guess it was a rare case where some were very difficult and challenging, which I liked, and some others were very easy, which was a bit disappointing.
Conclusion
It's not a masterpiece as other games in this series were, Final Fantasy 8 instead dares to be different, to be unique, with gameplay that allows you to progress at the pace you want and a story that is sometimes ambiguous but hides a certain charm behind all the weirdness it can be. Final Fantasy 8 is imperfect, and somehow, I think that sometimes that's better than being a masterpiece.
I hate to admit it, but I identified a lot with Squall, my high school self is still inside me after all and will never leave, and this whether I like it or not influenced a lot in how I enjoyed the story, so whether you like this story or not depends a little bit on your personality and your age in a way, I think... Well, the truth is that the story is very weird no matter where you look at it, I think what made me like it were its characters. Each character feels very human in a way, even in their interactions and dialogue. The story is entertaining mainly because of seeing how it is that said characters perform in the different events throughout the game, especially Squall, who is a misfit most of the time, and it's fun to see how he always confuses his companions by the way he is, or to see how he disappoints and annoys them... I thought it was a cool detail too how the decision dialogues make what your companions have to say fit very adequately to what a real person would say. Maybe a lot of times the characters can seem silly or flat, but looking at it from the perspective that they're just teenagers (if not kids) in the middle of all the conflict, I don't know, it all makes more sense than it seems at first glance. As I mentioned before, the story is pretty weird, though by the third disc it all made sense to me and somehow clicked and I liked it too much, maybe not one of the best stories, but certainly one with a lot of memorable moments. I guess it's important to keep in mind at all times that despite how realistic and serious the game can be at times, it's still a Final Fantasy game, so it's common to see out of the ordinary vehicles, characters and situations, for better or worse.
I'll save the gameplay for last this time as I plan to talk in depth about that because of how "complex" it is, so I'm going to talk about the music and graphics. And wow, they are really of a very "fine" quality to say the least. Speaking of the music, it was very different from the rest of the other games, especially in how varied it is. It's definitely a weird soundtrack, but it's one that I really liked. The battle theme and boss theme are very "different" from the rest of the series, but I think they've become my favorites. Sometimes more traditional themes are present which are always very memorable and relaxing themes. While sometimes we have songs that seem to belong to a different game, and I love them.
On the graphics at first I got the impression that they were bad, in fact worse than FF7, but once I got further into the game I realized that they are actually a huge improvement. The models look better in every way, they are no longer deformed humans but have a more realistic complexion, and the same goes for the monsters, which look great, all added with very well done animations for characters and monsters that, it's just awesome, it shows as a very high budget game with a lot of attention to detail for its time. Even the interfaces look very polished, and menu navigation is more fluid and responsive than ever. I like how in battles the command menu is very clean and minimalistic compared to previous titles, you can even hide the command menu by pressing "Select", which I really liked. The prerendered backgrounds now look more detailed and better done in general, I guess because the development team already had more experience in making them, which allows for a more diverse and different set of scenarios, it just looks great, and this looks very well complemented when the game mixes CGI cinematics with real time models, it looks amazing.
Now yes, regarding the gameplay this time the gimmick that has as FF game to distinguish itself from the other titles is the Junction System, which in short is a rare combination between the Espers of FF6, the Materia of FF7, and in turn serves as a class system, and to finish off, also serves as a replacement for armor and accessories, as here there are none. That's right, it sounds incredibly weird, and it fascinates me. For starters, the attributes of our characters depend on this, because how much attack or defense a character has is determined by the magic and the amount of it that we link to those attributes, for example, if we want to increase our base HP, linking a healing magic would be the most preferable. In addition to the stats, we can also link magic to our attacks or our defense against enemy attacks, for example, if we link ice to the attack, our attacks will be of that element and will inflict more damage to fire enemies, or on the other hand, if we link a status alteration magic to the attack, we can do things like every time we attack an enemy, we have a 50% chance of putting them to sleep. But well, in order to have these abilities, we have to make Junction with a guardian (a summon, like Ifrit for example) and the abilities or attributes available to modify depend on which Guardian it is, for example, a Guardian specialized in magic can give us the ability to make that every time we level up the magic attribute goes up 10% more than normal, but another guardian can unlock the command to defend, for example. I love it, this offers a huge degree of customization, I said it resembles FF7 Materia as the guardians have their own level independent of the character, so they are very "portable", and makes you can have strong characters even if their level is low.
Speaking of how to get magic, this time it is not learned by leveling up or buying it from stores, instead it is drawn from enemies, which makes it exciting every time we encounter an enemy to know what kind of new magic we can get from them. Magic can also be obtained from transforming objects if we have the ability to do that unlocked. Although in this system a problem can arise, and that is that many can get too distracted trying to steal 99 magic from enemies to have the stats at the maximum or to never "lack" that magic to have stock to spare, which is not really necessary in my opinion, because doing that is the equivalent of grind in a traditional RPG, It's something that only needs to be done if you really need it or if you're struggling a lot. Certainly by its very nature it is quite easy to break, and I like that, because if you want to make the game easier the same game gives you the freedom to do so and allows you to have the highest stats and not have to worry for the rest of the game about it. You can literally play the game the way you want and you set the difficulty to your own liking.
Another thing I should mention to finish covering this aspect of the game is that all enemies are at your level. Which means, the stronger your character is, the stronger the enemies will be, and therefore, the better the magic you can get from them. To be honest, it's an idea that I like a lot, as it made the battles against some bosses very interesting most of the time, the bad thing is that I think that on the other hand some bosses are very easy as they have a quite... pacifist behavior, I guess it was a rare case where some were very difficult and challenging, which I liked, and some others were very easy, which was a bit disappointing.
Conclusion
It's not a masterpiece as other games in this series were, Final Fantasy 8 instead dares to be different, to be unique, with gameplay that allows you to progress at the pace you want and a story that is sometimes ambiguous but hides a certain charm behind all the weirdness it can be. Final Fantasy 8 is imperfect, and somehow, I think that sometimes that's better than being a masterpiece.
what if we...
ate hot dogs in balamb garden?
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just kidding...
ate hot dogs in balamb garden?
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just kidding...
One of the finest in the series and a quality evolution. Squall is such a dick but you can't help relating. Maybe it was the FMVs, that unforgettable opening cinematic. Maybe it was the way it took the best FF ideas from previous games and improved on them in every way (howls of protest ensue but I don't care.) Whatever it was it worked. Wonderfully.
“I’ll be your knight.”
-Squall Leonheart
“It's time to D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-DUEL!”
-Me
Hey, wait a second, Final Fantasy VIII is a masterpiece? An imperfect game, undeniably, but a work of genius and love. I can’t say it’s “better” than VII, but I liked it more.
The junction system requires at least a four-year degree and a team of world-class scientists to understand (which I guess is fitting considering the material) and is easily the most divisive part of this game. I get it, but to me the strange, many would say busted, nature of the FFVIII’s systems made the entire playthrough a vibrant, mindful one.
Whereas the combat in VII felt largely mindless, VIII made me invest time and effort into every action that surrounded it. It’s not for everybody, but somehow it ended up being for me.
Then there’s the futuristic academia setting complete with a teenage paramilitary force. Classes. Dances. Political assassinations on the weekend. For the final exam you basically land on Omaha beach.
It’s a killer setup, but (without spoiling anything) I’m continuously amazed by the escalation of stakes in these games. The big setpieces of this game are maybe my favorites of the franchise thus far. Several times I was like “Wait what? WHAT?!?”
The cast is all human this time around, which was a change of pace I appreciated. I was happy with most everyone, although a few characters sorta got benched again, but the leads are where it’s at:
Squall: autistic, card-playing supercommando.
Rinoa: bubbly, dog-catapulting revolutionary insurgent.
A match made in (the island closest to) Heaven. I love these guys, and I was hooked on the story. Final Fantasy keeps giving me these corny will-they-won’t-they love stories, and I keep getting invested. This one was particularly sweet and filled with youthful energy. Ah… young love.
But the real star of the show is TRIPLE TRIAD, BABYYYYYY. Get outta here with your normal leveling systems! I’ve got the heart of the caaaaards! This game’s systems are inexorably tied to the best minigame in the franchise. It’s like tic-tac-toe Pokémon? You turn monsters into cards, cards into items, and items into magic. You slap magic on your stats. But you can also win cards by playing cards with like every npc in the game. It’s fun, and not as skippable as IX’s Tetra Master. There’s an incentive to do everything in the game, and to interact with everyone and everything.
I want to point out that I usually can’t stand card games in real life or in videogames. But this one is kind of a spacial positioning puzzle game and involves catching monsters.
This is a weird game! I was kind of trying not to level up, but the game actually supported my strategy by not giving xp in almost any mandatory fights and providing perks to eliminate random encounters whenever necessary. It was different, in a good way.
Ok I’ve gotta stop somewhere, but there’s so much I want to say. I loved this crazy, messy, flawed, beautiful game. Omg the cutscenes too like-
-Squall Leonheart
“It's time to D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-DUEL!”
-Me
Hey, wait a second, Final Fantasy VIII is a masterpiece? An imperfect game, undeniably, but a work of genius and love. I can’t say it’s “better” than VII, but I liked it more.
The junction system requires at least a four-year degree and a team of world-class scientists to understand (which I guess is fitting considering the material) and is easily the most divisive part of this game. I get it, but to me the strange, many would say busted, nature of the FFVIII’s systems made the entire playthrough a vibrant, mindful one.
Whereas the combat in VII felt largely mindless, VIII made me invest time and effort into every action that surrounded it. It’s not for everybody, but somehow it ended up being for me.
Then there’s the futuristic academia setting complete with a teenage paramilitary force. Classes. Dances. Political assassinations on the weekend. For the final exam you basically land on Omaha beach.
It’s a killer setup, but (without spoiling anything) I’m continuously amazed by the escalation of stakes in these games. The big setpieces of this game are maybe my favorites of the franchise thus far. Several times I was like “Wait what? WHAT?!?”
The cast is all human this time around, which was a change of pace I appreciated. I was happy with most everyone, although a few characters sorta got benched again, but the leads are where it’s at:
Squall: autistic, card-playing supercommando.
Rinoa: bubbly, dog-catapulting revolutionary insurgent.
A match made in (the island closest to) Heaven. I love these guys, and I was hooked on the story. Final Fantasy keeps giving me these corny will-they-won’t-they love stories, and I keep getting invested. This one was particularly sweet and filled with youthful energy. Ah… young love.
But the real star of the show is TRIPLE TRIAD, BABYYYYYY. Get outta here with your normal leveling systems! I’ve got the heart of the caaaaards! This game’s systems are inexorably tied to the best minigame in the franchise. It’s like tic-tac-toe Pokémon? You turn monsters into cards, cards into items, and items into magic. You slap magic on your stats. But you can also win cards by playing cards with like every npc in the game. It’s fun, and not as skippable as IX’s Tetra Master. There’s an incentive to do everything in the game, and to interact with everyone and everything.
I want to point out that I usually can’t stand card games in real life or in videogames. But this one is kind of a spacial positioning puzzle game and involves catching monsters.
This is a weird game! I was kind of trying not to level up, but the game actually supported my strategy by not giving xp in almost any mandatory fights and providing perks to eliminate random encounters whenever necessary. It was different, in a good way.
Ok I’ve gotta stop somewhere, but there’s so much I want to say. I loved this crazy, messy, flawed, beautiful game. Omg the cutscenes too like-
severely underrated game. i deeply resent and hate noah antwiler for completely disgracing this game with his dumbfuck smoothbrain review series. anyway the OST bags hard and if you dislike it you're not getting into heaven.
Gorgeous gorgeus video game. Squall & Rinoa's love story is one of the best in the whole medium. The space sequence absolutely stands the test of time, breathtaking, romantic, beautiful.
In general the whole game looks fantastic, the pre-renderd cutscenes together with the visual world and city design make scenes like the Sorceress' parade amazing to witness for the first time even now, 24 years after release.
The story is held back by poor translations and pacing but the core of what is being told is classic top tier Final Fantasy, full of angst and heart and drama.
The junction system is completely unbalanced and I wouldnt have it any other way. One of the most unique systems Square has ever come up with, and a lot of fun to experiment with and find broken combinations by turning enemies into cards, cards into items, items into spells, and junction said spells.
Also Triple Triad.
I hope this game gets an FF7 style remake in the future, because the foundation is there for 8 to be maybe the best Final Fantasy of them all, it just needs a bit of polishing and restructuring.
In general the whole game looks fantastic, the pre-renderd cutscenes together with the visual world and city design make scenes like the Sorceress' parade amazing to witness for the first time even now, 24 years after release.
The story is held back by poor translations and pacing but the core of what is being told is classic top tier Final Fantasy, full of angst and heart and drama.
The junction system is completely unbalanced and I wouldnt have it any other way. One of the most unique systems Square has ever come up with, and a lot of fun to experiment with and find broken combinations by turning enemies into cards, cards into items, items into spells, and junction said spells.
Also Triple Triad.
I hope this game gets an FF7 style remake in the future, because the foundation is there for 8 to be maybe the best Final Fantasy of them all, it just needs a bit of polishing and restructuring.
I hate that stupid fucking pussy ass song that all the shippers squeal over. Why couldn’t they get real music like Metallica?
" I rolled a streak of 7 hits in my limit break with a Meteor Barret 9999 finisher "
Me: STFU Zell nobody cares. Annoying ass "chicken-wuss" SeeD member.
" I uhmmm rolled a single Cura in my Slot ability... "
Me: Thank you for this vital support my queen. All hail Selphie from Trabia Garden.
Me: STFU Zell nobody cares. Annoying ass "chicken-wuss" SeeD member.
" I uhmmm rolled a single Cura in my Slot ability... "
Me: Thank you for this vital support my queen. All hail Selphie from Trabia Garden.
Might just be the worst sequel to a game ever made. What happened to Cloud and friends? Unbelievable.
Just finished Disc 2 and the twist that everyone hypes up as "ruining the game" is something that, while kinda corny, is such a nonissue that all it does is prove that everyone who hates this game is simply too weak
Go back to using a bad fan theory to cope with your inability to recognize a good game, losers
Go back to using a bad fan theory to cope with your inability to recognize a good game, losers
"An epic story based on the theme of love..."
On startup, there's just a black screen, and music. Some names appear, a fade to black. A black and white render of a character or place from the game, a fade to black. The play experience of Final Fantasy VIII is defined by punctuation. When I told a friend of mine I was playing the game, he assumed I meant the remaster; when I clarified that I was playing the original PlayStation version, he replied "How are those load times?" It's consistently shocking to me how people assume that the load times in these old disc based games were just universally bad, when it usually has more to do with how the program itself is designed than the limitations of the hardware. In any case, the fading in and out between each screen transition is an important part of the game's feel. Each seam is an opportunity for a shift in scale, a shift in mood, a new song to set the stage, a new perspective when the visuals do present themselves.
At the beginning of the game, the player is able to name the main character, Squall, whatever they like. Afterwards as Squall talks with Dr. Kadowaki, she ponders the name of Squall's instructor, there's a heavy pause. It's as if the game is about to bring up a second menu, where the player will name this character as well, but it doesn't happen. Kadowaki says the character's name outright, Quistis.
The first choice you're really given in the game, aside from your character's name, is whether or not you want to use your desk terminal in the classroom. It contains quite a bit of background on the world, including things I would have otherwise considered "twists", and even things I didn't really absorb in my first several playthroughs. It has the student guidelines for the Garden, information on what SeeDs are, and a somber announcement that the school festival is almost certainly not going to happen. Throughout my life I played through this opening section of the game at least half a dozen times without looking at this terminal at all, and I imagine I'm not the only one who ignored it. On Disc 3, probably more than 20 hours into the game for most players, someone says "Of course monsters live on the moon, didn't you learn that in school?"
There's an idea I've had for a game for a long while, a setting inspired by Fullmetal Alchemist, gameplay inspired by what I imagined Shin Megami Tensei would be like when it was first described to me, an RPG with absurd customizability where the only way to win was to indulge in a high risk-high reward gamble inspired by Battle Network's dark chips. A world where magic exists, but almost nobody is any good at it, a game where even the best party setups would be cyclically robbing Peter to pay Paul. If I had been a better student, if I had actually read the terminal at my desk, if I had actually learned how to play the game a few playthroughs earlier, I could have realized that Final Fantasy VIII is the closest any game I'm familiar with has come to being my dream JRPG.
Final Fantasy VIII isn't a game where you grind enemies for experience points, and it definitely isn't a game where you repeatedly draw the same spell from the same enemy until you can't anymore. Final Fantasy VIII is a game where you play card games and answer quizzes and spec into certain skills so that you can buy a stock of easily obtainable items and turn them into high level magic and quadruple every party member's HP by the end of Disc 1 without leveling up at all. The worst part of every JRPG is the grind, the amount of time it takes to improve your characters, the amount of time you spend waiting for your turn. The interesting part of a JRPG is rarely the fight, it's the preparation, and Final Fantasy VIII knows this. It's a JRPG that asks you to work smarter, not harder. It's a game where turning every boss fight into a coin toss that ends on the first turn is a strategy that is not only possible, it's completely valid.
Final Fantasy VIII is cinematic in a way that few games have been able to be. By the time I first played the game, nearly a decade after its original release, its graphics were still not so deprecated to be distracting. My first experience with game environments made predominantly of prerendered background was Universal Theme Parks Adventure on the Gamecube, and the Wii wasn't much more visually impressive than that, so to me this likely didn't feel as antiquated as someone more accustomed to the 7th generation consoles or high end PC's from the time might have thought. Sometimes there are transitions between scenes with 3D characters on a static background, to 3D characters over an animated prerendered scene complete with shifting perspective, to a prerendered cutscene.
While these moments are impressive, they are also some of the moments where the issue with the remaster become most glaring. The versions of Final Fantasy VIII available on modern platforms are apparently based on the original PC version of the game, which has no support for analog control, nor rumble. Using a D-pad was a bit more acceptable in Final Fantasy VII, with its city blocks and industrial catwalks; however, in Final Fantasy VIII even the manmade locations have a swooping curved Y2K futurist aesthetic that makes navigating them at straight angles just plain cumbersome, and it's even worse when the camera is given an opportunity to move around. The lack of rumble in these modern versions makes it more difficult for the player to discern whether they have successfully timed their Paper Mario-esque gunblade critical hits when doing basic combat. I'd recommend either playing the game from the original discs (which aren't particularly expensive because apparently Square Enix still prints new ones from time to time), or perhaps there's a mod for the PC version that can fix these issues.
Balamb Garden is initially presented with this light, airy music, like the music Haruomi Hosono apparently made for convenience stores in the 80's. Beneath the uniforms and the combat exercises, Garden is home. A bit later in the game the team visits another Garden in Galbadia; defamiliarized, the same elements of Garden are now characterized as sterile, as cold as a waiting room, its fascistic character laid bare. The apparent death of Seifer lets the banal reality of the world set in. When the player is finally able to return to Balamb Garden hours later, they find it has erupted into chaos, students splintering into separate factions and killing each other over a conflict that many of them barely understand. Balamb Garden becomes this games equivalent of the boat in other Final Fantasy games, Trabia Garden is destroyed, and the party collectively remembers the orphanage on a coast in the middle of nowhere, the place where they all grew up together. Homes destroyed, homes we take with us, homes we leave behind, homes that aren't ours, that aren't safe anymore. Balamb Garden too is eventually left behind, most players likely leaving it docked at Fisherman's Horizon from Disc 3 onward.
Where do I even start with Squall and Rinoa.
Aside from Squall and Rinoa, most of the party members take a backseat for a good portion of the game. Aside from Squall, Rinoa is the only character in the game that the player is able to name. You name her because she isn't just another party member, she's the other player character. Her goal of Timber's independence is what actually gets the plot of the game moving, while Squall merely settles into his role as acting leader of Balamb's SeeD. She has agency, and the worst thing that can happen, the lowest point of the story's arc, is for her to lose that, to be forcibly closed off from the rest of the world by a force beyond control or comprehension. And here, Squall realizes that this is exactly what he has done to himself. This is why the other party members don't have this sort of role in the story, why they can't be named, because they don't have this connection to Squall, to the player, they know not to try.
When I play RPG's old and new alike, I often think about a moment in Chris Davis' review of the original Fallout wherein he says that the dialogue in a game like that couldn't work in a modern game, it couldn't be fully voice acted, it couldn't be delivered with a straight face, it couldn't be taken seriously. Consider the moment in the game where Edea, free from Ultimecia's control, explains the villain's plan. To progress, the player has to talk to Edea several times, and attempt to leave the room. The screen goes black, Squall's thoughts appear in transparent text boxes in the center of the screen while solid text boxes pop up around them. He catches bits and pieces of the science fantasy technobabble but all he can really think about is Rinoa. If they had tried to communicate this with facial expressions, motion capture gesticulating, voice over, I genuinely think that the game would have suffered for it. The way that the user interface elements typical of a JRPG are used here communicates the emotion in such a tangible, potent way, just trying to semi-realistically animate Squall with a pensive face wouldn't be able to capture it.
There's quite a bit of Oedipal stuff here, isn't there? The concept of the sorceress as a sort of interdimensional primal mother, Squall's apparent estranged father cloistered away, leader of an invisible isolationist nation, not to mention Cid's role as adoptive father. The whole world have contorted into some kind of grand familial conspiracy to keep the mother and father a secret. There's an a sort of half-implied pseudo-incest, the ambiguity of which characters are whose children; Rinoa is most likely simply the daughter of Squall's father's first true love, but for much of the game there's a nagging question.
In Disc 3, we drop everything and leave our post, leave the planet itself, in the pursuit of restoring Rinoa's will. Squall calls out to her, she can't hear, and under control of the sorceress she is thrown into the vacuum of space, utterly alone. Ellone brings Squall into her memories, into her mind, eventually into the closest past to the future, the present. He joins her in the endless void, and they stow away together on a derelict spaceship. Once outside of their spacesuits, Rinoa asks for a hug; despite the risk he took to save her life, despite perhaps knowing her thoughts more intimately now than any other person, he refuses. The encounter with the xenomorph-like aliens on this ship is so distracting and so on-the-nose that I feel like it can't possibly be anything other than intentional. That surely this is representative of how even now Rinoa is still terrifying to Squall, the alien, the other. How do you share your self with someone?
The first time I played this game, I was aware that there would be a needle drop of a pop song complete with vocals, but I didn't know when or what the context would be. I was kind of taken aback, confused as to why it played here. As Rinoa completely opens up and tells Squall that he provides her the kind of comfort she previously only associated with family, he ignores her, the heightened emotions of his heroism deflate as the two literally descend back down to earth. This song, "Eyes On Me", in the context of the game is written by Rinoa's mother, about Squall's father. This song doesn't play here because it's the grand happy ending, it plays here because it's the climax of Squall's inner conflict. Are you really going to make the same mistake your father did? Are you really going to refuse to open up? Are you really going to keep lying to yourself, to everyone else, and keep that stupid stoic look on your face and pretend you don't care because it's "cool"?
I just hate hearing people talk about this game. Nobody gets it. It's as if Squall is just some whiny brat who won't get in the robot, or he's an incel and Rinoa is his manic pixie dream girl. Or the whole game is just reddit fedora child soldier badass mall-ninja military aesthetic. With all the dumbass Channel Awesome-tier takes I see people spouting about this game I could hardly believe any of the people saying that shit have even played it, or at least not beyond the first few hours, if it weren't for the fact that it took me like 4 playthroughs to really get it myself. I can hardly believe how few views on youtube some of the songs from this game have, how it's actually kind of hard to find recordings of the version of Eyes On Me that can play during the Garden Festival in Fisherman's Horizon, that one of the few recordings I can find has only a few hundred views and is interrupted multiple times by screenshot sound effects.
How could you think so low of the game when the song at the core of it all, the song whose phrases echo through at least half a dozen of the game's background tracks, is contextualized as the other half of the player crying out "Don't you know I'm a person? Don't you know I'm just like you? That I have my own thoughts and dreams and desires?" I genuinely believe Final Fantasy VIII is one of, if not simply the best written narrative ever told in a video game, and one of the best coming of age stories of the past few decades. I don't understand how someone who has actually experienced it in full could walk away from it and so totally ignore the obvious character development that occurs, that Squall is more than the brick wall we see in the games opening chapters, that Rinoa is more than just a wish fulfillment "romance option".
Still, Squall's indecision means that their ship touches down, Rinoa turns herself in to the Esthar soldiers to be sealed away in the sorceress memorial for the safety of the world. At virtually the last possible moment, Squall chooses honesty. It is at this moment that the player gets this game's airship, the spaceship Ragnarok. The music that plays during flight, the freedom it offers, the uniquely satisfying way that it handles compared to all other movement in the game, this is the ultimate mechanical and emotional payoff.
I said in a previous review of this game on this site that this is the only video game I own which features its narrative theme as a bullet point on the back of the box, and that says it all, doesn't it? Final Fantasy VII touts its size, its audiovisual spectacle, but it gets no more specific than a vague gesture towards "a good story". Final Fantasy IX, as good as it is, is Square admitting defeat; in its appeal to nostalgia it reveals an internal sense that this format is already as archaic as the SNES games which came before. Final Fantasy X was the real future, with its voice acting, facial expressions, and full 3D environments rendered in real time. Final Fantasy X was the point where these games just utterly lost something, they stopped feeling like Final Fantasy. From the first to the ninth each game in this series truly felt like a world, as though even with its tricky sense of scale and perspective the player could truly feel as though they had explored every nook and cranny of a massive place. Final Fantasy VII was sort of properly primitive, abstract through necessity, struggling to convey itself through multiple discontinuous styles. Final Fantasy VIII was perhaps the absolute pinnacle of a kind of game that we simply don't see anymore and may never again, and it was all in the name of love.
Anyway, this is where I reveal that I'm actually a fake fan, I've never beaten this game. I've gotten to the final disc at least 4 times, I have never beaten the final boss, I have never seen the credits. The entire first three discs of this game are actually just the tutorial, they're baby mode, once you have literally the slightest idea of how to build a decent party the entire game up until the final dungeon is a complete cakewalk. Then, the final dungeon, the entire 4th Disc, is a Resident Evil mansion full of super-bosses, each of which basically requires you to completely reconfigure your party to meet some hyper-specific criteria. I haven't touched my current save file in months, maybe I'll beat it next playthrough, maybe the payoff will feel so great that I'll add that last half star to my rating, but I wouldn't bet on it.
On startup, there's just a black screen, and music. Some names appear, a fade to black. A black and white render of a character or place from the game, a fade to black. The play experience of Final Fantasy VIII is defined by punctuation. When I told a friend of mine I was playing the game, he assumed I meant the remaster; when I clarified that I was playing the original PlayStation version, he replied "How are those load times?" It's consistently shocking to me how people assume that the load times in these old disc based games were just universally bad, when it usually has more to do with how the program itself is designed than the limitations of the hardware. In any case, the fading in and out between each screen transition is an important part of the game's feel. Each seam is an opportunity for a shift in scale, a shift in mood, a new song to set the stage, a new perspective when the visuals do present themselves.
At the beginning of the game, the player is able to name the main character, Squall, whatever they like. Afterwards as Squall talks with Dr. Kadowaki, she ponders the name of Squall's instructor, there's a heavy pause. It's as if the game is about to bring up a second menu, where the player will name this character as well, but it doesn't happen. Kadowaki says the character's name outright, Quistis.
The first choice you're really given in the game, aside from your character's name, is whether or not you want to use your desk terminal in the classroom. It contains quite a bit of background on the world, including things I would have otherwise considered "twists", and even things I didn't really absorb in my first several playthroughs. It has the student guidelines for the Garden, information on what SeeDs are, and a somber announcement that the school festival is almost certainly not going to happen. Throughout my life I played through this opening section of the game at least half a dozen times without looking at this terminal at all, and I imagine I'm not the only one who ignored it. On Disc 3, probably more than 20 hours into the game for most players, someone says "Of course monsters live on the moon, didn't you learn that in school?"
There's an idea I've had for a game for a long while, a setting inspired by Fullmetal Alchemist, gameplay inspired by what I imagined Shin Megami Tensei would be like when it was first described to me, an RPG with absurd customizability where the only way to win was to indulge in a high risk-high reward gamble inspired by Battle Network's dark chips. A world where magic exists, but almost nobody is any good at it, a game where even the best party setups would be cyclically robbing Peter to pay Paul. If I had been a better student, if I had actually read the terminal at my desk, if I had actually learned how to play the game a few playthroughs earlier, I could have realized that Final Fantasy VIII is the closest any game I'm familiar with has come to being my dream JRPG.
Final Fantasy VIII isn't a game where you grind enemies for experience points, and it definitely isn't a game where you repeatedly draw the same spell from the same enemy until you can't anymore. Final Fantasy VIII is a game where you play card games and answer quizzes and spec into certain skills so that you can buy a stock of easily obtainable items and turn them into high level magic and quadruple every party member's HP by the end of Disc 1 without leveling up at all. The worst part of every JRPG is the grind, the amount of time it takes to improve your characters, the amount of time you spend waiting for your turn. The interesting part of a JRPG is rarely the fight, it's the preparation, and Final Fantasy VIII knows this. It's a JRPG that asks you to work smarter, not harder. It's a game where turning every boss fight into a coin toss that ends on the first turn is a strategy that is not only possible, it's completely valid.
Final Fantasy VIII is cinematic in a way that few games have been able to be. By the time I first played the game, nearly a decade after its original release, its graphics were still not so deprecated to be distracting. My first experience with game environments made predominantly of prerendered background was Universal Theme Parks Adventure on the Gamecube, and the Wii wasn't much more visually impressive than that, so to me this likely didn't feel as antiquated as someone more accustomed to the 7th generation consoles or high end PC's from the time might have thought. Sometimes there are transitions between scenes with 3D characters on a static background, to 3D characters over an animated prerendered scene complete with shifting perspective, to a prerendered cutscene.
While these moments are impressive, they are also some of the moments where the issue with the remaster become most glaring. The versions of Final Fantasy VIII available on modern platforms are apparently based on the original PC version of the game, which has no support for analog control, nor rumble. Using a D-pad was a bit more acceptable in Final Fantasy VII, with its city blocks and industrial catwalks; however, in Final Fantasy VIII even the manmade locations have a swooping curved Y2K futurist aesthetic that makes navigating them at straight angles just plain cumbersome, and it's even worse when the camera is given an opportunity to move around. The lack of rumble in these modern versions makes it more difficult for the player to discern whether they have successfully timed their Paper Mario-esque gunblade critical hits when doing basic combat. I'd recommend either playing the game from the original discs (which aren't particularly expensive because apparently Square Enix still prints new ones from time to time), or perhaps there's a mod for the PC version that can fix these issues.
Balamb Garden is initially presented with this light, airy music, like the music Haruomi Hosono apparently made for convenience stores in the 80's. Beneath the uniforms and the combat exercises, Garden is home. A bit later in the game the team visits another Garden in Galbadia; defamiliarized, the same elements of Garden are now characterized as sterile, as cold as a waiting room, its fascistic character laid bare. The apparent death of Seifer lets the banal reality of the world set in. When the player is finally able to return to Balamb Garden hours later, they find it has erupted into chaos, students splintering into separate factions and killing each other over a conflict that many of them barely understand. Balamb Garden becomes this games equivalent of the boat in other Final Fantasy games, Trabia Garden is destroyed, and the party collectively remembers the orphanage on a coast in the middle of nowhere, the place where they all grew up together. Homes destroyed, homes we take with us, homes we leave behind, homes that aren't ours, that aren't safe anymore. Balamb Garden too is eventually left behind, most players likely leaving it docked at Fisherman's Horizon from Disc 3 onward.
Where do I even start with Squall and Rinoa.
Aside from Squall and Rinoa, most of the party members take a backseat for a good portion of the game. Aside from Squall, Rinoa is the only character in the game that the player is able to name. You name her because she isn't just another party member, she's the other player character. Her goal of Timber's independence is what actually gets the plot of the game moving, while Squall merely settles into his role as acting leader of Balamb's SeeD. She has agency, and the worst thing that can happen, the lowest point of the story's arc, is for her to lose that, to be forcibly closed off from the rest of the world by a force beyond control or comprehension. And here, Squall realizes that this is exactly what he has done to himself. This is why the other party members don't have this sort of role in the story, why they can't be named, because they don't have this connection to Squall, to the player, they know not to try.
When I play RPG's old and new alike, I often think about a moment in Chris Davis' review of the original Fallout wherein he says that the dialogue in a game like that couldn't work in a modern game, it couldn't be fully voice acted, it couldn't be delivered with a straight face, it couldn't be taken seriously. Consider the moment in the game where Edea, free from Ultimecia's control, explains the villain's plan. To progress, the player has to talk to Edea several times, and attempt to leave the room. The screen goes black, Squall's thoughts appear in transparent text boxes in the center of the screen while solid text boxes pop up around them. He catches bits and pieces of the science fantasy technobabble but all he can really think about is Rinoa. If they had tried to communicate this with facial expressions, motion capture gesticulating, voice over, I genuinely think that the game would have suffered for it. The way that the user interface elements typical of a JRPG are used here communicates the emotion in such a tangible, potent way, just trying to semi-realistically animate Squall with a pensive face wouldn't be able to capture it.
There's quite a bit of Oedipal stuff here, isn't there? The concept of the sorceress as a sort of interdimensional primal mother, Squall's apparent estranged father cloistered away, leader of an invisible isolationist nation, not to mention Cid's role as adoptive father. The whole world have contorted into some kind of grand familial conspiracy to keep the mother and father a secret. There's an a sort of half-implied pseudo-incest, the ambiguity of which characters are whose children; Rinoa is most likely simply the daughter of Squall's father's first true love, but for much of the game there's a nagging question.
In Disc 3, we drop everything and leave our post, leave the planet itself, in the pursuit of restoring Rinoa's will. Squall calls out to her, she can't hear, and under control of the sorceress she is thrown into the vacuum of space, utterly alone. Ellone brings Squall into her memories, into her mind, eventually into the closest past to the future, the present. He joins her in the endless void, and they stow away together on a derelict spaceship. Once outside of their spacesuits, Rinoa asks for a hug; despite the risk he took to save her life, despite perhaps knowing her thoughts more intimately now than any other person, he refuses. The encounter with the xenomorph-like aliens on this ship is so distracting and so on-the-nose that I feel like it can't possibly be anything other than intentional. That surely this is representative of how even now Rinoa is still terrifying to Squall, the alien, the other. How do you share your self with someone?
The first time I played this game, I was aware that there would be a needle drop of a pop song complete with vocals, but I didn't know when or what the context would be. I was kind of taken aback, confused as to why it played here. As Rinoa completely opens up and tells Squall that he provides her the kind of comfort she previously only associated with family, he ignores her, the heightened emotions of his heroism deflate as the two literally descend back down to earth. This song, "Eyes On Me", in the context of the game is written by Rinoa's mother, about Squall's father. This song doesn't play here because it's the grand happy ending, it plays here because it's the climax of Squall's inner conflict. Are you really going to make the same mistake your father did? Are you really going to refuse to open up? Are you really going to keep lying to yourself, to everyone else, and keep that stupid stoic look on your face and pretend you don't care because it's "cool"?
I just hate hearing people talk about this game. Nobody gets it. It's as if Squall is just some whiny brat who won't get in the robot, or he's an incel and Rinoa is his manic pixie dream girl. Or the whole game is just reddit fedora child soldier badass mall-ninja military aesthetic. With all the dumbass Channel Awesome-tier takes I see people spouting about this game I could hardly believe any of the people saying that shit have even played it, or at least not beyond the first few hours, if it weren't for the fact that it took me like 4 playthroughs to really get it myself. I can hardly believe how few views on youtube some of the songs from this game have, how it's actually kind of hard to find recordings of the version of Eyes On Me that can play during the Garden Festival in Fisherman's Horizon, that one of the few recordings I can find has only a few hundred views and is interrupted multiple times by screenshot sound effects.
How could you think so low of the game when the song at the core of it all, the song whose phrases echo through at least half a dozen of the game's background tracks, is contextualized as the other half of the player crying out "Don't you know I'm a person? Don't you know I'm just like you? That I have my own thoughts and dreams and desires?" I genuinely believe Final Fantasy VIII is one of, if not simply the best written narrative ever told in a video game, and one of the best coming of age stories of the past few decades. I don't understand how someone who has actually experienced it in full could walk away from it and so totally ignore the obvious character development that occurs, that Squall is more than the brick wall we see in the games opening chapters, that Rinoa is more than just a wish fulfillment "romance option".
Still, Squall's indecision means that their ship touches down, Rinoa turns herself in to the Esthar soldiers to be sealed away in the sorceress memorial for the safety of the world. At virtually the last possible moment, Squall chooses honesty. It is at this moment that the player gets this game's airship, the spaceship Ragnarok. The music that plays during flight, the freedom it offers, the uniquely satisfying way that it handles compared to all other movement in the game, this is the ultimate mechanical and emotional payoff.
I said in a previous review of this game on this site that this is the only video game I own which features its narrative theme as a bullet point on the back of the box, and that says it all, doesn't it? Final Fantasy VII touts its size, its audiovisual spectacle, but it gets no more specific than a vague gesture towards "a good story". Final Fantasy IX, as good as it is, is Square admitting defeat; in its appeal to nostalgia it reveals an internal sense that this format is already as archaic as the SNES games which came before. Final Fantasy X was the real future, with its voice acting, facial expressions, and full 3D environments rendered in real time. Final Fantasy X was the point where these games just utterly lost something, they stopped feeling like Final Fantasy. From the first to the ninth each game in this series truly felt like a world, as though even with its tricky sense of scale and perspective the player could truly feel as though they had explored every nook and cranny of a massive place. Final Fantasy VII was sort of properly primitive, abstract through necessity, struggling to convey itself through multiple discontinuous styles. Final Fantasy VIII was perhaps the absolute pinnacle of a kind of game that we simply don't see anymore and may never again, and it was all in the name of love.
Anyway, this is where I reveal that I'm actually a fake fan, I've never beaten this game. I've gotten to the final disc at least 4 times, I have never beaten the final boss, I have never seen the credits. The entire first three discs of this game are actually just the tutorial, they're baby mode, once you have literally the slightest idea of how to build a decent party the entire game up until the final dungeon is a complete cakewalk. Then, the final dungeon, the entire 4th Disc, is a Resident Evil mansion full of super-bosses, each of which basically requires you to completely reconfigure your party to meet some hyper-specific criteria. I haven't touched my current save file in months, maybe I'll beat it next playthrough, maybe the payoff will feel so great that I'll add that last half star to my rating, but I wouldn't bet on it.
Nothing especially insightful to add on this one compared to my original log, as I think I've said about all that can be objectively said about FFVIII in my previous review - just wanted to say how special an experience this game is to share with a partner.
I've heard plenty of reasonable complaints about how Squall and Rinoa's romance is caught in the middle of a million different things instead of being the main focus like some thinks it should, but in doing so it manages to capture a specific sort of feeling: of being thrust into an intersection of far too many things for any one person to handle, feeling as if it's going to crush you from all directions... and then looking up and finding that someone else has also somehow found their way right where they are, threatened by those exact same burdens and every bit as in need of help as you are. Our two protagonists' private moments alone are few and far between, but they're all the more special for it: just like how we always see Squall's narration as our protagonist but only rarely get to see Rinoa truly open up, it's far too easy to get in our own heads and be left helpless to our limited perceptions of others' points of view. Sometimes you might be surprised what you find on the other end - or on your own.
Anyways, sorry, don't want to get too sappy or mushy to a bunch of people who don't know me or the details of my personal life. Squall is literally me and Rinoa is literally my girlfriend, that's what I'm getting at here.
I've heard plenty of reasonable complaints about how Squall and Rinoa's romance is caught in the middle of a million different things instead of being the main focus like some thinks it should, but in doing so it manages to capture a specific sort of feeling: of being thrust into an intersection of far too many things for any one person to handle, feeling as if it's going to crush you from all directions... and then looking up and finding that someone else has also somehow found their way right where they are, threatened by those exact same burdens and every bit as in need of help as you are. Our two protagonists' private moments alone are few and far between, but they're all the more special for it: just like how we always see Squall's narration as our protagonist but only rarely get to see Rinoa truly open up, it's far too easy to get in our own heads and be left helpless to our limited perceptions of others' points of view. Sometimes you might be surprised what you find on the other end - or on your own.
Anyways, sorry, don't want to get too sappy or mushy to a bunch of people who don't know me or the details of my personal life. Squall is literally me and Rinoa is literally my girlfriend, that's what I'm getting at here.
This review contains spoilers
My final log on FF8 I promise. I had to do one more please understand.
Now that I've beaten it I feel comfortable waxing poetic about it. I don't feel bad about it either! I see you out here writing 1000 words about Kirby and Homestuck, I'm writing an essay on FF8!! I safely feel like I've played the absolute shit out of it, I spent 50 hours on it and I loved every second of it. But, to be honest, I have delayed my FF9 play through just to play MORE of this game. It scratches such a particular itch that I didn't know I had.
The junction system, maligned by many, is one that I personally just sunk into, I loved finding creatures with rare spells I could put to sleep and just wring them dry of them, it makes what should feel like an exploit feel like gaming the system in my favor. FF8 is really a game that encourages you to use any opportunity you can find, it rewards a player who can get their party so fucked up that they one-hit a monster the second they spot them. Coming up with a party configuration to annihilate the Marlboros is one of those satisfactions that doesn't come very often in a game. This and FF7 have turned me into a turn-based combat die hard. Give me the menus!! I fucking LOVE MENUS!!
This game does do a really bad job at onboarding you for the junction system though, which I will not deny even a little bit. This game even has way more tutorials than FF7 ever did and it still took me many, many hours of trial and error before I really understood what I was doing.
It actually lead to a funny scenario. I went on vacation last month, and my save file for FF8 was on my PS3. While I was gone I was still itching to play FF8 so I said "Ah fuck it" and played the Remastered version that I still think looks fugly. Well, at that point I had become so much more knowledgeable on junctioning and triple triad that my party was swole as fuck, and when I returned home my PS1 party was completely underpowered compared to them. It creates a very interesting game where you're able to modify the difficulty very gradually, knowing it so well you can make it really hard or easy on yourself. I personally chose to junction sleep to Squall and silence to Zell, so I could basically just bully an Iron Giant into submission. After some of the shit I went through in FF7 this was vindicating.
Also the FMVs? God damn. I am going to deeply regret when voice acting is introduced, because the things they do with non-verbal communication and body language here is to die for. The dance sequence between Rinoa and Squall was the moment I was IN, the character dynamics already so delightful to see in action, and the call-back to it in the ending...damn who is cutting onions in here??
I also love these limit breaks, it is insane how strong they are. Squall can do the izuna drop, Zell does God Hand shit, Selphie damns enemies to Hell, Irvine just fucking shoots the shit out of people, and Quistis sends people to the shadow realm. It's all the completely over-the-top spectacle that has captivated me with Final Fantasy. Why just hit someone with a sword? Why not hit them 10 times in an aerial combo? Why just summon a guy to attack? Why not summon a guy to collapse the universe around a single enemy? While this shit definitely needs a skip button, I still find it funny when people rail on Final Fantasy for spectacle. Like, fuck are these epic internet gaming fucks capable of having some fun in their goddamn life.
Speaking of Epic Internet Gaming Bros who Smell, ProJared hates this game so I'm just letting you all know it's not too late to hear me out on this game.
The plot has been very much reclaimed over the years, as the geriatric gamer crowd who hated it so much have been flushed down the toilet of obscurity where they fucking belong. Spoony was wrong about Phantasmagoria 2 and this game!! He was never an effective media critic or comedian! The confusion surrounding the plot does absolutely baffle me though, are people not paying attention? Are they being daft on purpose? The game is explicitly clear what it's about. People are desperate to CHANGE THE PAST, people lament the TIME THEY LOST with loved ones, the main villain is ulTIMEcia. When time compression is first introduced Squall can't even focus on it as he is distracted thinking of Rinoa, it could not be more obvious!! Yet people act like the plot is fucking Ulysses! The most stunning criticism I see is how Squall only starts worrying about Rinoa after she falls into a coma.
Yeah? Have you ever had a real life experience before? What the fuck. Of course only when it's too late do you realize what you have lost, that's the ENTIRE FUCKING POINT OF THE GAME!!! FUCK!!! Sorry I'm getting really mad at a strawman gamer I'm picturing in my head who uses phrases like "it's objectively trash" or "this game aged bad" and shadow boxing at him like Zell does. Hey speaking of Zell!!
I love these characters! After FF7 had the best cast of all time, I was wondering how they'd top it, and they did it with another best cast of all time. Interesting is how different all of them are even when they play into the same archetypes, as it feels like FF8 has gone to great lengths to give characters a duality to them that gives them a depth that took me off guard. Squall is cold, distant, and emotionally closed, but is so insecure of how people perceive him that he takes great pangs to control their perception. Zell is hot-headed and doesn't think before he speaks, but can be level-headed and knows a great deal about the world around him, even being really beloved in his hometown! Irvine puts on a front of a cool and lone sniper, but is secretly shocked and confused that people he grew up with simply don't remember him anymore, and Rinoa, fuckin' Rinoa, I love this character. Her interactions with Squall, fuck it, her interactions with anyone! She can be naive, childish, and bratty, but also very introspective, very world-weary, she can ask Squall very matter-of-factly if he's prepared to kill Seifer, and she can see the tragedy in a 17 year old so ready to make that decision.
FF8 captures the fact that teenagers aren't so cut-and-dry, they can make good decisions, bad decisions, they can sometimes make decisions that wouldn't make sense to anyone but them. Whenever I see characters taken down a peg for it, it strikes me as people being infected with a lethal case of TvTropes brain, making them think characters not behaving rationally 100% of the time is a ding against the game. Not just for the sake of FF8, but for the sake of art in general, you HAVE to get that line of thinking out of your head, it is the destroyer of art. Teens fuckup all the time, that's part of the coming-of-age narrative in FF8. When I was 16 I tried dropping out of high school, why? Late 20s me couldn't even fucking tell you! I'm glad I didn't! But that's one of those things where I was doing shit off of my gut, because I felt like I had to. Squall feels like he has to close people off, can't let anyone in, and when someone as stubborn as Rinoa tries to get in, he only fortifies those walls. Once she's gone though? Only then does he realize what her laugh, her smile, her voice meant to him.
That's not bad writing, that's not a contrivance, that's how people are. FF8 has characters I believe, I root for them, I love seeing their adventures, and I love seeing them come closer.
What's interesting though is that I think years of life experience has given me a lot from this game than I probably would have AT 17. When I was a teenager I was listening to nothing but Foetus and was deeply cynical about love, you know how kids are. A game about love? About time? Who needs love? I got all the time in the world!!
Well, I am now in my late 20s and I don't have all the time in the world, I have loved, I do have regrets about love and life, and sometimes I do wish I could have gone back and made better decisions. But FF8 argues in a way that I find emotionally very gripping in this time in my life, that the past is immovable, but you are able to shape things in the present. Squall choose to open up to Rinoa in the Ragnarok, he chooses to hold her and smell the roses, it's one of the most beautiful scenes I've seen in a game for how many little things it says.
The fact it takes place after battling aliens on a spaceship is why Final Fantasy is the GOAT in my eyes.
So I adore FF8, I'd even go as far to say that I am in love with this game. It's a game I could write thousands and thousands of words on. It's another FF7 case where I don't think it's perfect, but for how much scope and ambition is put into such an experimental, personal game is still hard to wrap my head around. Some modern AAA games feel like every plot point, every story beat, is carefully crafted to be crowd-pleasing, but FF7 and FF8 have felt like no one was telling them what to do, they had a story in their hearts and fuck they were GOING To tell it. I'm really glad they did.
Now that I've beaten it I feel comfortable waxing poetic about it. I don't feel bad about it either! I see you out here writing 1000 words about Kirby and Homestuck, I'm writing an essay on FF8!! I safely feel like I've played the absolute shit out of it, I spent 50 hours on it and I loved every second of it. But, to be honest, I have delayed my FF9 play through just to play MORE of this game. It scratches such a particular itch that I didn't know I had.
The junction system, maligned by many, is one that I personally just sunk into, I loved finding creatures with rare spells I could put to sleep and just wring them dry of them, it makes what should feel like an exploit feel like gaming the system in my favor. FF8 is really a game that encourages you to use any opportunity you can find, it rewards a player who can get their party so fucked up that they one-hit a monster the second they spot them. Coming up with a party configuration to annihilate the Marlboros is one of those satisfactions that doesn't come very often in a game. This and FF7 have turned me into a turn-based combat die hard. Give me the menus!! I fucking LOVE MENUS!!
This game does do a really bad job at onboarding you for the junction system though, which I will not deny even a little bit. This game even has way more tutorials than FF7 ever did and it still took me many, many hours of trial and error before I really understood what I was doing.
It actually lead to a funny scenario. I went on vacation last month, and my save file for FF8 was on my PS3. While I was gone I was still itching to play FF8 so I said "Ah fuck it" and played the Remastered version that I still think looks fugly. Well, at that point I had become so much more knowledgeable on junctioning and triple triad that my party was swole as fuck, and when I returned home my PS1 party was completely underpowered compared to them. It creates a very interesting game where you're able to modify the difficulty very gradually, knowing it so well you can make it really hard or easy on yourself. I personally chose to junction sleep to Squall and silence to Zell, so I could basically just bully an Iron Giant into submission. After some of the shit I went through in FF7 this was vindicating.
Also the FMVs? God damn. I am going to deeply regret when voice acting is introduced, because the things they do with non-verbal communication and body language here is to die for. The dance sequence between Rinoa and Squall was the moment I was IN, the character dynamics already so delightful to see in action, and the call-back to it in the ending...damn who is cutting onions in here??
I also love these limit breaks, it is insane how strong they are. Squall can do the izuna drop, Zell does God Hand shit, Selphie damns enemies to Hell, Irvine just fucking shoots the shit out of people, and Quistis sends people to the shadow realm. It's all the completely over-the-top spectacle that has captivated me with Final Fantasy. Why just hit someone with a sword? Why not hit them 10 times in an aerial combo? Why just summon a guy to attack? Why not summon a guy to collapse the universe around a single enemy? While this shit definitely needs a skip button, I still find it funny when people rail on Final Fantasy for spectacle. Like, fuck are these epic internet gaming fucks capable of having some fun in their goddamn life.
Speaking of Epic Internet Gaming Bros who Smell, ProJared hates this game so I'm just letting you all know it's not too late to hear me out on this game.
The plot has been very much reclaimed over the years, as the geriatric gamer crowd who hated it so much have been flushed down the toilet of obscurity where they fucking belong. Spoony was wrong about Phantasmagoria 2 and this game!! He was never an effective media critic or comedian! The confusion surrounding the plot does absolutely baffle me though, are people not paying attention? Are they being daft on purpose? The game is explicitly clear what it's about. People are desperate to CHANGE THE PAST, people lament the TIME THEY LOST with loved ones, the main villain is ulTIMEcia. When time compression is first introduced Squall can't even focus on it as he is distracted thinking of Rinoa, it could not be more obvious!! Yet people act like the plot is fucking Ulysses! The most stunning criticism I see is how Squall only starts worrying about Rinoa after she falls into a coma.
Yeah? Have you ever had a real life experience before? What the fuck. Of course only when it's too late do you realize what you have lost, that's the ENTIRE FUCKING POINT OF THE GAME!!! FUCK!!! Sorry I'm getting really mad at a strawman gamer I'm picturing in my head who uses phrases like "it's objectively trash" or "this game aged bad" and shadow boxing at him like Zell does. Hey speaking of Zell!!
I love these characters! After FF7 had the best cast of all time, I was wondering how they'd top it, and they did it with another best cast of all time. Interesting is how different all of them are even when they play into the same archetypes, as it feels like FF8 has gone to great lengths to give characters a duality to them that gives them a depth that took me off guard. Squall is cold, distant, and emotionally closed, but is so insecure of how people perceive him that he takes great pangs to control their perception. Zell is hot-headed and doesn't think before he speaks, but can be level-headed and knows a great deal about the world around him, even being really beloved in his hometown! Irvine puts on a front of a cool and lone sniper, but is secretly shocked and confused that people he grew up with simply don't remember him anymore, and Rinoa, fuckin' Rinoa, I love this character. Her interactions with Squall, fuck it, her interactions with anyone! She can be naive, childish, and bratty, but also very introspective, very world-weary, she can ask Squall very matter-of-factly if he's prepared to kill Seifer, and she can see the tragedy in a 17 year old so ready to make that decision.
FF8 captures the fact that teenagers aren't so cut-and-dry, they can make good decisions, bad decisions, they can sometimes make decisions that wouldn't make sense to anyone but them. Whenever I see characters taken down a peg for it, it strikes me as people being infected with a lethal case of TvTropes brain, making them think characters not behaving rationally 100% of the time is a ding against the game. Not just for the sake of FF8, but for the sake of art in general, you HAVE to get that line of thinking out of your head, it is the destroyer of art. Teens fuckup all the time, that's part of the coming-of-age narrative in FF8. When I was 16 I tried dropping out of high school, why? Late 20s me couldn't even fucking tell you! I'm glad I didn't! But that's one of those things where I was doing shit off of my gut, because I felt like I had to. Squall feels like he has to close people off, can't let anyone in, and when someone as stubborn as Rinoa tries to get in, he only fortifies those walls. Once she's gone though? Only then does he realize what her laugh, her smile, her voice meant to him.
That's not bad writing, that's not a contrivance, that's how people are. FF8 has characters I believe, I root for them, I love seeing their adventures, and I love seeing them come closer.
What's interesting though is that I think years of life experience has given me a lot from this game than I probably would have AT 17. When I was a teenager I was listening to nothing but Foetus and was deeply cynical about love, you know how kids are. A game about love? About time? Who needs love? I got all the time in the world!!
Well, I am now in my late 20s and I don't have all the time in the world, I have loved, I do have regrets about love and life, and sometimes I do wish I could have gone back and made better decisions. But FF8 argues in a way that I find emotionally very gripping in this time in my life, that the past is immovable, but you are able to shape things in the present. Squall choose to open up to Rinoa in the Ragnarok, he chooses to hold her and smell the roses, it's one of the most beautiful scenes I've seen in a game for how many little things it says.
The fact it takes place after battling aliens on a spaceship is why Final Fantasy is the GOAT in my eyes.
So I adore FF8, I'd even go as far to say that I am in love with this game. It's a game I could write thousands and thousands of words on. It's another FF7 case where I don't think it's perfect, but for how much scope and ambition is put into such an experimental, personal game is still hard to wrap my head around. Some modern AAA games feel like every plot point, every story beat, is carefully crafted to be crowd-pleasing, but FF7 and FF8 have felt like no one was telling them what to do, they had a story in their hearts and fuck they were GOING To tell it. I'm really glad they did.
The 2000 Toyota Echo of Video Games
haters may hate but this is the best Uematsu soundtrack that exists and Tetsuya Nomura channeling art nouveau/euro sci-fi makes for one of the most peculiar and special worlds in the series. Genuinely think the bildungsromance-y mutual character growth between Squall and Rinoa is sweet, wry, and generally excellent, although its a bummer the rest of the (endearing! good!) cast largely loses relevance to the central conflict and hardly chimes in or develops much after Trabia Garden or so. The plot as a whole ends up in some bonkers places (which I actually enjoy despite the inanity; there's a touching sort of emotional honesty to the gestural teen melodrama chrono-existential pathos of it alll) but Edea is definitely the most imposing and seductive villain in the whole franchise--for the first disc at least. The FMVs in this game still floor me, and the borderline postmodern combat/leveling systems are fascinating in concept and super easy to exploit and render meaningless if you hate them and just want to get through the story. Not my favorite, but theres a ton to love here if you just chill out and approach the game on its own terms.
also laguna is a total hottie and can get it
also laguna is a total hottie and can get it
This review contains spoilers
Final Fantasy Marathon Review #3
I respect the subversiveness of this game a lot and it’s laudable that Square went for something so experimental right off the heels of FFVII, but I would be lying if I thought the result was very successful - for every interesting thing it does there’s ample flaws to compensate - or at least, things I don’t think work well. The way this game is composed readily opens itself up to saying that any given flaw is part of the overall point, especially in the narrative, and I do think that aspect of it is interesting, but for me at least I wasn’t drawn to a lot of these interpretations so the result was fairly mixed.
The junction system is tragically close to being amazing. It’s understandable that so many misunderstand it considering it’s one of the most poorly tutorialized mechanics I’ve seen in recent memory, the UI is a nightmare, GFs default to learning useless skills and it’s incredibly unintuitive to hoard magic instead of using it, but the fundamental idea behind it is great. Instead of a traditional levelling and MP system, you have a sort of magical economy - triple triad cards get turned into items, those items get turned into magic, low-level magic gets converted into high-level magic, it’s this glue that binds the disparate mechanics together and it makes decision-making (at least in theory) more interesting when you are essentially sacrificing your stats to cast strong magic. I like the implications it has for character switching too; instead of individual builds, you essentially have three different loadouts that you pass around the cast, which feels quite flexible when it’s working.
It’s a shame the whole thing is largely undermined by the ability to draw an infinite amount of magic out of a single enemy, and it’s this more than anything which ruins the system for me. You can’t have a resource economy and then give the player an easy, low-risk way to max out the resource as long as they’re willing to stand around for a bit. This could be defended by saying that drawing a max stack out of an enemy is this system’s equivalent to grinding and shouldn’t be considered intended play, but I don’t find that defence very convincing. In a traditional system, it’s quite clear when you’re grinding, walking back and forth and trying to get into encounters instead of progressing. Whereas here, there’s nothing to signpost or demarcate any stopping point to drawing - because it’s confined to a single encounter, you just keep doing it until you get bored or max out the magic. For me it was often the latter, and the game was very unengagingly easy as a result, but I think I would still say that overall, the combat in this is much more interesting than VII’s.
Weirdly though, it’s more so the minutiae which brings down the gameplay for me. I immediately noticed something off about the game feel and that never really went away: Loading screens are even longer than VII, attack and spell animations feel much slower with less weight, I found myself getting annoyed with the pre-rendered backgrounds a lot more here than VII, often it was confusing where I had to go to progress, where screen transition zones were and what was traversable (shoutout to the random crane you have to walk on at the start of Disc 4) and interacting with the background was a lot more fiddly and unresponsive (shoutout to the random floor tile you have to interact with to find the sniper in Deling City). Environments and scenario design are also quite poor: You go from a repetitive, copy-paste, maze-like sewer level in Deling City into a prison escape with copy-paste floors that all look the same, into searching for Cid by tediously going through every room in Balamb Garden, into an annoying sequence where you search repetitive, copy-paste rooms and corridors in Galbadia Garden to find keycards, into Esthar City - which has a cool design but is excruciating to traverse with its long, empty, and narrow footpaths. You can’t tell me I’m misremembering VII and that it had the same issues either! I played it for the first time last week and this really made me appreciate how hand-crafted all of VII’s environments feel in comparison.
As for the story and characters… I feel this game really suffers from how slow it is to get going, it’s not until well into Disc 2 that the main cast starts to have a real rapport, which isn’t a problem in terms of internal narrative, considering they’ve literally forgotten their history with one-another, but on a meta-experiential level it does result in a first disc where it feels like there’s no chemistry between the characters or much characterisation or backstory for any of them besides Rinoa, which especially stings coming straight from VII, where the cast have instant cohesion and all generally feel like they have an authentic place in the world distinct from their function as party members (with the deliberate exception of Cloud). I think a lot of this is just a result of having 5 out of the 6 party members be SeeDs who have spent their whole lives inside the Garden with little connection to the outside world - there are no moments like Nanaki’s arc in Cosmo Canyon in VII, for example.
The worldbuilding feels very thin too. Very basic questions about the world like what the Galbadian’s whole deal is and why they worship the sorceress or… what the hell even is a sorceress and where do their powers come from and how does Edea transfer her powers to Rinoa “without realising it”?… what is “Guardian Force” and why does it make you forget things and what is the relationship between GFs and the civilizations of the world? What is so special about SeeDs for them to be considered such a powerful force when it seems like anyone can use GFs? Don’t even get me started on “time compression”... only some of these questions get answered and even they arrive only dozens of hours after they get raised. I recognise that, to some degree, this is the point. Squall and the player are supposed to feel like they’re being jostled about by forces bigger than them, but it’s really unsatisfying when you’re just sitting through text laden with jargon that you don’t have a meaningful grasp on. Again, I like the disregard for narrative conventions in principle, but it feels like there’s so many narrative dead-ends here that my good-will for this exercise runs thin pretty quickly. Laguna is probably the worst of these, the game creates this intrigue in the relationship between him and the party and so much time is devoted to these flashback sequences and it amounts to… he’s just the president of Esthar? He’s not important to the plot at all? You’re telling me passionate doo-gooder himbo Laguna didn’t search for his daughter-figure Ellone for like, over a decade because he was “busy”? That’s actually what he says, he was “busy”. Seifer also goes nowhere, we learn basically nothing about his deeper emotional state or his motivations for doing what he does and he undergoes no development and barely appears past Disc 1 (despite being on the cover of the game!). Cid and NORG’s whole plot point is glossed over and then discarded, Zell gets the setup for an arc but no followthrough, you get the point.
On the bright side, the emotional core of Squall and Rinoa’s romance is actually quite good and feels like a successful execution of that disregard for convention. Instead of Cloud and Aerith’s instant storybook chemistry, Squall and Rinoa don’t care for each other at first and their personalities clash heavily. It’s only after considerable time has passed and Rinoa is gone that Squall realises he actually loves her, and I love how this complements the overarching themes about yearning for the past which is already gone. It’s a much more realistic portrayal of romantic feelings; taking someone for granted and thinking you don’t care about them until they’re gone and you realise they were actually incredibly important to you and wanting them back.
Gotta give it props for having the best battle theme and the best boss theme too. Even if I prefer VII’s soundtrack overall, this one is pretty damn good.
I should also mention triple triad since it’s such a large part of the game. It’s decent, I like the flavour of it more than the act of playing it. I think it gets pretty uninteresting once you have a roster of top-tier cards and you can kinda invalidate anyone with weaker cards, and the rules are there to make things more interesting with this in mind. It’s cool how different regions have different rules (bizarrely one of the most grounded details of the worldbuilding) though some of the lategame rules are kinda bullshit. Once you start combining closed with same/plus and random, it feels like you can just lose based on bad luck a lot more, maybe I just suck though!
There’s some really diehard fans of this one so I hope I can come back sometime and appreciate it more. Knowing in advance that IX will play it relatively safe might make me appreciate the weirdness here a lot more in retrospect, but for now, I like it, just not a lot. But onto IX we go!
-----------
Previous FF Reviews
FFV
FFVII
I respect the subversiveness of this game a lot and it’s laudable that Square went for something so experimental right off the heels of FFVII, but I would be lying if I thought the result was very successful - for every interesting thing it does there’s ample flaws to compensate - or at least, things I don’t think work well. The way this game is composed readily opens itself up to saying that any given flaw is part of the overall point, especially in the narrative, and I do think that aspect of it is interesting, but for me at least I wasn’t drawn to a lot of these interpretations so the result was fairly mixed.
The junction system is tragically close to being amazing. It’s understandable that so many misunderstand it considering it’s one of the most poorly tutorialized mechanics I’ve seen in recent memory, the UI is a nightmare, GFs default to learning useless skills and it’s incredibly unintuitive to hoard magic instead of using it, but the fundamental idea behind it is great. Instead of a traditional levelling and MP system, you have a sort of magical economy - triple triad cards get turned into items, those items get turned into magic, low-level magic gets converted into high-level magic, it’s this glue that binds the disparate mechanics together and it makes decision-making (at least in theory) more interesting when you are essentially sacrificing your stats to cast strong magic. I like the implications it has for character switching too; instead of individual builds, you essentially have three different loadouts that you pass around the cast, which feels quite flexible when it’s working.
It’s a shame the whole thing is largely undermined by the ability to draw an infinite amount of magic out of a single enemy, and it’s this more than anything which ruins the system for me. You can’t have a resource economy and then give the player an easy, low-risk way to max out the resource as long as they’re willing to stand around for a bit. This could be defended by saying that drawing a max stack out of an enemy is this system’s equivalent to grinding and shouldn’t be considered intended play, but I don’t find that defence very convincing. In a traditional system, it’s quite clear when you’re grinding, walking back and forth and trying to get into encounters instead of progressing. Whereas here, there’s nothing to signpost or demarcate any stopping point to drawing - because it’s confined to a single encounter, you just keep doing it until you get bored or max out the magic. For me it was often the latter, and the game was very unengagingly easy as a result, but I think I would still say that overall, the combat in this is much more interesting than VII’s.
Weirdly though, it’s more so the minutiae which brings down the gameplay for me. I immediately noticed something off about the game feel and that never really went away: Loading screens are even longer than VII, attack and spell animations feel much slower with less weight, I found myself getting annoyed with the pre-rendered backgrounds a lot more here than VII, often it was confusing where I had to go to progress, where screen transition zones were and what was traversable (shoutout to the random crane you have to walk on at the start of Disc 4) and interacting with the background was a lot more fiddly and unresponsive (shoutout to the random floor tile you have to interact with to find the sniper in Deling City). Environments and scenario design are also quite poor: You go from a repetitive, copy-paste, maze-like sewer level in Deling City into a prison escape with copy-paste floors that all look the same, into searching for Cid by tediously going through every room in Balamb Garden, into an annoying sequence where you search repetitive, copy-paste rooms and corridors in Galbadia Garden to find keycards, into Esthar City - which has a cool design but is excruciating to traverse with its long, empty, and narrow footpaths. You can’t tell me I’m misremembering VII and that it had the same issues either! I played it for the first time last week and this really made me appreciate how hand-crafted all of VII’s environments feel in comparison.
As for the story and characters… I feel this game really suffers from how slow it is to get going, it’s not until well into Disc 2 that the main cast starts to have a real rapport, which isn’t a problem in terms of internal narrative, considering they’ve literally forgotten their history with one-another, but on a meta-experiential level it does result in a first disc where it feels like there’s no chemistry between the characters or much characterisation or backstory for any of them besides Rinoa, which especially stings coming straight from VII, where the cast have instant cohesion and all generally feel like they have an authentic place in the world distinct from their function as party members (with the deliberate exception of Cloud). I think a lot of this is just a result of having 5 out of the 6 party members be SeeDs who have spent their whole lives inside the Garden with little connection to the outside world - there are no moments like Nanaki’s arc in Cosmo Canyon in VII, for example.
The worldbuilding feels very thin too. Very basic questions about the world like what the Galbadian’s whole deal is and why they worship the sorceress or… what the hell even is a sorceress and where do their powers come from and how does Edea transfer her powers to Rinoa “without realising it”?… what is “Guardian Force” and why does it make you forget things and what is the relationship between GFs and the civilizations of the world? What is so special about SeeDs for them to be considered such a powerful force when it seems like anyone can use GFs? Don’t even get me started on “time compression”... only some of these questions get answered and even they arrive only dozens of hours after they get raised. I recognise that, to some degree, this is the point. Squall and the player are supposed to feel like they’re being jostled about by forces bigger than them, but it’s really unsatisfying when you’re just sitting through text laden with jargon that you don’t have a meaningful grasp on. Again, I like the disregard for narrative conventions in principle, but it feels like there’s so many narrative dead-ends here that my good-will for this exercise runs thin pretty quickly. Laguna is probably the worst of these, the game creates this intrigue in the relationship between him and the party and so much time is devoted to these flashback sequences and it amounts to… he’s just the president of Esthar? He’s not important to the plot at all? You’re telling me passionate doo-gooder himbo Laguna didn’t search for his daughter-figure Ellone for like, over a decade because he was “busy”? That’s actually what he says, he was “busy”. Seifer also goes nowhere, we learn basically nothing about his deeper emotional state or his motivations for doing what he does and he undergoes no development and barely appears past Disc 1 (despite being on the cover of the game!). Cid and NORG’s whole plot point is glossed over and then discarded, Zell gets the setup for an arc but no followthrough, you get the point.
On the bright side, the emotional core of Squall and Rinoa’s romance is actually quite good and feels like a successful execution of that disregard for convention. Instead of Cloud and Aerith’s instant storybook chemistry, Squall and Rinoa don’t care for each other at first and their personalities clash heavily. It’s only after considerable time has passed and Rinoa is gone that Squall realises he actually loves her, and I love how this complements the overarching themes about yearning for the past which is already gone. It’s a much more realistic portrayal of romantic feelings; taking someone for granted and thinking you don’t care about them until they’re gone and you realise they were actually incredibly important to you and wanting them back.
Gotta give it props for having the best battle theme and the best boss theme too. Even if I prefer VII’s soundtrack overall, this one is pretty damn good.
I should also mention triple triad since it’s such a large part of the game. It’s decent, I like the flavour of it more than the act of playing it. I think it gets pretty uninteresting once you have a roster of top-tier cards and you can kinda invalidate anyone with weaker cards, and the rules are there to make things more interesting with this in mind. It’s cool how different regions have different rules (bizarrely one of the most grounded details of the worldbuilding) though some of the lategame rules are kinda bullshit. Once you start combining closed with same/plus and random, it feels like you can just lose based on bad luck a lot more, maybe I just suck though!
There’s some really diehard fans of this one so I hope I can come back sometime and appreciate it more. Knowing in advance that IX will play it relatively safe might make me appreciate the weirdness here a lot more in retrospect, but for now, I like it, just not a lot. But onto IX we go!
-----------
Previous FF Reviews
FFV
FFVII
Final Fantasy VIII is a masterpiece in gaming media. Squall's temperament is totally up to the player to decide, showcasing an extremely early example of interactive narrative in an RPG. His relationship with Rinoa is fantastic, while he is cold he opens up when she shows true affection towards him. The combat is impeccable with the strategic Limit Break usage COMBINED with the new Junction mechanic. The music, unmatched. The iconic gunblade has persisted within media for years upon years. There is a reason why Squall is represented in Kingdom Hearts, another masterpiece within vidya literature.
Borges says somewhere that dying in Babylon at the age of thirty-two is as much an aspect of Alexander the Great's character as pride or arrogance. There's a temptation to say that this is a game about that idea, one's inseparability from the events of one's life, life as a single unified moment, and the implications of this idea on connections between individuals. How do we separate Laguna's life from Seifer's, if the former's awkward fencing stance in an acting gig becomes the latter's idea of how to be a man?
If this was what Final Fantasy VIII was about, of course, it wouldn't be a terribly good game. Anyone who's played it knows its merit in the intensity of emotion conveyed in its animation, the efficient pace of its melodrama, and the strength of its soundtrack. Above all, it's a series of visuals: the prerendered backgrounds are the series' best. Each area drips with character and each shot, static or in motion, has a great sense of composition. Cinematography in video games would never really be better.
The strength of the junctioning system is that one can build out a set of tools quickly and without being locked into anything: Squall can transfer his Strength stat to Rinoa as easily as he transfers his sister complex onto her. It allows one to approach combat as a puzzle, like fellow best Final Fantasy game FFXIII, though this is held back by the absence of enemies that can really stand against a planned-out party beyond the superbosses.
The game is at all times conscious that it's opera or ballet, that its strength is in individual scenes, in elegance of form rather than substance. The costuming of the sorceresses nods at this, which is as good a way as any to bring up Adel's design. O, for the planned Laguna content which might have given her screen time.
Most tasteful implementation of a character's fursona into a JRPG, not to mention another character's Geocities page.
If this was what Final Fantasy VIII was about, of course, it wouldn't be a terribly good game. Anyone who's played it knows its merit in the intensity of emotion conveyed in its animation, the efficient pace of its melodrama, and the strength of its soundtrack. Above all, it's a series of visuals: the prerendered backgrounds are the series' best. Each area drips with character and each shot, static or in motion, has a great sense of composition. Cinematography in video games would never really be better.
The strength of the junctioning system is that one can build out a set of tools quickly and without being locked into anything: Squall can transfer his Strength stat to Rinoa as easily as he transfers his sister complex onto her. It allows one to approach combat as a puzzle, like fellow best Final Fantasy game FFXIII, though this is held back by the absence of enemies that can really stand against a planned-out party beyond the superbosses.
The game is at all times conscious that it's opera or ballet, that its strength is in individual scenes, in elegance of form rather than substance. The costuming of the sorceresses nods at this, which is as good a way as any to bring up Adel's design. O, for the planned Laguna content which might have given her screen time.
Most tasteful implementation of a character's fursona into a JRPG, not to mention another character's Geocities page.
Dumb plot but this game is still cool as fuck.
Edit: HOLY SHIT THIS GAME IS GOD AWFUL
Edit: HOLY SHIT THIS GAME IS GOD AWFUL
This review contains spoilers
Me: I can get through this game without crying
Game: epilogue cutscene with Laguna standing at Raine's gravestone while "Eyes On Me" is playing
Me: FUUUUUUUUU-
Game: epilogue cutscene with Laguna standing at Raine's gravestone while "Eyes On Me" is playing
Me: FUUUUUUUUU-
I played Final Fantasy VIII for the first time fifteen years ago. Despite loving the music and the visuals, I never progressed beyond disc 1 because I found the story and characters (Squall aside) to be bland. And then there was the junction system, which...well, everybody has already talked about that a million times. It's really neat in concept, but tedious in practice. (I would love to see it attempted again with some things adjusted.)
Anyway!
2020 happened, and I figured it was finally time to knuckle down and finish the game that splits opinions like Squall splits skulls.
And…
I still think the first disc and a half of FFVIII is a total tranquiliser of a game. I'm sorry. I nearly quit like ten million times. The jailbreak sequence at the start of disc 2 was especially dull. That said, something changed when I reached Fisherman's Horizon. The writing there, when you talk to some of the NPC's... It's hot shit, am I right? Like, suddenly it's firing on all cylinders. The dialogue is charged. The skits are funny. This energy bleeds out into the subsequent scenes, too. It's the strangest thing. Your characters start meshing more, and the jokes start zipping.
One of my favourite moments was right after FH, when you put together a band with your characters and set their instruments and perform a song with them for two of your party members to dance to. It's whimsical. It's cute. It's a little stupid. Like, that's the kind of thing I play Final Fantasy for. Everything is going to hell, but then your oddball characters take five and do something that totally eases the tension. It's like smiling at someone you love, moments before the moon crashes into the Earth. It's beautiful. Another example of a scene like this is the date in FF7, when you can get Cloud to kiss the wrong person in the play, and then they twirl off stage.
From FH onward, I really did enjoy Final Fantasy VIII.
Now, a sudden improvement in the writing didn't fix all the problems. The characters didn't actually get any richer, they were just used better. The gameplay didn't improve, but it felt like less of a problem because, well, at least the dialogue was hitting cleaner. And the plot... well, I quite liked the plot from then on! I know most people complain about how wacky it gets, but I think it became a lot more entertaining when it stopped making 100% sense.
(By the way, my favourite thing about the game, soundtrack aside, is the way Squall thinks to himself the whole way through the story, because he's afraid to voice his feelings. Sometimes he answers other people's questions in his head, but forgets to answer out loud, and they're like, yo, you there? and I just find that really great.)
Well, I've talked long enough about this one. Am I going to play it again? Probably not... Would I recommend it? ... ... ... Tentative yes! I'm as surprised as anyone.
Anyway!
2020 happened, and I figured it was finally time to knuckle down and finish the game that splits opinions like Squall splits skulls.
And…
I still think the first disc and a half of FFVIII is a total tranquiliser of a game. I'm sorry. I nearly quit like ten million times. The jailbreak sequence at the start of disc 2 was especially dull. That said, something changed when I reached Fisherman's Horizon. The writing there, when you talk to some of the NPC's... It's hot shit, am I right? Like, suddenly it's firing on all cylinders. The dialogue is charged. The skits are funny. This energy bleeds out into the subsequent scenes, too. It's the strangest thing. Your characters start meshing more, and the jokes start zipping.
One of my favourite moments was right after FH, when you put together a band with your characters and set their instruments and perform a song with them for two of your party members to dance to. It's whimsical. It's cute. It's a little stupid. Like, that's the kind of thing I play Final Fantasy for. Everything is going to hell, but then your oddball characters take five and do something that totally eases the tension. It's like smiling at someone you love, moments before the moon crashes into the Earth. It's beautiful. Another example of a scene like this is the date in FF7, when you can get Cloud to kiss the wrong person in the play, and then they twirl off stage.
From FH onward, I really did enjoy Final Fantasy VIII.
Now, a sudden improvement in the writing didn't fix all the problems. The characters didn't actually get any richer, they were just used better. The gameplay didn't improve, but it felt like less of a problem because, well, at least the dialogue was hitting cleaner. And the plot... well, I quite liked the plot from then on! I know most people complain about how wacky it gets, but I think it became a lot more entertaining when it stopped making 100% sense.
(By the way, my favourite thing about the game, soundtrack aside, is the way Squall thinks to himself the whole way through the story, because he's afraid to voice his feelings. Sometimes he answers other people's questions in his head, but forgets to answer out loud, and they're like, yo, you there? and I just find that really great.)
Well, I've talked long enough about this one. Am I going to play it again? Probably not... Would I recommend it? ... ... ... Tentative yes! I'm as surprised as anyone.