Is and will always be my favorite game of all time. The gameplay, the story, the graphics, the propaganda for the military industrial complex; it’s all just perfect. The only thing that could be more fun than this game is making a dumb gimmick account as something to do when I’m bored during work and getting a surprisingly high amount of clout amongst a community I mostly chose not to engage with. Thanks for 10,000 likes.
Also, Fidel Castro is like the rawest video game character of all time and I wish he was real so fucking much.

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.

Edit: I might update this with a full properly written review later to include other glaring problems but I feel so emotionally frustrated with this game I just want to give a "brief" summary to hopefully help others that care about these things dodge a bullet.

I don't even know where to begin with this other than that I was INCREDIBLY hopeful for this game. Final Fantasy changing is nothing new and the idea of a character action Final Fantasy game with the politics of FFXII had me excited, especially after the demo, which I hugely regret.

Eikon fights are flashy and cool for the first 10 minutes but they drag on significantly too long. Especially considering most of them are so visually over the top it becomes increasingly hard to discern what's happening on the screen. You could cut out an entire phase of each eikon fight and they'd still be incredibly fun and amazing to look at and you'd have had additional development time for other lackluster fights (or completely missing plothole fights).

Another thing is the overuse of similarities to FFXIV is such a detriment to this game. Fight's often don't feel unique enough because they're sometimes just massive callbacks to FFXIV. The mmo fight endings taking excitement away from killing an enemy, the overabundance of side quests and awful pacing after major plot events leading to an extreme disconnect in the importance of the plot. And the excessive amount of information delegated to text logs in a way that subtracts from story in a bizarre way. Which also ties into...

The abysmal treatment of women. I can't stress enough how badly this game treats its female characters. Total story important female characters are Three of them. Two die because you can't be redeemed unless you're a male character and the other barely gets to interact with her own plot or the story of the game outside of being an emotional support unit for Clive while also constantly not having much to say while all the men talk. She doesn't even get to come to the end of the game instead being replaced by a male character whose importance wasn't even relevant until 3/4ths through the story. Shiva has so much wasted potential.

I wish I could go into this more but I don't have the energy after venting about it in other places. Other people have levied similair criticisms for all these aspects Just know that if you're somebody easily put off by the treatment of female characters, unecessary reuse of exhausting tropes, horrible pacing, shallow 10 - 15 minute combat sections where you fight the same enemy types for 70 hours or you hated the Game of Thrones TV show (the tv show specifically because the GoT influence was clearly not the books) you'll dodge a bullet avoiding this one. Don't be like me, don't waste $100aud because you're a Final Fantasy fan and a character action fan. It's 70 hours of two games that could have been incredibly good on their own but made absolutely mediocre together with one of the most needlessly depressing stories a Final Fantasy game's told with one of the worst slavery plots known to man.