In 2020, the Walt Disney Company released “Into the Unknown: Making Frozen 2.” A six part documentary series detailing the trials and tribulations of making Frozen 2. I never saw the actual movie but I think a lot about the documentary. The series tries to clean up the appearances of production, making the process appear seamless and careful. But they always manage to let slip various telling details about the film’s creation. They reveal how cool animations and songs were built before they built the plot, even up to the final months before release. There’s this… naivety in their tone. They gleefully discuss with each other if THIS will be the new Let It Go, completely blind to just how creativity hollow they come across. No one did a bad job, they were all putting in incredible effort. But they were laser-focused on creating the next Big Cash Cow Beloved Success Like Frozen. Not a single person is ever thinking about how to make a new story.

I don’t think the team behind Final Fantasy 8 is as bad as that, really. There’s clearly an intent here to move forward and evolve the franchise. They’ve discovered a new art style and dynamic for its characters. They’re continuing to build complicated political dynamics for the backstory of the world. They’ve polished up their minigames and created a genuinely genius card game with Triple Triad. There’s a genuine passion for these characters and their lives.

At the same time, it’s hard to escape the shadow of FF7. Squall is very much a new Cloud, albeit with a bit more self-awareness than Cloud had. Rinoa is very much a new Aerith, albeit with an arc that shifts into much stranger directions. The supporting cast aren’t copies of other characters, but there’s also not a lot of details into their personal lives when they aren’t on screen. They don’t get complete arcs like FF7 characters do. The memory shenanigans introduced in Disc 2 are nowhere near as developed or thematically important as FF7, but they just sort of decide to take a swing at doing that plot. It vanishes just as quickly as it’s introduced. The villain is introduced with the same overwhelming power and presence of Sephiroth but ends up nowhere near as developed. We never really get to sit down with the Sorceress and be like “hey. What’s going on. Why are you doing this?” We just sort have to guess at what happened to her from context clues. All these half-baked repetitions of old ideas just sort of vaguely stumble around the narrative, taking away from the main ideas.

It’s when the game is embracing that original imagery to create new ideas that it truly seems to soar. While FF8 repeats the FF7 journey into space, they commit so hard to the insanity of “monsters come from the moon” that it wraps around to incredible again. The climatic drama of Squall and Rinoa’s reunion with each other in Disc 3, even as chaos spins down into the Earth and their subsequent heart to heart, is genuinely one of the most gorgeous images I’ve ever seen in gaming. It truly won me over on a couple I felt somewhat neutral on for most of the game. The entire final dungeon and the extremely surreal events around it is a genuine delight and it showcases the real ambition the development team possessed. The entire time travel concepts it throws at you are so completely wild and weird that I wish the game committed more to that weirdness. The story is such a slow burn and so focused on Squall that it takes a while for those bold ideas to come to fruition.

FF8 is really an internal game above all else. For as much as I was initially annoyed by Squall kinda being Cloud 2, the truth is that you get to understand Squall’s internal process earlier than Cloud. Cloud’s a quiet guy. Squall is too, which is why his inner monologues are so essential to his character. You can watch him shift and change and justify himself. It’s genuinely engaging! The problem for me is that Squall’s monologue is so present, we never quite get a look at the internal workings of anyone else except Rinoa and Laguna.

Speaking of which, Laguna is just delightful. I’m sure it’s not a hot take that many people prefer him to Squall. But what makes Laguna work is the fact that his life is constantly falling apart, over and over again, yet he still tries to maintain his good cheer and optimism. You just get moments of a guy’s life. It’s nice.

I talked about the problems with the villain, but Seifer is genuinely a fascinating weirdo. He's a mess of a person who's fixated on the what he thinks he deserves and the delusion he feeds to justify that mentality. He sort of escapes unharmed by the story's end, but at that point its better for everyone that he just goes to retire and become a sad fisherman.

The gameplay is… weird. The Junction system takes a lot of getting used to and I think there has to be a way to pull it off without making me spend so much time in menus. I get the sense that the goal was for players to use magic and MP more. But in action, tying that to your stats means I’m still not using magic. I don’t want my stats to go lower. And then the leveling up system means that the enemies frequently overpowered my lower leveled allies no matter where I was. I generally played FF7 and FF9 remasters on their own terms. But with 8, I eventually had to give in and keep the remaster's invincibility mode on full time just to survive the full game.

I dunno! The whole game is messy and complicated, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. Disc 2 and early Disc 3 felt like an arduous slog that I genuinely considered dropping, only to drastically improve post-Esthar and Disc 4. I wanted more and less from this game. I'll probably deciphering my feelings on it for a while. At the very least, I can say they took some swings and some of them landed.