"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.