Final Fantasy 8 is the worst mainline Final Fantasy in this marathon yet by a noticeable margin and it mostly all comes down to a rotting core of ideas regarding its character progression at the center.

There, I didn't bury the lede. It's sadly not a super controversial take and I had really hoped I would be able to be on the other end of it- to be able to see why its offbeat take on RPG mechanics is actually a cool twist or at worst an inoffensive if not truly revolutionary system ala my experience with FF2's progression. But it wasn't to be. So let's just get straight into it.

There is a lot going on for the uninitiated here- for all its actual flaws, FF8 cannot be accused of resting idly on new implementations of former game models or just making tweaks here and there. No, it upends the character progression and build process pretty much entirely. Characters still gain levels but the game scales all (or nearly all? a late optional boss or two may be exempt from this) enemies to character level. Characters also gain stats on leveling up but there is another system that takes the place of both primary skill learning path and equipment all in one that also informs those stats- junctioning- and the degree to which it informs those stats is so severe than innate stat growths and values may as well not matter outside the very start of the game when you have no magic. The junction system is built upon FF8's version of summons- guardian forces- so as a starting point, you can kind of model it similar to FF6's magicite in your head. Each summon has a set of skills, both passive traits and active commands that can be issued, that characters "junctioned" to that GF can learn over time. These skills are not learned through xp but through ap- ability points- which are also received from battles but not in a 1:1 scaling manner. (There are monsters that grant loads of ap but little to no xp and vice versa) Among those skills are junction skills themselves- expressed as Mag-J, HP-J, Str-J, etc. Each of those allows you to set a "magic" in a characters inventory to the associated stat. Depending on the magic chosen, the stat will gain somewhere between a small and a massive amount of value for that character. (The associations are intended to be intuitive, so picking something like a healing spell ala curaga, for example, for HP will result in higher gain for it than an offensive spell)

Which brings me to magic itself. MP is out again for the first time in a while. Instead, spell usage is governed by actual inventory of those spells. Series staples like fira, esuna, and thunder are now obtained in consumable fashion and can be stacked up to 100 of a given spell in a given character's inventory. The amount of a spell you have also drastically influences how high a stat value it confers to any associated junctioned stats. (and yes to be clear, they confer stats directly- not stat growth values! if you have a very powerful spell early game you can get ALL of its stat contribution as soon as you can obtain 100 of it) To obtain these... disposable? magics you must "draw" them. (With a couple notable exceptions I'll mention later) This can either be done in limited fashion from draw points in the world itself, usually one time usage or one time per location visit usage, or from monsters. Drawing is an active command and both uses a characters turn and a spot on their commands list. (This actually matters in this FF game specifically for reasons I'll get to) Each spot and monster has its specific associated magics, so theres no randomness to what you will see in that regard. Also, crucially, there is no limit on the amount of magic that can be drawn from a single enemy except what you can hold in your inventory; if a boss has a new powerful spell you haven't seen yet, you can sit there and load up your entire party on 100 copies of it for each of them.

That was a lot of mechanics breakdown. Usually I try to avoid this kind of regurgitation in reviews so I do apologize for that, but it's such a different set of systems and I feel its so crucial to understand how they work in order to see why they fall apart- either individually or as is so often the case with this game, through their interactions/incentives produced with each other- that I really did want to lay it out in as non judgmental a manner as possible initially for those unfamiliar.

So let's start breaking down the issues and interactions here, beginning with something that actually looked very appealing to me at the start- level scaling. I've been obeying a strict no grind rule for my entire FF series playthrough so when I saw that this was a feature, I thought, great, game will do the work here for me. Unfortunately, the way it plays out in practice is significantly worse. For one, you are encouraged to draw all of any new magic from a monster the first time you see it rather than across multiple battles which might be more stomachable because.... 1) there is no limit to how much magic can be drawn per fight, 2) fighting more enemies means getting more xp which means getting weaker relative to enemies since your strength is derived mostly from magic junctions and not stat growths, 3) getting a maxed stack of magic immediately means stronger junctions and a more immediate power spike, and 4) the speed at which you draw doesn't meaningfully go up between encounters with the same mob for the same magic- if you factor in having to load in encounters it actually takes LONGER to draw the magic across fights than it would to just do it in one. So in any given first encounter with a spell, you pick off any monsters besides the one you want magic from, ideally afflict with some status affect to render it mostly harmless, then just turn on 3x speed to sit through your entire party spending 10+ turns each drawing all of the magic. And if the player does end up doing this because it is so heavily encouraged by the confluence of systems here, the next domino to fall for them will be all the random battles with enemies that possess magic you already have. You guessed it; with no new magic to draw and xp actively harmful, the player should just escape each time to reduce the amount of xp they take in. This dynamic results in a good chunk of your battles being incredibly drawn out (get it?!??!) magic harvesting affairs and the rest just being the sight of the party turning tail immediately. Not a great dynamic. Even with the normal flow of encounters ruined, the game doesn't even get to claim not encouraging grinding as a positive tradeoff! You can argue the repetitive drawing in a single battle is spiritually grinding as well but let's say I'm willing to be forgiving since the actions performed are no different than distributing them across a wealth of battles in efficacy and grinding usually entails repeating content below your level over and over inefficiently to power up above content before reaching it. Even then, the aforementioned ap centric monsters exist to allow players to specifically camp a spot and power up their capabilities without risking much level growth. It's just a mess and all totaled, not at all what I'd hoped for when I heard "level scaling".

Of course, as we get into the results of all that functioning, one might question why even bother trying to grind ap for a power spike when the game will naturally guide you to being broken incredibly early itself. The direct tying of magic strength and inventory size to immediate stat value means that as soon you uncover a handful of early game accessible spells, your characters HP and attack values will skyrocket to what would be lategame levels in prior FFs. One doesn't even need to tread too far off the beaten path for this- the curious player will notice unlockable abilities to refine magic from items early and quickly discover that early game accessible items can yield absolutely busted magic well before its more logical place in the game. Heaven forbid they also notice the ability that lets you refine from cards for the game's minigame triple triad as items produced from cards can grant even stronger magic when refined within the first disc even.

To make all of this even more worse, the very nature of being overpowered in FF8 is monotonous and incredibly dull compared to what one might call overpowered strats in some prior FFs. The series certainly has a history of letting you thwart the occasional tough boss with a well placed status effect or flavor appropriate phoenix down usage, but those were usually distributed amongst more "traditional" challenges and at least required attacking from amusing, different angles specific to the enemy at hand. In FF8, the strongest strat to do for the vast majority of the game is just straight up attacking, (and frequently one shotting foes with it) nothing else required. This comes from a number of factors again blending together in a disgusting mix: the previously discussed abnormally high STR stat you can reach early through the junction system, the fact that the number of commands a character can have accessible in a fight is limited for the first time in series history and two slots are going to always be attack and draw almost by requirement so magic will frequently not even be accessible in your party lineup, magic itself is both consumed AND the source of your stat strength so using it over attacks means needing to replenish/slowly losing stats, magic itself is undertuned- perhaps as a misguided way to alleviate the players worries about using up their own stats by making it unappealing to begin with?- save some non numbers dependent utility spells in the lategame, and, finally, in the spots where you might consider exploiting an elemental weakness you can always just junction that element attack to your party members instead to convert their attacks to the element of weakness rather than having to actively expend any resources! Such an approach even leaves you more resilient to the standard status effects- squall has inherent maximum accuracy from the get go and cant miss when blinded, berserk buffs your damage and takes care of your atb on time inputs for you, and silence disables everything that isn't basic attack, so the standard FF ailments end up somehow encouraging you to take what is already overwhelmingly the best option. There is, again, an overwhelming incentive to do the most boring thing possible (ok, short of watching characters draw magic for 20 turns might be worse or flee every fight but dont worry you'll still get to do those!) produced by what seems to be the uninvestigated interaction of all these systems? It's truly baffling.

As an aside, I suppose curative magics still retain some functionality though, in that you can obviously heal up party members between fights with them from the menu. But then.... if you're willing to use up your disposable curative magics like this, what is the difference between them and potions and such? Why are items even in this game? The nature of its magic system basically renders them redundant!

If regular attacks boosted by the incredibly broken junction system aren't powerful enough for you, you can use the game's also almost inherently exploitative limit break system instead I suppose. Dropping 7's logical bar building system for employing them, 8 instead ties their usage to low health and a number of "crisis level" factors. It seems narratively/emotionally correct initially but once the player realizes there's zero cooldown on repeating them or accessing them from the point a character drops to low health, the flavor gets fuzzy. Leave your child soldiers in critical condition all the time so they can chain off what are framed as last ditch efforts of great strength just as easily as they can repeat regular attacks. Instead of wanting to heal up low characters, you instead want to beat them down to as little health as possible and leave them there. Granted, I honestly never really used this much as the regular attack strategy was broken enough as is, but just in glancing at ways to play the game without the junction system at all since out of curiosity, I see that people have taken yet another one of 8's poorly designed changes to its logical place and found a 57th way to snap the game in half.

If we're to really look for it to give FF8 the benefit of the doubt, the most reasonable plan of attack that doesn't involve breaking the game apart by simply.... doing what its systems teach you to do.... are the summons themselves, but even they are also not without flaws. Indeed, for the player who doesn't take the time to try and understand the ins and outs of the junction system, mashing the summon button is an understandable impulse. Unfortunately, the game both retains the lengthy cinematic summon animations of ff7 but crucially drops its per battle limitations, so instead of seeing a fun treat every once in a while, or animations tailored to the new usage behavior for GFs, the player will instead have to watch lengthy animations repeated over and over per battle. Once they arrive at lategame, a couple of specific boss/area designs will render their approach invalid almost entirely- something I'm normally sympathetic to in design (asking players to learn the game to beat the game) but here I've come to hate the junction system so much my sympathies are sadly reversed, and I instead pity the player who arrives at these moments having only employed GFs throughout.

I can't even say the junction system is a cool idea in search of a better implementation- there's more to discard here than there is to salvage. My initial complete impression of it, which I hoped would prove wrong in time, was that it was basically as though the designers wrote out the traditional FF character progression and combat design in a paragraph, then took out all the nouns out to render the paragraph one big mad lib, and then finally replaced all those empty spots with the same nouns distributed randomly. And that was probably the most positive take I ever had with it throughout the playthrough. There's simply no reason to go back to it. Unlike FF2's system- a similarly lambasted different progression system which can be played in a straightforward way akin to selecting a starting class and enjoyed despite its potential for breaking the game if you go off the natural path of what the game tells you to do- there's no way to actually engage with any part of its system and enjoy it.

But moving past that mountain of frustration and hate, there are actually parts of this game that I like believe it or not. Part of me hates that I'm going to cram them into much smaller notes given that they are the parts that deserve to be appreciated, but I cannot overstate just how much the systems detailed above completely wrecked what good will I did have towards the rest of the game, so the ratio in writing is warranted.

The music here is the series high point thus far. I've traditionally avoided commenting on this in prior reviews as I lack any knowledge on how to dissect music theory but for what it's worth, the sheer quantity of tracks that hit for me here outpaced the rest of the games quickly. Even more impressive, it does so through a clear change in approach- this one actually good- towards developing a coherent set of themes and moods which are built upon throughout. While I've enjoyed a lot of the singular character themes from prior FFs, dropping the obligatory new one for each character and instead doubling down on cross character/narrative themes or themes for the principle two cast members and their variations resonates strongly throughout the playthrough. And lest one think that this change up plus the games more brooding by turns romantic mood might result in a critical dearth of "bops", Man with a Machine Gun and Force Your Way would like to have stern words with you. Maybe most impressively, while this is the most coherent soundtrack to date, it also manages to get further "out there" with its sound at times than any other FF without breaking that coherency. Blue Fields is easily the most straight up bizarre overworld theme thus far, for example, but feels very home in the absolutely bizarre maelstrom of feelings the games child soldiers/adolescence/identity/timey wimey nonsense angles all create. (The time travel/compression angle in particular of those allows a lot of profitable stretching here as the suitably named... "Compression of Time" demonstrates)

This more coherent and high quality aural backdrop also helps to elevate the game's narrative, something I'm more torn on than its music but in general can appreciate for what it's attempting even when it fails at least- unlike its combat/progression. FF8 is the story of a group of child soldiers attempting to thwart a sorceress in the future's schemes of "compressing time". It is also, purportedly, a romance. (Although having finished the game and now having played through around disc 3 of FF9, I'd actually say 9 is more of a romance than 8 for whatever that's worth...) This is a very strange combination of things but it's uplifted by said soundtrack and also series best to date by a mile visuals, both of which are capable of accomodating the variety of seemingly clashing tones measure for measure. In order to tackle its angsty protagonists lack of external expressiveness, the game presents internal thoughts to the player for.... what I think is the first time? At least in this substantial a fashion. (Cloud may have had some moments like this prior but I don't recall the whole of FF7 being colored by them) It's a clunky tool, to be sure, but it does help expand the series' character development capabilities. Also an impressive mostly new tool for the series expressiveness', cross cutting is employed heavily here. Both across time in larger movements as the cast tracks the exploits of another band of heroes from a time past and in tighter, tense action sequences and dramatic events. While I would't necessarily call this impressive from a modern standpoint or in comparison to what other media had been able to accomplish, it's definitely noticeable coming off of the first 7 and another welcome step forward.

The material being presented, once past the improved presentation itself, is a bit more of a mixed bag. A proto-kingdom hearts opening montage rumination on thoughts of self and vague visions of a future/past unfulfilled set the tone appropriately enough for what is eventually to come, but the game spends long periods of time between these more surreal visions and I'm not sure what it ultimately has to offer for them is all that compelling even if I like the idea of departing from the more straightforward narratives of the past for more internal focused stories less concerned with the literal events happening on screen.

At the risk of picking nits, a number of world building quandaries perplex/undermine the literal narrative on screen throughout. Why does this world nearly exclusively use child soldiers when adults exist with presumably all the advantages one would expect, let alone the moral ramifications? What nation would ever consider military academies that conduct live military operations within their borders "neutral" just because they're a school first and not an nationally aligned army? Why does the single most useless Cid in the history of the franchise see fit to delegate the running of said private military company to a kid when there are other presumably more veteran graduates available even if he and all the other adults feel like bailing out? Even if one accepts that these are necessary sacrifices to the gods of marketing games to kids/teenagers, one doesn't get the sense they ever even attempted to build a convincing world around those starting points.

Actual big spoilers now, those were only just getting started- a lategame twist paints your entire party as a group of childhood friends that somehow all nearly forgot this AND all somehow got back together again how many years from how many different places on the planet to be the single most important group of people doing anything currently. It would be the most insultingly contrived bit of story in the entire franchise were it not for the fact that the ramifications of this are pretty much discarded immediately, which is both a relief from a story construction perspective and also another source of bewilderment as to why they'd even make this decision in the first place. Perhaps most confusing of all, though, is the very conclusion itself in which the group decides that, in order to stop the sorceress from fulfilling her goal of time compression (a concept that hasn't been explained in neither implication for what it actually means nor why its appealing at all to the sorceress...) because it will apparently render everyone dead but the sorceress and no one wants that obviously, they need to.... let the sorceress go through with time compression????? so they can then kill her while being somehow not dead????? But then the time compression has also already happened so what does it matter if you kill her or not now?????

It's a good thing the story is mostly carried by its tone, ability to convey emotional dislocation symbolically, and actual storytelling techniques and not the lore itself because had I actually cared about it at that point, I have to imagine that would have sunk it. Instead, I just laughed as I willingly followed the ride through to its conclusion. It may seem like I'm really down on it, but all in all, I did enjoy that ride on the whole. (the Laguna cast game would have been so much better, though- more appealing cast, none of this child soldier/weird neutral pmc nonsense, no time compression, better romance for loves both found and lost)

But it is worth pointing out that even throughout experiencing this story, traveling the still beautiful lands and cities of FF8's world, and listening to its gorgeous soundtrack, you're never that long from having to play through its dull combat or deal with its terrible character progression. For every novel cross cut the story does, that's another moment you need to manage moving all your magic and GFs around. Because there is a one to many relationship between party members and GFs and GFs only level when equipped, you should load up three characters in particular and just trade their full inventory each time. (Something this FF- credit where its due- finally added the functionality for) But then you find out that was just a story sequence and no combat was needed and you go back to another party so back to the menus again. Or worse you get sucked into an unexpected flashback sequence in which the game has mapped characters without inventory onto the active characters and now you have nothing on two party members. (No, the game does not explicitly tell you for the first few sequences which modern day character's moveset will be the flashback characters for some reason.) Oh, and if you've seen that running criticism for some prior FFs in my reviews of party members beginning to feel interchangeable/more of a reflection of equipment than anything unique? Yeah, obviously that has reached its zenith here. I just had so many other design problems to break down I forgot to even bring it up!

See what's happening? I was having a nice conversation about the actual fun parts of the game but then the ramifications of its terrible systems came careening through because even the narrative itself and how its structured gets impacted by them! Heck, for further example, this game has what is probably the single coolest final dungeon in the series but even it gets crushed by the systems. (It's a breath of the wild-esque approach where you can immediately fight the final boss or go around a atmospheric castle with great music hunting specific bosses to "unlock" your character commands which have all been disabled except for attack..... see the problem? All you need in this game is attack! Why couldn't it have been in any other FF? ) I say all this to demonstrate/preempt the inevitable question aimed at my conclusion- how could I dislike this game so much if there are multiple elements I not only enjoyed but found series best worthy? Well, this is the answer. There's just no escaping FF8's poor design for any lengthy amount of time.

So, in summary, I refer back to my opening line. Let time be compressed and the beginning be the end.