I’m not really sure what the general consensus on Final Fantasy VIII is, but among my circles… it’s divisive. In one circle, it’s generally loathed: they don’t like the cast, they definitely don’t like the battle system, and if you try to talk about how you actually like those things you’re going to be starting an argument. My other circle… are a bit more lowkey about it, but they vibe with it — because of the setting, the cast, and because of how weird and interpretive the plot can be. It’s… an interesting dichotomy — hearing people talk shit in one Discord server only for me to then look over and see my other friends talk positively about it, with me, in the middle, not really knowing which side I leant closer to. I’d played the game before, but not enough before my PS3 crapped out and stopped me from playing it, the only impression I really had being that… it was a game I definitely wanted backseating for. Which was why I didn’t initially pick it back up once I got other options to play it, but then, this year, I needed to beat an RPG released before 2000, and I had a slot open up, so I figured ‘hey, let’s finally play it and see on what side of the axis I fall.’ So I did, and I went through all ~45 hours, and ultimately…
…It’s okay.
Which, for an RPG such as this, is a bit of an indictment. If I’m playing something that veers that long, then… I really want to be doing more than just going through the motions. It’s a bit as to why I don’t play RPGs as often as some of my friends do: the time investment is way too high for something to be merely ‘fine,’ or even 'good.' If something really draws me in and makes me invested, then it really makes the runtime fly by (even if I’m usually like “okay, I’m ready to wrap this up” long before I reach the end). If the game isn’t all that great, then I can still at least look at what’s in motion and see where exactly things are going wrong, even if I could maybe do the same thing with a game that’s much shorter. If the game is merely cromulent, then it truly just becomes a drag. What might be 35 hours feels more like 90. I could drop the game for months or even years and still not regain the spark that initially pulled me in. I truly only keep on out of a feeling of obligation — whatever reason I chose to play the game in the first place, my inbuilt headworms that will not let any game go unfinished if I can help it. Final Fantasy VIII… fares better than most other RPGs of that ilk, being mostly shorter (and structured in a way where you can really just gun it to the end after a certain point), but… to be honest, if I wasn’t playing this the way I was playing it, the game as background noise as I hangout with online friends… I probably would have lost interest in beating this. At least within a reasonable timeframe. It’s not the game that really would’ve held me onto it otherwise.
The story followsLeon Squall Leonheart, a recently graduated child soldier trained at Balamb Garden: a boarding school and mercenary force deployed all over the world. While Squall is one of the best in his field — one of two people in the whole world capable of using a gunblade — he’s far less capable in his personal life, his blunt and aloof demeanour pushing his cohort away from him. However, on his first mission — to help a resistance effort liberate a city from foreign control — he finds himself in too deep on multiple fronts: with a simple mission of assassinating the president slowly exposing a web of political ramifications that soon put the world itself at stake, with Squall’s walls slowly breaking down as his mission places him in the company of Shiva Rinoa Heartly, a girl who seems absolutely hellbent on breaking him out of his shell.
I’ll start off by getting the most pervasive thing out of the way: the junction system sucks. The way it works is that… effectively, rather than armour or weapons, you instead equip spells onto yourself to directly boost your stats, but the whole process is explained so poorly (I do love the tutorial being given to me two or three words at a time) and implemented in such an overcomplicated way that it was such a drag every time I had to interface with it. This is mostly because the initial requirement is to equip your summons (or ‘GFs’, as they’re called in-game) in order to junction your stats — and while I assume the intention was for each party member to be equipped with their own GFs, GFs also require EXP to learn new passive skills and increase their stats, which means that if you don’t want to have any of your GFs fall behind… all of them have to be in the party at once. This means that every time you switch party members, you have to manually rejunction everybody, navigating through menus or menus to individually pick which magic best fits each stat (there’s a thing that’ll automatically pick magic for you, and a system that lets you switch magic inventories with other party members, but they both suck) and it’s so miserable to have to interact with. It’s especially bad whenever the party splits into several groups: you’ll junction one group, presuming you’ll do something with them… then before you even get to go into a fight you’re forced to play as the other group and then you have to manually rejunction them… until the point where you actually switch back and rejunction them, and then you switch back again and have to rejunction them, etc etc etc…
And the draw system works, I feel, to make combat… way too simplistic and not particularly engaging. As opposed to previous Final Fantasy games, where spells are limited by an overall MP pool, magic here instead must be drawn from enemies as an action in combat, with each use of draw giving you a couple of uses of whatever spells they have assigned to them. This, theoretically, eliminates the woes of having to deal with MP… but the limited amount of casts allowed for a specific spell, and the somewhat tedious process the player is initially stuck with to get more spells afterwards often make magic feel too costly to use — especially since this magic is much better junctioned to your stats than cast in battle. Summons, comparatively, do more damage and are almost entirely free to use… but then proceed to make you watch a 30+ second animation every time you summon them, with no real interaction rather than a rather finicky button-mashing minigame you can unlock to boost its power. Regular attacks (and fishing for Limit Breaks) instead become your primary way of interacting with enemies as you reach the later stages, partially because it’s your highest damage option, partially because… the lack of variety in enemy types or gimmicks (nothing in this game resists physical damage) often means that there’s no reason to do anything other than keep attacking, making for strategically bare and rather boring fights. This lack of variety, I feel, also ranges to your party: the only things that separate each of them mechanically are what magic they have in their inventory and what limit break they happen to have, meaning that there's never a need to build a specific party for a specific threat, nor is there any real way you can build a specific strategy using your party's unique capabilities, making combat as a whole feel... rather simple, once you navigate through all the fluff surrounding functioning and drawing. There are exceptions, of course — bosses which possess a diverse and imposing moveset (or a gimmick overarching the battle) where often the key to defeating them is located through the spells you can draw from them, but as a whole… I was really not into this battle system, especially given how slow all the animations feel and how frequent (like, every two steps in some parts of the overworld) they were.
The story… is something I have mixed feelings about. It starts off well: the initial section where you’re at school is a fairly decent introduction to the characters and mechanics, I really like the way the subsequent mission slowly escalates off the rails — as it goes from something routine for a freshly graduated soldier to a situation where everybody is… way in over their heads, and I like how the characters grapple with that. I’m also a fan of the flashback sequences: they help to set up how… abstract the plot can get, and on their own they’re fun little isolated episodes that take decent advantage of the game’s strength in scenario and character writing. However, I feel like once the plot starts approaching its final act (rooooughly right at the start of Disc 3) it kind of starts falling apart. Most of the plot threads the story had actively been following right up to the end of Disc 2 feel like they get dropped, and in its place the game just dumps a ton of exposition about people and things that had never appeared or had been brought up beforehand without any real explanation of who they are or what they even mean. What happens subsequently feels… slapdash — while there’s a decent emotional throughline that takes you from place to place I really felt like things were just happening without any setup or justification. This culminates in a final confrontation with the main antagonist I found… rather weak — for how much the game throws everything out of the way to try and establish who she is and what her goals are, the one actual interaction we get with her is… truly just “I am Chaos! I will cause Time Compression (what does that even mean)! Mwahahahaha, prepare to die!” I can understand things becoming more abstract and reliant on the personal interpretation of the player — I particularly liked the ending FMV for how out there it got — but from my perspective a lot of what constituted the lategame… wasn’t that: it felt more like the plot lost a lot of its internal coherence and started rushing towards a conclusion… rather alien to what it was initially set out as.
The cast, I feel, was the consistent strong suit of the game. I wouldn’t necessarily place them among my favourite RPG ensembles, or anything, but they’re consistently solid and fun and the best parts of the game’s writing. Even when the plot takes a turn for the worse — and, at the same time, the rest of the cast takes a backseat for Squall and Rinoa — the game still makes sure to give them little moments and never lets them fall into irrelevance.Leon Squall was somebody I expected to not be into, but I like the way his internal thought process is represented (all the times he’s insecure about something, or whenever he’s second-guessing himself) and I like the way he slowly thaws and opens up over the course of the game. Shiva Rinoa is a really cool counterpoint to him; I’ll admit that sweet and sour romances are loosely a bit my thing, and I kind of like the way the love triangle compares to FF7 — with you being one of the two on the outside as opposed to being the one at the centre — but I love how continuous she is about challenging Squall and trying to break down his walls. Selphie is my favourite of this party: she’s just so fun and it’s always a blast to see how straight-up psychotic she is under her energetic and friendly exterior. Quistis… is the one weak link — I feel like she loses her lane once the Squall/Rinoa will-they-won’t-they begins — but I’m fond of how much she just fucks with Squall during Disc 1. Irvine’s someone who’s ostensibly a side character, but I like the dramatic beats he gets: he carries a non-zero amount of the plot on his shoulders and I reckon he handles it in a way that does him fairly well and helps to set up and foreshadow that particular plot thread. Zell… got a lot less than I was thinking he would going in, but he’s cool: he’s not a particularly revolutionary take on the ‘hothead doofus’ archetype but he pretty consistently delivers on that front. As a whole… I do like the more down to Earth approach they took with your main party: it strikes a good balance of matching the military tone of the (earlier) story while still making them feel distinct and fun as characters. As far as Final Fantasy games go… I don’t think I’d rank them that high as a unit compared to the casts surrounding them, but I do think this is one of those games where the cast is what delivers: the consistently best moments were all bits the cast had with each other, and as I progressed through the plot I did so because I wanted to see what this group would say next.
Some other notes: Triple Triad is fun. I wish the AI for it was a little better (they always seemed to be playing to not lose, rather than playing to win), but it’s a fun little strategic dopamine booster and never got old even when I was grinding for specific cards. I’m a fan of the crafting system: it provides a much less tedious way of getting specific magic than trying to draw from enemies would, and I like how it and the level-scaling reconfigure grinding — instead of grinding to gain levels directly, you’re doing it to search for certain tools, either to craft into something strong or to refine into particularly strong spells. The final dungeon has a neat gimmick, one that inserts a breath of strategy into the otherwise sterile battle system, as you have to pick and choose what parts of it you need for the next fight or can save for later — though I think it’s too little, too late. By the time I reached it I just powered through it as quickly as possible because I was at the point where I wanted the game to end. The FMVs still look really good today, and it’s so cool how seamlessly the game can go from a cutscene rendered in-engine to FMV and back again. Every time one happened (which was a lot) I was pretty impressed.
As a whole… I definitely have some mixed feelings about this game. For as well as the story starts, and for as much as I enjoyed the cast the whole way through, I felt encumbered by the tedious and honestly quite rough battle system. And while I did enjoy how weird and abstract the later parts of the story could get, the story itself really goes in a direction for the worse: where things happen in a way that feels quite overcomplicated and where important people or events just suddenly appear and are relevant out of the blue. As a whole… I’m still not particularly sure where I fall in the debate about FF8. Maybe I’m a bit closer to the side of the people who like it because… in the end, I don’t think I hated it, but ultimately… I don’t think that appeals to me. I didn’t really love it, either. 5/10.
…It’s okay.
Which, for an RPG such as this, is a bit of an indictment. If I’m playing something that veers that long, then… I really want to be doing more than just going through the motions. It’s a bit as to why I don’t play RPGs as often as some of my friends do: the time investment is way too high for something to be merely ‘fine,’ or even 'good.' If something really draws me in and makes me invested, then it really makes the runtime fly by (even if I’m usually like “okay, I’m ready to wrap this up” long before I reach the end). If the game isn’t all that great, then I can still at least look at what’s in motion and see where exactly things are going wrong, even if I could maybe do the same thing with a game that’s much shorter. If the game is merely cromulent, then it truly just becomes a drag. What might be 35 hours feels more like 90. I could drop the game for months or even years and still not regain the spark that initially pulled me in. I truly only keep on out of a feeling of obligation — whatever reason I chose to play the game in the first place, my inbuilt headworms that will not let any game go unfinished if I can help it. Final Fantasy VIII… fares better than most other RPGs of that ilk, being mostly shorter (and structured in a way where you can really just gun it to the end after a certain point), but… to be honest, if I wasn’t playing this the way I was playing it, the game as background noise as I hangout with online friends… I probably would have lost interest in beating this. At least within a reasonable timeframe. It’s not the game that really would’ve held me onto it otherwise.
The story follows
I’ll start off by getting the most pervasive thing out of the way: the junction system sucks. The way it works is that… effectively, rather than armour or weapons, you instead equip spells onto yourself to directly boost your stats, but the whole process is explained so poorly (I do love the tutorial being given to me two or three words at a time) and implemented in such an overcomplicated way that it was such a drag every time I had to interface with it. This is mostly because the initial requirement is to equip your summons (or ‘GFs’, as they’re called in-game) in order to junction your stats — and while I assume the intention was for each party member to be equipped with their own GFs, GFs also require EXP to learn new passive skills and increase their stats, which means that if you don’t want to have any of your GFs fall behind… all of them have to be in the party at once. This means that every time you switch party members, you have to manually rejunction everybody, navigating through menus or menus to individually pick which magic best fits each stat (there’s a thing that’ll automatically pick magic for you, and a system that lets you switch magic inventories with other party members, but they both suck) and it’s so miserable to have to interact with. It’s especially bad whenever the party splits into several groups: you’ll junction one group, presuming you’ll do something with them… then before you even get to go into a fight you’re forced to play as the other group and then you have to manually rejunction them… until the point where you actually switch back and rejunction them, and then you switch back again and have to rejunction them, etc etc etc…
And the draw system works, I feel, to make combat… way too simplistic and not particularly engaging. As opposed to previous Final Fantasy games, where spells are limited by an overall MP pool, magic here instead must be drawn from enemies as an action in combat, with each use of draw giving you a couple of uses of whatever spells they have assigned to them. This, theoretically, eliminates the woes of having to deal with MP… but the limited amount of casts allowed for a specific spell, and the somewhat tedious process the player is initially stuck with to get more spells afterwards often make magic feel too costly to use — especially since this magic is much better junctioned to your stats than cast in battle. Summons, comparatively, do more damage and are almost entirely free to use… but then proceed to make you watch a 30+ second animation every time you summon them, with no real interaction rather than a rather finicky button-mashing minigame you can unlock to boost its power. Regular attacks (and fishing for Limit Breaks) instead become your primary way of interacting with enemies as you reach the later stages, partially because it’s your highest damage option, partially because… the lack of variety in enemy types or gimmicks (nothing in this game resists physical damage) often means that there’s no reason to do anything other than keep attacking, making for strategically bare and rather boring fights. This lack of variety, I feel, also ranges to your party: the only things that separate each of them mechanically are what magic they have in their inventory and what limit break they happen to have, meaning that there's never a need to build a specific party for a specific threat, nor is there any real way you can build a specific strategy using your party's unique capabilities, making combat as a whole feel... rather simple, once you navigate through all the fluff surrounding functioning and drawing. There are exceptions, of course — bosses which possess a diverse and imposing moveset (or a gimmick overarching the battle) where often the key to defeating them is located through the spells you can draw from them, but as a whole… I was really not into this battle system, especially given how slow all the animations feel and how frequent (like, every two steps in some parts of the overworld) they were.
The story… is something I have mixed feelings about. It starts off well: the initial section where you’re at school is a fairly decent introduction to the characters and mechanics, I really like the way the subsequent mission slowly escalates off the rails — as it goes from something routine for a freshly graduated soldier to a situation where everybody is… way in over their heads, and I like how the characters grapple with that. I’m also a fan of the flashback sequences: they help to set up how… abstract the plot can get, and on their own they’re fun little isolated episodes that take decent advantage of the game’s strength in scenario and character writing. However, I feel like once the plot starts approaching its final act (rooooughly right at the start of Disc 3) it kind of starts falling apart. Most of the plot threads the story had actively been following right up to the end of Disc 2 feel like they get dropped, and in its place the game just dumps a ton of exposition about people and things that had never appeared or had been brought up beforehand without any real explanation of who they are or what they even mean. What happens subsequently feels… slapdash — while there’s a decent emotional throughline that takes you from place to place I really felt like things were just happening without any setup or justification. This culminates in a final confrontation with the main antagonist I found… rather weak — for how much the game throws everything out of the way to try and establish who she is and what her goals are, the one actual interaction we get with her is… truly just “I am Chaos! I will cause Time Compression (what does that even mean)! Mwahahahaha, prepare to die!” I can understand things becoming more abstract and reliant on the personal interpretation of the player — I particularly liked the ending FMV for how out there it got — but from my perspective a lot of what constituted the lategame… wasn’t that: it felt more like the plot lost a lot of its internal coherence and started rushing towards a conclusion… rather alien to what it was initially set out as.
The cast, I feel, was the consistent strong suit of the game. I wouldn’t necessarily place them among my favourite RPG ensembles, or anything, but they’re consistently solid and fun and the best parts of the game’s writing. Even when the plot takes a turn for the worse — and, at the same time, the rest of the cast takes a backseat for Squall and Rinoa — the game still makes sure to give them little moments and never lets them fall into irrelevance.
Some other notes: Triple Triad is fun. I wish the AI for it was a little better (they always seemed to be playing to not lose, rather than playing to win), but it’s a fun little strategic dopamine booster and never got old even when I was grinding for specific cards. I’m a fan of the crafting system: it provides a much less tedious way of getting specific magic than trying to draw from enemies would, and I like how it and the level-scaling reconfigure grinding — instead of grinding to gain levels directly, you’re doing it to search for certain tools, either to craft into something strong or to refine into particularly strong spells. The final dungeon has a neat gimmick, one that inserts a breath of strategy into the otherwise sterile battle system, as you have to pick and choose what parts of it you need for the next fight or can save for later — though I think it’s too little, too late. By the time I reached it I just powered through it as quickly as possible because I was at the point where I wanted the game to end. The FMVs still look really good today, and it’s so cool how seamlessly the game can go from a cutscene rendered in-engine to FMV and back again. Every time one happened (which was a lot) I was pretty impressed.
As a whole… I definitely have some mixed feelings about this game. For as well as the story starts, and for as much as I enjoyed the cast the whole way through, I felt encumbered by the tedious and honestly quite rough battle system. And while I did enjoy how weird and abstract the later parts of the story could get, the story itself really goes in a direction for the worse: where things happen in a way that feels quite overcomplicated and where important people or events just suddenly appear and are relevant out of the blue. As a whole… I’m still not particularly sure where I fall in the debate about FF8. Maybe I’m a bit closer to the side of the people who like it because… in the end, I don’t think I hated it, but ultimately… I don’t think that appeals to me. I didn’t really love it, either. 5/10.