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The fact that
Final Fantasy 8 looks really pretty is obvious is universally agreed
upon. But once you get underneath the glamour and glitz of
Squaresoft’s multimillion-dollar blunder, you’ll see that there
is... Well, I want to say nothing, but that’s not true. There’s
something under there, but it’s bigger and much more confusing than
your average rocket scientist or brain surgeon could handle. I shall
try my best to explain it.
First I have to get the boring stuff - er, the good stuff about the
game out of the way while I can still remember it. The graphics look
great. All the people’s complaints about the graphics in Final
Fantasy 7 have been ironed out, so the characters don’t have Popeye
forearms in the eighth FF outing. In fact, all of the characters
look like humans, with their heads proportional to the rest of their
bodies. This is good news for any gamer because that means the, er...
Lonelier gamers can make any of the main characters into whackoff
material and not be considered desperate perverts. Especially during
the cutscenes, which are perhaps the most realistic in the entire
series. Although the massive amount of detail still can’t hide the
fact that all the clothing is horrendously ugly. If that’s what the
clothes of the future are going to look like, I’d rather strut
around nude.
Anyway, I do have one lone complaint about the graphics: For all the
detail, they’re kinda drab. Almost every area, with the exceptions
of New Deling, Esther and the space station, looks like it was done
with a color point scheme. Read: It makes the graphics look just a
wee bit on the lifeless side. It would have been better if the
development team had splashed color around like they did in Final
Fantasy 9, but this issue is really a minor complaint.
The other thing I can safely say that I liked about Final Fantasy 8
was one of the more interesting story twists I had seen in some
time. About halfway through the first disk, the main characters in
your party are casually sitting on a train when they are lulled into
a deep sleep and share the same dream. Placed into the bodies of
three soldiers named Laguna, Kiros and Ward, they see several events
through the eyes of these three soldiers. It seems that Laguna and
the main character, Squall, are connected in some mysterious way. In
the long run, the Laguna sequences don’t have any effect on the main
story, but they’re interesting enough to keep you playing through
until you finally receive closure on this little issue. Too bad you
have to endure the main story just to see where this one takes you.
If the rest of the game ware as good as those two points of
interest, I might have felt like Final Fantasy 8 was worth paying
for. But noooo. Every other aspect of Final Fantasy 8 makes it feel
like a lab rat that was the victim of several experiments gone
wrong, although the positive point in all this negativity is that I
get to fly into a rage and beat
on this game like a rag doll. So let the games begin!
While still on the subject of the story, let us tackle the stuffing
out of that first. Final Fantasy 8 starts out with a spectacular
showcase of the eye candy that you’re in for with a thundering
swordfight between the main character (Squall) and his arch rival (Seifer)
during which Squall gets hurt and winds up in the infirmary of his
military training school (called a garden). It seems that Squall is
in training to become a SeeD, which is Final Fantasy’s response to
elite military organizations like the Navy SEALs or Army Rangers.
After getting out of the infirmary, Squall is sent to his final
exam. After passing, he gets hired by some rebel group to
assassinate a witch named Edea. So far, so good. Problem is, after
this the story begins to drift. And drift. And drift. The idea that
Edea is the one you’re really after slowly begins to fizzle out, and
instead of developing, the story just kind of wanders into the usual
Final Fantasy ‘save the world’ scenario. This is not a good thing
because most of the time it makes you scratch your head, confused
and asking, “I’m doing what now? And why?”
Squaresoft is (by their own admission) to be blamed for this. In
their attempt to recreate the whole Locke/Celes love story in their
be-all or end-all game, Final Fantasy 6, they decided to give the
main story the old heave-ho. What they forgot was that the
characters from Final Fantasy 6 were so incredibly well developed
that you forgot that they were mere 16-bit sprites no bigger than
your big toe nail. You develop feelings for them, the same way that
you would develop feelings for certain characters in dramatic
movies. The characters in Final Fantasy 8 lack that distinct
advantage. They utterly suck. Squall is a lone wolf and a prick that
acts more like a high school outcast on the verge of a killing
spree. The love interest (Rinoa) spends the majority of her screen
time whining and looking for subtle ways to hit on Squall, who wants
nothing to do with her. The rest of the crew is an underdeveloped
bunch straight off the airwaves of the WB, minus the cliché black
guy. Quistis, the young teaching prodigy, secretly has feelings for
Squall, even though she never admits it. The eternal optimist is
Selphie, who laughs and claps her way through the game like a
stereotypical cheerleader. Selphie shares her optimist spot with
Zell. Irvine is the babe magnet who will screw any woman who can
walk. Seifer is the throat-cutting villain who is always plotting
behind our heroes’ backs. And Buffy and Dawson are... Oh, wait,
there’s no Buffy or Dawson. My bad.
So far I haven’t said anything about this game that hasn’t been said
about Final Fantasy 7. But Final Fantasy 7 was able to redeem its
inconclusive, hole-filled story through a wonderful customization
system. And, during the summon spells in Final Fantasy 7, you were
actually able to get up and grab a cup of coffee. Not so in Final
Fantasy 8. In Final Fantasy 8, Square introduced the junction system
to customize your characters. While I give credit to Square for
trying something new that probably looked like a good idea on paper,
in practice the flaws with the system become apparent immediately.
To get it to work you first need to equip a summoning monster, which
in this game is called a Guardian Force. This is because every
battle command, with the exception of attack, is only available
through GF junctioning. Anyway, after equipping the GF, you then
equip the Draw command, which allows you to draw magic spells from
your enemies. After you draw those magic spells, you then attach
them to your hit points or attack or whatever stat you feel like
increasing. See, great idea on paper. But realize that whenever you
want to draw magic in battle, you are basically giving the bad guy a
free shot at you. And your stats go down whenever you use magic. So
try not to become too dependent on magic.
Oh, wait, but you won’t be depending on magic! Magic in Final
Fantasy 8 has all the effectiveness of a mosquito bite on an
elephant. Without magic, you would normally turn to your weapons to
knock the living daylights out of your attackers, but in Final
Fantasy 8; the weapons have the effectiveness of a mosquito bite on
a whale. Want to try winning a fight depending solely on your
weapons and magic? Good luck, buddy boy, you’re in for a long fight.
All right, I lied: Weapons and magic work just fine in the beginning
of the game. But after the first couple of missions, they quickly
become useless. The only way to get in and out of a battle is to
make use of your Guardian Forces, but unfortunately, while your GFs
are useful in slaughtering the baddies by the dozen, they have super
long animations that can’t be skipped over. Another Final Fantasy 7
complaint, but at least FF7 didn’t have you relying on summons to
fight your battles for you. And you could get up and grab a cup of
coffee while the pretty summon animations flashed across your
screen. This is not the case in FF8. In FF8, when you summon a GF,
you get to sit there pounding your buttons to increase the strength
of the GF. It’s a lose/lose situation as the battles always take
forever.
Let me read your thoughts for a moment: To increase the speed at
which the battles go by, you’re thinking of using the age-old RPG
solution: Leveling up. A good idea in theory, yes. But little do you
know that every enemy in Final Fantasy 8 has levels parallel to
Squall’s. This means that whenever Squall gains a level, every bad
guy in the game also goes up a level. Think of the way the bosses
got more powerful as Alex got more powerful in Lunar, and you have
the idea, except Squall’s levels affect EVERY enemy. So you can
power up all you like, but the rule is if it gave you fits in the
beginning, it’ll give you fits right until the bitter end. Oh, and
while still on the subject of battles, why don’t I mention that you
no longer get paid for winning battles? Nope, instead you get a
regular paycheck according to what SeeD level Squall is currently
at. You can increase SeeD levels by taking tests that come with the
tutorial. Get the point here: Combat is USELESS. There’s no point.
Fortunately, early in the game, you get a magic lamp with a Guardian
Force called Diablos, who provides you with an ability to avoid
battles.
The weapons system has also been revamped for the worse. First, you
get no armor besides the suit you were born in. I don’t agree with
that change, but I don’t disagree with it, since it saves cash. As
for the weapons themselves, instead of buying entirely new weapons
you now get to purchase upgrades. As you travel across the world you
find and collect magazines that contain descriptions of your next
weapon and what parts you need to get it customized. Then you set
out to collect them without the slightest hint of where these parts
may lie. As you’ll find out, they often lie (rarely may I add)
waiting in the bloody remains of some ultra-powerful enemy who will
likely wipe out your entire party before your first turn.
That about cover it? No, wait, limit breaks! While these (unlike
weapons) do damage, you only get to use them when your hit points
get low. And I mean LOW. We’re talking 150-250 out of some four or
five thousand here. If you want to use them as a primary attack
option, you’re either very brave or very insane. Probably both.
Instead of throwing in a vast variety of mini-games like in Final
Fantasy 7, Squaresoft (in their feeble attempt to hold your
interest) threw in one single mini-game that can be played anywhere
- a card game called Triple Triad. And don’t ever expect to win at
it, because while the computer offers several tutorials on how to
play the game, the methods that it goes over never work for you. On
the other hand, they always seem to work for the computer. So I’m
not going to even bother trying to explain how it works. Although,
since I’m such a nice, reasonable man, I will tell you that cards
you win can be converted into non-essential items. And that the game
is made even more of a nightmare by rules specific to every region.
And they can be spread. Once you manage to spread a rule you don’t
like, good luck trying to remove it. The legendary strategy guides
all say it can be done, but so far all that is just legend. I’ve
never been able to remove a spread rule from an area.
Well, I went over the graphics. Now it’s the soundtrack’s turn to
get hammered. I understand that even with all the Final Fantasy 8
detesters, some of those actually like this crap. Well I don’t. The
score is probably the worst I’ve heard in a Final Fantasy game. As I
sit here typing this venom soaked rant; I cannot remember a single
track from the soundtrack. Well, I can remember the overworld theme,
but only because it was that horrible. It’s a boring and overly
simplistic piece that sounds like it was composed of leftover 8-bit
NES computer blip notes. We know the PlayStation is capable of more.
Oh, a good thing I almost forgot: At least the game responds. The
controls work just fine. Squall is automatically set on run mode, so
when you press what is normally the dash button, he slows down. A
good touch.
Final Fantasy 8 is a travesty. A mockery of the good name of Final
Fantasy rivaled only by that awful Spirits Within movie. While the
Final Fantasy series continues (deservedly) to dominate the RPG
landscape, this is one title that deserves to be lost and forgotten.
It’s a pseudo fantasy, and not worth your money. Should you download
it for free, it’s not
worth the 50 or 60 hours you’ll be investing it to reach the end.
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