Squaresoft does it again with another immersive, lengthy adventure filled with fun, secrets, and a compelling story.

User Rating: 9.6 | Final Fantasy VIII (Platinum) PS
Coming after Final Fantasy VII really showed what RPGs on the PS1 could be like, the next iteration only improves things. From a better, more understandable story, improved battle mechanics, to cinematics that would even hold up to scrutiny on a PS2, the game delivers the goods in about every way imaginable.

Most of the game has you in the role of Squall, a young cadet in SeeD, a mercenary force of the Garden. The story starts off with the attempt to find and defeat a sorceress, the main goal of the Garden. However, it soon becomes apparent that the sorceress is not all she appears, and that the true threat is for more dangerous than was first imagined. Along the way you'll pick up a half-dozen cohorts and travel across several continents as you seek out the information you need to complete your goals. At times you'll also enter a dreamworld where you seem to be playing events of a decade past in the character of Laguna, and slowly but surely you'll discover just how your adventure is linked to these visions.

The game has 2 major departures from the traditional FF formula. The most noticeable is the lack of an equip command. That's right: no weapon, armor, or accessory fiddling (though weapons can be upgraded via components you obtain by defeating monsters). All your defenses and stat modification is taken care of with a junction system, where you graft to one or more Guardian Forces, previously known as summons. Each GF learns abilities that let you junction spells to your attributes and elemental/status attacks and defenses. So junctioning Fire to elemental defense makes you more resistant to fire, while attaching Haste to your speed stat makes you faster. The other big difference is the lack of spell points. Instead you carry set amounts of each spell, drawing them from your enemies and from draw points found in your travels. You can carry 100 each of up to 32 spells, and carrying more of a spell alters your junctioned ability more. GFs also allow you to acquire different combat commands (like healing an ally fully without spells), menu commands (like turning items into spells), and percentage boosts to statistics. As radical as the departures are from the FF norm, they both work really well.

The best thing about the game is that the story isn't just great, but it makes a lot more sense than VII's story. While there's still the same soul-searching and prodding from companions to fit to some emotional template, at least you know who you are. The two big differences aside, the same great gameplay you expect from the franchise is here: battles flow the same and the menus are roughly the same, though you get to set a different order to have your items appear in battle than at the menu screen. The sounds are a little improved, and the movies are absolutely majestic, even if at times you get the feeling the programmers did some things just to show off. A big plus is that targeting in battle is now easier again: no more healing a healthy character or cast Blizzard on a creature that regenerates from ice attacks. A great side-quest is the Triple Triad card game: some monsters will drop cards of themselves upon defeat and they can be used to play a game against many people in all towns, with the chance to win or lose more cards each time. Once you get the ability to synthesize items from the cards, the game becomes more than just a diversion and a chance to obtain some extra power.

The biggest downfall is that at some times, often when coming back from dreamworld visits, all your junctioned magic will be undone for no reason at all, leaving you scrambling to figure out what went where, and likely sending you to Excel after the 3rd time to make a spreadsheet. There's never any real reason for that to happen, so it's extra disappointing when it does. The economic system could use some tweaking--almost from the time you start getting money, you will always have a huge surplus. There's just not that much to buy, and while having money is nice, it still would've been nice to have to make a hard choice or two of what to buy and what to do without for a while. It's also tough to keep people balanced--since Squall is required to be in the party, he rapidly rises in levels, and the odd choice to have every level advance take the same number of experience points make his advances even more tough to control. It does serve to ensure he's the most powerful character, but it gets a bit laughable when he's dishing out 3 or 4 thousand damage per hit and others barely do 3 or 4 hundred.

The game and it's controls flow smoothly, and the GF unjunctioning is really the only serious negative issue. The graphics are far crisper than the previous game, both the standard gameplay character models and the higher-resolution cinematic cutscenes. The sound also seems to have been taken up a notch, and while some pieces of music grow stale after 60 hours, there are some very catchy tunes in certain cities and locales. You'll easily get your money's worth, as squeezing 80 hours out of this game that you shouldn't have to spend more than $20 to acquire is a distinct possibility. The game very simply does something very tough: it takes a game series that was truly groundbreaking and breathtaking, and actually manages to make it more fun and amazing to create an RPG experience that all should let themselves enjoy.