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Game Title: Final Fantasy VIII
Platform: PlayStation
Developer: Square Soft (Square Enix)
Publisher: Square Soft (Square Enix
Genre: Role Playing
Age Rating: ELSPA: 11+, PEGI: 16+
Release Date: 27th October 1999 (Europe)
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Game Score: 4.5/10
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Summery:
While it tries to have its moments but Final Fantasy VIII's Junctioning system, Storyline, Characters and Battles really fail to deliver.
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Final Fantasy VIII certainly has a lot to live up to in terms of how successful Final Fantasy VII was back in 1997, I can remember playing the game as a child and even though I never beat it those years ago I can remember talking about with my friends in school and enjoying it all the same. Final Fantasy VIII on the other left a very big emotional scar on my childhood as it ruined everything I possibly could have like about Final Fantasy and about RPGs in general. That was a very big shame for me because I used to hear what everyone said about the presentation about the game which is said to be much better then how Final Fantasy VII. It eventually told me a really important lesson is that it's not always best to trust what critics will say about a game and also to note that good graphics does not always make a good game. This is because for everything that Final Fantasy VIII tries to do to make it stand out is sadly ruined by weak storyline, unlikeable characters, slow battles and one of the most boring mechanics to ever be used in an RPG game let alone a Final Fantasy game.
Now just to get my positives for the game out of the way the presentation is as I just said is a lot better then how Final Fantasy VII looked. For such a old game it still looks really good for a PS1 game even so many years later. The game's characters have more detail put into and look less polygonal, the monster designs are really cool and are well animated and I especially like how both characters and monsters have their own unique death animations, the spell effects and also the guardian force summons are very crisp and show off a lot of impressive effects. Even the CGI cutscenes look amazing especially when they are pasted well into the game and they are worth watching through. The opening CGI cutscene has a strong orchestral mix of heart pumping action and tension, it gets you really excited to play the game. Another of the game's biggest strength is the soundtrack, composed by Nobuo Uematsu many of the tracks are upbeat, catchy and smoothing which makes each of the tracks worth listening too even if you are playing the game. Liberi Fatali may not be as awesome as One Winged Angel but later on into the track tension really builds up and fits well with the action seen in the cutscene and it's arguably the best moment of the game. My favourite tracks in the game are the boss fight theme called Force your way and also The Man with a Machine Gun which is played when fighting as another character which I won't reveal just yet.
Okay so now look that really is everything that I have positive to say about this game and I am going to summon up the courage to say what I really hate about this, let's talk about it together shall we? So the game takes place in Balamb Garden where it is school that trains students to fight against various threats around the world, I have no idea how an idea like that would even came to pass for a setting but anyway you play as Squall who must lead his allies against an evil sorceress who is either trying to possess all of the good sorcerers for a purpose or trying to use the power to corrupt all of time. Siding with the evil sorceress are Galbadian Soldiers which aims to eliminate all resistance but the power struggles between the two sides is never that fully realized even with the clash they both get later which is kind of a little lacking. There are also moments where the main characters have dreams about the man named Laguna a solider turned journalist who tries to have insight about the game's past events but some of these moments really fails to build any semblance of plot towards any of the game's characters. They simply tried to add elements of dreams and time but it honestly it just makes some of the plot points more confusing to follow. I really didn't find anything remotely interesting about the story that goes on in this game at all, I found the plot to be mostly all over the place and what I also think drags the plot down further are the characters which I honestly just find them unlikeable. You got Zell who kind of acts all hyped up most of the times and loses his temper for no reason, you got Quistis who tries so hard at trying to even fill in respectively as an instructor although getting overly emotional about it, the main villain Ultimecia makes ultimately no effort to do anything worthy of being a villain besides possessing the good sorceress not even the confrontation or the cutscene and fight with her has any impact at all. The worst of the lot really goes to Squall who is in every way just as bad as Lightning from FFXIII. He is seen in the cutscenes not caring about what is going on around him not even the things his allies say, he often has those thoughts in his head where hides his true feelings and also one moment where he says he only does it for one such character only because it's his mission and nothing else which really makes him a really selfish and unlikeable protagonist. Sure he is described as a lone wolf and he tries to make it up to one such character much later on but that really doesn't excuse his attitude that you see within him throughout most of the game. At least the dialogue is decent and the translation is better then how the translation in FF7 was handled so at least has got that going for it but you are not going to feel attached to either the story or any of the characters nor the actual storyline.
Now Final Fantasy VIII plays very different compared to other RPGs of it's time but let's get the basics out of the way. You're still entering dungeons, towns and fighting monsters and getting experience and you are still travelling on the overworld on either foot or in some vehicles like cars and also vehicles or travelling on water and air which you get later on. What I don't like with the vehicles is the controls, I hate that how Square is the accelerate button instead of the X button like in driving games. You can change the controls to your liking but however changing the controls in one area changes it in another which can make it confusing. However the developers decided to change the rules up and some game mechanics that are just poorly implemented. Now the battle system is still based using the Active Time Battle System so that you can use whatever commands you want to give to each character. One of the decent ideas they put into the battle system is with Squall's weapon which is called a Gunblade which is basically a combination of a sword and a gun which I'll say is quite creative. When attacking with Squall a well timed press of the R1 button by default will deal extra damage which is the only saving grace of the combat and here are plenty of valid reasons why. Every time a character gets 1000 experience points he/she gains a level and gets stronger but however what the developers put into the game is levelling scaling, what's that I see people asking well let me explain. If a highest level character in the party gains a level then the monster gains a level to be equal to the highest level character increasing it's overall stats making it stronger then maybe the last time you fought it. This effects some bosses but mostly random enemies that you encounter and if you are very highly levelled you can expect them to deal extra damage to your party members. All I can say is that who in the right mind thought it was a good idea to have in a Final Fantasy game? It just make some of the fights brutally unfair especially in later fights where enemies deal high level damage to your party members or getting more turns then your party can even their actions off.
One other system they wanted to implement into the game is one of the more important and also the most boring expect of the game and that is the Junctioning system. At the start of the game you get two summoning beings called Guardian Forces and how that works is that equipping a Guardian Force grants your character abilities that it knows like being able to use Magic spells or use Items, I'm just going to let that sink in for a moment. You have to equip a Guardian Force to be able to use abilities and use Items and you can only equip 4 abilities at a time. I would complain about equipping Guardian Forces to use items considering that in any other RPG but really they just can't use items without the Item Junction ability, how on earth is that even supposed to work.
The other effect of Junctioning is the Draw mechanic, instead of learning Magic Spells from gaining levels your characters must Draw Magic Spells from enemies to either use. Every time a character uses Draw on an enemy he/she stacks in range from 1 to 9 and the limit that a character can stack each spell is up to 100. When you have a spell to Junction you can place it in either slot to increase characters stats like Strength, Health Points, Speed and so on or you can use it for Elemental Attacks or Increase resistance to certain status effects like Poison or Silence. What I can praise about the system is that it does offer advanced character customization so that you set up for character resistances and efficiently for later fights however there are things I seriously dislike about the system. Firstly you need to get a drawn spell to reach 100 to get the best overall effect and that means in battle you could be spending minutes to get one magic spell drawn to 100 and you have to do the same thing for each character as well which also doubles the time you spend drawing magic from enemies. Sometimes your character will get as much as 1 or 3 per Draw or sometimes a Draw might even fail and I swear I had those instances which is just annoying more then anything. You can also draw magic from small Draw Points and it's a one use time cause some of them need to recharge before reusing while others are permanently one time use forcing tough decisions. I also noticed that while some Draw Points are easily indicated others are not and you are forced to use a Guardian Force ability to find them or just by look online for their locations. They can be found throughout the game's areas or on the world map but on there there is simply no indication as to where they are as I just said so walkthroughs is your best bet to finding them. There is a Guardian Force ability which turns Items you have into Magic Spells to cut down on the majority of drawing but two things come to mind, 1. You don't get the ability till hours into the game. 2. Some requirements are a little steep that you still will get possibly little results which will still force you do more drawing for your characters and it is just tedious and boring. You can also get an ability which turns your character magic spells into better variants but again the requirements are steep that you will still spend time drawing to get your spells full. Against regular enemies Drawing won't become too bad unless they deal big damage to your characters but against enemies that use status effects it can make Magic Drawing duties a absolute chore. It's even worse when some enemies spam the spell Death on your party and it's just cheap unless you place resistances to it. There is also an enemy in the game I encountered and also the final boss which draws magic from your party which begs the question, Why make the enemies draw from the party when it is already a pain to draw a spell to max in the first place?
Whenever you choose to or not to use any of your items for refining magic is difficult to decide because Item Materials found or stolen from enemies with the Mug ability can also be used to upgrade a characters weapon. Instead of purchasing new weapons with currency like in other RPGs you have to keep hold of your materials for customization and you won't know the right materials to make the weapons till either you get a hold of a weapons magazine that may drop from a boss or purchasing them all in one such store later in the game. Tales of Symphonia would use the customization store where you can use materials you have to make better weapons but there are stores in that game where you can get better weapons and gear with actual currency which made the system efficient. I also realize that there is no armour in the game so you have to relay to customizing your characters resistances to be able to survive against some of the enemies' attacks.
I also don't like that you never obtain Gil from winning battles instead you either sell off some of your unwanted materials or by increasing your Seed rank. How that works is that you have tests that you can do that focus on the overall games mechanics and getting all the answers right in a test will increase your rank. You can take on other tests up to 30 when you risen up your character's level. The higher the rank you are the more Gil you get in a random occurrence. I have no idea how frequent this occurrence is what I do is that every now and then as you are walking around you will get a message letting you know you got extra Gil. It's not a very efficient system since you might want to either relay on recovery items and spending the nights at the Inns to easily recover your characters. Recovery items can also be used for refining magic spells for your characters so getting extras will be a pain if you are low on Gil.
It also doesn't help that the battles are just so slow and boring. Every time a character or enemy takes an action the ATB bar stops till their action is finished, even when I set the battle speed to Active and also to the fastest setting it's still very slow and takes forever to get your character's actions going or even input their commands in. They also changed the way the Limit Break system works, instead of having a simple meter letting you know that a character's Limit Break is full instead when a character's HP reaches low enough you can use a Limit Break. They are really cool like Squall's where his Gunblade deals multiple hits and like with his regular attacks a well timed press of the trigger button deals extra damage. Zell's has the player inputting buttons shown on screen to do fighting game style moves, Quistis uses other enemies abilities if learnt from materials while Selphie can use spells multiple times depending on what she has stacked up. Using Limit Breaks makes the fights easier and faster because they can deal major damage to enemies plus also you can use it again as long as your character's health remains low enough. Another thing you will spam in regular battles are the Guardian Forces as they can deal major damage and kill mostly weak enemies in a single attack. You can summon a Guardian Force as many times as you want with the only factor being that they take damage from enemies if active and will need to use revival items for Guardian Forces to revive them if killed. You can earn new Guardian Forces either in fights against them or drawing them from boss fights.
Oh yes you can also draw both Magic Spells and Guardian Forces from boss fights as well maybe more powerful and useful spells that you don't get from regular enemies and like I pointed out you will spend a few minutes having to draw magic from these guys and I find that just as tedious as drawing from regular enemies.
I have to mention that while there plenty of different spells available to draw in the game but the biggest problem that you will have with the system is that you can only draw up to 32 spells but get this there are over 50 spells in the game. Through basic spells to stronger variants to support spells and status effect spells they can be Drawn and Junctioned but there will be times your characters spell list will be full and if you need to make room for more powerful spells you need to either waste them in battle or refine some of them into powerful spells. Although refining spells only works for some weaker versions like Blizzard or Fire and just like with the drawing mechanic it becomes absolutely tedious mainly because I have noticed that there is no discard option to get rid of the spells you don't need any more which is a serious pain. Not only do you need to spend so much time doing the drawings for your characters but to spend time tossing out magic spells your characters won't need for later challenges which in my opinion is just a real waste of gameplay. That's also because you wouldn't know the best spells to have with you for Junctioning unless you looked online at each of their ratings or on a strategy guide. I could talk for extra moments about how much I seriously hate how poorly executed the Junctioning and Draw mechanics are but I mean it's one of the most boring and tedious game mechanics and trust me you'll spend hours having to deal with drawing magic as supposed to actually killing monsters and getting stronger.
As for the bosses themselves they are not entirely challenging till later on where bosses start doing high damage to your party which is where you relay on Limit Break spams with Squall, Irvine and Rinoa to make most of the fights a total cakewalk. Cause apparently even the game knows that the challenge level in some areas is a little cheap especially with optional boss fights near the end of the game.
Now look I know that I am being far to critical against the draw and junction mechanics but was it that you spend the majority of your time in a RPG game? You fight monsters and gain experience to make your characters stronger to take on harder challenges. You did this with great and well designed battle systems in previous Final Fantasy games that gave their games plenty of depth. Final Fantasy VIII on the other hand ruins all that by wanting to make the player do hours of magic drawing and junctioning to make the characters efficient for fighting. This is why I never actually use any of my magic till maybe the last few fights in the game. In other RPGs characters have an MP meter where each character's special attacks costed the amounts of points of MP needed to use it. It made using certain attacks very thoughtful and required strategy to use it at the right time to make a comeback as well as using special attacks effectively to attack an enemy's weakness to make fights easier. Final Fantasy VIII's magic spells is only costed by how many magic spells a character has stacked up, I already mentioned how tedious and boring the junction mechanic is and how restocking your spells is also a chore plus it's also a pain to restock each spell. In battles I mostly just relay on physical attacks, summonings and limit breaks and I was able to win through nearly every fight in the game that is I get into the optional boss fights near the end of the game. The difficulty in the game isn't that bad till later enemies start spamming Death and other status effects to cheaply kill your characters but I still can't help but feel that the combat, Junctioning, Drawing and Level Scaling is just feels horribly thrown together without regards to fairness.
Final Fantasy VIII also has some minigames and some puzzle elements that are thrown in here and there to try and spicing things up, there are areas where you have to make your way out within a time limit, one where you set codes in and one area where you switch things around which are decent enough I guess. Some of the areas are decently well designed but since the game uses the pre-rendered backgrounds some areas I found later on have rooms that you won't see or notice unless you walk your in game character towards the screen which isn't good design. Other example of that is the final dungeon in the game which seals all of the characters abilities and you have to beat the bosses of the area to unlock them. This is arguably one of the most tedious sections of the entire game and the fights against them are frustrating to fight against unless you did some Junctioning. Most of the minigames are forgettable, there's one where you try to fend of a solider by fighting him in a poorly designed fighting game, there's one where you get a Chocobo which is just easy to just let the kid get one for you for a price of course. However the standout minigame is the Card collecting minigame called Triple Triad which you use different cards which have strengths and weaknesses in different stats that beats one cards stat while one other beats out another. There are 110 different cards that you can get in the game and you can earn these either from winning card games that you can have with citizens, using the card ability to turn monsters into cards or doing the card sidequest that you can do. It's a good minigame and so far the best gameplay aspect of Final Fantasy VIII although personally I didn't quite get into it and only had few boss cards I needed and was able to win through my matches just fine. You can also just ignore the quest and refine the cards into useful items like Bahamut which can be turned into 100 MegaElixirs which was enough for me to beat the optional and final bosses.
Final Fantasy VIII is an example of trying too hard to be set a new stance for the franchise as it believes that change is a way that it can make a new instalment fresh but sadly the game is just poorly executed an it's just ludicrous how people even hold this game up and compare it to the likes of Final Fantasy VI and VII and also even hold it in the same high regards. When the game was released back in 1999 it received such high praise because critics just assumed it was because it was another high quality product plus also another Final Fantasy game that maybe everyone was looking forward to playing. However it's poorly implemented Junction and Draw mechanics combined with the slow and boring battle system and weak and confusing storyline just really makes this possibly the worst of the PS1 Final Fantasy games released. After talking with friends I knew, my brother and also some other people I met in my life we all came to a conclusion that Final Fantasy VIII is in line of being one of the worst J-RPGs and it's just a real terrible game in general and it actually killed my interest in Japanese Role Playing. It has taught me a very valuable lesson and that it is not to always trust high review scores especially from big name franchises like Final Fantasy because somewhere down the line a new game in the franchise is bound to screw up. At least now with the completion of Final Fantasy VIII I can finally clean my hands from the suffering it gave to me when I was little and won't have to go back to this abomination again cause if I have to I might as well just use a Death spell on myself and end my life instead. It just happens to be one of those love it or hate it kind of games and I am staying towards the hate it part. I was never fond of it back then and I am still not fond of it now either. It's disappointing, it's slow and boring and it's overall negatives outweighs the positives and that is a shame because the best moments of it to be honest are the opening cutscene and the CGI cutscenes and soundtrack which for the most part are high standard. The Junctioning and Drawing mechanics are just tedious and boring, the storyline is just confusing to sit through and the characters are just overall unlikeable. Thank goodness Square changed so much of what this game does wrong and improved it gracefully with Final Fantasy IX. If you really want to see how Final Fantasy games begin to fall from grace before after FFX then I should advice getting it cheap on PSN and stay away from the PC port which looks and sounds far worse then the PS1 version. At least the popularity of this game has at least also encouraged other developers to have their shot at releasing their own RPGs for the console as well as ones that players living in the UK like myself would never see the light of day that are far better executed with less problems then this game has.
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The Good Points:
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1. Very impressive graphics and soundtrack
2. Junctioning at least offers customization options
The Bad Points:
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1. Slow and boring battle system
2. Junctioning and Drawing magic is tedious and super boring to manage
3. Weak storyline and unlikeable characters
4. Unfair level scaling
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Reviewed by: Anthony Hayball (AQWBlaZer91)
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