(To start things off, I realized after about 25+ hours with Final Fantasy VIII that I wasn't actually taking any screenshots. Turns out, Big Screen Mode has to be on in Steam to use the Xbox button + RT thing to take a screenshot. Epic fail on my part... Sorry, everyone. Just gonna be text right now.)
When I was a kid, Final Fantasy VIII was the granddaddy of RPG's. My buddy had it for PC and I was enthralled. It's what I thought of when I heard Final Fantasy. Collecting and training GF's sounded awesome and the graphics were incredible (for the year 2000), it just looked like the game to play. I still thank it for getting me interested in Final Fantasy but otherwise, boy, was I wrong.
I've always stood up for Final Fantasy VIII against anyone bad-mouthing it. Everyone online always either loved it or hated it and I fell firmly in the loved it camp. The problem was, I had never actually played through it. Later in life, I played up until the Garden takes off and you can fly it around but stopped shortly after that for... some reason I can't remember.
Now, despite being a firm supporter of the game to start, the more I play Final Fantasy VIII, the more I utterly despise this wretch of a game. Everything from the plot to the characters to the gameplay mechanics is broken as sin and it just keeps getting worse. Let me explain:
1) The Plot
Final Fantasy VIII starts off fairly well. You are a member of a mercenary school called the Garden and you have to pass your final test to be a full-fledged SeeD. Yeah, it stands for something but I don't remember what. Basically, you're a mercenary who works for your school err... Garden. On your mission, your rival Seifer goes AWOL causing him to fail the test. Failure eventually sends him straight into the waiting arms of Edea, the big baddie for most of the game.
Now, if this is what they had focused on, the game could have been great. An interesting dynamic between rival students, the struggle between your personal hatred of the guy versus your duty to your school to save him. Interesting, right? Well, here's where things go crazy. Instead of following Seifer's downfall into Edea's grasp, that happens off screen while you get a mission to help Rinoa (read: female lead because the script says so) and her Forest Owls! The Forest Owls are a terrorist organization made up of three people who want to free their town of Timber from the evil Empire of Galbadia, similar to AVALANCHE from FFVII. You spend a bunch of time helping them in Timber, hijacking a train, meeting the townsfolk and getting on TV. Seifer is met, battle ensues and Edea takes him and flees. Forest Owls are NEVER MENTIONED AGAIN. I'm not clear if we somehow saved the town or not. It doesn't seem like it since Imperial soldiers are still there. I have no idea. Anyway, Rinoa joins your party and no longer gives a flying fuck about Timber for the rest of the game...
Instead, she decides to join you and your mercenary team that she hired in the first place to assassinate Edea for your next mission! Even the party members seem confused since they introduce the rest of the team as fully licensed SeeDs and then Rinoa as... nothing. Anyway, main goal is now Edea which the team inevitably fails at resulting in Squall's death. Or not since he wakes up in the next disk with absolutely no explanation as to how he survived a giant ice spear through his heart. Team is now in prison and Rinoa/Irvine bust in to save you because apparently, in Final Fantasy VIII world, two people can break into a highly guarded prison with no problem at all. Hell, one of them doesn't even need to be trained in anything! Awesome.
Out of prison you get and here is where the story gets really bizarre. You find out that Edea is in charge of the Empire now and plans on shooting missiles at two of the Gardens, Balamb and Trabia. Half your team goes to the missile base to stop the missiles and half goes to Balamb to... die, I guess.
Balamb is Squall's Garden so obviously, Trabia gets nuked first. Too bad, Selphie, your people just weren't important enough to the plot. After watching the first wave of missiles get shot, they infiltrate and fail to stop the next missiles too. Great job, guys. Second half of your party gets to fix the mistakes of the first by trying desperately to debrief to someone who gives a shit without success. You find out that a fat blob thing is the financier of the Garden and lives in the basement for some reason. Squall and friends kill this fat angry blob and decide that pressing a mystery button in the lower basement is a good idea. Lo and behold, the Garden flies! And so, the giant building flies off, out of the way of the approaching missiles.
I may go into more detail later but the plot further devolves as we find out that none of the characters remember anything because of their GF's but they actually grew up together and Edea is their orphanage mother! I didn't even mention how you keep having flashbacks to a guy named Laguna who seems somewhat aware of you because Ellone, Squall's non-biological sister he didn't remember has some sort of power to send people back in time to other people's memories. There are people known as Sorceresses, who are somehow different from your team who uses magic regularly, who SeeD was created to fight against despite never fighting against the Sorceress they knew existed until Squall came around. Then it turns out the Sorceress helped create SeeD to stop herself when she'd go crazy from being possessed by a Sorceress from the future who wants to make a Time Compression which I guess is bad for some reason. There's a super advanced city who imprisoned the last Sorceress in space and you get to go to space too and then the moon is filled with monsters and a big plaque a la 2001: A Space Odyssey gets excavated by the Empire to create a space elevator for monsters from the moon... HOLY CRAP!!! MAKE IT STOP!!!
It's important to note also that I'm just about to enter the final dungeon and absolutely NONE of this has been explained at all. The game just keeps throwing twists at you with no lead-up or anything. Nothing makes any damn sense at all but the game just keeps going with its nonsense. Honestly, all of this could be tolerable if it weren't for...
2) The Characters
Oh, Lord, the characters in this game... You guys remember back to Final Fantasy V? When I complained that the characters were more or less all the same and didn't feel like they had personalities? At least you could forget about them, unlike Final Fantasy VIII which shoves it's flat, 2D characters into your face CONSTANTLY. In fact, it's basically as though the writers didn't know the difference between personality and backstory since that's really all you get.
Squall is the main character. If you thought Cloud was brooding, he's got nothing on Squall. This character is so boring and bland, all of the dialogue choices you get throughout the game actually start with ellipses. This guy is so horribly unlikable, it makes Rinoa, an already unlikable ditz of a character even more hateable since she for some reason likes this jack-off. Rinoa is the leader of the Forest Owls despite barely understanding how basic strategy works. She immediately falls in love with the equally incompetent Squall because of his utter loathing of conversation. Our two lovebirds are accompanied by such memorable characters as Zell, the overly-energetic punching bag who does literally nothing throughout the entire storyline, Quistis, the 18 year old instructor of soldiers who joins Squall because she also can't keep it in her pants. Selphie, basically Yuffie with even more incompetence, and finally Irvine, a sniper who doesn't like to shoot things.
These people are so boring with zero motivations of their own that I literally root for Seifer through the whole damn game. At least Seifer has some proper motivation for doing what he's doing. He's egotistical and allows himself to succumb to the Sorceress' manipulation that makes him feel like her Knight. Instead, you get these six numbskulls during the era when developers were trying to fix the problem of most characters in RPG parties sitting unused through the whole game. Their solution, to make you constantly switch between them in almost every dungeon. These switches are so contrived, one of the explanations for a character being unavailable is literally that she is taking a nap. Your base is under siege by an invading force and she's decided now is a good time to sleep. Great job... Fortunately, she wakes up in time to get possessed so, that's great.
As if the characters weren't bad enough, their weapons are completely ridiculous. Now, many people laugh at the famous Gunblade, wielded by Squall. This is a pistol merged with a sword. Honestly, I think it's kind of cool, especially when compared to the others. Zell literally punches things to death. When you are picking out weapons for weapons training, literally surrounded by choices, who says "Nope, I just want to punch the living hell out of everything!" Idiot... Quistis uses a whip. Heh, she's an instructor? Sexy librarian thing going on? Uses a whip? Get it? No? Moving on. Irvine is a sniper so he uses a shotgun. Obviously. Because those two are guns and otherwise are the exact same thing- STOP ASKING QUESTIONS! Selphie uses nunchaku which may make sense from a weapon standpoint but considering Selphie seems to be the most physically weak character other than maybe Rinoa, it's an odd choice of weapons since it's super close-range. Anyway, the best has been saved for last. Rinoa uses what can only be described as an arm slingshot which she uses to shoot a boomerang disk. I could not make this up. It's a disk thing that comes back to her and she shoots it like a slingshot from her wrist. Even better, her limit break is that she shoots her DOG from this wrist launcher. Yes, in Final Fantasy, there is a character who slingshots her dog at enemies. Wow... just wow.
3) The Gameplay
Here's the sad thing about the gameplay in Final Fantasy VIII. This system is not inherently broken by itself. In fact, it could be really cool. Basically, the system uses an evolved version of Final Fantasy VI where you equip summons to each character to determine their abilities. Except, instead of just giving them active abilities, this determines their stats and everything else as well. You can equip multiple GF's, as they're called, on one character or leave a character without a GF (although that's a really bad idea with no noticeable benefit) but however you do it, you will then need to junction (read: equip) magic to each individual stat that the GF allows. Different magics will benefit different stats differently and will increase it more if more magic's are stocked.
That leads us to the magic system. Anyone can use any magic at any time but they have to be stocked like items. Magic can't be bought in stores though, they have to be drawn from either draw points found throughout the world or drawn from monsters in battle. Different monsters have different magics that can be drawn and drawing will take several casts of a magic of your choice. You will need to wisely think out which magics you are going to junction to your stats and which you will keep for casting since they benefit your stats more if you keep a higher number of casts available. You can still use them in battle but it will lower your stats accordingly.
All of this would be cool if it weren't for the fact that they tried really hard to make you use all the characters by switching them constantly for the plot. This ultra-crunchy junctioning system quickly becomes tedious and painful when you have to spend half an hour every few hours just setting up your party and getting them ready to fight. There's thankfully an auto-feature for junctioning magic but it rarely gets things exactly right and really just provides a jumping-off point. The assumption was probably that people would equip one or two GFs to each character and would keep them there but this would be stupid in actual gameplay because you need to level up your GFs abilities which can only be done by keeping them active participants in battles. So what results is just constant tedium which makes you hate whenever they force you to change characters, further increasing your hatred for these already boring non-people!
Weapons also cannot simply be bought but instead, must be crafted. You go to a store like usual but you need to discover weapon blueprints, found in magazines, before you can do anything there. You then need to have the correct items found from monsters in order to actually make the weapons for each character. These raise their base strength and hit percentages to give you that extra boost to attacks for battle. The problem is that these items often need to be stolen from enemies as the drop rate for some is extremely low. If you were like me and never stole anything in previous games, this is a painful lesson in FFVIII since your attacks will be left woefully pathetic by the endgame when you're still using your starting weapons. Of course, there isn't anything that tells you this, you just have to figure it out.
This is something that's especially odd since otherwise, the game goes way overboard in making sure you understand the systems. Since you are a mercenary working with an organization, you actually get a salary throughout the game, given to you at time intervals. Your salary is based on your SeeD level which is mostly determined by the level of tests you have passed. That's right, this game has tests. You know, those things that kids take because they're fun? Oh wait, that's not right...
Anyway, at any point in the game, you can take tests up to whatever Squall's level is at the time up to a maximum of 30. Each test has 10 questions and you have to get 100% in order to progress up the levels. Doing the math, that means you need to answer 300 questions about the game before it deems you worthy of playing it. Since you get more money for higher levels, the game also doesn't tell you which of these questions you got wrong. Best case scenario, if you can't pass a test, you have to wade through menus of support documents to find the correct answer. Worst case scenario, they ask about an extremely specific situation that you actually have to go out and find before you can answer it. It's a pain in the ass that didn't need to be so opaque. The problems of this system are made even clearer by the fact that playing it today means you can just look online to find the answers. This is also way more helpful, allowing the test to actually teach you the game rather than just make you feel like an idiot.
Anyway, I'm near the end of the game, about to jump into the Pandora something or other and finish this bullshit so I'll save my final judgment for then. Perhaps some story threads resolve themselves but I'm not holding my breath. I'll finish this up probably this week and get back to you though. I've got a hold of a ROM of Final Fantasy IX which I can play through a PSP emulator (since it was released on PSN) so that's good to go also! I'm kind of excited to jump into that since I was immediately turned off by the art style back in the day but am told it's actually a really great game. It'll be fun to play a Final Fantasy game that I actually know nothing about. I don't even know the name of the villain going into it!
Game on!
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