Hey Squall, You Wanna Title This Review For Me? '...Whatever'
Written: Feb 21 '04
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Creative gameplay elements, the existence of Rinoa
Cons: Confusing, unbalanced gameplay elements, the existence of Squall
The Bottom Line: Hey Squall, I think you need to talk to Tidus about how to properly handle things when a beautiful girl falls in love with you. '...whatever'
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| awoolcott's Full Review: Final Fantasy VIII for PlayStation 1 |
After the tremendous commercial success of Final Fantasy VII (and giving birth to the single most annoying individual game fanbase of our generation), Squaresoft obviously had a lot of work to do for an encore. And it's obvious they did a lot of work, as Final Fantasy VIII abandons nearly all usual FF trademarks to create a very different, very complex RPG that furthered itself from the traditional 'castles & kings' feel of the earliest Final Fantasy games. The result is a mostly good, but not particularly great or mindblowing game that hasn't aged all that well, with only the impressive visuals maintaining themselves over the last 5 years. Even today though, FFVIII is a good game - better than FFVII if you ask me - but it's not anything incredibly memorable either.
In Final Fantasy VIII, you play as Squall - a student at Balamb Garden (which I suppose could be compared to joining the Army), to become a SeeD soldier. For many reasons, Squall is a vastly lothable character - his cold-hearted mannerisms and the distance and angst he maintains is incredibly grating after a while (thankfully, at least it's explained why he's such a jackoff through the entire game). Seriously, if I wanna hang out with someone like this, I'll talk to 95% of the teenage population instead. Anyway, Squall has a few friends and a major rival at SeeD; Zell is his buddy, a fists-only kinda fighter, as well as Quistis, his instructor who is quite taken with Squall (...I beg to ask, why?). His main rival is Seifer, a confident, but arrogant and competitive fellow student, who seems to respect Squall but is too wrapped up in his conceitedness that he struggles to show it.
Early in the game, Squall and company complete their tasks to become SeeD's - and the game officially begins. It starts out innocently, with the team of Squall, Zell, and Seifer headed out for a mission, but when all hell breaks loose, the game picks up, and you start in with the main storyline - and that involves stopping a sorceress named Edea, who's out to pretty much destroy the world. There's more to it than that, but, you know, spoilers and all. Along the way, however, Squall adds more teammates to his troupe - Selphie, another SeeD from a different Garden facility, Irvine, an old-western gunslinger, and of course, Rinoa, who is determined to break Squall and get him to open up just a little bit. These folks all wind up being involved in a ridiculous plot twist that's right out of the cliché handbook, but otherwise, the story is at least passable, and outside of Squall, all the characters are pretty likable, though not as well developed as many other FF games.
There's of course one small wrinkle, and that's when you get a strange period of time when you take control of Laguna, a solider, and his 2 friends. Why this happens is only revealed later in the game (part of that crazy plot twist, actually), but it all adds up in disc 3. Anyway, this happens a few times through the game, even though you mostly spend time playing with Squall's party. Most of the time, the Laguna segments are goofy and un-serious, taking the heat off the heavy-handed drama of the main storyline.
Anyway, RPG's still have gameplay, and FFVIII has it, in a very different form. The first thing you might notice is that there's no magic points anymore. Instead, magic is handled through the Draw system. Long as you have the whole junctioning thing going down (more on that in a second), you can draw magic from different points on the map, or even steal it from enemies. As long as a character has the Draw ability, they can take magic and use it. This process is naturally quite unique and does take time getting used to, if only because of the complexity of the Junction system.
The Junctioning system is the heart of the game - if you don't use it...you won't get far at all, as you'll be only able to attack in battle, and not use items, draw magic, or use GF's in battle. In order to junction, you must have a Guardian Force (GF) to junction. Thus acquiring GF's is very important - some you earn the easy way, some you draw from bosses, others you have to battle and defeat in order to gain their use. Once you do, you junction the GF to your character, and then can learn abilities to junction, use magic, items, and of course, summon the GF to virtually destroy enemies, creating a sometimes overbearing lack of gameplay balance. It's actually both easier and harder to understand than it sounds, as only really paying attention to the in-game tutorials will help understand it enough to avoid totally crippling your characters.
The ATB is of course the staple of of the battle engine, and since random battles appear every .5 seconds, you'll get used to it. What's different about the battles is how the monsters and bosses actually level up with you - if you're stronger, they'll be stronger and tougher as well; none of that 'level up a lot, and then be way overpowered and waste the bosses' stuff that a lot of these RPG's can fall into. This does lead to a few problems, as it makes the game fall into the 'use GF, rinse, repeat' trap as the easiest way to crush difficult bosses and monsters. Anyway, the battle system isn't much different than past FF games, with the lone exception of being able to draw, and then use, magic from enemies; which is wise, as they tend to carry the best spells in the game, or in some cases, draw a GF from them. The only way to know, however, is to check out what they have and then choose what you want, so be sure to at least do the draw command on each enemy. It is imperative that each character has a GF, unless you want to do GF switches all the time when the party focus shifts around.
The Guardian Forces are effectively the downfall of FFVIII in a gameplay sense, as they make most battles anti-climactic and simplistic - just summon, wait out the ATB bar (which varies depending on your compatibility with each one), and let it do its thing. Once you've summoned the GF, it's own HP replaces yours, which is always a few times higher than your own, making it a nice shield against a boss with a high-damage attack, as well as a way to avoid annoying status effects. But otherwise, just using them most of the game can lead to breezing by, no matter how strong enemies are.
It creates an imbalance that is not always much fun, and added that you'll have characters sometimes with much higher stats than others, it seems so awkward at times to engage in battles. Unless you spend hours leveling up to even things out, you'll probably wind up like this, relying on GF's to win. It's disappointing and why there's 3 stars next to the review - the junction system and how it affects drawing magic and the GF's is a good, creative idea, just not fully executed properly to balance itself out. Adding enemies that level up along with you is a smart idea, but it only adds to the imbalance if you have a bunch of characters many levels below Squall's (as he is always in your party, he's guaranteed to be at higher levels of strength), as they'll get whooped pretty soundly by increasingly tough monsters.
Still, the mostly interesting story and characters (even Squall at times, as you learn more about him, though he is still a very annoying creation) is enough to at least press on, though the game for me was only doable in small doses, before getting annoyed at either the gameplay system or just dealing with controlling the poster-boy for Prozac, who's favorite line is '...Whatever.' Most of the time, I just kept asking myself why in the hell Rinoa would keep trying to get him to open up, when he just blows her off most of the time, until later in the quest (especially when Rinoa is this beautiful young woman with an obvious interest in him, but he could care less...man has some serious issues. Must be one of those 'guys' who think FFX-2 has too much cheesecake, sex appeal and fan service, eh?). For a game that's supposedly pushing the theme of love, there's a wee bit too little of it - might as well save that theme for Final Fantasy X, which managed to create a story of love with likable characters that's lightyears ahead of this.
For being a 5 year old PlayStation game, Final Fantasy VIII still manages to look good. Other than the ugly world map (good riddance to this crap these days), the locales are beautifully pre-rendered and filled to the brim with detail that still looks fine today, with our current generation visual goodness. Just look at Esthar in disc 3 and be blown away with graphical splendor on a now-ancient game console (I ask, why am I more wowed by PlayStation graphics now than PS2? Age does weird stuff). There's not a major load of color this time around, as it feels much more realistic than fantasy (I wouldn't call it Sci-Fi, as it is more fantasy than FFVII), but all looks good, most especially the many towns you visit, like Deling City and Esthar.
Most importantly, the characters have now abandoned their miniature, silly designs for realistic, detailed ones that look more like real people than before. Only FFX and the upcoming FFXII have surpassed these, for obvious reasons. There's way too much body language going on, but without voice acting to pass along the tone, something has to get across the emotions of the moment. While more than a few have shunned this way of designing characters, for me, it works just fine.
The biggest deal though, is the awesome GF's summons. While they tend to be long and get repetitive after a while, they're technical marvels, filling the screen and doing their business in stunning ways. Naturally, these have been surpassed by both FFIX, FFX, and FFX-2 (in the form of spherechanges in the latter, naturally), but for its time, these were wonders of Square's ability to create some very cool graphical tricks, and even today, are still impressive, especially given the hardware it's done on.
Without voice acting, the music has to carry the tone of an RPG, and Final Fantasy VIII does it...decently. Definitely not Uematsu's finest hour (I will claim FFX until it can be topped, only that soundtrack can I listen to and hear a track and remember exactly what happens in the game when it plays), the soundtrack has a definite war/military theme to it most of the time, but aside from the great battle theme and of course, Victory Fanfare, nothing is completely memorable unless you're playing the game. Many compositions are almost bordering on annoying, actually, though there's just as many good to great ones (the opening theme that plays when you first start the game is definitely a high point). There's far worse game music out there, but for FF, it's a bit disappointing.
The Bottom Line
As an experiment of 1999, Final Fantasy VIII is a decent game that didn't get all the kinks worked out, creating a gameplay system that's creative and promising, but way too unbalanced to work 100% effectively. It's also a game that hasn't aged well aside from graphics, as storylines have improved and gameplay is more streamlined, yet complex, in future FF releases, but still can claim to be a pretty good PlayStation RPG that has issues, but is playable all the way to the end despite itself. I actually enjoyed it more than the 3 stars show, but it's definitely a flawed experiment, but one at least worth checking out. As Square Enix has re-released FFVIII under their name, it's available pretty much anywhere for $20, it's a good value for the price. As long as you can tolerate Squall, anyhow.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
awoolcott
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Location: Arizona
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Okay, scratch that...Uncharted 2 - Game of the Year.
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