Final Fantasy 8 - More like, Final Fantasy VIII !! [SquareSoft WriteOff]
Written: Jun 26 '01 (Updated Jul 25 '02)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: incredible cinematic presentation, excellent soundtrack, deep, entrancing gameplay
Cons: battling consists of nothing more than repeated GF summons
The Bottom Line: .
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| xeno3998's Full Review: Final Fantasy VIII for PlayStation 1 |
Squaresoft's FF8 does it's best to harness the energy, emotion and entertainment value(s) of the previous 7 games in the series only to fail miserably. Put simply, this is NOT a real Final Fantasy game, at least not according to rabid FF fans. Regardless of what this is or isn't, I love it....in fact, this is the best Final Fantasy game ever in my opinion. I never thought I would say that after playing FF9 a few months back, but FF8 truly outshines all others in the series in almost every way imaginable.
As Squall Lionheart, trained member of the SeeDs of Balamb Garden, which is a military training facility, you are cast off once upon a time to the Rogue City of Dollet, where the Galbadian Army has invaded. This will be an exam for you and the rest of your class, including Zell 'chicken-wuss' Dincht and Seifer Almasy, the captain. Once the Radio Communications tower and the entire city of Dollet have been liberated, Squall high-tails it back to Balamb for further orders.
From Balamb, he is assigned to assist in a resistance movement in the town of Timber which lies on a different continent. This resistance movement is being lead by the organization Zone and Watts work for, who end up being your leaders in the situation. During the resistance, Squall meets up with Rinoa again, though now he realizes her true intent the first time he saw her at Balamb, and why she is where she is now.
That's all I will tell you about the storyline, because after this there are some moderate spoilers and we all don't like those now do we? I'll just mention what aren't spoilers. There is a whole sub-plot involving Laguna Loire, Ward and Kiros which Squall and his party experience as flashbacks, and that these flashbacks tie in with a person in the Laguna scenarios that's causing them. There's also the Sorceress and her militaristic over-powering of the Galbadian nation, and some other sub-plot elements that make up the FFVIII experience (agian, these were not spoilers).
The Storyline is excellent, though it could have benefited greatly from some more thorough development. I understand why Square would attempt to subtly progress the plot through slightly-off-topic conversations or metaphors, but there are times when the plot hammer needs to hit hard for things to make sense. The story isn't bad - in fact, it's one of the best on Playstation ever, but it would have been much better if some elements were further described and emphasized upon (Squall's Laguna flashbacks come to mind)
The game's characters develop decently, but I could have lived without the nagging personalities of a few charas in this game. Zell mainly, seems to have established himself as a main character, when he really doesn't add to the storyline much at all, nor does he affect the outcome of the story at all. He is a powerful character, but it would have helped a lot if he had been better developed and/or if his personality would take a drastic change. Most of the characters are typical, except Squall who's arrogance and apathy for anything not related to his mission set him aside from the otherwise cliche cast.
Gameplay is your usual Final Fantasy stuff, oh you know, the infamous ATB (Active Time Battle) battle system, running through a combination of towns, dungeons and world map settings gaining experience for your characters, progressing the storyline forth - FFVIII is like a pseudo-combination of Final Fantasy VII's battling with the incredibly powerful storytelling of Xenogears. Of course, it isn't a complete hybrid of the two, it simply borrows many of it's central elements from those two games, there are many other differing areas of gameplay where FF8 dffers vastly from it's peers.
First off, there's the much-touted card game, which is infinitely better than the rushed, dumbed-down and simply unfun card game in Final Fantasy IX. You're given a pack of cards at the beginning of the game, and with these you must battle against other card players to earn their cards, or lose your cards to them if you suck. The cards are based off of the designs of other characters, Guardian Forces and random battle enemies you will encounter in the game. To start a card game you walk up to some NPC chap and initiate the duel with the Square button. You're brought up to a screen with a table in the center and two sides for each opposing player and cards on either side.
The actual Card gameplay is a real treat. The main objective of the Card game is to fill the card table (nine slots) with cards and end the game with more cards in your hand than the opposition. Should each side have an equal amount of cards (5), a Draw will be issued and in the case of Sudden Death rules, the match will go on. There are several other unselectable; predetermined options awaiting you should you choose to challenge someone from one region or a player from another. Some of these options include the dreaded "Plus", which flips two cards in a players favor should one of their cards' sides match up in numerical value with the sides of another card. The more sides that match up, the more cards you receive from the opposition and the better a chance you have at winning the game. Then there's the sub-element of (pardon my Awesome) Elements that use the elemental values of some cards to flip over those that oppose their element and/or are weaker cards.
The card game is brilliant, in every way. I would accept it as an entirely different game unto itself! It's much, much better than most of the Card VideoGame drivel we see nowadays in stores, that's for certain.
The level of depth associated with impeccably placing a card and not having it tackled by the 'Plus' or 'Same' rules is a brain-excercising experience.
Then, we have the minor element of chocobos, which have been a trademark commodity in nearly if not all Final Fantasy games released to this day. Fortunately, since I don't really like chocobos, at least not in my futuristic Final Fantasy experiences, they serve only as a minor diversion in this game. Sure there are chocobo forests ala Final Fantasy IX, but they are worthless in this game, at least without the import-only PocketStation which could be used in a mini-game called 'Chocobo's Forest'. And Since Sony had trouble meeting demand for that PDA device, it never made it's way over to this side of the swamp, and thus, the presence of chocobos in FFVIII is even more pointless. I feel sorry for the lil' buggers don't you?
Then, the uber-gameplay element of train riding, secret stuff and some more mini-games. Yes there is a lot, let me repeat myself, A LOT of hidden junk in FFVIII, and it will take you weeks of patrolling the world map and various towns and dungeons in order to find the secret(s) you're looking for. There are a good amount of hidden GF Guardian Forces, hidden Cards and Items that help you out in battle and in the game on a whole very much. Through optional side quests, these hidden necessities become available.
I feel that the amount of hidden stuff in this game is incredible, and adds a wealth of depth to a game that can barely handle being as deep and immersive as it is anyway. Bravo Square!
Final Fantasy VIII's battle engine is, as was previously mentioned, the typical Active Time Battle jargon,
just that this time, your success in battles depends more on how you prepare for them, than how you actually perform in them.
When you eventually enter a battle, you must first wait for the camera to adjust, the entire battling field to load and finally, the characters to fill in their Attack meters before you can proceed with your offensive/defensive plan of action. You can either summon a Guardian Force to quickly and efficiently exterminate anything on screen, or you can use Magic, Attacks and Items which reap absolutely no benefits unless you fight for a while or have some really powerful magic junctioned to any of the mentoned skills. That's pretty much what battles consist of, besides the occasional drawing of magic from enemies: summon Guardian Forces to aid you in your defeating of an enemy, then heal or use defend or something, then rinse, repeat and watch as victory comes your way. This is a moderate problem, because at least in Final Fantasy VII your characters' regular physical attacks did a good amount of damage, as did magic like Ultima and Comet 2, while in FFVIII, summons are what determine the outcome of battles.
Though to make up for this, Square made the pre-battle equipping, junctioning and general organizing a deep and involving task. Which brings me to my next section....
Junctioning magic is one of the best things about FF8. It allows you to customize your battles to make fighting different enemies with sometimes different elemental affiliations a simple(r) task. The result gives most gamers a headache, but no one can deny how absorbing the junctioning is especially when you consider the elemental associations of some Guardian Forces and which status-increasing abilities to equip.
With every new Guardian Force, a select quantity of Abilities presents itself that that GF can develop and master, which will ultimately spawn new abilities until two pages worth of these are filled. Some GFs already have a HP-J or other related status issue junction available when you first recruit their services, though, but other junctions would need to be levelled up first. Equipping a character with a GF that contains a specific junction would allow magic to then be accrued into that specific junction slot, thus boosting the power of that stat. Better magic in bigger quantities would raise that stat's power even more, and this is where the depth comes in, in deciding what magic to equip accrue into what junction.
There's also the matter of equipping Guardian Forces to certain characters that don't need the Abilities those GFs can provide, and spreading out your GF arsenal equally to every character in the working party is always a tough thing to decide. There's a lot of depth in the junctioning aspect which elevates FFVIII to the top of it's class in terms of replay value, as you'll want to run through this game at least once more to try all the possibilities that come with junctioning specific magic to specific abilities. The J system is impeccably tailored to my tastes, and I pity Square for removing it from Final Fantasy IX.
I found the gameplay to be a treat even though the battling can become repetitive and nausiating sometimes when long boss battles occur and you're casting a string of Guardian Force summons one after the other. Each of these GF animation sequences lasts a significant amount of time - some even reach the whole minute boundary, and thus take up a lot of game time. There is the added feature for some GFs to 'Boost' their abilities through pounding on the Square button, but that's the extent of your interaction with the GFs and sadly, only a select few Guardians utilize this.
With the various optional quests and hidden treasures galore, Final Fantasy VIII will keep most completist gamers busy for days on end - some that are crazy like me might even want to play through it again to get all the Cards, Summons, Items and max out my characters' experience levels. FFVIII makes doing these things easy witth the Islands Closest to Heaven and Hell, which are prime experience-gaining areas. There is just so much to see and do in this game that it gets one of the first 5/5 Replay Value scores I have ever given out before in my Epinions career.
One of the bigger detractors from FFVIII's gameplay is the lacking ingenuity to the ATB engine. It's true I do in fact like the junctioning system which is very unique, but the basic battling leaves a lot to be desired and isn't up to par even with that of the old SNES FF games in terms of originality, not to mention playability. If battles relied on more than just summons and if Square had implemented something that breaks new ground instead of walking on it, I would have praised this game even more.
Controlling your character is simple with the Dual Shock. The basic controls apply, and there is none of that "push forward to walk your character forward in the direction they're facing" bullsh!t that clogs many Survival Horror games. Controls in FFVIII are dead-on, accurate and simply flawless.
Final Fantasy VIII uses pre-rendered image maps as the background for any and all non-world map gameplay, and three-dimensional polygonal character models as the characters you control in the game.
It also incorporates Computer Graphics (CG) cutscenes that flow seamlessly with the gameplay. Battling is in full 3D, though.
The effect of an FMV scene playing on in the background while your characters are on screen doing whatever is astounding, to understate. The screen comes alive with intensity as, for example, you make your way through a greusome battle between the Galbadian and Balamb garden militaries, on a motorcycle, or when you guide Irvine and Squall through a moving parade - the effect is mesmerizing and can sometimes make you forget your playing and just stare in awe of what's happening.
From an architechtural standpoint, Final Fantasy VIII is neither a masterwork, nor is it a failure. Dollet, Timber and especially Balamb, though spaced out well and colorful, have such incredibly boring, uninspired architechture that they could pass for real world designs There are some notable pieces in the game, however, such as Esthar, which is huge city coated with mainly blue but has some inventive color arrangements in some areas, and the background maps are unbeatable. Esthar's high-angle camera views and numerous buildings and people to interact with give it a bustling, lively and high-tech feel. Easily the best City in the game.
The world map is again a pixilated, ugly disaster. I really don't understand why Square doesn't just follow in the footsteps of Chrono Cross with all of their world maps, and make it a painting where your characters travel to from cities and dungeons on a top-down angle, and have the map be pre-rendered and static. This would not only help save valuable disc space, but would eliminate having to look at the often-times disgusting polygonal arrangements that Square calls 'mountains' and 'towns'. A small flaw in this area, but a flaw nonetheless.
The game's graphics are not perfect, but for their time they exceeded everything else on Playstation at that time. Final Fantasy 8 even to this day is among the better looking Playstation games ever made, even when played on an original PSX machine.
Nobou Uematsu's musical pieces for FF8 range from somewhat disappointing (the regular battle music), to impressive (the new boss battle theme), to intense and splendid in every way (Laguna's battle music). There's the obligatory emotional themes for when Rinoa and Squall go on a date or relate to one another (zZz), the over-performed last boss battle music and some soothing tunes but I'm not sure where exactly they fit into the equation - mostly individual town stuff like Winhill. Overall the soundtrack is some of Nobou's best work ever, though it isn't FFVI - caliber, but then again, what is?
The rest of the sound is okay, nothing extraordinary but it does have an impact, especially the thunderous Guardian Force animations pounding down on unsuspecting enemies with thunderbolts and waves of ice cold water while you twiddle your thumb waiting for the animation to end. Attacks and a lot of engine noise make up the rest of the sound, since there is no voice acting here (YAY!).
Final Fantasy VIII is one of the greatest role playing games in existance on the regular Playstation 1. The experience is one to cherish forever, with a wonderful storyline, immersive and ground - breaking Junctioning system and enough optional side quests to tide you over until the next FF romp. Though it doesn't touch Xenogears in any of it's facets except Graphics, the game is virtually superior to all it's other competitors on PSOne. The Second best Playstation RPG ever? Maybe, just maybe...
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Recommended:
Yes
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xeno3998
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