Final Fantasy 8 - Final Thoughts
Now with the title bit up, let's throw up the stats board, and then we can REALLY get started!
Final Fantasy 8 - Game Stats
Hours Played - 76 hours
Final Party Levels (Listed from highest to lowest)
- Squall - Level 100
- Zell - Level 61
- Selphie - Level 58
- Quistis - Level 57
- Irvine - Level 56
- Rinoa - Level 54
I'm actually fairly proud here. I managed to max out a character! Of course, Squall (from the beginning) was almost always several levels above the others. Before I started really getting levels, he was nearly TWENTY levels above the others. I'd put up the Guardian Force levels, but those are generally irrelevant. That...and it'd take up too much space typing it up. Let's just get to my review.
For this round, I've got FOUR parts to mention! Yeah, that's right...I am upgrading again! However, the first one is simply to say "neener-neener" to the previous title more than anything. I doubt I keep it after this review although it will get mentions. The four parts (in order I'll be reviewing) are presentation, game play, story, and characters. Without further ado, let us start with PRESENTATION! *insert music and lights and shit*
I have made presentation for a point for a good reason. As far as Playstation graphics should be concerned, this game looks downright amazing. It easily blows away anything done previously in the FF series, and I'm mostly looking at you FF7. FF7 is a large graphical update to FF6 more than anything. FF8 has taken the idea of 3D Final Fantasy and given it the look it STILL uses today. What am I talking about? FF8 presents fully detailed and and full sized characters. After what FF8 did to it, the rest of the titles (namely FFX and after) started making people look like...well people. (FYI, I love FF9, so I'm not dogging on it.) I understand old game consoles and FF7 had limitations, but this is a great point nonetheless. Everything in FF8 looks and feels lived in. Towns look like real towns with lots of little details to accentuate things. It's a good touch on a really good looking game. The music is really great, but that's no surprise considering everybody's favorite Mr. Uematsu is behind it. I just wanted to get it out there that this title changed a lot and really upped the ante for Square Enix to constantly improve on the look and detail of their games. Even today, Final Fantasy is always a staple in the "this shit looks amazing" graphics. Even when compared to all else, Final Fantasy always steps above in their presentation. With that said and done, I'm going to move on to the larger portion of the review. Please bear with me as I go through a looong review.
Final Fantasy 8 takes your ATB (Active Time Battle) system and makes its changes. I wouldn't say anything is necessarily improved though, but nothing at this point is really in need of improving! Battles offer you the basic commands of Items, Magic, Draw, GF, and the special commands. The main commands are pretty easy and straight forward, but Special Commands bring something interesting to the table. Examples of these include the Recover, Revive, or Treatment command. Recover fully heals, Revive...revives, and Treatment heals any status effects. These are just a few of the fairly diverse list of special commands. Of course, these replace having any other commands outside of Attack. You always have that. After that, the only other thing truly worth mentioning is the Limit Break system. In FF6, you more or less always had it. In FF7, you got a bar that charged up as you lost health. In FF8, it sort of combines the two ideas. You only get your Limit Break in FF8 when your health is critical. After that point, it it possible to constantly use your Limit Break as long as you don't get out of it. This means that yes...you could just stay at low HP and constantly Limit Break, but it also leaves you up to dying easily. The game offers the Aura spell to allow for constantly Limit Breaks, but this feels like cheating to just rain down Limit Breaks on everybody. (Of course, that was my strategy for the final boss...) I'm more or less undecided on this, but I didn't really touch my Limit Breaks until the game was done with. Therefore, I'm not the best judge on them. They do have some super powerful ones though. That's about it for battle game play, but now we should look over the system for characters...
The biggest thing you should love OR hate about Final Fantasy 8 is the Junction System. It's actually a really clever yet incredibly customizing system. You are a bit out of luck early on, but once you have at least half of the Guardian Forces, you can basically make a super team suited to your needs. However, with the Junction System comes the Draw system of magic, and I can tell you that this is probably a big reason people don't like it. For me, I'm cool with drawing, but I spend more time than I should doing it. Before I got anywhere in FF8, I spent at least an hour drawing all the magic I could so I had a couple sets of 100. This gave me a stupidly large advantage early on. This is somewhat of a flaw in FF8. I'm not necessarily looking for a challenge at this point, but since I have no limit to what I can draw...Why not draw it all? I even doubled if not tripled the time of a boss battle by drawing all the magic I wanted. With a pile of 100 magics, you can easily boost your team to superhuman limits in categories and make the initial bosses zero challenge. Not a huge complaint, but it would be better to limit me somehow at some point.
The next part of the Junction System would be the summoning of GFs in battle. They have a lot of cool and even some fun summons in the game, but they made summons into...win buttons. Once you get the Boost ability of a GF, you can boost its power to 150% for most GFs and even 250% for Eden! GFs have zero cost and can be done as often as you want. Sure, there is a time you have to wait for them, but that speeds up as you use a specific GF over and over. At one point, I just stopped using magic entirely and relied on physical strikes or GF summons. You can modify attacks to have elements or statuses, and attacks, when junctioned properly, tend to be more powerful than any magic you can use. The game sticks to the same basic elements and statuses while adding in a few fun ones like Vit-0, which is probably the best one. (Quick explanation...it makes their defense ZERO.)
One of the best parts is also a really shitty part of FF8. That part is enemy levels. Basically, instead of enemies being level constricted all over the map, they all level up with you as you level up. Near the beginning, they will almost always remain behind you if you draw magic to the extreme like I did. Later on, there can be several enemies that do offer some challenge. Overall, this makes random battles more rewarding and more challenging. On the flip side of this, it can be downright annoying. FF8 uses an upgrade system to weapons as opposed to buying new ones. To perform any of these upgrades, you have to collect items off of enemies. The initial upgrades are easy and only need a few items of course. However, later on becomes a huge pain just to locate some enemies. On top of this, enemies have a different item drop rate based completely on their level. This means you have to either...
The biggest thing you should love OR hate about Final Fantasy 8 is the Junction System. It's actually a really clever yet incredibly customizing system. You are a bit out of luck early on, but once you have at least half of the Guardian Forces, you can basically make a super team suited to your needs. However, with the Junction System comes the Draw system of magic, and I can tell you that this is probably a big reason people don't like it. For me, I'm cool with drawing, but I spend more time than I should doing it. Before I got anywhere in FF8, I spent at least an hour drawing all the magic I could so I had a couple sets of 100. This gave me a stupidly large advantage early on. This is somewhat of a flaw in FF8. I'm not necessarily looking for a challenge at this point, but since I have no limit to what I can draw...Why not draw it all? I even doubled if not tripled the time of a boss battle by drawing all the magic I wanted. With a pile of 100 magics, you can easily boost your team to superhuman limits in categories and make the initial bosses zero challenge. Not a huge complaint, but it would be better to limit me somehow at some point.
The next part of the Junction System would be the summoning of GFs in battle. They have a lot of cool and even some fun summons in the game, but they made summons into...win buttons. Once you get the Boost ability of a GF, you can boost its power to 150% for most GFs and even 250% for Eden! GFs have zero cost and can be done as often as you want. Sure, there is a time you have to wait for them, but that speeds up as you use a specific GF over and over. At one point, I just stopped using magic entirely and relied on physical strikes or GF summons. You can modify attacks to have elements or statuses, and attacks, when junctioned properly, tend to be more powerful than any magic you can use. The game sticks to the same basic elements and statuses while adding in a few fun ones like Vit-0, which is probably the best one. (Quick explanation...it makes their defense ZERO.)
One of the best parts is also a really shitty part of FF8. That part is enemy levels. Basically, instead of enemies being level constricted all over the map, they all level up with you as you level up. Near the beginning, they will almost always remain behind you if you draw magic to the extreme like I did. Later on, there can be several enemies that do offer some challenge. Overall, this makes random battles more rewarding and more challenging. On the flip side of this, it can be downright annoying. FF8 uses an upgrade system to weapons as opposed to buying new ones. To perform any of these upgrades, you have to collect items off of enemies. The initial upgrades are easy and only need a few items of course. However, later on becomes a huge pain just to locate some enemies. On top of this, enemies have a different item drop rate based completely on their level. This means you have to either...
- Really luck on enemy item drops (You won't.)
- Get Tonberry with Level Up/Level Down ability and even the odds slightly (Only helps.)
- Play insanely large amounts of the card game Triple Triad to get a dozen cards to make ONE of the items in question.
As fun as the card game can be, it relies a lot on chance and luck. This means your best alternative is to find rare enemies with rare items. A couple of these enemies can be HARDER than the regular bosses, like Ruby Dragon. You could possibly spend hours finding a SINGLE monster just to have it drop the wrong item. I realize I might have just been unlucky, but this downright pissed me off and made me want to quit all together. It's my biggest complaint of the entire game though. The only other thing I'd say is that it gets annoying when a regular enemy takes forever to fight because he has a pile of HP but isn't directly hard or powerful outside of that. This means an average random encounter has a slight chance (later on) of being a long battle for absolutely no reason. But...that's about it.
To quickly review before moving to the next point, the battle system is upgraded ATB but generally the same. The Junction System is an incredibly awesome and customizable system of stats, but you can easily take advantage of it and make yourself ridiculous. It's nice that battles level up with you so that you are always challenged. However, this can get tedious and annoying when looking for specific enemies and items in a pile of random. Overall, it's still fairly enjoyable and a nice different experience. I'm calling that wrapped up...I spent longer than I should on it. ONWARD TO STORY!
(If you didn't realize it, there is going to be spoilers here so...OMG LOOKOUT! SPOILERS!)
The story of FF8... sort of goes all over. It does well on the story progression overall. I'd say the story is basically composed of three big pieces. You have the Sorceresses, Squall, and the romance of sorts. It does tell you that "Sorceress is evil!", but of course, we learn that there is more to it than that. We find out this whole thing about a Sorceress from the future wanting to compress time into one space. However, I don't think it ever really explains WHY she does it. I might have missed that somewhere, but the only thing you can figure is she has SOME reason. It might be evil, but it might just be a generic "I don't want to die" thing. Outside of Sorceress thing, there's the parts about SeeD, Garden, and Squall. Like a lot of FF titles, the game does focus on other characters, but the main character is king. Squall's story is growing out of his "lone wolf" mentality. He learns that he needs people, and he learns about love. That brings us to the romantic part of the story. It only gets a brief portion here and there, but it becomes the main focus of Disc 3 aside from Ultimecia. This is more character-stuff, so I'll go into it more later. As for any real downsides...
I will say that you can start learning about all kinds of things early on if you talk to people, but if you don't talk to everyone, you can miss out on a LOT of extra details that fills in spots. It's mostly of the backstory or history in-game, but it'd be nice if more of it was straightforward as opposed to random NPC babble. The dream sequences are interesting enough, but they just add a pile of questions to the game when you are barely starting. Once you learn more, it does resolve itself, but it can feel annoying at the same time. Personally, I liked Laguna better than Squall. That's all I'll say about that though. There's the whole thing of "turns out we were all orphans together" twist. I understand it, but it feels like it was used for big plot device and twist. Outside of explaining some of them, it basically meant nothing else as far as I'm concerned. Of course, it was a pretty good twist that you don't see coming, so it succeeds in that capacity. They managed to handle the situation of "time travel" fairly well, but the ending cutscene is somewhat confusing at best. I dunno whether to take it at face value or believe it has more meaning to it. (I prefer the face value version.) I don't get why things have to be overly confusing or deep like this. That'd be all of the "downside" to the game as far as story is concerned.
If I had to be straightforward about the story and put it simple...I like the story. I don't love it, but I like it. It's well done and more or less complete. There are plenty of details left out, but they were either never found by me or left out. It gives you the full satisfaction of a complete ending (UNLIKE YOU FF7!). Squall's bit is waaay better than Cloud ever was. (Of course, that isn't really that hard to top.) The romantic story is easily the best so far in the series. Starting with FF4, they all have some, but they don't ever truly focus on it or make it a big part of the story. With story said and covered, let's get down to the characters!
As you may recall (from playing or reading my reviews), the character aspect of Final Fantasy first got its start in Final Fantasy 4 with Cecil and company. Since then, the characters have been a bigger aspect of the series and so far have just constantly improved. FF6 still has some of the best characters of the series. FF7 gave it a good shot and gave us a handful of good. FF8 continues the tradition by giving us an all-star cast of good characters. Before I go on, I will say that I only have a couple favorites of the group, and that my opinion of the others isn't great. And so...let's do it!
The main cast of FF8 (play-wise) is a selection of six characters: Squall, Quistis, Zell, Selphie, Rinoa, and Irvine. Everybody doesn't get a huge amount of spotlight in the game, but they all have at least one moment of "character revealing." Technically, the spotlight would be on whoever you keep in your party the most. No matter the situation, they each have something different to say. FF7 did this as well, but they didn't always have something super relevant to add. In FF8's case, you could easily unlock entire sets of new and informing dialogue to hear/read. (I know this for sure thanks to the Game Script on GameFAQs located here.) Like I stated before, it is an interesting and somewhat unexpected twist when the group finds out about all being related through the orphanage (minus Rinoa of course), but I found that to be a bit touch and go.
As to not keep dragging this on, I'll try to get to the point. The characters don't all get a lot of spotlight, but they each tend to have their one big moment. They all feel better and more realistic characters than any possible one before this. Each one shows to be more than they appear. They have emotions, feelings, dreams, and so much more. Even many of the side-ish characters are better done. Seifer, Edea, Cid, Raijin, Fuujin, and hell even Biggs and Wedge are better done! They all evolve and change throughout the game. They prove to have feelings and dreams. The characters aren't my favorite cast in entirety, but they are a likable group nonetheless.
If I have to make a "bad comment" on all these characters, I'd have to point my finger at Ultimecia. Outside of the final area, you never directly meet her at any other point. She "possess" people in the current time and simply uses them for her own means. That's evil...but she doesn't really get much said or done outside of those acts. She wants to compress time but never really explains why. Upon meeting her, she basically just says something about banishing us to a place where we will slave for her forever. It's evil, but it doesn't feel as evil as past villains were aiming for. It's a weirdish kind of evil. I'd say...she doesn't really rank in the top villains like I previously said. Maybe I'm not the best judge of this. Maybe I read parts of the game wrong and didn't understand it right. Regardless, she's not the best villain. That's really all I got.
One last bit before I wrap it up (I PROMISE THIS TIME!) is talking about Squall. Squall is a strong male lead, but his attitude isn't the most drawing thing about him. Sure, it is incredibly honest and accurate, but how am I supposed to relate to a complete "don't care" attitude? I really can't myself. There are others out there who can and do, but I can't. It's interesting to see his dramatic change due to Rinoa though, so that helps to make him a better character and a better person overall. As a lead, I'd say he can be hard to like at first, but you grow to like him later on. Problem is...you have to stick around long enough to get to like him. Not my favorite lead, but who is? I'm not sure, but I will know before it it said and done. To sum up characters at this point, like any selection of characters, you are going to like some and hate others. There isn't much more to say. I enjoyed the cast as a whole, but the villain wasn't as strong evil-wise as I first thought. So....yeah!
Time to wrap this game up as a whole! The presentation is some of the best so far. It took Final Fantasy to a whole new level from where it was and set the standard for today. The game play, as per battle system and level system, is really good. Battles haven't changed much, but the Junction System is a lot of fun. Only problem is enemy leveling can easily get annoying. The story can seem confusing with the dream sequences and sometimes lack of details, but it's a decent story overall and told very well. The characters come about to be some of the most realistic in the series. I feel like the villain stops short of everyone else, but I've seen worse.
It's obvious what I'm say about it...Go play it! It's a great game for Final Fantasy beginners or Final Fantasy veterans. I would say for those who are unsure while first playing...stick it through. If you make it through the entirety of Disc 1 and don't like it, I say you have more than the right to stop then. This has been a fantastic Final Fantasy journey, and I look forward to Final Fantasy 9. In the past, it was my favorite, and it is now about to be retested in that capacity. Will it hold up? Will it lose its place in my heart? Find out in the next episode of RECURRING FANTASY...The Power of 9!
~May the Crystals Guide Me~
To quickly review before moving to the next point, the battle system is upgraded ATB but generally the same. The Junction System is an incredibly awesome and customizable system of stats, but you can easily take advantage of it and make yourself ridiculous. It's nice that battles level up with you so that you are always challenged. However, this can get tedious and annoying when looking for specific enemies and items in a pile of random. Overall, it's still fairly enjoyable and a nice different experience. I'm calling that wrapped up...I spent longer than I should on it. ONWARD TO STORY!
(If you didn't realize it, there is going to be spoilers here so...OMG LOOKOUT! SPOILERS!)
The story of FF8... sort of goes all over. It does well on the story progression overall. I'd say the story is basically composed of three big pieces. You have the Sorceresses, Squall, and the romance of sorts. It does tell you that "Sorceress is evil!", but of course, we learn that there is more to it than that. We find out this whole thing about a Sorceress from the future wanting to compress time into one space. However, I don't think it ever really explains WHY she does it. I might have missed that somewhere, but the only thing you can figure is she has SOME reason. It might be evil, but it might just be a generic "I don't want to die" thing. Outside of Sorceress thing, there's the parts about SeeD, Garden, and Squall. Like a lot of FF titles, the game does focus on other characters, but the main character is king. Squall's story is growing out of his "lone wolf" mentality. He learns that he needs people, and he learns about love. That brings us to the romantic part of the story. It only gets a brief portion here and there, but it becomes the main focus of Disc 3 aside from Ultimecia. This is more character-stuff, so I'll go into it more later. As for any real downsides...
I will say that you can start learning about all kinds of things early on if you talk to people, but if you don't talk to everyone, you can miss out on a LOT of extra details that fills in spots. It's mostly of the backstory or history in-game, but it'd be nice if more of it was straightforward as opposed to random NPC babble. The dream sequences are interesting enough, but they just add a pile of questions to the game when you are barely starting. Once you learn more, it does resolve itself, but it can feel annoying at the same time. Personally, I liked Laguna better than Squall. That's all I'll say about that though. There's the whole thing of "turns out we were all orphans together" twist. I understand it, but it feels like it was used for big plot device and twist. Outside of explaining some of them, it basically meant nothing else as far as I'm concerned. Of course, it was a pretty good twist that you don't see coming, so it succeeds in that capacity. They managed to handle the situation of "time travel" fairly well, but the ending cutscene is somewhat confusing at best. I dunno whether to take it at face value or believe it has more meaning to it. (I prefer the face value version.) I don't get why things have to be overly confusing or deep like this. That'd be all of the "downside" to the game as far as story is concerned.
If I had to be straightforward about the story and put it simple...I like the story. I don't love it, but I like it. It's well done and more or less complete. There are plenty of details left out, but they were either never found by me or left out. It gives you the full satisfaction of a complete ending (UNLIKE YOU FF7!). Squall's bit is waaay better than Cloud ever was. (Of course, that isn't really that hard to top.) The romantic story is easily the best so far in the series. Starting with FF4, they all have some, but they don't ever truly focus on it or make it a big part of the story. With story said and covered, let's get down to the characters!
As you may recall (from playing or reading my reviews), the character aspect of Final Fantasy first got its start in Final Fantasy 4 with Cecil and company. Since then, the characters have been a bigger aspect of the series and so far have just constantly improved. FF6 still has some of the best characters of the series. FF7 gave it a good shot and gave us a handful of good. FF8 continues the tradition by giving us an all-star cast of good characters. Before I go on, I will say that I only have a couple favorites of the group, and that my opinion of the others isn't great. And so...let's do it!
The main cast of FF8 (play-wise) is a selection of six characters: Squall, Quistis, Zell, Selphie, Rinoa, and Irvine. Everybody doesn't get a huge amount of spotlight in the game, but they all have at least one moment of "character revealing." Technically, the spotlight would be on whoever you keep in your party the most. No matter the situation, they each have something different to say. FF7 did this as well, but they didn't always have something super relevant to add. In FF8's case, you could easily unlock entire sets of new and informing dialogue to hear/read. (I know this for sure thanks to the Game Script on GameFAQs located here.) Like I stated before, it is an interesting and somewhat unexpected twist when the group finds out about all being related through the orphanage (minus Rinoa of course), but I found that to be a bit touch and go.
As to not keep dragging this on, I'll try to get to the point. The characters don't all get a lot of spotlight, but they each tend to have their one big moment. They all feel better and more realistic characters than any possible one before this. Each one shows to be more than they appear. They have emotions, feelings, dreams, and so much more. Even many of the side-ish characters are better done. Seifer, Edea, Cid, Raijin, Fuujin, and hell even Biggs and Wedge are better done! They all evolve and change throughout the game. They prove to have feelings and dreams. The characters aren't my favorite cast in entirety, but they are a likable group nonetheless.
If I have to make a "bad comment" on all these characters, I'd have to point my finger at Ultimecia. Outside of the final area, you never directly meet her at any other point. She "possess" people in the current time and simply uses them for her own means. That's evil...but she doesn't really get much said or done outside of those acts. She wants to compress time but never really explains why. Upon meeting her, she basically just says something about banishing us to a place where we will slave for her forever. It's evil, but it doesn't feel as evil as past villains were aiming for. It's a weirdish kind of evil. I'd say...she doesn't really rank in the top villains like I previously said. Maybe I'm not the best judge of this. Maybe I read parts of the game wrong and didn't understand it right. Regardless, she's not the best villain. That's really all I got.
One last bit before I wrap it up (I PROMISE THIS TIME!) is talking about Squall. Squall is a strong male lead, but his attitude isn't the most drawing thing about him. Sure, it is incredibly honest and accurate, but how am I supposed to relate to a complete "don't care" attitude? I really can't myself. There are others out there who can and do, but I can't. It's interesting to see his dramatic change due to Rinoa though, so that helps to make him a better character and a better person overall. As a lead, I'd say he can be hard to like at first, but you grow to like him later on. Problem is...you have to stick around long enough to get to like him. Not my favorite lead, but who is? I'm not sure, but I will know before it it said and done. To sum up characters at this point, like any selection of characters, you are going to like some and hate others. There isn't much more to say. I enjoyed the cast as a whole, but the villain wasn't as strong evil-wise as I first thought. So....yeah!
Time to wrap this game up as a whole! The presentation is some of the best so far. It took Final Fantasy to a whole new level from where it was and set the standard for today. The game play, as per battle system and level system, is really good. Battles haven't changed much, but the Junction System is a lot of fun. Only problem is enemy leveling can easily get annoying. The story can seem confusing with the dream sequences and sometimes lack of details, but it's a decent story overall and told very well. The characters come about to be some of the most realistic in the series. I feel like the villain stops short of everyone else, but I've seen worse.
It's obvious what I'm say about it...Go play it! It's a great game for Final Fantasy beginners or Final Fantasy veterans. I would say for those who are unsure while first playing...stick it through. If you make it through the entirety of Disc 1 and don't like it, I say you have more than the right to stop then. This has been a fantastic Final Fantasy journey, and I look forward to Final Fantasy 9. In the past, it was my favorite, and it is now about to be retested in that capacity. Will it hold up? Will it lose its place in my heart? Find out in the next episode of RECURRING FANTASY...The Power of 9!
~May the Crystals Guide Me~
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