Screenshots :.
Final Fantasy VIII
Retro
Matt
21-04-2009
"Ah, the box art. Quite lovely I reckon."
"Kick! Punch! Offer drink!"
"Ah, young love *sniffle*"
Caught iawkwardly between Final Fantasies 7 and 9, which are two of my favourite RPG's of all time, the eighth instalment in the main series proper provokes a wide range of feeling amongst the Final Fantasy hardcore. The first game to move away from the bobble-head cartoon style toward a more realistic setting, it told the story of a rather emo fella named Squall who, through his involvement with the military, ended up having to save the world from all sorts of oddness.
My opinion of what followed throughout the four-disc duration is somewhat mixed, although looking back now without the excitement-induced haze that a new Final Fantasy game brings I can still see more positives than negatives. The story was pretty interesting throughout, the levelling and abilities system worked pretty well once you’d gotten hold of the basics and – at the time – it looked fantastic. Add in another sublime Nobou Uematsu soundtrack and you soon realise that it was actually very good indeed.
Of course, following on from 7 was never going to be an easy task, and given that aforementioned 1997 classic was the first time the majority of Europe had gotten their hands on the series we could be forgiven for not realising how much Square like to tinker with battle systems, attribute building and the like between titles. Gone for the eighth game was the materia system that allowed players to slot little gems into their weapons and armour to give their characters various types of magic, with an initially confusing magic-drawing and junction system filling its place.
The general idea of this was that instead of having characters learn magic, the game would allow you to steal it from any monsters you came across and stock it for future use. Once your character had a healthy stock of the various types of magic you had two options: to use it, or to assign it to an attribute to raise their stats. The more magic you had in your stock and the more powerful the spell was would raise these stat increases even further, and many an hour could be lost tooling around with various combinations trying to strike a healthy balance. Adding 99 Ultimas to Squall’s strength was all well and good, for example, but would that stat increase make up for the 99 Ultima spells that you could then not use in battle? Much chin stroking resulted from such conundrums.
Along with all the tactical tinkery came changes to the battle system, with the majority of the difference being centred around the Limit Breaks and Summons. The former were initiated by a character dropping below a certain level of their health bar rather than 7’s system of filling a limit bar by mashing enemies, although various spells could work around this. Summons were renamed Guardian Forces and, once summoned, they protected party members with their own health bar until they were ready to unleash their attack. As with most of the game, neither system was necessarily better or worse than previous efforts; they were merely an interesting new direction for the battle system to take.
The story that played out was still the same swords-in-space kind of affair, in spite of the new visual direction that the game took. The characters were a ragtag bunch of complete opposites, with the rather dour Squall frequenting with the mad-as-a-box-of-frogs Selphie and the rather over-keen Zell amongst others. For the most part they were a decent bunch with a good dose of personality, although sharpshooter Irvine felt a bit tacked-on and the strange dream world parts of the story featuring Laguna took a heck of a while to finally click and make sense. For the most part, though, the game made you actually care about your gang and constantly developed their attitudes and outlooks as they grew, which was pleasing.
What wasn’t quite so good was that the game didn’t really feature a proper bad guy, instead throwing some kind of time-travelling sorceress at you that you don’t really ever meet until near the end of the game. Whilst Squall’s colleague-gone-bad Seifer provided a pretty interesting adversary for a while along with the original sorceress whom the main evil character possessed did the same, you never felt the animosity or grudge match atmosphere that the like of Kefka and Sephiroth had provided in previous games.
Still, even taking the negatives into account it managed to make me feel a twinge of sadness when the final credits rolled, and it was good enough to make me replay it again a few times. I am the biggest Final Fantasy 7 fanboy on earth and I also seriously enjoyed 9 too, but 8 – whilst often overlooked – stands toe-to-toe with both of them more often than not.
My opinion of what followed throughout the four-disc duration is somewhat mixed, although looking back now without the excitement-induced haze that a new Final Fantasy game brings I can still see more positives than negatives. The story was pretty interesting throughout, the levelling and abilities system worked pretty well once you’d gotten hold of the basics and – at the time – it looked fantastic. Add in another sublime Nobou Uematsu soundtrack and you soon realise that it was actually very good indeed.
Of course, following on from 7 was never going to be an easy task, and given that aforementioned 1997 classic was the first time the majority of Europe had gotten their hands on the series we could be forgiven for not realising how much Square like to tinker with battle systems, attribute building and the like between titles. Gone for the eighth game was the materia system that allowed players to slot little gems into their weapons and armour to give their characters various types of magic, with an initially confusing magic-drawing and junction system filling its place.
The general idea of this was that instead of having characters learn magic, the game would allow you to steal it from any monsters you came across and stock it for future use. Once your character had a healthy stock of the various types of magic you had two options: to use it, or to assign it to an attribute to raise their stats. The more magic you had in your stock and the more powerful the spell was would raise these stat increases even further, and many an hour could be lost tooling around with various combinations trying to strike a healthy balance. Adding 99 Ultimas to Squall’s strength was all well and good, for example, but would that stat increase make up for the 99 Ultima spells that you could then not use in battle? Much chin stroking resulted from such conundrums.
Along with all the tactical tinkery came changes to the battle system, with the majority of the difference being centred around the Limit Breaks and Summons. The former were initiated by a character dropping below a certain level of their health bar rather than 7’s system of filling a limit bar by mashing enemies, although various spells could work around this. Summons were renamed Guardian Forces and, once summoned, they protected party members with their own health bar until they were ready to unleash their attack. As with most of the game, neither system was necessarily better or worse than previous efforts; they were merely an interesting new direction for the battle system to take.
The story that played out was still the same swords-in-space kind of affair, in spite of the new visual direction that the game took. The characters were a ragtag bunch of complete opposites, with the rather dour Squall frequenting with the mad-as-a-box-of-frogs Selphie and the rather over-keen Zell amongst others. For the most part they were a decent bunch with a good dose of personality, although sharpshooter Irvine felt a bit tacked-on and the strange dream world parts of the story featuring Laguna took a heck of a while to finally click and make sense. For the most part, though, the game made you actually care about your gang and constantly developed their attitudes and outlooks as they grew, which was pleasing.
What wasn’t quite so good was that the game didn’t really feature a proper bad guy, instead throwing some kind of time-travelling sorceress at you that you don’t really ever meet until near the end of the game. Whilst Squall’s colleague-gone-bad Seifer provided a pretty interesting adversary for a while along with the original sorceress whom the main evil character possessed did the same, you never felt the animosity or grudge match atmosphere that the like of Kefka and Sephiroth had provided in previous games.
Still, even taking the negatives into account it managed to make me feel a twinge of sadness when the final credits rolled, and it was good enough to make me replay it again a few times. I am the biggest Final Fantasy 7 fanboy on earth and I also seriously enjoyed 9 too, but 8 – whilst often overlooked – stands toe-to-toe with both of them more often than not.
9/10