This is going to be a long one, so here is the TL;DR : Final Fantasy VIII is a broken game that stands to be one of the worse in the series with mechanics that desperately needed polishing. It took me 16 years to finally complete this game due to lack of interest, and now that I have completed it, I'm glad I did just to give me a full appreciation of the Final Fantasy series as a whole.
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The year is 1998, and my friend Josh and his father are playing on their PlayStation and I see what will forever be one of the best games I have ever seen in my life, Final Fantasy VII. My family was not very well off and it was rare I ever had more than two video games in the span of a year or two for my gaming consoles, so I never played an RPG before in my life. To me, there was no reason why a video game should look this good. This was beyond the anything I had expected games to be, and it sort of ruined my expectations. That said, I never did "play" it, just watched it get played for small stints and hours.
Now the year is 2002, and during this summer my 16 year old self felt this odd calling to play this game. I cannot, even to this day explain it, but Final Fantasy VII enraptured my imagination so much I felt I had to play it. My family had bought a PlayStation, but this game was not in our collection. I still didn't have a lot of money at the time, so I took a gamble and walked. My family moved and the walked to Josh's home now was 2.2 miles one way. I did not even know if him or his father would say yes. It had been years since they played the game, so the odds were in my favor, but I was perfectly willing to accept a no and try to buy the game second hand.
But they said yes and handed me their copy to burrow.
I walked home, took a shower, popped the game in...and it ruined my expectations for RPGs for years to come. Final Fantasy VII in not just one of the best games I ever played, it is not just a genre defining game, it is one of the best games ever made. Whenever people were making lists of what is the first Final Fantasy game they should start with, barely anyone says "start with 7". You are setting yourself up for disappointed for many over titles in the series. The spiky-hair overt style of Cloud and his obnoxiously large sword, Barret being one of the few black characters in a video game with his gatling gun arm , and Tifa who actually punched and kicked enemies with her outlandish outfit. Then there is the ending, the 15 hit Omnislash against Sephiroith, a fitting end
After I completed the game my summer was over and my step-father bought final Fantasy VIII for the house. I was ready for another adventure, and the back cover showed off the main character with a sword that was also a gun?!? It was also four disc instead of Final Fantasy's three, meaning a longer adventure. How could this be bad? I never made it past disc one.
I was recently playing Octopath Travler and really felt like I wanted a Final Fantasy game instead, so I buckled down and got the Steam version of Final Fantasy VIII. Took me 20 minutes to set up a controller, but once it was done...I finally completed this game after 16 years of waiting and having completed every single other mainline Final Fantasy game in the series.
-----------------To begin with my dissection------------------
The game relies heavily on the Draw mechanic, a system that lets the player gain magic spells. This is pretty much the only way to gain magic spells in the game beyond finding Draw points or refining items. Magic is a consumable in this game, and it's also need to Junction to increase your character's stats since you cannot gain armor in any form in this game and the weapons you can get only increase your damage potential in tiny amounts. Frankly, if done correctly, you can have the Ultimate Weapon for the main character, Squall, before the end of disc one.
You notice how I am sort of rambling here? That is because there is so much wrong with Final Fantasy VIII that I do not know where to start. As of this writing I completed this a little less than two months ago, and I have been wondering how to phrase this blog post.
-Do I start with how Squall is the best character in the game with the best weapon (he has a Trigger mechanic that lets him do 150% full damage to any enemy) and you have no real reason to augment the strength stat of other characters so long as Squall is in your line up, which he is by default since he is the main character?
-Do I note how the Junction system scared me away as a kid, but once I understood it as an adult I found it to be the most broken RPG mechanic I had ever played? Used to even basic effect, the game is a cake walk. only saw the Game Over screen once, and that was during an optional boss fight (The Brothers).
- Do I note how that though the game took me 54 hours to complete, easily 15 or more of that was sent drawing magic from enemies?
- Do I note how even though Final Fantasy VII is a silly story when inspected for more than a couple minutes, Final Fantasy VIII's story actually requires you to abandon all known concepts of time and space? It even asks you to abandon concepts of character development, because the only character that "develops" is Squall. Everyone else is one note. More insulting, not a simple mainline or secondary character in the entire game dies, so there is no concept of mortality in this game. The game directly before this one had lots of secondary character death (some implied, granted), including the famous death of Aeris.
- Do I note that almost every boss in the game can be easily beaten by spamming Boosted Guardian Forces?
- Should I harp on the most worthless plot-twist in the game, that all the characters knew each other from their childhood as orphans? Maybe even harp on how it is revealed loosely that Laguna ( I do not even want to get started with him) is Squall's estranged father and the story does nothing with this!
- Maybe I should note that while Final Fantasy VII was bursting with mini-games, this one only has one, a card game called Triple Triad. I do not like it. In a game where much of the monotony comes from Drawing magic from enemies, mini-games would have broke up the monotony.
- Maybe I should note how this game commits a sin in RPGs that no other RPG has ever committed (besides FF Tactics, but that came out a year earlier) and all of the enemies in the game world level up with you. Nothing takes away the power fantasy of playing a game when the enemies, for no reason other than a poor sense of balancing on the developers part, than having your enemy become as strong as you are even in the beginning areas of the game. This tidbit right here convinced me as a kid that playing the game any longer felt futile because I did not understand the junction system enough to make this a moot point.
I could go on an on, but the point is that it took me over a decade and a half to finally return to this game because I knew it was not "fun" in the way other Final Fantasy games had been. After I dropped, FF8, I went on to eventually complete (in order of completion) FF Legends 3 on the Gameboy, FF9, FF10, FF1, FF2, FF3, FF4, FF12, FF5, FF6, FF13, and finally FF15. I never completed FF Tactics because I just have not found the patience yet and I played both the online games FF11 and FF14 extensively. I can equivocally say I despise Final Fantasy Type-0 and it may be the only game in my life I go on to never complete, not for lack of trying. Also Squall Leonhart used to be, in my eyes, the best designed character in the series. There are pictures online of me cosplaying as him, and I rarely ever cosplay.
I wanted to love this game, and I still do to do this want to love this game for the good ideas and character design in it. I would be remiss to call it a "good RPG", because it is not. It is functional, and I encountered few bugs, but that does not mean it stood the test of time as well as its predecessor. Was it my fault for daring to play one of the best RPGs, hell, one of the best video games ever made before playing one of the most tepid? I do not think so, since those are huge shoes to fill, and personally speaking only FF10 has gotten close to filling them (variety of reasons for me). As noted above, I am glad I finally, after all these years, completed this game. Not because it was good, not because it was nostalgia, and not because anyone even recommended it to me. I needed to finally complete that gap in my mental space of mainline FF games I have completed. This was that gap, and it is now filled.
The frustration was worth it.
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