CLASSIC GAMING
Final Fantasy VIII
Developer - Squaresoft
Publisher - Squaresoft
Genre - RPG
Year - 1999
System - Playstation/PC

Now I bet all of you knew at some point I was gonna review a Final Fantasy game.  And I bet you all thought I was gonna review Final Fantasy VII because it's the most well-known game in the series with the largest fanbase and as such has a lot of fodder.
Well, WRONG FUCKERS!  Because that's just way too easy.  It is my job, nay, my DUTY, to educate gamers of classic games that are not so well known for whatever reason.  So with that I bring you the understudy of Final Fantasy VII.

Story - The story begins with Squall Leonhart, a moody untalkative ellipsis-loving teenage student of Balamb Garden, one of three Gardens in the world which are essentially a preschool, elementary school, high school, college and military school rolled into one, with each one leaning towards certain studies more.  Squall is ready to become a SeeD, which is an exceptionally-skilled but young mercenary force who aid others around the world.  Essentially it's a GI Joe kids' team but better animated and less American.


Squall's career as a teenage mercenary leads him across the world involving a civil war, dark sorcery, mind control, buried memories like something out of a Charlie Brown school special, and unholy mindfucks with time.  Which is actually a damn interesting story and at the very least tries to be more different than most Final Fantasy games which is summed up by combining the words "crystals", "ungodly villain", "apocalypse" and "four heroes at the start".  Actually it's not that original, the crystals are now instead sorceress' powers but it's still a damn sight better revamp of the same old Final Fantasy plot than usual!

Gameplay - So now onto the big matter of this game and one of the reasons why people like or dislike the game, the gameplay itself.  FF8 decided to take a brave step in making its magic system not so magical, and in that sense, completely get rid of MP.  To take away such a centric stat of an RPG is madness, but some enjoyed the new system.  Others did not.
The real difference here is spellcasting.  In most RPGs you had an MP gauge and a range of spells which all used various amounts of MP, and if you had enough MP, you could cast the spell.
This game however has spells themselves in amounts, such as having 65 Fire spells, or 32 Blizzaga spells.  And how do you obtain these spells which apparently are just like items?  By absorbing them from enemies.  When you fight a battle, you have the Draw command, which lets you target an enemy and any spell it possesses.  You then have to absorb the spells to gain as many of one spell as you want right up to 99 of them.  You have to do this with EVERY GODDAMN SPELL (except half the summons, since the ones that don't have to be drawn in the same way from particular bosses you just defeat in combat) and if you wanna get powerful in this game, you pretty much have to rack up your spell amount to a high number all the time if you wanna keep ahead, as I will explain, and not just because the enemies actually level up with you no matter which area you are in.


While pretty much ALL the Final Fantasy games had you just buying armour and equipping them, FF8 decides to do armour a different way with the Junction system.  The weapons you can upgrade by finding magazines of weapons around the world and learning out what parts you must obtain to create them.
The Junction system however, has you use the spells you obtain for armour and power, by assigning each spell to a certain stat such as Defence and Magical Defence and Luck and Hit Percentage and Status Defence and so on.  There are three things to junction spells to.  Stats, Status Defence and Elements to defend, absorb or attack with.  Now to some this looks real complex and to others this is easy.  Personally I found it unique but not entirely complex, except the fact that because you USE the spells, the stat or defence it is associated with will weaken.  Now if you stocked right up the ass with one spell up to 99, you are A-OK for a while.
But this has become the absolute PEAK of grinding in an RPG.  We can bear with grinding our levels by five everytime we move between towns but grinding extra just for SPELLS?  Spells you have to keep stealing in battle while the enemy beats the crap out of you?  Seriously, does this picture look wrong to you?  Who keeps trying to steal in every battle?  Does ANYONE who plays Final Fantasy ever do such a thing?  Because it looks seriously messed up to me and if anything looks like a parasitic relationship forming between you and your spells, that's just not right somehow.


Now there is also two other things to mention.  Firstly the Guardian Forces, or GFs, which are the summons of the game and will become your most powerful and probably commonly used attack in the game, of utilising powerful beasts to whack out over a minute of attacking.  Now in Final Fantasy 7 they were certainly shorter except for the ultra-powerful ones.  But all of these beasts, as awesome as they look, love to take their sweet-ass time with this, to the point of goddamn tedious.
On the upside, they do have a great ability system similar to the older FF games' ability system of learning new skills.  By fighting and gaining EXP, your GFs not only level up on their own but also gain new powers ranging from more resistance to magical attacks to new commands to utilise in battle such as Devour and Card.  The GFs also have their own health which only comes up when summoning them, and any attacks on the summoner during this, affects the GF instead of you.
On the note of special attacks there is a Limit Break option in the game which you only access when your health drops below 32%, being rather similar to FF6's Desperation Attacks, and all of the characters mostly combine attacks together such as Squall's sword-slashing Renzokuken and these are actually really awesome, considering that not only are they fully desperate attacks but require way more input from you.  An example is Renzokuken when Squall can deal extra damage from his gunblade by pressing R1 at the right moment of attacking the enemy (which happens in normal battles too but in his Limit Break it's consecutive).


Lastly there is the fully optional card game of Triple Triad.  While across the world you will probably get some cards to use to battle other people AT ANY GODDAMN TIME to a card game duel, which is thankfully way less ridiculous than Yu Gi Oh and actually has RULES!  You win by just simply having a higher number of cards flipped over than your opponent and you do so by having a higher number than whichever number is on whatever side you place your card down on.  But oh here's the catch.
See the card games, while largely optional, are a bitch to play when you get past the starting region of Balamb which only has the easiest ever rule in card game history.  When you start playing across the lands, you carry rules with you from other lands and some you don't even want to ever see again, such as the evil Random rule, or the atrocious Direct rule where any card you flipped over in the game, you keep, but SO DOES THE OPPONENT WITH ANY CARDS THEY FLIP OVER.  So it's a bittersweet victory, you got her Diablos card but you lost your Tiamat card.  Nobody's fucking happy ever, like pretty much any casino game.

Graphics - Saying this here and now, the graphics of FF8 are much better than the graphics of FF7 because naturally it is the second 3D Final Fantasy game and therefore can only go upwards.  For a start the characters ALWAYS look full-grown, instead of the chibi-in-field full-grown-in-battle and half-and-half-inconsistent-bullshit-in-cutscenes of FF7, while in this game they are normal-looking (as normal as you can get in this series anyway) in battle, field and cutscenes.  The field map is lush and and less pointier by a mark than its predecessor's, as well as more gorgeous smoother-looking backgrounds of the dungeons and towns, and finally the absolutely fantastic cutscenes where the characters look really human, with actual human faces that could have come from a Japanese Beverly Hills-style show rather than the anime-ish pointy-heads of FF7.  As expected, this game is graphically better in every way.


Music/Sound - Naturally as a Final Fantasy game, Nobuo Uematsu has never disappointed with his music and he continues to keep that record up in FF8 when you get the greatest song of the entire game at the very opening.  A crisp, clear, beautiful orchestral song with choirs and all narrating something on the screen that frankly until you reached to the end of the first disc you're not gonna give a shit about, but the music is wonderfully operatic and not only is it more original a chorus than One-Winged Angel (which of course is one of THE greatest videogame music pieces ever) it sounds clearer as well.
The rest of the soundtrack is not too forgettable either with such classics as the mysterious dungeon music and the absolutely fucking EPIC rock version of the Chocobo's Theme which is undeniably one of the best, if not THE best version of the chocobo song ever made.

While this is the fastest selling Final Fantasy game of all time, it is still a little underrated in the shadow of FF7, in that while this game is rather polarising in some aspects such as gameplay, it doesn't deserve that when it actually bothered to mix up things a bit and move away, like FF7 did, from the medieval world landscape the series has become so engrossed with.  This game should be praised for at least trying to move out of the usual mindset of Final Fantasy more than usual, and at the very least give some attention away from Final Fantasy VII, because it's had enough of that already.

Fun and Innovation - 4
Replayability - 3
Gameplay - 3
Presentation - 5

Oh yes I did enjoy the paytime <3 it was like the Xbox achievement of back then, you heard that sound and you go "OH YAY" before "...wait why did I go DOWN a rank?  FUCK YOU!"

Great game. The junction system was great and really rewarded those who spent time on it. However if you knew what you were doing it was a bit too easy to make yourself godly powerful early on. (By early I mean first disk.) The card game was pure crack and its mind boggling that they havent brought it back yet.

Hey dragon if you want to play this game again just kill Squall at the beginning of every batltle and level up everyone else, one of the main flaws in this game was that all the Monsters were the same level as squall and I think you start off at level 7, so you keep him at level 7 even till the end game while your characters are like level 99, this was also the only real FF game i finished not counter any of tthe FFT games

:O

........Jesus....BRILLIANT!  Dude that is so going to be worth trying.

Mm, I don't think that's accurate. From personal experience and from what I read later, FF8 mobs (or at least bosses) are moreso tiered. Depending on the level of your characters (or, granted, maybe just Squall), mob difficulty would leap from tier to tier. Case and point, the first time I played through one of the boss encounters (with Seifer's stooges) was ungodly difficult. The next time I played through they were horrendously easy - a sign that I was on a higher tier the first time through. So while it's possible their tier might be determined by Squall's level alone, it's definitely not a 1-to-1 level association.

But I digress...

I loved FF8 and it's probably safe to say it's my favorite FF game of all time. Why? Because I was an absolute sucker for the love story. I have no clue why other than thinking Rinoa was cute. Maybe as an angsty teenager I related to Squall, too.. I donno. But the way the story comes out through the game, and that Squall and Rinoa's relationship was a realization of the relationship that always eluded her mother and his father.. eh.. it got me. To this day the "love song" from that game is in my MP3 collection, however "different" it is.

I didn't like the junctino system as well as the materia system.  And I hated haveing to farm spells out of creatures.   There is nothing MORE FUN than sitting there for 30 minutes pulling out 80 blizzaga's from a mob.   wooo.

yes....I wet myself as well.