- Played – January 2024 – Review written in April 2024
Final Fantasy VIII is a game I first played on the original PlayStation all the way back in the day. I had been hyped up from playing my first “real” role playing game in FFVII, and that drew me into this title. I remember really enjoying the setting and overall vibe of 8 as I played it. I like the school setting, getting graded on objectives, and the more lifelike portrayal of characters. I would later go on to play every other mainline title in the series and I always considered 8 to be one of my favorites.
Going back to this title, playing it on the PS4 and using the new functions that make the game more easily digestible to today’s palette. Things like being able to fast forward, battle assist, and the ability to turn off random encounters. The thing I slowly started to realize is that, maybe, I don’t really like this game as much as I thought. And that’s a little shocking.
This review comes out of me getting the platinum for the title, So I have basically seen everything that it has to offer, if that even matters.
I still love the Triple Triad card game. Love the process of challenging people and collecting cards. The music in the game is that little earworm that has stuck with me all these years. Is the game as enjoyable as I remember it being? No. The most annoying aspect to the game is that there are regional rules that can get stuck to your character and spread throughout the region. It is so annoying, at least to me, when you’re trying to do these hard matches and have ridiculously stupid rules applied to your game that cause you to throw away all your strategies that you’ve been building, and good luck trying to get the rules reset back to the original status. There are ways, I just found it an annoying process.
I am actually still impressed that this is a PS1 game based on the graphics. Granted, this version runs at a higher resolution, just the fact that they were able to create this game in 1999 is really impressive. The CG cutscenes that were incredibly impressive when I was a kid, where I called my parents into the living room to have them watch the opening cutscene with me, look more like a PS2/PS3 game now. That’s not really a knock against this title or anything, just goes to show how much real-time rendering has advanced over the years.
In order to enhance your abilities or to cast magic, you have to “draw” the magic from draw points in the world, or from other enemies. You then fuse this to different abilities like HP-UP. This is a much maligned system from this game, one that I remembered not really being bothered by as a kid, perhaps because of all the free time I had. Today, I found it highly tedious and downright stupid. Luckily, the remastered version allows you to not really care about these systems as much, since you can just cheese your way through the majority of fights if you’d like.
The best part of my experience with this game came from realizing that I still had my original Final Fantasy VIII strategy guide tucked away on a shelf. So I immediately grabbed it, realized that I still had sticky notes in it from playing it as a kid, and synced up where I was in the story with the book. It was a much better experience to play with a physical strategy guide rather than looking at yet another screen for help.
My biggest point of contention with this game has to absolutely be the story. See, my memory of this game and what I like about it is literally the first half of the story. After that, it turns into utter crap. I ended up fast forwarding through major plot lines and just not caring about what’s happening. You may say that that’s my fault for not really diving into the storytelling in the game, but I say that it’s the games fault for the way they’re telling the story. It goes with my issues with the original FFVII, where I don’t think that they told their story in a concise and understandable manner at all.
So how did I get the whole story in the game? I went to YouTube to get a story breakdown, and I must say that it’s not good at all. It’s so convoluted, why do these games need to go so far off the deep end in the last third of the game? Epic doesn’t mean that the most insane or unbelievable things have to happen. Once you get to Esthar city and have to go into space I feel like the game just loses its grip on reality. It gets sloppy and almost incomprehensible to me.
Perhaps this isn’t a problem in the story itself, but in the way that the story is told. I have a real issue with the way games portray their story and engage with the player/viewer. Granted, it is harder for these older games where interesting cutscenes are simply impossible to do for the majority of conversations, instead we’re stuck with speech bubble after speech bubble. It starts to drag on and ultimately loses me.
So what am I really trying to say? Perhaps it’s that I recognize FFVIII for what it did for gaming when it was released, and that it doesn’t hold up to my modern sensibilities. I am happy that I was able to replay the title using the features this title has and that I was able to say that I platinumed this game. My younger self would be proud of this achievement, however sad that may sound. It’s an important title in my early gaming history and I recognize it for what it did for me and gaming at the time.
I never would have thought that this game would get pushed down in my overall ranking of all Final Fantasy games, but it really has done just that. It makes me very curious as to how FFIX holds up now, I almost feel like it has the perfect opportunity to jump up a few notches on the rankings.
Final Score – 7.2
The story should have remained smaller in scope with more focus on the school. Drop the whole draw system and go more traditional. It still holds a special place in my gaming history, I just wonder if anyone should ever truly give this a full remaster, and I think I’m leaning towards no.
Ghost Ba Bomb 