Final Fantasy VIII and the beginning of Square's fall
Or how to ruin the theme "love".
Final Fantasy VIII sucks. Yeah, that's right, you heard me: this game sucks. It's terrible. It's moronic. And it's this piece of shit that represented the shift in how Square Enix designed its RPGs and games in general, a shift in the company's soul.
But first, let's start with the basics: Final Fantasy VIII was released in 1999 by Squaresoft for the original Playstation. It was a monstrous 4-disc release featuring a lengthy adventure revolving around the love triangle of the main protagonists Squall, Rinoa and Seifer, with an evil witch trying to compress time and space (and with that, destroy the world) to boot.
Graphically, it's the fist game in the series to ditch the SD look of the previous titles for a more realistically proportioned characters — remember what I wrote about not allowing the gamer to develop an emotional attachment to the characters by letting them imagine how they'd look like but instead just showing them on a more concrete fashion? Well, this trend started here.
This entry in the series also tried a bunch of new mechanics on its battle systems, such as the draw gimmick. Oh my God, drawing. The most unwieldy, obnoxious system ever to grace a Final Fantasy game, this mechanic basically made you use the steal skill on every single enemy in the game in order to find the special summons and to be able to cast spells. There is a profound problem with that from a design standpoint, because if you missed one single draw on a boss fight (because frankly, the game does a crap job of telling you you need to steal every single frickin' enemy in the game) you need to either load a save game and do it all over again or simply not have the summon or the magic spell. During my first play through of the game, I reached the last disc with three summon spells. Three.
By making every single character in your party a thief, you also steal something really precious out of the game: the sense of wonder. You see, good game design is about a couple of tenants and theming is one of the most important of them. You must treat the gamers with respect, of course, and let them create their own stories about the product you designed, but you also need to set the tone for your adventure. You need to theme it out, and every aspect of your game must relate to those decisions. This makes for a cohesive, thought out experience and good design projects are done like so. Final Fantasy VIII throws that out of the window. Why would you implement a stealing mechanic if there's nothing thievey about the main characters? Why isn't the mechanic a part of the world?
In Final Fantasy VII, the materia system was one of the most important parts of the gameplay experience. All of your special skills were related to them and, in order to be able to access it all, you needed to socket said materia into your weapons. Materia was also condensed Mako, which in turn is the energy of the planet, Gaia. See where I'm getting at? Theming. Cohesion. Where is that in Final Fantasy VIII?
It is well known that every single Final Fantasy game revolves around a main theme. The case of Final Fantasy VIII, the developers wanted to explore "Love". So they basically drafted a story where a bunch of teenagers led by an angsty emo kid had to destroy an evil witch (who wanted to compress time and space… what for again?) by stealing magic from everything and everyone. And oh! They decided to include a sappy romantic thing going on too between the angsty emo kid, a blond jock and a idiotic girl (maybe to get around the whole "love" theme thing? I don't know). Really, how can anyone like this game? And I'm not even mentioning the whole Laguna arc, the most stupid side-story to ever grace a Playstation game.
But I guess it all comes down to bad design choices and lack of project cohesion. This is, by far, the worst entry in the series when concerning the Playstation releases, but maybe it was due to a lack of focus, of cohesion during its development. The same thing also almost plagued Final Fantasy XII, for example, but that game had such different, forward-thinking design ideas that it remained a cult classic until its remaster was released for the Playstation 4 in 2017.
You can see, though, that many problems of Square's newest releases actually started here, with Final Fantasy VIII. The discord between the game's systems, the lack of soul and theme, all these things appeared in many of the softhouse's later games, such as the mediocre Final Fantasy X, the awful, mesmerisingly bad XIII and the unfinished mess that was XV.
They can learn from it though. If they developed masterpieces such as Tactics, VII, VI and XII, they can most surely get their shit back together and get back to designing great games. I can't say I have my hopes up, though.
