Final Fantasy VIII

This game was released a few days before Valentine’s Day in 1999. Fitting considering the teenage love story that developed from the overall plot. When we think about FF VIII, we can’t help but think about the dance between Squall and Rinoa at the SeeD party (one of many dramatic scenes between these two). This theme of “love” was such a departure from the story of FF VII. Many of us wondered how could Square move the series forward after the impact that FF VII made. However, the surprising statistic is that FF VIII became the fastest selling title at that time. Unfortunately I wasn’t one of them. As I mentioned in my previous post, I didn’t even get to play VII until 2000. I actually didn’t get to play VIII until 2009 when it became downloadable on the PSN! That’s 10 years later! Finally I’ll top it off by saying that FF VIII is the only FF game of the main series that I didn’t finish (with the exception of XII because I never owned a PS2, which is why I am extremely looking forward to the remake in 2017).

While I applaud the visuals (the opening CGI scene was absolutely amazing) and another awesome score by Uematsu (love the battle/boss and final boss scores), the game play eventually made me abandon the game. Now before you come at me with pitchforks and torches, not everyone was keen on the Junction and Experience Point System. I also wasn’t a huge fan of the Equipment and Limit Break Systems either. FF VIII was such a huge departure from what I was used to and the game introduced a lot of “firsts” for Square. At that time, I just wasn’t ready for the changes and quickly became frustrated that my characters weren’t leveling the way I wanted them too. I became frustrated at the input commands for Limit Breaks (Sabin’s commands on the D-Pad were bad enough in VI, however easy execution on iOS though). As for weapons, each character had a unique weapon you had to strengthen. Again, that was more work for me to figure out rather than hitting up the next town and buying a stronger weapon. I recently tried to give it another go, but the entire game play system brought back too many bad memories. Also, perhaps I’ve just been spoiled by recent games, but the sprites were painful to look at and the battle speed was beyond sluggish. This may have been the cream of the crop back in ’99, but in 2016, I just couldn’t do it. So sadly, unless there is some type of upgrade done, I still won’t be finishing this game. Actually it is quite surprising after all this time that VIII hasn’t received any love from Square Enix. They have poured a lot of time into mobile remakes and even created a few new games. However from that old school generation, III-VII and IX are available for iOS/Android. Absolutely nothing (with the exception of a enhanced PC version and Steam release back in ’13) to look forward to.

While this will probably be my only “down” post of the series, on the upside, I enjoyed Squall’s role in Kingdom Hearts. There were even moments you got to play as him. He certainly looked better. Not exactly making my opinion of VIII any better. To reiterate, I hope Square Enix has some plans for this game. They are busy with finishing up XV, the VII Remake, XII Remake and perhaps may already be working on XVI. Nonetheless, for those who have played and cherished this game, please let me know your thoughts. For some, VIII was their favorite.

Feel free to send those comments and as always, thanks for reading!