O tempora is a series of retrospective posts where I play games from ages before to see if they stood the test of time.
Of the original 9 Final Fantasy games, the “pre-voice acting” era, the “proper overworld” era, Final Fantasy II tends to be most disliked and Final Fantasy VIII most divisive. Pixel Remaster fixes a lot of issues of FF II and in that form, I’d say the game can be worth playing. But there is no version of FF VIII that could fix its countless issues. This is a game I respect and adore a lot. It’s a game I want to love. A game that I’ve completed a few times before, both on PS1 and with the older PC port the Remastered version is based on. But it is ultimately a game that I just do not enjoy playing.
Making a sequel to Final Fantasy VII – sounds tough. After all, FF VII was a huge hit and made RPGs far more popular then they ever were before. But it seems like it didn’t stop developers at Squaresoft to treat it as any other project in the franchise and try out new things, push boundaries, create something new. There are so many things, narratively, structurally and gameplay-wise, that are completely unlike anything that you could find in a Final Fantasy game before. All of it inspiring and cool. But also a lot of it rather poorly done.
The story and storytelling in Final Fantasy VIII is amazing. I forgot how genuinely well-written a lot of the game is and how the developers attempted to add much more nuance and detail to each character this time around. This is the deepest, at that point, the series has ever gone into trying to portray characters as well developed and almost real (if still very dramatized) people. A lot of quirks are well done, jokes are funny and still land, the idea to show the thoughts of the main character in addition to the spoken dialogue adds a lot to each scene. There are moments that slightly fail in delivering an emotion due to the lack of either voice acting or little detailed animations that would work fantastically with modern technologies. But even in such events it’s easy to understand the intent and let your imagination add the missing elements.
And how about the idea of revolutionizing the whole concept of equipment? You don’t get a traditional “equipment” screen in this game and the only thing that changes (visually too) is the equipped weapon if you upgrade it. Which is completely optional and is a bit more complicated than buying a new sword and equipping it. Instead of all that, you equip the GFs – the Guardian Forces (and yes this game being a love story has always made it a butt of “GirlFriend” jokes). GFs are your typical Summons from FF games, except when you equip them on a character, it allows you to also equip different magic spells to different stats, including adding elemental and status damage and defence. Since any character can equip any GF (and any number of them), it’s entirely up to you how you create your party as the only real mechanical difference between the characters is their Limit Break. Which is returning from FF VII, however in a form that is closer to how “desperation attacks” worked in FF VI, activating when character is in low health (although it can be forced with magic and items).
Some of the elements are removed or reconsidered to fit this new, more “realistic” feel of the game. There are no concept of “treasure chests” in the game, for example and you don’t get money from battles. Instead you get regular salary which you can spend on mostly healing items, as due to the lack of the equipment there’s not that many things you can spend your money on. Some changes are just a tad odd, like the removal of the “rows”, where you could put ranged party members in the back row and physical attackers in the front row. In this game the position of the character or enemy on screen is completely irrelevant instead. Oh and several character attacks and GF spells have additional interactivity tied to them that makes the attacks stronger, which can get a bit annoying, but was a neat idea nonetheless.
The world is amazingly cool too. This time around it’s a kind of a mid-20th century style world mixed with sci-fi elements and magic. The story you learn as you go is super interesting. There are lots of interesting details. The way the whole story is at first told with strange “dream sequences” where you play as people from a different generation is really cool and intriguing. And how it all comes together in the end is absolutely awesome and extremely well presented. This game pushed super hard on mixing CGI and real-time scenes as well and often the result looks great even today. There are many “cinematic moments” that sometimes feel like QTE-like experiences, but sometimes involve more typical gameplay, just with a more bombastic presentation. The music is fantastic as well, as it tends to be with FF, and worth listening separately.
Oh and since you put magic as your equipment, you don’t get “mana” or “MP”, you get magic as limited number items – game calls it “Draw”. And… and… yeah, this is where the game starts falling apart, honestly. The idea is cool – you must manage these magic spells by drawing them from enemies or spots in locations. And if it’s drawn from enemies in a fight, you can grab it to your stock or cast it right there and then with enemies having completely unlimited stock. So, often times harder fights might have an enemy with a healing spell of some kind, thus serving as both the danger and your main source of healing. I genuinely think that there’s potential for this idea to work if it was done better.
It just doesn’t work in FF VIII well. Drawing magic is grindy and avoiding it is doing yourself a disservice – it is beneficial to you to stock up on best magic spells and slot them into your stats, so you get ridiculously overpowered. Can get an unlimited and relatively safe way to grab Death spell? Do it, stick it to your status attack and one-shot a lot of enemies in the game, why wouldn’t you want that? But on top of this constant weird disbalance, game constantly wants you to micromanage this. Some fights work better with a specific set of magic, sometimes it’s better to not have status or element tied to attacks. And every time you go into the “dream world” any equipped GFs and magic gets unequipped from everyone but Squall (main character), leading to more of this really tedious micromanagement.
For how cool the world is, for how you can ride trains and rent a car, the overworld is basically pointless in this game. I think it’s rather weak in FF VII, but there it gets some use and some worldbuilding. In FF VIII it would’ve been simply better to cut it out and make the journey work like it does in FF X, so it’s linear until the end where you inevitably get some flying vehicle which works like a fast travel selector with no overworld view to show how unnaturally small the world is. Things are so dire with the overworld, in fact, that this game has probably worst side-quests involving it I ever saw in a Final Fantasy game. Some spots in the game overworld can be interacted with to get vague treasure hunt messages or hidden spots of magic you can draw. Just… because they wanted to sell guide books? It doesn’t add anything to the game and neither it is fun, so… I really don’t know why it’s done like this.
Though even in the linear cinematic story-driven sequences sometimes the game just expects you to guess that what you need to do is something that must be done to a specific pixel from a specific position and there’s no hint of any kind about what is it exactly the game wants you to do. Or it can give you a vague goal and then provide no further hints. Oh yeah, and a huge chunk of game items that are extremely useful, are entirely missable unless you guess that you need to talk to some particular character during a particular story beat. Even the GFs themselves are missable as some of them must be Drawn from bosses and they are not even marked in any special way in the menu when you do that. If you miss one, you can only get a second chance during the final dungeon. And yet, there are forced tutorials about things that are tied to those GFs, so if you miss one at the start, the game will then tutorialize you about doing something you literally cannot do until hours later… Yes, I missed Drawing Siren again, just like I did 20 or so years ago, how did you guess?
There’s just so much cool potential in this game. And of all Final Fantasy titles, in my honest opinion, Final Fantasy VIII is the one that needs a remake. Everything for it being a beloved entry is already here, it just needs to be done better next time. The Remastered version is the same PC port from decades ago, but with higher detail models (that do look very nice), some slight balance changes due to the removal of Chocobo World as a separate mini-game (all of the items from that grindfest are now findable in the main game) and fixed music to use the PlayStation version tracks instead of the midi versions of the old PC port. It has some issues and in some spots looks and feels worse than the PS1 version, but, I suppose, for a modern player this might be the best option to get.
Issue is – I don’t think a lot of people will want to play FF VIII. Which is a shame, because there’s such a good cinematic story-driven RPG with cool ideas hidden beneath all of the horrible horrible execution of said ideas. Granted, with this Remastered version you can use modifiers (speed up is still such a blessing for people who dislike the slowness of these games) and actual cheats and just play it for the story. And maybe that’s one way to play it. But it would be so much better to see a remake of this game that does everything (or at least most things) right.