Blimey, it's been a long time since I've been sat down in front of a blank blog canvas like this. Life, as it was always going to, got in the way a little bit, but I now find myself mostly settled and ready to crack on with the rest of the 1001 list, and the return title is quite the entry.
Hot off the heels of the insanely popular Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VIII stretches out a little (a design choice I would much rather look at than the animated potatoes of FF7), taking us to a world that's a little more familiar to that of our own - save for the introduction seeing students taking a final exam in the middle of an active military conflict, I suppose.
It was one of the first games I watched a Let's Play of, back in the day, and I watched it because I hadn't played it even further back in the day when it came out. Let's see how far I can get, and whether I'll be distracted by mini-games.
Fun Times
If there's one thing I remember the most about FF8, it's that intro cinematic. The one that's typically Japanese in its unattributed quotes splashed across seemingly meaningless images, unnamed characters having some sort of connection to each other, and drama in the form of an epic duel.
It's not quite so epic a duel as you may expect. The combatants are students, but students who wield gunblades and are students of a military school of some description, but that's irrelevant - this dude got his face slashed! Look at that scar! How romantic!
Frustrations
Ahh, yeas, emulation woes. Still, better than the PlayStation Classic, amirite? A dash into the settings and we've got readable text to begin our adventure.
Further Fun Times
FF8 has this fascination with brief snippets of CGI to establish a character or setting, and they really are a welcome addition. It's one thing to imagine what a polygon mesh is supposed to look like, and quite another to have a rendered cutscene actually introduce you to, in this case, our teacher Quistis.
If you're concerned about the relationship between our hero, Squall, and Quistis, know that I am too. I'm sure it's as innocent a relationship as you can get, played only for laughs, and that it is not at all weird for a teacher to finish her students' sentences.
But it does lead to yet another snippet of CGI, this time blended in with the environment we were just in. In places, it looks fabulous, though you will have to ignore Quistis' appearance in this screenshot, as she's looking a tad hollow...
This, if memory serves, is the Garden, the school grounds where we're learning all about the world, and when it comes to the meta, where we're going to learn about all the fantastic features of FF8.
Further Frustrations
The big thing to take away from FF8 is that there are whopping great big summons that you can summon to the battlefield to fight for you, but only if they're Junctioned to you, and Junctioning things allow you to attach types of magic to stats in order to buff them and stuff.
I'm going to be honest (if it's not already clear enough), I have no idea what the hell is going on in any status screen of this game, and as such, I have no idea why I need to do any of it. It doesn't make sense. I can only hope that my first quest helps me to make sense of it, as I'm going to hunt down a summon to Junction to.
I don't even know if I'm using Junction as a verb right, that's how much I don't know.
The overworld has clearly not aged as well as the areas with highly detailed backgrounds, and that's simply down to it being a big ol' 3D world. You can go where you please and, in a nice touch, random encounters don't happen when on the safety of a road. They do happen based on step counts, if I've remembered that correctly though, for all you speedrunners out there.
Born ready to find a low-level GF, I give myself ample time to do whatever it is I need to do in this cave.
Battling in FF8 is how you'd expect it to be. Timers build up and when they've reached their limit, you're able to perform an action, like attacking and using items and so on. You can also draw magic from the enemy if I've learned that correctly, but most of the fancy stuff you can do requires you to have stuffed Junctioned to you, which you'll be managing out of combat in endless amounts of status screens.
Fun Times
Eventually, I reached the firey hole in the ground I needed to reach, and inside was Ifrit, a beast born of the fires. I'd need to prove my worth against him, which either meant spamming the attack option until the numbers added up, or using some summons of my own.
Uhh... was that it? All that animation for one hundred-odd points of damage?
Who wrote this awful interaction? I understand that battle screens aren't the best place for any kind of chatting, but this is dreadful. Anyway, we've got ourselves another GF, and we can crack on with the game.
Now, the only plot I can recall of FF8 is that we're going to be sent on a military mission to an island and we'll eventually get attacked by a giant robot crab thing. Something like that. That's my target for this playthrough. Just gotta get through all this Junctioning bollocks first...
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| Make your own jokes for this one. |
Further Fun Times
We're back on track and looking mighty fine. I'll say at this point that I really do like the aesthetic of FF8 over the other games in the series, certainly so far. Everyone looks a little too thin, perhaps, but they have proportions akin to humans, which is great. I feel I can follow along with what's going on more than in FF7. Might even be more emotionally connected, like Quistis is to us...
It would help if characters weren't hidden behind text boxes, but I'm sure we can pass that off as some kind of 'charming'. It shouldn't be, but people overlook all kinds of faults these days.
We're finally doing the thing I want to be doing - going on a clearly defined mission. None of this 'find the forests to the west' or 'I've heard a funny old hermit lives near the river', no, we're just along for the ride and following orders from our superiors, which for this mission will be our potential nemesis but probably just a bit of a dick, Seifer, who scarred us in the opening cutscene. Ooh! Backstory! Still, I don't know why we were fighting though.
We're also joined by this idiot.
More cutscenes flowing seamlessly into game environments as we land in... town... and get on with making our way to Central Square. For all the plot-lovers out there, remember that we are hired mercenaries comprised of students from a military school, and this combat serves as our final exam. I'll just let that sink in for a moment.
Further Frustrations
FF8 looks so good, and then it looks so twenty years old, and then it looks so good again. Exploring the town is a visual treat, although you do only explore a corridor, but it's broken up by goofy looking random encounters - thankfully described away as ambushes and enemy encounters and the like.
It's like I'm playing two different games, one of which I'm on board for and the other is the actual gameplay. This first screenshot is the game I want and then staged random encounter screen wipe into an arena that looks alright but nothing special, against a monster that is just a thing to block my path, filmed by a motionless security camera.
To spice it up/speed it up, I summoned Ifrit to see what he brings to the party.
One minute and one hundred and forty-five damage later, and the answer is 'not much'. All that presentation for barely more than a blip. Where's this robot crab thing I want to see?
It's a distraction from my quest to run away from a giant robot crab is what it is. No flashy cutscenes or quippy characters could save this section. It's time for another roadblock to fall.
And that was that. Where did I go wrong? I bet I didn't Junction something.
Final Word
I was hoping that Final Fantasy VIII was going to emerge as a game that I wanted to play more of because I've always liked the idea of playing it. I've never followed through on that idea largely because of the near impenetrable amount of tutorials and menu screens that need to be navigated in order to get anything useful done.
Attaching a spirit animal to a character and levelling up both in order to unlock extra attacks or spells or abilities or whatever, I get that. I don't get Junctioning. I don't get having magic locked off unless there's a giant GF junctioned to my party members. It is a deep system. You can tell your creatures what you want them to focus on - extra damage, better stats, etc - and they'll develop those things with repeated use. Using them, however, is a chore, and once you've seen their animation once or twice, you don't want to see it again.
They're screen-clearing nuclear blasts of ice or fire or hyper beams, yet they tickle your opponent because they're just level one GFs right now. "Don't worry, they'll level up in time", you might say. Then have them not start off like world killers, maybe?
There's a lot to like in FF8, but I'm finding many a reason not to like it, and we've not even got into Triple Triad yet.
Fifteen, twenty years ago - after FF8 at any point - I played a very quick Formula 1 game that was essentially Triple Triad, which for those that don't know is a card game in the FF8 universe where values on your cards affect other cards depending on where in the grid they're placed and what other cards they're next to and so on.
That F1 game was one and done in a single lunchtime and never played again (but I won, so go me), but the idea of Triple Triad was cool. Cards were scattered about the world adding a collectable aspect to your minigame. Different locations even had different rules, mixing up the gameplay depending on where you were and who you fought. It felt like a living game. An interesting diversion from slaying monsters and saving the world.
This guy, though... this guy spoiled it for me. The first guy outside of the safety of my military school. He whooped. My. Arse. And I know the rules! I've even got a physical card game that's clearly inspired by this one (Sellswords, if you're interested), but nope, I gotta lose and he's gotta take a random card for keeps. What an arse.
Still. Makes me want to play just that part of FF8. I'll probably watch the rest like I did a good few years ago now. I've forgotten all about the plot entirely. Things just pop into my head, like giant robot crabs. Hope I'm not confusing games...
There's clearly a good time to be had playing Final Fantasy VIII, but for me, I think I'd need a guide by my side and at that point, I'm sort of just following someone else play the game for me, which defeats the point. I want to play it myself. I want it to not faff around with junctions and GFs. I can't even remember what GF stands for, that's how baffling they are.
I'm just being fussy, really. Nothing has changed.
Fun Facts
Squall's jacket is lined with fur 'to give the full motion video designers a challenge'. Nice one, boss.
Final Fantasy VIII, developed by Square, first released in 1999.
Version played: PlayStation, 1999, via emulation.
Version watched: PlayStation, 1999 (Necroscope86)