FFVIII Game Pros and Cons

[Pumpkin]

I did one of these for X/X-2, so now how about we discuss FFVIII?

Pros:
-The atmosphere. It just "feels" so Final Fantasy and it easily draws me in to this world.
-The music. I have the Balamb Garden theme in my head right now.
-The GF's. I like a large number of summons and the Boost and Ability systems were a nice touch
-The characters. Overall I really like the cast of characters.
-The story. It's interesting to me and I quite enjoy it.
-The Moombas.
-The world, locations. SO many beautiful locations, like Shumi Village, FH, Balamb Garden, Balamb, etc.
-Being able to decide which characters get which GFs and Magic.
-The SeeD thing giving me tons of cash at regular intervals.
-Angelo.

Cons:
-Drawing magic making it so I was never able to use any magic unless drawing it and casting it from the enemy.
-I liked the Laguna story and characters, but I didn't enjoy playing those parts as much.
-Finding out so many characters were connected from before the game kind of made the world smaller.
-The Odin sidequest. Did not enjoy.
-Wasn't a huge fan of having to play for hours to get certain items to improve weapons.

[Ayen]

Pros: The World
The music
The system behind the schools
The GF's
The characters
SeeD
The Galbadia Army
The Sorceress
The Junction system (like it or hate it it makes VIII stand out from the rest)
Triple Triad
Riding around in a Garden
The sheer insanity of it all

Cons: The world felt too small at times
Only being able to name two characters, the summons and the dog

[Slothy]

Pros: - it ends
- the Squall's dead theory that makes more sense than much of the game.

Cons: - most of the game after disc 1
- you can break the game in about two hours from the start.

[Forsaken Lover]

Pros:
NORG and the Cid's wife twist
Seifer's character
Rinoa is very pretty
The soundtrack
The Ragnarok scene between Squall and Rinoa
Sorceress Adel
Ultima Weapon

Cons:
Almost everything else, including the fact most of the story makes no sense. Why has the Centra, the greatest power in the world, faded into complete obscurity...in less than a century? They built the Gardens, were around for millennia, and nobody knows who they are because the Lunar Cry wiped them out a measly eighty years before the game. That is NOTHING.

[Skyblade]

Pros: The majority of the game's parts.

Cons: How those parts fit together as a whole. Or rather, how they don't.


Seriously, I like almost every piece of this game. I even like the Junction system (conceptually, and I have seen the system executed incredibly well in other games). But as a whole, things don't work. There are too many plot holes, too many inconsistencies and questions raised. The events of the plot don't fit together.

[maybee]

Cons

- Irvine, Selphie, Quisty, anybody that isn't named Squall or Rinoa could of been better developed, and had more screen time. They shouldn't of been pushed aside because of the love story.

- Ulti could of been pulled off a bit better, she was a puppet master type villian, but at least show her more in the final castle, or before the final castle in her true identity before the final fight, gheez !

- Squall goes OOC too fast and quickly. We want him to grow and change, but not that damn quickly.

Pros

- The rest, basically.

[John Davis]

Pros:

Junction system begs a proper amount of thought and work enough for it to be on the more severe side of JRPG taskloading. As someone who is familiar with these gimmicks (like any good JRPG fan) I found the tedium to be exhilarating.
Graphics for the time were an appreciable step up.
Atmosphere tended to be very creative. Somewhat precursory to FFX's.
Guardian Forces, not only with their basis in the junction system, are pretty awesome and creatively employed. They are like de facto party members that come in handy as either HP shields or serve a lot of purpose as really fun stat boosters. There's a lot of incentive in training them, and to wrap it all up, their designs are impeccable for the time and they themselves are pretty numerous. This game got the summoning system right-- FFX took it too far.


Cons:

The story was literally bad. People who enjoyed this story either enjoy really typical, shallow anime love stories as a rule or have a bad taste in stories. There are countless things in the game that are mentioned but not explained properly. Some things are explained just vaguely enough to fly but not enough to impress me or make me feel immersed in the game. I can appreciate that this is a fantasy game and all, but there were enough potential death scenarios and plot devices haphazardly used with little to no responsibility that its not appreciable. The game includes a "wiki" that should (and usually does...) exist to clear up plot confusions and whatnot. With this one, I was laughing hysterically at how many things listed had one line of descriptive text ending with "everything else is a mystery" or "not much else is known." I could really write for a long time about the poor quality of the story but people who give a dang about literature or its perceived carryover into video games will understand my disposition here.
The characters are almost all unlikable and either not dynamic at all or are poorly/cheaply dynamicized. It also forces you to use all of your characters at scattered, uneven points of the game, which was unfair as hell. I usually stick with a handful of characters and when the game forces me to use all of them I get pissed. FFVII didn't really do this except with Aeris, and that portion of the game is entirely beatable without her being given any attention at all. In this case I found myself infuriated not only by how many times I had to play with bulltrout characters due to a thinly veiled call for character equality or even worse, when you have to play as Laguna and his friends and you have to figure out/remember who exactly is who. On that note, the Laguna segments are incredibly uninteresting and were a huge hassle due to how infrequently and without notice they occurred.


I think that is all I have to say. It probably isn't.

[MJN SEIFER]

- Squall goes OOC too fast and quickly. We want him to grow and change, but not that damn quickly.

. Didn't seem very quick to me; it seemed like at a realstic pace considering the length of the game. If you look at it closely, and pay attention to Squall's thoughts it actually makes a lot more sense - in fact, it could be seen as that he is OOC when we first see him, and then he reverts back to who he was meant to be.


Cons:
Almost everything else, including the fact most of the story makes no sense. Why has the Centra, the greatest power in the world, faded into complete obscurity...in less than a century? They built the Gardens, were around for millennia, and nobody knows who they are because the Lunar Cry wiped them out a measly eighty years before the game. That is NOTHING. Good point (I remember trying to imply in my headcanon that Centra = Cetra due to the fact I liked the idea of FFVII and FFVIII sharing a world somehow, but I never really got around to it.)

I'll do my pros and cons later, as this is my second favorite Final Fanstasy.

Pros:
1. Most of the characters were likable; Squall and Rinoa are my two favorite Final Fantasy characters (and I ship them), and what we saw of the other characters (see cons) they appeared to have likable personalities.
2. Very interactive battle scenes; Squall's trigger, Zell's "Dual" limit break (an update of Sabin's "Blitz"?) and Irvine's "Shot" all allowed the battles to have an extra sense of game play, allowing me to feel more in control.
3. Squall's development and his relationship with Rinoa. I liked the way it developed overtime, and made a lot of sense, and for me came to be the closest FF ever got to realism.
4. The orphanage twist; not many will agree, but I loved this. I loved the way it was cleverly foreshadowed so that you only notice that it was foreshadowing after you've seen the twist (kind of like "The Sixth Sense" or "Final Destination 5"), and I love the idea of friends having some kind of bond before they properly meet each other, or something.
5. The world of FFVIII; it seemed pretty close to ours, in a sense and I could totally see places like Dollet, Timber and Deling existing in the real world, and the game made them feel like real places with a fantasy twist. Gardens where basically cooler versions of schools and colleges, which again placed the gamer in an environment they could relate to, while giving it a twist in someway.
6. The idea that magazines and websites existed in FFVIII's world, which was both another way to make the world seem more real, but they were also helpful.
7. The music, as this is of course, a Final Fantasy game. Pretty much every song fitted into what it was supposed to be.
8. The Junction system was pretty cool, and easy to get into after playing FFVII.
9. The fact that the World Map is treated like the main game in places, as you can get items and find draw points on there.
10. The fact that there is cool page on the menu that gives information about the game, it would have been awesome to have that in the other games (I'd have loved it to be on FFVII myself.) It was a nice way to remind yourself of certain things, and get a deeper look of the world of FFVIII.
11. The card game was fun to do (though it reminds me now of the fact that no one bothered to actually play Pokemon Cards at my school, which I got into more for this than Pokemon, which I also loved).

Cons:
1. As likable as the other characters are, they are pretty much sidelined to make room for Squall and Rinoa's development as characters (even Seifer was given some level of character evolution, and he wasn't even part of the "good guys" for long.) There was no real character defining moment for the other characters, ala Final Fantasy VII (in which each character kind of had their own "ending" to their own storyline within the game itself - like the space scene for Cid for example), even though some characters kind of came close (Selphie could have had one connected with Trabia, Zell could have had one connected to Balamb), they were sidelined and pretty much supporting characters.
2. It would have been nice if we could have actually read Timber Maniacs itself, as opposed to just having Selphie talk about it on her blog, or whatever that was.
3. The top level being 100, and not 99 - because now you're vulnerable to Level 5 Death, ooops! (To be fair, I only ever achieved Level 100 by cheating).
4. The fact that it was either really hard or impossible to explore the world on disk four (I never really bothered to check).
5. The fact that the Lunar Cry didn't have any affect on the moster count or anything where you'd expect it to have an affect.
6. The D-District Prison. Arguably one of the most boring places ever designed.
7. Lack of minigames that totally change the gameplay. After playing FFVII which had motorbikes and snowboards to name just two examples, this game felt really lacking in that department. They could have at least designed a T-Board mini game, rather than just include T-Boards in a throwaway scene with Zell. Anyone remember that scene? No?

That's all I can think of for now.

[maybee]

- Squall goes OOC too fast and quickly. We want him to grow and change, but not that damn quickly.

. Didn't seem very quick to me; it seemed like at a realstic pace considering the length of the game. If you look at it closely, and pay attention to Squall's thoughts it actually makes a lot more sense - in fact, it could be seen as that he is OOC when we first see him, and then he reverts back to who he was meant to be.



I know

But alot of people still think that Squall didn't give a toss about Rinoa, and then all of a sudden she falls into coma and then true love.

[MJN SEIFER]

- Squall goes OOC too fast and quickly. We want him to grow and change, but not that damn quickly.

. Didn't seem very quick to me; it seemed like at a realstic pace considering the length of the game. If you look at it closely, and pay attention to Squall's thoughts it actually makes a lot more sense - in fact, it could be seen as that he is OOC when we first see him, and then he reverts back to who he was meant to be.



I know

But alot of people still think that Squall didn't give a toss about Rinoa, and then all of a sudden she falls into coma and then true love. They should read between the lines more then. Even when they were fighting for that short time, it was obvious to me he cared about her, in that he always seemed to be looking out for her, and stuff like that. The coma was more of a regret of not showing it more than anything. It was like "I'm not going to get close to anyone, so when something happens it can't hurt me" only to realize it isn't that easy.

I remember doing a full article on how I felt the relationship was handled, and I may posted it again (possibley rewritten to my current style), and it certainly shows that he didn't start caring after the coma, but long before that.

[Pumpkin]

It's always been obvious to me that Squall cares about others, period. He just has a hard time showing it, and a lot of the time doesn't want to because he's afraid of losing them. Being afraid to lose people obviously shows you care about them or you wouldn't care if they left.

Sure, the first few minutes of the game he comes off like an ass, but it becomes clear pretty early on he is actually a caring guy who wants to take care of the people around him. Heck, he even cares about Seifer and Seifer cares about him in their own weird way. The good thing about this game is that instead of throwing us some emo jerk like in VII and having him suddenly realize he isn't an emo jerk, you get to see his thoughts and his behavior develop. No, it wasn't a super quick, hard hitting development like Cloud had after that big scene when he suddenly became a more positive person, but if you waych and pay attention, you can see it happening slowly throughout the game. Heck, his friends pick up on it, they pretty much understand that he cares about them and just has a shield up, and they let him deal with things his own weird way. I thought it was great to finally have a hero who had a difficult time interacting with others, and not because he didn't care, but just because he was awkward and uncomfortable. That makes him very human and relateable to me, especially since I've been through times where I just can't talk to people to save my life.

[MJN SEIFER]

It's always been obvious to me that Squall cares about others, period. He just has a hard time showing it, and a lot of the time doesn't want to because he's afraid of losing them. Being afraid to lose people obviously shows you care about them or you wouldn't care if they left.

Sure, the first few minutes of the game he comes off like an ass, but it becomes clear pretty early on he is actually a caring guy who wants to take care of the people around him. Heck, he even cares about Seifer and Seifer cares about him in their own weird way. The good thing about this game is that instead of throwing us some emo jerk like in VII and having him suddenly realize he isn't an emo jerk, you get to see his thoughts and his behavior develop. No, it wasn't a super quick, hard hitting development like Cloud had after that big scene when he suddenly became a more positive person, but if you waych and pay attention, you can see it happening slowly throughout the game. Heck, his friends pick up on it, they pretty much understand that he cares about them and just has a shield up, and they let him deal with things his own weird way. I thought it was great to finally have a hero who had a difficult time interacting with others, and not because he didn't care, but just because he was awkward and uncomfortable. That makes him very human and relateable to me, especially since I've been through times where I just can't talk to people to save my life.
Yes, that's pretty much how I see it myself.

[Trumpet Thief]

Pros: - it ends
- the Squall's dead theory that makes more sense than much of the game.

Cons: - most of the game after disc 1
- you can break the game in about two hours from the start.

The real draw of that theory is that first disc of that game really is the best. The second was still alright, but I remember having lost quite a lot of enthusiasm for the game by the third.

Maybe a replay will change my mind, but the whole set-piece in Galbadia with Edea was probably the highlight of the game for me.

[Forsaken Lover]

Having just replayed the game, I'm bumping this.

PROS:
Seifer is still a great character.
Character designs as a whole are very good in fact.
The amount of "choice" you get with Squall's dialogue.
The soundtrack.
Rinoa was very sweet.
Selphie's combination of spunkiness and insanity is quite memorable.
The ending, especially the home video segment during the credits.
Fujin's speech to Seifer on Disk 3.
Garden vs. Garden.
The battle system, when handled by a competent person, is excellent.

CONS:
The vanilla Junction System is all kinds of broken and anybody can beat the game with 0 effort. It is hands down the easiest FF I have played.

Nobody ever talks about this but THE MOTHERSMURFING CAMERA on the World Map. It is AWFUL. I used to think it was just because I suck that I couldn't find the White SeeD ship but a lot of other people have problems with this too. Why? THE CAMERA. It is total ass. It will show you anything but what you want to see. It will do a overhead shot when you need to look around. It will spaz out when you need to zoom in and only let you zoom in when it feels like it. It took me forever to find the Chocobo Forests because I am just completely at the mercy of a camera that hates me.

Rinoa's father, General Caraway. High-ranking official in Galbadia, our main enemy, husband of Julia, father of main character - NEVER GONNA BE IMPORTANT AFTER DISK 1. WHY?!! His and Rinoa's relationship remains strained and unhappy for the entire game. I guess the moral of the story is as long as you have a cold, asshole boyfriend you don't need to have a healthy relationship with your father.

NORG subplot goes nowhere.

Nobody thinks to comment on how Malboros are going to be raining from the sky in a few days. I think people would be discussing if it was literally raining cats and dogs, don't you? And this time it's raining cats that kill you with a look and three-headed dogs.

Seifer's character gets NO resolution or closure, just a stupid random boss fight. He doesn't even get a chance to redeem himself. How great would it have been if he joined your party in the final fight against Ultimecia? Sorry, this is FFVIII, where you get everything but what you want. Seifer will be completely absent from the climax of the game and then just randomly appear again fishing because why not. WHAT THE SMURF HAPPENED AFTER LUNATIC PANDORA?????????


And those are my major complaints. I tried to focus on things people don't usually bitch about.