Remembering Final Fantasy VIII
Hey everyone. Though it says I am a brand new poster I am actually one that used to post pretty regularly way back in the day. It had been years though since I had posted at all here and couldn't exactly remember my username nor the email address I used to sign up with so just decided to create a new account.
I havn't really played video games for years and years now. Pretty much the only game I have played in the last several years was Walking Dead and that is more because I am a big fan of the Walking Dead universe than anything else. My height of activity as a gamer and interest in video games was back in the ps1 days which would have been the exact time this game was released. A few days ago the old games I used to play and talk about a lot came back into mind so decided to look at the old site again that I talked on back then.
FF8 was a very interesting game to talk about because it was probably for many the most polarizing game of the series. Maybe some of the more recent releases have been just as polarizing (if not more so) but I stopped playing the series after FF10 so I wouldn't really know what the popular opinion of the newer games are.
As for me I was one of the ones that did have a difficult time getting into it (at least compared to VII). I should probably re-state that by saying I did fully enjoy it the first time going through it but its appeal didn't last for me like VII did. The first time going through it I (as probably many others were as well) was in awe of the music and the absolutely outstanding (for the time) graphics. This was potentially the best looking game ever released for the original playstation.
However the more I tried to dissect it the more the game seemed to come up short in the areas that were important to me. In VII it seemed they really took their time on the characters and pretty much every single one in the game had a specific arc. Even the optional characters Yuffie and Vincent had specific arcs that allowed players to get to know them. And then there was Sephiroth who many consider the best boss of the entire Final Fantasy game series. FF8 though didn't seem to spend nearly as much time on the characters. Squall I do admit does have a very thorough arc and an arc that was probably pretty relatable to the (mostly teenage) crowd that would have been playing the game. The only other character that seemed to have much importance to the story was Rinoa (who was being used as the main device to pull Squall through his journey). Quistis, Selphie, Zell, and Irvine though all just seemed to be one note characters added to the game because we needed more than two people to fight with.
The overall plot seemed to be about as vague as the cast of characters as well. There were many occasions where the game doesn't really explain plot or character motivations. It often just seemed like a love story between two characters and everything else was just added on to be filler because you can't really make a 40 hour long game strictly about a love story between two characters.
I was never much into gameplay but I from what I remember 8's gameplay was almost as polarizing as everything else. People really loved the junctioning and magic system or they absolutely hated it.
In the end though FF8 was definitely designed to be different. Much to some people's liking and also much to some people's disliking. As for myself I never played through it more than once. I think I tried a time or two to play through it again but never got that far as I just wasn't attached to the characters or the story. Then after that I got IX (which I think did put more emphasis on giving us a well rounded cast) ,and after that I got into the Xenoverse, and after that I really stopped playing games much in general.
But in anycase FF8 definitely was one of the more interesting games to talk about due to the scheer amount of differing opinions about it.
