FF8! What's Wrong With It?

all i have to say is that it is one the best games ever :)

The battle system was hideous... having to find an enemy with a fairly strong magic and draw-draw-draw for an hour to build up your character's junctions and make them stronger got really boring.

The answer to battles was always to just sit summoning GFs as they were so overpowered compared to the normal attacks (the GF animations were really long, too)

Otherwise it was great, I loved the story and the characters. I did miss the non-human characters you normally have though. The only thing I didn't like was the battle system, and unfortunately that's one of the major things that make an FF. After all, without it, it's just a movie.

I agree heartily that the draw system was tedious. Especially when you tried to draw 100 of something good, and it took 20 minutes to do it. I remember reading a book at the beginning of the game while I was drawing my first magic out of stuff.

The junction system is something I always enjoyed tinkering with. Not so much the GF junctioning, but the stat junctions were a lot of fun.

I think the real reason the game sucks so bad is because it was such a terrible storyline. I had to play the game about four times before I finally understood what the hell was going on. Especially those Laguna transitions. Lord, every time I hit one of those I groaned and prayed it would be short.

The love thing was a bit thick for me. It was too realistic, somehow. FF9 did a much better job of that kind of thing. There was too much avoiding the topic of the love thingee. I think Seifer had it right about the Squall-puberty thing. Grow up some, and get some Zoloft!

The card game was pretty good, but again, FF9's was better.

The storyline is just tedious and there aren't enough moogles or cute characters! But don't get me wrong apart from that, I kinda like it. ^_^

Everything is perfect!

The SeeD rank system essentially punishes you for deviating from the storyline or spending a lot of time hacking up characters. I prefer getting money from defeated monsters as illogical as that is.

Everything else was well done.

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Originally Posted by FFanatic Of FFantasy

WHAT'S WRONG WITH FF8? :confused:

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The question should be: What ISN'T wrong with FF8? Not much. Zell was good. And uh.. Triple Triad was fun. And... well Zell was good. Other than that, the entire game sucked. The love story between Zell and Seifer wasn't developed enough.

Ooh, there was a love story between Zell and Seifer? Darn, I missed out on the yaoi. :love:

i think if u want yaol u should just stick with gravitation or whatever its called lol :D

lol, sure, I'll do that

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Originally Posted by TheAbominatrix

There's a difference between character 'development' and character 'changes'. Squall changes, not develops.

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For a fun and seemingly pointless discussion had by myself, TheAbominatrix, aeris2001x2 and a few others on this topic, check the thread entitled "Poll: Squall." I felt the urge to start that again, but it would just go the same and end in us arguing again and then making up again, too much hassle.

What is wrong with this game? I only have two complaints. One, character development on a whole. Too much character development was given to Squall (and whether you believe it was real or attempted is besides the point) and Rinoa. I understand that they are the main characters, but the supporting characters, who were still important, didn't receive enough. They had some, and it was good, but not enough. Two, the insane overabuse of the junction system. I love the junction system. But the junction system combined with the leveling system in this game made it so that you could go through the game and only have one slightly difficult boss. While you don't have to play the game as such, the ability to uberize your characters almost from the very beginning of the game makes the want to have maxed out characters almost null.

Other than that, I loved this game, and my dislikes stand deep in the shadow of all the things I like about this game. Nothing's perfect.

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Originally Posted by SeedRankLou

For a fun and seemingly pointless discussion had by myself, TheAbominatrix, aeris2001x2 and a few others on this topic, check the thread entitled "Poll: Squall." I felt the urge to start that again, but it would just go the same and end in us arguing again and then making up again, too much hassle.

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:p Yeah, that was a cool discussion. I recommend it for everyone's list of required reading for the evening.

I think my post from another thread accurately conveys my thoguhts about this game's shortcomings. That and I'm too lazy to retype everything.

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Originally Posted by American Badass

Yes, I understand Square was trying something new with this game. Hell, I appreciate that. Square needs to do more innovationg, but in the case of FFVIII, those innovations just didn't pay off.

For example, FFVIII was the first one which really centered on the love story more than anything else. I really didn't have a problem with that. I'm a romantic guy at heart, and I can handle a good love story so long as it was believable and well done, two things which the love story in FFVIII was not (unless you want to talk about Laguna/Raine, but I digress). The love story depended on two characters, and Squall and Rinoa were just not up to the task of delivering.

First off, we have Squall which is a decent character for a lot of the game. Sure, he was an ass to pretty much everyone, but I was used to that from Cloud in FFVII so no big deal. Ok, he doesn't want anyone ever getting closed to him because his "sis" left the orphange he was in when he was younger. Ok, that's a pretty big stretch there but I'll let that go. He throws himself into SeeD because we assume that it is something to believe in. That's fine, someone with no friends would commonly throw himself into his work. Then enter Rinoa. She confuses him about 99% of the time with what she says and does. We consistantly see evidence of this in his thoughts. But where's the attraction to her? Sure, they may be snippets of thoughts here and there but there is not enough internal dialogue to prove to me that he sees her as anything more than a pest of nuisance. He suddenl only really shows that he cares when Rinoa goes comatose, and I wouldn't mind that so long as the character's dialogue showed him starting down that path when he first met her. But I didn't get that at all. I understand the concept of someone not realizing what they have until they're faced with the possibility of losing it, but I don't agree with damn near an entire love story being based on that belief.

Then to add more fuel to the fire by stating that I absolutely hate Rinoa. I mean, I have never seen a more selfish, impulsive, naïve girl in an RPG before in my life. From conducting plans while sitting on the floor of her train to being upset when she doesn't get her way to throwing a tantrum when the obviousness of a situation is presented to her in cold hard fact. She reminds me of a little girl who you have to hold hands with all the time and cries when she doesn't get her way. Granted, she does change a little bit as the game goes on, especially when she is comatose. I'm sorry, but I found nothing positive about her character, and the fact that the love story involves her is one of the reasons I hate it so. Like I mentioned earlier, I consider the Raine and Laguna love story to be better, and it only had about a half hours worth of dialogue and FMV at the end to support it, and I found that so much better and much more believable than Rinoa/Squall.

And lets not forget the other characters who take a backseat to Rinoa and Squall. With the exception of Laguna, none of the other characters get any kind of decent treatment with the exception of the exact same backstory. Let's not forget, these kids are the Fated Children, and the all happened to grow up at the same orphange. What else is there to these characters? Zell's hometown gets invaded. Ok he wants to kick their asses. What else...oh wait that's it as far as Zell goes. Then there's Selphie who's Garden she was at before coming to Balamb was attacked and pretty much reduced to rubble. But she's ok again pretty soon and nothing else is said about it. We've got Mr. Arrogant sharpshooter Irvine who, apparently, can't actually pull the trigger when he needs to, but minutes later gets over it and finally pulls the trigger. Anything else about Irvine...nope. And then there's Quistis. Ok, she thinks she has an infatuation with Squall, but not really she's apparently only trying to take Ellone's place. She also apparently can't say something mean to someone without the need to apologize, despite possibly ruining her assignment. Well that pretty much says everything about her.

But that's alright, I can withstand a plot I don't believe in and shoddy character so long as the gameplay is good. Oh wait, this is FFVIII, so I can't really do that. Like I said, I enjoy innovation, but whoever thought the idea of the battle system actually penalizing you for using magic deserves never to have any say in the development of games in the future. Because that's what FFVIII's gameplay did, it actually penalized you for using magic. Why? The Junction System. Now, I like the idea of junctioning to Guardian Forces to be able to access abilities (except for the Item command, which I think is stupid being it leads me to believe a character can use a potion with the GF's help but I digress). I thought that was a good idea. Junctioning magic to increase your stats? Hey, that wasn't a bad plan either. Horribly executed? Oh hell yeah it was. The idea that my character's stats would actually be lowered by using junctioned magic in battle was the stupidest thing I could ever imagine. I've never seen and RPG that acutally penalized you for the use of magic, and as a result of that, would damn near force the user to abandon using magic, which I did because I'm a stats whore and I didn't like to see my stats lowered for using magic, nor did I particularly care for finding a draw point for the magic I used so I can have a maximum supply too. And there's drawing too which is so mind numbingly boring its beyond description. Thank God for Triple Triad and the ability to refine the cards you won. The only problem with this method is that you'd still need to draw the higher level magic cause it'd take forever to get the cards you need to finally refine it, and drawing the Ultima spells from the Ultima weapon is not my idea of a fun time, nor do I find it particulary well thought out.

And that's quite enough from me I think.

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Originally Posted by TheAbominatrix

The general consensus is that VIII had very little character development. It focused on two very annoying and bland main characters, and shoved everyone else to the back. The storyline seemed pretty lame to me.

I do enjoy the general game play, and Triple Triad, but the rest of it just isnt up to Final Fantasy standards, in my opinion.

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Yup.

Personally, I don't think anything wrong with this game at all! I'm not going to repeat what I've posted before oer and over again, so to make it short, FF8 is my absolute favorite in the series. I love everything about it. I know that drawing magic took a very long time, but I didn't mind one bit. I was okay just sitting in the same battle for 20 minutes stocking meteors, because I love the game so much.

However, I DO think that the other characters should have gotten more time in the game. Even though I don't like her very much, I think Quistis needed a little more. I lvoe Irvine, so any more of him would have been great, and the same goes for Zell. Selphie....after about 5 minutes of meeting her, you already know everything there is to know, so I don't think there's much more to be done there.

But the gameplay was good, the plot solid. Although a lot of the game was devoted to the love story, at least it wsa a good one. I know Squall's sudden change was.....sudden, but hey, maybe he's flaky. I'm like that-one minute I'll be talking about how much I dislike a certain person, next minute that opinion has completely changed. You never know.


:D