This game definitly recieves too much hate

[Aemilius Blight]

Massive tl;dr post coming. You’ve been warned.

FFVIII isn’t a horrible RPG. Swords and Serpents: now THAT’S a horrible RPG. Seriously, what a crap game. I was like walking around in some dungeon and all this stuff was happening…I don’t know, it was crap. Even recent games like .hack//INFECTION are much worse than FFVIII. But ultimately, there is some stupid, stupid in FFVIII that prevents it from being anything that could ever be considered a ‘great RPG’. Long ass summary ensues:

Graphics: No real complaints here. The graphics in this game are probably its main asset. Sure, a few of the character designs are a little derivative but artistically everything else looks great. This game probably has the best environments in the series, besides FFX.

Music: A few great tracks surrounded by a lot of crap. Actually, the decent-to-crap ratio is pretty even for this game; it’s just that the crap tracks are the ones you’ll be forced to listen to over and over again. Tracks like “Balamb Garden” and “Blue Fields” will drive you insane by the end of the game due to their shear monotony. God knows how Nobuo came up with some of these abominable tracks. He must have been having an off day.

Battle System: Urgh, what where they thinking. Everything about it is flawed in one way or another. The Junctioning system is a great idea but its execution was lacking to say the least. Allowing players to build their characters any way they want is a fine idea but ultimately this results in a host of characters that are statistically identical since there is no advantage is giving characters a specific role. Characters maintain a degree of individuality due to the frequency of limit breaks in this game, however this becomes a problem within itself: limit breaks are too powerful for their level of accessibility. This leaves players using limit breaks as their primary (and sometimes only) form of attack, with everything else becoming redundant. Even GFs, with their ludicrously long attack animations, become a secondary form of attack pretty quickly. Then of course there is the fact that you can make your characters ludicrously powerful very early on in the game due by using Magic Refineries, allowing you to finish off most bosses with two or three Renzokukens. Seriously, I don’t think there is a more broken battle system in the series.

Gameplay: Actual gameplay isn’t so bad, in that there are some pretty entertaining missions and mini games throughout. The boss battles, while easy for aforementioned reasons, are generally pretty fun. There’s nothing really outstanding until you get to the bosses on Disk 4, but nothing horrible. My only real grip with the gameplay is that you spend far too much time on the world map. This wouldn’t be a problem if it wasn’t for A: the music being awful and B: the lethargic rate in which characters and vehicles move. Seriously, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a slower air-based vehicle in an RPG ever. That isn’t even to mention the movement of the Garden, which makes the search for the White SeeD ship seem like hours. The White Ship can eat me.

Story: The Story itself, while obviously completely ludicrous, isn’t all that terrible when it comes down to it. At times, it can even be quite clever in the way it connects characters and events to each other. However, the story is ruined by its horrible execution. Plots twists like the orphanage scene are thrown at the player in such an awful manner (everyone just kind of ‘remembers’) that I literally let out a moan while playing disk 2. And then there’s their attempt to justify it. It’s bad enough that they just sort of throw that plot point at you out of nowhere but then the explanation they give as to why no one realized any of it sooner is ‘we all forgot because of the GFs lol”. Seriously, there is like one line in a database somewhere that ‘kind-of-sort-of’ indicates that GFs might be linked to long-term memory loss before that scene. Talk about your Deus-Ex-Machina plot devices.

In addition, the ‘love’ aspect of the story is so poorly handled it’s laughable. Squall is almost callously indifferent to Rinoa’s existence up until the beginning of disk 3 and even considers leaving her hanging off a ledge for the greater good during the Garden fight. As soon as she goes into a coma however, he suddenly ‘can’t live without her’. Cliché as hell and an illogical way of dealing with things based on what we had already seen within the game (aforementioned cliff-hanging scene already dictates how Squall should have reacted to Rinoa becoming comatose. There was no significant character development between the cliff scene and the coma).

Finally, there is almost no plot on disk 4, when there are plot points that needed wrapping up. The most prevalent of these pertain to the character Seifer. He goes from feeding innocent girls to power-hungry sorceresses to kicking it with friends in the game’s final FMV. Continuity error much? There needed to be at least SOMETHING to indicate that Seifer was capable of that sort of drastic change before the game’s finale in Ultimecia’s castle. Also, Laguna’s relationship with Squall isn’t explored to the degree that it should have been, considering its importance to the plot. It’s the only thing that explains various scenes that we see earlier in the game such as the Moomba’s calling Squall ‘Laguna’ and why Squall calls Ellone ‘sis’ (or hell, why he’s at the orphanage to begin with). Yet despite its importance, it’s given the ‘Shadow/Relm’ treatment, which only serves to make a confused plot more confusing.

Characters: By far the weakest aspect of the game. Since FFVI, all FF games excluding FFVIII have found time to give a decent amount time to developing all of its player characters. FFVI, FFIX and FFX filled out the vast majority of its cast by the end of the game. Even FFVII, which pretty much becomes all about Cloud after disk one, still has entire portions of the first disk devoted to each character.

In FFVIII, however, only three player characters at the very most are developed at the level they should have been: Squall, Laguna and Rinoa. Let’s ignore for a minute that out of these three characters, only Laguna is the least bit likable (since that borders on the realm of personal taste) and that between Squall/Rinoa that half the plot is sacrificed for isn’t any good anyway (since I’ve already mentioned that) to look at the other characters:

Quistis: Despite being a prominent female character in the very beginning of the game, she is quickly fazed out of the plot in favor of Rinoa. It was clear that Square initially intended there to be a love triangle between her, Rinoa and Squall yet it was pretty much completely ditched after the ballroom scene. Quistis goes from being seemingly infatuated by Squall, to having virtually no contact with him for the rest of the game (and fading from the plot almost entirely). And how do they justify this? One line of dialogue towards the end of disk 3 that basically states “Guess I wasn’t in love with you after all lol”. I really don’t get it; Square had already had practice with love triangles in the last game. There was absolutely no reason to cock it up so badly in this one.

Also, there is something to be said about female characters whose only spot of depth is in relation to their feelings for the main character.

Zell: There is some crap about him joining SeeD because of his grandfather at some point. That’s about as complex as this character gets.

Irvine: He gets stage fright. That’s a character trait, not character development. The writers need to learn the difference.

Selphie: Yeah, ok: she obviously wasn’t designed to be some cuts-herself-at-night schizophrenic or anything so much as she is just there for comic relief. Even so, the developers were clearly building up a relationship between her and Irvine towards the beginning of the game, which isn’t mentioned again after that one scene on the train. Would it have killed Square develop a relationship that wasn’t SquallxRinoa? Seemingly so, since every other relationship in the game is cast under the rug in favor of the main ship. Blarg.

Seifer: Probably my favorite character in the game and definitely the only decent antagonist, however the fact that they completely gloss over his moment of epiphany/redemption towards the end is really retarded. Already mentioned all that though, so I’ll move on.

Ultimecia: …is, who exactly? Seriously, she’s just some random chick who show’s up in the end. She has no clear motivation for her actions at all. I mean really, FF Villains have at least had motivations since frigging FFIII! She makes for a neat boss fight but that’s about it.

So yeah, that about wraps it up. The only other thing I can think of is that for a Final Fantasy game, it’s pretty void of the series’ signature icons. I mean, you can go through the entire game without seeing a damn Chocobo. About the only thing that indicates that this is a Final Fantasy game is the appearance of Cid, and a few of the GFs (some of which have been put into other non-FF Square games anyway).

Ultimately, FFVIII is not an awful game. It’s moderately fun to play and the graphics are better than the vast majority of game from the same era. The problem is, the game falls flat in every other category, which easily puts it at the very bottom of the series.