A Galaxy of Possibilities

My experience with Western role-playing games is, well…  “Sparse” would be a tremendous understatement.  “Just this side of non-existent” is probably more accurate.  I played Stonekeep for a few months back in 1999 or early 2000, well after it was new (I was going to say “after it was relevant”, but then remembered there was really never any such time).  And I’ve sunk some hours into Diablo and Diablo II.  But that’s pretty well it.

Final Fantasy VII was my first real RPG of any kind that wasn’t part RPG, part something else (like Crystalis on the NES).  And of course, then there were the subsequent Final Fantasy installments (and some earlier ones), Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete, Lunar: Eternal Blue Complete, a few Breath of Fire games, some time spent tinkering with a few Tales games... 

The pattern to all of these is usually pretty straightforward, well worn territory.  You have a town where someone tells you where to go next and who or what you need to kill there, some other people might give you helpful hints, drop information about a short side-quest, or let you buy and sell various items and bits of equipment.  Experience is earned from battles, which tend to occur randomly – this particular ageing, hoary mechanic comes down to us from of old, when this was the best way to simulate the occasional encounter with dangerous monsters you might expect while traversing the trackless wilds of the fantasy world du jour.  Killing monsters earns you experience points, and eventually, when you accumulate enough, your experience level increases.  This makes all the monster-pummeling marginally easier.

In between these bouts of village-finding and random encounter-having, the story occurs.  This typically happens in chunks of cut-scenes, completely non-interactive.  These tend to be riddled with bits of whatever the director or scenario writer can remember of their time in Philosophy 101.

Perhaps I’m being unfair, but if so, well, familiarity breeds contempt.  Certainly there are exceptions.  And there is a certain amount of comfort in having one’s expectations catered to.  But these exceptions are just that: exceptions.  And by their nature as such, they merely serve to underscore the general pattern. 

So as you can likely imagine, much of Mass Effect was strange to me.  Getting experience points just from talking to people and examining things?  Having party members I can actually talk to when I want, to explore their personalities and their pasts (or not) as I choose?  Being able to choose what I wanted to say?  Being asked a question, and being able to say “No” without the game saying, effectively, “Haha, okay, seriously though: say ‘yes’ or you’re not going anywhere”?  What madness was this?

*             *             *

I first encountered Mass Effect at a friend’s house, back when the game was still new.  I was vaguely intrigued by what little I saw of the opening mission, though I was horrible at what little I played because the Xbox 360 controller was unfamiliar to me.  Its placement of the A, B, X, and Y buttons was completely the opposite of what I expected.  Back then, the game looked amazing.  This was the first HD game I had seen played on an HDTV, and so that perhaps has something to do with it.  Today, the graphics are far less impressive.  But aside from running around awkwardly and shooting very poorly, I had no real sense of what the larger game was like.  That I was, effectively, in the game’s tutorial portion didn’t really register with me.  That the game was actually some species of RPG went right over my head.  It was an odd night.

Still, the title Mass Effect, and the general sense of interest, stuck with me.

I wasn’t able to own the game for myself, initially.  This was still in the early days of the last console generation.  I’d taken a long, hard look at my finances, and chosen, rather than an Xbox 360 or the then-astronomically priced PS3, to buy the system I could afford.  Sadly, Mass Effect didn’t look likely to see a release for the Wii at any point in the near future.  But I kept it in mind.  And then, some two or three years later, my wife (then my pseudo-fiancee) and I got together the money for a respectable desktop PC.  Browsing Steam one day not long after this, I found Mass Effect for twenty dollars.  Realizing, suddenly, that I could play beefy HD games like this, I thought, “Why not?”

Not since Ico, back in 2001, or Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter a year or so later, have I been more amply rewarded by an impulse buy.  Maybe not even then.  Roughly an hour or two after I started playing Mass Effect, I quit, went into the Steam store, and bought Mass  Effect 2.

In an odd way, playing Mass Effect is like going to Disney World.  There are a lot of interesting things to see and do, and you can’t really see and do all of them in a single trip.  And subsequent trips are like returning to Disney, in that you’re faced with a dilemma: Do you revisit all the highly enjoyable things you did before, which made the experience enjoyable and memorable for you in the first place, or do you forsake those and do something completely new?

*             *             *

Choice is a big part of Mass Effect.  And ironically, most of the choices are, on some level, irrelevant.  Well, maybe “irrelevant” is putting it a bit strongly.  What they mainly boil down to is a matter of flavor, or perspective, for lack of better terms.  

The story always hits the main beats.  You play as Commander Shepard.  The gender, face, first name (never used in-game), personal background, military history, and skill set of the character are all up for grabs.  Humankind is the new kid on the galactic block.  There is the Citadel, a construct built by an ancient precursor race, now vanished, known as the Protheans.  The Citadel isn’t quite a capital, and the representatives of the various other sentient races of the galaxy who live and work and negotiate there aren’t actually the rulers of their respective people, but at the same time, the Citadel is a symbol of galactic civilization and unity.  Of all the races who have embassies and representatives there, only three are actually on the Council.  The asari are a mono-gendered race (who tend to appear female to most other races), great policy-makers and diplomats, and are almost universally adept with biotics, which serve as magic in this game’s setting.  The salarians, by contrast, are a relatively short-lived species, for whom 40 is pushing decrepitude.  Warm-blooded amphibians with a habit of speaking quickly, they take a very scientific approach to life.  Lacking the brute force of the other Citadel races, they rely upon spying, espionage, sabotage, and other trickery to gain the advantage in warfare.  Lastly we have the turians, militaristic and hawkish, but disciplined; essentially Romans in space.  They have a somewhat antagonistic attitude to humanity, due in large part to a brief conflict fought between the two races not long after humanity discovered the Mass Relays.  These are the giant structures which allow for convenient space travel; like the Citadel, these are believed to have been built by the Protheans, and the technology behind them is poorly understood.

Shepard is earmarked to be the first human Spectre.  Spectres are operatives working for the Council, given an almost absurd amount of leeway and virtually no oversight (the better to plausibly deny, if necessary).  The Spectres are the Council’s right hand, and having a human Spectre is generally seen to be a step toward having a human on the Council.  But the first mission, meant to be one of many, to see whether Shepard would qualify as a Spectre goes sideways before it’s fairly begun.  Instead of retrieving the Prothean artifact recently discovered in the human colony on Eden Prime, Shepard encounters an attacking force of geth, synthetic beings who have not, until now, ventured beyond their own little corner of the galaxy for some centuries.  These are led by a turian named Saren, himself a Spectre, now apparently gone rogue.  The mission ends with the artifact being destroyed, but not before it grants Shepard a strange, disturbing, distorted vision of the doom visited upon the Protheans fifty thousand years ago by a race of spacefaring machines known as the Reapers.

It is these Reapers Saren appears to be serving.  He seeks the Conduit, which will allow him to bring them into the galaxy to wreak havoc once more.  Shepard, once he or she is able to prove to the Council beyond doubt that Saren has gone rogue, is then made a Spectre and charged with bringing him in.

From here the game opens up, offering three different story missions, each of which offers certain information about Saren’s plans and movements.  There is also an ocean of side-missions in which to lose yourself, about which more later.

Ultimately, the plot unfolds, as mentioned before, along the same lines no matter what you do.  Your choices mainly tend to affect how events happen, rather than determining the outcome directly.  You’ll always, for instance, rescue your teammate Liara from her entrapment in an ancient Prothean ruin, but you can choose whether to be nice about it, or whether you’d rather be an asshole instead.

This type of choice is really the heart of the game’s morality system.

*             *             *

Most games that feature any kind of morality system are honestly kind of laughable, mainly because of the way the choices are presented.  Your options usually boil down to either being able to do something very obviously good which is also very obviously reasonable and sensible, or something outlandishly evil, such that it is completely ridiculous and could only be considered even remotely reasonable from a completely insane point of view.

I’ve heard this particular tendency in game design referred to as the “Save the Baby/Eat the Baby Dichotomy”. 

Mass Effect tends to avoid this problem by not presenting its choices in a good and evil light.  Instead, where the choices break down into obvious types at all, they break down into two.

Paragon choices tend to emphasize cooperation, diplomacy, and appealing to people’s better natures.  A Paragon Shepard would generally rather negotiate than go in guns blazing, and is often forgiving and understanding, and keen on behaving in a way that seems fair.  But a Paragon Shepard isn’t all sweetness and niceness.  As much as he or she may want to avoid starting a fight, they rarely have problems with ending one.

Renegade choices, by contrast, tend to go pretty much the opposite.  A Renegade Shepard has no compunctions about using force to do what seems right, and often feels quite certain that the ends justify the means.  Renegades don’t hesitate to threaten, and tend not to be overly concerned with the needs of others.  The mission takes priority, and God help you if you find yourself in the way and slow to move.  However, a Renegade Shepard isn’t completely evil or tyrannical, and it may be that some Renegade options seem more just, or at least more expedient when it matters.

Both choices, when offered, will get the job done equally well.  What changes is the way other characters respond to you.  The “flavor” of the story, the sense of perspective it takes as you play, changes according to your choices.  What you do or don’t do, and how you do what you do, causes the characters to respond in different ways.  And Mass Effect keeps track of it all, as you discover in the sequels.

As much as personalizing your character’s face and background, these choices personalize both the story and the character for each player.  More than changing the story, the choices offered let you feel more involved in it. 

In this, Mass Effect actually walks a very fine line.  On the one hand, you have the wide-open narratives of Western RPGs where your characters are usually blank slates (of necessity, being player-created), and the story is therefore never very personal.  In these, you usually have a lot of choice about what you’ll do and how you’ll do it, because the view taken in most Western RPGs is that they are a simulation of an adventure.  Japanese RPGs, on the other hand, tend to focus more on the story.  Where exploration is possible, it’s rarely of much consequence, as the game typically wants you to go to specific places in a specific order so as to advance the story a certain way.  These games typically have a more in-depth story, as the characters are pre-made, with personalities and appearances designed by the developers.   Most Japanese RPGs tend to focus on the plot, rather than the simulation of an adventure.

Between the two, we have Mass Effect.  I don’t think it was BioWare’s intention for the game to necessarily take a middle way between these two schools of RPG design, mind you.  But I feel like it does that, just the same.  And the way BioWare handles it, we still get an engrossing sci-fi adventure without losing the feeling that we can choose how we go through it.  We feel like we’re doing it all our own way – and we are, in a sense – even as the game always, always dictates what we do.  It’s because we choose how to do it that we feel like we’re in charge.

*             *             *

Actually playing Mass Effect, from a mechanical perspective, and from a broader game-design perspective, can be frustrating.

While it’s structured as an RPG, it has the basic mechanics of a cover-based third-person shooter.  But the mechanics are just that: basic.  Moving can be imprecise, and the character slow to respond.  Taking cover isn’t handled by way of a button press.  You just shove the character up against a wall, and if you’re moving more or less perpendicular to the surface in question, Shepard will take cover.  From there, you can lean out and shoot at your enemies.  But if you come at your cover from the wrong angle, it can be difficult to “stick” to it.  This usually results in the enemies taking potshots at you while you try to actually take cover, and likewise results in you having a frustrating time aiming and firing.  This is especially irritating if your squad (two chosen ally characters who may accompany you) gets in the way, which they invariably do. 

Worse than this, and less forgivable, is that the game itself is a bit…  Well, “janky” is the word that comes immediately to mind.  The framerate suffers visibly during more intense conflicts (when you most need it to be smooth), to the point that aiming and firing can occasionally be difficult for more than just the usual reasons.   Even outside of battle, camera movement is kind of rough and jagged.  Vehicular combat can also be an issue, as you may occasionally find yourself too close to a target to be able to actually hit it, even when you have it in your sights.  And the less said about the driving segments, the better.

Playing the game on PC, rather than on console, can mitigate this somewhat.  While still not exactly worth writing home about, Mass Effect’s visuals look considerably better, and lack the framerate problems and rough camera issues when running on even modest hardware.  It’s also nice when the textures load more or less immediately, rather than taking several seconds to pop in as they do on the Xbox 360 version.  But then the PC port introduces bugs not present in the original version of the game (to the best of my knowledge, anyway).  I found myself ejected from the level geometry during a boss fight in one run through the game.  A friend of mine says that he’s run into a situation where, once a weapon overheats, it never, ever cools down again.  This isn’t just the Overload ability (which you can also learn and use against enemies); Overload is temporary.  This is permanent.

In a broader sense, the gameplay of Mass Effect is a bit uneven, also.

Story missions are a blast to play.  Wonky mechanics aside, they provide interesting environments, objectives, and enemies.  The story that advances through these missions is also pretty interesting, and of course playing through multiple times lets you play through it multiple ways, with different party combinations. 

But then you have the side-missions.

These are given to you by other characters.  Sometimes you’ll enter a system and be alerted to an occurrence that requires your attention.  Sometimes you’ll find clues while on a main mission that lead to a side-mission.  There’s always a bonus to be had in experience, gear, and money for completing these, but they don’t offer much beyond this, and are kind of lacking in themselves.  The vast majority of them are barebones affairs with little interaction or plot advancement, and usually go something like this:

You touch down on a planet, and are given a small part of its surface area to explore.  There will be a few different points of interest, often in the form of rare minerals you can survey, or abandoned gear you can pick up, and one or two places (depending on the mission) where the actual meat of the side-mission happens.  Traversing the planet surface is an exercise in aggravation.  Typically, the shortest distance between any two points on the map is a straight line which has that planet’s equivalent to Mount Fucking Everest right in the middle of it.  It’s fun, at first, to realize that the Mako (your exploratory vehicle) can drive up virtually any surface that isn’t an actual 90-degree cliff, given time enough, and sufficient finagling.  It goes from fun to irritating in a hurry, however, when you realize that not only can you, you’ll have to.  Frequently, and at length.  Then, as you begin to thank your lucky stars for finding a nice, flat stretch of ground to drive over…  Invariably, this is when you will encounter a Thresher Maw.  This is essentially a giant worm, found on many worlds, that spits acid and does its level best to ruin your day.  You can fight and kill Thresher Maws, but this quickly (which is to say, more or less immediately) becomes tedious.

So you drive to where the mission actually happens.  And here, you’re confronted with the fact that there are only three maps in which side missions take place.  You have the mine shaft, the pre-fab dwelling, and the underground bunker.  The only variation to speak of in these is where the crates and any (entirely static, non-interactive) machinery in them will be placed. 

Finishing the side mission usually nets you some money, maybe some halfway interesting gear, and often fleshes out some of the “lore” or other sub-plots going on in the main story.

The side missions aren’t actually awful, but they do get tedious, and the work-to-fun ratio is not favorable.  They’re best done a few at a time, between story missions.

*             *             *

My most recent play-through of Mass Effect is actually my wife’s play-through.  She has been in the room for a good portion of all four of my previous runs through the entire trilogy, and has gotten more than a little curious about the game.  So she took a stab at playing herself.  For this, I had to leave the room.

It turns out that a lifetime spent not playing more violent video games, developing the skills necessary to run, jump, punch, shoot, throw grenades and otherwise ruin your opponents’ whole week does not predispose one to much skill with this sort of gameplay.  So it’s more than a little intimidating, and even its basic mechanics offer a comparatively steep learning curve to a raw newcomer.  I should explain that this is nothing against my wife.  She plays games like The Sims, and all its countless and myriad variations and expansions, and as much as I tease her, secretly, at the bottom of my heart, those games are intimidating to me because they are completely inscrutable.  So I do the running around and the shooting things, and she chooses where we go and what we do and say, who we do it and say it to, who we like, who we dislike, who we’ll fall in love with, who we’ll ultimately have to sacrifice.

She’s playing a female Shepard, out of curiosity as much as anything else.  I always play a male Shepard, because I am boring and dull.  I have run through the entire trilogy about four times, and have played Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 five times.  Always, I play a male Shepard.  After all of that, she’s been curious about what it’s like with a female Shepard.  It’s actually helped to make the game new for me, because I’m so used to hearing certain lines of dialogue at certain times, and when those lines are delivered by a different person in a different way, it sometimes jars the whole experience into a strange feeling of newness.  Especially since characters react differently depending on whether you play a male Shepard or a female one.

*             *             *

Ultimately, Mass Effect is a diamond in the rough.  I love it, really – despite all it does wrong, there’s a lot it does right to be worthy of that love – and I still, in the end, enjoy playing through it.  I love setting down on alien worlds, seeing strange skies with strange moons, suns, and planets in them.  I like standing on a high place, hearing the ambient music, and the booming of the wind, and staring out across the vista.  Even with all the lack of refinement, there’s a certain rough elegance to it at times.

But playing at someone else’s direction lets me think about things in a way I sometimes don’t get to when I’m focused on the decisions I want to make.  When I know a choice is coming and I’m debating it silently in my head, running through a particular firefight or stretch of Mako driving purely on auto-pilot, I don’t have time to notice the minor flaws, and the not-so-minor flaws, that have been there since the beginning.  Then, too, it doesn’t help any that I’ve since played much better third-person shooters.  Gears of War, of course, and then Mass Effect’s own sequels both stand as better examples of how this sort of gameplay should really work.  Sure, you can always say that Mass Effect is supposed to be a sort of RPG-shooter hybrid, but problem isn’t that the shooter mechanics aren’t very deep or fleshed out.  They’re just shaky, and kind of bad.  You have only to play Mass Effect 2, with its much tighter and more responsive moving, maneuvering, and shooting, to understand what could have been – what should have been.

But, at the same time, Mass Effect’s story elevates it above these problems, and the sense of exploration is unrivaled in anything else I’ve played, including its own sequels.  If it falls a bit short of the mark in this, it at least aimed high, and you can tell.  When it’s on, it’s really, really on.  At its worst, Mass Effect is a diamond in the rough. 

And when that’s the worst you can say about a game, well…  Some studios live and die wishing they’d made a game you can say that about.

FITHOS LUSEC WECOS VINOSEC: Succession of Witches, and...

So.

In 1997, we had Final Fantasy VII which, despite being technically uneven, was an unprecedented success.  Its sales figures were amazing for its time, and are still respectable today (more than a decade and a half later, mind you).  It’s a sort of lightning Square has been trying to make strike twice to this day.  As a popular and critical darling, warts and all, it’s a rare creature, and it was the spark that set off the explosion of Japanese RPGs that would become staple genre of console gaming for the remainder of that console generation and virtually all of the next.

In 2000, we had Final Fantasy IX, a massive nostalgia bomb, a love letter to the medieval-ish high-fantasy days of the series before the Playstation.  Hearkening back to its 8-bit and 16-bit history, it referenced and name-checked all sorts of characters, places, plot elements, weapons, and other thematic elements from the days of yore, which really weren’t all that far back in retrospect, but were worlds removed from the modern, urban fantasies that Final Fantasy VII had ushered in.

In between, in 1999, we had Final Fantasy VIII. 

Final Fantasy VIII, the awkward, gangly, but well-meaning middle child of its generation.  In retrospect, it could never have been anything else.

The success of Final Fantasy VII was practically an accident, as most such runaway successes tend to be.  It was a massive technological leap forward for the series, horrifically inconsistent visual style aside.  While its enduring success is due to its rock-solid gameplay, interesting story, memorable characters, and status as a game of historic significance in both its specific genre and the medium in general, its immediate success owes much more to savvy marketing.  Not one commercial for the game showed any of the actual playable parts, but instead focused exclusively on the cutscenes, which were state of the art for their time.  If you didn’t know that Final Fantasy VII was a role-playing game, and you didn’t know what a role-playing game was, you had no idea what to actually expect of the game.  Which was a perfectly understand course of action to take for the advertising, really.  Menu battles don’t exactly make for thrilling commercials.  As far as Squaresoft (now Square Enix) was concerned, so long as you wanted it nonetheless (as many people certainly did), then that was fine.

I say this mainly to point out that Final Fantasy VIII’s own considerable sales figures, despite its status as the black sheep of the Final Fantasy family for several years (and now merely as one of the black sheep), are no great surprise.  It traded on a massive amount of goodwill built up by Final Fantasy VII.  The plain truth of it is that Final Fantasy VIII could have been shit—Square could have packaged actual human feces in every jewel case—and still it would have sold millions, based solely on the strength of reputation.

But let’s step back a bit.

*             *             *

It’s pretty uncommon now, but it used to be, way, way back in the day, that sequels could be radically different from each other.  The Legend of Zelda went from being an overhead-view action-adventure game with non-linear exploration and some light puzzle-solving to a sort of vaguely RPG-ish game where most of the actual playing, outside of navigating from one location of interest to another, took the form of a side-scrolling platform game.  Super Mario Bros. 2 was so different, mechanically, from its predecessor that it might as well not have been a Mario game at all (I know, I know; what we got in the U.S. as Super Mario Bros. 2 technically wasn’t a Mario game originally, but bear with me; I’m going somewhere with this).  Where Castlevania was a linear, side-scrolling platform game, Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest offered a wide-open sandbox with no real boss encounters until the very end of the game.

And so on, and so on.

Final Fantasy, as a series, has always done this.  What makes Final Fantasy as a series unique is that it has kept doing this, while other series are now content for sequels to simply iterate upon the basic formula outlined in the first game.  Iron out the kinks from the previous game, introduce a few new quirks to the system, make the game bigger and better-looking.  That’s essentially the way sequels are done today.  Occasionally, you reboot the franchise if things have gotten stale or you want to go in a new direction.

Meanwhile, the only thing truly the same between all Final Fantasy titles is the goddamned title font.  And even that wasn’t set until Final Fantasy IV.

Actually, that’s a little bit untrue.  In recent years, Square has taken to creating compilations of games set in the same world, featuring the same characters.  It started with Final Fantasy X-2, and there have been other sequels and related games made for Final Fantasy VII, XII, and XIII.  But even before this, there were certain things all entries in the series had in common.  Some of it was in the names of certain places, characters, and items, which carried over from one game to the next.  Some of it is in the mechanical elements of the games (the ATB System, the Job System, etc.).  A lot of it was in certain ideologies and philosophies; certain repeated narrative themes, elements, and motifs; and a certain “feeling” (for lack of a more exact description) present in the various games.

Final Fantasy is one of the only series around still doing this, still reinventing the wheel with every new installment.  Which is one reason why I like Final Fantasy VIII, perhaps in spite of itself.  Because even in the face of the overwhelming success of its immediate predecessor, Square decided not to do the obvious thing, which would have been to make another game exactly like Final Fantasy VII, only prettier and bigger.  Instead, they chose to do what they’d always done, which was to do something completely different.

*             *             *

Inevitably, Final Fantasy VIII was going to be seen as somewhat of a disappointment to a lot of people.  It was really never possible for it to be anything else.  The truth is simply that its predecessor left some impossibly big shoes to fill by virtue of its reputation, and no game on planet Earth was going to be able to fill them.  Much like Destiny today, the product being sold by advertisements and interviews and previews and ad space in magazines, and on the strength of the reputation of its predecessor, and the product that eventually arrived in stores, that real human beings in our sadly limited physical universe could own, were too far dissimilar.

Which is not, of course, to say that Final Fantasy VIII is perfect, or even great.  It isn’t, and there are reasons why it’s one of the black sheep of the series.  But it isn’t a bad game, either.  It’s merely a good game, coming after a series of consistently excellent ones, and foreshadowing some of the troubles its developer would come to face in a console generation or two.  But then, experimenting with the formula is bound to result in more than a few failures.  It’s in the nature of experimentation to fail, occasionally.

But probably even saying that is putting it too harshly.  A game that has moved as many millions of units as Final Fantasy VIII has over the years can hardly be considered a failure by any reasonable metric.  And as time has marched on, and we’ve gotten away from the immediate aftermath of its predecessor and can more clearly judge it on its own merits, without bias, it turns out that Final Fantasy VIII is pretty all right, in the end.

So what does Final Fantasy VIII do right, and where and how does it go wrong?  What’s it like to play today?  That’s what I’m hoping to answer.

One of the first things Final Fantasy VIII got right was its English localization.  This was a relatively new practice at the time; in point of fact, Final Fantasy VIII may have been the game that pioneered it.  Before this, games were usually translated into English at some point after the game was finished and released in Japan.  Because getting the game into English was a generally secondary process, it usually had a brutally short timeframe.  Most of the quirks and errors in the translation of earlier games tended to be due to this.  Rather than laziness on the part of the translators, it was simply a matter of not having enough time to get it fine-tuned.  The international success of Final Fantasy VII helped to convince Squaresoft that the market beyond Japan was important enough that good localizations mattered.  And so the English script was written in tandem with the game’s development.

This was also the first game to finally standardize the spell name structure of the Final Fantasy Series.  The whole “-a”, “-aga”, “-aja” suffix thing got its start here.

As an insufferable English pedant myself, this pleases me to no end.  Granted, some of the slang and other colloquialisms of the game stand out sharply today, and date it, but on the whole, the attempt (largely successful, by the way) to give the game’s dialogue some texture and flavor was and remains greatly appreciated.

There are other developmental points we could make about the game—its use of realistically proportioned character models, the minimalist combat menus, and so on, but technical details are so dry and boring, and don’t make for a good retrospective.

So let’s talk about gameplay.

There’s a lot to talk about, and I’m probably only going to scratch the surface because of it (this is a retrospective, not a manual or a guide), but even just skimming the surface reveals how different this game is.

As I mentioned, pretty much every Final Fantasy game reinvents the wheel to some extent.  Final Fantasy VIII does it more so than most. 

Where its predecessor was already comparatively minimalist about weapons, armor, accessories and whatnot, VIII does away with these things altogether.  You don’t even buy new weapons.  You can upgrade your weapons, assuming you find the right parts (these are items, dropped like everything else after combat, depending entirely on the will and the whims of the fickle and almighty Random Number God).  Aside from the usual combat items – potions, antidotes, echo screens, eye drops, softs, etc. – there’s not much to buy with your money.

And then money is yet another thing VIII handles differently.  Rather than earning money from fighting monsters, you are paid at regular intervals.  Your characters belong to a mercenary group (more on this later), and are paid a regular stipend corresponding to their rank.  Said rank can be raised and lowered depending on how skillfully (or not) you play.  You can also take quizzes to raise your rank, and increase your pay thereby.

And then there is the Junction System…

This is the thing that frustrates newcomers and people who prefer more straightforward character building in games.  A cursory look at how the system works makes it look like the most insufferable thing imaginable in a game. 

So:  You have Guardian Forces (GFs from here on out), which are powerful spirits like Ifrit, Shiva, Quezacotl, Siren, and a score of others (basically the summon spirits from previous Final Fantasy games).  You Junction these GFs to a character, which initially enables various battle commands (magic, items, etc.).  The GFs can be summoned at will, without draining any kind of magic point pool—because there isn’t one.  They also each offer a slew of passive bonuses and abilities, and are capable of learning more as they level up along with the characters.  One of the fundamental  benefits of GFs, however, is that they let you junction magic to your stats.

This takes some explaining.

So, in Final Fantasy VIII, you don’t have magic points, or even spell charges like the very first entries (at least, not in quite the same way).  Instead, if you have a GF junctioned, you have access to a “Draw” command.  You can use this to draw magic spells out of the enemies you fight (each enemy has a set selection of spells you can draw from it, though not a set amount of said spells), as well as certain “Draw Points” in the world at large.  Drawing from an enemy or draw point will give you between one and nine charges of a particular spell.  Characters can carry up to 100 charges of a particular spell.  When you junction a spell to one of your stats, the more charges of that spell you have, the greater the effect.  So if you junction 100 Cures to your hit points, you can expect your HP total to jump by about a hundred or more.  Some GFs let you junction elemental spells to your attack stats, meaning your default attack will carry an elemental modifier, which makes those attacks more effective on enemies weak against that element.  You can also junction status effects to your attacks as well, with the right GF.

This is the sort of complexity that makes some players tear their hair out.  It’s also exactly the thing that lets you open the game up wide, break it over your knee, make it your bitch, etc. , etc., in so many clever and creative ways. 

You know those status spells that always sound really cool?  Blind, Sleep?  Death?  You know how they never, ever work when you need them to or want them to in other Final Fantasies?  Well, they still don’t work terribly often in Final Fantasy VIII, either, not when cast regularly.  But only a chump does that.  Slap 100 Sleep spells on your attack stat, and you’ll be putting enemies to sleep about 80 percent of the time with just your standard attack.  Or maybe you’re just tired of getting hit with Death spells yourself, since your enemies never seem to suffer from the sort of questionable effectiveness of these spells.  Junction 100 Death spells to the right stat, and you’re pretty much immune to the instant-death status.

And it gets better!

There is a card game you can play with many other people in the game’s world, with cards based on various characters and enemies found throughout the game.  One of the GF abilities you can learn early on lets you turn enemies into cards.  Now, winning the card game is great and all, but there are other GF abilities which let you refine cards into items, sometimes rare and powerful items, which you can then junction to your stats, which then allow you to run roughshod over the world at large, like gods.

I could go on and on forever, probably.  There’s the fact that enemy monsters’ power scales with your own experience level, so that they always present a consistent challenge, but if you keep your levels low and junction smart, you can make yourself inordinately more powerful than the monsters, and stomp all over them from hell to breakfast, if you like.

I think I need to stop, though, or else I’ll never shut up.

*             *             *

So what’s Final Fantasy VIII about, anyway?  We’ve come this far; maybe we should, you know, talk about the story.  There are four discs of it, for God’s sake; it must be worth mentioning at some point.

So we start off playing as Squall Leonhart.  Squall is a young man enrolled at the Balamb Garden, a sort of military academy which trains and deploys elite mercenaries, known as SeeDs (yes, with ridiculous capitalization), all over the world.  Squall has a rival or adversary of sorts named Seifer Almasy.  While their relationship is mutually antagonistic, they also seem to be the only people who really understand each other, and they both mirror each other in odd ways throughout the game.

To say that Squall is a loner is to put it mildly.  An orphan (as are so many main characters in this game), suffering from severe abandonment issues, he believes that a person should rely only on themselves, and should never have to rely upon others to get by, either physically, emotionally, or otherwise. 

Upon becoming a SeeD (which happens fairly early on), he and two companions are sent to aid a resistance group in a place called Timber.  Timber is occupied by an imperialistic nation-state (there do not seem to be well-delineated countries) called Galbadia.  While in Timber, Squall and Co. discover that Galbadia has a new ambassador, the Sorceress Edea.

Sorceresses in this world, we learn, are Bad News..  There was a massive war fought to subdue one (probably the equivalent of a World War) 17 years prior, and Galbadia’s thinly veiled bid for world domination looks likely to trigger another such conflict.  And of course, the Sorceress here is far more than she appears to be. 

Not long after this, Squall’s orders change.  Instead of supporting the Timber resistance, he is to eliminate the Sorceress Edea at all costs. 

With him and his SeeD compatriots in this endeavor is Rinoa Heartilly, the young, impulsive leader of the resistance that he was previously (and grudgingly) aiding.  While she is quite serious about the resistance movement she leads, she is immature in ways; she lacks the understanding of just how grim an undertaking it is that she leads.  Squall finds himself irritated by and with her, and at the same time, can’t seem to part himself from her.  As much as she frustrates him, she also helps to ground him and humanize him. 

If it wasn’t apparent before, even just from looking at the game’s logo, Final Fantasy VIII is, as much as it is a fantasy adventure, a romance.  This is both good and bad.

The characters themselves are actually fairly well done and developed, and interesting once you get to spend time with them.  But it’s the time required for this to become apparent that is the fatal stumbling block of Final Fantasy VIII.

A large part of the problem is the pacing.  To an extent, this is true of most PS1-era RPGs.  The vast amount of storage space for raw content offered by the then-new widespread adoption of CD-ROM as a standard format was far too tempting for many developers of long-form games, and very, very few of them were able to resist that temptation.  “Bloat” is one of the hallmarks of the era, honestly.  But Final Fantasy VIII feels especially bad about this.  There are a number of segments that feel, if not necessarily gratuitous on their own, then excessive and unnecessary taken altogether.  It feels as if, enamored with the thought of all they could do, they never stopped to think about whether they should do it.

And this makes the characters suffer.

In previous Final Fantasies, as with most games, the characters are instruments of the plot.  Their strengths and weaknesses, their troubles, their failures and their triumphs, all occur by order of dramatic necessity. 

Final Fantasy VIII tries to turn this around.  The characters, their relationships, and the development of both, are ends in themselves.  The characters don’t develop on the way to other things; their development is a large part – probably the main part – of the whole.

But this process is slow.  Clear and momentous transitions are vanishingly few, perhaps nonexistent.  Our hero Squall is one person at the game’s start, another, different person at its end, and there is not a single point where all of it changes.  It’s a gradual process, not set up in discrete stages or movements.  I like this, actually, because in this much it is honest.  Life is like that.  But the drawback to this slow development is that first impressions, or any other brief surveying of the game, will not reveal any of its greater depths.  It will, in fact, only reinforce the stereotype of Squall as an emo loner jackass.  And while this much is true as far as it goes…

1.        He has reasons for being the way he is, and

2.       He gets better, which of course is part of the whole point of the story in the first place.

But it is such a slow burn.  You have to stick with it.  And this is a large part of the problem. 

I like character stories.  Really, I do.  I have always been of the belief that good, strong characters are the life’s blood of any story.  If you can’t get invested in the characters—whether you love them or hate them—you can’t get invested in the story.  But this kind of story is perhaps not the best fit for an RPG.  The countless hours of random battles and grinding and drawing spells and fiddling with your junctions and hitting enemies with wildly improbable weapons until all the numbers come out can get in the way of the character development, and vice versa.

None of this is to say that Final Fantasy VIII is bad—far from it!—but it does require a certain amount of patience.  An amount of patience I didn’t have back in 1999, when I was 18.

*             *             *

So, how has Final Fantasy VIII aged?  Is it worth it?

Graphically, it’s a bit rough.  In September of 1999, of course, it was phenomenal.  But fifteen years of technology marching on have not been kind to it.  I’ve been playing most of my PS1 games on my PS Vita, where the screen is small enough that this issue isn’t very noticeable, but on a nice, big, HDTV…

The polygons are sharp-edged and jagged like sawteeth, and the pixels in the texture maps are big enough to pick out and count.  Some of the animations look pretty twitchy and jittery as well, par for the course in this particular timeframe.  And of course, because of the PS1’s shortsighted lack of perspective correction, the textures warp and bend at odd angles from time to time.  But in a weird way, I’m nostalgic for that.

I’ve taken to playing the game on my PS2 on a standard definition TV.  I find that it softens the blow.

The music is definitely a step up from its predecessor.  Final Fantasy VII was well-composed, but the execution was frankly embarrassing in comparison to Final Fantasy VIII, which maybe doesn’t have as many memorable songs, but certainly has an overall better sound quality.

In all, the gameplay conventions that Final Fantasy VIII was founded on have gotten pretty long in the tooth.  Random battles are becoming increasingly passé, and the game probably serves as one of the most egregious examples of the aforementioned PS1-era bloat.  I’m not sure who the audience for this game is going to be.  Kids who grew up on HD systems are probably going to find it visually glaring, mechanically obtuse, and torturously slow.  But for those of us who are older and more patient, those are the very things that make it more rewarding (well, not the visually glaring part), and I’m finding that I enjoy the game much more today than I did fifteen years ago when it came out.

So that’s my verdict, I suppose.  If you tried it and couldn’t hack it then, give it another shot now.  You may find that it’s changed, or that you have.