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.
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