Final Fantasy 8

Original release date:  September 9th, 1999

Release date on PSN: December 17th, 2009

Price: $9.99

Story

Final Fantasy 8 has you taking control of a group of elite mercenaries called “SEEDS” and you start the game in their training site the “Garden”. There are a few more characters that join your party from other Gardens, and there does seem to be a bit of a rivalry that goes on with one particular character that you see in the opening cinematic, but it does feel like the story treads a lot of water, there are a few aha moments, but I really didn’t find myself invested in the story, it just moves too slowly, but that’s more of the gameplay department’s problem than the writing department. Your main character Squall is the standard FF hero, sort of a loner with gorgeous girls falling over themselves for him and he can’t get a clue. I have friends that say this has the best story of the three final fantasies on the PSone, but sadly I couldn’t get invested into it.

Gameplay

This is by far the worst part of this game. It has a turn based battle system that is evident in all the FF games released on the PSone, but the problem here is with the battle system. It pads out the game forever, and makes playing this more of a chore than a joy. It most RPGs like FF7 perhaps; there are hit points HP and magic point MP. When you get hit you lose HP, when you cast a spell you lose MP. Not so in this game though, you have to draw every spell you want to use from your opponents. So if for instance you find a great healing spell that you want to keep for all your members you have to wait, and draw the spells out of the opponent while they continue to battle with you. Each spell can only hold 100 casts though, (these get tied to some of your attributes), but it still takes and agonizingly long time to get enough casts for everyone, and most of the time you find more than one new spell with a new monster so you can spend 10-15 minutes on a battle that would take FF7’s battle system to finish in about 2 minutes. This makes the game move about as slow as a glacier, and really if it moved a little faster I could have gotten into the story a bit more.

I will admit that the junction system is really deep, and that there is a lot of changes you can make to beef up your character, but it doesn’t make up for the fact that it is incredibly slow.

Graphics

I will admit to the graphics in this game being WAY better than FF7s. People look like people all the time in this game instead of funny looking triangle sprites, the music is good, the backgrounds look nice, and the cut scenes are really spectacular. They also meld right into the gameplay seamlessly. FF7 never managed to pull this off, you can tell that FF8 was given a lot of love in the graphics department. Character design isn’t that bad either, and the animations are nice and fluid, not the best I’ve seen on the platform, but certainly nice.

How it holds up today

After spending 30+ hours on this game I couldn’t really tell you when it got interesting to me. Any developments in the story that caught my interest were soon buried by the incredibly slow gameplay you spend the overwhelming majority of this game doing busy work to pad out the game, and really it’s just a chore, I’ve played 3 other PSOne classics in entirety while trying to get through this game. When I realized I’d played 30+ hours and was only on the second disk (of 4) I Just felt like it wasn’t worth it. The gameplay really fails in this regard, the story line also jumps in between two different timelines and groups of characters, and really when you’re that far in and you’re not yet sure of your motivations, it’s hard to continue.

I know this is a loved and much disputed game, but in my humble opinion there are better games out there to spend your money and time on.

5/10