FINAL FANTASY 8

Well, last night I got to the final dungeon of FFVIII, so I thought I’d be a bit of a completist and go around getting all the little extras, but when I realised I’d got rid of a card I needed for a crappy subquest, and one of the GF summons would need me to go around hunting obscure monsters for hours to steal rare items from, I gave up, and decided to complete it this morning.

Started at half eleven and didn’t finish until 5 hours later. Should’ve known Square would make an incredibly frustrating, dull and repetitive final dungeon for this frustrating, dull and repetitive game.

It was always going to be hard to follow up something as seminal as FFVII, but Square seem to have kept all the flaws of the previous game without including any of the charm or character, and adding a whole plethora of new problems.

Graphically, of course the game has dated in almost seven years. But really, even for the PS1, the graphics are rather ugly. FFVII had an appealing cartoony style to the general gameplay, and there was obviously a conscious decision to get away from that by having very realistic character design, but the graphics are blocky, the prerendered backgrounds often difficult to navigate and the character animations extremely wooden. The fight scenes are where the focus has clearly gone, with huge summons similar to those of FFVII stealing the show, but of course, getting very dull after the first few times. CGI has progressed a long way, but the FMV sequences were still very nice to look at, if rather few and far between.

But FFVIII falls down in story terms. The characters are very badly portrayed: Squall somehow manages to be less charismatic and more irritating than most mute RPG protagonists, with his mood swings and occasional simian grunts, followed by oodles of angst. I never found a single reason why I (or Squall) should like Rinoa. Zell and especially Selphie were very entertaining, but always seemed like children stuck in adults’ bodies, and never had much of a chance to develop. None of the other characters got any real screentime at all, not even Seifer, whose story arc began as a rival in love and strength, but soon spiralled into that of a peripheral lapdog.

And the story is a mess. The promising initial setting suffers from Star Wars bathos (what seems to be an established institution with great power and influence turns out to be less than a generation old) and also Naruto temporal bias (where are all the other SeeDs who came before Squall and co, and why aren’t they at all important?). The big twists rely on huge leaps of faith, and there was no intriguing villain this time around, just a variety of sorceress figures leading to a very uninteresting climax. The best bit was the video camera sequence in the credits.

Not to say I didn’t have fun. I quite enjoyed going around the world fighting bosses for more GFs. The junctioning system was rather too time-consuming and I bet a lot of players just didn’t bother with it, but if you put some time and effort into it, it made the game very easy. Perhaps a little TOO easy, but I can’t deny the fun of kicking some random monster butt on occasion.

Overall, not a great game, not one I’d ever even THINK about playing again, but I’m glad I at least know what it’s all about now. Next, the 30000th time I’ve tried to play through Suikoden II!