Game Review: ファイナルファンタジーVIII リマスタード
2021-Aug-09, Monday 11:59![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dorchadas
This is the divisive one.
I didn't own a PS1, so I didn't play the PS1-era Final Fantasy games until later--Final Fantasy IX in 2002, Final Fantasy VIII in 2006, and Final Fantasy VII never--but my friends in high school did and so I was peripherally involved in the wars over its quality.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
uriany hated the game, especially the draw mechanic, and made sure to mention it every time it was brought up. fiendishfanfares loved the story and the characters, and did her best to defend it. I had never played the game so I had no opinion, but the Great Final Fantasy VIII Wars are one of the memories I have of high school.
I first played the game years later and I liked it well enough, but there were still some problems that prevented me from really enjoying it. The way the story kept taking sudden right turns, and the way that magic worked, and the strange difficulty scaling, but I appreciated the Retro Future Art Noveau setting and the focus on character interactions. Years passed, I studied Japanese, and when the Axe of the Blood God podcast and the Square Roots podcast both picked FFVIII as their next game I knew that I needed to play along. Would I enjoy FFVIII as much asfiendishfanfares had if I played it in the original language?
It took me months to finish because there is a lot of text in this game, but I finally see what the fans love about it, even if I can't agree that it's wholely loveable.
...
By far the most important part of FFVIII is the hero, Squall Leonhart.
Most Final Fantasy games have an ensemble cast, or at least a small number of characters that the game focuses on, but Squall is the protagonist for roughly 98% of the game. Other than a single mission on Disc 2, the player spends all of their time with Squall to the point that the game explicitly shows his inner monologue. This is really the make-it-or-break-it part of FFVIII--people who appeciate Squall's character arc and growth will like the game, and people who think he's a whiny emo who needs to man up will hate it. The problem is that the English localization tilts his character much more strongly to the latter end, to the game's detriment.
I'll just come out and say it--the English version of Squall is a worse person than the Japanese version. Both versions of Squall are curt, pessimistic, and moody, but only the English version of Squall is so casually dismissive of everything. Mention Squall around any English-speaking FF player and his catchphrase of "...whatever" will probably come up in short order. It's one of the most common things that he says throughout the course of the game, especially when he's responding to other people. The problem is that multiple Japanese phrases with different meanings were all translated as "...whatever," collapsing the depth of Squall's response into a sullen teenager who just, like, wants you to get off their back, man. This Legends of Localization article has multiple examples of the Japanese, but one I noticed immediately was in the fire cavern, where Squall and Quistis's exchange was different:
Selphie: "We blow him to bits with a rocket launcher, yeah?"
FFVIII's plot also gets a lot of criticism, some of it certainly deserved. The game is less interested in coherent and compelling worldbuilding than it is in showing Squall's personal growth, and a lot of the best parts of FFVIII's world have to be sought out or they'll never come up. What really helped me get into the game, though, is realizing that it's structured like an anime series.
In Season (Disc) One, the stage is set--Squall and his friends are teenage mercenaries called SeeDs, taught at Balamb Garden, which is one of several Garden military schools around the world. Unlike the other Gardens, however, the students at Balamb are taught how to bind and control Guardian Forces (GFs), powerful beings like Shiva and Ifrit and Quezacotl and Carbuncle which allow them to use para-magic (疑似魔法 giji mahō). In the world of FFVIII, true magic is limited to a small group of women called witches (魔女 majo, Eng: "Sorceresses"), but the recent discovery of GF-binding allows normal people to greatly enhance their powers through para-magic. This is the draw of Balamb Garden--a single Balamb SeeD is puissant enough to defeat powerful monsters or multiple trained soldiers, and a group of them can fight an army and win. It's like any number of anime about a group of high school students with superpowers.
Despite being Final Fantasy and starring magic teenage mercenaries, FFVIII's beginning is grounded. After the fire cavern trial, Squall and his fellow trainee Zell, along with teacher Quistis, are sent under the command of his rival student Seifer to their final exam to graduate as full SeeDs--a live fire engagement against a professional military. The small duchy of Dollet (rhymes with "Cabernet") is being invaded by the expansionist Republic of Galbadia, and after two days of fighting Dollet contracted SeeD to help defend them. Seifer's squad is ordered to guard the town square to secure the students' rear, but after Seifer runs off seeking glory, Squall assumes command and secures the radio tower--Galbadia's true objective--before being ordered to withdraw and being chased back to the landing craft by a Galbadian autonomous war machine. Following his graduation and Seifer's reprimand for gross dereliction of duty, Squall is promoted to squad leader and his squad is assigned to aid a resistance movement in the occupied city-state of Timber. Galbadia's president-for-life Vinzer Deling will be in Timber to make a broadcast, using Dollet's radio tower to punch through the static that has blanketed the airwaves and forced the world to use landline transmissions in the seventeen years since the Witch War (魔女戦争 majo sensō, Eng: "Sorceress War"), and the Timber Owls--led by Rinoa Heartilly, a woman who Squall had met at the SeeD graduation dance--plan to kidnap Deling and force him to grant Timber's independence.
I could go on, but I'm not here to summarize the entire plot. My point is that Disc One is all about military actions and politics, about making hard choices and the importance of discipline, and it maintains that coherent thread throughout its entire run, from the fire cavern at the beginning to Irvine failing to take the shot against the witch Edea as she assassinates President Deling and declares herself Witch-Queen of the Galbadian Empire, forcing Squall's squad to attempt a frontal assault. Disc One ends with Edea conjuring an enormous magical icicle and impaling Squall with it, and the screen goes black as he falls backward off of her victory parade car.
Zell: "Our memories are going away...because of the GFs? Is that why no other military uses them?".
Discussions of Final Fantasy frequently talk about how in the last disc of the game things go off the rails, but when FFVIII comes up, the derailing point is always placed much earlier. There's even a website called SquallsDead.com, devoted to the theory that Edea fatally wounds Squall with her magical attack and the rest of the game is Squall's dream before he dies. I don't believe that, but I understand why people would find the rest of the game unsatisfying. After the politics and military action of Disc One, Disc Two changes radically. It starts with Squall, miraculously and inexplicably (literally--the game makes no attempt to explain it) recovered from his wounds, in a Galbadian prison. After being tortured by Seifer, who demands to know the true purpose of SeeD, Squall is rescued by his squad and they split up to warn Balamb Garden of an impending missile attack and stop the missiles from impacting Trabia Garden. So far, so good.
Season (Disc) Two is about self-discovery, about how no one can live alone and the bonds of friendship make us all stronger, and one of the ways it reinforces that is by revealing that the main cast all knew each other in the past. They all grew up in the same orphanage after they lost their parents in the Witch War, but they don't remember it due to a combination of childhood trauma and the side-effects of GF use--GFs need to be "junctioned" to be effective, and junctioning alters the brain to allow magical power to flow freely into the junctioner, but that also affects memories and over time causes more and more amnesia. Balamb Garden's use of GFs caused these childhood friends to forget each other, and it's only in the ruins of Trabia Garden that they reforge their forgotten connections.
Except that Irvine was trained in Galbadia Garden, which does not use GFs, and so remembered everything and just never brought it up.
This is one of the moments that a lot of people cite as their break point with FFVIII, and I won't attempt to defend it because it really is egregious. But the reason why it passes and no one comments on it again is that Final Fantasy VIII is a game about Squall, and secondarily about Rinoa as Squall's love interest, and everything else in the game is built to support this. It's why Rinoa is the successor to Edea's witch powers even though Quistis, who is already a blue mage, would seem a better candidate. It's why Squall is put in command of his squad even though he is uninspiring and unlikeable. It's why Season (Disc) Three is about love and the lengths that Squall will go to for Rinoa, taking her to the ends of the earth and going into space to save her. It's why everything important in the game is done by Squall, one of Squall's forgotten childhood friends, or someone connected to Squall--the head of the orphanage was the witch Edea, her husband is the headmaster of Balamb Garden, Squall's father is the president of Esthar, where Squall takes Rinoa after her new witch powers put her in a coma, and Ellone, the woman with time-traveling superpowers who enables the game's largest subplot, was raised by Squall's father. Even SeeD's founding is due to Squall thanks to time-traveling shenanigans. Final Fantasy VIII is Squall's story.
Squall: "My bad-"
Rinoa: "My bad."
This leads to a very satisfying character arc for Squall, who grows from a sullen teenager who refuses to let anyone get close to him into a man who values friendship and is willing to dedicate his life to his lady love, but it comes to the detriment of every other aspect of the story. None of the other characters even have an arc. Quistis seems like she'll be competition for Squall's affection, but Squall ignores all her advances and then later, Quistis says that she felt like Squall's older sister at the orphanage and thanks to GF amnesia she assumed her feelings were love. Zell is a headstrong, punchy, hoverboard skater dude for the entire game and the one bit of development he gets is a love interest in an optional sidequest who doesn't even get a name--she's just called 三つ編みの図書委員 (mitsuami no toshoiin, "Library Committee Member with Braids"). Selphie is genki all the time except in the ruins of Trabia Garden. Irvine exists to confirm the characters' memories of their pasts and does nothing after that. Even Rinoa is just a foil to Squall. The rich daughter of a Galbadian general who nonetheless fights for Timber's independence, in the beginning she's happy that he's a SeeD sent to help her but annoyed at his callous attitude and lashes back when he dismisses her as nothing more than a child playing at revolution. As the story continues, Rinoa continually throws herself at Squall for no apparent reason other than because the plot demands a manic pixie dream girl to crack open Squall's emotional walls, ignoring his attitude and any of his many attempts to brush her off, and by Disc Three when she becomes a witch no one brings up her father. No one suggests that she tell her family that she's one of the few women in the world who can use true magic. None of her previous connections matter--only Squall matters.
Not actually the final villain.
This is why there's so much discussion of the villain. Ultimecia is introduced relatively early on as the witch from the future who is puppeting others around for her mysterious ends, and then it just turns out that she wants to initiate Time Compression (時間圧縮 jikan asshuku) so that she can absorb the power of every witch who ever lived and become invincible. This is not that different from most Final Fantasy villains who want to end the world because they read Conspiracy Against the Human Race in Villain High School, but since everything else in the game is so Squall-centric people assume she must be connected to him as well. The common theory is that Ultimecia is Rinoa, sent to the future through Time Compression and with GFs eating away at her memory so that she doesn't remember Squall, she doesn't remember herself, all she remembers is that she lost something, long ago, and she needs to find it. So she fuses all times into one to make sure that whatever it is she wants, it will be within her grasp.
There's more here, and this theory was even popular enough that the developers explicitly denied it. Ultimecia is just a power-hungry witch like any other Final Fantasy villain. Honestly, I've gone both ways on this theory and right now I'd prefer it to be true--as I said, the whole game revolves around Squall. Imagine a time loop like Final Fantasy I, one where Squall forgets Rinoa at the end, they never find each other, and she becomes Ultimecia. Time uncompresses since the previous iteration of Ultimecia died, but the loop restarts and plays out, over and over again, until in one iteration Squall finally remembers and breaks the cycle. That would fit the rest of the game--it would explain why Ultimecia keeps puppeting people Squall knows, why she's focusing on his time period specifically, why she summons a GF based on Squall's ring during the final battle, and why Seifer, Rinoa's ex-boyfriend, decides to serve her. The rest of the game is about Squall and the villain should be as well. If they're going to commit so strongly to that theme, they should have gone all the way.
Final Fantasy VIII is being chased down a picturesque shopping street by a deathbot while the moon takes up half the sky.
While Squall overshadows everything else, I really love the world of FFVIII and I wish you didn't have to go out of your way to learn more about it. This playthrough, in the starting town of Balamb I walked into a house and heard an old man tell his granddaughter the secret history of the world. Long ago, the Great God Hyne created humanity and then fell asleep. When he woke up, he noticed that humans had multiplied and were everywhere, so he decided to reduce their numbers by burning up all the "small ones." Humanity was outraged at the massacre of their children and declared war on Hyne, and eventually they won and Hyne was forced to give up half his body to appease them. Humanity accepted this deal but then began to fight over the body of god. The winners tried to command the prize but failed--Hyne had taken all his power into the other half and concealed it in the bodies of women, who became the first witches.
Generally JRPGs end with you attacking and dethroning G-d, but in FFVIII, that's the backstory!
The worldbuilding is amazing, a retrofuture mix of augmented reality tablets and World War II-era beach assaults, a world where all long-distance communications is over landlines because ever since the Witch War the airwaves are filled with IAMALIVEHEREBRINGMEBACKTHEREIWILLNEVERLETYOUFORGETABOUTME on an endlessly-repeating loop, a world where travelers take steam trains and drive 1930s cars but soldiers fight battles using autonomous combat robots. Final Fantasy VIII doesn't have a lot of the series staples--there are no moogles, chocobos are found only in isolated forests, the airship looks like a spaceship, and Cid is Robin Williams--but it still has that peculiar mix of future and past that started in the first Final Fantasy, a game that people always seem to forget had both a hidden village of the elves and a civilization that lived in an orbital habitat.
Another design element I appreciate is the prominence of the moon. It's always enormous, hanging low and taking up ten times as much of the sky as Earth's moon would, and later in the game it's revealed that the moon is the source of monsters. Every few centuries, the number of monsters grows too large and they fall to the planet in a phenomenon called the Tears of the Moon (月の涙, tsuki no namida, Eng: "Lunar Cry"), devastating civilization. For all of FFVIII's flaws, it, FFIX, and FFX are the only games that actually try to explain why there are so many monsters out in the wilderness instead of just assuming that since it's a D&D world, there have to be monsters out there.
"You acquired Pandemonium." At least GFs only need to be drawn once.
If the story were the only problem with FFVIII that could be forgiven, but unfortunately the mechanics are also widely disliked.
The chief complaint about FFVIII's mechanics is the junction system, which is also the entire basis for combat and leveling. In FFVIII ordinary humans are weak, capable of fighting monsters and magic only through the use of technology, and the leveling system reflects that. Leveling to 100 will increase stats by a modest amount, from single digits to the mid-40s on a scale of 1 to 255, but in perhaps the most baffling design choice in a Final Fantasy game the monsters also level and their stats increase faster than the party's does. It is an iron law of JRPGs, going back to Dragon Quest I, that if you can't defeat an enemy with clever tactics you can outlevel them and defeat them with raw power, but FFVIII spits on that law. Leveling is a trap that makes the game harder.
The path to greater power in FFVIII is the Guardian Forces, which not only allow characters to cast spells but also allow them to junction magic to increase their stats. When I beat the game, Squall had a Strength of 207 thanks to junctioning Ultima to his Strength stat. Without any magic junctioned, his Strength would have been 23, and the gap in all the other stats was smaller but still many times his base level. Furthermore, all battle commands other than Fight are derived from GFs--the standard Magic and Item, more esoteric ones like GF (summon) or Darkside or Devour, or the infamous Draw.
Drawing is another often-complained about element of FFVIII, primarily due to the tedium involved. Para-magic is artificial and even junctioning a GF doesn't give its user any magical energy of their own. They have to draw it out of monsters or wellsprings in the world. This energy is limited--a single draw will give a handful of uses of a spell, after which more must be drawn. Since levelups have a minimal effect on stats but more powerful monsters have more powerful magic, drawing new spells and then junctioning them to stats is the primary way of gaining power, and higher counts of new spells provide higher power increases. This leads to the optimal strategy of deliberately lengthening battles to have each character draw 100 of every new spell, and then avoiding using magic because a reduced magic stock will reduce the attribute it's junctioned to. Even with an entirely new magic system, the best way to play is still spam Fight to win.
The upshot of all this is that there are two main ways to play the game. The first is the traditional path, to fight monsters and level up, unlocking higher level monsters and their more powerful spells. To summon GFs during battle and use their powers during harder fights. To make full use of the variety of command abilities like Devour and Defend to overcome the game's challenges. But, there is another path to power, a path that leads directly through the greatest minigame ever developed by humanity.
Triple Triad.
The basic rules are simple. Gameplay takes place on a three by three board, each player has a hand of five cards, and each card has a value for each of its sides. Higher values change ownership of adjacent cards and the player with control of the most cards when the board is full wins. That's it. A single game takes around thirty seconds and the winner gets to take some of the loser's cards.
The complications come with trying to get every single card, which requires challenging people all over the world and playing through the game's sidequests, and dealing with the regional rules. Each region of the game has its own ruleset, with rules like Open (makes the opponent's hand visible to you), Elemental (places elements on various squares that empower cards with their element and penalize other cards), or Plus (if the sum of the values of a card's two sides and the respective adjacent cards add up to the same value, both cards are taken). Furthermore, these rules are contagious--playing in a certain region infects Squall with those rules, and moving to another region allows you to mix rules. This can be used to remove an annoying rule like Plus from a region or, without appropriate caution, spreading Random (your hand is randomly chosen from your entire selection of cards) across the entire world.
So, what's the point? Playing Triple Triad is fun itself, but there are multiple GF abilities that can turn items into spells and one that can turn cards into items. Rare cards turn into correspondingly rare items--refining the Selphie card creates three Elem Guard items, each of which can teach a GF the Elem-Def-Jx4 ability, which can junction four types of magic to elemental defense, and refining the Bahamat card creates one hundred megalixirs. By playing cards, turning the cards into items, and refining the items into magic, it's possible to access extremely powerful magic very early in the game, junction it, and become almost unstoppable.
This playthrough, for the first time I really engaged with all these systems. I turned enemies into cards rather than kill them to keep my levels low (and later on just turned off random encounters with a GF ability), I eliminated Random as a rule from the entire world, I challenged the Card Club in Balamb and used their cards to power myself up, and I easily steamrolled the entire game. Almost every boss, including the Ultima Weapon and every final boss form except the last one, died in a single Renzokuken (連続剣, "Continuous Sword") from Squall. I didn't have to use any tactics in battle because all my tactical energy went into junction planning and Triple Triad rule manipulation. I turned FFVIII into a fantasy-themed cardgame simulator and honestly, I think the play experience was better for it. I didn't have to sit in battle and endlessly draw, I didn't have to worry that leveling too high would mean I fell off the treadmill. I got to sit back, experience the story, and annihilate all enemies. With my characters' battle performance, I understand why Cid told Squall that if the students failed their mission at Dollet, nine full SeeDs would be enough to defeat the entire Galbadian army.
I legitimately lost this fight the first time because I was too busy watching the cutscene action.
So what is so good about FFVIII? I already called out the worldbuilding, but the cinematics were frankly astonishing in 1999 and still looked good when I played in 2006. I linked the Dollet assault cutscene earlier, but I also want to point to the Battle of the Gardens when Witch-Queen Edea's Galbadia Garden attacks Balamb Garden. The sequence with Squall and the Galbadian soldier punching each other is a minigame so you expect in-game graphics, and then the air armor rises up and reveals an entire battlefield with the SeeD trainees fighting the Galbadian invading force, swords clashing, SeeDs using para-magic, motorcycles riding through, and then it happens again when Squall and Rinoa are crossing to Galbadia garden. Even in Final Fantasy XIV, there's always a loading screen before a cutscene and that game came out in 2013. Seemless cutscene-to-gameplay transitions were amazing in the 90s and still look good today.
And the opening movie! I'm a sucker for overly-dramatic chanting in the background, but the FFVIII intro still stands as one of the greatest opening movies in video games and it's paired with an incredible score. Back during my Final Fantasy VI review I wrote that the music in FFVIII wasn't memorable and I am here now with hat in hand, begging your forgiveness, because that statement was possibly the least correct thing I've ever written in one of these reviews. The Man with a Machine Gun, Laguna's battle theme, is driving and powerful. The Landing is like a early 2010s trailer theme. The Stage is Set, which plays as the SeeDs enact their plan to assassinate Edea. Only a Plank Between One and Perdition, which plays whenever tension is rising. The idyllic theme of Fisherman's Horizon. The organ-heavy gothic The Castle that plays in Ultimecia's stronghold. And, of course, Liberi Fatali.
Liberi Fatali is transcendent, incontrovertibly one of Uematsu's masterpieces and in the running for one of the best video game songs ever written. I think that actually works to the game's detriment, however, because Uematsu also realized how amazing it was and worked the melodic line in all over the soundtrack. He also did this with the love ballad Eyes On Me, so the soundtrack seems split between threatening, bombastic Liberi Fatali songs and more flowing, sedate Eyes On Me songs. The songs I listed above are my favorite mostly because they escape the pull between these two poles, though not entirely--"The Stage is Set" is in the Liberi Fatali camp.
I always pick a remix for the accompanying music for these posts and usually it's pretty easy, but on this post I went with the bombastic trailer music remix Attack on Dollet, since the Dollet Mission was the demo and really could have been the opening of the game, but a close contender was Wings of Freedom, the serene vocal mix of the game's overworld track Blue Fields. I guess even here, there's still a Liberi Fatali/Eyes on Me dichotomy.
"I want to see Rinoa's smiling face" says Zell as everyone looks on impassively.
I played the remastered version, so I should talk about that. But honestly I don't think it mattered that much. The character models have all been greatly enhanced but the backgrounds have not, so I often had the sense that they were floating as high-definition characters ran around in low-rez pixelated landscapes. Worse, I think the enhanced character models actually harmed my immersion because their facial expression never changes. It was easy to assign emotional weight to the dialogue when I was playing on a CRT back in 2006, but during the scene on the Ragnarok when Rinoa is sitting on Squall's lap, trying to connect with him, both of them have bland 😐 expressions which really undermines the impact. There are mods to improve the game's backgrounds based on AI upscaling, like the Moguri Mod for Final Fantasy IX, but none of them worked with the Japanese version so I was forced to play with a clash between characters and scenery for the entire game. I preferred the times when characters were facing away from the camera because then their expressions didn't break the immersion.
There are also quality of life features now standard in Final Fantasy releases, but this is probably the game where they're least useful. Triple speed was amazing, especially when I was repeatedly resetting trying to get a Triple Triad rule to spread or running from place to place with encounters turned off, but the other two options were No Encounters and Battle Assist. No Ecounters is available in the game itself as a GF Ability from Diabolos, first obtainable maybe a third of the way through Disc One, and Battle Assist wasn't that different from my characters' native prowess. It heals everyone to full every turn and allows them to Limit Break at will, but my characters were already killing every boss in one blow and had thousands of HP when fighting enemies that did maybe 100 per hit. Thanks to hours of Triple Triad, there was no actual difficulty that I needed to mitigate. I'm still glad it's in there, though--people who just want to play through for the story can turn off encounters and turn on assist for boss battles and they should be able to do so without all the gamebreaking tactics I used.
Symbolism.
So, should you play FFVIII if you have no nostalgia for it?
That's a difficult question. I've gone over the game's many flaws, and it's true that a lot of them are ameliorated by the remaster. The battle system can be almost completely bypassed using Battle Assist--you still have to junction some magic because one-hit kills and death magic are still effective, but the ability to Limit Break every turn goes a long way. It's easy to get No Encounters so the time-padding endemic to 90s JRPGs can be cut out. As I said, people who want to play through for the story can do so.
But the story has problems. It's not the story of the chosen ones that band together to save the world, it's the story of one man, his childhood trauma, and how he overcomes both to become a more well-adjusted adult. It's far more character-focused than Final Fantasy VII, which has the most similar plot, and most of the content that helps flesh out the story is hidden away in sidequests and optional interactions. Why is Seifer such a jerk to Squall and his friends, why does he use a gunblade, and why is he obsessed with sorceresses and knights? It all goes back to a movie he watched as a child, a movie that you get to play through the filming of during on of the time-travel sequences, but this is referenced in side character dialogue and never comes up unless you search for it. Why do the Moombas free Squall in the prison and keep saying "Laguna"? Do a sidequest to find out.
FFVIII is a game for two kinds of people--fans of love stories, who want the relationship to be the most prominent part of the game, and systems enthusiasts who love breaking games in half, because FFVIII is the most exploitable RPG I've ever played. Everyone else should approach it with caution. I do miss the old Square Enix, who even after Final Fantasy VII's massive success followed it up not with a sequel but with another totally different Final Fantasy game, but that creative energy and experimentation didn't always work. FFVIII is a case where that's true.
In the end, what we really need as a Final Fantasy VIII remake with as much talent and resources as the FFVII remake got. Only then will FFVIII finally achieve its full potential.
I didn't own a PS1, so I didn't play the PS1-era Final Fantasy games until later--Final Fantasy IX in 2002, Final Fantasy VIII in 2006, and Final Fantasy VII never--but my friends in high school did and so I was peripherally involved in the wars over its quality.
uriany hated the game, especially the draw mechanic, and made sure to mention it every time it was brought up. fiendishfanfares loved the story and the characters, and did her best to defend it. I had never played the game so I had no opinion, but the Great Final Fantasy VIII Wars are one of the memories I have of high school. I first played the game years later and I liked it well enough, but there were still some problems that prevented me from really enjoying it. The way the story kept taking sudden right turns, and the way that magic worked, and the strange difficulty scaling, but I appreciated the Retro Future Art Noveau setting and the focus on character interactions. Years passed, I studied Japanese, and when the Axe of the Blood God podcast and the Square Roots podcast both picked FFVIII as their next game I knew that I needed to play along. Would I enjoy FFVIII as much as
fiendishfanfares had if I played it in the original language? It took me months to finish because there is a lot of text in this game, but I finally see what the fans love about it, even if I can't agree that it's wholely loveable.
...
By far the most important part of FFVIII is the hero, Squall Leonhart.
Most Final Fantasy games have an ensemble cast, or at least a small number of characters that the game focuses on, but Squall is the protagonist for roughly 98% of the game. Other than a single mission on Disc 2, the player spends all of their time with Squall to the point that the game explicitly shows his inner monologue. This is really the make-it-or-break-it part of FFVIII--people who appeciate Squall's character arc and growth will like the game, and people who think he's a whiny emo who needs to man up will hate it. The problem is that the English localization tilts his character much more strongly to the latter end, to the game's detriment.
I'll just come out and say it--the English version of Squall is a worse person than the Japanese version. Both versions of Squall are curt, pessimistic, and moody, but only the English version of Squall is so casually dismissive of everything. Mention Squall around any English-speaking FF player and his catchphrase of "...whatever" will probably come up in short order. It's one of the most common things that he says throughout the course of the game, especially when he's responding to other people. The problem is that multiple Japanese phrases with different meanings were all translated as "...whatever," collapsing the depth of Squall's response into a sullen teenager who just, like, wants you to get off their back, man. This Legends of Localization article has multiple examples of the Japanese, but one I noticed immediately was in the fire cavern, where Squall and Quistis's exchange was different:
キスティス「私とここに来ると、いつもの実力を出せない生徒、多いのよね。私の魅力ってやつかしら？」The Japanese line shows an actual emotional reaction--Squall's confusion over why Quisitis is joking about her looks during combat--unlike the blandly dismissive English. The most common phrase translated as "...whatever," Squall's catchphrase in Japanese, is 悪かったな warukatta na, which is a casual and somewhat flippant apology, like "my bad" in English, but it's still an engagement with the other person's perspective in a way that "...whatever" is not. If everyone who had played this game spoke Japanese, I think it'd have a much better reputation.
スコール（……なんて教師だ）
Quistis: "When I come here, there's a lot of students who can't go all out. Maybe it's my charms?"
Squall: (I can't believe this teacher).
Quistis: "You know, the boys often choke on this test when I come with them. I guess my charm makes them nervous."
Squall: (...Whatever.)
Selphie: "We blow him to bits with a rocket launcher, yeah?"
FFVIII's plot also gets a lot of criticism, some of it certainly deserved. The game is less interested in coherent and compelling worldbuilding than it is in showing Squall's personal growth, and a lot of the best parts of FFVIII's world have to be sought out or they'll never come up. What really helped me get into the game, though, is realizing that it's structured like an anime series.
In Season (Disc) One, the stage is set--Squall and his friends are teenage mercenaries called SeeDs, taught at Balamb Garden, which is one of several Garden military schools around the world. Unlike the other Gardens, however, the students at Balamb are taught how to bind and control Guardian Forces (GFs), powerful beings like Shiva and Ifrit and Quezacotl and Carbuncle which allow them to use para-magic (疑似魔法 giji mahō). In the world of FFVIII, true magic is limited to a small group of women called witches (魔女 majo, Eng: "Sorceresses"), but the recent discovery of GF-binding allows normal people to greatly enhance their powers through para-magic. This is the draw of Balamb Garden--a single Balamb SeeD is puissant enough to defeat powerful monsters or multiple trained soldiers, and a group of them can fight an army and win. It's like any number of anime about a group of high school students with superpowers.
Despite being Final Fantasy and starring magic teenage mercenaries, FFVIII's beginning is grounded. After the fire cavern trial, Squall and his fellow trainee Zell, along with teacher Quistis, are sent under the command of his rival student Seifer to their final exam to graduate as full SeeDs--a live fire engagement against a professional military. The small duchy of Dollet (rhymes with "Cabernet") is being invaded by the expansionist Republic of Galbadia, and after two days of fighting Dollet contracted SeeD to help defend them. Seifer's squad is ordered to guard the town square to secure the students' rear, but after Seifer runs off seeking glory, Squall assumes command and secures the radio tower--Galbadia's true objective--before being ordered to withdraw and being chased back to the landing craft by a Galbadian autonomous war machine. Following his graduation and Seifer's reprimand for gross dereliction of duty, Squall is promoted to squad leader and his squad is assigned to aid a resistance movement in the occupied city-state of Timber. Galbadia's president-for-life Vinzer Deling will be in Timber to make a broadcast, using Dollet's radio tower to punch through the static that has blanketed the airwaves and forced the world to use landline transmissions in the seventeen years since the Witch War (魔女戦争 majo sensō, Eng: "Sorceress War"), and the Timber Owls--led by Rinoa Heartilly, a woman who Squall had met at the SeeD graduation dance--plan to kidnap Deling and force him to grant Timber's independence.
I could go on, but I'm not here to summarize the entire plot. My point is that Disc One is all about military actions and politics, about making hard choices and the importance of discipline, and it maintains that coherent thread throughout its entire run, from the fire cavern at the beginning to Irvine failing to take the shot against the witch Edea as she assassinates President Deling and declares herself Witch-Queen of the Galbadian Empire, forcing Squall's squad to attempt a frontal assault. Disc One ends with Edea conjuring an enormous magical icicle and impaling Squall with it, and the screen goes black as he falls backward off of her victory parade car.
Zell: "Our memories are going away...because of the GFs? Is that why no other military uses them?".
Discussions of Final Fantasy frequently talk about how in the last disc of the game things go off the rails, but when FFVIII comes up, the derailing point is always placed much earlier. There's even a website called SquallsDead.com, devoted to the theory that Edea fatally wounds Squall with her magical attack and the rest of the game is Squall's dream before he dies. I don't believe that, but I understand why people would find the rest of the game unsatisfying. After the politics and military action of Disc One, Disc Two changes radically. It starts with Squall, miraculously and inexplicably (literally--the game makes no attempt to explain it) recovered from his wounds, in a Galbadian prison. After being tortured by Seifer, who demands to know the true purpose of SeeD, Squall is rescued by his squad and they split up to warn Balamb Garden of an impending missile attack and stop the missiles from impacting Trabia Garden. So far, so good.
Season (Disc) Two is about self-discovery, about how no one can live alone and the bonds of friendship make us all stronger, and one of the ways it reinforces that is by revealing that the main cast all knew each other in the past. They all grew up in the same orphanage after they lost their parents in the Witch War, but they don't remember it due to a combination of childhood trauma and the side-effects of GF use--GFs need to be "junctioned" to be effective, and junctioning alters the brain to allow magical power to flow freely into the junctioner, but that also affects memories and over time causes more and more amnesia. Balamb Garden's use of GFs caused these childhood friends to forget each other, and it's only in the ruins of Trabia Garden that they reforge their forgotten connections.
Except that Irvine was trained in Galbadia Garden, which does not use GFs, and so remembered everything and just never brought it up.
This is one of the moments that a lot of people cite as their break point with FFVIII, and I won't attempt to defend it because it really is egregious. But the reason why it passes and no one comments on it again is that Final Fantasy VIII is a game about Squall, and secondarily about Rinoa as Squall's love interest, and everything else in the game is built to support this. It's why Rinoa is the successor to Edea's witch powers even though Quistis, who is already a blue mage, would seem a better candidate. It's why Squall is put in command of his squad even though he is uninspiring and unlikeable. It's why Season (Disc) Three is about love and the lengths that Squall will go to for Rinoa, taking her to the ends of the earth and going into space to save her. It's why everything important in the game is done by Squall, one of Squall's forgotten childhood friends, or someone connected to Squall--the head of the orphanage was the witch Edea, her husband is the headmaster of Balamb Garden, Squall's father is the president of Esthar, where Squall takes Rinoa after her new witch powers put her in a coma, and Ellone, the woman with time-traveling superpowers who enables the game's largest subplot, was raised by Squall's father. Even SeeD's founding is due to Squall thanks to time-traveling shenanigans. Final Fantasy VIII is Squall's story.
Squall: "My bad-"
Rinoa: "My bad."
This leads to a very satisfying character arc for Squall, who grows from a sullen teenager who refuses to let anyone get close to him into a man who values friendship and is willing to dedicate his life to his lady love, but it comes to the detriment of every other aspect of the story. None of the other characters even have an arc. Quistis seems like she'll be competition for Squall's affection, but Squall ignores all her advances and then later, Quistis says that she felt like Squall's older sister at the orphanage and thanks to GF amnesia she assumed her feelings were love. Zell is a headstrong, punchy, hoverboard skater dude for the entire game and the one bit of development he gets is a love interest in an optional sidequest who doesn't even get a name--she's just called 三つ編みの図書委員 (mitsuami no toshoiin, "Library Committee Member with Braids"). Selphie is genki all the time except in the ruins of Trabia Garden. Irvine exists to confirm the characters' memories of their pasts and does nothing after that. Even Rinoa is just a foil to Squall. The rich daughter of a Galbadian general who nonetheless fights for Timber's independence, in the beginning she's happy that he's a SeeD sent to help her but annoyed at his callous attitude and lashes back when he dismisses her as nothing more than a child playing at revolution. As the story continues, Rinoa continually throws herself at Squall for no apparent reason other than because the plot demands a manic pixie dream girl to crack open Squall's emotional walls, ignoring his attitude and any of his many attempts to brush her off, and by Disc Three when she becomes a witch no one brings up her father. No one suggests that she tell her family that she's one of the few women in the world who can use true magic. None of her previous connections matter--only Squall matters.
Not actually the final villain.
This is why there's so much discussion of the villain. Ultimecia is introduced relatively early on as the witch from the future who is puppeting others around for her mysterious ends, and then it just turns out that she wants to initiate Time Compression (時間圧縮 jikan asshuku) so that she can absorb the power of every witch who ever lived and become invincible. This is not that different from most Final Fantasy villains who want to end the world because they read Conspiracy Against the Human Race in Villain High School, but since everything else in the game is so Squall-centric people assume she must be connected to him as well. The common theory is that Ultimecia is Rinoa, sent to the future through Time Compression and with GFs eating away at her memory so that she doesn't remember Squall, she doesn't remember herself, all she remembers is that she lost something, long ago, and she needs to find it. So she fuses all times into one to make sure that whatever it is she wants, it will be within her grasp.
There's more here, and this theory was even popular enough that the developers explicitly denied it. Ultimecia is just a power-hungry witch like any other Final Fantasy villain. Honestly, I've gone both ways on this theory and right now I'd prefer it to be true--as I said, the whole game revolves around Squall. Imagine a time loop like Final Fantasy I, one where Squall forgets Rinoa at the end, they never find each other, and she becomes Ultimecia. Time uncompresses since the previous iteration of Ultimecia died, but the loop restarts and plays out, over and over again, until in one iteration Squall finally remembers and breaks the cycle. That would fit the rest of the game--it would explain why Ultimecia keeps puppeting people Squall knows, why she's focusing on his time period specifically, why she summons a GF based on Squall's ring during the final battle, and why Seifer, Rinoa's ex-boyfriend, decides to serve her. The rest of the game is about Squall and the villain should be as well. If they're going to commit so strongly to that theme, they should have gone all the way.
Final Fantasy VIII is being chased down a picturesque shopping street by a deathbot while the moon takes up half the sky.
While Squall overshadows everything else, I really love the world of FFVIII and I wish you didn't have to go out of your way to learn more about it. This playthrough, in the starting town of Balamb I walked into a house and heard an old man tell his granddaughter the secret history of the world. Long ago, the Great God Hyne created humanity and then fell asleep. When he woke up, he noticed that humans had multiplied and were everywhere, so he decided to reduce their numbers by burning up all the "small ones." Humanity was outraged at the massacre of their children and declared war on Hyne, and eventually they won and Hyne was forced to give up half his body to appease them. Humanity accepted this deal but then began to fight over the body of god. The winners tried to command the prize but failed--Hyne had taken all his power into the other half and concealed it in the bodies of women, who became the first witches.
Generally JRPGs end with you attacking and dethroning G-d, but in FFVIII, that's the backstory!
The worldbuilding is amazing, a retrofuture mix of augmented reality tablets and World War II-era beach assaults, a world where all long-distance communications is over landlines because ever since the Witch War the airwaves are filled with IAMALIVEHEREBRINGMEBACKTHEREIWILLNEVERLETYOUFORGETABOUTME on an endlessly-repeating loop, a world where travelers take steam trains and drive 1930s cars but soldiers fight battles using autonomous combat robots. Final Fantasy VIII doesn't have a lot of the series staples--there are no moogles, chocobos are found only in isolated forests, the airship looks like a spaceship, and Cid is Robin Williams--but it still has that peculiar mix of future and past that started in the first Final Fantasy, a game that people always seem to forget had both a hidden village of the elves and a civilization that lived in an orbital habitat.
Another design element I appreciate is the prominence of the moon. It's always enormous, hanging low and taking up ten times as much of the sky as Earth's moon would, and later in the game it's revealed that the moon is the source of monsters. Every few centuries, the number of monsters grows too large and they fall to the planet in a phenomenon called the Tears of the Moon (月の涙, tsuki no namida, Eng: "Lunar Cry"), devastating civilization. For all of FFVIII's flaws, it, FFIX, and FFX are the only games that actually try to explain why there are so many monsters out in the wilderness instead of just assuming that since it's a D&D world, there have to be monsters out there.
"You acquired Pandemonium." At least GFs only need to be drawn once.
If the story were the only problem with FFVIII that could be forgiven, but unfortunately the mechanics are also widely disliked.
The chief complaint about FFVIII's mechanics is the junction system, which is also the entire basis for combat and leveling. In FFVIII ordinary humans are weak, capable of fighting monsters and magic only through the use of technology, and the leveling system reflects that. Leveling to 100 will increase stats by a modest amount, from single digits to the mid-40s on a scale of 1 to 255, but in perhaps the most baffling design choice in a Final Fantasy game the monsters also level and their stats increase faster than the party's does. It is an iron law of JRPGs, going back to Dragon Quest I, that if you can't defeat an enemy with clever tactics you can outlevel them and defeat them with raw power, but FFVIII spits on that law. Leveling is a trap that makes the game harder.
The path to greater power in FFVIII is the Guardian Forces, which not only allow characters to cast spells but also allow them to junction magic to increase their stats. When I beat the game, Squall had a Strength of 207 thanks to junctioning Ultima to his Strength stat. Without any magic junctioned, his Strength would have been 23, and the gap in all the other stats was smaller but still many times his base level. Furthermore, all battle commands other than Fight are derived from GFs--the standard Magic and Item, more esoteric ones like GF (summon) or Darkside or Devour, or the infamous Draw.
Drawing is another often-complained about element of FFVIII, primarily due to the tedium involved. Para-magic is artificial and even junctioning a GF doesn't give its user any magical energy of their own. They have to draw it out of monsters or wellsprings in the world. This energy is limited--a single draw will give a handful of uses of a spell, after which more must be drawn. Since levelups have a minimal effect on stats but more powerful monsters have more powerful magic, drawing new spells and then junctioning them to stats is the primary way of gaining power, and higher counts of new spells provide higher power increases. This leads to the optimal strategy of deliberately lengthening battles to have each character draw 100 of every new spell, and then avoiding using magic because a reduced magic stock will reduce the attribute it's junctioned to. Even with an entirely new magic system, the best way to play is still spam Fight to win.
The upshot of all this is that there are two main ways to play the game. The first is the traditional path, to fight monsters and level up, unlocking higher level monsters and their more powerful spells. To summon GFs during battle and use their powers during harder fights. To make full use of the variety of command abilities like Devour and Defend to overcome the game's challenges. But, there is another path to power, a path that leads directly through the greatest minigame ever developed by humanity.
Triple Triad.
The basic rules are simple. Gameplay takes place on a three by three board, each player has a hand of five cards, and each card has a value for each of its sides. Higher values change ownership of adjacent cards and the player with control of the most cards when the board is full wins. That's it. A single game takes around thirty seconds and the winner gets to take some of the loser's cards.
The complications come with trying to get every single card, which requires challenging people all over the world and playing through the game's sidequests, and dealing with the regional rules. Each region of the game has its own ruleset, with rules like Open (makes the opponent's hand visible to you), Elemental (places elements on various squares that empower cards with their element and penalize other cards), or Plus (if the sum of the values of a card's two sides and the respective adjacent cards add up to the same value, both cards are taken). Furthermore, these rules are contagious--playing in a certain region infects Squall with those rules, and moving to another region allows you to mix rules. This can be used to remove an annoying rule like Plus from a region or, without appropriate caution, spreading Random (your hand is randomly chosen from your entire selection of cards) across the entire world.
So, what's the point? Playing Triple Triad is fun itself, but there are multiple GF abilities that can turn items into spells and one that can turn cards into items. Rare cards turn into correspondingly rare items--refining the Selphie card creates three Elem Guard items, each of which can teach a GF the Elem-Def-Jx4 ability, which can junction four types of magic to elemental defense, and refining the Bahamat card creates one hundred megalixirs. By playing cards, turning the cards into items, and refining the items into magic, it's possible to access extremely powerful magic very early in the game, junction it, and become almost unstoppable.
This playthrough, for the first time I really engaged with all these systems. I turned enemies into cards rather than kill them to keep my levels low (and later on just turned off random encounters with a GF ability), I eliminated Random as a rule from the entire world, I challenged the Card Club in Balamb and used their cards to power myself up, and I easily steamrolled the entire game. Almost every boss, including the Ultima Weapon and every final boss form except the last one, died in a single Renzokuken (連続剣, "Continuous Sword") from Squall. I didn't have to use any tactics in battle because all my tactical energy went into junction planning and Triple Triad rule manipulation. I turned FFVIII into a fantasy-themed cardgame simulator and honestly, I think the play experience was better for it. I didn't have to sit in battle and endlessly draw, I didn't have to worry that leveling too high would mean I fell off the treadmill. I got to sit back, experience the story, and annihilate all enemies. With my characters' battle performance, I understand why Cid told Squall that if the students failed their mission at Dollet, nine full SeeDs would be enough to defeat the entire Galbadian army.
I legitimately lost this fight the first time because I was too busy watching the cutscene action.
So what is so good about FFVIII? I already called out the worldbuilding, but the cinematics were frankly astonishing in 1999 and still looked good when I played in 2006. I linked the Dollet assault cutscene earlier, but I also want to point to the Battle of the Gardens when Witch-Queen Edea's Galbadia Garden attacks Balamb Garden. The sequence with Squall and the Galbadian soldier punching each other is a minigame so you expect in-game graphics, and then the air armor rises up and reveals an entire battlefield with the SeeD trainees fighting the Galbadian invading force, swords clashing, SeeDs using para-magic, motorcycles riding through, and then it happens again when Squall and Rinoa are crossing to Galbadia garden. Even in Final Fantasy XIV, there's always a loading screen before a cutscene and that game came out in 2013. Seemless cutscene-to-gameplay transitions were amazing in the 90s and still look good today.
And the opening movie! I'm a sucker for overly-dramatic chanting in the background, but the FFVIII intro still stands as one of the greatest opening movies in video games and it's paired with an incredible score. Back during my Final Fantasy VI review I wrote that the music in FFVIII wasn't memorable and I am here now with hat in hand, begging your forgiveness, because that statement was possibly the least correct thing I've ever written in one of these reviews. The Man with a Machine Gun, Laguna's battle theme, is driving and powerful. The Landing is like a early 2010s trailer theme. The Stage is Set, which plays as the SeeDs enact their plan to assassinate Edea. Only a Plank Between One and Perdition, which plays whenever tension is rising. The idyllic theme of Fisherman's Horizon. The organ-heavy gothic The Castle that plays in Ultimecia's stronghold. And, of course, Liberi Fatali.
Liberi Fatali is transcendent, incontrovertibly one of Uematsu's masterpieces and in the running for one of the best video game songs ever written. I think that actually works to the game's detriment, however, because Uematsu also realized how amazing it was and worked the melodic line in all over the soundtrack. He also did this with the love ballad Eyes On Me, so the soundtrack seems split between threatening, bombastic Liberi Fatali songs and more flowing, sedate Eyes On Me songs. The songs I listed above are my favorite mostly because they escape the pull between these two poles, though not entirely--"The Stage is Set" is in the Liberi Fatali camp.
I always pick a remix for the accompanying music for these posts and usually it's pretty easy, but on this post I went with the bombastic trailer music remix Attack on Dollet, since the Dollet Mission was the demo and really could have been the opening of the game, but a close contender was Wings of Freedom, the serene vocal mix of the game's overworld track Blue Fields. I guess even here, there's still a Liberi Fatali/Eyes on Me dichotomy.
"I want to see Rinoa's smiling face" says Zell as everyone looks on impassively.
I played the remastered version, so I should talk about that. But honestly I don't think it mattered that much. The character models have all been greatly enhanced but the backgrounds have not, so I often had the sense that they were floating as high-definition characters ran around in low-rez pixelated landscapes. Worse, I think the enhanced character models actually harmed my immersion because their facial expression never changes. It was easy to assign emotional weight to the dialogue when I was playing on a CRT back in 2006, but during the scene on the Ragnarok when Rinoa is sitting on Squall's lap, trying to connect with him, both of them have bland 😐 expressions which really undermines the impact. There are mods to improve the game's backgrounds based on AI upscaling, like the Moguri Mod for Final Fantasy IX, but none of them worked with the Japanese version so I was forced to play with a clash between characters and scenery for the entire game. I preferred the times when characters were facing away from the camera because then their expressions didn't break the immersion.
There are also quality of life features now standard in Final Fantasy releases, but this is probably the game where they're least useful. Triple speed was amazing, especially when I was repeatedly resetting trying to get a Triple Triad rule to spread or running from place to place with encounters turned off, but the other two options were No Encounters and Battle Assist. No Ecounters is available in the game itself as a GF Ability from Diabolos, first obtainable maybe a third of the way through Disc One, and Battle Assist wasn't that different from my characters' native prowess. It heals everyone to full every turn and allows them to Limit Break at will, but my characters were already killing every boss in one blow and had thousands of HP when fighting enemies that did maybe 100 per hit. Thanks to hours of Triple Triad, there was no actual difficulty that I needed to mitigate. I'm still glad it's in there, though--people who just want to play through for the story can turn off encounters and turn on assist for boss battles and they should be able to do so without all the gamebreaking tactics I used.
Symbolism.
So, should you play FFVIII if you have no nostalgia for it?
That's a difficult question. I've gone over the game's many flaws, and it's true that a lot of them are ameliorated by the remaster. The battle system can be almost completely bypassed using Battle Assist--you still have to junction some magic because one-hit kills and death magic are still effective, but the ability to Limit Break every turn goes a long way. It's easy to get No Encounters so the time-padding endemic to 90s JRPGs can be cut out. As I said, people who want to play through for the story can do so.
But the story has problems. It's not the story of the chosen ones that band together to save the world, it's the story of one man, his childhood trauma, and how he overcomes both to become a more well-adjusted adult. It's far more character-focused than Final Fantasy VII, which has the most similar plot, and most of the content that helps flesh out the story is hidden away in sidequests and optional interactions. Why is Seifer such a jerk to Squall and his friends, why does he use a gunblade, and why is he obsessed with sorceresses and knights? It all goes back to a movie he watched as a child, a movie that you get to play through the filming of during on of the time-travel sequences, but this is referenced in side character dialogue and never comes up unless you search for it. Why do the Moombas free Squall in the prison and keep saying "Laguna"? Do a sidequest to find out.
FFVIII is a game for two kinds of people--fans of love stories, who want the relationship to be the most prominent part of the game, and systems enthusiasts who love breaking games in half, because FFVIII is the most exploitable RPG I've ever played. Everyone else should approach it with caution. I do miss the old Square Enix, who even after Final Fantasy VII's massive success followed it up not with a sequel but with another totally different Final Fantasy game, but that creative energy and experimentation didn't always work. FFVIII is a case where that's true.
In the end, what we really need as a Final Fantasy VIII remake with as much talent and resources as the FFVII remake got. Only then will FFVIII finally achieve its full potential.
