Back To Reviews
Rating: Awesome Final Fantasy 8 is a deep and challenging game that will delight any fan of RPGs, but some glaring flaws prevent it from living up to its full potential. Before I say anything else, I must say that FF8's graphics are truly remarkable. The deformed, anime-style look of previous Final Fantasy games has been replaced with a much more realistic look in FF8, particularly when it comes to the characters. While the intro doesn't give me goosebumps like FF7's intro did, the graphics are a lot more polished than FF7's graphics overall. If the rumors are true that Square is making one more Final Fantasy game for the PlayStation, I can't imagine how the in-game and CG graphics could get any better than this. Then again, I didn't think that the graphics could get any better than they were in FF7, and Square proved me wrong with FF8. One of FF8's major flaws is that it doesn't offer enough conversation with townspeople when compared to other RPGs like Chrono Trigger or especially Lunar. In addition, after playing Lunar and hearing its excellent voice acting, FF8's cut scenes seem kind of weird without any voice acting in them. Still, I would certainly rather have no voice acting than the poor voice acting present in all too many video games. Square has stubbornly insisted that you still can't save your game anywhere but the overland map and at designated save points. I know that different people have a lot of different opinions on this issue, but personally, I would like to be able to save anywhere I darn well please rather than just where the designers of the game say I'm allowed to. The new system of drawing magic from your enemies and Junctioning it to your characters is confusing at first, but some nice in-game tutorials help clear things up. Once you fully understand it, there is a lot to like about FF8's magic and battle systems. First of all, the game lets you be as creative as you want with Junctioning, while also offering a convenient Auto-Junction option that takes care all of your magic Junctioning for you at the press of a button. Also, a cool action element is added to the battles with your ability to press R1 at the right moment and increase the damage that Squall's regular attack does (Squall is the game's main character). In addition, the music that plays during battles is catchy and not the least bit repetitive. It's also nice that the standard battles are fairly painless if your party is at a decent level. The whole battle system is very innovative, and it gives you a lot of choices of what you could be doing at any given time in a battle. As much as there is to like about FF8's battles, there are times when the negatives seem to out-weigh the positives. Being able to Junction anything to any character pretty much eliminates any individuality that the characters might have in combat. It's one thing to get attached to a particular character in an RPG through the story line sequences, but I would care a lot more about each individual character if I were also attached to them because of something special they can do in combat. Instead, when a character leaves my party in FF8, my battle strategies aren't greatly effected because I can just remove all their magic spells and Guardian Forces and put them on another character. The animations for the numerous attacks in the game are impressive to say the least, but most of them take too long, especially the Guardian Forces. I could overlook this if you could press a button and skip to the end of any battle animation, but you can't. I'm sorry, but sitting through the same animation sequences over and over again for hours on end is not my idea of a good time, no matter how impressive the animations may be. And as unique as it is, drawing dozens or hundreds of magic spells from enemies is very repetitive and tedious. I shouldn't have to spend long periods of time doing nothing but drawing magic just so that I have some to use later. It's inevitable that comparisons will be made between Final Fantasy 7 and Final Fantasy 8. While both of them are classic RPGs, I must say that I believe FF7 is the better game. FF8's story line can be very hard to get into at times due to Squall's bad attitude, loner personality, and just plain rude behavior. Squall's personality makes it especially hard to get into the plot when you consider that it's supposed to be a love story. This game will have you on the edge of your seat a lot more than most RPGs, but I could enjoy it a lot more if Squall weren't such a prick. As it is, Final Fantasy 8 is still a phenomenal RPG, it's just nowhere near as revolutionary as Final Fantasy 7 was back in 1997. Send your thoughts on this review to ivan@mastergamer.com
© 2001 ivan@mastergamer.com