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SQUARESOFT: What did you like most about FF7?
FANS: The awesome storyline and awesome CG movies!
SQUARESOFT: OK, here's FF8! It has even more storyline and CG movies!
FANS: We hate it.
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LOVE IN THE TIME OF KOMPRESSION
Millions of dollars and state of the art 3D graphics technology being used to render a totally superfluous scene of an idiot choking on a hotdog. FF8 in a nutshell.
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Lots of people bitch and moan about FF8's storyline not being as good as the others, but what does 'good' actually mean in this instance? It's surrounded on all sides by games that have G.I. Joe-caliber plotlines: A bunch of two-dimensional characters rush from A to B in order to stop the bad guys, fail, and try again until the requisite 30 hour length is reached. They were videogame plotlines based around physical conflict between two sides, and it never changed, despite occasionally becoming insufferably pretentious. But then we come to FF8, which puts most of its emphasis on a love story, and the interactions of its characters. Characters who are fleshed out beyond simply having a background story, have relationships that evolve across the story and who ask questions beyond the usual "How will I know which way is right?".
This is all presented in CG movies that, six years later, still look amazing (which can hardly be said of FF7). The parallel storyline is about the interplay of warring nation-states, rather than an empire invading defenseless towns. It also handles the concept of time travel in a more restrained, thoughtful way than Chrono Trigger does and the translation is flawless. Which makes it, as far as I can tell, the best story in the series.
Except that it's not any fun from the player's perspective. Having a character's entire life revolve around one tragic event in their past, which can easily be undone by visiting their hometown and killing some monster, is a pretty vacant excuse for characterisation, but in the context of an RPG - which revolves around exploring and killing things - it works. When the characters are portrayed in a semi-believable fashion, as FF8 attempts, their feelings and worldview change gradually and internally, which does not make for a very interesting gaming experience since you have no control over it whatsoever. In FF6, Locke will only complete his character arc if he gets the magicite from the Pheonix Cave, so the player is in control of his fate, which makes it personally involving even though it's actually not a very interesting story. Two games later, though, and Squall's going to summon up the courage to ask out some girl he barely knows... whenever he gets around to it, I guess. It isn't up to the player because they're just controlling him when he fights, and none of the major problems in the story can be overcome by fighting, ergo the player is more or less redundant. Squall will admit his feeling for Rinoa, she'll say "I love you", Quistis will get her head straight, Zell will choke on a hotdog etc. etc. regardless of what we choose to do. Like the apathetic one himself says, it's someone else's problem.
I dreampt I was a moron.
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It might have worked if the story had been interesting on its own. It wasn't. Yes, it was a more sympathetic and subtle approach than the previous games, but they were still goddamn video games. They weren't bloody Chekov. It might very well be the greatest love story a video game has to offer, but the characters are still less engaging and well-developed than the cast of the average trashy romance novel. This isn't helped by the fact that, no matter how good the CG cutscenes looked (and still look), the PS1 still didn't have the power to pull off the cinematic narrative devices FF8 attempted to utilize. The much-touted dance sequence looked great, of course, but a few minutes later we're treated to a murky, pixellated Squall trying to look moody and introspective on the balcony. I seriously thought the game had frozen. He's just... standing. The models might have been more detailed, but it's still blatantly obvious that they lack the kind of subtlety and precision required to pull off scenes like this. Perhaps in recognition of this, we also get a lot of Squall's internal monologue thrust down our throats in order to understand how he's feeling - but this hardly helps matters, since he's selfish, whining, introverted and has the emotional maturity of... well, a 17 year old.
But they're teenagers! That's how teenagers act!
Yes, and that's the fucking problem: Instead of larger-than-life heroic characters fighting against evil and tyranny in order to save the world, we have boring, ordinary teenagers who do what they do because their school principal told them to. They behave, in fact, just like the average highschool Final Fantasy player would in the same situation, only less fat. Not to suggest that ordinary heroes are inherently boring, but as we're the ones who are paying to watch them for the entire goddamn quest, we should expect them to rise to the occasion and do something that merits our attention (or just shut up and let us play the game). Instead, we get a four-disc, 50+ hour love story where the leads do nothing but feel nervous until the final shot of the ending sequence.
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DRAWING A BLANK
The way it plays comes under just as much fire as the storyline, the phrase which appears the most being "It lacks the Final Fantasy feeling". This is, of course, the whole point. It was a bold move by Square to break away from the very traditions that had ensured its success over the last four games at possibly the most decisive point in the series' history, which they must have known would alienate a substantial part of their fanbase. I suspect they secretly hated them all along, and the mainstream success of FF7 had given them the clout to do whatever they wanted without worrying about the financial implications. See also: FFX-2.
It would sadly take Squaresoft until FFX-2 to capitalise on the potential of pseudo-lesbian group hugs.
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Everything looks good on paper, though, and I was convinced that I was a closet fan who'd just missed the brilliance first time through as an impatient 15 year old. There are probably thousands and thousands of things you could do in FF8, customising the characters to your heart's content, trying different Guardian Force combinations, and searching for rare items to build new weapons. There's probably a depth here that rivals FF5. Probably. I'm fairly certain it's there, I just can't be bothered looking for it, because it's so unimaginably tedious.
Let's say I'm playing FF6, and want to be a jerk and see if I can get Celes' Magic Resistance so high that no spells can hurt her. Over the course of my travels, I have acquired a few Magic Resistance-enhancing items, so I go through my items, work out the best combination, and give them to Celes. She now has a ridiculously high Magic Resistance, but since the items that raise it are rare, everyone else's has taken a hit because of it. Also, every one of those Magic Resistance increasing items is taking up one of Celes' equipment slots, which means she won't also have the strongest armour, or weapons, or status-protection. It's balanced, it rewards my ability to find rare items, it's flexible, and it took about a minute.
Now let's say I try to do basically anything at all in FF8. Like, I dunno, give myself 50% resistance to fire. First I have to draw the 'Fire' spell out of an enemy until I have 100 of them stocked. This takes anywhere between 20 and 50 turns, during which time that character can't do anything but draw. If the other two characters help, it takes the exact same amount of time, and they can't do anything either. If they attack the enemy and kill it, I can't draw from it anymore and I have to find another one. This can take upwards of 15 minutes, during which time I have been stuck in the exact same battle and not made any progress whatsoever. Then I've got to make sure I have a GF equipped that knows Elem-Junction-DEF, and give it all my Fire spells. These Fire spells can't be junctioned to any other stat at all, or given to another character, and if I ever want to cast Fire, my defense is going to go down. It's not like I'm jumping through hoops to try and 'break' the game or do anything fancy here; I just want to make use of the junction system in a way that's the least bit beneficial to me. Instead, I'm being forced to stand around doing sweet fuck all for hours on end, intentionally prolonging random encounters so I can collect enough magic to make myself strong enough to take down the boss, since they level up at the same rate I do. And then I have to do it again if, heaven forbid, I actually cast any of these spells.
Yeah, it's possible to do all sorts of complicated stuff with the junction system, like making your weapon inflict Sleep while doing fire damage while the character absorbs thunder damage and is healed by poison, it's just that you never need to. Granted, there a lot of things in the other games that you don't need to do, but those tended not to involve sitting there navigating the menu and keeping track of everything in your inventory at once for twenty minutes.
It's just not worth the effort. Why can't I just win a Flame Shield in a boss battle somewhere along the line? It's got nothing to do with the fact this is the traditional way to achieve the same effect, but that it's the simplistic, intuitive, unobtrusive way to achieve the same effect, not to mention it encourages me to actually beat the boss instead of standing there for hours sucking sparkly shit out of him. The amount of time and effort required by the junction system simply isn't justified by what it actually produces. You could, of course, just leave it on 'auto' and ignore it, but when the only good point about something is that you don't actually have to use it... Mmm.
It's more of a false start than a disaster, though. For all the tedium involved, it still does what it's meant to, and you can see FF10's massively-improved Sphere Grid take root here. But yeah, it's not that fun.
Of course, all this is largely irrelevant, because you can just summon a Guardian Force every turn anyway.
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TO TRAIN THEM IS MY CAUSE
Moombas. Oglops. Hypellos. PuPus. And so the quest to reinvent the Moogle continues.
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The Guardian Force system is another kettle of fish entirely, being almost a separate game in itself, and one which is substantially more fun than the rest of FF8. The GF's themselves receive enough attention to make them just as important as the characters - no, fuck that, they're much more important than the characters, since they'll be the ones doing all the work. The characters are really just Pokemon trainers.
Let's do the math: I can either...
1. Get Squall to attack one enemy for about two hundred damage, with a chance that he'll miss.
Or
2. Summon Shiva, at no cost to myself, to hit every enemy for two thousand damage at 100% accuracy.
USE MATH SO SOLVE THIS STORY PROBLEM!
The characters, in fact, are utterly inconsequential to the battles as anything other than avatars for the Guardian Forces. The GF's are also substantially easier to manage than characters: Tell them what ability to learn, and they'll learn it when they have enough AP - which is acquired through winning battles rather than prolonging them. They all possess inherent strengths and weaknesses that the player has to keep in mind, and the player has the capacity to make them stronger and give them new abilities by finding rare items. Imagine if they'd forgotten about the garbled mess that was the magic system and just focused on the GF's, giving them their own command menus like in FF10, resulting in a an RPG that kept the monster-raising aspect of Pokemon, but ditched the obsessive-compulsive collecting, and was able to appeal to an older audience through not being a 'kiddie' game. It might not have been perfect, but it would have been a damn sight more fun than FF8.
The storyline exists on its own, without the player having any involvement. The junction system can quite comfortably work on its own, and is tedious as all hell otherwise. The Guardian Forces win the battles, not the characters the player is controlling. The monsters level up with the player, destroying any incentive to actually win fights in the first place. In the end, this is a game that doesn't want people to actually play it. Certainly it wants people to look at it, and probably discuss it, but it won't even meet them half way when they want to pick up the controller and enjoy it. Less a game, then, and more an... object, I guess.
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WHATEVER
It's inventive and daring when it had every reason to regurgitate more of the same, so hats off to Square for that. There are a lot of good things going on here, it's just that they fit together in the most catastrophically tedious manner possible. Of course an inventive misfire is better than a derivative misfire, but either way it's still a misfire. FF10 did the same stuff but got it right, so play that instead.
It's probably no coincidence that Square chose to follow it up with the most derivative, doggedly traditional game they could think of, as if the negative reaction was due to simply the idea of change, rather than the changes themselves. So, instead of another experimental attempt to revitalise the formula, we got an uninspired piece of garbage that was sold on the basis of it having airships, knights and 'the classic FF feeling', whatever that is. FF8 might have gone too close to the edge, but at least it had an interesting view.
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| ANTHONY R WOMBLE REMEMBERS... |
 I could tell that Final Fantasy VIII was going to be the third worst RPG ever made before the game had even begun, as, in a move that sickened and angered me, the familiar Final Fantasy Prologue Theme was not playing. Laboring under the misapprehension that Squaresoft had not totally abandoned its true fans, I played all the way through this disaster of an RPG searching for the Final Fantasy Prologue Theme, ensuring I visited each location at least twice. To my horror, it never appeared. I wrote a letter to Squaresoft about this little stunt, and also forwarded carbon copies to numerous mainstream videogame magazines. As I do not make a habit of reading candy-coated mainstream filth, I will simply assume that they were printed, although the subtlety of my insights was mostly likely lost on their target audience of intellectually-impaired slackers, most of whom cannot even read and just want the pull-out Dead Or Alive Beach Volleyball poster. Let them have their Gamecubes - I'd rather learn something!
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