Final Fantasy VIII (1999) by Square

I'm a huge fan of the Final Fantasies of the SNES and PS1 era. I've put hundreds of hours into the western games of this era and I consider myself a qualified opinion on the quality of each.

I've replayed all of these in the past few years, and though dated, they all still represent a high-quality experience that's worth exploring even now, decades after the original releases. All of them, that is, except Final Fantasy VIII. The things that make these games so great; the quality of their writing and exploration of serious themes, the beautifully rendered (though aged) backgrounds, the excellent soundtracks, and the quality JRPG gameplay, are all noticeably lesser in Final Fantasy VIII than in its brethren.

An accurate depiction of what it's like to try and make sense of
Final Fantasy VIII's convoluted, lugubrious plot

VIII is plagued by a tedious, grind-heavy draw system that grates on the nerves from minute one and cannot be avoided in order to progress through the game. The junction system could have been, but its reliance on this tedious draw system to be effective kills whatever potential it has. From the second you're given control of your characters, you are expected to spend several hours out of the initial town, continuously drawing spells from enemies with which to junction to your stats. It's a mind-bogglingly bad design decision, and it's going to immediately kill the drive of most folks who are dipping into this game for historical purposes.

Another negative is puzzlingly awful plot writing. There are several instances of enormous plot-holes that smack of being rushed. Seifer attacks President Deling at the Broadcast Station in Timber, and is whisked away by the sorceress. Deling, presumably, escapes. Our heroes were also there, and were culpable, but are somehow allowed to walk straight out the front door. But why? And where are all of Deling's guards? It's established that he was very well-protected in Timber before this, so how can we just walk in and out of the broadcast area without being stopped, or anything? There are no fights in this section, no guards at all. And even more puzzling, almost all of this happens off-screen. There is also a moment later that I won't reveal because it's a massive spoiler, but basically: There's a large reveal, which is nearly impossible for none of the characters to have known about. This is explained away to us as the characters believing they all have shared memory loss. I'm not joking -- It's actually that bad.

There are many instances in the story that make no sense whatsoever. It feels like there are huge portions of the game's story that were ripped out, or unfinished. My uneducated assumption is that the team had little time to finish these segments and were rushed to complete the game to capitalize on the massive success that was Final Fantasy VII, but that's just my guess. Either way, these Final Fantasies live and die on their writing, and this is an aspect in which Final Fantasy VIII fails miserably.

Triple Triad, the card game present, is at first intriguing, but also plagued by the same sort of tedious, logistical nonsense that the junction and draw systems suffer from. Certain regions in the game have completely idiotic rulesets, and these are only changeable through a massive pain-in-the-ass of traveling to different regions and succumbing to whatever the RNG gods tell you.

The Steam port is also pretty awful. Controller support is a must with these games, as several minigames rely on on-screen button displays showing the original PlayStation symbols. This is something completely lost in translation with this Steam version, which stupidly uses S, X, C, and V in place of the controller's face buttons. These is extremely clunky, and it makes the train mission when you first arrive in Timber (when you have to input codes of numbers aligning to these face buttons) almost impossible. It's completely broken on Steam if you're using a controller -- Literally. The display is actually incorrect on the screen. I had to break out a pen and paper and write which buttons went with which, and after failing several times, switched to the keyboard to accomplish the mission instead. It's an absolute mess.

I've put several hundred hours into all of Square's recent rereleases from this era on Steam. I've got nearly 100 in Chrono Trigger, more than 100 in Final Fantasies VI, VII, and IX. And I've got nearly 150 in Final Fantasy X. If Square ever releases Steam ports for Final Fantasy Tactics and Xenogears, I'll probably put 100 into those, too.

It's noticeable, then, that Final Fantasy VIII has seen only 30 hours of play from me. And that's over two playthroughs. I replay the other games once every few years and still love them to this day; 20+ years after playing them for the first time. However, I haven't replayed Final Fantasy VIII since probably 1999 or 2000, and I've tried to replay it twice in the past few years since the Steam port released. I can never get much further than Galbadia Garden. Last time, it was the relentless amount of drawing I was subjecting myself to. "Why am I doing this? It isn't fun," I said to myself before putting the game down. That was a few years ago. This time it was traveling back and forth between Timber and Dollet and attempting to change the Random rule out of Triple Triad in Dollet. This was taking me hours, before I finally just put the game down once again and figured it was time to whip up this negative review.

The Final Fantasies released in the '90s and the early '00s are nearly universally phenomenal games. But every series has its duds, and for this series, it is unquestionably Final Fantasy VIII that falls far short by comparison to its brethren.

Oh, but Uematsu's soundtrack is good. Really good. It's by far the best part of the game. So, you know, just go check that out on YouTube or something. And skip this. Because Final Fantasy IX is probably the best game in the entire series. Do yourself a favor and just play that instead.

⭐⭐

Playtime: 34 hours