I have no nostalgia for FFVIII - and when playing Final Fantasy VIII Remastered a few years ago I thought the game was meh at best. What am I missing?
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I think Yuji Naka should be employed by more game companies to do wacky shit and rage post on social media. Last time we got Balan Wonderworld (great game if you have object permanence), a blacked out picture of Naoto Ohshima (comedic gold) and prison memes (he didnāt even go to prison but history has been written regardless!). I think we could have another go at it, why not? We take all the gain and the only one hurt is the stock market, which is fake anyway.
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plays an incredible JRPG with a beautiful love story and maybe the best video game soundtrack of all time
@cloudcarpet: āā¦whatever.ā
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Iām not a huge Final Fantasy VIII defender or anything (I consider it middle-of-the-pack for the series), but its soundtrack is nigh unparalleled
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we need a separate thread for rehabilitating people with wrong opinions
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Straight love stories canāt be beautiful. I donāt make the rules.
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imo itās a mid-tier FF game notable for an incredible first disc and a banger soundtrack.
The plot goes completely off the rails (as it does every time FF tries time travel) and the game never really recovers
The cast is okay. The face tattoo definitely brings down the average. Iām not sure who the standout party member is. I preferred Quistis and Irvine
The junction system gameplay is a complete mess, but if you know what youāre doing it becomes a so-bad-itās-good situation. Itās very fun to break that gameās combat
The game seems to have somewhat of a polarizing reception overall - I see lots of people say its their favorite one but a lot of other people rank it relatively low. I seem to remember it being more popular back around the Kingdom Hearts/Kingdom Hearts II days, with people very happy to see Squall (āLeonā) in those games
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43 posts were merged into an existing topic: Ranking of Things
A few of us here on this fair forum are on itā¦..
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Iād do anything to spend more time with my oomfies!!
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Hereās who to follow:
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The craziest thing in Final Fantasy VIII is that Quistis thought she wanted to fuck Squall until she learned they were foster siblings. She was like oh thank god - it wasnāt a sexual urge, it was a misdiagnosed sisterly urge
Contrarian opinion: backlogggggd looks like a lot of workā¦
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I donāt use it to log my own but I use it to lurk others fav games and secret desires
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Hereās a contrarian opinion: I like games that force you to use your brain and think, but I think when you need a pen and paper (or any other auxiliary tool) to keep track of things from a gameplay or usability perspective, the game failed in some way.
Maybe this just means Iām a nu-skool gamer who likes a little slopā¦or maybe it means games should have better maps and/or landmarks!
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I like how weird Final Fantasy VIII is.
It was the first game I played with such a fleshed out school setting. The prior Final Fantasies had main characters in adulthood or at least out in the world. In Final Fantasy VIII, Squall and his companions are students at a school. That ordinariness is then pierced by several elements of unusualness: they are mercenaries in training, their exam is an actual mission, they graduate into being mercenaries with little sense of whether theyād be able to leave what they do, and meanwhile the nearest country is descending into a dictatorship. The resistance is well-meaning but poorly resourced. What unfolds feels both novel and odd, especially for the first disc when there are few answers and few characters are really questioning this current state of events.
Instead, the gameās first disc slides expertly from one kind of strangeness to the next. One strength of its story telling is that it manages to do a lot of showing and implication. For instance, Squall takes the perspective of Laguna and his friends, and for a while players are left to figure out that theyāre flashbacks, who Laguna is in relation to the characters, and why these flashbacks keep happening. Similarly, the Dollet mission and the subsequent Timber mission tap into a lot of backstory about the sorceress from a generation ago that rewards close attention. Irvineās reactions near the end of the disc intimate something weāve been missing for a while.
The subsequent discs arenāt as structurally tight, but they still work well for me. We learn more about how the mercenary schools are funded and then why they were set up. We learn why all this uncanny deja vu seems to be going on with the group. We learn how Laguna, the former sorceress, the current sorceress, Squall, and Rinoa are all related. We do end up getting more exposition, more telling, more explanation, but thatās no worse than typical for JRPGs in their second half.
Iād need to have played the game more recently to go into more detail with characters (who are also delightfully odd) or plot, but in short, it was doing things I hadnāt seen a game do with its setting, and even now I think the whole mercenary school premise is extraordinary in a way other school settings (Lost Judgment, latter-day Persona) arenāt.
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This write-up makes me want to revisit it again. I havenāt played it since I was a teenagerā¦
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Maps in games are a solution to a problem (getting players to go where you want and make them aware of what opportunities they have) that could always be solved in more interesting ways.
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The correct answer is always to have the player draw the map themselves. Although, if you design a space well you wonāt need a map.
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Also, it should be noted that I had refused to ever draw a map for a game until last year when I played Shining in the Darkness, and suddenly everything clicked. Drawing maps is awesome and helps create an incredibly strong bond towards the game!
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