Final Fantasy Challenge Home Page

Heavy story spoilers ahead

Introduction

Welcome back to the Final Fantasy Project. It’s literally been months since I finished Final Fantasy VII, and it’s not because Final Fantasy VIII is a very long game, it’s more that I so deeply disliked it, that it literally made me want to do anything else. But I persevered, because if I can’t commit to self-imposed challenges, then I don’t even deserve to have a blog!

Final Fantasy VIII was released on September 9th, 1999. 9/9/99, about two and a half years after the hugely successful Final Fantasy VII. I wasn’t aware at the time, as I grew up in the middle of nowhere, but I think it’s hard to understate just how big Final Fantasy VII was, and I often wonder what it would have been like to be on the team at Squaresoft during this time. Having a monumental hit is no doubt exciting, but the thought of following it up is terrifying. Suddenly you have millions of people watching, and comparing it to your previous works.

World and Characters

Final Fantasy VIII starts off with a montage of scenes and characters. One scene that keeps popping up is a vicious sword fight between a young man wearing black, and a young man wearing white. The scene ends with blood splattering the ground, and both boys sporting a large gash across their noses in opposite directions.

When the game starts in earnest, you’re in control of the young man in black, Squall Leonhart, who is laying in bed in the infirmary. You’re told to get to class, where the boy in white, Seifer, sits next to you. Your instructor, Quistis, chastises Seifer, reminding everyone that you shouldn’t hurt your sparring partners.

You and your classmates are all SeeD candidates in Balamb Garden. SeeD’s are mercenaries for hire, and Squall and Seifer are on the precipice of testing to become full-fledged members. First, Quistis takes Squall on a mission to claim a Guardian Force, which will augment your abilities.

Final Fantasy VIII has really abandoned the fantasy aesthetic. The world is much more modern, with touches of magical or technological flair. Unlike Final Fantasy VII grimy aesthetic, this world is brighter and cleaner, more optimistic, which lines up nicely considering the main cast of characters are all a bunch of late teenagers hanging around their school.

As Squall and Seifer prepare for their mission, he’s joined by Zell to round out the team. The mission, secure the town square in Dollet, which is currently under occupation by the Galbadian Army. They do so, also uncovering a plot about the army securing an old radio tower, but Seifer, being rash, begins to disobey orders and runs off on his own. The next party member, Selphie, arrives and gives the order to evacuate. The team is chased by a mechanical spider thing, which can be felled, but stands back up fairly quickly. Once the team manages to hit the beach where the evacuation boats are being held, Quistis breaks out a gatling gun and blows the whole thing to smithereens. Badass.

Back at the Garden, Squall, Selphie, and Zell have passed the test and are now SeeDs. Seifer, having disobeyed orders, has failed. At the graduation party, a girl asks Squall to dance, then disappears.

The next day, the party is given a new mission. Go to Timber and provide assistance to an underground resistance group, the Timber Owls. Also Quistis has quit being an instructor, so she can come along too.

My first major qualm with Final Fantasy VIII is the characters. They’re all children, and act like it. Squall is edgy and emo, and most of his dialogue happens inside his head in parentheses. Most of his spoken dialogue is dismissive and rude. Zell is brash and goofy. He’s earnest, but he often comes across like a caricature, and is often sidelined. Selphie acts like a teenage girl, she’s a cheerleader and just wants everyone to do their best! She never really develops, despite her having a ton of potential. Quistis started the game with a bit of a romantic interest in Squall, which is wildly inappropriate, but thankfully that thread was quickly dropped and never spoken of again. She seems to be the party mom, providing a level-headed comment when the children just want to run in and start punching faces.

At the point in the story, the party falls over, and the story picks up with 3 new characters, Laguna, Kiros, and Ward. These are Galbadian Army soldiers as they live out events that happened over 17 years ago. These scenes feel like random, non-sequiters, but over time they set the stage and show reoccuring characters that become important in the present.

Upon arriving in Timber, the leader of the Forest Owls is Rinoa, the girl who danced with Squall at the graduation party. Their plan is to kidnap the Galbadian President, but their plot is foiled when the person on the train they hijacked turns out to be a body double. After that failure, a TV broadcast reveals that the president is making a sorceress the new ambassador. During the TV broadcast, Seifer bursts in and takes the president hostage, but the sorceress appears and takes Seifer away, seemingly willingly.

The next mission is to try to assassinate the sorceress, where the final main party member, Irving joins the group. He’s a sharpshooter, so the plan is to get him into position, and when the sorceress is having a parade, for Irving to snipe her. Flash forward a couple of hours of gameplay, Irving chokes. He falls into a pit of shakes and can’t take the shot. Squall talks Irving into taking the shot, but the sorceress blocks it with a magical field. Squall takes the fight directly to her, and fights her head on. He fights Seifer, who is protecting the sorceress, and while he defeats Seifer, he takes an ice bolt to the shoulder, and falls unconscious. Thus ends the first disc.

What follows is a winding plot of time travel, memory loss, body possession, leadership, and love. The story swaps between teenage love, to global politics, to being fired into space, and then crashing back to earth without really taking a moment to breathe. Certain plot threads seem like they’re going to be important, but are then just largely dropped. For example, using GFs is supposed to cause memory loss, which is why the main party don’t remember being together as children. But once that revelation is revealed, it never really comes back into play again. It provides context for some of the events that happened in disc 1, but memory loss didn’t really come back up again.

One of my favourite parts of JRPGs is exploring all the characters and the struggles they face. In Final Fantasy VIII, this is squarely Squall and Rinoa’s story, everyone else feels in service to that tale. Zell, Irving, Quistis, and Selphie don’t get the spotlight. It’s not like Final Fantasy VII where you get to explore Barrett’s history, or travel to Yuffie’s village and see why she is the way she is. And the love story between Squall and Rinoa feels shallow. Squall does NOTHING to earn Rinoa’s affection, he’s callous and unkind, and yet she throws herself at him, flirting and teasing him, trying to catch his attention. Until about halfway through disc 3 when he seems to turn on a dime. With Rinoa rendered unconcious, his inner monolgue is entirely focused on how much he misses her, how much he needs to hear her voice again. To me, it feels forced.

I do wonder how much I’ve missed. Like in the scene where Squall leaps out of a space shuttle as it hurtles back to Earth to catch an adrift Rinoa, a seemingly random ship appears in the black of space, and after clearing out a small monster infestation, you’re able to pilot it back to land. I know there are plenty of scenes that give texture to the side characters of the party, but I didn’t spend much time seeking out all the side quests.

The plot of Final Fantasy VIII, summarized

Gameplay Mechanics

When you first start the game, the only option you have in battle is to “Attack”. As you collect Guardian Forces, they’ll give you the options to use Magic, to summon them in battle, to use items, and to Draw. Each party member can have 4 commands, including attack, which means if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll need to leave one of the other commands off your party. Magic, is no longer innate or learned, and the MP bar is totally gone. Instead, Magic has become itemized. To stock up on Magic, you need to Draw it out of your opponents, and hoard up to 99 of each spell. Each character needs to draw their own spells, but they can swap their spells between each other, if one character needs to leave the party for any reason.

The GFs, in addition to giving you more actions, augment your stats, mainly by allowing you to junction one of your magic spells to a stat, increasing its power. The amount the stat is increased is directly related to how strong the spell is, and how many of those spells you have drawn. Life will boost your Max HP dramatically, but as you use the life spell, the Max HP will start to diminish. Some will even allow you to junction spells to augment your attacks and defence with different effects, It’s great when your basic attack also inflicts sleep, or when your main spell caster is totally immune to silence, or absorbs a rogue fire spell.

This system, is interesting in theory. In practise, it means I spend a dozen minutes in every battle checking for new magic and drawing so every character gets 99 of that spell. Then, because the junctions may need to move around depending on what situation we’re going into, it just means that I never really used my magics until the final bosses.

Many of the skills the GFs learn also augment your stats directly. One annoying on was HP +40%, because in some story segments you need to swap your characters frequently. But every time that skill moved on and off someone, it would leave them with their base HP. While it was satisfying hitting 9999 HP with a character, it was annoying when I moved that GF over to someone and then back, only for that character to just lose all that HP. It’s a super minor complaint, I was drowning in cure spells, but still. Just another aspect that I found annoying.

So all this talk about GFs and junctions affecting your stats, let’s talk about levels. As per usual, each character gains EXP and gains levels. But the levels don’t affect your stats all that much in the end, at least nowhere near the effect that the GFs give you. The enemies do scale to your party’s average level, meaning you could do a low-level run and be viable for the end-game. By keeping your level low, enemy levels are kept low, but you have the option to bolster your stats by junctions, allowing you to beat down weak enemies easily.

Speaking of stats, Final Fantasy VIII does away with most equipment. There’s no accessories, no armor, and only a handful of weapons per character that needs to be crafted. Call me boring, but I miss seeking out treasure chests in dungeons and getting cool new armor right before a boss.

You can use the Guardian Forces in battle as a summon, usually dealing out some very impressive damage, but there are a couple drawbacks to using them. First, your active time battle bar has to fill up so you can choose which GF to summon, then the GF’s HP covers your character’s HP, and another active time battle bar has to fill up. Once it has, the summon occurs, including a 30-second animation. Every single time. If you take damage while your GF is readying, your GF loses HP, and can potentially get knocked out. Make sure you stock up on the GF specific potions, as regular healing spells and items don’t affect your GFs. I stopped using GF summons pretty early on because I just didn’t want to watch that animation over and over again. At this point, I’m desperate for a skip animation button.

Another thing I’m desperate for, is for a menu of names that I can just pick from. When you are choosing your target during battle, a little pointer lets you select which character you want to target. The battle camera is quite dynamic, and it’s not uncommon for characters to become hidden behind enemies or even just the menu, so selecting which one you’re going to target with your cure spell can be a bit of a crap-shoot. What infuriates me is when a summon animation is ongoing, it pops up a menu of names to easily pick from. DO THAT, FOR ALL THE TARGETS!

Visual Presentation

This is where Final Fantasy VIII really shines. Unlike the blocky, polygonal overworld characters and more detailed battle sprites, Final Fantasy VIII uses the more detailed battle sprites in the overworld. The characters are much more realistically proportioned. The backgrounds are detailed, and when compared to Final Fantasy VII, it’s usually pretty apparent which aspects of the background you’re able to interact with.

Final Fantasy VIII also uses the Full Motion Video liberally, and often to great effect. I suspect back in 1999, the effects of the videos under the gameplay sprites would have been breathtaking. Even today, I found myself appreciating the videos and most of the visuals. The character sprites are often well detailed, but the faces can clip in a weird and funny way. Like in the below screenshot, Rinoa’s cheek and chin jut out in an awkward way.

Triple Triad

A major part of Final Fantasy VIII is a card game called Triple Triad. By pressing square against almost any character in the world, you can challenge them to a game of triple Triad. In Triple Triad, both players have a hand of 5 cards, and take turns placing one of those cards on a 3×3 grid. Each card has a number corresponding to the 4 adjacent directions. If you place a card next to another card, you compare the number on both cards, and whoever has the higher number wins. If the losing card flips belong to the opponent, the card flips over to the other colour. Once 9 cards have been played, whoever controls the most cards is the winner.

The only good thing about Triple Triad is that it’s over quick. It’s a brain-dead simple area control game that reeks of power creep. You can’t tactically master Triple Triad, you can only get stronger cards and wait for your opponent to make a stupid play and capitalize on their folly. Maybe it’s my board game snobbery showing up, but as a game, I don’t think Triple Triad is any more compelling than Tic-tac-toe.

When you win or lose in Triple Triad, the winner gets to steal a card from the loser, Yu-Gi-Oh style. You can also turn monsters from the random encounters into cards as well. Considering you only need 5 cards, you might wonder what you can do with the extra cards? Well, some of the GF abilities allow you to turn the cards into various items, or even turn cards directly into magic spells.

It’s this system that allows you to utterly break the early game. You can obtain Squalls ultimate weapon before the end of disc one, and if you feel like spending a couple of hours in Triple Triad, have a fully kitted out party before leaving for Timber.

You Have to Play it Right

Listen, I know that a lot of my complaints about Final Fantasy VIII have counterpoints. For all my complaining about drawing magic, I know you can play Triple Triad to grind out cards, refine the cards into items, which you can then refine into magic spells, eliminating the need to draw entirely. If you just spend 6 hours at the start of the game, you can set your junctions up for the majority of the rest of the game. Put in another few hours of tedium and you can even unlock Squall’s ultimate weapon before the end of disc one.

I know that earning and refining cards is the technically more efficient way to manage the junction system, but I rebel on following a guide THAT closely for a game I’m going to play the first time. Also, I chafe at the idea of spending so much time making the battles trivial. On some level, the challenge of the battles is the point of playing the game!

I did have a guide open for most of the playthrough that I would reference now and again when I couldn’t remember where to go next. But every now and then I’d find myself skipping whole paragraphs as the author laid out incredibly specific steps to managing certain side quests, which include losing specific cards to a certain character, seeking out specific members of a club and beating them at Triple Triad, and a few optional GFs. There’s also the bonus bosses, Omega Weapon, Ultima Weapon, and Bahamut. I didn’t chase any of these side quests because really, Final Fantasy VIII made me not care.

The one thing I appreciated having the guide open for, was for hinting at who to have in my party for certain scenes. Now and then throughout the game, certain characters will offer some small comments or have a bonus scene if they’re in your party. This feels most prevalent at Fishermen’s Horizion and choosing the right instruments has Rinoa and Squall share a pretty important scene. Choose wrong, and that scene simply passes you by.

I’m obviously not against having a guide on hand, but Final Fantasy VIII feels particularily bound to it. Without the expert advice readily available, you’ll find yourslef fighting against tedious systems. While they can be exploited for massive benefits, it’s fairly obtuse and time consuming if you don’t have a guide to follow.

Final Thoughts

I started to enjoy Final Fantasy VIII about halfway through Disc 3, when Squall stopped being an edgy jerk. And, it was about that point where I encountered an enemy with some really strong spells that took my basic attack from doing 800 per hit to nearly 3000. That allowed me to fly through the last chapters of the game.

The entirety of Disc 4 is dedicated to the final dungeon, upon which entering, a bunch of your skills are sealed away. Everything but the basic attack option. As you defeat some optional bosses, you’ll unlock your abilities. I… skipped most of this, somewhat accidently. I was just wandering around the castle and then I just found the final chamber. I had only unlocked Magic, so, decided to give the final boss a go with a limitied skill set.

I did enjoy the final boss, Ultimecia. Starting the fight you’ll be given a random party. During the actual fight with her, she can make you randomly lose a whole stacks of your magic spells, which can poke holes in your character like Swiss cheese. If any characters fall, you have a small window of time to revive them, if you don’t, they’re “absorbed by time” and removed by the battle. During the final form, Squall lost Ultima, which was his attack junction, dropping his damage output from 4000 per hit back to 800. Then Ultimecia alternated between a spell that dropped everyone to 1hp, and a powerful AOE spell, keeping my characters on their toes.

Depending on which of the spells that get lost, this fight can be a cake walk, or a struggle. I enjoyed it, as it kept me on my toes and required me to pivot when certain spells got lost, but anyone who takes umbrage with its random nature is completely valid in calling this fight unfair. It took me 2 tries to beat her, as the first try I was unaware of any of her abilities and was caught a bit off guard.

I’ve often heard of Final Fantasy VII through Final Fantasy X as a “Golden Era” for Final Fantasy, but Final Fantasy VIII is the strange middle child of the PS1 era. It’s bold and confused, and often deeply irritating. It has sky-high ambition and the technical chops to back it up, yet it constantly feels at odds with itself. For every emotional high point like Squall finally thawing in Disc 3, the iconic space sequence, or the tense unpredictability of the final battle, there are at least three moments of head-scratching narrative whiplash, undercooked character arcs, or mechanical decisions designed to test the player’s patience.

The junction system turns magic into a hoarded resource rather than a tool of expression. The level-scaling and GF-centric progression make levelling feel meaningless. Plot threads like childhood amnesia via Guardian Forces appear with fanfare and then evaporate. Meanwhile, huge character beats are shoved aside to make room for the next bizarre twist involving sorceresses, time travel, or surprise field trips to space.

I can’t call the game soulless. At its heart is a coming-of-age story wrapped inside a love story wrapped inside a political thriller wrapped inside a time-compression fever dream. When it works, it really works. When it doesn’t, it leaves you wondering how such talented storytellers missed the mark so many times.

Final Fantasy VIII was ambitious, and it had gargantuan shoes to fill, following in the wake of Final Fantasy VII, so I can’t fault it for shooting for the moon. I know those who enjoy Final Fantasy VIII really enjoy it, but I’m not in that camp. Final Fantasy VIII didn’t just fail to win me over, but it actively pushed me away. I’m glad I’ve finished it, and I’m glad I never need to draw another spell again.

Unless that’s a mechanic in Final Fantasy IX. Gosh, I hope not.