Those are the first voice-acted words spoken in the Final Fantasy franchise. They’re spoken by Tidus as Final Fantasy X begins in medias res. A group of people sit around a campfire looking forlorn and melancholy. There’s no context for who these people are or where they are, or what’s causing them to be so depressed. All we have is this beautiful piano piece playing over the scene as a blonde boy touches a girl’s shoulder and then walks up a hill to look at a ruined city in the distance. He asks us to listen to his story.
Before I dive any further in, I want to mention up front that Final Fantasy X is one of the few Final Fantasy games I had actually played a lot of before starting this blog series. I played the original PS2 release back in 2005 when I was about 14 or 15 years old. I vaguely remembered something, like running into a stone wall of a fight when Kimahri has his solo battle, and some another boss or two being incredible difficulty spikes. I remembered the major plot twists, and getting up to what I thought was the final boss. That said, something I’ve learned over the course of this series is that if you don’t play a game for twenty years, you really don’t remember very much of it when you come back.
Story
Final Fantasy X begins in earnest with Tidus about to head to a Blitzball game, a type of underwater soccer. He’s a star player of the Zanarkand Abes and treated exactly like you’d expect a professional sports celebrity to be treated. He’s cocky, full of himself, loud, kind of obnoxious. Just a downright jock in every sense of the word. But as the Blitzball game gets underway, an unknown monstrosity attacks the city of Zanarkand. Buildings crumble around him and, in the chaos, Auron appears. Auron was a friend of Tidus’s father, Jecht. Jecht disappeared at sea ten years ago and Auron has seemingly been watching out for Tidus ever since. He tosses Tidus a sword and asks if he knows how to use it. Before long, though, both Auron and Tidus are sucked up into the sky by this gigantic gaping maw.
Tidus then awakens in an unknown ruined location where he’s picked up by a ship with some Al Bhed peoples, who speak a language he doesn’t understand. Thankfully, one of the Al Bhed, Rikku, does speak his language and she recruits him to help recover some underwater treasure. Things go slightly awry, as that giant monstrosity appears again. The Al Bhed call it Cin, and the next thing you know, Tidus is once again waking up in the water. This time, however, he washes ashore on the island of Besaid, an idyllic tropical beach that feels almost aggressively peaceful after the destruction of Zanarkand.
In Besaid, he meets Wakka, captain of the local Blitzball team. Tidus can’t help but show off his Blitzball skills, Wakka. He asks who Tidus plays for, and Tidus proudly proclaims that he’s the star player of the Zanarkand Abes. The whole group is in a quiet shock. Wakka says Zanarkand was destroyed 1,000 years ago and its ruins are considered sacred ground. They chalk Tidus failed memory and general cluelessness to the customs of the world to Sin’s toxin messing with his head.
Wakka brings him back to the village where Tidus meets Yuna, who is about to embark on her pilgrimage. Yuna is a summoner, and the role of a summoner is twofold. Their first duty is to go on a pilgrimage across the world, praying at temples along the way until they reach Zanarkand where they obtain the Final Aeon and use it to destroy Sin, bringing about a temporary Calm to the world. But Sin always returns. The cycle continues endlessly until humanity has supposedly atoned for its past sins.
The monster Sin that destroyed Tidus’s Zarnakand in the introductory sequence is this cataclysmic force that appears seemingly at random to destroy towns whenever humanity becomes too technologically advanced. The local religion, Yevon, teaches that Sin appeared because Zanarkand relied too heavily on machina and that Sin is humanity’s punishment for becoming lazy and dependent on technology.
The second duty of a summoner is to perform sendings, guiding the souls of the recently departed to the Farplane, so they can rest peacefully. Otherwise those souls linger, consumed by resentment, eventually becoming the fiends you fight throughout the game. I actually really appreciated this because it’s a great bit of ludo-narrative cohesion. The monsters aren’t just there because it’s a JRPG and JRPGs need monsters. The game gives them an actual place in the world and mythology. These souls are often represented by pyreflies, floating streaks of light drifting through the air, and you see them constantly throughout Spira.
Yuna convinces her party to let Tidus join them as one of her guardians. Wakka is already traveling with her, and you’re introduced to Lulu, the black mage, and Kimahri Ronso, this giant muscular blue lion-man with a broken horn who sort of exists somewhere between a dragoon and a blue mage. The party sets off from Besaid, and thus begins Final Fantasy X.
What immediately sets Final Fantasy X apart from every previous Final Fantasy is that there’s no over world to explore. Instead, you are on a pilgrimage, traveling from one location to another down a series of narrow hallways. Seriously, Final Fantasy X is basically a straight line that you move along as the story progresses. Sure, there are often small diversions or forks in the road. But at the end of those diversions is generally a single treasure chest, then you just need to head back to your main road and keep following the carefully designed path.
On one hand, I genuinely appreciated this change. No longer are you aimlessly hoofing it across barren over world landscapes trying to find the next destination while random encounters chew through your patience. In past games these over worlds gave you a sense of freedom, of having an open world. But you aren’t really free in those games, there’s a specific place you need to be to progress the story. Having the open world gives you the illusion of freedom. And in many of the past games if you accidentally venture in the wrong direction, you’ll encounter enemies 30 levels higher than you are and get instantly KO’ed. I know Final Fantasy XIII was heavily criticized for being a series of hallways, but part of me has to wonder why XIII got all those criticisms and yet X seems to have dodged the hallway simulator moniker. Maybe it’ll make sense when I get to XIII.
Most of the world is rendered fully in 3D unlike the previous games which used 3D character models on pre-rendered backgrounds. Because the locations in Final Fantasy X are mostly narrow hallways with fixed camera angles, the camera can pan and zoom and frame scenes in ways earlier games really couldn’t. In Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VIII, and Final Fantasy IX, the camera mostly just slid around on the X and Y axis. Here, the camera moves dynamically through forests, villages, and temples, creating this sense that the world is dense and alive beyond the path you’re walking. I wonder if the reason Final Fantasy X avoided the “hallway” criticism I mentioned, is because hallways evoke the feeling of being overly simplistic. These hallways are acceptable to me because the world feels textured and full in a way the older overworlds often didn’t.
The use of linear pathways does something that I really appreciate. It controls the pacing of the story. You don’t miss important details because you didn’t visit an optional location, you don’t spend days wandering between plot points. The story is delivered smoothly and cohesively.
Using Tidus as the protagonist in this story also works incredibly well because he’s effectively a stranger in a strange land. Since he doesn’t understand Spira, the game has a perfectly natural excuse to dump exposition to him, and by extension, to the player. Tidus doesn’t understand Yevon’s teachings because we don’t understand them either. Meanwhile, for the people of Spira, these rituals are just part of life. They’ve never known anything different.
So as Yuna’s pilgrimage begins, Tidus is this happy-go-lucky idiot. He makes all these promises that he and Yuna will come back to these locations later. He completely misses the awkward and sad looks people give when he says these things. Then, partway through the journey, Tidus learns the truth: summoning the Final Aeon to defeat Sin kills the summoner. Yuna’s pilgrimage is her offering herself as a sacrifice, so the people of Spira can experience a brief period of peace, called the Calm.
Everyone else already knew this. They understood from the very start that this journey ends with Yuna’s death one way or another. Tidus, meanwhile, absolutely refuses to accept it. He vows to think of something, like the irrational child he kind of is. Which to be fair, defeating Sin doesn’t mean Sin is gone forever. Quite the opposite, the Calm generally lasts for about 10 years, then Sin always returns. The teachings of Yevon say that when the people have atoned enough, then the cycle will break. So they just keep throwing Summoners at the problem, hoping that each new Calm will be the eternal one.
Tidus also finds himself directly at the center of this conflict when Auron reveals that Sin is actually Jecht. Auron brought Tidus here at Jecht’s request in the hope that Tidus might finally break this endless cycle. Tidus hates Jecht. Jecht was the Wayne Gretzky of Blitzball players, so even though Tidus is a star athlete in his own right, professionally he’s still living in his fathers shadow. When Jecht was at home, his mother ignored him, fawning over Jecht. When Jecht tried to be a parent, he would berate Tidus, calling him a crybaby and that the only thing he was good at was crying. Anytime Jecht’s name comes up, Tidus is quick to point out his resentment towards Jecht.
I actually really love the father-son relationship here. I grew up with a single mother and never knew my father, and one thing that always frustrated me throughout the 90s and 2000s was how media constantly depicted fatherless sons as being overwhelmed with joy the moment their deadbeat father returned. It’s never something I connected with because I don’t have those feelings. If my father appeared in my life tomorrow, I wouldn’t suddenly want a relationship with him. To me, family is so much more than blood, it’s the relationships between people.
So I appreciate that Tidus is angry. Jecht was a jerk to him as a child and then disappeared. Tidus doesn’t spend the game longing for reconciliation. He has this massive chip on his shoulder because he spent his entire life living in the shadow of his famous father. And then in a twist of cruel irony, throughout Spira, he learns that Jecht traveled alongside Yuna’s father, High Summoner Braska, and because Braska brought the last Calm, he, Jecht, and Auron are viewed as legendary heroes. It’s genuinely compelling watching Tidus try to reconcile these conflicting feelings about a man he hates and hearing from everyone how much of a hero he was.
Graphically, Final Fantasy X looks significantly better than Final Fantasy IX. Almost like there was a generational leap or something. Like the previous games, it uses both low-resolution and high-resolution character models depending on the scene. Most gameplay uses lower-detail models, while emotional cutscenes swap in the more detailed versions. Sometimes it’s kind of jarring. You’ll have Wakka’s high-detail face standing beside some poor NPC who looks like they were carved out of damp cardboard.
The character movement can also be hilariously stiff at times. There are scenes where characters pivot like forklifts before walking off in a different direction. While very often the aesthetic, music, and well realized world can look great, there are absolutely moments where you’re suddenly reminded that Final Fantasy X is over twenty years old.
But then the FMV cutscenes kick in and good lord. These cutscenes are what I remembered the game looking like back in 2005. The flowing water, the hair physics, the lighting, it’s all incredibly good looking. Squaresoft absolutely flexed everything they learned from the previous Final Fantasy games and from their failed movie venture Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. One thing I especially appreciated was how seamlessly the game transitions between in-engine scenes and FMV scenes. Sometimes the transition between FMV and in-engine is clunky, sometimes it’s smooth, but it always looks good.
As the story progresses, the party begins to reject the idea of feeding summoners into this endless cycle of death. They repeatedly clash with Seymour Guado, a high priest of Yevon who believes the only release from suffering, is death itself. Seymour wants to actually become Sin because he genuinely thinks annihilating humanity is its ultimate salvation.
The party, unsurprisingly, rejects his philosophy.
Another aspect to the world is you discover that some people can remain in Spira after death as “unsent,” essentially refusing to pass on. Eventually, near the end of Yuna’s pilgrimage, the party meets Yunalesca, the original summoner who defeated Sin a thousand years ago. They learn the full horrifying truth: not only does summoning the Final Aeon kill the summoner, but the Final Aeon itself must be created from one of the summoner’s guardians. Braska chose Jecht. The Final Aeon destroys Sin… and then becomes the next Sin.
The party refuses to continue the cycle and defeats Yunalesca, effectively destroying humanity’s only known method of combating Sin. I actually chuckled at the scene afterward where the group casually informs Maester Mika that they killed Yunalesca, and the poor man just completely breaks down, refusing to believe that there is any alternative to the current cycle. Instead of listening to the party or trying to help, he just gives up and sends himself to the Farplane, dissolving into pyreflies.
During all this, Tidus also learns the truth about his own existence. A thousand years ago, Zanarkand and Bevelle were at war. Zanarkand’s summoners knew they were doomed against Bevelle’s machina, so the leader of Zanarkand, Yu Yevon used the fayth, people locked in an eternal slumber, with their dreams getting physical manifestations. That’s what Yuna’s aeons are, dreams from the Fayth at each temple. Yu Yevon uses the Fayth to summon Dream Zanarkand, and hides it elsewhere in the world before Yu Yevon created Sin. Tidus is from Dream Zanarkand, and is therefore a dream of the fayth himself. All this means that when Sin and Yu Yevon die, the fayth will stop dreaming, and Tidus will disappear.
This is the most confusing part of the plot, and I’ll be honest in saying that I looked it up after the fact. But I do want to mention here that Final Fantasy X has the most approachable story of the series by far. There’s no alien cells being injected into people, no memory loss mixed with time travel, nothing that convoluted. The world has all kinds of texture and depth, the religion feels real and well thought out, but the overall story, Yuna’s pilgimage, is really straightforward. This is one of the first times I’ve been able to follow the entirety of the story without much confusion or needing to look up alternative resources to figure out exactly what’s going on.
The party eventually teams up with Cid and his airship, tears a hole into Sin. They journey inside Sin’s body Pinocchio-style to confront Jecht and Yu Yevon himself. Tidus’s reunion with Jecht is exactly the kind of messy emotional confrontation I wanted from the game. Tidus says he hates him. Jecht basically responds with “Yeah, I know.” There’s no magical reconciliation. No perfect healing. Just two deeply flawed people understanding each other a little too late.
And then Tidus says, “This is the only time I’m glad that you’re my dad,” right before they have to kill him. Perfect.
After defeating Jecht, the party confronts Yu Yevon in a final battle that’s kind of fascinating mechanically. Every time you hit him, he heals for 9,999 damage, so unless you’re breaking the damage cap, the fight becomes this long grind. At the same time, all your party members have Auto-Life, so no matter what Yu Yevon does, you just keep getting back up. I suppose there’s something thematically fitting about that. The battle feels less like overcoming a challenge and more like stubbornly outlasting the embodiment of an endless cycle. Apparently Yu Yevon will use Grativja and hit the whole party and itself at the same time, constantly knocking it’s health down, but I managed to overcome it by breaking it’s magic, and then casting reflect on it so it’s healing just reflected to my party instead.
Anyway, once Yu Yevon is defeated and Sin explodes into a mountain of pyreflies, Tidus begins to fade away. There’s this genuinely emotional farewell where Yuna runs to hug him and falls straight through his disappearing body. He stands behind her, wraps her arms around her for a tender moment, then leaps off the ship with a hasty ‘goodbye’.
Because the church of Yevon sits at the center of the story, the gradual dismantling of that institution gives Final Fantasy X an incredible sense of scale. Whether it’s the party being branded heretics or watching Wakka, who starts the game as a blind follower of Yevon, to the point of racism and bigotry, slowly confront and unpack the hypocrisy around him, it feels huge. When the game reaches its climax and you finally tear down the foundations of this entire religion, it genuinely feels like you’re killing God. Final Fantasy has always loved the “fight God at the end” thing, but I think Final Fantasy X executes that idea better than any game in the series so far by having the entire conflict and story and culture of the world being centered around the church of Yevon.
The Level System
For this playthrough, I played the original US PS2 release, meaning I didn’t get access to the Expert Sphere Grid, but I’ll touch on that in second. The Sphere Grid itself is this massive interconnected web of nodes where every character starts in a different location. Instead of traditional leveling, gaining experience and passively improving their stats with each level up, characters gain Sphere Levels which let them move within the grid following the lines and activating nodes to increase stats or learn abilities.
I actually really enjoyed this system. It feels highly customizable even if, in practice, the customization is a little illusory because most characters are clearly funneled along intended paths. Tidus moves toward agility and time magic like Haste and Slow. Lulu focuses on elemental black magic. Auron becomes a physical powerhouse. But because everyone exists on the same grid, you can absolutely do ridiculous things if you want. You can focus your time and efforts to turn everyone into black mages if that’s your dream.
Often characters will come across a branching path on the sphere grid. Perhaps it’s a dead end, but has access to a couple extra nodes for a stat boost, or a path will be blocked off by a lock. Often removing these locks are what give characters the ability to trespass on other characters routes, letting you double up on skills amongst your party members. That being said, most of the time I just followed characters along their intended routes. The one exception was Kimahri, who I pushed toward Lulu’s section of the board to turn him into a backup black mage so I could exploit elemental weaknesses more aggressively.
By the end of the game, each character was around the end of their sphere grid, or was just starting to overlap with others. Wakka got Auron’s Break skills, Auron was moving into Tidus’s path to get more speed, that kind of thing. I’ve read that some people put the time in to earn ludicrous amounts of sphere levels to then max out each character on the sphere grid, but that’s an insane task that’s wholly unnecessary to beat the game. I’ve also read that doing that largely robs each character of what makes them unique.
The Battle System
The Sphere Grid gives you stats and abilities, so it ties directly into the battle system, and I think Final Fantasy X has one of the better combat systems in the series so far. Gone is the ATB system that’s been present since Final Fantasy IV Now, battles are fully turn-based with visible turn order. Big attacks will cost more ‘time’, while quick attacks or using items might let you do 2 actions before the next enemy gets to make their move. Adding to this, you can (and are encouraged to) swap party members in and out mid-battle without forfeiting that characters turn. I can’t stress how much I like this flexibility. Now I’m no longer trying to think if I should have my black mage in the party, or leave them behind for a summoner like I was in Final Fantasy IX or VI. Everyone is available at all times, but only 3 characters are in a battle at any one moment. Sometimes it was a juggle trying to get the right 2 characters out at the same time so one could buff the other, but it was a tactical consideration I really enjoyed.
An important aspect of this battle system is that any character who participates in the battle gets the full SP rewards. The SP earned from a fight is not divided between all characters, everyone gets the full amount from the fight. What this means in practice is that you really want every character to take at least one action in every fight. Once you get into the rhythm of it, it becomes second nature. Using your first two turns to kill all but one monster, then swap in every other party member to do a non-damage skill before finishing off the last one. I’m also pretty sure this mechanic is why teenage me struggled so much with the game back in 2005. Especially because some story sections lock your party composition, and if you’ve neglected certain characters, suddenly you’re in trouble. I neglected Kimahri hard, so when he had a solo battle he had to tackle, it was essentially a brick wall for me. Thankfully older me is more wise and now that I understood the system from the beginning, I was much more prepared to deal with that twist.
A lot of the regular mobs have have specific weaknesses that you’ll want to exploit. Tidus hits fast enemies, Wakka takes down the flyers, Auron with piercing is best for enemies with high defence, and so on. It made most of the random encounters pretty trivial, as you generally just needed to use the right tool for each job, but the flexibility of swapping in chracters mid-battle created some very satisfying tactical considerations, especially in some of the bigger boss moments.
One thing I especially appreciated was how quickly the game gives you most of the party. Compared to Final Fantasy IX, where you don’t even get the final character until absurdly late, Final Fantasy X gets your core cast assembled relatively early. Sure, Rikku doesn’t join until about 10 hours in, but the other 6 characters are in your party nearly from the get-go.
The Equipment/Aeon Customization system
The equipment system, however, is a bit weird. Weapons and armor don’t really have traditional stats. Instead, they have slots containing abilities. One sword might give Auron +5% Strength while another gives elemental damage or counterattacks. Later, Rikku unlocks the ability to customize equipment by consuming massive piles of items to fill empty slots with abilities.
I barely touched this system.
The customization costs felt absurdly high for relatively minor benefits, and there’s NO way to undo modifications. I couldn’t justify spending 20 mega-Phoenix to embue one piece of amour with Auto-Phoenix on an armour I might need to replace eventually. I mostly just made do with whatever gear I found naturally. The same applies to Yuna’s Aeons, which are this games Summons. They can also be customized using enormous quantities of items. Sometimes it was tempting to give one of them a new spell, but raising one aeon’s single stat by a single point would cost ~30 spheres. It was something I was never willing to commit to doing.
Also, I didn’t engage with this system because the main story really didn’t need it. Sure, there were difficult bosses. Seymour on Mt. Gagazet took me several attempts. The optional Baaj Temple boss underwater where you can only use Tidus, Wakka, and Rikku while dealing with petrification and party members being swallowed for a turn was rough. But overall, I didn’t find the main game especially punishing. I’ve read that in the HD Remake, the Dark Aeons are brutally difficult, but that’s not a feature in my game so I can’t really comment on it.
End-game grind
One of the things I appreciated most about Final Fantasy X. was the fact that I could just play it. In most of the games I’ve played in this series so far, I’ve had a guide handy at almost all times. But Final Fantasy X was different. Perhaps it’s a by-product of the linear nature of the game, but I didn’t look at a guide until I was nearly finished and I wanted to dabble in getting some of the celestial weapons. And I was so happy that I was able to beat the final boss without grinding at all through the entire game.
Unfortunately, getting those celestial weapons was locked behind some tedious grinding that I just wasn’t willing to engage with. I only managed to get Tidus’s celestial weapon, and I think that’s enough, because having a whole party kitted out with the best gear in the game would make the final battles utterly trivial. And those celestial weapons are wildly over-powered. From breaking the damage cap, to tippling the Overdrive meter, to reducing the spell cost down to 1MP for Lulu and Yuna, these weapons are wild, but they’re really tedious to earn.
Near the end of the game you unlock a monster arena, where the proprietor asks you to go out and capture 10 of every enemy. Doing so gives you gobs of items and unlocks some tougher battles for better prizes, but the idea of just running back across the whole world capturing enemies is a lot more tedium than I’m willing to embark on. I’m already most of the way through a Living Dex in Pokemon, I don’t feel like doing it here too. Yuna and Auron’s weapons are gated behind this monster arena, while Lulu, Kimahri, and Tidus’s weapons are hidden behind some mini-games.
I’ve read horror stories about Tidus’s weapon, needing to win a Chocobo race with randomly placed balloons and birds. Some people report spending hours trying to win and failing. I somehow managed to win it on my 4th try. Lulu’s weapon requires you to dodge a randomly occurring lightning strike 200 times in a row. Kimahri has you hunting butterflies while dodging random encounters.
I haven’t even talked about Blitzball yet. It’s a sport that you can play, and there’s one mandatory match in the whole game. It’s kind of a shame the way they framed that one match, as you and your players are hopelessly out-matched. Your first game of Blitzball is a frustrating experience which made me never want to touch it again. By working your way through the tournaments you unlock overdrives and the celestial weapon for Wakka, but I found Blitzball to be a frustrating mess of a game. Each character has half a dozen stats and when you try to do an action based on those stats, it’s not deterministic. There’s a random variable element that means sometimes you’ll just be unlucky in your shot. I get that’s a better way to emulate sport, but I wasn’t willing to pour several hours into a mini-game that I didn’t enjoy.
All of this doesn’t really matter to me though. It’s unnecessary to get those celestial weapons, as cool as it is to be overpowered. They exist for the players who want to bring the battle system to it’s logical conclusion. For me, I’m happy enough just finishing the main story.
Final Thoughts
Overall, I had a fantastic time with Final Fantasy X. Sure, there are scenes where the age of the game shows itself. There are awkward animations and weird PS2-era stiffness. But the story is genuinely excellent, the characters are memorable, the combat remains satisfying moment to moment, and Spira feels like a real world with history, culture, religion, and consequences.
At this point, I would comfortably place Final Fantasy X among the best Final Fantasy games I’ve played so far. Certainly head and shoulders above the PS1 trilogy of games, but I’m not quite so sure if it supplants IV, V, and VI in my heart yet. It might, but I’m not ready to commit to a firm ranking yet.
But I will say that I do not want to be done with Spira yet. So I’m going to play Final Fantasy X-2 next, which I hadn’t originally planned on doing. I have vague memories of trying it about fifteen years ago and bouncing off almost immediately. I remember the opening J-pop concert scene, and the game play being focused around costume changes and then turning the game off after maybe half an hour. But now that I’m so much more familiar with the characters and the lore, I hope I’ll find a lot more joy this time around.
Final Fantasy X represents a pretty major shift for the franchise. Core series staples like the ATB that have been a staple were tossed out, voice acting was introduced, and the FMV cut scenes are just getting better and better. It’s another generational leap forward, and even 25 years later, the story still holds up to this day. I know some people hold Final Fantasy X as “the last good Final Fantasy”, which I doubt is fair. Nevertheless, I will continue to move forward in this series. Hope to see you again, soon.
Playing through Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VIII, and Final Fantasy IX back-to-back really drives home just how much of a turning point the PlayStation era was for the series. The series moved on from being so iterative and really started getting experimental in big, albeit sometimes messy ways. I’m not sure if there were too many cooks in the kitchen, but one thing for sure is that kitchen got a lot bigger. These 3 games feel like they come from larger teams with bigger ambitions, each one trying to push the franchise in a new direction, rather than just refine or tweak what came before.
Final Fantasy VII is the obvious line in the sand. Moving from the SNES’s 2D plane into fully 3D character models layered over pre-rendered backgrounds is such a generational leap that it’s almost hard to recognize how dramatic the shift was back in 1997. And then you add in the shift to a disc-based system, which suddenly gave the developers room to tell a much grander, more cinematic story. That dramatic generation shift carries forward into Final Fantasy VIII, where the character models lean toward the more realistic proportions. And the way it blends those gameplay models into the full-motion prerendered cutscenes goes from “pretty neat” in VII to really technically impressive in VIII and IX. In fact, by the time you get to IX, it often feels so seamless that I don’t realize that I’m in a cutscene until it slowly takes my control away from the character. That’s to say nothing about the cinematic CG cutscenes in IX. You can certainly tell Square was getting really good at making CG movies at this point. And pair all that with the music which, never once falters across the whole series, and the whole presentation just rockets these games so far beyond what the NES and SNES entries accomplished visually and emotionally. Those earlier games still told great stories and built strong character connections, but this is where the series starts flexing in a completely different way.
What stands out just as much, though, is how willing these games are to tear up their own series conventions. The battle system changed in Final Fantasy IV to the ATB, and that ATB persists into Final Fantasy IX, but the magic system in this trilogy of games gets broken down to bits and rebuilt twice. For the past 6 games you needed to have a mage class in your party if you wanted to cast spells (Except in Final Fantasy II, but we don’t talk about that one much). But the materia system in VII suddenly enables anyone in your party to run a black mage build. Or heck, your strongest melee fighter can have a couple spells to fall back on when the situation calls for it. Then the magic gets reworked entirely again in VIII with the junction system which while I have my criticisms, I can see why some people love that system. It’s as they say, reasonable people can come to different conclusions. Perhaps that’s one of the trade-offs with this era: you can’t just slip back into the old familiar rhythms anymore. Every new Final Fantasy asks you to relearn how it works, and while that keeps the series from going stale, it also makes each entry a bit divisive. If you gel with the system, it becomes a new favourite. If you chafe against it, you call the game garbage.
Something I didn’t fully appreciate before playing through these games is just how influential the Final Fantasy series was on the JRPGs that came after. You can see ideas, themes, and even mechanical DNA from VII, VIII, and IX echoing into other franchises that I already know I love, like the Tales Of series. It’s easy to look back now and poke at the jank or criticize the systems that NOW feel dated, especially when later games iterate on and improve those ideas. But it’s important to remember that when these games originally came out, they were trailblazers. While other franchises were content to slightly iterate on their previous games to be consistent and familiar, Final Fantasy was out there challenging what it even means to be called a JRPG anymore.
And yet, for all that, I keep circling back my personal ranking of these games. I still prefer the SNES trilogy of games. IV, V, and VI have aged much more gracefully, at least for me. Part of that is probably timing, as they came out at the end of the SNES lifecycle and really pushed that hardware to its limits. The people making the games at the time were already experts in pixel art and creating interesting 2D locations and set pieces. Compare that to the PlayStation games, where making games in 3D was still in its infancy, and you can feel the growing pains. The way the textures are stretched and warped on awkward 3D models, it just isn’t good to look at in this day and age. The PS1 Final Fantasy games are absolutely ambitious in ways that are commendable, but innovation doesn’t always equal timelessness. Final Fantasy VII’s overworld models are laughably simple, they look they could be made of clay or cardboard. And sometimes navigating those pre-rendered backgrounds was confusing in ways I don’t think were intentional. 4
Now, I haven’t played the Final Fantasy VII Remake, I’ve just seen screenshots and a few clips here and there, and it looks incredible. But it does make me wonder whether all three of these games need that kind of treatment. Do they all deserve to be rebuilt with modern sensibilities now that we understand 3D design so much better, or is it okay for them to exist as artifacts of their time? They may not hold up as cleanly as some other classics, but their impact is undeniable. And there’s something to be said for leaving history intact, rough edges and all.
From here, I’m heading into the last stretch of this little project: Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy XII. X is a weird one for me, I made it all the way to the final boss when I played it on my PS2 back in 2005, but never actually managed to finish the game off. And now that it’s been so long, I struggle to remember anything other than the very main story bits (and that laughing scene). XII is even stranger; I’ve played the first half of the game at least three separate times on different systems and never committed to seeing it through. Honestly, those unfinished games was a large part of my inspiration for embarking on this journey in the first place.
After that, I honestly don’t know what comes next. Maybe I’ll keep going with the numbered entries, the XIII trilogy, the XV multimedia juggernaut, and XVI, which I know shocking little about. Or maybe I spend some time detouring into the side stories like Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles. Or maybe I pivot to an entirely different franchise, and finally give the Tales Of series the full play through it probably deserves.
Whatever direction I end up going, I have a feeling I’ll keep writing about it. At this point, that’s kind of half the fun.
I really didn’t mean for this much time to pass between talking aboutFinal Fantasy VIII and Final Fantasy IX, but life kind of got in the way in a way I didn’t fully expect. One of the biggest barriers to actually finishing and sitting down to talk about this game is that I got laid off from my job last August, and as strange as it sounds, that job had plenty of downtime where I could just have a game running beside my desk and chip away at it throughout the day. On top of that, I transitioned into being a stay-at-home parent, and it turns out if you actually want to be a good parent, spending all your time grinding random encounters isn’t exactly conducive to that goal. It’s kind of ironic that losing my job ended up meaning I had less time for video games, but here we are.
Regardless, I’m finally here and ready to talk about Final Fantasy IX. This one released on the original PlayStation in the fall of 2000, right at the tail end of that console’s life, just before the PlayStation 2 came along. Just like how I grouped Final Fantasy I,II, and III as the NES trilogy and IV, V, and VI as the SNES trilogy, you can similarily group Final Fantasy VII, VIII, and IX together as the PS1 trilogy, but what really makes IX stand out immediately is how hard it pivots back toward the series’ roots. Especially when contrasting it against Final Fantasy VII and VIII, as they leaned much harder into a more modern, sci-fi aesthetic with experimental systems. Final Fantasy IX is a love letter to the series, a return to it’s roots after a sabbatical in the futuristic sense.
The Final Fantasy call backs come fast and hard, starting with the aesthetic. Airships, castles, knights and princesses dominate the setting here. And again, contrasting against the more realistically preportioned character models from the previous games, the character models in IX are much more exaggrated, more chibi in nature. I’m not totally against this art direction, the moments when the game is trying to be funny, the aesthetic lends to the goofiness of the situation. But the child-like character models does make some of the more emotional or dramatic scenes to feel a bit flat in my opinion. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start by talking about the story.
Story
Final Fantasy IX begins with a plot. The Tantalus Theatre Troupe are en route to Alexandria to perform the famous play I Want to Be Your Canary for Queen Brahne and the royal family. Inside Tantalus, we meet Zidane, a plucky young thief with a monkey tail and a can-do attitude. The play is a ruse; their real goal is to kidnap Princess Garnet. As the play is underway, Zidane sneaks into the castle and bumps into Garnet, wearing a classic white mage robe to keep her identity hidden. Before Zidane can say anything, she asks him to kidnap her. How serendipitous.
During their escape, Captain of the Knights Steiner catches onto Zidane’s plot and gives chase. In the mayhem, a lone black mage named Vivi gets caught up in the action, and all four end up on the theatre ship, which soon crashes into an evil forest. Garnet is separated from the group, so Zidane, Vivi, and Steiner set out to find her, Zidane always eager to help, Steiner determined to return her to Alexandria, and Vivi simply happy to see the world.
The forest is filled with a malevolent mist that turns people and animals violent, and after an encounter with a Black Waltz, the forest begins to petrify itself. The party narrowly escapes, though Blank is left behind, and they pass through the Ice Cavern to the village of Dali. There, Garnet adopts the name Dagger, and Vivi is kidnapped. Finding him leads the party to discover black mages being manufactured as weapons of war. For Vivi, who has never seen anyone like himself before, the revelation that these mages are lifeless golems raises sincere questions about his origin.
From there, the party heads to Lindblum to meet Regent Cid, who refuses to offer help. This splits the group. Steiner smuggles Garnet back toward Alexandria while Zidane and Vivi travel to Burmecia. Upon arrival, they find it destroyed by Alexandria’s forces and encountering Kuja for the first time. Meanwhile, Garnet and Steiner are captured and imprisioned upon returning home, and Zidane’s party moves to warn Cleyra, only to witness Queen Brahne use Garnet’s extracted eidolons to destroy it.
Back in Alexandria, Zidane and Steiner reunite and free Garnet before her execution. Up to this point, Steiner has been unwavering in his loyalty to the crown, dismissing any claims of Brahne’s warmongering. But when forced to choose between his queen and the princess he swore to protect, he finally sides with Garnet, asking Zidane to protect her while he stays behind.
As the story unfolds, Garnet learns more about eidolons, while the party discovers Kuja has been supplying Brahne with black mages, all tied to the mist’s mysterious origin. On the outer continent, they encounter a village of sentient black mages who have defected, and Vivi learns that his kind have a limited lifespan, forcing him to confront his own mortality.
The party meets Eiko, a young summoner connected to Garnet’s past, and Amarant, a lone wolf who joins after being defeated by Zidane. Their journey leads them to the Iifa Tree, where they stop the flow of mist, only to witness Queen Brahne launching a final assault on Kuja. Her attempt to destroy him backfires, and she is killed when Kuja captures and turns Bahamut against her fleet.
Before dying, Brahne admits the war was her own ambition, Kuja only gave her the nudge towards war. Garnet returns to Alexandria and is crowned queen, only for Kuja to attack again. With Eiko’s help, Garnet summons Alexander to defend the city, but Kuja is ultimately driven off by Garland, a mysterious figure with ties to both Kuja and Zidane.
Chasing Kuja leads the party deeper into the mystery of Terra, where Zidane learns the truth of his origin. Terra, a dying world, sought to assimilate Gaia by replacing its souls through the Iifa Tree, with Garland orchestrating the plan. Kuja was created to accelerate the process, and Zidane was created to replace him, making the two basically brothers. Garland seeks to discard Kuja, but refusing to accept his fate, Kuja rebels, ultimately choosing to destroy everything when faced with his own mortality.
The final act takes place in Memoria, a realm shaped by memories, where Zidane and his allies confront Kuja who’s trying to destroy the original crystal, from which all life was born. Upon defeating him, Necron, a being born from nihilism that seeks to return everything to nothingness appears. The party prevails, affirming their will to live despite the inevitability of death.
In the aftermath, Kuja uses his remaining strength to save the party. Zidane returns alone to the collapsing and writhing Iifa Tree to save Kuja, but the screen fades to black when all possible routes of escape seem closed. Time passes, and Alexandria gathers for a performance of I Want to Be Your Canary. Vivi has passed on, leaving behind “Vivi’s sons,” and the cast reunites. Freya is rekindling her romance with Fratley, Eiko has been adopted by Cid and Hilda, and Steiner and Beatrix are at Garnet’s side. During the play, Zidane returns, revealing himself at the play, and Garnet runs to him. the crowd chears as she leaps into Zidane’s arms.
I don’t know if I’m in the minority or not, but I never really found the story of Final Fantasy IX to be particularly gripping. I never thought the story sagged at any particular point, but it also never really had me on the edge of my seat. There were some moments, like when Queen Brahne ruthlessly destroyed Cleyra, that were devastating, but overall I felt like the story didn’t ebb and flow. The plot just continually moves from one scene to the next in a straightforward escelating progression, instead of the narrative arcs that we’ve seen in previous games. In Final Fantasy VII, when you end the Midgar arc, it feels like a definate shift. You’ve moved on from Act I. But I didn’t feel that in IX. I think at least some part of it has to do with the fact that so much of Zidane’s background and Kuja’s motivations aren’t revealed until the very last dungeon. For most of the game, Kuja is just the mysterious character who keeps showing up as things are getting destroyed.
I also perpetually question Zidane’s motivations for continuing with this quest. Zidane as a character would say, “I don’t need a reason to help someone,” and some part of his motivation for sticking close to Garnet has to do with their mutual attraction for each other, even if neither will admit their affection until the final scene of the game. But the happy-go-lucky thief perpetually gathers people around himself and encourages them to help everyone they come across. As said in Klaus, “A truly selfless act always sparks another.”
The characters in Final Fantasy IX represent both high and low points in their personal arcs. Vivi is an obvious standout. A charming, naive black mage who is excited about life and the world, it’s difficult to imagine anyone not falling in love with Vivi. The story also presents sweet Vivi with his own mortality, and Vivi comes out the other side as optimistic as ever. If his time is short, he better start living now. Zidane’s unending optimism, Garnet’s growth as she rises to the role of monarchy, Steiner’s growth from blindly loyal and contemptuous toward Zidane to making his own decisions and considering Zidane a comrade-in-arms, and even Freya’s short bit of story, her intense longing for Sir Fratley, the elation she has when she finds him, only to have her joy ripped away when he announces his amnesia, are all emotional high points.
While some characters have strong growth, others remain relatively flat. Quina is a one-note comic relief character whose only goal is to seek out new foods. Amarant is prickly and emotionally unavailable for the entire game, only slightly coming around to Zidane’s way of thinking right at the end. I even find Eiko to be relatively flat, as she serves more as a way to provide Garnet’s history than any kind of growth herself.
Mechanics
Mechanically, Final Fantasy IX returns to the series to familiar ground, especially after VII and VIII were such departures. The party is back to four members instead of the three-person setups from the last two games, and the combat is more straightforward, with each character falling into a clear archetype. Zidane steals, Vivi nukes things with black magic, Garnet and Eiko keep everyone alive and can summon, Steiner hits hard and tanks big hits, and so on. There’s comfort in this structure, but it also comes at the cost of flexibility. Unlike VII and VIII, where anyone could concieveably do anything and you could often of break the system in half if you really wanted to, IX keeps everyone to their prescribed archtypes.
Character progression is tied to equipment, which grants abilities that you learn over time by equipping the equipment and earning AP in battle. Once learned, those abilities can be enabled independently of the gear with each skill costing a number of skill crystals. The skill crystals are limited in number and acquiring more for each character is tied to their level. In theory, this creates an interesting decision space where you’re choosing between better equipment stats or prioritizing learning new abilities, but in practice, it almost always felt like the correct choice was obvious. If a piece of equipment teaches a new ability, you equip it until you learn that ability, and then you move on. If it doesn’t, it often felt borderline useless, even if the stats were just a bit better that what you were doing before. Often, instead of feeling like I was customizing my characters, it felt like I was just checking all my equipment for new skills, and if there weren’t any skills left to learn, just picking the one with the highest stat. Some equipment in the late game let you absorb certian types of elemental attacks, rendering some bosses absolutely trival, providing you know what elemental attacks they’re going to use ahead of time. But in the year 2026, who isn’t following a guide these days?
The battle system itself also suffers from pacing issues. First off the loading screens are brutal. From the moment your character freezes due to a random encounter starting, the screen swirling, 6 whole seconds of black, another 4 seconds of the camera panning and zooming around before you get to do a single action. the loading time after the battle to get you back into the overworld, it’s a lot. Now, saying 10 seconds of loading doesn’t sound like a lot, but keep in mind that you’ll do hundreds of battles throughout a playthrough. And sometimes when you’re just aching to get to the next story beat, the long loading time of the random encounters is brutal.
The Active Time Battle system is still here, but everything just feels slow. The bars fill up and then prompt you to take an action. You choose what they’re going to do, and then you wait. If another one of your characters bars fill up while you’re waiting for your action to take place, you choose thier action too. The challenge becomes when you’re balacing 4 characters and multiple enemies attack animations. It seems the orders you make are put into a queue, and will activate in the order that you make them. But the enemy attacks and ATB bars are hidden from you, so they might take actions inbetween your characters, which will often make you wish you could undo the actions in the queue. Like when you’re going to cast cure on a low health character, only for them to be attacked 3 times before Garnet gets her turn to act. Even worse is Doom, more than once a character afflicted with the curse, only for the timer to tick down to 0 before I was able to input a new command. But on the flipside, it’s certainly handy to cast Regain on a character, then launch a long eidolon animation, letting your regain activate several times before any enemies continue their assault. It’s not usually a game breaking feature, but I certainly found it to be annoying.
Another annoyance is the Trance system. A seperate bar under your ATB metre fills up as your character takes damage, and when full, activates their Trance form. Every charcter’s trance form has a unique ability, but in general for the time they’re in Trance they are much more powerful. Think, Super Sayain from Dragon Ball strong. The challenge with this system is that the Trance often fires during a random encounter, then the metre is completely depleted for the next fight. It’s a power I certianly would have preferred to be able to trigger during the boss fights when I actually needed the power boost.
On the positive side, the combat camera usually remained locked in a single view, not swinging around wildly, making it difficult to know who exactly you’re targeting like it did in the previous couple games. And unless you have boost equipped, you only really see the full summon animation the first time you use a ediolon. Everytime after that, you get a much more cut down version of the animation, which after the lengthy movies that VIII used for it’s summons, it was a very welcome change.
Tetra Master
While Final Fantasy VIII had it’s card game, Triple Triad, Final Fantasy IX sought to level up the card game with Tetra Master. You can challenge most characters in the world to a game of Tetra Master at any time, but not many characters actually reference the game. In Tetra Master each player has 5 cards cards each on a 4 by 4 grid. Each card has it’s own stats and arrows. If you play a card somewhere and your card’s arrows point at another arrow, the cards engage in a “battle” and whomever is the stronger card wins, and flips the opposing card to the opposite colour. The tutorial of Tetra Master walks you through that much, but then refuses to tell you what the numbers on each card means. “Figure that out on your own!”, it says.
I messed around the Tetra Master a bit, but grew really fusturated with not understanding how the mechanics work. This is something I already know about myself and my game group, we are not the “figure it out as we go along” type of gamers. We’d rather spend an hour going over the rulebook until we all understand the game before we make any decisions. So the in-game tutorial of Tetra Master being so sorely lacking and purposefully opaque, absolutely fusturated me. I figured out that if you place a card with an arrow pointing at nothing, you simply capture the card, but arrows at each other initate battles, but then in one game of Tetra Master I had conqoured almost the entire board, then the opponent put down his final card and flipped 8 cards due to a chaining mechanisim that I didn’t understand, I almost threw the game across the room.
Looking at a guide online lead me to discover that the stat line works in a base 15 hexadecimal format, with the numbers (in order) corrospond to attack value, attack type, physical defence, and magical defence. If you have an arrow pointing at them and they have an arrow pointing back, you enter combat. You attack them with your cards attack value against the defense value on their card based on your attack type. if you win, you capture that card and any card that card has arrows pointing at, this is a chain.
But how is the attack and defense calculated? Randomly. During a battle each card is basically rolling their attack die and smacking into the opponent, but that attack die’s highest limit is based on the attack stat. So a low attack has a low ceiling, and then the attack is subtracted from the opponents appropriate defence which is also a random number based on the stat line. If the attacked card is still alive (it’s randomly determined defence didn’t fall to 0), it takes a turn attacking, and back and forth the cards swap until one of those cards loses.
Convoluted to say the least, but what fusturates me the most is that Tetra Master is absolutely pointless. There are no tangiable rewards for playing this stupid mini-game. At least in Triple Triad you could mod the cards to get items or spells. Sure, the card mod system absolutely broke the game, but it was a reason to play the little game. Tetra Master on the other hand, gives you nothing for sumbitting this random and arcane system into your brain. There is one spot halfway through disc 2 where you HAVE to play in a Tetra Master tournament, but other than that, curating a deck list and engaging with this mini game offers you nothing in return. But on the subject of a fusturating mini-game that does offer you rewards…
Chocobo Hot and Cold
Everyone knows the apex of fun exists at the intersection of randomness and tight time limits. add in a healthy dose of blindness and button lag, and you have yourself a rollicking good time. Chocobo Hot and Cold shows up early in the game, but unlike Tetra Master, this one rewards you in items. And some of the items you can dig up are the strongest items in the game!
To play Chocobo Hot and Cold, you basically run around a little field and peck the ground. Then your Chocobo will say “keh” if you’re far, while “Kweh?!” mean you’re closer, and “Kwehhh?!” means you’re very close. The challenge is that you need to be pixel perfect to get the coveted “KWEEEEEEEH!!”, indicating that you found an item. At this point you just need to mash the peck button until you dig the item out.
The real treasure from Chocobo Hot and Cold are the Chocographs. These are little treasure maps that have a screenshot of somewhere out in the world, that require you to take your chocobo out to find the exact spot. But the rewards for doing so can be pretty lucrative, the very first Chocograph gives you 2 Elixers along with some other decent items considering how early in the game it shows up. Several of the characters best gear in the game are rewards you get for finding Chocographs.
The real problem with Chocobo Hot and Cold is that you only have 60 seconds to peck the ground and find items. And then you’re just running back and forth trying to get closer and closer to the item. The Kweh?! system had me circling items only to finally hit the KWEEEEEEH!! just as the time ran out.
I found Chocobo Hot and Cold to be utterly fusturating and boring. I don’t think pecking the ground and having someone yelling out “warm, warmer, warmer, hot!, hot!, YOU FOUND IT!” is intresting or clever game design. To find all the chocographs would take hours that I’m just not willing to pour into this luck based mechanic. Too bad, as I really could have used some of the gear at the end of the game.
Final Thoughts
Obviously, I have criticisms that I could levy at Final Fantasy IX. The game is too slow, the story didn’t grip me, Tetra Master and Chocobo are bad mini-games, some character arcs are flat, and so on. But the more I reflected on my time with Final Fantasy IX, the more I realized how charmed I was by it. It’s unfortunate that I lost an hour of progress halfway through playing it and then put the game on hiatus for four months, but it is what it is. I can’t change the past now.
I’m very glad I finally played through this. The focus on characters and their interactions between each other is something I adore in video games, and it’s interesting seeing how some of my favourite games that came out after IX were obviously inspired by this game. I know there are legions of fans that adore this game, and it’s easy to see why. Even with all its blemishes and nitpicks, Final Fantasy IX succeeds in being an emotional and touching entry to the series. When people ask, “What’s a Final Fantasy?”, this is the entry that they should point to.
Final Fantasy IX absolutely succeeds as a love letter to the franchise that came before it. There are so many great references that would have went right over my head, had I not embarked on this Final Fantasy project. Like, Garland and Sarah’s names appearing from Final Fantasy 1, the reference to Kefka kicking Ghestal when Kuja kicks Garland off his pedastal. The elemental fiends showing up and mini-bosses, Ramuh’s story being a retelling of FF II, all the musical references, the list goes on and on.
It’s safe to say that Final Fantasy IX is the swan song of Hironobu Sakaguchi and Nobuo Uematsu. A celebration of everything that made Final Fantasy a beloved series of games up to this point. And looking forward from here, the series was ready to leap off the PlayStation onto the PlayStation 2, and with that leap, it started to move in bold new directions, often breaking some conventions that had been in the series from the beginning. Many of the games that come after Final Fantasi IX would often make people question what it even takes to be called a Final Fantasy game anymore, but that’s a question to explore on another day.
In the fall of 2019, my wife and I started climbing at our local gym. We fell in love immediately. It was a cathartic challenge—physical, yes, but also deeply mental. There’s something uniquely satisfying about staring at a wall of coloured holds, mapping out a route, failing, adjusting, and finally sticking that move that felt impossible ten minutes earlier. And because I am obsessed with maximizing my value of something, we both bought our own harnesses and shoes, paid into the monthly membership plan and started going three times a week. For months!
Then, spring of 2020 happened. The gym shut down. We moved, had a baby. The membership lapsed. We’ve never made it back, even though it’s one of those activities we both agree we genuinely loved. Fast-forward to January 2026. My five-year-old daughter has just started bouldering. We sign her up for a climbing class, and suddenly I’m spending three days a week back in that chalk-dusted environment, watching people try a problem over and over again. And just like that, the itch is back. I miss that carnal feeling of accomplishment, that feeling of strength of pushing my body past previous limits.
So imagine my surprise when I boot up my Steam Deck and saw that someone in my Steam Family has purchased Cairn. I’d heard nothing about it, but I saw it had strong reviews (I’m pretty good at dodging video game media).
A climbing game? Sure. Why not. What have I got to lose?
Cairn casts you as expert mountaineer Aava attempting to summit Mount Kami, the most dangerous mountain in the world. If you take the time to explore the posters in the tutorial area, you’ll learn that around 30 people attempt the climb each year. Few ever return. None have ever reached the summit.
Past the tutorial area, the game begins simply. You’re on the mountain, starting your ascent. Better get climbing.
The climbing system initially defaults to an automatic limb-selection mechanic. You move hands and feet individually with the left thumb stick. Up, sideways, diagonally, everywhere you’d think your limbs can go. While the game automatically suggests which limb should move next, it’s tactile, deliberate, and slow. You don’t just “hold forward to climb.” You’re supposed to think through every placement. Just planting your foot against a smooth rock and counting on your smear to hold is going to result in a bad time.
Also, Aava is absurdly flexible. At one point I had her hooking a foot somewhere near her own ear to gain leverage. As I often tell my daughter, video games are not real.
But this system is also where my first major frustration surfaced. Sometimes the “obvious” move like adjusting the bottom-left foot as I’m moving to the left, wasn’t the move the game wanted. Instead, it would shift the bottom-right foot, which then I couldn’t even see behind Aava’s back. Suddenly her leg is dragging across her body, toes reaching where her hands should be, and she’s clinging to the wall by fingertips, and I’m scrambling to fix a problem I didn’t mean to create.
More than one fall happened that way.
On most difficulty levels, you can place pitons into the rock to act as checkpoints. If you fall, you’re hauled back up to your last placed piton. They’re limited, though. If you misuse them or fall too often, you’ll need to collect scraps to forge new ones. and Falling in Cairn stings. Not just because you failed, but because of the time and resources that arelost.
Cairn is a slow game. A tricky problem can take 5–10 minutes to work through. Sometimes 20. One time, 25. And inevitably, you’ll be right at the end of a brutal stretch, one final foothold between you and a cave or hidden discovery… and then Aava’s foot slips. You scramble. You panic. You fall.
Aava’s voice actress has a couple of great screams and curses that I feel in my soul when this happens. If you haven’t placed a piton recently, then you’re falling the way down until your rag-doll body stops rolling. If you’re lucky, you’ll just die and restart from the last save. Otherwise, you now need to climb out of whatever crevice Aava’s body just fell into. And when you get back to solid ground and look up at that climb that you just failed at, you have to ask yourself if you really want to try it again. Spend another 20 minutes scampering up that wall and face the risk of falling again. And when you’re low on food, low on water, freezing, and exhausted, that lost time also means lost resources.
I don’t think Cairn intentionally wastes your time, not like other games that make you backtrack unnecessarily or have runs ruined by randomness. Cairn demands time through the slow, methodical, and purposeful gameplay. It’s the kind of game that every step is slow, but you’re always progressing. You focus on only the next hand or foot hold, and after a few minutes, you’ll pan your camera around and be a little breathless at how far you’ve gone.
That being said, when you finally conquer that tricky section? When you stick the move that previously sent you plummeting? It’s absolutely euphoric. The dopamine rush is so real. It mirrors real-world climbing in a way I did not expect from a video game.
Cairn isn’t just a game about limb placement. It’s also about survival. You’ll need to manage your hunger, thirst, warmth, and stamina. You’ll need to shake your pack to cram as many supplies as possible in, as you scavenge abandoned backpacks, derelict cable cars, and broken vending machines. The real treat is when you come cross a delicious egg in a nest during a climb. The survival mechanics and lack of a firm restocking point creates a tension that triggers my hoarding psychology.
I have “Final Fantasy Elixir Syndrome.” I never use the rare, powerful items because what if I need them later? So I end most games with a stack of elixirs and a pile of regret. Cairn pokes that exact nerve. You don’t want to use your good food. What if there’s something worse ahead? What if there’s no food beyond this point? But if you don’t use your best foods and benefit from the stat boosts they give you, you might fail the next section
And that brings me back to the fall. If you fall and have to climb again, all that food and water you consumed is just… gone. You’re no further up the mountain than when you started, but you have less resources to get you to the next checkpoint.
It’s brutal. It’s effective. It feels bad. But that bad feeling is clearly intentional design.
The HUD (heads up display) is wonderfully immersive. Your survival meters fade away unless they demand attention. Most of the time, it’s just you and the mountain. As you climb higher, you’ll discover remnants of those who came before you. Abandoned infrastructure, old campsites, backpacks from climbers who never returned, and most interestingly, artifacts and stories from the troglodytes, a group of people who once lived on Mount Kami.
Your only consistent companion is a small robot called a Climbot, a boxy robot on four spider-esque legs that skitter along the rocks, carrying your ropes and retrieving your pitons. Occasionally, Climbot will receive voicemail messages from her manager gently asking how her progress is going, or her partnerchecking in, seeing if she’s okay on her death hike. Aava’s responses to those messages can vary from indifferent to abrasive or dismissive. She resents the distraction. How dare they interrupt her focus while she attempts something this monumental?
Early on, you meet Marco, another mountaineer. He climbs for the love of climbing. He doesn’t believe he’ll reach the summit, but he’s just here for the good times. Aava tears into Marco for that mindset. Calls him defeated. Weak. It’s one of the first times she really speaks, and it’s not flattering. Aava does soften slightly over time, but so much of her characterization left a sour taste in my mouth. I understand she’s undertaking something life-threatening. I understand obsession. But her abrasiveness made it hard for me to enjoy her company.
Near the summit, you encounter another climber who has lived on the mountain for twelve years. He’s too close to the summit to turn back, but he’s unable to reach the top. He shows you dozens upon dozens of backpacks from those who tried and failed. a graveyard. Here, Marco decides he’s done. He’s going back down. Then the game asks you to choose. Do you descend with Marco? Or do you continue your ascent, despite every warning?
On my first play through, I went down. The reward for choosing that is a quiet montage of descent. Marco gives Aava a ride home in his van. The final scene shows her sitting on her bed, staring into space. Disappointed, but alive. Her partner calls out that friends are coming over. Marco is on his way.
This ending felt human. Bittersweet. Real.
On my second play through, I chose to go up. Shortly after that decision, An avalanche crashed on your head, and reduces your survival meters to a third of what they once were. You claw your way through the final ascent, which, surprisingly, isn’t dramatically harder than what came before. On the final wall, Climbot succumbs to the elements. For his mechanical failure, Aava beats it with her climbing picks, berating it for failing her. You can choose to drag it along anyway, or cut it loose. The choice here, doesn’t matter.
Then, Aava reaches her summit. She trudges through the snow cap, to the highest point of mount Kami. There is nowhere else to climb. She screams, a visceral, guttural howl. Then, she sits down in the snow, quiet. Finally, she reaches toward the stars, grabs them, and climbs into the sky.
Some players will find transcendence there. The culmination of obsession. The ultimate accomplishment. But for me, it felt unsatisfying. There is no joy in the accomplishment, no one to share your victory with. Just a tired woman sitting quietly on all she’s conquered. Maybe she dies there, and maybe she heads back down. The ending is poetically ambiguous, to me, it felt like descending with Marco was the good ending, and reaching the summit was the bad one.
Cairn will not win my Game of the Year.
But it was a cathartic, memorable experience, especially given where I am in life right now. It gave me an echo of the real-world climbing rush I’ve been missing since 2020.
The first ascent in Cairn is magical because of the discovery. Peaking your head into a cave to find an indestructible piton, or an angry bear gave me such rushes of excitement. Subsequent climbs lose some of that magic. Now, you know where the food is. You know the shortcuts. You know which caves you should explore, and which you can skip. The mystery fades.
Still, finishing Cairn felt like a real accomplishment.
I wouldn’t want every game to use this limb-by-limb climbing system. I cannot imagine playing Breath of the Wild or Assassin’s Creed, and having to individually manage my feet every time I try to scale a hill.
But for a game wholly committed to simulating mountaineering, Cairn does something special. It captured the frustration. It captured the obsession. It captured the fall.
But most importantly, It captured the feeling that climbing gives you. It reminded me why I got obsessed with it in the first place in 2019. And any game that manages to evoke strong feelings, is a special one indeed.
Disclaimer: A review copy of Inkborn was provided during early access. All impressions are based on the game’s current January 2026 state.
Listen, it’s going to be real hard to not directly compare Inkborn to Slay the Spire throughout this review. Both are rogue-lite deck building card game. The similarities and influences are obvious from the first moments of the game. Also, I have over 300 hours logged in Slay the Spire, its gameplay is ingrained into my brain, so when something like Inkborn shows up, standing on the shoulders of that giant, it’s going to draw comparisons at every turn.
That said, I’ll do my very best to focus on what makes Inkborn its own thing, and save the direct comparisons to Slay the Spire for when they’re absolutely necessary. This isn’t a question of whether Inkborn is “the next Slay the Spire.” It’s about whether it brings enough new ideas, systems, and personality to justify its existence in a genre that’s already very crowded.
As I’ve said above, Inkborn is a rogue-lite deckbuilding game, designed by Acram Digital. Acram is well known for their visually appealing board game adaptions. From Concordia, to Charterstone, to Istanbul, Acram has proven themselves to be proficient in adapting tabletop games to PC and mobile devices. Unlike their previous output, Inkborn isn’t based on an existing tabletop game, instead it’s an original game, built from the ground up for PCs (and Steam Decks).
In Inkborn, your character moves from encounter to encounter, battling enemies and reaping rewards, until you either succeed in beating the final boss, or die trying. The rewards can be new cards, upgrades to existing cards, potions, and augments to your character, giving you persistent benefits for the rest of your run. The core loop of Inkborn is immediately comfortable to anyone who’s sunk even a little bit of time into any of the (many) other rougelite deck building games.
What really sets Inkborn apart, is its presentation and style. Everything in the world is built of, and revolves around paper. The enemies are ornate origami creatures with scissor blades for claws, the black and white backgrounds feature papercraft trees. As you or the enemies take damage, the character model gets covered in black, splotchy ink. It’s moody, atmospheric and engaging.
Further to the theme, your buffs and debuffs are also thematically named. Specifically, ‘sharpness’, ‘crumpled’, and ‘torn’ (Sharpness grants +1 to attacks, a crumpled character takes 50% more damage, and a torn character receives damage for every point of torn, then loses one point of torn). These thematic terms for status conditions are a little unintuitive, I constantly have to remind myself that crumpled means vulnerable in Slay the Spire-speak, but it’s probably more of a byproduct of my extensive time with the other game, and not something that Inkborn has done wrong.
Instead of potions, your character gets ideas, one time bonuses to be used in battle and expire at the end of each fight, forcing you to use them instead of hoard them. Quotes take the place of relics. Kind of. Instead of having being able to hold an unlimited number of relics to provide passive buffs to your character, you inscribe quotes to your body parts. These do all the things you’d expect a relic to do, such as make you immune to specific status debuffs, but you are limited by the amount of appendages that your body has. You’re often asked to make trade-offs on which quotes you want to carry with you, instead of collecting them like a rabid pack rat, which is my go-to strategy.
Combat starts off familiar, you draw a hand of cards, select which ones you want to use and the targets, and keep doing that until either side runs out of HP. Inkborn introduces a combo system, where if you play your cards in a certain order, like ‘skill, skill, attack’, you’ll get a bonus attack, or playing two status cards and then a skill will earn you a bonus buff. Personally, I loved this system right from the start. Discovering new combos is exciting, and being able to pull off a clutch combo to deal that final 4 damage to an enemy is utterly satisfying. Some combos even utilize those useless curse cards, turning a bane into a boon.
This is really where Inkborn begins to separate itself from Slay the Spire. Rather than pushing players toward specific archetypes or established builds, Inkborn’s systems encourages flexibility, adaptation, and occasional deviation from your intended build. It’s less about executing a perfect plan and more about learning how the systems talk to each other.
The map between encounters is a bit of a mixed bag. You start out in the centre of a map shrouded in shadows, with paths to follow spiralling out. You can take your time to hit extra combats and encounters, or, you can beeline to the Act Boss if you so desire. There is a timer, called the Chronicle Metre at the top of the screen that progresses every time you enter a new map node, that will inflict a curse upon you once it fills up, gently nudging you towards your destination, lest the curses undo all the grinding you’ve just gone through. It’s a neat risk vs reward system that works well.
Something else that makes Inkborn stand out is the town that offers some meta-progression that persists from run to run. It’s unlike Slay the Spire where you start from fresh every single run and have only your knowledge and skill to rely on to get you though. If you don’t get good, you won’t ascend the spire. Inkborn feels a bit more like Hades where the intersection of your skill and the persistent benefits you’ve earned will eventually carry you over the finish line.
Inkborn as an early access game is already really strong. The core gameplay is strong, and the unlockable combos are varied and interesting. The one character that is available feels really solid, and had me coming back again and again to try different builds. Heck, cards can be upgraded in different ways to suit your current deck, meaning taking the same card run after run can still feel fresh. I know that I will really appreciate the variety when the other characters get released, but the one that’s currently in the game offers a really solid gameplay experience.
I don’t know how well Inkborn is balanced, and I’m almost tempted to say that commenting on the balance doesn’t really matter right now, because the game is in early access. You can be sure that there will be lots of changes and tweaks as the game works its way towards its full release, which is currently planned for Q1 2027. Between then and now, two more classes are planned, more cards and skills, more combos and quotes, enemies and bosses are all planned to roll out throughout the year.
I did mostly play Inkborn on my steam deck, and generally found the UI to be passable, but sometimes confusing. The D-pad is used as shortcuts for various things, and I kept trying to use it to select my cards. Every now and then I felt like the timing for the animations were a bit off, but nothing really game breaking. I suspect that as time goes on, the UI will get tightened on various devices. I didn’t have any of these nitpicks while I was playing on my PC with the keyboard and mouse.
Inkborn is a pretty and well-made rougelite deck builder, but it isn’t finished. The theme is well executed, the systems are interesting and engaging, and I’m excited to see more content get added to the game to expand the breadth and depth. In it’s current state, Acram Digital has laid a strong foundation, and their ongoing updates suggest a team committed to refining and expanding the experience. If you’re the kind of person who likes to see a game change over development, or value being part of the early adopter crowd and having your input help shape the direction that Inkborn moves in, then Inkborn gets a solid recommendation from me.
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 VIIIreally 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.
