u/otterpawprints

tldr; FF8 is a fun game, but it's 10/10 ideas are let down by poor execution on nearly every front. I'm glad I replayed it, and I'm glad I can replay it again in the future. I'll just never stop wondering "what if?"

Final Fantasy 8 is a game I first played when I was 9 years old. Coming out on the heels of Final Fantasy 7, the game that changed me from a kid who played games to a full on gamer, I had high hopes for FF8. Ultimately, I would view it as the black sheep of the 7-9 PSX trilogy. I enjoyed it while I was playing it, but the further I got, the more I felt detached from it. There was something here, I told myself. FF7 had it, and when I went on to FF9, it had it, too. So why couldn’t I find ‘it’ in FF8? I would go on to call FF8 “not very good” until I met my best friend in college, who espoused FF8 as his favorite, and possibly the best FF there was.

Why? Did he find the ‘it’ I couldn’t find? We talked about it, over and over again, for years. We still talk about it. We’ve talked about it while I’ve been replaying it. I met him in 2008, so we’ve had plenty of time to talk about FF8. And now I’ve finally beaten it.

See, I hadn’t beaten it before. When I was 9, I only used a single save slot. When I got to Disc 4, my save corrupted. I was too upset, it was too much game, to play again. So perhaps the “it” lived on Disc 4, or perhaps it lived in the game’s totality? In order to understand what I was missing, I would need to finally complete it properly.

I now believe that Final Fantasy 8 is a game detached from itself. Like the effects of using a GF, my memories of the story I just played even feel a little hazy. Whether a victim of short development time, cut content, just plain poor writing…FInal Fantasy 8 is a graveyard of Great Final Fantasy Ideas that will (probably) never get to be used properly, to their full potential.

Final Fantasy 8’s ‘it’ lies in what it is lacking, not in what it contains. Final Fantasy 8 isn’t a romance, it’s a tragedy.

Early on in Disc 1, Quistis and Squall share a heart to heart while looking at the beautiful backdrop of Balamb Garden. The music is melancholy, pretty, but with a hint of sadness. Squall is sort of graduating from school, so maybe that was the vibe they were going for. But, that really isn’t it, is it? Though Squall and Quistis are as unaware of it as the player, their relationship is one of melancholy because of what they’ve experienced together, and what they’ve both lost. 

Throughout Disc 1, Squall and his party members are able to have smaller conversations, talk about things that aren’t time compression or lunar cries. For the first disc, characters set out on arcs, as characters do. We see Quistis struggle in leadership, Rinoa struggle with impulsivity, Zell struggle with his anger, Selphie struggle with loneliness, and Irvine struggle with shooting his adoptive mom in the head. We see children being shaped and scarred by a war they can’t really escape. The only way out, for them, is through. This is echoed in Fisherman’s Horizon, when Squall explains why he thinks fighting is necessary and the mayor of FH is a silly wuss.

Then, when we begin Disc 2, something peculiar happens. All of those story arcs seem to come to an abrupt end. It takes a little while to notice it, because it’s all very exciting. You’re escaping prison, you’re stopping missiles, you’re going into the bowels of the Garden, you’re fighting Galbadia. There’s no time to stop and talk. There is time to stop and play cards. But there is no time for Squall and his individual party members to have meaningful heart to hearts about what they think and feel about the situations they’re in. Maybe this is intentional, remember, I just said they have little choice but to just keep fighting. But eventually, a strange feeling sets in, a small itch at the back of the brain. Why is it like this? In part, it’s because Selphie has to go to the missile base.

What? Well, Selphie has to split the party and be the leader of a second squad. So far, you’ve pretty much just been told who you could use, and who you couldn’t as they came and went based on circumstance. Even during the assassination mission, you just follow the fun, wild twists and turns and enjoy the ride. Then Selphie has to go to the missile base. Because it’s firing missiles at Trabia Garden. This is actually part of her story arc! Which abruptly ends when the garden gets bombed anyway, and continues to still be over when you go there later. But I digress. What does this have to do with aborted character arcs for the rest of the characters? Because you get to choose who else goes with her.

FF8 writes itself into a little bit of a corner. Selphie and the others you send with her (obviously Quistis and Irvine, duh) are gone for, like, a rather long time. They can’t have their story arc progress in any meaningful way unless the developers were willing to write dialogue to account for the changes. And this isn’t the last time they do it. You split the party again during the battle with Galbadia Garden (and it gets confusing in real time, cause I think you even do another second change part way through.) You choose who goes to space. On top of that, you lose access to Selphie after the trio returns for no real reason, and you lose access to Rinoa for most of Disc 3. There’s so much of this, if you really think about it, the character arcs were doomed from the start.

And then there’s the elephant in the room. The orphanage twist. This was the final nail in the coffin for the doomed story arcs. All characters are now relegated to “power of friendship” cardboard cutouts, and serve only to make sure Squall and Rinoa get to kiss one day. For whatever reason, the game decides that the team remembering this fact just resolves their story arcs.

This all wouldn’t be impossible to overcome. Plenty of RPGs have disappointing character development. Then Disc 3 happens. Disc 3 is a whirlwind of new plot points, thrown at the player with a matter-of-fact intensity that implies the player should already know a lot of this stuff. Edea is defeated but oh well, we just have 2nd Edea, and when we defeat 2nd Edea, we just get…3rd Edea. It makes sense on the surface, since it had always been Ultimecia possessing the sorceresses, but is that an excuse, really? Famously, we never learn much about Ultimecia. She’s kind of rude, sort of a nasty lady. She wants to compress time. Why? She does. Odine says shut up now.

A player should not feel a tension between “should I know this?” and “I don’t think I’m supposed to know that yet! Ooh, a mystery.” FF8 made me ask the former far too many times on Disc 3.

Do I hate FF8? Not at all. It has some great aspects to it. I think its set pieces are wonderful, and absolutely rank among the best of FF history. The SeeD Test, the Dollet Mission, The Train Heist, the Assassination, the Battle of the Gardens, the Space Trip. These are all awesome set pieces. I remember them fondly, and I always will. The music is absolutely phenomenal, and so much of the world design is really, really cool. Coming off FF7 and the mako-punk rust atmosphere, FF8 had such cool settings with the Garden, Balamb, Esthar…they have unique vibes unlike anything else in FF (at the time). 

I think the GFs and Junction system are really cool, and with some refinement, could have been some of the best FF Skill systems ever made. I don’t really need to talk at length about how breakable it is here. I think we all know at this point. But this is where I say Final Fantasy 8 is a game detached from itself.

The combat and skill system seem at odds with each other, the level scaling discourages you from wanting to fight anyway, the constant party member shifts make keeping your average level reasonable more difficult anyway, and stopping to play cards lays bare the games two largest weaknesses. Why did they make Shuffle and Boogie such a great song when hearing it makes you realize what FF8 is lacking? There’s no time to stop and have important conversations, because of missiles and monsters from the moon, but there is time to play cards. And there’s no point in gaining levels, because there is time to play cards.

Before anyone comes back and says “well you can just NOT play cards”, this is true. I didn’t play cards until this playthrough. The game works, on a functional level, just fine. I’m not talking about an optimal play strategy here. I’m talking about what FF8 is lacking. It’s missing mechanical, literary, and structural cohesion. It’s a game disconnected from itself, never to be more than the sum of its parts.

Did I find FF8’s ‘it’? I can see it, even if I can’t reach it, like I’m watching it from another time. If only we could compress time ourselves and travel to a period where FF8 got the development its ideas so sorely deserved.

It's time to start throwing out recommendations for the May RPG. Now that we know Okami might win, we can think about how long that is and use that to calibrate what we want to play over here. There'll be at least one pick from Discord, one from Reddit, one from Me, and probably a wildcard. Most upvotes wins the spot on the ballot, please do not downvote.

No specific rules other than it can't be a repeat game, so no one suggest Threads of Fate, that'd be silly.