How Misery Is Hilarious: Afterthoughts on FFVIII

You know what? I actually did go through Final Fantasy VIII during the weeks following my time with VII. You know what I found? Well, just about the same stuff everybody talks about (and more!), but is worth talking about again. You know what we're gonna do? Talk about them. Your damn right we are...

FFVIII is probably the most polarizing game in the proper franchise for a lot of reasons. Probably the first and foremost of these is its enormously complex stat boosting system. Known in the game as "junctioning", the player is forced to draw magic spells from enemies and assign (junction) them to their statistics. The more of the same spell you have junctioned (up to 100), the better the stat becomes. The more powerful the spell combined with the amount you have (100 Fire spells aren't half as good as 100 Flares, and so on), the stat becomes that much stronger. Bearing all of this in mind, getting your head firmly wrapped around this early on can make the game either a snap or a total drag. Specifically, drawing magic spells out of your enemies is so tedious that it makes you long for the time when you could just step on those fools and move on. In this game, each new enemy that you encounter (and in the overworld you will encounter a lot. The encounter rate here can get astronomical) must be checked to see if they have something that you want, and then you have to play the cat and mouse game of drawing their magic while you stay alive.

The second major problem with junctioning, and one my biggest beefs with the game in general, is it's stance on experience points. See, since you are allocating abundant resources to your stats (magic can be found all over the place, so it's relatively easy to find stat boosts through good junctions), the typical RPG growth system of accumulating experience points for level boosts is far less meaningful as you only get minor upgrades to base character statistics. That, really, is small potatoes to the real problem: ENEMIES LEVEL WITH YOU. It doesn't matter if it's the first slug you fought or the boss of the super secret dungeon (or whatever), if you don't have a lot of strong magic junctioned to you, you're going to get your ass kicked eventually on no matter how high leveled you are. What this essentially means is that the game forces you to accept it on its own terms. You are forced to make good use of the junction system, or you will succumb to the hell of 1000 Game Over screens.

How do I know this? Well, here's a story: a few years ago, when I played this game for the first time, I didn't follow a guide and let myself carelessly meander through the game. At first, it was fun getting to know the little ins and outs of the game world and powering up my Guardian Forces (summon spells in this game, which are also tied to junctions). Since the in-game tutorials were vague on little things (like strengthening junctions) and noticeably silent on others (ENEMIES LEVEL WITH YOU. Stupid.), I found myself spamming GF monsters incessantly. This was not only a totally boring way to play the game (those GF monster animations are long and repetitive), but it tied my hands in certain key endgame battles since I either couldn't use them or they weren't strong enough anyway. So there I sat, capped at level 100 with my characters, and consistently getting my ass handed to me by the final boss of the game. It's been my white whale ever since.

Now, the other side to this game system is how easily it can be exploited under the right circumstances. After doing the right amount of research, one can pretty easily blast through the beginning of the game (after obtaining some almost unfair early-game junctionable magic) and bide their time until near the end where they can easily grab all of the high-level magic, and then crack the whole thing wide open. Hell, that's what I did this time around, and it pretty much turned into a joke. Just goes to show how the internet proves yet again that it's always smarter than you were while in college.

FFVIII has many other noticeable faults. For one, every bit of it bleeds the word "excessive". Every battle that you fight starts with an unnecessary amount of zoomed and panned camera angles and pre-fight battle animations. While it may have seemed like a clever way to mask loading times back then seems like trite wastes of time now. The plot, also, takes far too long to get its feet on the ground. True, this is more of a character-driven story than some of the other Final Fantasy games, but much of events of the game are wrapped up way to easily near the end. Without giving anything away, it seemed that the solution to everyone's problems probably could have been thought of at the end of disk one, and that would have been the end of that. Sure, part of the fun of playing through games like this is to see how things fall together, but it was almost near the end of disk 3 (of 4) where it seemed like there was any cohesion to the story, and then it was over.

Then again, it has other differences compared to the FF pantheon that makes it just priceless. For one, main character Squall is a dick. I don't mean an angsty, somewhat self absorbed loner jerk like FFVII's Cloud and countless other main characters that came after him, I mean he's an absolute asshole. Now, I can see how people don't like this, but seeing a main character be so much of a detached chump was just hilarious. If every RPG character has "'tude", Squall has a nearly incurable attitude PROBLEM. What's better is that when he finally loses his cool later in the game, it has so many exclamation marks after his sentences that I feel a little cheated that there wasn't any voice acting. I love hearing pretty boy JRPG characters scream at the top of their lungs. That kind of comedy is a reason to wake up everyday.

After playing through Final Fantasy VII, I'm that much more impressed by the graphics. To be fair, Playstation One games do not age well as character models were large and blocky (at one point, I think a character was holding a clipboard. Or maybe it was a green sandwich. Or perhaps an Alaskan fish...), but the backgrounds still look spectacular decade later, and the fully rendered cut scenes -for the most part- still look great. The opening cinematic stands tall as a great set piece, and the fire fight in the Ragnarok late in the game is amazing. Even in their strange form, the characters animate pretty well and have realistic motions to them; all a huge step up from VII two years earlier.

So there you have it. Time has not been especially kind to FFVIII in terms of how some of it looks and how some of it plays, but what it got right almost makes the whole experience worth it. I truth, the whole game feels like a mish mash of really good ideas that just didn't equate to a cohesive whole. Then again, if you were ever inclined to find out for yourself, you can grab a copy of it in good shape pretty easily for under $20. After the last few weeks, I'd actually say it's worth it.

Here's a pretty interesting article for some further reading. As always, Gametrailers.com (which seems to be down at the moment) has a really well researched video retrospective, but it's squished in with Final Fantasy IX which, while fun, isn't worth getting into. Have a good weekend, fools.