Facebook – Top 100 FAVORITE Video Games: 99

99: Final Fantasy VIII (PS1)
Developer: Squaresoft (NOT Square-Enix!)
Year: 1999

In general, the problem I’ve heard people have with this game is that it wasn’t Final Fantasy VII. That’s fair. The game was a drastic shift in tone and gameplay from the previous title. Gone are the super-deformed looks, the serious-yet-light-hearted affairs of the world, and the grandiose bad guys wearing ridiculous outfits and wielding dumb-as-Hell… oh, well, actually, that part IS there. Just, you know, not as blatantly strange as people like Sephiroth and/or his mother, Jenova.

VIII takes place in a more “modern” setting (if you can consider a world with flying fortress schools and giant spider mechs as “modern”) than its predecessor, and – as such – it features characters who look like human beings. Square had hoped to bank on this by having human looking characters experience human emotions and, thus, draw in human players just a bit more. They miffed the whole thing up, though, by having the two primary male protagonists be the most emo-tarded characters in FF history. And, as always, that’s saying a lot. Especially when one considers the series’ history.

Yes, of course I’m talking about Squall and Laguna, two of the dumbest, most depressing characters to ever grace an FF title. These jokers run around, generally whining and moaning about how much life sucks and how much they hate people, how love is dumb and inaccessible, and how great they think they are. Of course, they’re balanced by an awesome cast of peripheral characters, key amongst them being Irvine and – the ever-so-drool-worthy – Rinoa. But I won’t waste time here talking about erections I’ve had because of her pointy, polygonal curves.

The game play itself, though, is the real heart and, at the same time, one of its marketing flaws. After VII’s incredible and critically praised “Materia” system, FFVIII went a different route with its draw and junction systems. In this game, you give each character a set number of “summons” (GF’s in this game) and then you steal magic from monsters or draw spots in the game and junction them to attributes between the characters and their summons. This allows for ridiculous boosts in strength, health, defence, and magic power, possibly early enough in the game to make it a cakewalk. If you know what to assign and where to find it, by level 50 you can be stronger than every monster you could possibly come across. While this is fun at the start, when you can plow through wave after wave of monsters with ease, the game starts to get stale, really fast.

Nobuo Uematsu again brings a score to the game that is both memorable and fitting, mostly because of the fantastic “Sorceress’ Theme” and Laguna’s battle theme (“Man with the Machine Gun?”). A card game, some great boss battles, a trip to outer space, some quality Squaresoft CG, and a dog you can name anything, yielding hilarious results when it comes to attack names make this game solid, enjoyable, but less than stellar.

All in all, Final Fantasy VIII offers RPG fans a wide storyline with stock characters and some dumb Japanese video game stereotypes, all of which make for a fun game, in the end. Is it as good as its predecessor? Clearly, at #99, the answer is no. But one must wonder what the gaming world would look like if VIII had come before VII. Would we all think the opposite was true? Probably not, really, because – in the end – Final Fantasy VII didn’t have Cloud and co. squaring off against a sorceress from the future bent on combining all of time into a single moment for… some… reason…

Classic Moment:
Toss up on this one between the really cool battle aboard Ragnarok, fighting honest to god ALIENS in a Final Fantasy title, or all the stuff that takes place on the space station around the moon, with the aftermath being depicted in full CG glory. For some reason, there is something awe-inspiring about billions of monsters creating a living bridge of themselves and using it to climb from the moon to Earth. I don’t know why something that stupid and bizarre is so cool in my opinion, but lord or lord is it cool.

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Added September 29, 2016
I’ve only finished this game once. I’ve come close two other times, but only managed it the one time. If they put it on PS4 with the speed boosts and stuff like FFVII, I’ll buy that, immediately.
Also, maybe its old age and maybe its being in a solid relationship, but there is something extremely cringe-worthy about speaking about Rinoa like that.