Ok then folks, here’s the deal; there has recently been some discussion about the last generation Final Fantasy games. By coincidence, I just so happened to be going through those games on an emulator at the time. Now having finished VII, VIII and IX, I thought I would type up a review of my experiences.
The relevant thing here is that I am a console outsider. I have been a life-long home computer/PC fan, starting with a spectrum back in the 80s, working up through the days of the Amiga in the early 90s, jumping ship to PCs just before the Pentium came out, and sticking with the ever developing PC market ever since. Hence, I am a joystick, mouse and keyboard jockey, and like anyone who pays vastly inflated prices for a PC and still thinks it is the best option for gaming, it’s because I tend to like PC types of games. My one foray in my life into console buying was an old Commodore CD32; not a disaster but not the best purchase I ever made either. So my reviews here are as a console outsider.
But not, I hasten to add, as a console virgin. One of my friends often used to bring over his SNES to play games on, and later his N64, which I then developed a habit of finishing such games as Mario 64, Banjo-Kazooie, Zelda and Diddy Kong Racing for him on. Much as I liked all those games, it was probably Zelda which, years ago, prompted me to look into the emulator scene to go hunting for old SNES games (starting with the old SNES Zelda, which I had been told as very good. Actually, I never got on with the original Mario Kart (heresy, I know…) and there was no older version of DKR, so Zelda was really the big remaining option). I was familiar with the emulating concept, having done it with plenty of Commodore games, and pretty soon I was underway.
Once I completed Link to the Past, I went looking around for other SNES games. Now, it so happened a different friend of mine had once lent me his Playstation and I had played through the first couple of hours of FFVII. I remember thinking at the time that the style was very reminiscent of the old Bard’s Tale games (NOT the new one, not by a long way)- wonder around, meet random monsters, level up, go to dungeon/castle/other world, wonder around, random monsters, level up some more etc. Once I had exhausted the Zelda option, it occurred to me that I should check out the Final Fantasy series, famous as it was and seeing as I remembered enjoying the brief foray I had so far made.
So, over the next few months I played FFs IV, V and VI (though just to be annoying, they were in order called FFII, V and III, as the mix-up between the American and Japanese market came to the fore). I can’t actually remember that much about them- especially the first two. I remember those bloody annoying twins, and I remember the class system from V. I remember beating the big boss in IV, but a look back at V reveals that I never finished it- my last save seems to be in some Egyptian style temple place lots of sand and bad guys, and I have no idea how close to the end it is. I guess I must have lost heart.
I remember VI rather better, from the opening scenes in the big battle suits to the espers to the various characters, and the way the world kinda resets itself about two-thirds in, and to the way that Edgar’s Drill really rocked as a weapon. That was a pretty solid gaming experience, actually.
So, yeah. That was all years ago, but it is worth noting that whilst I am an outsider, I am not totally inexperienced with either consoles or Final Fantasy games. However, I am NOT a console expert- in fact, I am not really a gaming expert in general, and I am sure some of you big FF fans will laugh at my amateurishness, so I am sorry I can’t complete the games in 10 hours without going up any levels, as some people seem to like doing. I really am just trying to play through them.
Anyway- so when recently I moved onto PS emulation- having cleaned out the important parts of the N64 catalogue, where I think Majora’s Mask took the longest- in the last few months it occurred to me that there was nothing to stop me playing the next few Final Fantasy games.
And so I did.
BTW- big spoilers in these reviews.
FFVII
Well, as everyone knows, this is the big one that turned the series from simply being a popular series into a full blown phenomenon, and so it is slightly ironic that it was so totally different in style to the earlier ones.
This might contribute towards its success, of course; the Playstation owning demographic (after Square jumped ship to Sony because they couldn’t stick with Nintendo sticking to cartridges- there, see, I know SOME things…) was all part of a new wave of ‘maturing’ gamers. That phrase really covers two areas- first of all, lots and lots of plenty of totally immature teenagers who THINK they are mature, inevitably. Secondly, though, a new wave of growing up gamers, heading towards their late 20s and beyond. Those who found the somewhat cutesy style of the earlier games a turn-off would probably find the harsh industrial background of FFVII more pleasing. Mind you, that said, VI was already going in that direction. Mogs and Chocobos might abound between all the games but each one I played was less cutesy than the one before.
So, let’s get this in perspective. Like quite a few things that happen in many FF games, FFVII reminds me of Blade Runner. In a polluted city in an age where exploitative technology is counted above all and a great corporation has near total power, our spikey haired big sword wielding friend Cloud is doing mercenary work for a eco-terrorist group named Avalanche, whose leader, Barret (often referred to as everyone’s favourite Mr. T impersonator) whilst claiming he is fighting for the future of people like his daughter, has already developed a morally ‘flexible’ view for his terrorism. Cloud, meanwhile, has a background as an ex-member of SOLDIER, the elite military wing of the Shinra corporation. Also present in Avalanche is a girl Cloud grew up with named Tifa, who has become very self-sufficient but still remembers her old days wanting Cloud to protect her.
The game dumps you all in the middle of this as Avalanche performs its missions, against the ‘Mako’ reactors that suck out the natural energies of the world for use in power production, that is the central environmental point of the game. Cloud is the absolute mercenary in all of this, not caring one whit for anyone’s agenda, just wanting the money, and not exactly pleasing Tifa that much. When one of these missions goes somewhat awry, and wounded Cloud is tended by a flower-selling girl named Aeris, whom he ten later escorts to safety when it turns out that Shinra is very interested in acquiring her. After Shinra counter-attacks and destroys Avalanche- taking out a chunk of the city in the process- Barret and Tifa survive and are involved with Cloud and Aeris in a raid on the Shinra HQ. That goes wrong as well but when just about everyone in the HQ other than the protagonists are brutally murdered shortly after, Cloud identifies the assailant as his old hero Sephiroth, the absolute top man in SOLDIER, lethal beyond imagining. Cloud’s earliest posting in SOLDIER was with Sephiroth, who seemed to be teaching Cloud rather a lot, but Cloud remembers the mission to destroy mutated monsters near an old Mako reactor, within which Sephiroth discovered the exploitative way in which he was created. Sephiroth went a bit crazy go-nuts after all this and promptly torched everything in a five mile radius, which sadly included Cloud’s home town and family. Cloud has had a bee in his bonnet about tracking down Sephiroth ever since, much as he knows that he can never match this legend. The group ventures out the city into the big wide world to follow Sephiroth’s trail, whilst Barret comes to terms with his disaster and tries to re-evaluate himself and the reason he fights, and Cloud gets caught in a love triangle.
Now, all of this is not a short way into the game, yet you are only just going out into the world, and this all speaks volumes about what solid games the Final Fantasy series produces in terms of length. Comparing the much shorter and less detailed play times of the recent Knights of the Old Republic games, and FF stands out a mile (though my old favourites, the Baldur’s Gate games, are more like an FF length).
As the game progresses we learn that Aeris is in a postion not dissimilar to Sephiroth, whilst Cloud turns out to have a few memory problems when it turns out he was never accompanying Sephiroth at all, and those memories are all fake (hence the strength of the Blade Runner allegory). This eventually twists back on itself when he susses out he WAS there (and not just created after the event, as was suggested earlier) but was not in fact a member of SOLDIER having never made the grade; some other guy was actually in the position that Cloud thought he was in and no-one seems sure what happened to him. But although Cloud was just a lowly grunt, he did witness what Sephiroth did and his early memories of Tifa (who was also there when Sephiroth went crazy, acting as a guide to the local area) are genuine.
Adding to the mix of heroes as time goes by are the mutated creature Red XIII, who apparently is considered rather cool on-line but whom I hated; tribal, attitude-filled wild girl Yuffie, whom I hated at first but grew on me as time went by, cynical, bitter engineer Cid who brought a needed touch of mature counterpoint to things, and philosophically minded, gun-wielding vampire Vincent who I really wanted to like but just never performed well enough for me to do so. Oh, and also some strange gobshite called Cait Sith who I wanted to kill from the start, was delighted when he DID die and then disgusted when he was immediately replaced by a duplicate. Blah. Other than Sephiroth, most the bad guys are various minions of Shinra, the most charismatic of which is the president (son of the original one killed by Sephiroth) Rufus. Shinra is continually trying soulless, technology based solutions to the Sephiroth problem whilst the protagonists indulge in more humanistic ways.
Eventually, it transpires that Sephiroth is going to destroy the world in a generic act of spite, and the protagonists have to go through all sorts to stop him, off the rather emotional sacrifice of Aeris as she starts the motion of the only force that can stop him, the others having to finish the job. Which you eventually do.
Now, all those themes of friendship, humanity, pollution, technology etc. have been done to death 100 times in films but you don’t apply the same criteria to a computer game. The plot fulfils its purpose perfectly, giving you just enough mystery and revelation to keep you going from one point to the next- without this, the game is just so much wandering and button clicking. Atmosphere makes a game, this game has it. It also has a well-drawn bad guy in the form of Sephiroth who is well presented throughout, especially in having a decent exploration of his motivations and his days as a hero rather than villain. My favourite game villain is still Irenicus from BG II, but FFVII still does well here.
As for FF gameplay… well, the battle system and so forth is all designed entirely for computer/console gaming, which to my mind gives it an advantage over BG and KOTOR, which adapt a tabletop system. Ironically, I think the systems so adapted work better on computer than they do tabletop (I hate the D20 system), but it is still not as good as a well-designed, purpose built system like this one. Although overwhelming at first, you soon get into the rhythm of how to fight battles.
It’s not perfect by any means. From five characters in a party in FFIV, to four in the next two, we are now down to three. With nine characters to choose from for the middle part of the game, three at a time is not enough- I felt that I was never building a truly tactical party, especially as you nearly always use Cloud.
Also, Final Fantasy suffers from an excess of imagination. There are FAR too many elements and other such effects- not content with Earth, Water, Fire and Air- (in fact, Water rather oddly comes as a later effect after Ice, which comes in at first), and having several levels for each of the earlier ones, the game buggers around with Holy and Shadow and more status effects than I can comfortably count without getting bored. With so many around, trying to render yourself immune or resistant to some of them becomes a pointless experience. Plenty of guides about fighting monsters talk of setting yourself up properly before hand. What the heck is that? There should never be any obstacle in a computer game which cannot, in theory, be properly attempted BEFORE you have encountered it. To have to learn what resistance to use by first attacking a monster and then being killed by it, and re-loading, is simply poor design. No, FF should reduce its mad variety there a little.
My greatest bugbear is gravity attacks- along with all attacks that reduce you to one hit point, or the like. Gravity attacks do damage based on how many hitpoints you have- the more you have, the more damage you take. This is a prime example of why, in game system design (something I do actually have experience in) you should not introduce a mechanic just because you can conceive of it. I am sure, when trying to think of what ‘Gravity’ attacks could do (as if they did not have enough attack types already), thinking of how it could work like that (“’cos like, people with more hit points are HEAVIER, yeah?”) seemed like a good idea but from a system point of view it is atrocious. Hit points, if you have them in your system, have one function only- so that those who have more of them can take more hits in combat. Start introducing attacks that break that logic and you break the hit point system, and you end up with the absurd situation where you actually hope such attacks target your weaker characters, because then they will be easier to heal, having taken less damage. If you are going to have hit points, you MUST follow that logic all the way through. FF would do itself great favours by removing such powers- it is not as if it does not have various ways to deal with ‘tank’ characters with lots of HP, with all the various status effects that can hit you.
Talking of which, the situation is also totally unfair. The game showers you with all sorts of gnarly special effects, and then when it works out that these things- that bugger your own characters up royally- would also incapacitate most bosses, as a rule, any important enemy is then made totally immune to these special effects (normally including, inevitably those gravity attacks). This is such horribly circular logic- to make all these attacks and then in turn to make anything important immune to them- that it makes me wonder how much creative time is being wasted in this cycle. A good rule for this kind of deal –SIMPLIFY! If you are going to have all the effects and then make things immune, it is simpler- and has the same rough effect- to just cut both factors out.
“But they work on random encounters!” I hear someone say. Two things there. First of all, in ALL FF games, random encounters very quickly become VERY annoying indeed. They really are irritating in the extreme, breaking up the flow of everything you do. Just to make it worse, they are also necessary, because you need to level up. The sooner a way is found to make this NOT necessary the better. And yes, the game builds in ways to avoid the random encounters, but what good is that? A. you still need them, and b. it again is a waste lf time to introduce a solution to a faulty mechanic you deliberately put into the game- not to mention having to make people WORK for that solution.
But secondly, the whole thrust of the system makes even the use of various special effects on random encounters irrelevant. Why? Well, because most of these things won’t work on bosses, you tailor your characters and your tactics towards what DOES work- namely, doing lots of damage as quickly as possible. This is quick, simple, and effective, and just as effective on random encounters… so there is little reason to bugger around with everything else.
As I mention tailoring, I mentioned in the earlier FF thread that the ‘materia’ system did not appeal. To explain quickly- there are no character classes in FF (in IV and VI, character had in-built classes; in V you could adopt different professions as time went by); instead, your characters learn abilities by having various ‘materia’ attached to their equipment- better equipment can hold more material, and a material piece itself can do anything from teach you a spell to the ‘Steal’ ability to summoning a Guardian Force (the killer attacks of the FF universe). Combat speeds such learning/ However, these abilities are attached to the material, not the character, so if one character learns a spell with a material piece, give that piece to another character and now the second character would have the spell instead.
This basically means that aside from some small differences in stats and limit break powers (a nice little system where characters who get hit enough times can lash out with a super-attack), all characters in FFVII are effectively the same- the only change by which material you offer them. This is such a damn shame because they all have well-defined personalities and they deserve better treatment than just being soulless bodies into which you insert powers as you like. They don’t even develop as such, because as I say, once developed you can just mix and match those powers around the group as needed. Ok, they go up levels, but levels don’t do anything to define what they can do, it just makes them generically better. A waste, this.
Well, I’ve been complaining a lot. And I think I will stick by saying that the scope, characterisation, plotting and style of FF is better than its mechanics. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it, and the game has hefty emotional impact that well explains why it became the phenomenon it did- even if you can point at other things that are actually better GAMES, FFVII is a great experience.
Most FF games follow a standard pattern- walk around a small portion of a big world, then walk around the big world, then sail around it, then fly around it (and maybe something extra- a submarine, or a spaceship to the moon, and so on). FFVII is no exception in this regard but it is a formula that works. Having not understood the limit system correctly, I actually was going around with level one limits for 99% of the game, only hurriedly changing to the other ones when I realised my error right before the last ‘dungeon’. Good that I did though, because (although I thought the last dungeon was over-long) I finally polished off the final boss with Cloud’s ultimate Omnislash attack, which worked well dramatically (and was then immediately repeated in the post-Sephiroth beating Sephiroth beating scene… a sentence which only makes sense if you have played it) and I was done. They didn’t cop out by resurrecting the dead character- this is good, and they really should kill off a few more in these games; death is a strong dramatic tool.
Must be said, I didn’t care much for the post credit sequence, Irrelevant dog beings see abandoned city in the future. Woo. I realised at that point that the overtly environmental message actually irritated me- there was no room for counterpoint or debate of the issue. But oh well
All things considered, it’s a great game. Ok, the system is not perfect, but then it is 8 years old; systems are revised and improved all the time.
Aren’t they?
I find myself having to agree with Ush on alot of points, even though I've only gotten so far (Just got into Cloud's creepily-rebuilt hometown).
The battles, I believe, are my main point of contention. The atmosphere really suffers from their profusion. For instance, take the sequence through the caves in Cosmo Canyon. While trying to gather up all the chests and stray piece of Materia, I'd rather not be sucked into a battle every seven steps. The game would benefit considerably from decreasing the number of battles while increasing the amount of EXP obtained per battle.
I also dislike the Materia system, because you end up pretty much just choosing your favorite three characters and doing everything with them, meaning you never find a situation where you say "this character would have been much better to choose here." I ended up subconsciously adapting the class system from FF1: Setting up "Cloud is the Fighter, Aeris is the White Mage, The Third Character is a Red Mage" or similar. I really am sore about this, because the characters are well-enough thought-out that they really shouldn't be arbitrarily interchangeable.
That's why I liked FFX - though you can personalize your characters all you wish with the sphere grid, it's still near impossible to, say, turn your White Mage into a Warrior. They could fight, yes, but they won't be any good at it. About the only thing you can do easily and well is make your Black Mage a White Mage and vice-versa....which I did. Hehe.
Oh, I am very open to the idea that problems I identify might disappear.
There are things I fail to mention in these reviews- one I forgot here is the number of neat touches in FFVII which elaborate on the plot. One entire, hard-to-reach subplot about Vincent's past makes an interesting appearnace, and a rather randomly inserted piece (if you return to the mansion in Cloud's hometown near the end of the game) explains how Cloud got to Midgard in the first place, and what happened to the person that Cloud was mistaking himself for in the game's earlier flashback sequences.
All this shows a commendable attention to detail.
It is worth nothing though that the lack of voices in FFVII doesn't look like a major problem, but it is actually a stylistic issue- for example, David Warner did an absolutely fantastic piece of work voicing Irenicus in Baldur's Gate II, ane really sold me on how decent voice work can make a huge difference; FF never really gets into this area.
Also... I am pretty sure that it is the auto-correct in Word that kept adding the 'l' at the end of 'material' above. I meant 'materia' all the way.
I am about to post my FFVIII review, and will mention about forcible role-playing- it's also worth noting, then, that I personally enjoy being able to make my own character rather than adopt a given role in a game; another area where BG scores well for me (doubly so in that they still gave fantastic possibilities for the person you created, with ana mount of possible branching relationship paths in BGII that really scared me). But that is definitely a matter of personal taste.
Onto Final Fantasy VIII. Now, I had heard a lot of negative press against this game, which instinctively makes me want to like it. Perhaps people didn’t like it on the grounds of things I might really like? After all, people tend to like plenty of things in Final Fantasy that I don’t. Ok, let’s see.
The ‘realism’ style was hyped up for this one- lusciously created CGI scenes of very realistic looking characters, and also attempts (limited by graphics technology) to make the game models look realistic as well. No strange beings as protagonists at any point- all Human, and in fact nearly everything in the game world is Human. That suits me perfectly- I think there is too much messing around with strange things in many such games. I am led to understand that this more serious attitude to things didn’t go down that well with a lot of fans- a shame. Not as if the game is like a Chekov play, or something.
Ok, plot. The basic set-up I found very engaging- our hero Squall is a cadet in an elite military training organisation- based in one of three such ‘Gardens’- called SEED. SEED is a mercenary organisation, but seems to only take good guy contracts. Aside from its mercenary nature, the set-up is very reminiscent of the Jedi in Star Wars, as the cadets are paired with instructors, go out and learn their craft the hard way, and also learn various powers as they go along. Squall, incidentally, is another guy with a big sword- and yes, ok, it’s a ‘gun blade’, but it’s still a damn sword, and it might have been nice if he wasn’t so similar to Cloud in style (but not, as I shall mention later, in personality).
As Squall- recently injured in an out-of-control training fight with his main rival Seifer- is still in training, the game has a very good introduction as his final exam process is gone though, including participation in a genuine SEED mission for his final test to become a proper member. You learn everything about the world pretty well, and playable characters like Squall’s instructor and two of his fellow students also drift in very easily. Inevitably, things go wrong and you are thrust into the game plot, but I think it is the best presented start to an FF game I have ever played.
The plot I would call ‘ambitious’. The game world itself really has two mighty nations- one industrial one to the west, which is currently expanding and taking over all manner of smaller nations (and SEED taking lots of missions to fight against it) and one mysterious, hi-tech one to the east. They have often been in tension and war is looming, though there is some reluctance to war as there are still memories of the last big one where the hi-tech eastern nation was in thrall to a mysterious Sorceress (though don’t let the magical terms confuse you, this is definitely a game in a technological setting). Squall, his instructor Quistis (who soon gives up as an instructor but looks damn fine with her whip- someone understood the base desires of a male audience well) and his fellow new SEED members Zell (brash, slightly dim martial artist) and Selphie (annoyingly twee girlie with nunchuks, which I guess redeems her) get sucked into a resistance movement led by the keen but slightly clueless Rinoa, a girl who then promptly falls for Squall, for no readily apparent reason; more, again, on that later.
However, Squall and his friends keep having mysterious flashbacks to a time they cannot remember, playing through events as different people- a man named Laguna and his two friends; in the military of the western nation at first, and as private citizens later. These sections take up big chunks of the game and effectively add three extra characters in isolation from the rest.
When a new Sorceress comes to claim power over the West, Seifer quickly joins her side (having gone at first to stop her) and Squall- now aided by another Garden member, the sniper Vincent, is sent to kill the Sorceress. Once more, this goes wrong (nothing goes right in FF games until the end), but the aftermath of it all sees the characters eventually realise that they all grew up together in the same orphanage but keep losing their memories of it. This memory loss is spectacularly unimportant and is an example of a complication crowbarred into the plot to cover a convenience- a problem this game suffers from.
Once the Sorceress is finally defeated, she returns to being the nice woman who ran the orphanage that the protagonists all remember, and explains that her body had been taken over by a very powerful Sorceress from the future named Ultimecia who wants to achieve something called ‘Time Compression’ and needs to reach back into the past in order to do it. Well, of course she does- we all feel like that sometimes, eh?
The flashbacks are explained as the result of actions by a girl named Ellone who is trying to explore her own past and is using Squall to do it; Laguna turns out to be the man who led the rebellion that unseated the Sorceress in the last big war and is now president of the eastern nation- it is also heavily hinted he is Squall’s father, though frankly he’s not looking very old when Squall finally meets him for real. Ellone- Squall’s sister- was brought up by Laguna and wanted to understand everything about herself; however, her strange powers in this regard are the reason Ultimecia wants her, so she can reach far enough back to compress time and…
…. And basically, I’ve lost the will to engage in this crappy b-movie plot any longer. Time travel is a risky plot at the best of times, and here it is used appallingly. As a villain Ultimecia is not even bad- she’s non-existent, you never see her until the very end where she is just another boss. Her motives remain largely unexplored- we are given little information as to what Time Compression is, and none about why she wants to do it. One character in-game remarks that it is not important why she wants to do it. Well pardon me, but as a games player, yes it IS, actually! I want to know why things are happening! FFVII took great pains to explore Sephiroth’s motivations; FFVIII is so distracted by its love plot that it doesn’t bother. In the end, you hang the sense of the plot and just go around beating one bad guy after another until it’s done. A shame, really. Meanwhile, entire plots, for example about the founder of Garden turning against its headmaster and turning out to be a big guy in a battle suit who you beat up and then he runs away… are just total wastes of time.
It might have worked if the central pairing had worked but it does not and here is why- Squall is a TERRIBLE character. He is sullen, moany, unfriendly and gruff. They obviously wanted to make that change in the game as part pf character development, but he’s such a terminal wanker that you just don’t believe it’s possible. Cloud had his personality problems but he’s presented in a much more open way that can be built upon. Squall I felt isolated from from the start, and when he moans to himself about not wanting to depend on others, I soon found myself thinking “Well, piss off and play yourself then; I don’t want to control you any more.” It is always a risk when you force someone to play an alter-ego with a pre-set personality, and Squall is a good example of that risk. I valued him as a combat character; hated him as a person. All he was good for was hitting people with that sword. And Rinoa falls for him? WHY? It defies all logic and sense, and why she keeps going for him after earlier rejections… well, my theory is that she secretly desires abuse. By the end of the game, Squall has apparently become a nicer person- seems like he’s become a very boring person to me. Odd thing is, Laguna is WAY more fun to play.
And that problem seems to infect the other characters also. For example, I rather liked Quistis at first, but by the end of the game, like everyone else, she seems to have just become one of Squall’s cheerleaders (“You can do it, Squall!!!”). Only Zack retains any personality, and though he was never my favourite that always seemed to be a relief. All conflict from the group actually dissipates quickly- a mistake. Conflict generates plot interest- Cloud’s love triangle and arguments with Barret drove a lot of FFVII, none of that is here. Everything gets focused on Squall and Rinoa and it just doesn’t wash. They end up together, by the way. Woo. I’d have gone for the whip, myself.
Ok, so enough of the plot, what about the system? Well, all the issues I identified in FFVII remain- too many effects, too many random encounters, too many immunities. Three characters again, but with less to choose from that’s not so bad- though as now characters don’t level up unless you play them, the maths works out badly. Six people is enough for two teams of three if you split up, but as most the time you have to take Squall and two others it means you cannot comfortably rotate the others around for even experience gaining as two does not go into five.
Materia is gone, to be replaced by junctioning. I’ll get this out the way now- I don’t like this one either. At the heart of it is an overhaul of the magic system so that you don’t need Magic Points any more- ok sounds good, lose a mechanic from an overly ‘mechaniced’ game; I approve in theory. Instead, you just gather spells in numbers- have 10 fire spells, and you can cast fire ten times. Go get some more and you can cast more. Fair enough, though there are too many damn spells, and they end up feeling more like objects than spells, as you just gather them.
However, the Guardian forces are no longer just super spells, they are essential parts of a character. Characters need to be attached to one (or more) Guardian forces, which in turn determine what special abilities they have. GF’s learn as time goes by, and so your abilities develop. Fine, though again as you can mix and match GFs as you like, we still have the same ‘soulless character’ problem.
Beyond that, you can also attach spells to your stats or abilities or resistances- attaching your fire spells to your Strength can make you stronger, for example, or you could attach it to give you fire resistance. However, your GF’s determine what can be attached to what.
It doesn’t really work. Well, it DOES, because you can customise your characters pretty quickly, but it still has the same issue that no character is ever distinctive, they are just what you decide you want them to be at any particular moment.
Just to make it much, MUCH worse… the main way to get these spells, and so to increase your junctioning power, is to ‘draw’ them from enemies. Each enemy has a different set of spells you can Draw from as an action. Oh my word, it is so BORING! FFVIII clocked in way more hours than the other FF games for me, and I reckon a large chunk of that was just sitting around drawing spells from monsters. Egad. What a snoozer! The silly thing is, is that they replaced the MP system with a system that was far more complex and far more dull. I also didn’t like the way that you were limited in actions you could use, so most my characters, needing to draw and fight and use magic, now couldn’t use items in combat. Gah.
So I am sure you will conclude that I have failed in my quest to like FFVIII more, and you would be right. Yet, I by no means hate it. The details might be poor, but I liked the overall style- the mature world, the Jedi-style central set-up, and teenage protagonists, the great presentation, and so on. There is a collectible card game which forms an amusing diversion throughout, plenty of decent sidequests, and despite its flaws the combat system ‘felt’ really good- it timed well, blows hit home well, and you got a decent sense of victory.
Also, the final sections as you go into the time compression weirdness I found really good- good visuals, good music (and FFVII had beaten VIII on most the music throughout the game), a good feel of pressure and trouble… and I like well-presented weirdness.
I never quite understood the logic behind the equivalent of limit breaks in this game. I was just rather satisfied and surprised when Squall went crazy-eight bonkers on Ultimecia at the end and did about a dozen attacks in a row doing 9999 damage each (I had managed to get Squall to level 100; I can only assume levelling up was easier in this game) and killed her stone dead. I’m not sure, that being the case, how I defeated her, but it looked damn good.
Nicely done outro sequence as well- very weird and well designed. Still attached to that pointless love plot, but never mind.
You know, it seems silly in retrospect having complained so much, but I really did enjoy VIII. I got the feeling they were really trying hard to achieve something different and significant and I appreciated that even though it failed. The general style really won me over, I must say.
A shame about Squall then (though artistically, he looked DAMN fine). If you want an example of an engaging flawed hero, try PoP: Sands of Time- here the attempt failed. The really bad thing? They missed a great trick here. Seifer is TERRIBLY underused- at first, he acts as a very good counterfoil to Squall- Seifer is also unfriendly, but also brash and arrogant where Squall is quiet and withdrawn. That could have worked well, but soon Seifer just becomes a crappy henchman to the main bad guy, who you beat the crap out of every time you meet. He would have made such a good villain in his own right, developing in parallel with Squall. But, worse than that… the fact is, I would much rather have PLAYED Seifer than Squall. He’s a far more interesting character, he has a touch of love interest with Rinoa, and his rehabilitation would have been both more dramatic and more plausible. You do actually get to control him briefly at one point- they should have stuck with him. If FFVIII had been about the contrasting adventures of them both, I think it could have worked much better.
My final gripe with this game- no lesbianism. Damn it! And the three female leads were so perfectly suited to it as well. Obviously you’d really want to pair up Rinoa and Quistis but any of them would have done. Ah well, maybe one day…