Collection essentials #358: Final Fantasy VIII (PS1)

After the enormous success that was Final Fantasy VII, the following game would have high expectations with the whole world eagerly anticipating it. Did it live up to the hype? Well, the game received critical acclaim and sold very well, but in terms of impact and reputation, it didn’t manage to reach the lofty standard of its predecessor.

Final Fantasy has generally been a series that very much tries to experiment and make each entry stand out quite a bit from the last. And that’s very apparent in Final Fantasy VIII, and Squaresoft did not try and simply rehash everything that made VII popular. You can tell right away that the look of the game is quite different from VII. This time the graphics are better and the character models were made more realistically. The game also takes place in a completely different world which, although not super different, feels distinct from VII’s.

Final Fantasy VIII places you in control of Squall, who is a teenager at a military academy called Balamb Garden, which is where the start of the game happens. Squall is a rather cold and serious protagonist who doesn’t express his feelings very much, though his relationships with other characters during the game help develop his character. The story involves an evil sorceress working to amp up hostilities between the world’s powers, and of course takes plenty of twists and turns that you’ll have to play the game for yourself to see.

Some of the basics of the previous game are here, such as random battles, the “active time battle” system, and the world map to move across getting from place to place. But FFVIII introduces some very new and unusual gameplay elements. Namely, the “junction” system is something unlike anything I’ve ever seen in another game. It’s a bit complicated and I’m not going to fully explain it. In most JRPGs, characters capable of learning magic learn spells as they level up and grow stronger, or perhaps with the aid of some kind of item, and they cast spells by spending “MP” which typically gets restored resting at an inn or using an item. But in FFVIII, the concept of MP does not exist. Instead, the player can “draw” a quantified number of uses of a certain spell in various ways, such as spending a turn in battle to draw from an enemy or finding a place outside of battle with a quantity of a spell to draw. One thing that’s unusual is that not only do you use your stocked spells to cast magic, but you can also equip these accumulated stocks of spells onto your characters’ various statistics (like “attack” and “defense”) to make them stronger, which is crucial. There are also summon monsters called “Guardian Forces” (or “GFs” for short) which can be equipped to a character to provide more abilities, and they can be summoned for a strong attack in battle too. 

One thing that’s fairly unusual about FFVIII but not totally unheard of is “level scaling”. Most of the time in RPGs, enemies you fight are always the same level no matter what. But in FFVIII, as your characters level, so will the monsters around you. So you cannot merely grind levels to get stronger, and you have to use the junction system to make your characters stronger in ways other than simply leveling up to actually get an edge over the competition. 

FFVIII is notable for introducing a card-based minigame called “Triple Triad” which was very well-received. I can’t really comment on it because I didn’t choose to engage with it very much when I played the game, but it’s something that was much more well thought-out than most RPG minigames which can often feel like a cheap throw-in for a little variety. Various characters throughout the game can be challenged to a Triple Triad match and this really added a cool bit of spice to FFVIII for a lot of people.

I want to give special mention to the game’s soundtrack. Of course it’s downright normal for a Final Fantasy game to have an amazing soundtrack by this point, but I still want to point out that the great Nobuo Uematsu continued his streak of producing some of the great soundtracks of all-time with FFVIII. Like FFVII, there was also a song in this game that utilized vocals. But instead of a boss theme, instead it was for a romantic scene. A song like that for such a scene is still pretty rare in the world of video games.

Many people do love FFVIII, but it is a much more divisive entry than some other games in the series. Not everyone thinks FFVII is the best Final Fantasy game, but most people at least hold some sort of positive opinion of it, which can’t really be said about VIII. A lot of the dislike comes from the junction system, which can be hard for new players to properly grasp, can seem overly complicated, and can feel tedious due to all the “drawing” of magic that has to be done. The quality of a game’s story can be rather subjective, but there were seemingly more people than usual who didn’t care for it. This may have been exacerbated perhaps by the fact that this game didn’t have nearly as strong or memorable of a central villain than the previous two Final Fantasy games, though that was admittedly a high bar to live up to. And while I don’t think this is a central reason why people don’t like FFVIII, I have to say that I didn’t like the final dungeon very much, as when I played it I felt that it required the use of a walkthrough more than anything in the previous few Final Fantasy games which was a bit annoying.

As for my personal experience, I got FFVIII early on after I got my PlayStation, but I waited a few years to actually play it, when I was an older teen. I kinda fell in the middle of the polarized opinions about this game, and enjoyed my time with it while also not feeling like it was one of the series’ stronger entries. But what was odd about my experience is that I played through the majority of the game completely wrong. I thought I understood the junction system when I really didn’t, and I was able to get through most of the game anyway, but then I hit a wall near the end. When I realized that I had screwed up, I used guides online and spent hours accumulating resources so that I would be powerful enough to finish the game, and I did! 

There’s a lot about FFVIII that I don’t remember too well since I played it so long ago, and I have been curious how I would enjoy a second playthrough while actually understanding how the game’s mechanics work. That may happen someday, we’ll see. Regardless, this is certainly a very interesting game in a big series that deserves a spot in my collection as an essential.