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Photo copyright:Square Enix ®

Final Fantasy VIII

Is it still the black sheep in the series?

9 months ago
2024-01-27
gaming
JRPG

Game review

Release date1999-10-27
PublisherSquare
DeveloperSquare
PlatformPlayStation 5
Playtime~10 hours (3x)
ProgressDid not finish

I take notes as I play the game for things that I think deserve a mention. If something was not mentioned, it is considered "fine" and not noteworthy in any sense.


Final Fantasy 8 "Remastered"

I wanted to go back to Final Fantasy 8 to see if what my memories held true about this game being the black sheep in the series. And sadly, it still is the worst final fantasy game I've ever played aside from Dissidia which isn't a main numbered entry.

Pros

  • Music
    Like always, the music is great by Nobuo Uematsu. Nothing to complain there.

  • CGI
    CGI is pretty fancy for a PS1 game. It's more interesting than the actual game.

  • Intro
    I kinda liked the whole intro sequence.

Neutral

  • Edea Kramer
    Seems rather fine as a villian. Reminds me of Disney's Maleficent in some ways.

Cons

  • Menu
    It's a complete mess and a bunch of popups, Bad layout, bad functioning and just does things in a annoying way. Example the "Switch" menu you think should switch characters but instead you constantly accidentally exchange junctions; and it doesn't say what was changed. So annoying.

  • No new weapons
    The lack of equipment upgrades in this game is ridiculous compare to other final fantasy games.

  • Tedious battles
    Not only is the battles rather slow, but because you have do do more actions it becomes just tedious. In a game like this I wished there was a auto-battle function.

  • Old menu translations
    In the already bad menu, they use abbiviations for things that is stupid. Example it say ”ST-A/D < EL-A/D” what the heck does that mean?. That's some old SNES era limitation stuff we have moved on from.

  • Mini Games
    Like with many of the final fantasies, this game mini games still sucks. All of them. The card game too.

  • Story
    For a JRPG you want the story to be the driving factor and in this game it's more flashy CGI than a good story. The story is actually quite bad.

  • Navigation
    Trying to navigate and walk around in this game is really annoying. And the camera angles used makes it just more annoying and disorienting. A place like Dealing City is just so bad where I just wanted to get over it as it's on the urge of unplayable.

  • No indicators
    Some other final fantasy game uses indicators to show where something is interactice, but not in this game. You can try to mash X what seems to be every pixel in the room and can't proceed. Then u go into the previous area thinking u missed something but no you didn't, so u go back into the area and then in a specific pixels you can interact and proceed. Very annoying.

Final thoughts

Just after 10 hours or so I ended up in Fisherman's Horizon and I was too annoyed to continue so I quit. Terrible game.