Final Fantasy VIII (PlayStation) review "FFVIII is just all around average. Not Square’s (now Square Enix) best showing."

Final Fantasy VIII is the follow up to one of the best JRPG’s of all time. Unfortunately, it does not come close to it’s predecessors standard of awesome. The magic system is stupid. Characters can either draw magic from enemies, or refine magic from items. Obtaining spells feels like a chore.

In order to do anything but attack your character must equip, or “junction”, a GF. GF’s are god like beings that grant abilities. Some GF’s are given to you, and some you have to find. A few are easy to miss, which is lame. If the player misses a GF, they have to wait until the final dungeon for another chance. By the time I had reached the final dungeon, all of my GF’s were leveled and speced the way I wanted. Obtaining a level 1 GF in the final dungeon feels worthless. There are also GF’s that help randomly in battle, none of which can be controlled.

Once junctioned, the GF lets you equip 3 abilities to each character. You must choose between items, summons, draw, magic, and abilities granted by a GF. The GF’s have some sweet abilities; things like restoring all of a characters HP, or casting haste and berserk on the whole party. Choosing which 3 abilities to use is frustrating, and makes the characters seem restricted and less powerful. I have always had the option to use items by default in RPG‘s. I ended up never using items in FFVIII , because the other abilities were much better. I didn’t miss the items much, but it was weird. The characters can also equip 2 passive abilities(this can be upgraded to 3 abilities). This limited the characters powers again, and many great abilities had to go in order to make way for different, uber abilities. Upgrading an ability is one thing, replacing it is another.

There is no equipment system. Each character has a weapon that can be upgraded using items once the correct “Weapons magazine” is found and read. You actually have to click through to learn how to upgrade weapons, which seems unnecessary. One of the better parts of the Final Fantasy series for me has been the loot hunting. The simplistic idea to weapon upgrades in FFVIII seems out of place with the complicated and annoying GF/Magic system.

There is a card game which is nothing special, and not really worth talking about in detail. In a 3x3 board players place cards, trying to claim the most cards in order to win. Some of the cards can be destroyed in order to gain items that can be used to create spells.

The graphics are trying to do something they cant. Things come off blocky and faded together, forming a blurry background. The CG scenes look great, but there are not very many, and they are no more impressive then the CG scenes in FFVII. The background music is decent, with generic classical music. A lot of the sounds from the Final Fantasy Series are reused, which you will love for the nostalgia factor, or hate for Square’s apparent laziness. Like most of the game, the sound is just average.

The story is decent, though sometimes the translations are a little off. A sorceress is trying to conquer the world and you must stop her, and along the way characters change and fall in love and blah, blah, blah. It’s a cookie cutter story, but it is still a pretty good one. A fatal flaw is that characters start to explain things and then are cut off by others, saying there’s no time to talk about it. Nothing really ever seems to get explained fully.

The story has you switching between different teams quite often, so you must exchange your GF’s and magic to the active team. There is a quick auto exchange, but I still felt like I was spending more time in the menus then in combat.

The final dungeon is more annoying then fun. You lose all you abilities, like attack, magic, etc, and you have to defeat bosses to unlock them again. With the ability that makes for no random encounters, it just feels like a time waster rather then a final dungeon.

FFVIII is just all around average. Not Square’s (now Square Enix) best showing.

Community review by Chris_Strott (May 28, 2012) A bio for this contributor is currently unavailable, but check back soon to see if that changes. If you are the author of this review, you can update your bio from the Settings page.