fagmaster.perfectlydarien.com


Final Fantasy VIII

System: Playstation
Release Date: 1999
Published By: Square
Reviewed by: Darien
Rating:


My, how the mighty have fallen. Only two series installments ago, Square was on top of the world, and now this.

I feel no reluctance to declare that Final Fantasy VIII is easily the worst game I have ever paid full retail price for. Fifty dollars and forty hours poorer, what did I learn? I learned that I would never pay full retail price for a Final Fantasy game again, that's what. I also learned that I'm clearly a retard, since I didn't give up on this turkey for forty blasted hours that I could have spent on something else, say developing a drug habit or punching old ladies for spare change.

Talking about the gameplay in Final Fantasy VIII would be a waste of time, since there isn't any. Period. Every battle is exactly the same: every character chooses the GF command and you sit through the exact same minute-long summon animations round after round until the monsters are dead. Quite literally the only time you'll ever pick a different command is for healing, unless you just get bored and want to do something else for variety.

Variety is not the game's strong point. There are maybe a dozen different monsters available, and they all just scale up in power to match your average level. This means that you'll get sick of them long before you're done seeing them, and this also means that you cannot gauge the difficulty of the upcoming boss battle by how difficult the random encounters are. This is not good design.

Let's talk about the story. All the characters grew up together, and they all lost their memories because... blah blah blah. It's insipid, it's brainless, and it evolves slowly. This is truly the algae of the story world. The characters have no depth and will get on your nerves quickly. The game at least looks better than Final Fantasy VII did, since somebody remembered the high-poly-count models this time around. Unfortunately, somewhere in there everybody forgot how to add colour to scenes, and everything looks washed-out and lifeless. Though that may be fitting anyhow.

Let's not talk about the card game. The less said there, the better.

In conclusion, I must apologise to Quest 64 for having once rashly declared that everything else is a better game. Quest 64 can at least claim superiority to Final Fantasy VIII.

Buy this game from Amazon.com!

pd.com


Questions, comments, suggestions, or insults? Send them right along to darien@perfectlydarien.com

All material on this site Copyright © 2002-2011 perfectlydarien.com, except where otherwise noted