Final Fantasy VIII.

Original Release: Sony PlayStation, 1999. Version Reviewed: Sony PlayStation, 1999.


THE PLOT:

Squall Leonhart is a young man studying at Balamb Garden to become a SeeD, a force of elite mercenaries whose services are regularly requested by governments and citizens alike. Squall passes the final exam and becomes a SeeD, alongside fellow trainees Selphie and Zell. Squall's rival, Seifer, fails the test due to his own impulsiveness, leading to even more resentment between the two.

Squall's first mission is to assist Rinoa, the daughter of General Caraway, head of the Galbadian military. Galbadia's weak-willed president has sold his country out to the evil sorceress Edea. Rinoa wants the SeeDs to help her free her country, and Gen. Caraway has a plan to assassinate the sorceress during a public event.

The plan goes awry, and the sorceress launches reprisals against all the Gardens. But Balamb Garden has a secret, and Squall and his companions soon find themselves preparing for a war that will decide the fate of the entire planet!

Squall and Rinoa meet at a Balamb Garden dance.

SQUALL LEONHART:

When I play a game that I know I'll review, I jot down my thoughts between play sessions. This is far from a remarkable or unusual procedure, and I mention it only because looking over my notes about Squall reminds me of my journey with this game.

I have never been fond of the "broody loner" trope. I made more than a few digs at the characterization of Cloud Strife in my Final Fantasy VII reviews, and Squall makes early Cloud look accessible and likable by comparison. Squall isn't merely standoffish - He's deliberately rude to just about everyone around him, and most of the notes I took while playing through the first disc reflected my annoyance at such an unlikable main character.

It took a while, but at a certain point the character just snapped into focus for me. There's a moment in Disc Two, where the characters split into separate parties, where those in the "B" party wonder if Squall assigned them to a dangerous mission because he trusted them to accomplish it or because he simply didn't care about them. When they later return, after the others believed them to be dead, everyone is surprised at Squall's brief but unmissable display of relief.

The key to the character is that he really isn't the "cool, brooding loner." He's actually massively socially awkward. He doesn't quite know how to deal with the emotions he feels, so he puts up an emotionless front to avoid dealing with them. He's also wary of growing close to others or of counting on others, lest they be taken away from him. At his core, he's still the version of himself that the game cuts back to multiple times: a frightened child, alone in the rain.

All of which is to say that, over the course of the game, Squall went from being my least favorite Final Fantasy protagonist to being my favorite in the series so far.

Squall's first sight of Rinoa.

MAJOR CHARACTERS:

Rinoa: Though the series has featured romance before, this is the first game in which the romance is a primary focus. Rinoa is Squall's opposite, outgoing and socially confident. She spends much of the story trying to draw him out of his shell. At first, this almost seems like an amusement, with her teasing to get a reaction, any reaction. When she first approaches him at the dance, her primary interest still lies with his rival, Seifer, and she dances with him as much for something to do while she waits as anything else. As she gets to know him, she becomes intrigued, then alternately amused and exasperated. By the time he realizes his own feelings, she's already reciprocating, though it isn't until a (visually gorgeous) cutscene in the latter half of Disc Three that they are explicitly framed as a couple.

Laguna: "I dreamt I was a moron." Throughout the first three discs, there are various points in which Squall, Zell, and Selphie collapse and finds themselves dreaming of the life of Laguna. He is basically the anti-Squall, impulsive, friendly, and eternally optimistic. Across the string of flashbacks, we see that many things do not end up going his way. Even so, he is never less than cheerful, disguising his pain behind a smile the same way Squall does behind a scowl. Squall dubs him a moron after the first dream sequence; in almost the same breath, Selphie calls him "cool" and spends the rest of the game being a massive fangirl, even creating a website detailing his life (which gets updated every time you find an issue of Timber Maniacs during gameplay).

Seifer: Squall's rival at Balamb Garden. He's initially just a one-dimensional jerk, the "Big Man on Campus" who bullies others while pursuing glory for himself. Like most of the characters, he gains depth as the story progresses. He's always an enemy, but there is a core of something sympathetic in him. His needs aren't unlike Squall's. He desperately wants a place to belong (though, like Squall, he'd never admit it). He worries about the approval of others; Squall masks this trait by pretending to care about nothing, while Seifer masks it by being an aggressive glory hound. As the story unfolds, Squall gains respect, position, and friends; and while Seifer has friends who are every bit as loyal as Squall's team, I suspect that he can't help but look on in envy as his old rival accumulates everything that might have been - in his mind, should have been - his.

Seifer expresses his view of life to Squall and Zell.

SQUALL'S TEAM:

While none of the other squadmates receive the same level of characterization, most of them get at least a few moments to feel like more than interchangeable backup units. Selphie is enthusiastic in every situation. She spends much of the first part of the game trying to single-handedly put together a Garden social event, a thread that culminates in an impromptu concert. Unless you pick the exact right instruments, this ends up being a giddy display of incompetence... which actually strikes me as the most fitting result.

Zell matches her energy, though for him it manifests not in social situations but physical aggression. His weapon of choice is his fists, and he will punch the air or random surfaces at wildly inappropriate moments. Lest he come across purely as comic relief, he does get a couple nice moments when his parents' home is occupied by enemy forces during the mid-game. Oddly, his personal hero is his grandfather, who fought in the last war and whom Zell respects as much for his judgment and restraint as for his fighting prowess... which, as Squall observes, makes Zell's grandfather pretty much the opposite of Zell himself.

Irvine is introduced as an arrogant, womanizing lout, a sniper who boasts of his prowess. When he hesitates to take a shot during his first assignment with the group, it seems like cowardice... until a later reveal that gives his hesitation added dimension. It's difficult to talk more about him without talking about that reveal. Suffice to say, there's more to him than his initial scenes suggest, and he actually ends up being a fairly likable character by the end.

The least interesting member of the group is Quistis Trepe, Squall's instructor who becomes his subordinate. She's the youngest teacher at the Garden. She's close in age to the students, and as a result has attracted a flock of both male and female admirers who call themselves "Trepies." Sadly, that's really all there is to the character, with her development basically stopping about midway through Disc One. Not coincidentally, she was the party member I used the least.

The junction system: Not nearly as complicated
as the tutorials make it seem.

THE JUNCTION SYSTEM - NOT AS COMPLICATED AS IT LOOKS:

The Final Fantasy series has long experimented with different systems for controlling skills and stats. Final Fantasy III introduced the job system, which was later refined in Final Fantasy V. Final Fantasy VII and its spinoffs had characters equip materia to determine what spells they could cast.

Final Fantasy VIII continues the series' experimentation, introducing the junction system. Unlike other games in the series, enemies level up with you - meaning that you can't just blast through tough bosses by grinding for XP. Instead, you need to improve your stats by junctioning Guardian Forces (summons) and also individual spells to boost either defensive or offensive stats.

The in-game tutorials make this look horribly complicated, particularly since they dump a lot of information on you pretty much all at once. Fear not: While the early tutorials resemble study material for a graduate level course, it's fairly simple at its core. For the early game, just make sure you equip GFs to all your active party members and pick your command skills under "Ability."

That alone will get you through Disc One and much of Disc Two, because most of the game is surprisingly low difficulty. By the time you run into enough of a challenge to seriously worry about GF abilities, elemental junctions, or anything else, you'll have had several hours to play with the various options. Just don't neglect doing some periodic trial-and-error with the junction menus, and you'll pick most of it by yourself with relatively few problems.

An early boss battle against the Guardian Force Ifrit.

GAMEPLAY:

Combat is similar overall to that of the past several main series outings. There are a couple of additional features worth mentioning, however. This game features no MP limitation on casting magic. Instead, you stock magic the same way you do items. When you cast, say, "Fire," you lose one of your stock of that spell. You can stock spells from draw points, but the most common resource is the enemies. Equip "Draw" as one of your command skills, and you can hoover up spell after spell. In encounters with enemies with particularly useful spells (i. e., "Aura" or "Curaga"), I would keep that enemy alive as long as possible until all my characters had stocked as many of the spell as they could.

The game utilizes both summons (GFs) and limit breaks. Summons are so overpowered in the early game that you'll be tempted to just spam them on every enemy. I would recommend not falling into this trap. By the endgame, limit breaks are far more useful, while most summons take too long to be worth the trouble. Upgrade your weapons at every opportunity. Squall's final weapon will, in a limit break, one-shot many bosses, never mind regular enemies.

Most of the game's combat is not difficult. There is, however, a difficulty spike at the start of Disc Four. When the game prompts you to save just before switching to Disc Four, DO NOT overwrite your last save from Disc Three! The boss fight that begins the final disc is much harder than anything up to this point; in fact, I'd rate it as harder than the actual final boss. Worse, the fight comes just after you've officially reached the Point of No Return. If you overwrote your final Disc Three save, you cannot leave the dungeon to grind, upgrade weapons, and come back.

Fortunately, I had a save file from only an hour or so before that point. When I realized that I was not ready for this boss, I was able to load up my previous save and grind/upgrade until I was ready. After that point, the rest of the game was smooth sailing. I will note, however, that the final form of the final boss has a staggering store of hit points. After dealing thousands of damage per turn with no apparent effect, I began to worry that the fight was glitched and that I'd have to reload it. There was no glitch - The final boss is just such a bullet sponge that it takes a very long time to kill her.

Laguna inadvertently inspires his crush, club
performer Julia, to write the game's theme song.

SOUNDTRACK:

The Final Fantasy series has consistently been noteworthy for its soundtracks, and this game is no exception. The music is varied and wonderful. The waltz for an early dance scene that sets up the relationship between Squall and Rinoa is a match for the visuals: graceful and playful at the same time. Later, when the action goes into space, a piece plays that's deliberately reminiscent of the classical music used in Kubrick's 2001. In the Laguna dreams/flashbacks, the OST takes on a more lighthearted tone, mirroring the comedic atmosphere of these bits. Laguna even gets his own battle theme, the ridiculously catchy The Man with a Machine Gun.

For the first time in the series, the game has an official pop song: Eyes on Me. In-game, it's a song written by Julia, the nightclub performer Laguna has a crush on. The lyrics are tailored to fit Laguna directly, and to also act as a counterpoint to Squall's emotional journey. It's performed by popular Hong Kong singer Faye Wong, and it is a lovely piece on its own - and a genuinely moving one in the context of the game's story.

The entire OST continues the series' developing complexity in its soundtracks. At this point, I don't know how much further the series can go in this respect without just making one of its entries a full-on musical.

The evil sorceress Edea, the game's villain -
though, of course, it's more complicated than that.

OTHER MUSINGS:

Something instantly apparent about Final Fantasy VIII is its visual style. Unlike Final Fantasy VII, which was initially designed with the Nintendo 64 in mind before moving to the PlayStation, this game was always intended for Sony's then-powerhouse game console. Gone are the blocky, vaguely Lego-looking people, and in their place are correctly proportioned character models that strongly resemble the same characters in cutscenes.

The cutscenes are longer and more frequent than in previous games, with highly detailed art and animation. An early dance sequence is particularly impressive. As Rinoa tugs Squall onto the dance floor, we see humor and mischief in her eyes and gestures, and we see him responding to her. Then they begin dancing... with Squall hopelessly clumsy at first.

If you've seen a fair amount of computer animation, then you know that clumsiness is very difficult to animate well. Even big-budget movies can struggle with animating convincing physical bits of business. This sequence pulls it off seamlessly, from Squall stumbling into other dancers to exchanges of dirty looks. While all this foreground business is going on, additional dancers remain visible in the background of the scene. The whole set piece is gorgeous and full of life. I'd say it stands up today, never mind how mind-blowing it must have been at the time.

Our first sight of Rinoa, waiting in a field of flowers.

OVERALL:

Final Fantasy VIII is one of the more divisive entries in the series. Contemporary reactions split between those who loved it and those who found it disappointing. While its reputation seems to have improved over time, even now Entries 6 - 8 seem to divide into: Final Fantasy VI as the artistic fan favorite; Final Fantasy VII as the mainstream hit; and Final Fantasy VIII as... well, the curate's egg, loved by some and loathed by others.

As is probably clear, I fall firmly into the "loved it" category. The visuals and the soundtrack help, certainly. Mainly, however, it comes down to the characters. By mid-game, they became real to me in the way that happens with very good movies or television series. I genuinely cared about what happened to Squall, Rinoa, and their friends - and heck, even to Seifer.

There are some moments of clunkiness or outright weirdness (one word: NORG!). Even so, I would have to rank this among my favorites of the series thus far.


Overall Rating: 9/10.

Previous Main Series Game: Final Fantasy VII
Next Main Series Game: Final Fantasy IX (not yet reviewed)

Previous Release: Final Fantasy Tactics (not yet reviewed)
Next Release: Final Fantasy IX (not yet reviewed)

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