I'm 37. When i was a kid i had a NES, a Genesis, Gameboy. But i was never into gaming. I got bored easily with plataforms and action games. In 1998, during summer vacation i went to my cousins house and he was playing FF7. Fighting the Emerald Weapon. Watching that fight hook me on the spot. Seeing Ultima, KotR, Bahamut Zero, Omnislash, i couldn't believe what my eyes were witnessing. I asked my mom for a PS1. When she finally could aford to buy me one FF8 just came out. And i got my PS1 with FF8 instead of 7. And since that day FF8 is my favorite video game of all time. Call it nostalgia or whatever, but i still lice that game to this day with the same passion. I know how much people trash on it but i must have played it to completion 15 times during my life. When i'm sad, when i'm bored, when i'm in a gaming slump i can always count on FF8 to get me out of it. Not only it is my favorite game but it also made me a fan of all kinds of JRPGs, to this day.
Ah, one of my fondest titles too. The tracks "The Extreme", "Movin'", "Compression of Time" and "Premonition" live rent free in my head. Also have fond memories of the Neoseeker FFVIII board, and the RP that we set up back in the day.
As a fellow teacher, I always play Balamb Garden and Breezy on a subtle low during workshops. Wouldnt it be nice to grab a beer at Fishermans Horizon over a game of triple triad after work. These places stay with us.
Life got in the way and I had to stop before finishing my teaching degree, but that is exactly what I hoped to do as well. You're a legend for it. I still go back to that soundtrack for so many of life's situations.
So glad to see love towards ff8 for once. It's like a meme to hate on it. Ff8 was my introduction to the series and rpgs as a whole. I was 9 or 10 when i watched a family friend play and he popped off a lionheart on a Behemoth. I was fascinated. Then my friend recommended ff7 to me and I recognized the series name from watching my other friends play 8. So I got 7 and 8 around the same time and fell in love with both. I never did beat 8 though unfortunately.
It was my very first JRPG too! And it was when I was 8 years old, what makes it craziest. I remember getting the other FFs was a quest on its own and I played them in such a bizarre order. When I finished with the PS1 FFs, I began my search for other similar games and thank god for that cause it made me find my very favorite JRPG (Valkyrie Profile), and many other amazing games (Xenogears, Star Ocean, Breath of Fire, Legend of Mana, Koudelka, and many others!)
This is a really cool idea for a review! Especially considering your thoughts from back then compared to now. Shame the remaster doesn't seem to live up to the original 😅
I love the story and all the characters. Yeah, I know Squall & Rinoa take lots of space in the plot and the other characters are less developed, but if you do all the side quests you can still appreciate the other characters. The nostalgic and the love atmosphere are amazing and you can feel the atmosphere if you're a teenager or if you're in your 30s... Best OST in FF, with 2 epic songs! Fantastic card game! And lots of other things to mention... but well you know better than me if you played it.
I’m really excited to watch. I’m currently playing FFIX (I have played the first 7 as of this summer) and decided to wait on VIII because it seems so convoluted. I still plan to play it this year but yeah I’m intimidated by it compared to the rest of the games.
Take a bit of time to learn how to Junction, and you'll be right. As you can see from the comments, loads of people have this as their number 1 FF game. You're likely to absolutely love it.
I LOVE FFVIII! It's always tied with VII as my favorite FF, and never understood the flack it got... At the time I was just blown away by the story, FMVs and overall feeling and don't recall any particular feelings about the battle system... it was just another puzzle to figure out to progress. Although we became more skeptical of war and the financial interests behind them with age, my brother and I were very into military stuff as kids... so at the time, the aesthetic of a military academy, going on missions, and interacting with cute girls was really an irresistible combination. (See also Full Metal Panic, which made us laugh so hard we had to pause to be able to breathe - but that's neither hear nor there.) I believe FFVIII was also the last FF to overlay gameplay on top of pre-rendered FMVs; and did it best - interactivity which I find sorely lacking in modern games. Also, I did know about low health and switching turns to activate Limit Breaks - It seems like a mechanic to me, as you are increasing risk and taking time in which you can take damage or fall behind as a fair tradeoff.
Thanks for the story! The mix of FMVs and character movement was amazing. I always loved the setting, even if a 17 leading an entire army to war is a bit strange, haha.
My school years! Exactly 21 years ago I played it Summer 2003 / finishing it December 2003! First time trying it was back in 1999 as my big brother had it and 7 at the time 😊🙌 Loved it a lot tbh
I was in the middle of a playthrough of the pc version of this game when this remaster released. The mods that I was running looked better than this version looked at that point. There are mods for the backgrounds so that it blends better with the character models
@@HellFireRPGs I think the older PC version had those, but don't quote me. It's been a few years since my last playthrough. Also, save yourself and use a mod to replace the midi soundtrack with mp3 quality audio lol
FF8 is my fav game. IMO the game's story has the best pacing of any RPG ever and the game-play seems to be designed around making sure the pacing is very good. I personally love this kind a of game provided the story is good enough to support it and FF8 defo does. It's probs why I like Metal Gear Solid more than Splinter Cell. I do also love the more gameplay focused RPGs too like Xenoblade Chronicles.
Hallo, greeting from Indonesia all,first am sorry if my english is not good or my memory is not accurate, please feel free to correct me if am wrong, don't mind, I appreciate it, thank you. This is my first JRpg that i see in my friends room, that brought me into unending journey of playing jrpg in Sony PlayStation console. First i thought it so cool to control more than one person, or three at pricisely, in FF VIII, then to move from two diffrent time in the game, from squall to his father, then fmv cutscene that killer at any time,first with gunblade fight scene,that end with squall scar,first meet Rinoa with sakura petal,ball dance squall and Rinoa at school with song "melody of life" if am not mistake,carnaval festival and many more ,is so memorable, unique battle system and equipment, with magic and no armor, school life at ballamb garden, summon squance that still rmembering, to mash button to get 255000 damage point in eden strongest summon,search and complete collect card battle,cactuar,tonberry,world map,outer space, story that layering and sad,mystery,amnesia, edea and witch ultimecia, and last but not least is secret battle, and its two not one, ultima and Omega weapon, yes you right its not as hard as fight ruby or emerald in sand or deep sea in ff vii( because i havent do that) but still it takes at least 1 hour battle with mental and physic drain, and its so fullfilling after your finish it,after that than Suikoden II came, then,legend of mana, legaia, dragoon, breath of fire III, IV,star ocean second story,3 tteot,chrono cross, trigger, grandia 1, 2,3,persona 2,vagrant story,Xenogears, xenosaga,wild arms 1,2-5, lunar,ys,dragon quest 7,valkyrie profile,dark cloud, radiata stories, rogue galaxy,etc, until trails of cold steel, from school back to school,i guest,what a good game.Thank you all, to reminancing a good memory.
Loved this game as a teen, especially Squall & Rinoa plot, used to be my favouirite jRPG, but it's been losing its flair with each replay. Last time I replayed it when a remaster came out. Have to admit I don't really like FFVIII game mechanics. Drawing magic is ridiculously tedious, even with a speed up feature. Junctioning magic to stats completely discourages using magic in battles. Alternate ways of getting magic spells from items and cards requires checking guides all the time, which isn't fun at all. Why even have a levelling system if the best experience with the game is to not level your characters? You can get overpowered with GF junctioning and get progressively weaker with levelling as enemies become more damage resistant and gain enormous amounts of HP while you're stuck with 9999 damage limit. Abusing multihit limit breaks helps, but sitting at low HP is annoying with main characters and impossible with side characters that you're forced to play as in many sections of the game. Constant GF swapping between characters upon party swaps is tiresome. Have to admit that I probably won't ever replay FFVIII again.
The enemy scaling was flawed and broke the game, junction or no junction. Enemies do not scale proportionally to your character so if you level up and gain +100hp, enemies will gain +1,000hp. So basically after 5 levels, you will have gained only +500hp while the enemy bosses will gain +5,000 more hp. This makes it impossible to defeat some bosses if you are over level 80 since they will have such a substantial amount of hp compared to if they were at even a few levels lower. This is why most people do not want to level up because the game punishes you for grinding, the complete opposite of other RPGs. When this game came out, it was this mechanic that was being talked about everywhere on the internet and gaming magazines.
Love VIII, hated Drawing though but yeh like u say many tricks later to reduce that. So lazy what they did with the Remaster though to the point I refuse to buy it lol. I think the older version looks better in most areas + I think you can mod it and AI upscale it
I was never a huge fan of this game. It was fun, but the plot especially the memory and time travel aspects never really meshed for me. But I think its biggest problem with popularity was coming right after FF7. Expectations were impossibly high for this game, so every fault was magnified. Had it come first, it might have been a different story. But at least the flack this one got gave us FF9.
Absolutely right with expectations. Chrono Trigger --> Chrono Cross is probably the best example of this. CC is an amazing game, but disappointed so many people who wanted another CT.
@@HellFireRPGs Same with this game, people didn't pay attention to or read interviews leading up to on the direction the game would go. They know CBU1 never does the same thing twice and thinking you'd get pretty much a sequel in approach and gameplay of VII was strange. Chrono Cross was rumored to have been sabotaged in a way to not be a sequel by the director, I think it had something to do with Final Fantasy. Even back then and being young, not seeing Toriyama's art direction or the original three minds behind it meant it wouldn't be the sequel people expected. For FFVIII just seeing the visuals and previews you could tell it wasn't going to be VII in the slightest. However, CBU1 had made their strong character writing into a trope somewhat or the expectation was of that and you can see the archetypes carry on through the series except with FFXI (of course) and FFXII. They still had the archetypes, but the entire cast wasn't going to get a relatively short arc compared to rest of game. If the focus was to make a love story, you have to dedicate even more time outside the main's development and we know they had development issues as with all FF. People would have been mad if they didn't do much/long enough arcs if they attempted it. Even so, everyone can tell you the personality, traits and moments with each character. Kitase understood conveying that. I was okay with the change in focus, as I think it would need to change genre so people wouldn't expect a follow up continuation that came before. My criticism is more they not only didn't do the JRPG standard party arc, but made a world that had so much mystery that the feeling of something missing was all the more ponente. I will say VIII makes more sense now compared to what FFVII has become, by a mile.
@@HellFireRPGs That's an interesting comparison. I remember I was in middle school/high school when Cross and 8 came out. People seemed to be upset with Cross (at least here in the US) mainly because it wasn't a true sequel to CT. More of a spiritual successor. Whereas, FF8 was disappointing because it didn't feel like an FF at the time. Unlike, Japan, we'd never seen FF do anything innovative like it had tried with FF2's saga system or FF3 and 5's job system. And if you really analyze it, the materia system in 7 was just an improved version of FF6's esper system. But FF8 was just a total departure from all we had known. And that made it hard to love at the time.
A lot of the things people hated about it were because it was so different from FF7 and fixed some of FF7's major issues (leveling, being overpowered by leveling early) Now that time has passed, I think these differences are actually what makes this game special. The leveling/junction systems are crazy but SO fun to manipulate and exploit.
I use to love FF 8 as a kid but after going back to play it, I came to the conclusion It was nostalgia that made me look back in it with fondness. You can't grind to overpower your opponents because they lvl up with you. The plot went legs up in the final act and so many other issues but its soundtrack is 🔥
The draw/junction system is not great.. I had few problems with because I didn't grind. Leveling up causes the game to become more difficult, while drawing everything you encounter is a tedious bore and exploiting the junction system makes anything the game throws you a negligible joke.
This is the ONLY Final Fantasy game I hated, playing it again I dislike it I do not think it deserves the hate it gets. Was nice to see it through the eyes of a fan
I can see why people love this game, but like with some movies i can't stand this one because it goes against so many things i like in jrpgs. You can make the game really easy by using a guide or weird experimentation with optional GFs it goes against my blind playthrough style, drawing it is maddening because you do get results from it, its just super boring. Having the enemies level with you makes it actually pointless to fight anything which is so stupid, you can run away from every single enemy and there is no punishment its so weird.
I hate to be Debbie downer but the love story annoyed me as it went against the betrayal that rinoa did to the main man multiple times. I am aware that the game just moves on to continue the story; but can we at least have some realism; there is no way on earth I would trust someone who constantly is controlled by someone else. So when they started to fall in love I lost interest in the game. I'm sure it is a good game but not for me.
This makes no sense, even if undestand in some level what you are trying to say. Like, Rinoa gets manipulated by sorceresses, and she is/becomes sorceress herself. This is a fantasy game. Dude.
@@SenseiThimii I am aware it's fantasy; just like lord of the rings is fantasy. The problem was the multiple betrayals didn't make sense to me how they could fall in love. It's just a weird thing that I think could have been done better.
@@davesworld1972 For sure there are many reasons why Squall should or not could fall for Rinoa. But there are some hints here and there if you follow different conversations thru and thru. Squall starts to undestand Rinoa better and see more layers. But best thing about crushes are that they do not need to have ”reasons”. It usually just happens, even in real life. These two are also pretty much teenagers, so overall, I do not fault the realism of this development too much. Even tho there are flaws, even I acknowledge that.
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I'm 37. When i was a kid i had a NES, a Genesis, Gameboy. But i was never into gaming. I got bored easily with plataforms and action games. In 1998, during summer vacation i went to my cousins house and he was playing FF7. Fighting the Emerald Weapon. Watching that fight hook me on the spot. Seeing Ultima, KotR, Bahamut Zero, Omnislash, i couldn't believe what my eyes were witnessing. I asked my mom for a PS1. When she finally could aford to buy me one FF8 just came out. And i got my PS1 with FF8 instead of 7. And since that day FF8 is my favorite video game of all time. Call it nostalgia or whatever, but i still lice that game to this day with the same passion. I know how much people trash on it but i must have played it to completion 15 times during my life. When i'm sad, when i'm bored, when i'm in a gaming slump i can always count on FF8 to get me out of it.
Not only it is my favorite game but it also made me a fan of all kinds of JRPGs, to this day.
Haha, thanks for the comment. That is VERY similar to my story.
Nice comment mate😊👊
Always love to see gaming channel give love to this title. Nice work, as always!
Thanks, mate!
It's awesome to revisit and review your gateway to JRPGs! Well done!
Thanks mate!
Ah, one of my fondest titles too.
The tracks "The Extreme", "Movin'", "Compression of Time" and "Premonition" live rent free in my head.
Also have fond memories of the Neoseeker FFVIII board, and the RP that we set up back in the day.
So many good tracks. The FF8 and Oceania forums were easily my two favourite. So many fond memories there.
As a fellow teacher, I always play Balamb Garden and Breezy on a subtle low during workshops. Wouldnt it be nice to grab a beer at Fishermans Horizon over a game of triple triad after work. These places stay with us.
What a legend! I should get these tunes going during class. Kids don't know what they're missing.
Life got in the way and I had to stop before finishing my teaching degree, but that is exactly what I hoped to do as well. You're a legend for it. I still go back to that soundtrack for so many of life's situations.
Great review! I really need to try and beat this one! Been bugging me for years!
FF8 is also my first jrpg, it's a masterpiece and i will forever love it, this game is pure art ❤
Yeah, brings back so many memories, too.
Man I just want to say I love this channel. So much jrpg goodness.
Thanks so much!
me too at grade 5 11 years old 1999, i learned alot of vocabulary because of this game.
It helped my reading, too! I didn't like books, but LOVED reading in my JRPGs.
So glad to see love towards ff8 for once. It's like a meme to hate on it. Ff8 was my introduction to the series and rpgs as a whole. I was 9 or 10 when i watched a family friend play and he popped off a lionheart on a Behemoth. I was fascinated. Then my friend recommended ff7 to me and I recognized the series name from watching my other friends play 8. So I got 7 and 8 around the same time and fell in love with both. I never did beat 8 though unfortunately.
Ah man! That was a long time ago. Now is a great time to finally finish it, haha.
Also my first RPG and one of my favorites to this day. I love this game!
It's so good!
This was the first rpg I ever owned holds a special place in my heart despite everyone's hate 😂
There's a lot of love there, too! People just seem very vocal about this one.
It was my very first JRPG too! And it was when I was 8 years old, what makes it craziest. I remember getting the other FFs was a quest on its own and I played them in such a bizarre order. When I finished with the PS1 FFs, I began my search for other similar games and thank god for that cause it made me find my very favorite JRPG (Valkyrie Profile), and many other amazing games (Xenogears, Star Ocean, Breath of Fire, Legend of Mana, Koudelka, and many others!)
The PS1 was such an amazing console for JRPGs. Many of those games are still in my top 10 today.
This is a really cool idea for a review! Especially considering your thoughts from back then compared to now. Shame the remaster doesn't seem to live up to the original 😅
Thanks! Yeah, they had the perfect chance to make the game better, but blew it :(
I love the story and all the characters.
Yeah, I know Squall & Rinoa take lots of space in the plot and the other characters are less developed, but if you do all the side quests you can still appreciate the other characters.
The nostalgic and the love atmosphere are amazing and you can feel the atmosphere if you're a teenager or if you're in your 30s...
Best OST in FF, with 2 epic songs!
Fantastic card game!
And lots of other things to mention... but well you know better than me if you played it.
What are your 2 epic songs?
@@HellFireRPGs eyes on me and liberi fatali
I’m really excited to watch. I’m currently playing FFIX (I have played the first 7 as of this summer) and decided to wait on VIII because it seems so convoluted. I still plan to play it this year but yeah I’m intimidated by it compared to the rest of the games.
Take a bit of time to learn how to Junction, and you'll be right. As you can see from the comments, loads of people have this as their number 1 FF game. You're likely to absolutely love it.
I LOVE FFVIII! It's always tied with VII as my favorite FF, and never understood the flack it got... At the time I was just blown away by the story, FMVs and overall feeling and don't recall any particular feelings about the battle system... it was just another puzzle to figure out to progress. Although we became more skeptical of war and the financial interests behind them with age, my brother and I were very into military stuff as kids... so at the time, the aesthetic of a military academy, going on missions, and interacting with cute girls was really an irresistible combination. (See also Full Metal Panic, which made us laugh so hard we had to pause to be able to breathe - but that's neither hear nor there.) I believe FFVIII was also the last FF to overlay gameplay on top of pre-rendered FMVs; and did it best - interactivity which I find sorely lacking in modern games. Also, I did know about low health and switching turns to activate Limit Breaks - It seems like a mechanic to me, as you are increasing risk and taking time in which you can take damage or fall behind as a fair tradeoff.
Thanks for the story! The mix of FMVs and character movement was amazing. I always loved the setting, even if a 17 leading an entire army to war is a bit strange, haha.
FF VIII was my first Final Fantasy game and still one of my favourites.
It was the perfect place to start for me!
👏👏👏👏 good shit also playing it on switch is sacrilegious 🤭😂
Agreed, haha.
My school years! Exactly 21 years ago I played it Summer 2003 / finishing it December 2003! First time trying it was back in 1999 as my big brother had it and 7 at the time 😊🙌 Loved it a lot tbh
Love it! Long live FF8!
I was in the middle of a playthrough of the pc version of this game when this remaster released. The mods that I was running looked better than this version looked at that point. There are mods for the backgrounds so that it blends better with the character models
If I played the game again, I would definitely consider the mods. However, I would miss the 3x speed and no encounter toggle.
@@HellFireRPGs I think the older PC version had those, but don't quote me. It's been a few years since my last playthrough. Also, save yourself and use a mod to replace the midi soundtrack with mp3 quality audio lol
Always loved this game despite the hit and miss of the junction system. Although you sell it really well.
FF8 is my fav game. IMO the game's story has the best pacing of any RPG ever and the game-play seems to be designed around making sure the pacing is very good. I personally love this kind a of game provided the story is good enough to support it and FF8 defo does. It's probs why I like Metal Gear Solid more than Splinter Cell. I do also love the more gameplay focused RPGs too like Xenoblade Chronicles.
Those cutscenes man.
My favorite too, as you and I have discussed over the years. Completely biased 10/10 from me.
It's so amazing! My score rounds up to a 10!
Hallo, greeting from Indonesia all,first am sorry if my english is not good or my memory is not accurate, please feel free to correct me if am wrong, don't mind, I appreciate it, thank you.
This is my first JRpg that i see in my friends room, that brought me into unending journey of playing jrpg in Sony PlayStation console.
First i thought it so cool to control more than one person, or three at pricisely, in FF VIII, then to move from two diffrent time in the game, from squall to his father, then fmv cutscene that killer at any time,first with gunblade fight scene,that end with squall scar,first meet Rinoa with sakura petal,ball dance squall and Rinoa at school with song "melody of life" if am not mistake,carnaval festival and many more ,is so memorable, unique battle system and equipment, with magic and no armor, school life at ballamb garden, summon squance that still rmembering, to mash button to get 255000 damage point in eden strongest summon,search and complete collect card battle,cactuar,tonberry,world map,outer space, story that layering and sad,mystery,amnesia, edea and witch ultimecia, and last but not least is secret battle, and its two not one, ultima and Omega weapon, yes you right its not as hard as fight ruby or emerald in sand or deep sea in ff vii( because i havent do that) but still it takes at least 1 hour battle with mental and physic drain, and its so fullfilling after your finish it,after that than Suikoden II came, then,legend of mana, legaia, dragoon, breath of fire III, IV,star ocean second story,3 tteot,chrono cross, trigger, grandia 1, 2,3,persona 2,vagrant story,Xenogears, xenosaga,wild arms 1,2-5, lunar,ys,dragon quest 7,valkyrie profile,dark cloud, radiata stories, rogue galaxy,etc, until trails of cold steel, from school back to school,i guest,what a good game.Thank you all, to reminancing a good memory.
Oh, i am sorry, the song is eyes on me, by faye wong, melody of life is FF IX song
Breath of Fire 3 was my first jrpg, FF8 was my second.
And they're my top two favorites
What a great way to start things off!
I’m a simple guy, I see a FFVIII video and I like. So take a like!
See comment. Like comment!
First JRPG I played was the original Super Mario RPG, but I didn't get hooked on JRPGs on FF7
FINAL F'N FANTASY VIII *in the style of Catalina Wine Mixer*
Are you saying you're going to make a song?
I’m hoping to play this game this year probably after XenoGears or FFVI, I’m be playing this game on Steam with Mods.
Going back to the classics! Great to hear.
Also, Man with the Machine Gun.
my all time fav FF, wished we got a remake instead of a poor remaster
There's still time!
Mine too. I will watch your video, i am a big sucker for FFVIII 😂
When I first got to play FFVIII I thought it was a sequel to FFVII! 😂
this was my first RPG too 😭
Lots of people saying it's the first! Great place to start!
Loved this game as a teen, especially Squall & Rinoa plot, used to be my favouirite jRPG, but it's been losing its flair with each replay. Last time I replayed it when a remaster came out. Have to admit I don't really like FFVIII game mechanics. Drawing magic is ridiculously tedious, even with a speed up feature. Junctioning magic to stats completely discourages using magic in battles. Alternate ways of getting magic spells from items and cards requires checking guides all the time, which isn't fun at all. Why even have a levelling system if the best experience with the game is to not level your characters? You can get overpowered with GF junctioning and get progressively weaker with levelling as enemies become more damage resistant and gain enormous amounts of HP while you're stuck with 9999 damage limit. Abusing multihit limit breaks helps, but sitting at low HP is annoying with main characters and impossible with side characters that you're forced to play as in many sections of the game. Constant GF swapping between characters upon party swaps is tiresome. Have to admit that I probably won't ever replay FFVIII again.
This game need a remake
The enemy scaling was flawed and broke the game, junction or no junction. Enemies do not scale proportionally to your character so if you level up and gain +100hp, enemies will gain +1,000hp. So basically after 5 levels, you will have gained only +500hp while the enemy bosses will gain +5,000 more hp. This makes it impossible to defeat some bosses if you are over level 80 since they will have such a substantial amount of hp compared to if they were at even a few levels lower. This is why most people do not want to level up because the game punishes you for grinding, the complete opposite of other RPGs. When this game came out, it was this mechanic that was being talked about everywhere on the internet and gaming magazines.
Yeah? Cheers for the input. My experiece has been the exact opposite. More leveling/junctioning makes the game so much easier.
Love VIII, hated Drawing though but yeh like u say many tricks later to reduce that. So lazy what they did with the Remaster though to the point I refuse to buy it lol. I think the older version looks better in most areas + I think you can mod it and AI upscale it
Yeah I agree. Hopefully a complete remake will be my next play through.
I was never a huge fan of this game. It was fun, but the plot especially the memory and time travel aspects never really meshed for me. But I think its biggest problem with popularity was coming right after FF7. Expectations were impossibly high for this game, so every fault was magnified. Had it come first, it might have been a different story. But at least the flack this one got gave us FF9.
The flack had nothing to do with FFIX. Sakaguchi was going to make his own game while Kitase did his own.
Absolutely right with expectations. Chrono Trigger --> Chrono Cross is probably the best example of this. CC is an amazing game, but disappointed so many people who wanted another CT.
@@HellFireRPGs Same with this game, people didn't pay attention to or read interviews leading up to on the direction the game would go. They know CBU1 never does the same thing twice and thinking you'd get pretty much a sequel in approach and gameplay of VII was strange. Chrono Cross was rumored to have been sabotaged in a way to not be a sequel by the director, I think it had something to do with Final Fantasy.
Even back then and being young, not seeing Toriyama's art direction or the original three minds behind it meant it wouldn't be the sequel people expected.
For FFVIII just seeing the visuals and previews you could tell it wasn't going to be VII in the slightest. However, CBU1 had made their strong character writing into a trope somewhat or the expectation was of that and you can see the archetypes carry on through the series except with FFXI (of course) and FFXII. They still had the archetypes, but the entire cast wasn't going to get a relatively short arc compared to rest of game. If the focus was to make a love story, you have to dedicate even more time outside the main's development and we know they had development issues as with all FF. People would have been mad if they didn't do much/long enough arcs if they attempted it. Even so, everyone can tell you the personality, traits and moments with each character. Kitase understood conveying that.
I was okay with the change in focus, as I think it would need to change genre so people wouldn't expect a follow up continuation that came before. My criticism is more they not only didn't do the JRPG standard party arc, but made a world that had so much mystery that the feeling of something missing was all the more ponente. I will say VIII makes more sense now compared to what FFVII has become, by a mile.
@@HellFireRPGs That's an interesting comparison. I remember I was in middle school/high school when Cross and 8 came out. People seemed to be upset with Cross (at least here in the US) mainly because it wasn't a true sequel to CT. More of a spiritual successor. Whereas, FF8 was disappointing because it didn't feel like an FF at the time. Unlike, Japan, we'd never seen FF do anything innovative like it had tried with FF2's saga system or FF3 and 5's job system. And if you really analyze it, the materia system in 7 was just an improved version of FF6's esper system. But FF8 was just a total departure from all we had known. And that made it hard to love at the time.
A lot of the things people hated about it were because it was so different from FF7 and fixed some of FF7's major issues (leveling, being overpowered by leveling early)
Now that time has passed, I think these differences are actually what makes this game special. The leveling/junction systems are crazy but SO fun to manipulate and exploit.
All I remember from this game is spam draw, spam limit breaks and play triple triad.
I use to love FF 8 as a kid but after going back to play it, I came to the conclusion It was nostalgia that made me look back in it with fondness. You can't grind to overpower your opponents because they lvl up with you. The plot went legs up in the final act and so many other issues but its soundtrack is 🔥
The draw/junction system is not great.. I had few problems with because I didn't grind. Leveling up causes the game to become more difficult, while drawing everything you encounter is a tedious bore and exploiting the junction system makes anything the game throws you a negligible joke.
FF8 is a hot mess, but with a capital "HOT"
@@talison461 not even remotely... are you ok?
This is the ONLY Final Fantasy game I hated, playing it again I dislike it I do not think it deserves the hate it gets. Was nice to see it through the eyes of a fan
Definitely not for everyone. I'm making a guess that most people who don't like it played FF7 first.
@@HellFireRPGs That was the case in my case I played 6 then 7 then 8
I can see why people love this game, but like with some movies i can't stand this one because it goes against so many things i like in jrpgs.
You can make the game really easy by using a guide or weird experimentation with optional GFs it goes against my blind playthrough style, drawing it is maddening because you do get results from it, its just super boring. Having the enemies level with you makes it actually pointless to fight anything which is so stupid, you can run away from every single enemy and there is no punishment its so weird.
You can be under-leveled, but your strength comes from GF abilities, and to learn these, you need AP, which you obtain through fighting.
I hate to be Debbie downer but the love story annoyed me as it went against the betrayal that rinoa did to the main man multiple times. I am aware that the game just moves on to continue the story; but can we at least have some realism; there is no way on earth I would trust someone who constantly is controlled by someone else. So when they started to fall in love I lost interest in the game. I'm sure it is a good game but not for me.
I have no idea what you are talking about. What part of the story are you even referring to?
This makes no sense, even if undestand in some level what you are trying to say. Like, Rinoa gets manipulated by sorceresses, and she is/becomes sorceress herself. This is a fantasy game. Dude.
@@SenseiThimii I am aware it's fantasy; just like lord of the rings is fantasy. The problem was the multiple betrayals didn't make sense to me how they could fall in love. It's just a weird thing that I think could have been done better.
@@davesworld1972 For sure there are many reasons why Squall should or not could fall for Rinoa. But there are some hints here and there if you follow different conversations thru and thru. Squall starts to undestand Rinoa better and see more layers.
But best thing about crushes are that they do not need to have ”reasons”. It usually just happens, even in real life. These two are also pretty much teenagers, so overall, I do not fault the realism of this development too much. Even tho there are flaws, even I acknowledge that.
@@SenseiThimii Makes sense now; I was in my late twenties when I played it.
Broken game!
skill issue
@@funicon3689 This game is ridiculously easy!
Absolutely broken if you know how to Junction. Most first time players wouldn't, though.
@@HellFireRPGs Exactly.