To give a little context about how deep in my brain this game is, I can't hear the un-remixed stock boss battle music without expecting to hear the draw sound effect at regular intervals. Once you know who/what/where/when of the system, boss battles basically never take any time, unless you're drawing full stocks of a new spell.
While a lot of people say FF8 has 'interesting ideas, but it needed less interesting ideas' I think it's typically a bit harsh, because imagine if the system was the other way.
What if the only reliable way to get money was to literally walk around in circles, and you actually needed that money for gear upgrades? It may not be high praise to say 'this janky system basically cancels out this other janky system so they both don't matter' but I think we've all played games where they changed one thing out of a standard design, and ran right into some major problems.
It's also the only FF game that flat out lets you remove random encounters so easily. Hidden behind a GF ability sure, but you get it remarkably early. Being able to decide 'I just want to focus on the story actually' or 'Let me grind a bit' as a player choice makes quite a lot of other issues with the battle system bearable, you don't actually have to fight the same monster 20 times if you're a bit lost and are double checking things. And because it's level scaling, you're not setting yourself up to be completely screwed later like if you run away from every fight in previous FFs.
To put it simply, the first disk of Xenogears is a great mecha/hybrid JRPG with a gripping story. The second half is... a massive disappointment and rushes through several plot points because they ran out of budget.
The first disc is also some absurd 40+ hours long. By the time you get to the end of disc 1, it feels like you've already played an entire two-disc game, if not more.
The end of Final Fantasy 8. Here we are. What a ride it's been. I have...[looks at post] a lot more thoughts than I expected.
When the LP picked up this game I commented: "Where FF6 and FF7 were both unambiguously massive, broad hits, FF8 was at one time the most hated numbered Final Fantasy title - although even that is harsher than I think it deserves. Rather, FF8 is one of those games that, in my experience, is either loved or hated. I know some people who absolutely adore this game. I know some people who loathe it. I'm in the latter camp. "Water off a duck's back" is the proverbial phrase, as every part of FF8 just rolls off me. The system, the story, the people..."
Coming back to this game 20 years later with fresh eyes has been an unexpected experience. For the first time in this thread I feel like my opinions on a game have changed. My relationship with the game has changed.
...I still don't like it.
Yeah. I don't want to lead people on. My opinion on FF8 is still that it's a bad game, designed badly, with the difference being that I want to give credit where I feel it's due instead of lazily writing the whole thing off as garbage. So, how did we get here? Well, I think if one wants to examine FF8 there's no better place to start than the characters.
Squall - FF8's unambiguous win. My opinion on Squall has 100% reversed from where it used to be. He's exactly the character this story needed to tell itself, moody and introverted and constantly wrestling his own thoughts into line. He's a kid with far too much placed on his shoulders, and he acts like it. The dork. Genuinely one of the best realized characters in the franchise. My entry on Squall is short but that's because I can't really say much that Omicron didn't already say during the LP. I'm sorry 18-year-old me hated you, dude, you didn't deserve it.
Rinoa - Oof. Coming down from the lofty heights of Squall's writing, we have his love interest. It's not that Rinoa is a bad character - far from it. She's a bit like a fusion of the Skywalker twins, combining Leia's rebellious spunk with Luke's fear of falling to the darkside. I just wish the game would stop being so fucking passive-aggressive towards her. Rinoa's arc is brutalized by some of the worst decisions in the game's production. She gets damseled over and over again. You can miss her scenes at Balamb Garden. You can miss her heart-to-heart with Squall at Fisherman's Horizon. Her big damn anime hero come-together speech gets upstaged by the orphanage reveal. She spends almost all of disc 3 unconscious. It's possible to spend disc 1 telling Rinoa to piss off, miss her significant disc 2 content, literally carry her through disc 3, and then be blindsided by Squall's sudden infatuation when he hurls himself out an airlock. My god. My god. The treatment of Rinoa in this game is unforgivable, and that's without getting into the way she gets damseled over and over again (HE GRABS HER OFFSCREEN?!). What is there is good, and even sweet- like the scene in the airship cockpit, and the very end of the game, but FF8 drops the ball hard on getting there.
Then there's the rest of the SeeD Squad. The rest of FF8's cast don't get the same depth of characterization, which is not surprising since Squall and Rinoa are our romantic leads and would naturally get the most attention, but I do feel like their own little narratives just sort of dried up as time went on. Quistis is lonely and overburdened...and being around her friends, being the nominal team mom instead of a superior just kinda fixes her. Irvine has confidence issues...and then being reunited with his childhood friends fixes him. Selphie...actually Selphie is fine, no notes. No cornfield for me today.
And then there's Zell. Zell is another piece of FF8 I hated when I was younger; he was obnoxious and annoying. And much like Squall, I've swung 180 on Zell because now I'm irritated that this game never quite seems to give him his due. And it can be summed up with one thing:
Zell never gets his hoverboard back.
I'm not joking - the hoverboard is a great avatar for how Zell is just kind of left abandoned by the narrative after the prison break. He settles into the role of Squall's nominal wingman with the ring caper and serves as something of a #2 who leads the squad when Squall's not around...but he never gets to talk to his parents about his adoption. He never really gets to come into his own, to be the Barret to Squall's Cloud; as the game designates Zell the comic relief and slams him into the closet over and over. And also what the hell guys, FF7 famously had the snowboarding minigame, FF8 having a HOVERboarding minigame would've been a fucking layup how do you not cross the T on this.
...
Despite all that, one of the strong points of the Garden Gang is...the bantz. Despite the artificiality of the orphanage reveal, the Balamb Buddies do a lot to push the franchise's found family motif. They like each other, even if they drive one another crazy sometimes. It's a shame they are tied to the orphanage reveal, which makes the lot of them, as Omicron hilariously described, "a variation on a kinda bougie white college kid with only moderately eccentric fashion tastes" which leaves the FF8 cast one of the samiest in the series. Most of the potshots taken at one another, especially Squall, are genuinely funny, and the moments when they support one another are genuinely heartwarming.
As for the rest of the cast...they're fine. As characters, they mostly do what they need to do. Laguna and Friends in Laguna's Big Unreasonable Adventure is a fun diversion as you essentially play through a different Final Fantasy game that happened 20 years ago. Cid being the wise mentor without so much the wise before turning out to be a wife guy on a level you can't even imagine is hilarious. Seifer and his crew are memorable rivals...although I'm not sure how I feel about Seifer's place in the story. I mean, he's on the cover of the game with Squall and Rinoa, and the opening cutscene is him and Squall getting carried away in a practice fight to the point they give each other matching facial scars. And Seifer does do the anime rival thing of popping up throughout the story to harass the good guys...it just feels like his arc runs out of steam long before his appearance at the end of disc 3, in no small part due to how disc 3 flips the narrative about Edea and changes the entire game by relocating to Esthar. And that does feel kind of deliberate, in that Seifer's dream of being a sorceress knight ended up suborning him to the narrative, but his lack of resolution, good or bad, outside the ending cutscene is unsatisfying.
So...I guess if I'm saying Seifer is doomed by the narrative, it's time to shift from characters to story.
...
FF8's story is a fucking mess.
The observation Omicron made - how once the orphanage reveal is done, the concern of GFs erasing memories is completely dropped - knocked the wind out of me, because it's absolutely true. A massive reveal about the character cast pivots on the loss of memory, and then the cause is itself memory-holed in some kind of double reverse meta-irony. The GFs themselves are characters integrated into the story...in a couple parts of disc 1 where Ifrit gets a line and the Brothers get some banter, after which they are as good as magic batteries that happen to look like creatures. It's a truly gigantic missed opportunity because the few moments where GFs take center stage are among the best in the game - not least the maximum hype of the Odin-Seifer-Gilgamesh double reversal, or the creepy vibes of Bahamut and Eden and the Research Center, or the first time summoning FUCKIN DOOMTRAAAIIIIN
I think the orphanage reveal also undercuts another of FF8's attempted themes, that being "battle high-school isn't all it's cracked up to be." FF8 attempts to be real with how being SeeDs has thrust responsibility and violence into the lives of our squad of teenages, but it's never willing to go full real. If anything it ends up inadvertently going the opposite - SeeD and Balamb Garden become strengths, pillars that the squad can lean on for assistance, while their trauma is recategorized under the nebulous memory loss and the orphanage rugyank. You could take our main characters and transport them to another high school game, like say for example, Persona with very little editing. FF8 verges on nearly saying "PMCs are good actually as long as the right people are in charge" although that's a rather bad faith reading of the ending.
The orphanage reveal further undercuts several of the character arcs I mentioned above. Especially Irvine - our resident gunslinger is supposed to have confidence issues he covers up with flirtatiousness and cocky attitude, and the scene where Squall coaches him through taking the shot is really good. "I can't do it. I always freeze up." But then no, it turns out he froze up because he was aiming at his mom, and Irvine spends the rest of the game flirting and wingmanning for Selphie. Quistis' confidence issues? Eh, she's fine. Zell's family and his own growth as a person? lol. lmao, even. Once the orphanage reveal is done, you could almost compress everyone but Squall & Rinoa into The Third Character and lose very little of the narrative, apart from the bantz.
The setting pivots around the legend of how a god manifests his power in certain women as revenge on humankind, but the god doesn't matter, and the persecution of sorceresses doesn't matter because its never lingered on. The motivation of our main villain is arguably tied up in said hatred, but it's also tied up her own damn time loop where she creates the enemy that will one day hunt her, and FF8 barely touches on the treatment of other such sorceresses. In fact, the setting flips back and forth as to what people do with sorceresses - are they exalted queens protected by loyal knights in a chivalrous courtly romance? Or are they terrifying figures carrying the power of a dead god to warp reality?
Like Adel. Jesus Christmas - Adel, my big buff beautiful butch god-queen, this game does you so dirty. Adel absolutely and unquestionably has the chops to be the game's villain. The entire plot point about her psychic screams drowning the world's wireless communication is on par with some of the franchise's most batshit villainy like "local Emperor too angry to die, conquers Hell instead" or "we crammed this tree so full of evil it wants to kill everything ever." Her villainy informs so much of the cast and world and she ends up being nothing! We don't even get to exchange one-liners with her; Adel fucking deserves to break off a pipe in Lunatic Pandora and bash Squall over the head with it while saying "let off some steam, Leonhart."
And speaking of Adel, we have to return to the previously mentioned grabbing of Rinoa, offscreen. Apart from a truly absurd damseling of the character, such a moment really speaks to an overlooked gap in the writing. Something happened here - things were deleted, changed in the storyboards - because something that absurd that doesn't just happen by accident. Some sequence of events that was supposed to play out between the end of disc 3 and beginning of 4 was dropped leaving us with a sudden "Seifer runs off screen and grabs Rinoa (and if she's in the party, Rinoa also just runs offscreen to be grabbed." If I had to guess, something was changed in the switch from moon to time compression during the work to finish FF8 and there was no time to fix the gap.
And shit. Speaking of the moon. The moon in FF8 is a giant angry orb of I WANT TO HURT YOU. I WANT TO CAUSE YOU AS MUCH PAIN AS POSSIBLE. And it's nothing. The moon literally hangs over the narrative - we see it ominously reflected in the ocean before the attack on Dollet right from the beginning. And it's nothing. The Lunar Cry is one of the game's biggest setpieces, a jaw-droppingly gorgeous piece of nightmare animation. And it's nothing. In a game where NPCs will react to the most unexpected things, the moon drops a flood of monsters and everyone outside Esthar goes "I got work tomorrow." I previously stated that I felt like I kind of had to respect the audacity of FF8 to turn the moon into a nightmare realm and then rugyank the player back to earth, but over the course of the LP putting together the dots of Artemisia's original name and the legend of Hyne, the more I feel I want to retract that because it's increasingly clear that the moon was supposed to be endgame and they replaced it with time compression instead.
...but. It's not all bad. One thing I do want to give credit for is that FF8 really does wonders with its modern-magitek setting. Escaping from the magitek spider and watching Quistis rip through it with a minigun turned me hetero. Watching Squall tear through traffic in a stolen Chevy only to get speared through the heart is an insane way to end disc 1. Missiles with junctioned monster brains. The way Balamb Garden lifts up out of the ground to become a giant mobile fortress. Galbadian troops on jetbikes. The entire Lunar Base sequence. The imagery of the Lunar Cry. Plus? Everything around Laguna is genuinely funny and charming. Yeah. There's good stuff in this game. There's great stuff!
And since it is a game, let's move on to game design.
FF8's system is custom designed to piss me off. At best it's like a puzzle, experimenting with how the pieces fit together and being rewarded with enormous power. At worst it's like a minimum wage job grinding for hours where you have to read instructions left by someone who doesn't quite speak your language.
It doesn't help that junctions have the worst story integration by far. I'm sorry but I can't get over this - Quistis literally tells Squall to go into the [Menu] and equip junctions and how does this work. Do SeeD soldiers literally implant magic crystals into their body a la Advent Children's interpretation of materia? Do they refresh them at aether springs and magic wells, called "draw points?" I don't fucking know, just go into the fucking menu and fucking junction them, you fucking nerd. Contrast it with materia, with magicite, with the job stones - it's so nothing.
The whole shebang of the junctions, the draw system, the refine system, etc, I don't think it couldn't work but FF8's execution of the idea is mildly interesting for a couple hours and then repetitive and obnoxious thereafter. I make no bones about it - I finished FF8 more because of sunk-cost fallacy than because I was enjoying it, and while my feelings on the characters have come around in some ways, my impression of the game itself has just been more and more validated watching Omicron repeatedly run afoul of the myriad ways FF8 can abruptly shove you into a ditch, from the removal of junctions when the party changes to the hidden content to the fucking level-up enemies.
The one thing that comes out of FF8's gameplay clean is the game of triple triad. As a minigame in and of itself, regardless of its knock-on effects in the rest of gameplay? Pristine. Well, mostly. The way people can change rules is kind of annoying, but eh. That's nitpicking. I've even gotten into playing it in FF14.
The game is very pretty, though. The design of the world and the monsters and GFs is really creative and well executed, not least of all FUCKIN DOOMTRAAAAIIIIN.
And the soundtrack is great, natch.
...
So that's Final Fantasy 8. It shot for the moon. And then changed its mind, turned around and slammed back down to earth at Mach 8.
...
Which. I guess. Leaves us with just one thing. One piece of the FF8 legacy to linger on.
Earnestly this update has been a delight because when I was younger NORG was rather meaningless to me but rereading this as a dude in his middle age I think this guy is hilarious.
He's a fat dude (+1) secretly a monster among humans (+1) hanging out in his hidden underground lair (+1) pulling the strings clandestinely (+1) and ultimately fights you from his comfy chair-pod (+1). And as a bonus he works in real estate. (+1)
He's basically the FF8 version of the Shadow Broker.
biggest he just like me fr fr energy in the entire series BUJURURURURURU
Can I just say I love that you found NORG so hilariously entertaining that you're still cracking jokes about his silly text accent all these updates later? He's such a stupidly memorable villain for a guy with ten minutes of screentime what with being Jeff Bezos meets Jabba the Hutt and talks exclusively through discount Microsoft Sam and Google Translate.
isn't it kinda fucked up that these are children being raised and used as soldiers? And say, isn't there quite an unusual number of orphans among them? And isn't it suspicious how the faculty keeps telling you not to worry about rumors regarding the side-effects of the powerful spirits you're learning to bind to yourselves? But at the same time, look at this prom ball! This cool uniform! Wouldn't you want to study at Balamb Garden? Isn't Cid almost like a father figure, someone you want to like and trust?
And then, as the game progresses, it eventually turns out that… Yes, Cid is in fact a literal father figure that everyone is justified in liking and trusting. The child soldier mercenaries had a true purpose and that purpose wasn't actually sinister but unambiguously positive (protecting the world from the apocalyptic threat of the final witch).
You know funny thought, but a lot of the Cids have been involved in some degree of moral ambiguity that the plots of the games just... gloss over? FFIV Cid was building airships for the Kingdom of Baron as they attempted a world-dominating regime, FFV Cid uhhh made the Crystal Amplification Devices (but granted feels super guilty about it by the time you meet him), FFVI Cid is Literally Doctor Mengele and it's kinda nuts in retrospect that the plot feels like it forgives him entirely, FFVII Cid... bit of a stretch but he is a Shinra man, and if they'd agreed to reinstate the rocket program he 100% wouldn't have helped the party (also whatever the hell his relationship with Shera is)...
And now we got FFVIII Cid, creator of a system of schools and headmaster of one that are dedicated to raising child soldiers into superweapons with memory-erasing magical powers latched on to their brains. Which... somehow all is actually fine. Kinda disappointing, frankly.
Until the end of the game, General Caraway remains in his house, answering the same three questions you can ask him and playing cards with you if you want, and he never has any new dialogue with Rinoa ever again. Is the threat of Galbadian imperialism even solved? Now that Seifer and Ultimecia are gone, will pacifists somehow end up in charge? Who knows! The game clearly doesn't care about that.
Hah I didn't even think about it but basically nothing has been done about Galbadia at the end, there's absolutely nothing stopping Yet Another Tinpot Dictator from taking control and driving their military forward for yet more invading.
As I was saying, I could spend this entire post going through the game in sequence to find all the ways it doesn't work. Instead, I'll say this: The central arc of Final Fantasy VIII, that being the romance between Squall and Rinoa, is actually the best romance Final Fantasy has ever done, and it works completely, to the point that I barely even noticed how much it relied on the Damsel in Distress angle with multiple scenes of a hapless Rinoa needing Squall to save her, because their relationship is genuinely compelling. This is where FF8 shines: In character work, in dialogue, in relationships. Laguna's entire plotline is about confronting Squall with his father's life, and how a man who was incredibly goofy and unserious was still, ultimately, more of a force for positive change in the world than Squall was until he shed his apathetic mercenary ethos. Does it make sense that our two heroes adrift in space would stumble upon the Ragnarok, completely operational after seventeen years drifting in space? No, but Squall and Rinoa hugging while Eyes On Me plays is one of the best emotional beats in the series.
Emotion. That's where Final Fantasy VIII shines. Not in realistic events, not in thematic depth, not in actual resolutions to the plot beats it raises, but in emotional truth, in embracing the power of feelings and vibes. What matters isn't the fate of the world, it's the fate of these people. I've been thinking a lot about the fact that Selphie, Zell and Irvine kind of don't have a lot going on as characters, and I'm realizing that I've been thinking of 'a lot going on' in terms shaped by modern gaming's companion systems - that a character isn't just a personality, but also a backstory to progressively uncover as the game goes on, that they need an arc, a personal side quest, and an emotional resolution. Selphie, Zell and Irvine (and frankly, past Disc 1, Quistis as well) don't really have any of that. What they have is being fun to hang out with.
That's all they need to be, really. You care about Selphie not because you've spent twenty hours uncovering the trauma of her childhood, but because she's energetic and weirdly amoral and violent in a way that contrasts her bubbly and cheerful attitude, and that makes her fun.
In the end, the fate of the entire universe, every nation on earth, every star in the sky, all past and present and future, comes down to the relationship and shared history of Cid and Edea Kramer, the six orphans under their care, the father of one of these orphans, the daughter of that guy's ex-girlfriend, and a witch from the future. To save any of these handful of people is the same as saving the world.
It's been said a number of times throughout the thread, but FFVIII's story and plot runs very heavily on Vibes. When those Vibes land, for the people they do land for? It's pretty peak. Buuuut as evidenced by at least a few constantly skeptical posters, when it doesn't vibe with them, everything can easily fall apart.
The junction system is a fascinating idea and I really wish Square had had a chance to refine it over new iterations in subsequent games, so that we could see what a good implementation of it looks like. I cannot, however, blame them for dropping it instantly and never looking at it again, because its FF8 incarnation is just… It's not even just that it's bad. It's that whatever merits it may have had exist in such a context as to erase them and emphasize the flaws. It's not just that the junction system has problems; it's that the junction system exists in the same game that also inexplicably has level scaling, so you're faced with stupid incentives like carding enemies instead of ever gaining a level or hitting certain level thresholds to draw specific spell lists. It 's not just that the junction system is broken, it's that the junction system exists in a PSX game where navigating the UI to check your magic list, exchange spells between characters and compare different junction benefits is incredibly inconvenient and takes forever, so you're disincentivized to actually try things out and explore the depth the system has to offer.
An inconvenience which is emphasized by the game's insistence on constantly changing your party, creating perverse incentives towards developing a way of playing that erases each character's already lacking identity to get them to Just Work every time the game insists on swapping someone in and out.
A maybe controversial take, but I honestly think FFVIII has the least mechanically distinct party in the entire series so far, barring FFIII. FFI is a party of literally generic nobodies, but you do lock their classes in at the start of the game and each class has its own mechanical identity. FFII's cast can become Literally Anything, but you're still likely to hammer out distinct roles for each party member over the course of the game like "Guy hits people with big weapons, Firion likes a Sword and Shield with support magic, Maria will be my battle caster and healer".
FFIII loses out because every class is freely swappable and the only thing that affects different characters is what class you level in influences max HP. FFIV is all mechanically distinct characters with individual roles. FFV is interchangeable the way FFIII is... except for most of the game, you'll totally be sending characters down different paths for each to have their own skillsets, it's just in the endgame grind where things usually devolve into "2 freelancers with dualwield X-Attack, 2 Mimes with X-Magic and whatever spell sets I want to cast from". FFVI characters despite the Esper system each have some mechanical identity in what equipment they can wield and usually at a unique to them battle command, and FFVII is close to FFVIII but at least weapons still have the slight difference of things like materia slot setups, and long ranged VS close ranged.
Then in FFVIII, effectively the only difference between your party members mechanically is their limit breaks, which may or may not ever matter.
Even the weapon upgrade system can be largely ignored because all weapons do is increase Strength, which can already be capped at 255 through Junctions.
Slight point of order on weapon upgrades: Selphie's ultimate weapon is similar to Squall's Gunblades in that it has base 255 accuracy (so she can never miss and doesn't need a Hit junction or blind protection), and iirc Squall's Limit Break upgrades based on what weapon he has.
That's pretty much it though, beyond that nobody cares about weapon upgrades.
I'm pretty sure you can easily reach endgame with only Quez, Shiva, and Ifrit. Every other GF is a sidequest, or item, or draw somewhere. Kind of wild, to be honest, I almost respect the balls on the devs to go "here's 14 GFs the main function of the entire combat system also 11 can be missed".
To put it simply, the first disk of Xenogears is a great mecha/hybrid JRPG with a gripping story. The second half is... a massive disappointment and rushes through several plot points because they ran out of budget.
I haven't actually played Xenogears, but from what I've heard doesn't disk 2 make a sharp turn into "we ran out of budget the game is now literally a visual novel here's the entire script?"
I can't give that title to any game that doesn't have a Job System, but disc 1 is really, really compelling.
I honestly feel like they horribly, horribly overreached. So many things are unfinished… because they tried to do too much. The mechanics are a horrifying kludged mess… because they tried to do too much.
I feel like a stripped-down basic story without all the time bullshit would have been SO MUCH better. Ultimecia is a nothingburger. Why didn't we have I-eat-lesser-sorceresses-for-breakfast muscle-wizard Adel as the final boss? She's actually a really interesting villain! This horrible dictator that was barely stopped by trapping her in a magic prison. Even from within that prison, her rage stops long-range communications from working, and seems to stir up monster activity. She's perfect!
But no, they added all this insane shit about time compression, and the ultimate sorceress from the future, and the GODDAMN STUPID we-all-grew-up-together-but-forgot-and-then-by-PURE-COINCIDENCE-all-ended-up-together-as-teenagers thing. That instantly snapped my suspension of disbelief like a desiccated twig, and then set it aflame. No, that didn't happen. Bullshit. I'd sooner believe that it's a GF-induced hallucination than that it's real.
The only way it makes any sense at all… is the stupid time loop thing. Edea found these specific kids, because she knew they'd need them to know each other in the future; and then Cid conspired to bring them together once they were trained up. But that's also stupid, because it's yet more of the stupid time bullshit!
If they took this script, scrubbed the time bullshit, and just had a fairly simple fantasy story about defeating the buff sorceress Adel who's so powerful that even imprisoned she's messing with the world. Then add the amazingly successful love story, the innovative graphics, and like the most refined 10% of the gameplay mechanics, and it could be amazing. But I guess it's not Final Fantasy if they don't reach for the stars, and then burn up in the atmosphere when they don't reach.
I haven't actually played Xenogears, but from what I've heard doesn't disk 2 make a sharp turn into "we ran out of budget the game is now literally a visual novel here's the entire script?"
I mean, if they actually went into the Lunar Cry, fixing it - or at least dealing with the absolute immediate effects on Esthar and then going, "We'll deal with this after Ultimecia," - the game would've been five discs long. Because the Lunar Cry is the sort of thing that deforms landscapes and kills continents. Even 8's shifty-eyed, 'we just off-screen took care of it, don't worry' is not at all compelling. Esthar is a bleeding wreck after the Cry; like, their soldiers are primarily physical, and the Cry came down with Iron Giants, those Esthar Soldiers are so dead. If the game had actually treated the Lunar Cry on Esthar as anything other than a spectacle to deliver Adel to the Lunatic Pandora, it would have just added even more game.
There are basically two ways to handle the Lunar Cry. Both of which had been used in previous games.
You can show all its impacts, and make the shattered world it leaves in it's wake the second half of the game ala FF6's World of Ruin, which kinda requires moving it up to happen earlier in the story
Or, you can have it occur during the course of the post-final-boss animation so that you can leave anything beyond the rest of the ending FMV up to player imagination ala FF7's meteorfall
Instead they chose to do neither and proved why FF7's choice, as aggravating and dissatisfying as it is, was ultimately better than whatever the hell this third option was
I wish Omi would play xenogears as part of this LP. Not just for context but because it's a great game when it's a game and he'd probably love to dissect it.
There are basically two ways to handle the Lunar Cry. Both of which had been used in previous games.
You can show all its impacts, and make the shattered world it leaves in it's wake the second half of the game ala FF6's World of Ruin, which kinda requires moving it up to happen earlier in the story
Or, you can have it occur during the course of the post-final-boss animation so that you can leave anything beyond the rest of the ending FMV up to player imagination ala FF7's meteorfall
Instead they chose to do neither and proved why FF7's choice, as aggravating and dissatisfying as it is, was ultimately better than whatever the hell this third option was
I'm not entirely sure about this being an unworkable option.
On one hand, it does not really work in the game as it is because you need the Ragnorock to get to the last GF locations and do your final preparations. Which means you can't have it as an implied timer towards the endgame, an extension of the rush to the final battle.
But thinking on it, I feel it would have worked better if you couldn't really wander around freely after the Cry. So you have all the miss-able stuff set to before you go to space at all, and then put the actual endgame point of no return gathering after Time Compression.
That way you have to go back to the time before the latest Cry to get stuff like Bahamut and Eden using the arches, or something similar.
Only allow views of Eshtar desperately going "put the new sorceress into the box!" even as they face the monster apocalypse until you get the plan to go after Adel and Ultimecia before something even worse happens to the world.
I suggested this a while back in the spoiler thread, but I feel like the Deep Sea Research Center should have, instead of being on the planet, been on the moon, and been the resolution to the Lunar Cry thing.
So with a Lunar Cry having just happened, you'd have a unique opportunity - now that most of the moon's monster population has evacuated, there's a tiny window of opportunity before the moon repopulates where a small, elite team with a space ship (you) can investigate the source of the Lunar Cry without being literally buried in monsters. You head over to the orbital launch facility in Esthar and get the Ragnarok launched into orbit, at which point you head to the moon and quickly discover the ancient facility on the moon.
It's basically identical to how it goes in the original game, but the fluff is different. It's now a secret bio-weapon factory built several world wars ago, but after the country that built it was wiped out before they could fully take advantage of their new weapons facility it's just been endlessly producing monsters with no end in sight. Turning it off's as easy as removing Bahamut from the power core, but you can go deeper to get lore, fight the superbosses and get Eden.
Also hey, Eden being obtained in a metaphorical Garden of Eden for monsters? Works.
@GilliamYaeger: I like your idea, I think that would have been interesting.
Having said so, I do think people in this thread severely overrated the gravity of a Lunar Cry throughout the playthrough. This is a regular event that apparently happens once a century or thereabouts, with the most recent one having been around 80 years ago. No way could Esthar as it exists currently, or even Galbadia with its multiple facilities and world-spanning empire, have been built in less than 80 years, that just doesn't make sense.
The Lunar Cry is a localized apocalypse, something that destroys a city, or perhaps a nation, but doesn't affect the rest of the world except in that it replenishes the stores of monsters all over the world as they spread from the impact point, meaning that what we see in the game is actually a perfectly understandable reaction to the event, given that nobody even knows that Esthar still exists, and thus there's no real reason for them to be informed about how it was just struck by the Lunar Cry.
I'm honestly still perplexed at everybody's reaction to it in the thread being "but why isn't the rest of the world reacting?", because the answer to me was, well, for the same reason why most of the world doesn't particularly reacts (other than by sending help) when a big hurricane strikes a major USA city; it's not happening to us, so we go on with our lives. And Esthar is hidden, so nobody knows to send help.
This could probably have been fixed by the game making it clearer that the Lunar Cry was a localized disaster comparable to a large scale hurricane, earthquake or tsunami; I can concede that the game didn't make it too clear, but I think that it did try to suggest that's the sort of scale it was going for, when presenting the threat before it was put into action. Perhaps that's just me though.
Anyway! For my usual endgame round-up, how long was FFVIII, in comparison with the other games played so far?
FF - 7 threadmarks (no double update ones) - 18,2 k words
FF II - 12 threadmarks (5 double update ones) - 27,9 k words
FF III - 16 threadmarks (9 double update ones) - 44,8 k words
FF IV - 20 threadmarks (5 double update ones) - 69 k words
FF V - 30 threadmarks (12 double update ones) - 110 k words
FF VI - 26 threadmarks (5 double update ones) - 140,5 k words
FFVII - 42 threadmarks (11 double updates, + 2 triple updates) - 318,5 k words
FFVIII - 36 threadmarks (16 double updates, + 3 triple updates) - 258,8 k words
Well! If anybody had any doubt about the extra-visual nature of FFVIII, that certainly dispels it - more double and triple updates than ever before means a ton of extra images were required to properly convey the scope of the game. That's certainly something.
However, it's still about 6 treadmarks less than FFVII, and certainly much shorter on the written front, with 60k words less; still a towering titan above FFVI, the game that it is the most direct heir to, in terms of length, but not a match for FFVII.
(About the heir comment: FFVIII is basically a better version of FFVI on practically all fronts. Both are a mess of a game with too many ambitions that they fail at achieving about as often as they succeeds, and a succession of great moments that leave an impact strung together by a structure that doesn't really hold together, with a underlying gameplay that is hard to get through, even if in FFVIII case is due to overcomplexity rather than the overglitchiness and seameness of FFVI.)
It is my firm belief that every other game in the series will fall short of FFVIII, both in terms of updates and in terms of words length, although FFIX should still account for more updates than FFV and more wordcount than FFVI. We'll see if I'm correct or not, I just wanted to state it for the record.
Anyway, @Omicron! Considering you already told us you played through FFIX, I think that discussing what you know about that game would be better done during your playthrough, but since apparently Final Fantasy Tactics is 100% guaranteed to be part of the plan now, would you feel like sharing what you know about it? In FFT case in particular, it's extremely easy to spoil things accidentally due to the game's structure - some names could be spoilers if you know them ahead of time - so it'd probably help the thread keep a lid on things if we know what to avoid talking about.
Also, since you seems undecided right now over which version of the game you should play, is there any particular type of information we could provide that would help you make a choice? It seems like something that could help guide discussion in a productive direction.
@Egleris It probably could have been fixed by making it more clear that the Lunar Cry was a localized event, but I don't agree about the hurricane metaphor. Hurricanes happen every year. Even pandemics happen a few times a century, and people absolutely take notice; but then, that's because they're not localized.
I think a better metaphor would be nuclear reactor meltdowns. Catastrophic, but localized. Yet people do take notice, even though they're more common than the Lunar Cry. Places on the other side of the world might not react, since mass media explicitly doesn't exist, but the giant column of blood should be pretty noticeable to anyone in the same hemisphere.
To put it simply, the first disk of Xenogears is a great mecha/hybrid JRPG with a gripping story. The second half is... a massive disappointment and rushes through several plot points because they ran out of budget.
Xenogears the video game equivalent of what people think Eva TV is, essentially.
I wonder if the first disk of FFVIII (alongside Harry Potter) inspired the pre-modern isekai gimmick of vaguely techno-magic school LNs. It would explain why I didn't like it or them.
Even as a literal chuuni, I was never chuuni enough to buy the vibes this game was selling outside of the romance, and I didn't click with Rinoa or Squall enough to really feel anything from their (technically proficient) romantic plot. The main enjoyment of this run was schadenfreude at watching someone run headfirst into the batshit system mechanics and Square's chucking galaxies like shuriken-sized hubris.
Yeah this is a pretty unsurprising assessment. FF8 has some pretty standout, unalloyed high points, but like...
Man I'm turning more boomer about RPGs by the year it feels like. It's okay to just make a normal turn-based RPG where characters gain xp to level up and gain new abilities when they level up. It's okay guys. You don't have to reinvent the wheel every time. You don't gotta make me use cards or pokemon or gems or make me wear outdated gear for an extra 8 hours to learn the skill trapped inside it or really even skill trees, and you certainly don't gotta subject me to bad realtime combat or the fucking ATB system system again. Old doesn't mean archaic and novelty isn't king. Like the fucking Labyrinth of the Ancients/Crystal Tower/Eureka/World of Darkness cheese-consumption marathon is too obnoxious for me to say FF3 is my favourite Final Fantasy now even ironically but sometimes I sure am thinking it kinda hard...
I'm of the opinion that the only time an ATB system was ever enjoyable to play is in the FF7 remakes, and that because it's not trying to be turn based.
I just find ATB so not fun...
Also, yea, give me standard character progression and characters that feel distinct to one another over some of the FF innovative systems every time...
After decades of memes about Final Fantasy games ending with sudden incomprehensible nonsense and cosmic threats entirely out of nowhere, steeped in a heady blend of "that's just how inscrutable those crazy Japanese are" racism, it's sobering to realise that the first real example in the 3D era of Final Fantasy (and probably the first real example since, like... FFIV?) is literally just an obvious case of needing to Wrap This Shit Up, We're Out Of Money.
Thank you for playing through FFVIII - I never would have (re)visited it myself, so it's really fascinating to see some of my biases and vague memories confirmed, others cast aside or supplemented, and finally wrangle a complete understanding of why so many people were so obsessed with this game while so many others referred to it as dreck, both just as loudly and angrily.
The aesthetic isn't for me, but the ambition is beyond admirable. And Selphie is, of course, perfect.
FFVIII is less than the sum of its parts. It throws a lot of cool ideas at you, it has impeccable FMVs, it plays around with some interesting mechanics, but nothing ever quite coheres, nothing feels complete from dropped story threads to self-defeating mechanics to underexplored characters.
Anyone who'd played the game (or read this LP, as the case may be) could point out to a really great moment that stuck with them, but it's hardly anyone's favorite game in the franchise.
I suppose we do have to commend FFVIII for being true to the FF legacy. The refrain of this LP is that the core defining principle behind Final Fantasy is ambition: every game reinvents itself, building on what came before while introducing new elements, always striving for new heights, reaching for the stars. And that is undoubtedly true for FFVIII. Unfortunately, the consequence of this ambition is that sometimes you just fail.
In conclusion, FFVIII is a land of contrasts and the friends we've made along the way.
Once again, congratulations on finishing it. That was a true challenge for all the wrong reasons.
Our next game will either be IX or Tactics, though I can't promise when it will start - I need to focus on writing a few other things first. Tactics and IX are very different games to me, in that I have never even touched Tactics, while IX is the first Final Fantasy I almost completed as a child. I'm eager to do both, but the tragedy of linear time means we can't do both at the same time, and I will likely start with Tactics, though that may be subject to change.
With the remake being a possibility, I'd vote for FFIX. There is no guarantee that FFT remake would be out by the time you write your other things and cover FFIX, but the possibility is here, and it's a way to hedge your bets. If you don't have a strong preference, that seems like a smart play.
Or you could take the third option and do Chrono Trigger. Just saying, the option is here.
I'll repeat, for the record and because Chrono Trigger is an incredibly good game, that playing it through a Let's Play format would absolutely suck out all of the enjoyment from it.
If you think FFVIII has missable stuff, that's NOTHING compared to Chrono Trigger. It's a game that is enjoyable to the extreme when you're playing it at your own pace and discovering hidden stuff on your own and then doing the new game plus to find all the things you've missed on the first round (which will be a ton unless you use a guide), but having to document it, with constant interruptions killing the game's great pacing and constant going back as people cite all the missed things, would absolutely destroy the enjoyment of the game.
Everybody should play Chorno Trigger, but nobody should ever make a blind let's play of it. That's my take on it.
Additionally, Chrono Trigger really isn't part of the Final Fantasy series and so it doesn't really fit with the purpose of this thread.
Regarding FFT, which version will you be playing? The original Playstation version has a pretty legendarily bad translation, but the PSP version is optimized badly and lags all over the place.
If possible, I'd recommend a mod to replace the translation but otherwise just playing the PS version.
To put it simply, the first disk of Xenogears is a great mecha/hybrid JRPG with a gripping story. The second half is... a massive disappointment and rushes through several plot points because they ran out of budget.
As I've grown older (and played more actual visual novel games), I recall the first disc is a hefty JRPG unto itself. Longer does not necessarily mean better, and unlike FF8 (or parts of 7, for that matter) there's nothing unclear or vague about Disc 2's story. It's just not delivered in the traditional JRPG way but after 40 hours of it maybe you'd just like to get to the damn end now.
I've definitely become more fond of games that know when to cut it short than games that want to promise 200 hours of gameplay, 180 hours of which is grinding or doing unsatisfying minigames.
God the party swapping alone drove me away from FFVIII several times. It's wild to me that the last time they take a party member out of your party is the penultimate dungeon, and it's a party member the game is practically begging you to use and has a (admittedly small) connection to the upcoming boss.
Imagine if Vincent was a core party member instead of an optional one, and the game kicked him out of the party before fighting Hojo?
I think it's telling that I've tried to beat this game maybe a half dozen times, and the furthest I ever got was the one where I junctioned every GF onto Squall and turned him into the one man super soldier the game spends its plot deconstructing.
