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Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]

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Omicron said:
Final Fantasy VIII, Final Thoughts

On Presentation

This is where everything is almost redeemed.
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I'm glad you liked the presentation, Omi. As a LP-reader, I found FF8 to be one of the worse ones to follow along, visually.

Everything seemed very pixilated and hard to distinguish, especially the characters. At least outside of combat. It was less bad for the combat screenshots, but still not great.
 
On consideration, I believe I've come up with a succinct solution to the junction system issue in story: Turn the Gardens even more into Yugioh Battle Academy.

That is, separate the junction system from GFs and tie it more into the Card Game. Make GFs as their own separate thing. They exist in the world, they're powerful, but the only people who've ever succeeded at drawing upon their powers safely before were Sorceresses. Then Dr. German succeeded in developing a technological method of drawing and casting magic for the user. Maybe this method is stillduel unsafe, definitely it had its drawbacks in development hence the memory erasure as a result of having your duel disk run its software through your brain. Then, you can have the Junction function by drawing upon other creatures, storing the abilities it draws out into cards of that creature. You can do it lethally but quickly, killing monsters for their cards, or slower and safer, thus people cards being much rarer and probably quest centric. It should also be a choice of what resources you want out of a battle: experience and item drops or cards. You can't just draw infinite spells. Carding a monster only gets a card, no exp or drops. And then you don't get ALL of the possibilities from a single card. Refinement abilities would go into better and varied draws from cards. Initially you would only get basic ass spells and/or items. But later you could get more spells from a single card, or Higher spells, either from stronger cards or from combined weaker ones. And then dueling with those cards goes from an idiosyncratic background thing, to and actual social and combat centered practice. Better Duelists are better Junctioners are better SEEDs.

GFs then wouldn't be drawn from fights, but should all be found in temples or Dungeons. People could draw from them but never get them. Maybe Squall getting Ifrit would be a severe divergence from how it should work like with other SEEDs, hinting at him being/becoming a Sorceresses Knight. But Ifrit should certainly be Squalls first and only GF. Other GFs should be their own distinct quests. GF cards should also be a hard thing to get. Maybe you can chose to refight them in their sites to draw a card. Maybe theres someone who could make the cards with your cooperation.

Any which way, i think divorcing the junction system from just being Materia would've helped.
 
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Given how shallow the non-Squall and Rinoa characters ended up being, I think that the game could have benefitted from just having Squall/Rinoa/Selphie as the three party members, with guest characters until they reach that point.

FF 3 and 5 got that if mechanically each character is interchangeable, you don't need more than a full party of characters.

Plus, this would let you do something interesting with GF memory loss. Squall chooses to let everything fall away that would interfere with his mercenary performance, but Selphie documents everything about herself and shares it with the people she cares about, making them into an external source of memory.
 
It really is astonishing the extent to which Final Fantasy 8 feels like a story where they took everything cool they thought of in drafting — stable time loops, imperial expansion, moon monsters, buff tyrant sorceresses, bujururu — and then just threw it all into the same story. It makes for some genuinely amazing spectacle, but at the cost of the spectacle not having the appropriate buildup or payoff or sometimes both. I wonder how much of this is due to shortened development time meaning that they couldn't do everything they wanted to, and shortened development time meaning that they had too little time to draft a coherent story before they needed to start making things.
 
I've been looking up Jodorowsky's Dune lately, a notoriously ambitious adaptation (in the loose sense) that crashed and burned. Given FF8's similar extreme ambition*, I'm now impressed the game got made and released at all. It has all the traits of a 'what could have been' epic that never was, except it actually was.

That said, and I know there's no way to say this without sounding douchey, but maybe it would've boosted FF8's reputation if it had never been finished? So people could fantasise about its potential, instead of knowing the reality of the final product.
Though given the game's likely rushed development, you could argue it was never really fully finished anyway, and fantasising about what it could have been is what we're doing right now.

*Though obviously there's no mass-shitting scene in FF8
 
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AliasiSudonomo said:
What I'd like to propose is, "maybe it isn't?"

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.
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It's not that the game wanted it to cut short... It's that square enix had a (stupid) policy of only having games in production for 2 years. So they proposed to cut off the game in half (and what a half it is) in a "maybe we will make a sequel if it sells". The director said "what if I do this instead" and square execs, that didn't actually care much in comparasion with the projected cash cows of FF8 and a certain Disney crossover, said "whatever as long as it comes out in time".


Then the director quit after pushing out the game and the predictable word of mouth about a incomplete game made it even less likely to have sequel.

So FF8 is not the only victim of Square push it out the door mentality in this era...

The more naiff scenes of xenogears are in the second half too so maybe the team wasn't having the most impartial reaction (like a certain crucification meme scene).

Would xenogears be a better game if it closed at 40 hours at the end of cd 1 then had a sequel on the PS2 still with square money instead of the xenosaga swerve that i feel is ultimately forgettable? Who knows, I think the director thought he wouldn't be able to make that second game if he had done that, and that's why you fight mecha god in a linear interactive novel in a game that previously had so many areas. There is still the pretty important "secret character" dungeon to show what they would prefer to do in disc 2 I feel.
 
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ArlequineLunaire said:
That said, and I know there's no way to say this without sounding douchey, but maybe it would've boosted FF8's reputation if it had never been finished? So people could fantasise about its potential, instead of knowing the reality of the final product.
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Probably not? FF8 wasn't the earth-shattering monster smash FF7 was but it still raked in a Norgillion dollars hand over fist and received lots of praise on release. It's really the long term where FF8 has kind of lost touch - 7 has kept its high popularity pretty much ever since it dropped, even through periods of poorly-received spinoffs, while 6 and 9 (nice) have both enjoyed their own extended renaissance periods among retro gamers and JRPG enthusiasts, despite their day 1 sales being much lower. FF8 by comparison still enjoys its dedicated fanbase but outside of that it's largely remembered as the game with the orphanage twist and the girl villain.

If FF8 as we know it had been canceled it would probably be forgotten by now, or more likely pieces of it would have been recycled into other games in the series. As a flagship title it would have been a substantial loss to Square to shut down, especially late in development. Instead they did pretty much what we got - do enough development worth 200% of a game, get it actually 75% of the way completed, then push it to 80% and shove the game out the door.
 
Ah, good point.

Kuja said:
7 has kept its high popularity pretty much ever since it dropped, even through periods of poorly-received spinoffs,
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It's possible FF7's popularity remained as high in part because of the spinoffs, and not just due to more content being pushed out. Rather, the spinoffs just kept making FF7 look better in comparison, as a pedestal the spinoffs couldn't live up to.

Then again, I do remember there were some people back in the 00s who did think less of FF7 due to how the spinoffs made it look, so again this is off the top of my head
 
Omicron said:
Disc 1 of Final Fantasy VIII is the best Final Fantasy game of all time.

Unfortunately, then the game keeps going.
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You know, thinking back on it, it's interesting how all of the things that made me really excited back in disc 1 - the kickass milsim moments, the morally dubious nature of both the Gardens and Cid in particular, GFs eating your memories, the Moonspiracy - are pretty much all of the things that got dropped and forgotten later on? It writes so many checks it can't cash, but at the end of the day it largely falls back on well-trod ground. Like when it comes down to it, Time Kompression really just boils down to "an evil wizard wants to destroy reality because reasons," and at this point we've had plenty of evil wizards threatening reality and it's. Really a shame?

That said, I do have to give props to the one thing it sets up early but absolutely nails, and that's Squall starting out with an impenetrable cool loner tough-guy mercenary affect and watching it break down over the course of the game as he slowly learns how to people. With him being so deep in his head at the start of the game, giving one word responses after running an entire monologue in his head, and seeing how frustrating it was to watch way back in disc 1. Then seeing him freak out after Seifer's death, to the genuinely touching scene where he stops to sit with Rinoa on the bridge where he admits to himself that it's all a shield for his own insecurities.

All of that culminates in the very end of the credits sequence - I won't lie, I teared up a little bit at that final shot before the curtain falls, with Squall turning to look at Rinoa with an expression of genuine happiness and fondness. It's something that would have been a whole lot of nothing without all the build up behind it, but we see that journey all the way through and that, at least, they nailed without a doubt.

Combined with Cloud FFVII, the writers at Square really had a handle on a very particular troubled teen/young adult mindset, and they knew how sad and lonely they really were and how important it is to grow and let yourself be vulnerable. I have to imagine that message flew over the heads of a great many people at the time, but looking at it now they really had something special there.

On to a plot beat I did not expect a lot out of but that they did good work with, the actual romance with Rinoa turned out to be a lot better than I was expecting. Others have already covered both how well it was done, and I fully agree with those. As for how strange it was to make so many of the beats between the two of them missable, I wonder if maybe they were planning on doing something with that?

Like, if Squall and Rinoa miss most of their romance moments, maybe it would come out as a less of a traditional romance, but once we learn how important Knights are to Sorceresses, they have more of a courtly I guess, relationship of convenience? Where it's more there for that sense of stability, just with some actual affection between them, if less developed? Or maybe in the parallel timelines world, an undeveloped romance would lead into one of the bad timelines? I don't know, but with how central that relationship is, I can't belp but believe there was some intentionality behind making so much missable before it was cut for being overambitious. Or maybe they just didn't want to lock the party too much and I'm overthinking things.

All in all FFVIII is A Time. It shoots for the moon, then rapidly loses interest in the moon and does Something, and that something is fascinating if flawed. The things it does well it does so well I'll likely be thinking of them for a long time to come, but at the same time I'll be thinking of its many, many stumbles and wondering just how much more it could have been.
 
StormyEyed said:
You know, thinking back on it, it's interesting how all of the things that made me really excited back in disc 1 - the kickass milsim moments, the morally dubious nature of both the Gardens and Cid in particular, GFs eating your memories, the Moonspiracy - are pretty much all of the things that got dropped and forgotten later on? It writes so many checks it can't cash, but at the end of the day it largely falls back on well-trod ground. Like when it comes down to it, Time Kompression really just boils down to "an evil wizard wants to destroy reality because reasons," and at this point we've had plenty of evil wizards threatening reality and it's. Really a shame?
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I feel like I should once again bring up Altimate Rewrite, which is very centered on the kickass milsim stuff and the morally dubious nature of SeeD. If that's the part of FF8 you liked, maybe you'll enjoy Altimate?
 
Mostly the former from my memories, but I'm not about to reread it just to check for the latter, especially with a lot of it being pictures and therefore impossible to Control-F.
 
Kuja said:
There's an ancient AMV on youtube of Kickstart My Heart set to cutscenes from FF7 and 8. I won't link it here because it has spoilers for later in FF8, but every time I think of those bikes being launched I imagine the Crue playing on the Galbadia Garden speakers during the whole sequence. Art.
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Oh shit oh fuck I almost forgot the FF8 playthrough being done means I can post this now.

Warning be prepared for some extremely 2000s AMV shot composition.


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2fVWyQJhH0

they dont make em like they used to
 
I can't stop thinking about that interview clip where Kitase talks about the possibility of Rinoa turning into Ultimecia. Not so much about the topic itself, but rather what the context of the answer implies: there were three writers for the game script, and none of them bothered to make sure the overall game script was coherent and consistent. Instead, Nojima and Nomura (and probably Kitase himself) could go in and add all sorts of new story hooks and plot points and not tell the others.

The story of FFVIII needed an editor. One with enough authority to tell the writers "this doesn't work, rip it out" or "redo this bit to fit this other bit".

FFVIII feels like it is intended to be enjoyed without thinking, like an action blockbuster movie. We're not supposed to look further into the world lore or setting; we just need to bask in the immediate vibes. Any contradictions or dangling plot threads should be ignored and forgotten, because it happened then, not now. For now, just enjoy the presentation.

Which makes it a relatively poor candidate for a playthrough write-up, since that would require looking back at the events the player just went through and recounting it to others, meaning everyone will be able to read it and compare it to previous entries and go "wait, this doesn't make sense".

The Lunar Cry that destroyed Centra happened 80 years ago, or over 100 years ago. The Lunar Cry is a well-known regular phenomenon that creates localized catastrophes, but nobody talks about any responses or countermeasures for it. The Lunar Cry is powerful enough to destroy a civilization, but is also limited to one specific area in its destruction. The Lunar Cry is, due to physics and angles, limited to one general path between the moon and the planet, and Esthar decided to put the very sensitive prison of their Sorceress dictator at "the" Lagrange point directly in its path (instead of the other possible Lagrange points), thus limiting the potential lifespan of that prison to "until the next Lunar Cry inevitably happens".

GFs erase memories, except they don't really and the memories just need a bit of prompting to return. GFs are also available in the wild for child Selphie to junction one in passing. The memories affected by GFs are the ones most dramatic to the narrative, rather than based on any known pattern or system. (Cf FFXIV's Echo, which is shown only when exposition is required.) The Tomb Of The Unknown King has a literal ghost of said king speak to the party, but nobody reacts or seems to care.

I can believe all of these are due to one of the writers going "wouldn't it be cool to add this in", and either the other writers didn't care, or looked at it and went "oh yeah, that sounds cool" and left it at that instead of asking whether it fits in the greater story. Because what the writers were going for was the "vibes" of the immediate present, and the audience was not supposed to think too hard about it.

GilliamYaeger said:
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.
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It would also give further Final Fantasy fanservice reference points, because then Bahamut is on the Moon.
 
Adloquium said:
The story of FFVIII needed an editor. One with enough authority to tell the writers "this doesn't work, rip it out" or "redo this bit to fit this other bit".
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Er, yes, that's the director's job. Kitase's.

Possibly the producer's as well, as a final stopgap, but Hashimoto had split his attention between so many responsibilities at the time that I think he was more concerned with the macro-focus (e.g., deadlines and budgets) than the individual details (e.g., game mechanics and story).
 
silentorphan said:
Er, yes, that's the director's job. Kitase's.

Possibly the producer's as well, as a final stopgap, but Hashimoto had split his attention between so many responsibilities at the time that I think he was more concerned with the macro-focus (e.g., deadlines and budgets) than the individual details (e.g., game mechanics and story).
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Yeah, I was thinking about FFXIV 1.0 as well, where each individual part was made with care and loving attention, and when put together it was a complete mess, and the director there (Komoto) clearly didn't do his job of making it coherent either.

I can at least give credit to the FFVIII dev team for being able to put out a game at all, and one that works more or less as intended, even if the intentions were contradictory. But the part of the director's job that is "does the overall game narrative and presentation make sense" was not done in these cases, which means they might have fared better if there was a position that did have that as a central responsibility.
 
Oh god, THIS
Omicron said:
On Gameplay

Oh god, oh fuck.

This is where everything breaks. While the story of FF8 has issues but is still, at its core, great but flawed, the gameplay is just. It's.

It's not good, guys.
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And especially this!
Omicron said:
It takes less than an hour for a new player experiencing Final Fantasy VIII for the first time to realize: 1) More spells to junction means more power to your stats, so you should find the weakest enemy you can Draw from and spend the next half-hour drawing 100 of each spell they have, 2) actually casting your spells depletes your junctioned stocks and weakens you so you should hoard them like a dragon.
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Early in the play through, I started playing FF8 on Steam to follow along and get whatever achievements I missed. It took me almost no time (grinding/spell hunting before the Fire Cave) to decide that this Was Not Fun, and that I was Not Going To Engage. I closed the game, used Magic Boost, and kept used the Max Magic cheat whenever applicable. It's a cheap way to approach gameplay, but when THIS is the alternative…

And I always thought it was weird that the junction system seemed to discourage Magic use. When I first played through the game, and even later when I could cheat to restore every spell I used, I did not use magic unless I absolutely had to, and resented every time I had to cast a spell.
 
Kinda feels it'd be better if casting a spell never lowered its number, so it only increases, but drawing the same spell gives you smaller numbers until drawing from the same monster hits a cap, requires drawing from stronger (ie: later) monsters to keep increasing it. That way there's no loss in casting spells, and power growth is curved earlier.
 
Or if junctioning didn't scale off of how many you had, and instead only let you junction one of a given type of spell. So when you draw Ultima, you can junction it to exactly one slot on one character, same with Fire, or Curaga. At that point it's a question of how you spread out your powerful junction versus the filler ones, how many you give to each character.

Then casting spells wouldn't decrease power, and it'd just be a case of don't cast your last copy. Or maybe not even then, and drawing a new spell permanently unlocks it as a junction option, regardless of your actual stock of the spell.
 
A different option I had in mind was to replace the Bonus abilities (which honestly encourage bad play attitudes such as holding back gaining level until you have all/the right abilities and then killing your team so you can level people one by one with all of the abilities or even doing things like swapping GF when you're about to level and so on, like it did in FFVI) with a "J-STR Stock +20" ability, or something like that. The name doesn't really matter, but the idea is that, if you had a spell junctioned to a specific stat (STR in this example), then you'd be treated as having an additional 20 (or whatever number fits best) in stock for the purpose of determining junction effect. This would still be capped at 100, so if you had 100 Spells, or 80 Spells + this ability, you'd be getting the same bonus, and if you had, let's say, 95 such spells, you could cast the spell up to 15 times without reducing the junction effect.

This would encourage people to reach 100 units still, but then those spells could both be junctioned AND used in battle without fear; or you could, say, split your Ultima three ways and still get a decent value out of it; if paired with an increase in power to attack spells such that they were more powerful than a standard attack, it would also encourage using mid-level spells for offense while allowing use of the high-level spells you might not have a max stock of for junction. Pair this with making drawing a faster process by adding a x5 modifier (so, instead of getting between 1 and 9 spells per draw, you'd get between 5 and 45 - allowing people with high MAG to complete drawing in a couple turns, also encouraging higher MAG and thus more powerful attack spells), and you would have a very different gameplay loop, one that encourages drawing once or twice per battle and actually using the spells you have.

This is just one of the modifications I feel could have helped FFVIII a lot; I already mentioned that changes to refining results, redistributing when certain abilities are gained, and limiting the maximum number of junctionable GF per character to three (as well as NEVER removing an active junction) are other options I though about for making the whole process much less annoying for players to deal with.
 
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