Saturday, September 13, 2008

Not the Greatest Video Games of All Time: Final Fantasy VIII

Final Fantasy VIII

Games in this category will contain my iconoclastic views of the video games that others consider great. We're not talking about games that are bad. We're talking about games that people think are great when really their not. Some might be bad games, most will be average games that are overrated. To the people who mistakenly think these games are good, hopefully by reading this they'll realize how wrong they are. I going to start with a game that is personally (and I wish there was a stronger word) irritating.

Final Fantasy VIII

"I'll be here..."
"Why...?"
"I'll be 'waiting'... here..."
"For what?"
"I'll be waiting... for you... so... If you come here... You'll find me. I promise."


I hate this game.

Perhaps it's not so much that there's a lot wrong with FF8 as it is the fact that it was such a let down after FF7.

-SPOILER ALERT-

In my ignorance and innocence I thought FF8 was going to be a sequel to FF7. FF7 was the first final fantasy that I played. So I was unaware that while each Final Fantasy was part of the series they each have they're own individual story. They aren't connected from game to game. When I learned that it was a crushing blow. (To think that I might never know what became of Cloud and Tifa. That I might never find out what Cloud's cryptic statement at the end of the game meant. (And then they made a movie and I sorta wished they hadn't. But I digress.)) Even knowing that the two games were connected in name only I still vainly hoped that somehow, someway the story and characters from FF7 would continue in FF8.

It didn't.

Next I thought that surely the materia system would return. Such a innovative and intuitive combat mechanic wouldn't be abandoned.

It was.

Not only abandoned but replaced with a flawed, cumbersome, unappealing, clunky, and difficult Junction/Draw system. To this day I still can't make heads or tails out of it.

The Junctions system was also linked to summoning. In FF7 one of the seven different types of magic you could use was summoning. You would acquire a summon materia which would allow you to summon a monster or creature to attack your foes in battle. The FF7 summons were fun and nifty. But they only occupied a portion of the rich cornucopia of FF7's game play. They were like icing on the cake.

FF8 over emphasized summoning. It was like the company that made these games said, "Huh, people liked the summons in FF7. Let's base our next game's entire combat system on them. And let's make them more integral to the story."
The cake had been replaced with a complete concoction of icing.

Next the main character is completely unlikable. Squall, what an ugly name. I read a reviewer who said that in FF8 Squall starts of as being aloof and unapproachable but he warms up. I played the whole seventy hour game and Squall remained a tight lipped, standoffish jerk the entire time. In the game one of the main characters is talking to him, opening up. She's even trying to tell him that she thinks that she is in love with him. He just stands there like brick wall. "How long are you going to keep me here? I'm only staying to listen to you because your my superior and you ordered me to." That's his attitude, not just to this woman in the game but to those playing the game as well.

Now you can have dispassionate loner characters in stories but you can't allow their disconnect with their fictional world to translate over as a disconnect with the audience. You'll end up with a character that now one cares about. It's easy for this to happen when a story is about someone who doesn't care about anyone or anything. This exact principal is why I can't stand the tv show House anymore. I used to love House. House was a jerk and a brilliant doctor. He isolated himself from people and the world and was an all around dirtbag. But there were hints of his humanity. That he really cared, and his harshness was just a defence mechanism of a man who had be hurt emotionally and physically. Then a few seasons into the show they took that sliver of humanity away and said "No deep down House is just a jerk." And I couldn't watch the show after that. The same thing is going on with Squall in FF8, except he never even has a glimmer of humanity.

The awkwardness continues at a dance where a girl named Rinoa forces Squall to dance. At first he's all like "I can't dance, oops I steeped on your foot, I can't dance. Oh your going to force me fine I'll dance." And then he dances perfectly. Turns out dancing is part of his spy training and he's really good. He was just being a jerk and not wanting to dance with a hot girl.

And then the whole spy/assassin thing. There's all these high school aged kids, literally hundreds, across the world training to by SeeD, or spy/assassins. They train at institutions known as Gardens, get it? SeeD, Gardens, seeds and gardens. Clever right? No, I didn't think so, but apparently the Japanese did.

The garden you start out in is run by this old guy named Cid. He sends you out on a mission to help Rinoa fight a witch named Edea. (Get it? Edea - Idea. Clever right?)
Well it turns out Cid is actually married to Edea. The two of them started the whole Garden idea. So your thinking they must have had a falling out and are now fighting. Well not entirely. Edea is a witch, but she's being controlled by a witch in the future. Makes sense right? The future witch is named Ultimecia, and she pronounces all her C's as K's. I'm didn't really think that was important but
the game makers seemed to think it was. Ultimecia is trying to compress time, wait I mean she's trying to "kompress" time. So that everything in history is all happening at once. This will somehow give her complete control of everything. Clever right? Our hero's figure out that the only way to stop Ultimecia is to let her compress time. Makes sense, makes a lot of sense. They want to let her compress time so that they can fight her, kill her, and then hopefully everything will go back to normal.

So time gets compressed, Ultimecia becomes all powerful and then you go kill her. I don't get it, if she was all powerful how could she be stopped? Oh well, so you kill her. Squall gets flung around in time and winds up briefly in his own past. He meets Edea back when she and Cid were all lovely dovey. They were running an orphanage in which he was an orphan along with most of the other main characters. While there he makes a few off hand remarks about SeeDs and Gardens to Edea. She thinks "Wow what a good idea." And that's how she and her husband get this bizarre idea to change their orphanage into a spy/assassin training academy. I mean you can't make this stuff up.

So Squall gets back to his time. Alls well that ends well. Now if you still think that this game sounds like a good game keep in mind I left out the following:

-Mind traveling back in time into Laguna's head. One main character wasn't enough for this game, no. We had to have two.
-The epic stinky fish chase.
-Fixing the worlds tv sets so that you can broadcast your declaration of war.
-Laguna becoming president of the country he fought against.
-Another witch named Adel who is important for some reason.
-Memory loss due to summoning junction system. As in the characters themselves suffered from amnesia.
-The under use of Seifer. He would have made a great villain, he would have made a even more interesting good guy. Either way they benched one of the few good characters they had for most of the game.
"Someday I'll tell you about my romantic dream." -Seifer
-Monsters on the Moon!
-The most asinine card minigame I've ever come across.

A reviewer from Edge found some of the story's plot twists "not ... suitably manipulated and prepared", leaving it "hard not to greet such... moments with anything but indifference". I couldn't agree more. And I couldn't say enough negative things about FF8.

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