Final Fantasy spent a decade constructing idols and Final Fantasy VIII demolished every one of them. Its elaborate, extravagant, and chaotic parade of ideas marched toward an evolutionary dead end and ensured there would never be another game like Final Fantasy VIII. Even by Remastered’s distressing modernization, Final Fantasy VIII’s paradigm shifting idiosyncrasies still showcase one of the most fearless and contemplative models of its medium. Final Fantasy VIII is a classic for people immune to the charms of classics.
A lot of people liked Final Fantasy VII. A lot of those people were confused and angry two years later when Final Fantasy VIII erased everything they liked about Final Fantasy VII. The role-playing game that finally captured the mainstream—and signaled Sony’s PlayStation was indeed legitimate hardware—created expectations of more Final Fantasy VII, or at least something like any previous Final Fantasy. Instead, Final Fantasy VIII brought in a brand new cast, issued mad scientist progression systems, and delivered a consciousness-spanning narrative that divided its time between protracted romance and existential dread. It would have been so easy for Square to make another Final Fantasy VII. Instead, they opted for something more dangerous. Final Fantasy VIII is calculated rebellion.
If you were paying attention to Square’s catalog, this should have come as no surprise. In 1999, Final Fantasy VIII was the pinnacle of the experimentation and innovation rapidly developing inside of Square’s development and publishing offices. Parasite Eve imagined survival horror with role-playing game mechanics, Einhänder turned in one of the most revered shoot ’em ups of its generation, and Bushido Blade and its sequel rejected the traditional directives of a fighting game. Even Ehrgeiz, Racing Lagoon, and Brave Fencer Musashi, while not as celebrated, were fiercely determined to defy genre norms. Thanks to the success of Final Fantasy VII, Square had the capital and the momentum to avoid playing by the rules. The role-playing game company wasn’t interested in making a traditional role-playing game.
After an expensive and assertive computer-generated prologue, Final Fantasy VIII opens in the last place its teenage audience ever wanted to be: school. Squall Leonhart is laid out in infirmary after a particularly heated scuffle with his assumed rival, Seifer Almasy. Both were given facial scars they will carry for the rest of their lives. It’s here we learn Squall is kind of dick, bottling any available emotion inside of his head and only distributing it in a series of no-sell reactions to any question that demands introspection. His lead instructor, pervasive Hot Teacher Quistis Trepe, is well aware of this and teases Squall as often as she teaches him. Instead of selling scale, as was the destiny of any previous Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy VIII’s meandering conversation and subdued characters start its adventure in a much weirder, more subdued place.
Rather than toss the player in a series of instructive battles, you’re given free reign over Balamb Garden. A well-to-do military academy, Balamb Garden operates with 1999’s idea of smooth-lined fluorescent futurism as an idealized version of an impossible college campus. It’s bright! It’s happy! It has colors! The maudlin school days spirit is alive and well inside of Final Fantasy VIII, only distorted by Balamb Garden’s double status as a mercenary creation factory. Students, referred to as “Seeds,” engaging in active combat with insane weapons and fostering statistical relationships with massively powerful creatures of fantasy is just as important as learning about the political machinations of Final Fantasy VIII’s unnamed planet.
Hearing someone describe Final Fantasy VIII before it was released—I looked at primitive Final Fantasy AOL forums every day in the six months between its Japanese and North American release—revealed an escalating series of decisions that felt sacrilegious and incomprehensible. You have to draw magic, up to one hundred times, out of enemies on the field, and then stock it like items? Final Fantasy, my game with swords and wizards, has cars? It takes place in the future? Party members actually follow each other around in towns and dungeons? People had an idea of what Final Fantasy should be and Final Fantasy VIII’s decisions were incongruous with our construction of reality. Predating Windwaker’s art direction and Metroid Prime’s first-person perspective, the reaction to basic facts surrounding Final Fantasy VIII’s premise was the progenitor of idiots losing their minds on internet forums.
Guardian Forces, Final Fantasy VIII’s interpretation of traditional Summon magic, is the first indication that this game is improvising its rule book. Eighteen of these ethereal creatures can be obtained (and some are optional! Final Fantasy VIII will let you miss Guardian Forces!), and junctioning at least one Guardian Force to any character essentially opens up a hacking interface to every statistical category. Not only can you adjust what commands are available in battle—items usage, magic abilities, drawing magic—but elemental resistances can be modified, health and magic points can be enhanced, and elemental properties can be added to character weapons. With enough AP, Guardian Forces allow the player to do almost anything they want.
Junctioning Guardian Forces to each party member can seem unbearably complex. And it is! But it also operates in manner that, with enough context and/or a play clock that eclipses forty hours, makes logical sense. Sticking a fully stocked Haste to a character’s speed stat is more effective than a magic spell that has nothing to do with speed. Junctioning Blizzard to the elemental defense category is great way to prepare for bosses with ice attacks. Curaga is obviously the spell that works best when junctioned to hit points. Through the Junction system Final Fantasy VIII can be beaten, broken, or—if you’re lucky—played as intended. It’s just takes a minute for its quirks to settle in.
In 2019, it’s difficult to relate the importance of the absolute spectacle of summoning giant monsters. Final Fantasy VII was notable for its integration of computer generated cut-scenes with its blocky character models and pre-rendered backgrounds, leaving its massive screen-dominating summons like Knights of Round and Bahamut Zero as its only honest tricks. Final Fantasy VIII doubled-down on spectacle and added two years’ worth of refinement on top. Texture maps are around this time, obviously, but the Boost option, which allowed players to pound a button to increase the power of the Guardian Force during its elongated unraveling, finally showed some respect for the player’s time. Even in its endless ostentatious exposition I can watch Eden’s majestic acid trip or Doomtrain’s hilariously pointless demon kamikaze to completion, smiling ear to ear. Like so many aspects of Final Fantasy VIII, there isn’t anything quite like it.
Admittedly, Final Fantasy VIII has one of the weaker casts in the series. Quistis’ role as a simultaneous peer and teacher goes nowhere after (what used to be) the first disc. Zell’s obsession with hot dogs is all that separates him from the role of a traditional hot head best friend. Selphie can’t manage a line of dialogue to separate her from fellow Final Fantasy Bubbly Girls Rikku, Eko, and Vanille. Irvine exists to botch a pivotal plot point and because someone was convinced Final Fantasy VIII required exactly one cowboy. A late third act plot twist binds the characters together in a manner that tests suspension of disbelief, but its lack of impact renders the whole reveal inert anyway. Visual distinction and best-in-class character design doesn’t create a character with any level of interiority.
Obviously this doesn’t hold true for Final Fantasy VIII’s stars, Squall and Rinoa. Despite their cover-shot of warm embrace and the iconic ballroom dance sequence, Final Fantasy VIII doesn’t spend its massive runtime only cultivating a love story. The revelation of Rinoa’s place in the machinations of Final Fantasy VIII’s narrative and Squall’s slow crawl out of a pretentious dickhead earn both the status of Actual Characters. It’s fun to watch them grow and change as they weave through Final Fantasy’s greater sorceress-swapping narrative.
Final Fantasy VIII also operates a parallel narrative in tandem with its core plot line. When Squall loses consciousness (these things happen) the player is granted control of journalist/soldier Laguna Loire and his buddies Kiros and Ward. Everything changes. The battle music shifts to the ecstatic and surreal The Man With The Machine Gun, new stats and different weapons are introduced, and locations are either brand new or oddly not as you remember. Laguna’s role in Final Fantasy VIII’s greater world may be the only time the game actually demonstrates restraint with one of its choices.
Even minor aspects of Final Fantasy VIII defied expectations. Monsters don’t drop money, you earn it as a stipend based on your rank at Garden. Weapons aren’t upgraded at shops, they’re purchased from magazine catalogs. Enemies don’t have static levels bound to locations, they level up with the average level of the party (and not only does this reduce the appeal of grinding, it actively makes the game harder the more you play it). Only Final Fantasy II and Final Fantasy XII were as willing to obliterate the bedrock of the series.
Final Fantasy VIII also revolutionized the idea of a mini-game. Whereas Final Fantasy VII kind of half assed everything under the sun—racing, rail shooter, tower defense, snowboarding—Final Fantasy VIII focused on its world-spanning card game, Triple Triad. Collecting every card demanded the player scour the globe, spread Triple Triad’s regional rules, and find a way to win in every variant of the core game. It could be maddening, especially if you started spreading the Random rule all over the place, but rewards were returned by being able to transmute rare cards into special items. Triple Triad is as optional or integral as you’re willing to make it.
Right on brand, Final Fantasy VIII also boasted one of the weirdest soundtracks Nobuo Uematsu had ever produced. Liberi Fatali doubled-down on Final Fantasy VII’s farewell fascination with Latin dialogue and orchestral composition. Blue Fields’ serpentine buoyancy facilitated Final Fantasy VIII’s tangled world map with ease. Balamb Garden’s idling piano is absolutely perfect for wandering around Future School. Lunatic Pandora is exactly what I want to listen to while I am in outer space and also playing a Final Fantasy game. Silence and Motion, which compliments the party’s first trip to Esthar, is one of the weirdest and most playful pieces of music I’ve ever heard in a role-playing game. Uematsu’s defiant soundtrack is perfectly aligned with Final Fantasy VIII’s rejection of complacency.
There are a few aspects of Final Fantasy VIII that escape eccentricity and are genuinely poor. Certain story beats—the reveal of Garden’s financier, the escalating procession of sorceress, the tedium of drawing endless magic—can succeed in turning off players. Squall is insufferable until he’s not, which is the point of his arc but it can be like drinking bad tasting medicine when you’re not even sick. Furthermore, believing in its more extraordinary plot points (why are we in space!) demands a lot from players not immersed in the unabashed lunacy of 90’s Japanese role-playing games. Final Fantasy VIII isn’t the easiest game to love.
While games certainly “age” and design decisions, not to mention hardware limitations, are either forgotten or fall out of fashion, it’s easier than ever to appreciate Final Fantasy VIII. From an academic perspective it’s the ultimate model of risk from a Japanese publisher, and for genre enthusiasts of all ages there still isn’t anything quite like it. New or younger players may interesting that the main character has a sword that is also a gun with a trigger you can literally pull every time you use the attack command…or any one of Final Fantasy VIII’s other attractive eccentricities. Problems persist, but fade with a shift in perspective.
Higher, or at least different, barriers may have been erected by Final Fantasy VIII’s present form as Final Fantasy VIII Remastered. The purpose of this package was to present a way to play Final Fantasy VIII on modern hardware platforms. This includes three basic objectives. The code needs to actually run and perform as it did on an original PlayStation in 1999. Remastered also needs to compensate Final Fantasy VIII’s original (I’m guessing) 480i resolution to modern 1080p+ screens, which would be considerably difficult with the simplicity of its texture mapped polygons and pre-rendered backgrounds. It also, like Final Fantasy VII’s modern release, should apparently feature built in cheats to compensate for 2019’s general absence of an attention span.
Final Fantasy VIII Remastered does all of these things to varying levels of success. It will work on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch, and PC platforms. It looks…well, my tests are not in any way scientific but my god look at that texture set on the mountain behind Balamb Garden. Whatever effects were used to conceal its seams in 1999 are no longer available in the god-like resolution days of 2019. I don’t know a better solution for this problem, my PlayStation disc of Final Fantasy VIII looked even worse when played through a PlayStation 3 on the same television, so it’s likely Dotemu did the best they could with the material. At least most of the pre-rendered backgrounds look OK.
As opposed to the Final Fantasy VII conversion, which was largely constructed from Eidos’ Final Fantasy VII PC release, Dotemu made the decision to significantly update Final Fantasy VIII’s character models. As revealed through Final Fantasy VIII’s most damning meme, Squall and the rest of your party now look more like human beings. Or maybe they look like doe-eyed automatons who fell out of Kingdom Hearts. It’s uncomfortable and incongruous. And it’s probably the best working solution for Final Fantasy VIII Remastered. I don’t care for it because I am a purist with a 300lb cathode-ray tube television in my basement. Normal people without this particular affliction will see updated character models as a positive move, or, more likely, won’t even be able to notice a difference from the original. It’s fine.
Final Fantasy VIII Remastered’s console ports arrive with all of the code-bending cheats contained in the Final Fantasy VII ports. Players can turn off random battles (which used to be an ability one had to earn through the Diablos GF), restore their entire hit-points at the push of a button (which also boosts the Crisis Level into enabling a Limit Break). Lastly, players can fast-forward time by a multiple of three, which should erase some of the draw/stock tedium. Interestingly, fast-forwarding battles doesn’t affect the timer in sequences like the Fire Cavern Seed test. Purists (hi) would judge these options as unnecessary but realists would understand that, as options, it’s optional.
Is it an ignorant statement if I wish aspects of Final Fantasy VIII Remastered had been handled better? I have no idea how game development actually works or the amount of labor required to make Final Fantasy VIII function on four modern platforms. I also have no idea what Square-Enix’s budget for the project allowed Dotemu to accomplish. I think the character models look alienating and uncomfortable and some textures look hideous on displays and resolutions that weren’t even theoretically possible at the time of Final Fantasy VIII’s production. These are not rational thoughts and, more importantly, don’t have much value alongside the fact that Final Fantasy VIII is available, acknowledged and, ever so briefly, back in the spotlight. The availability and existence of Final Fantasy VIII Remastered is ultimately a force of good.
Final Fantasy spent a decade constructing idols and Final Fantasy VIII demolished every one of them. Its elaborate, extravagant, and chaotic parade of ideas marched toward an evolutionary dead end and ensured there would never be another game like Final Fantasy VIII. Even by Remastered’s distressing modernization, Final Fantasy VIII’s paradigm shifting idiosyncrasies still showcase one of the most fearless and contemplative models of its medium. Final Fantasy VIII is a classic for people immune to the charms of classics.
