FINAL FANTASY VIII

---{ Graphics }---
☐ You forget what reality is
☐ Beautiful
☑ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS
---{ Gameplay }---
☑ Very good
☐ Good
☐ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't
---{ Audio }---
☑ Eargasm
☐ Very good
☐ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf
---{ Audience }---
☐ Kids
☐ Teens
☑ Adults
☐ Grandma
---{ PC Requirements }---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☑ Potato
☐ Decent
☐ Fast
☐ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer
---{ Game Size }---
☐ Floppy Disk
☑ Old Fashioned
☐ Workable
☐ Big
☐ Will eat 10% of your 1TB hard drive
☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it
☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data
---{ Difficulty }---
☐ Just press 'W'
☑ Easy
☐ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Significant brain usage
☐ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls
---{ Grind }---
☐ Nothing to grind
☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☐ Isn't necessary to progress
☑ Average grind level
☐ Too much grind
☐ You'll need a second life for grinding
---{ Story }---
☐ No Story
☐ Some lore
☐ Average
☐ Good
☐ Lovely
☑ It'll replace your life
---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☑ Average
☐ Long
☐ To infinity and beyond
---{ Price }---
☐ It's free!
☑ Worth the price
☐ If it's on sale
☐ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money
---{ Bugs }---
☑ Never heard of
☐ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs
---{ ? / 10 }---
☐ 1
☐ 2
☐ 3
☐ 4
☐ 5
☐ 6
☐ 7
☐ 8
☐ 9
☑ 10

Top 3 games of my life. I honestly don't understand all the hatred it got. If 8 years old me without knowing english can figure the junction system out then so can you! The story and the characters are amazing and I'm willing to die on this hill. Not giving this game a chance from you and a remake from the devs would be a HUGE mistake!

Final Fantasy VIII is a strange, disorienting game. It leans a lot more heavily into what FFVII was going for with its more futuristic approach to its world. But in terms of character writing and combat, it’s quite different, in some ways for the better, and other ways for the worse.
The game is very easy to break thanks to the junction system. I think this is just a common fact about the game. The junction system is heavily debated amongst fans as to whether it’s any good or not. I personally think it’s cool. The game just does a very poor job of explaining the system. It’s an interesting way to gain stats, use summons and magic, and overall, a cool way to enable character growth instead of relying mostly on levels or equipment. Hell, it’s best if you have as few levels in the game as possible because of how the overall level scaling in the game works. It makes for one of the most unique systems in the series and even in JRPGs from the 90s. I think the system was quite influential, as was FFVIII in general.
I’ve always liked Final Fantasy games' gameplay for the pre-planning aspect, how much freedom or how many interesting choices the game gives me to build the characters and overall team before a fight. Rather than the actual combat itself, which I still greatly enjoy since it displays the quality of my character/team building. And FFVIII had a neat system for me to mess around with. As previously mentioned, the game is very easy to break, even if you aren’t aware of the known ways to break it, you kinda just find them as you play. If you pay attention to the world, GF abilities, and how to use them, you should easily be able to come up with a way to break it. And I like this. I tend to like JRPGs that let me break their systems if I understand them well enough. You can still play the game like a typical JRPG, but it just isn’t as fun that way because the encounters in the game range from average to pretty good.
I wanna talk a bit about Triple Triad, a card minigame that feels like crack cocaine. At first, I just played a bunch of it because I found it incredibly fun. It’s very simple but has tons of depth, making it very easy to lose track of time as you play games of it. But I also noticed how it interacts with some of the GF abilities you can acquire. Namely, being able to turn cards from the game into spells and items in the game. Making it one of the ways you can absolutely break the combat of the game. The rewards have such a large impact on the general combat and party building that it’s very hard not to play it a bunch during your playthrough.
Usually, though, what I care about the most in a Final Fantasy are the characters and world. And this is where the game became a bit of a mixed bag for me. Squall was generally unlikable in the first 2 discs, which makes sense from a story perspective, but it made for a dull protagonist for most of the game. When he goes through a majority of his character arc and has an attitude change, he’s fine, but still one of the least memorable FF leads. Which kinda sucks because he has an awesome character design. On the other side of the spectrum, Zell is pretty hard not to like. He’s one of those super happy go lucky energetic characters that we see in JRPGs pretty often and I’m a sucker for them personally so I liked Zell.
Seifer is kinda just a weirdo that made me laugh a lot when he’s around. He’s like one of those 10 year old relatives you might know who thinks they’re hot shit and cool but comes off to adults as super goofy and childish. He isn’t around much though which sucks, and led to me forgetting he’s a part of the story many times. Selphie, Quistis, and Irvine are kinda just there, I don’t mind them, but they don’t do anything for me as characters. Rinoa’s pretty good, though, and she might be my favourite character in the game next to Zell. And the main antagonist is pretty horrifying, and in terms of lore and overall story, is great. But they are very, very lacking as a character. I don’t mind this too much, honestly, since I found their presence to be a good enough driving force, but there's some untapped potential here.
The romance in the story was a mixed bag for me. I’m a fan of Rinoa and Squall and was rooting for them, but they didn’t give me enough of them being close together, and the pacing is pretty bad. It almost felt like it went from them not being close to them being really close. Lacking a natural buildup when it comes to character relationships, especially love, can be detrimental to how I feel about characters by the end. And that kinda happened here. The next 2 games did a much better job at giving us a more natural love story.
I found the overall story to be pretty lacking, but there are moments I found great, like when you get the airship in the game. A very important part of an FF story at this point in the series, and the way it was done here was very cool. The Laguna flashbacks were also some of my favourite story segments in the game. I quite liked Laguna, and while the flashbacks didn’t connect with the main story as well as I hoped, it was still a cool way of trying to tell the story, and I could see what they were trying to do. The main issue I had with the story was the pacing; sometimes it felt like we were speeding through it, which led to underdeveloped characters and a bad execution of events. Other times, it would have huge exposition dumps, which were written in a very convoluted way, making it read very poorly. I do like the ending sequence quite a lot, though. It’s a rollercoaster of emotions, from making me disturbed to depressed to kinda confused but happy all in like 20 minutes. It’s stuck with me for the past week. It was probably cus Zell finally got to demolish a plate of hot dogs.
The side quests and the world were fine. I like some of them, like the one with Zell and the library girl. I do wish the world were more interesting, though; it’s got some cool and weird stuff in it that I liked, like the UFO and Obel Lake. But something about it didn't give me the same wonder and fascination that many of the other FF worlds do. The areas and atmosphere are really nice, though. I enjoyed most of them, and the way the areas meshed with the music made for a magical experience. I especially love the atmosphere of the game after disc 1, where it feels dreamy and disorienting. The dungeon design is fairly simple, though, and so I found it lacking many times.
Of course, the music is fantastic, possibly one of the best by this point in the series. It’s got a militaristic sound to reflect the early narrative of the game, but it has a lot of the classic wonder and magic heard in the previous games as well. And the melodies are just so nice to listen to, making exploring areas a lot more memorable. The final boss theme is hands down one of the best in the series. Lastly, graphically, the game looks good. It’s a huge step up from FFVII in terms of character models. And the overall art direction and pre-rendered backgrounds look amazing. The only thing that’s lacking is the character faces; some of them look fine, like Zell’s, but most of them look wonky or wrong. I felt Rinoa’s face looked the worst since it looks nothing like her character art or FMV model.
I honestly didn’t expect to find so much to love in Final Fantasy VIII; it’s got a very unique gameplay system in the series, a very memorable atmosphere, and an amazing soundtrack. But it does fall flat with many things, such as its characters, its pacing, and the story in general. I honestly think this is the game in the series that could get the most out of a remake. It felt like they couldn’t quite capture what they wanted to with the time and technology limits they had, which led to some poor execution of some great ideas. I know I’d personally love to see a remake of this much more than FFIX just because that game did exactly what it wanted to and to full effect.
7/10
full review:

Every complaint I've ever heard about this game has stemmed from one of two things. First, it's that "it's not Final Fantasy VII" from Cloud fanboys with no taste, and second that "Drawing magic is stupid." To the people who say the first, I say you're right, and thank goodness for that. To the second, I say that you're playing the game wrong.

The only times you need to use Draw are to grab the handful of GFs from bosses, or if you run across a particularly rare magic from a Draw Point in the world. Outside of that, you should be using a combination of the Card ability and GF refinement to get your magic. I find that the most critical people of the game genuinely don't understand its mechanics because the game doesn't hold your hand or give you pretty colored rocks to play with like they do in VII, and it expects that you experiment and encourages you to break its systems.

The game has a competent story (yes, even including the time compression,) relatable characters, and one of the best designs for mechanics and systems across the whole franchise that encourages freedom and doesn't pigeonhole you into useless stats and narrow builds like so many mediocre JRPGs.

Ben Starr said it best: "Final Fantasy VIII is and always has been an S-tier Final Fantasy game."

Literally the best FF game of all time 10/10 great story and cinematics for a 90s game.

It's a great game but a mediocre port. I had a hell of a time with mapping a controller. The "Default" controller settings are all wrong and it changes the START and SELECT button to L3 and R3 and there's no way to change it after you've hit "Default" controller settings.

Also I would have preferred if they stuck with the Playstation controller scheme, because let me tell you, finding out what B1, B2, B3 ~ B9 were, was a giant pain in the a**.

Other than that, game runs flawlessly. Volume is a bit high.

I've played this game since 1999, and I finally bought it on steam. I think this is one of the best games ever made, and I'll die on that hill. The junction system makes the game incredibly fun for returning players, and creates a very unique system for first timers. The story (although admittedly convoluted near the end) is deep and rich and the characters are fantastic. Squall's development is natural and relatable, and him and Rinoa's relationship is a great romance. The world is huge (especially for it's time) and the replay value is immense. 10/10 stars.