A Flawed Final Fantasy
Final Fantasy VIII is a highly polarizing game, you either think that the love story and the unique game system is amazing and brilliant, or you think that the plot and game system are a broken mess. Spoilers for this review, I fall into the latter: this game is fundamentally broken.
While I could go on and create a wall of text, I think it best to just break it down into what is good and what is bad about this title. First off, this game isn't a "bad game", there are plenty of Quest 64, Superman 64, and NES X-Men out there to compete for the title of world's worst game. Final Fantasy VIII does not belong near that pantheon of horror.
The graphics, while currently outdated, are by PS1 standards, fantastic. The art design of realistic characters and semi-futuristic areas are extremely well done. Similarly, Square learned much from Final Fantasy VII, and upped the quality of the audio significantly in this game. The opening scene's audio alone is goose-bump inducing.
That being said, the game has major flaws. The first is the plot. If you haven't played this ten year old game, and don't want to have the plot spoiled skip ahead a paragraph. You play as precocious teenagers who are at a mercenary training school. Your schoolmates that you travel with all knew each other in the past, but you forgot about that because the ultimate sorceress wiped your mind with time compression powers (no folks, I couldn't make this up if I tried). All the while you learn about your past, Squall, a brooding emotional teen, and Rinoa, a cute, likable teen (both of which are mercenaries) fall in love.
Yes, that is the plot that all of the people gush and rave about. I hate to break your rose colored, teenage angst filled glasses, but that plot sucks. I would love to be shown how wrong I am, so go ahead and PM or comment on this as to why I should re-think my opinion of the plot.
The second major problem is the game system. Leveling up in this game actively makes the game more difficult. You increase in power slightly, but the enemies (including bosses) increase even faster. To offset this you need to draw (think of it as mystically stealing) magic spells from the monsters you find. As you "draw" this magic, you can link these spells to your attributes to raise them. For instance linking your cure spells to your health increases your health.
However, and here's the broken part, as you use said drawn spells, the attributes linked to that stat actually decrease! So you using a heal spell will reduce your maximum health.
The way around this is through summoning guardian forces (summons). They do all the fighting for you. So as it turns out, the best way to play this game is to have high powered summons linked to each character until the very last fight where you then unleash all the spells you have drawn over the course of the game.
Ultimately, this game isn't terrible. I had a lot of fun with the card game, and seeing "what came next" did draw me forward. But in the realm of the Final Fantasy games, this one is only better than Final Fantasy II (NES).
