Opinion Piece: For Sale: One broken copy of FF8.

by Shanoyu

I haven't finished ff8 but quite frankly, i'm not too intrested in finishing it.

I could probaly do it if it weren't for the bugs, which are undoubtedly targeted at my early series psx.

I am currently at lunatic pandora, I have been told that it is possible to leave to do the subquests and return to the ship, however it is not possible for me to go back the way I came. Doing so causes my PSX to freeze, or, if i'm lucky, do nothing, just kind of stand there walking back thru the tunnel like i'm on the invisible treadmill from hell. I'm too lazy to fight the next boss simply because of the retardo design of the battle. How many times do we need a "Don't hit when XXXX" fight till it's boring to square?

Ignoring that fact, i'm disappointed that more wasn't done with the difficulty and strategy that could have been inserted with the new junction system.

Generally speaking the strategy is to teach your GF's the Refine abilites and then junction spells to whatever. The Bosses thus far have been far too weak, this is due in no small part to the fact that junctioning should allow the bosses to be almost super-charged, simply because junctioning the massive amounts of spells possible with the GF Refine abilities allows the party to be super charged, however the bosses are weak. Why? Furthermore, Why is Boost included, I can already boost without boost itself to 140%, then I can get 150% of that? Why don't we just do 100% and use strategy instead of button pressing and AP gaining, I want Final Fantasy, not Track and Field.

However other critiques of the game only prove that FF8's menus are far too complex, "you can't see what someone has junctioned on the switch screen", yes you can, hit Square. I'm suprised people don't know this. Even rpgamer's review fails to note this. Has it gotten to the point where Squaresoft has made menu's so complex that even reviewers don't know of 'SECRET' menu features that simply make the game _playable_?

All and all the game is fun, but it's fun in the way that playing Doom with Godmode on is fun. It's fun for a while. Heh. The story almost makes up for it until the orphanage where a plot twist is pulled out of the writers ass in Dues Ex Machina style, (Dues Ex Machina, of course, means God behind the curtain, meaning that the plot twist was totally unexpected and illogical.) After this the story begins to take a devolve into a mucky 'what is the price for power' bullshit that we see often in stories when the writer is completely and totally baffed by a case of writers block. Evuntally though they pull out of this and the story picks up again, leaving me, to this point, somewhat happy.

Other parts of the story were frustrating for instance the 'hey we escaped from near certain death by getting into this broken tank which barely works which we then drove across half a continent and across some train tracks without getting hit by a train on the way cool huh? *breathe*' I'm not trying to be picky ala the lake in titanic or the tarot cards from diffrent sets in the Red Violin, but what i'm saying is that square tries, and fails, at this point to deliever a touching goodbye along with utterly horrid dialogue about dying and trust.

Other than that FF8 is great. Just not that fun for me.