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Final Fantasy 8: Harmless tedium? Or Neo-Nazi training ground?
I didn't like Final Fantasy 8. Granted, it has a stunningly beautiful opening sequence, but after that, this is the most soul-crushingly horrible game I have ever played in my life.
To start with, I was disturbed by the theme of young people being trained to be assassins. An RPG based on the School of the Americas; how nice. Later, it is discovered that all these child assassins were raised in the same orphanage, and that they have been systematically exposed to hazardous materials that have been erasing their memories. This in the game that's 'based on the theme of love'. Perhaps my definition of 'love' is different from Square's, but it sounds more like the theme is child abuse. When the kids are old enough, they attend a military school, and you, the player, get to be subjected to the same rigid discipline as your characters. Now that's role-playing! Taking tests and walking slowly and quietly through halls is not my idea of recreation, but that's what this game makes you do, unless you want your pay docked. Earning money through drudgery adds a nice touch of realism, and helps prepare young players for their adult lives as oppressed drones in the hive of capitalism, but again, it's not my idea of a good time.
Speaking of things that don't provide a good time, I come to the Junctioning system. You must be obsessive-compulsive to tolerate this. Another disciplinary aspect is introduced with this system: if you actually use your magic in battle, your stats drop. So remember, kids, hoard things and never use them! Obsessively collect junk to level up your weapon! Spend hours staring at your prison-grey menu screen converting imaginary items into other imaginary items! Go completely insane by the third disk!
The menus in this game really bothered me. In Final Fantasy 7, you could at least change the color of menus and windows, and in FF6, you could use patterns and change the colors. I thought this was really neat; after all, in an RPG, you spend a lot of time looking at text windows, adjusting things in your camp screen, and a little variety makes it more fun. A game like Final Fantasy 8, where equipping your characters is an obnoxious and time consuming chore, should have an option to change the backgrounds; instead, it forces you to look at grey windows, and every second you spend in camp feels like staring at the wall of a cell.
Drawing is another feature I found odd. What is drawing but sucking magic out of the earth? Since you can also draw from enemies, it seems to me that the magic you draw is actually lifestream; you're stealing the Planet's life force and being raised as a killing machine...Squall is actually Sephiroth in disguise! Seriously, why is behavior that was regarded as villianous in the last Final Fantasy now accepted and even encouraged? I understand the appeal of the reluctant hero, and I can see how a touch of moral ambiguity can enhance a plot, but the issue of drawing isn't even addressed. Nobody, in or outside of the game, sees anything wrong with this!
Even the battles in this game manage to be insidious by pitting the team members against each other. It's weird enough that you have to keep your characters on the brink of death to bring out their powers (if I just burned Zell horribly, ala Alessa, would he be in constant limit break, or should I just have Squall beat him up some more?), but does this game actually expect me to care which of my characters strikes the final blow to get the experience boost? Am I supposed to be counting hit points, calculating who will do what before his turn comes up, so I can know who will make killing blows? This game thinks the player is as psychotic as it is, and in my case, it was wrong.
This is a game that emphasizes discipline, discourages creativity, fails to address moral issues, crushes the spirit of its players (mine, anyway), encourages obsessive behavior, and doesn't even condemn the idea of using mind control in the form of memory loss to create child assassins. The theme of this is 'love', all right: Square's love of spitting in its player's faces and watching them come back for more.
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