If this game is top-notch, I will jab rusty nails into my eyes. Frantically.

by Wisdom 

Discussing this topic again is like beating the worm-eaten carcass of a long-dead horse, but it always, ALWAYS comes up, and no one ever does a decent job of tearing the game down or building it up. I'm normally the only person defending this game anyway, but after reading the editorial that attempted to do this as well, I feel that the game is being given too much credit. So, I'll spare all of you die-hard FFVIII haters and HARDCORE GAMERZ! the trouble and deal with this one myself. Consider this my early Christmas gift, you rat-bastards.

Letâs start with the absolute worst aspect of Final Fantasy VIII. The battle system just sucked. I can't even say how much it sucked because this is a family-oriented website, and I would probably seriously offend somebody, but rest assured that the magnitude of Square's butchery of FFVIII's combat system defies explanation. Retarded primates, flinging feces at each other, could have done a better job on a battle system. Why? First rule of battling: do not punish the gamer for using any option other than attack. And yes, in Final Fantasy VIII, you are punished if you use magic, because it lowers your stats. Juggling having stats to withstand attacks and using magic to deal damage is not my idea of a captivating fight. That is not strategy. Strategy would be limiting the uses of spells per battle, not per the game. Drawing takes up valuable battle time, and is just plain annoying. One must allot an action slot specifically to drawing if he/she even wishes to consider maintaining an expendable magic supply. I shouldnât have to spend time sucking spells out of the enemies. Magic did not add depth to Final Fantasy VIII in any way. The spells were often weaker than physical attacks, and the Guardian Forces were basically command materia that mastered much more quickly, and the skills they gave you superceded any magical spells you'd want to draw. The only reason I drew at the end of the game was for stat building: that is NOT my idea of successful appropriation of magic. I should never have to force myself to find "rare" spells just so I stand a semblance of a chance against the next boss. That hurts the flow of the game, seriously. But itâs not like the magic system interfered too much. I could deal with flaw of this size.

I cannot, however, deal with the leveling system. Second rule of battling: do not punish your gamer for choosing to battle. A short explanation of FFVIIIâs philosophy on combat: "First, the gamer simply has to fight a battle ever 1.4 nanoseconds. Hmm· then, let's have the enemies level up with your main character so you're never too strong so as breeze through the battles you fight in any section of the game! Hey, better yet, let's make it impossible to remove your main character from the party, so he levels up 4,000,000% more than anyone else! That'll make the game fun!" What MORON thought of that one, Square? Did you all take bets as to who could come up with the worst gameplay system ever? Or was this some programmer's way of getting back at you? Did you botch a Christmas party or something? Good God, how did this pass play-testing?!

See, Final Fantasy VIII deviates from the RPG norm with regards to level building: instead of rewarding you for accelerating your characters' growth, Final Fantasy VIII defecates on their rotting corpses. Because of that "never take Squall out because heâs somehow essential to every scenario" bit, Squall was level 80 before anyone else in my party had reached level 40. Now, had the enemies not leveled up with me, that would not have been a complaint of mine. But no. Oh no. They DO level up with me. Or more appropriately, they level up with Squall: who is forty levels above everyone else in my party. The enemies are matched for Squall: they are also forty levels above my party. Everyone but Squall dies every other battle. So he gets higher level. Now he's level 100. So the enemies are level 100. Watch my party get decimated. It was ridiculous. Do you have any idea how fustrating it was to just walk on a random island, looking for draw points, get in a battle all of a sudden, and get nuked for 9999 points of damage by a stray flare dragon before you know what happened? You see, I'd been accustomed to not getting killed outright in RPGs. It violates the third rule of battling, namely that you should have enough time to run the hell away if an enemy is too powerful. Nope, not this time. The dragon goes before everybody, or maybe after Squall, who plinks the beast for a nice amount of damage before he is incinerated. As we progress towards the ending dungeons of the game, this begins to happen on a regular basis. Enter dungeon, proceed three steps, fight, die horribly, try again. As you can imagine, my enthusiasm for the game diminished considerably. (Squaresoft is soooo lucky the post office scans their packages. I mean soooo lucky.)

This is really the point where my disappointment with the game shows through, because if the entire game had sucked, I would have just trashed it immediately. But it didn't. In fact, the battling system was a crippling link in what was, in other realms, a real gem. It had by far the most mature storyline written for an RPG to date, involving realistic dialogue, (sorry, Xenogears was like listening to acid-laced pre-schoolers), and a character-driven plotline. It wasn't just "see bad guy, follow bad guy, get there too late to stop bad guy, follow bad guy again, eventually corner bad guy after he has sufficiently raped the planet, kill bad guy, game over." The people in the game were confused about what to do and how to do it. They argued, they got pissed off at each other, they had to juggle duties with personal vendettas, and you got to watch it all. The love sub-plot added a whole new dimension of realism to the game, because if anyone here has actually been outside of his/her house, he/she would have noticed that love does not have to shatter one's reality to change a person. In Squall's case, it was a gradual turnover involving little, miniscule changes. By the end of the game, he'd reached a state of manhood, but we never quite grasped it until the last cinema. That deserves high praise, because game had ever done that before, or at least conveyed it so clearly. (Although Xenogears comes very close, and in my eyes is a much, much better game... if only half of the dialogue made sense...)

So I'm basically saying that Final Fantasy VIII sucked and was great at the same time. It suffered from a serious flaw, but it wasn't by any means a bad game: it's not the best or the worst of the series. And when compared to other RPGs, it garners a high rank. But "top-notch" is something only a cherished few of the RPGs can attain, as with any genre, or any modicum of art, for that matter... and Final Fantasy VIII falls short of that goal. Not by a cataclysm, but not by an inch, either. It just, quite simply, falls short.