Final Fantasy 8 (or VIII if you're that concerned about it)

Final Fantasy 8 – 0/1 – Henry Arrambide

...and the word 'emo' is not used once. Because that term has been overused by morons.

              Final Fantasy 8 is the anti-videogame. It is a game about making the rules up as you go along, a game that doesn’t try to approach the player at all. It lives in a realm where consistency is a bad thing, where the “story” is an empty shell of a bullet point on the back of the case that was slapped together for no reason aside from it being “what jrpg’s do”.

              It starts with the junction system, needless and bloated, potentially interesting, ultimately gamebreaking. You see, rather than giving you a set of characters with skills, strengths, and weakness, what the game does is give you blank slates. These characters are not “start off unique and eventually turn powerful” characters that previous installments have delivered. With the junction system, literally every character is blank. Stats are modified mainly through attaching different elemental powers to different attributes. Throughout the game, you encounter various beasts and draw points which allow you to collect different types of magic which you then bind to different characters for different statistical outcomes.

              This is not bad. The system itself can be fun. Upon first realizing the intricacies of the system and messing around with it, it seems pretty damn fun, and once you start effectively using Junctions, you feel wonderful. It gives the player incentive to invest in the game world and learn the mechanics. The biggest flaw however, is that the game itself decides that rather than steadily opening up new possibilities for the player by moderating when you get what magic, it’s going to dump the whole mess on you at once. Early on you are handed Diablos, an optional boss who can be defeated with one of those simple jrpg strategy staple patterns. What Diablos does when defeated is give you a card, which then can be harvested into hundreds of “Demi” magic spells, which then can turn your character into a killing machine. All this is roughly an hour into the game. No longer is there challenge. No longer is there incentive to collect magic and use the junction system.

Who the hell looks at this and thinks "Fun"?

              What’s that you say? Rather than breaking the junction system I should be experimenting and exploring what the game has to offer? That’s exactly HOW I broke it, dear reader. Even if you don’t consider this breaking the game, fine, the system works. Yes, the system works. That does not stop it from being needlessly and pointlessly convoluted, overindulgent, and abstract as hell. When characters in-universe are talking to you, the player, directly, explaining rule sets, without even trying to keep said dialogue sensible in-universe context, with no other characters in said universe thinking it is slightly odd that Quistis is talking to herself about arranging your firagas so that your attack stat will be higher, someone should be getting fired somewhere. Look man, Of Mice and Men is only like 100 pages long; brevity is the soul of wit, ideas are best expressed understandably, think like a wise man, express yourself like a simple man, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. If an idea is good, people will be receptive of it. The problem is that Final Fantasy 8 has no central idea or statement – it has nothing to say, just hundreds of tenuously linked plot points with no real direction buried under inane dialogue and horrible mechanics.

              The bosses and enemies in the game are scaled to level. This means that they will always be weaker than the party, because they are scaled to the players base level (the game can’t calculate every junction combination or anticipate every custom design), meaning that once you find that broken set of junctions that destroys every enemy you come across, there is nothing to stop you. There will be no spikes in difficulty because everything is attached to the scaled difficulty. What do you get in the end? Overpowered characters and no fun. The Junction system could work wonders in a game where enemies weren’t scaled. Imagine approaching a challenging opponent and taking him down because you organized your stats and weaknesses and rearranged the genetic makeup of your character (this is why Chrono Cross is the best game on the PS1. Yeah, that’s right, you heard me Metal Gear Solid). If you lose, well, reload, reorganize your parties junctions – think it through. It’s part gamble part strategy. That would have been fantastic. Imagine not gaining gamebreaking items one hour in. There would be a rewarding flow and evolution in the game to the characters as they progressed through battles. Imagine a game where they didn’t tell you how to use the junction system every five minutes for the first two hours through fourth wall breaking dialogue’s involving characters telling you to navigate to the “Junction” option on the “Character Menu” using the “X Button” and “Triangle Button” over and over. You get the basics laid out, and then the game turns it loose on you, and the menu’s become your own little lab in which you can experiment.

Photographic evidence that I did in fact beat the game - no baseless attacks here!
(shirt courtesy of Spoony)

              Speaking of menu’s, the game has you juggle your elements terribly between characters, having to detach and swap junction settings all the time. This isn’t a gaming OCD thing on my behalf either – you go through several plot related party swaps. The developers knew that you would be juggling. But rather than make a pool in which you could dump all your junctioning materials, they left the system as is. So you usually have to detach everyone’s junction and drop them all onto one person who serves as a pool, and then as you configure your junctions you move the pool from person to person. God forbid you want to split several of the same magic type across multiple characters. It’s micromanagement at its worst. You could get around this by breaking down and grinding and harvesting Demi’s or Curaga’s or whatever – it’s a catch 22. The game does not want you to play and learn the subtle intricacies of the system, it wants you to amass amounts of magic so large you don’t need to split it and manage it, staple them permanently to characters, and then run through the game without managing too much.

              The worst part is, all these mechanics are totally detached from the world of the story. Even in universe, it makes very little sense, with only a passing reference to how Junctioning might possibly work (they drop one or two lines about the dangers of junctioning, yet the questions raised are never returned to or answered – the line is just dramatic for the sake of the game needing a dramatic moment). Unlike say, FF6 with Espers being central plot figures or FF7 where Materia plays a crucial role, the Junction system is abstract as hell, never explained in-universe, and whenever the characters do refer to it, it’s done in a fourth wall breaking tutorial in which they tell you how to navigate the menus. This wouldn’t be bad, but as I said, at the same time that the characters are telling the invisible man controlling them how to control them, they are referring to the system in-universe without giving much justification as to why the system is even in place, seeing as it makes no in-universe sense.

              What happens is that all player interaction is totally destroyed. If I’m just going to harvest aura’s and demi’s and curaga’s and get by spazzing limit breaks, it’s pointless to do much else. What is left for us to do? Walk through battle after battle destroying monsters, sit back, and enjoy the story. A story about an evil empire or president or someone in cahoots with a witch or something something something. That all gets thrown out the window and replaced with an evil space witch and a technologically advanced hidden city near the end anyway (while suffering major pacing problems, it feels like a great throwback to the convoluted NES rpg’s – heavy classic Final Fantasy or Crystalis vibes). For “An Epic Story based on the theme of Love.” Bullet point, the game pretty much sticks to the stock tropes of the genre. There is something about space and a rocket ship launcher which looks like a revolver, but it is never explained or really justified; like the gunblade, it simply ‘looks cool’. Flashbacks pad out the main parties quest and serve as bright red arrows which point you in the next direction. Rather than tinting the game with light humor and comedic relief every now and then, of reminding us that “hey this is just a game, have fun”, this Final Fantasy was dead set on telling some kind of story. One involving a grand witch and time “kompression” and orphans and flying schools. Oh yeah, and the moon cries. Stated before, there is no central theme or idea present; lacking this foundation the game crams itself full of “cool moments” and absurd game mechanics – the end product is highly unstable.Even if I am "missing the point" (lol too deep for me lol!) and Squall is dead or mind controlled or something yadda yadda yadda...well 1) this is a fan theory that only ever pops up in defense of the game and never discussed in its own right because it boils down to HA HA THE GAME IS BULLSHIT BECAUSE SQUARE WANTED IT TO BE BULLSHIT! and 2) That only renders like 60% of the dialogue of the game good - just the dialogue; the other 40% of dialogue is still bad/tedioustutorialtalk and the REST of the game is still nonsensical play mechanics.

....and believe me, no amount of reading between the lines can justify NORG.

              The game tried. It failed. It wowed an entire generation with prerendered sequences and a man who had a sword which doubled as a gun. It was, and still is, a glorious mix of ideas which ultimately fail to work in unison. It is the worst example of an ‘experimental’ jRPG – but it sold, and so we are plagued with the fallout to this day. Squall is soooooooooo cool.