Chronicles of the Last Fantasy Part 2

Where Final Fantasy VII had a human touch, Final Fantasy VIII didn’t. Where Final Fantasy had an in depth world and story, Final Fantasy VIII had a disjointed and somewhat muddled story. These are the sort of things that can be compared between the two games. The sequel took a different direction but had similar beginnings; your character, Squall, was an unsociable, didn’t care about the world, Cloud like figure. The difference was that throughout Final Fantasy VIII he never really changed.

Final Fantasy VIII was about SEED, Galbadia, witches and sorcerers. About the past mingling with the future. It was an interesting if somewhat complex story. Again Squaresoft presented us with an amazing world to live in, but there was a fundemental flaw in the sequel to the highly acclaimed FFVII; the characters. Somewhere along the line the love and lives of the characters, the background stories, the very soul that existed in Final Fantasy VII, was lost. Instead your characters took on a more adult role, but never really delved deep into their existence.

Indeed, VIII at times felt very adult, almost like a Final Fantasy Advanced. Gone were the dwarf sized spikey characters that you moved within the world. Instead the characters forms were more complete and human. The FMV sequences snapped into the game rather than being seperate sequences; the world moved into the video and then back, your characters sometimes appearing more graphically formed in the sequences and sometimes not. Materia was replaced by a drawing system allowing you to draw and use magic by effectively stealing it from an opponent. The opponent would have specific magic, and this in turn was a helpful guide to the sort of magic you may want to use to fight against them. “Drawing” almost seemed to be a continuation of the magic Enemy Skill, in which your character learnt the skills of the opponent. Instead it was learning what the character had magic wise.

This effectively wiped out the need for magic points. Instead the amount of times you can use magic depended on the supply you had on you. Coupled with the ability to draw from opponents, the result was that you had a healthy supply of magic for whatever enemy you faced on the battlefield. There was however a downside to this; weaponry became the secondary option. The attack button became a second choice, and in ignoring it and not properly looking into upgrading your gear you would in later levels find yourself in dangerous situations with your weapon only doing a small amount of damage.

Summoning turned into Guardian Forces, and indeed the GF was the beginning of what we see today in the Final Fantasy games when it comes to summoning. Allocating specific skills for each GF to learn, summoning taking damage as it attempted to load, and your GF’s only becoming more powerful if properly developed. The natural evolution of summoning magic was a neccessity given that in Final Fantasy VII it was far too easy to just cast the materia repeatedly until the enemy was defeated. In FFVIII, the repetition was slowed down, and there was a possibility that a GF could reach zero health and not be used if played too often in the battlefield.

There were fun moments though. The collectors card mini game that accompanied your travels was a nice addition to the game, and alot of players of FFVIII enjoyed becoming adept at it. Personally I always failed miserably at it, and didn’t particularly enjoy losing cards as the AI would always swipe away your strongest card if you lost. This resulted in alot of restarting my saves…

In the end though i’ve always found Final Fantasy VIII difficult to like. Though the world was interesting, the music once again fantastic, continuing the melodic tunes and rememerable songs just as well as its predecessor, the characters in it weren’t. Everyone appeared to be very stale and uninteresting. The main characters were difficult to fully like, appearing more generic than compared to FFVII’s established characters. Like most Final Fantasy games alot of people testify to this version as well, touting it as having the best magical and equipment system of the lot. For me though, FFVIII was a bit of a miss.

Next up, David gives us his views on Final Fantasy IX. Stay tuned…

© 2009-2010 LMB Productions. Template by GhostPool Designs. In the time you have spent reading this, Google has acquired all your details.

• Home