Final Fantasy VIII Remastered

Genre: Turn-Based JRPG

Players: 1

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Review:

Final Fantasy VIII is a Turn-Based JRPG originally released in 1999, and it is often seen as one of the black sheep of the Final Fantasy series. After the huge success of Final Fantasy VII, fans were eager to see what the next installment would bring, and Squaresoft took a lot of risks and had a lot of experimental ideas in this one… and as sometimes happens, not all of those ideas panned out quite as well as one would hope.

However, even though Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII were both on the original PlayStation, the leap in the quality of the presentation here is notable – we went from the laughably blocky characters of Final Fantasy VII to surprisingly-detailed (for the time) realistic-proportioned human characters – and in this version of the game, these graphics have been further improved with much better textures for the characters (though environments are still low-poly with pretty poor textures). This is paired with pre-rendered backgrounds that are higher-quality than Final Fantasy VII had, and much better computer-animated cutscenes (though still dated by today’s standards) that were better-integrated into the gameplay. And as iconic as Final Fantasy VII’s soundtrack is, I think I like this game’s excellent soundtrack much better.

The localization is better this time around too, although there are still awkward moments (no, Seifer, I don’t want to hear about your ROMANTIC DREAM), as well as annoying characters (the less I see of Zell, the better, and Squall takes up the mantle from Cloud as this game’s antisocial jerkwad protagonist). Overall, the story here is more ambitious too, focusing on a group of young cadets at a fantastical military academy who find themselves pulled into a sinister plot from a mysterious enemy. As with most mainline Final Fantasy games, this game’s story is unrelated to previous games in the series, so don’t feel like you need to play any of the other games to understand what’s going on.

All told, this game’s presentation has aged much, much better than Final Fantasy VII’s, but what about the gameplay?

Well, in some areas, this game is a marked improvement. This game mostly does away with the frustrating camera angles and difficult-to-parse environments that made navigating the world of Final Fantasy VII frustrating, In fact, in general, a lot of the frustrating interface issues of Final Fantasy VII are gone. What’s more, this game gives players a lot of agency to customize their characters through the game’s junction system, which allows players to attach magic spells to specific stats to bolster them, or to add special effects to weapons and armor.

However, the junction system is paired with another new system the draw system, which has players collecting their magic directly from enemies as if they were items being stolen. It’s an interesting idea in theory, but in practice it means that players will likely spend hours grinding to collect a sufficient amount of magic from enemies, and then never use that magic because it’s far more valuable as something to junction to a stat than to spend on a one-time attack. The result of all of this is that the game pretty much encourages hours of tedious grinding, and when you’re done, battles will generally be simple and grindy as well.

Players also grind to get items to upgrade their weapons, grind to power up the “GF”s that make the junction system work… just about the only thing players won’t find themselves grinding for in this game is experience, as the game has enemies leveling up with you, making the notion of leveling up seem a bit pointless.

I suppose I’d be remiss not to mention one other addition to this game, a card game called… er, card game, apparently. In the original game, it was referred to as Triple Triad, and I’m not sure why they opted to make the name generic in this release, but suffice it to say, it’s an in-game Collectible Card Game that’s fairly simple, but fun, with a variable rule set that lets you try out variants of the game in different areas, which is a clever touch.

Much like the Switch port of Final Fantasy VII, in addition to the improved higher-resolution characters this version of the game receives, this release has a host of other upgrades. The loading times have been thankfully shortened, and players can push in the left stick to speed up the game, press in the right stick to give themselves a free limit break, or press in both to turn off random encounters. These quality of life enhancements are welcome, and help the game to be less of a slog by today’s standards. However, this port isn’t all positives – there’s also a strange flaw that causes the game to register a held button as repeatedly tapping it, making for accidental menu selections when you only meant to tap the button once.

Final Fantasy VIII Remastered is a solid port of a game that still to this day has fans mixed about how they feel about it, and for good reason – for all the things it improves over Final Fantasy VII, it makes numerous other changes that are less than successful. However, I believe that overall this game has aged much better than its predecessor, and the improvements added in this version are definitely an improvement over the original. Plus, while the experimental nature of the game may have been hit or miss, it certainly resulted in something unique that’s never been replicated since. On the whole, I’d say that RPG fans on the Switch should definitely give this game a look, as it’s a superb JRPG that’s overall an excellent albeit flawed experience.

tl;dr – Final Fantasy VIII is a Turn-Based JRPG that isn’t quite as iconic as its predecessor, but I’d argue that it has aged much, much better, and this version adds a good number of enhancements to the graphics and gameplay that are a marked improvement over the original. It’s a bit dated, and some of the experimental systems here don’t work out all that well (in particular, the Draw system makes for a lot of tedious grinding), but on the whole this is a solid JRPG worth playing.

Grade: B

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