Just leave this one in the bargain bin.
Graphics: 8/10
The saving grace of this game.
The graphics are nice and the characters are modeled real life-like. They have mature bodies and support pretty complex animations. Monsters and other secondary characters are also very well made, with attention being paid to detail. The attack animations are absolutely superb in the anime style we’re all familiar with (well maybe not all, but there still hella' pretty). Weapons and equipment look great, but I donnou if that is too much of a praise... as you will later read.
However, since this game stinks so bad, not even this category is perfect. The first problem is that the game can have some really lengthy attack animations which, after watching them about 10-15 times, will get nauseatingly boring. The frame rate also seems to be somewhere below 30... don't ask me how that's possible on a console RPG, but this one did it.
In short, the graphics are mostly nice with the exception of a few hic-ups.
Sound: 0/10
Yeah, that's right folks... ZERO.
Why, and I do mean why, didn't Square get off it's lazy butt and hired some voice actors for these people? I mean at least for the screams and the 2 (or less) important dialogues in this game? You guessed it, because they know people would still buy this crap.
The sound effects and music don't fare any better.
Just like Nintendo games, FFs bear the same tune for victory, exploration, etc. for about 20 years. Let's just say it gets old.
As for the sound effects, there's so little of them that you won't notice if they are there or not, and if you don't notice them that's great! They seem to be MP3s recorded at 8kb/s!
Gameplay: 2/10
Where would the Final Fantasy series be without game play? Well maybe up higher on the charts that for sure. Before I piss some more fanboys off (well... then again…) lemme just say that the gameplay in this game, characters, and story all suck worse then you could possibly imagine.
First off: the story. OK... I really don't go for the boy girl crap and this story doesn't even begin to tickle my fancy from the start. It's a convoluted love story with Square ''wannabe'' shock moments that well, don't work. Of course the story gets darker and more absurd as you go on. It seems like the world, from being peaceful 2 days ago, has now become a beacon of evil and destruction! Great! At the end, the story also tries to intertwine psychological philosophies, and other dooms day prophecies for size and let's just say that if it didn't work for Matrix: Reloaded it's sure as hell not going to work for a much more badly written game. In the end though, this is just a crappy love story, way too cliche for anyone with more then 10-15 RPGs under their belt.
This is also due, in part, to the bad characters. And what bad characters are they! Wow, Squall the wanna be bad guy who gets softer than a tomato by the end. Rinoa the, ''you can't get any of that'' princess, that seems to fall in love with the rag-tag solider. And of course the rival, Seifer, who wants to kill the main hero and kidnap the girl and turn her in to the big scawy witch. Oh brother!!! Does this get more cliche? There are some characters, to be quite honest, that do liven up the scenery. But they are far and few in between and with the exception of 1 or 2 of them, the rest are still as cliche as they could possibly get. Another problem with the characters (perhaps due to the fact that they are too cliche) is that they have washed out personalities. Since they don't have any spoken voices (or for that matter, any worthy dialog) that only helps you forget all these characters 10 minutes after finishing the game. As for the characters themselves, there are about 7 in all. They all have special weapons and some special abilities but thanks to what is perhaps one of the stupidest battle systems invented you won't be noticing their special abilities that much.
OK so let's talk about the battle system, or lack they’re of. The battle itself is exactly like it is in every FF game: Each person in the battle takes turns at hitting the opposing team. The inclusion of the ATB “or whatever the hell that was”-bar was, at least to me, completely unnoticeable. The characters didn't get to hit twice in their ''turn'' nor would anyone attack you as long as your turn was still there.
The real fun of the battle system should come form the abilities, right? Well in FF8 it doesn't. The whole battle system is structured like crap. You can draw items or magic form monsters. So far so good, right? Well not really. The whole drawing thing means that unless you put yourself in danger (by checking the draw menu) you may miss out on Guardian Forces (GFs) or spells. Of course the ever-present random encounter problem plagues FF8 as much as any other FF game ever made. Admittedly, Square did make some nice touches to help prevent excess encounters but they’re hardly noticeable. The main ''improvement'' to the battle system, is the ability of one of your GFs to learn a skill that either halves or completely annulles random encounters. However, by the time that GF actually learns that skill, since it's not exactly a quint-essential skill for you too learn, you won't even bother with it.
Problems is that even if you do hate random encounters you won't be able to avoid them endlessly since the main idea in FF8 (as in any other FF game) is get to Lv. 99 by walking around in circles in the most dangerous area in the game. After you’re done ''leveling'' your next task is to go around looking for the only 3 available weapons... great fun!!
What would a RPG be without weapons and armor? FF8 has to at least do something right when it comes to weapons and armor, right? WRONG!
There are about 5-6 weapons, at most, available for each character. They all have to be upgraded and require no such thing as actually buying them from a shop, you know like in all the good RPGs. Rather, in order to get a new weapon, you have to go out in the world, find some incredibly rare monsters, and then fight them until they drop an incredibly rare drop... gee, that was my dream all along, playing a game in which I get bored to death trying to defeat unbalanced monsters.
Oh and that brings me to another idea, the monster unbalances! Some of the monsters in this game are absolutely ridiculous. Take the Marlboro for example, a plant that uses Bad Breath to infected your whole crew of shallow cretins with every stat alteration possible. Better yet, it uses that 80% of the time, as soon as you randomly encounter him, in the first turn of the battle!! YAY!!! That's not all there is to it when it comes to monsters though.
Most monsters in this game (that is, the ones that actually are a challenge to fight) are immune to most stat altering magic (mini, toad, poison). Now I know many RPGs use this, but FF games have made a very, very bad habit of giving you GFs or summons that use these abilities. It's plain simply useless to use these GFs battle as they’re only as strong as the poison most high-level creatures are immune to! So then, why the hell did they give them to you? Oh, that's right for you to junction them. Don't know what junctioning is? Then read on.
See FF8 uses ''junctioning'' as a way of enhancing your characters abilities and even gifting them with other super abilities. What you do is junction (i.e. equip) your character with 3 GFs at any time, or junction his stats with the spells that he/she drew from monsters or spell dispensers. OK, let's put it in a more concrete view. Say you junction a mage with 10 Str. with 99 Aura spells, the mage is gonna have 255 Str. Which means you will see mages doing the same amount of damage as fighters (some where over the 60000 margin), which in turn means that GFs who take 1-2 ''rounds'' to load up and do 30000 damage are downright useless. Great concept Square!!!
Now back to the GF part of the junctioning. See GFs are magical stat altering creatures. They can either alter you characters stats (with such passive skills as, Hit Points plus 300%) or allow you to equip abilities such as No Random encounters. There's really nothing to complain about here. The GF part of the equation suffers from the same game unbalancing issues as the first (MP +300% on a warrior, etc.) but generally speaking its far better executed and “balanced”.
There are a few positive aspects of game play. However, out of the few that do exist, most serve the purpose of masking the huge amounts of “bad” that exist other wise.
For starters there is a Card Game that has you playing with acquired cards (which you may draw from monsters, bosses, or receive from NPCs). This is great until the rules from different regions start mingling with each other, after, it just becomes a crappy try to make a Yu-Gi-Oh clone. A really bad one.
Another plus to the game is that it has a plethora of side quests. However, the GFs and experience that they offer are of so little value (for the most part) that they’re just something that lengthens game time rather than something you’re actually are encouraged to do.
Multiplay: N/A
No multiplay.
Overall: 2/10
This game is bad, plain and simple. I'm sure I'll get a billion fanboys telling me how wrong I am, but there too showed up Square’s you-know-what to see the plain truth: The whole FF experience isn't up to par with other Square RPGs and FF8 only adds to the disappointment.