I played FF7 recently and the writing was quite funny. But then whenever 8 tries to be funny, it's not and just feels like Japanese autism. Like the guy who has a stomachache every time you talk to him that just makes you go "huh?". What went wrong with 8? They were written by the same person.
Imagine how disappointed people were after coming down from the high of FF7 and then playing this dogshit?
I don't have to. 🙁
I bought Musashi mostly just to play the demo, and I could immediately tell it wasn't going to be as good as VII.
>They were written by the same person
Nope. FF7 was conceived by Sakaguchi and mainly written by Kitase, with input from Nojima and Nomura. Kitase stepped back into the Sakaguchi role for FF8, with basically everything being done by Nojima and Nomura. They're both moronic hacks, so there's your answer.
Nojima wrote the scripts for both. And Nomura had a larger role in 7 than you think.
Nojima wasn't even a part of the FF7 team at the time Kitase was working on turning Sakaguchi's base concept into something workable. He was responsible for writing the scenario under close supervision and guidance as to what Sakaguchi and Kitase wanted. FF8 is what happened when he and Nomura were no longer being actively tard wrangled.
>ff7
>The mental anguish and shame of not living up to your highly publicized ambitions combined with being a human experimentation creates a amnesiac supersoldier living a lie
>Ff8
>Summons cause memory loss because...cause they just do OK?! Oh and every character grew up in the same childhood orphanage together because that's not bad writing
Imagine thinking "boo hoo I tried to achieve more than what I was willing to work for" is compelling writing. Cloud was a moron and for some reason he's the hero even though he always just does what the story says with no rhyme or reason even betraying the party for literally no reason even though hes the main character.
>FF8
>"Memory is fleeting. Dont be hung up on your past. Move on and find happiness in front of you. Hate begets hate, however your suffering and trauma isnt justification for being a shithead so you're still responsible for your actions. Dont be a fricking anti-social incel moron and grow up."
Way better story cause its about personal growth and not "MUH PLANET GOOD AND CORPORATIONS EVIL"
Kind of interesting how the game juxtaposes Squall and Ultimecia perfectly with the way you worded that (Ultimecia never let go of the trauma of being persecuted by SeeD and put into motion the events that led to her demise) but the game never speaks clearly that across to the player. Final Fantasy VIII is a game with a lot of great ideas, it's such a shame it does such a shit job communicating them.
I would argue FF7 is about personal growth too, but that's probably best for another thread.
The high IQ take is to realize they are both garbage. FF stories peaked in 1-5. FF6 - onwards are nothing but pretentious dogshit.
Why start and stop there? It's all trash. FF2 is miserable, somber tragedyporn, FF4 likens itself to a serious drama filled to the brim with navel-gazing homosexuals who feel sorry for themselves, and FF5 plays itself completely straight with a god-awful environmentalist theme aside from a few moments of levity (unless one is playing the meme-ridden GBA translation where it turns everything like Exdeath into the joke it is)
1 and 3 is the only "honest" one because they doesn't even try, they have nothing to say to begin with and they know it.
>What went wrong with 8?
a lot
it feels like it was written off-the-cuff, with almost no planning at all. 7 was kinda like that too, with its rather disjointed story, but 8 is even worse
i liked GF-junction system a lot, but even that was a bit of a step down from materia. it also forced you to spam draw magic, and then never use your magic
now do quistis, same shot
huh? is that official?
Imagine the smell
why is there no romance with quistis 🙁
She probably doesn't smell good 🙁
But I remember reading about a delusional gamer that was complaining that he couldn't date and romance every single npc in Cyberpunk2077.
So, yeah.... dating Quistis would be fine (still wouldn't smell as interesting as Selphie)
Quistis DOES try to romance Squall, and Squall shuts her down. It sets up Squall for being absolutely messed up as a person. Quistis spends the rest of the game coping. Squall takes 2 and a half discs of crazy shit turning his world upside down to get "fixed", and by that point, Quistis has gotten sisterzoned and Rinoa is in the way.
We all agree that Rinoa is better than Quistis, right?
Quistis couldve has the potential to become ultimecia with her crazy magic powers. And I bet she would be a very faithful wife and loving mother. Rinoa on the other hand, seems like she would divorce you after two years and turn your son into a daughter.
>Quistis couldve has the potential to become ultimecia with her crazy magic powers.
This is how I would retell the story.
Quistis's canonical prodigy skills with magic is because she's an undiscovered sorceress. The themes of Rinoa COULD HAVE BEEN Ultimecia outlines how Quistis BECOMES Ultimecia all along.
Quistis tells Squall way back at the start of the game that not everyone can handle being alone (implied that that is how she feels about herself). She lacks her Sorceress's Knight as Squall rejects her and ends up in Timber on a mission for Rinoa. When Seifer goes haywire she actually tracks him all the way to Timber and Seifer would have been Quistis's Sorceress's Knight, but Ultimecia (future Quistis) steals Seifer from herself, causing her downward spiral into madness as the GFs siphon away their memories.
Quistis even spends time trying to reason out Ultimecia's identity and motives throughout the game. It would fit wonderfully.
that actually doesnt sound too bad anon.
>Rinoa on the other hand, seems like she would divorce you after two years and turn your son into a daughter.
Rinoa is one of The Three Great She-Devils of Squaresoft
>What went wrong with 8?
It's a boring game that kneecaps the player when they try to make it fun, to the point that proponents of the game suggest breaking the gameplay to make it bearable.
FF7 was a breakthrough success that put jRPGs into normie territory, so they wrote a normie plot for 8. It's basically japanese school drama TV with supernatural elements.
What's with the Japanese and "military academies" anyway?
Obedience and servitude. Feudalism. Anime just reflects this with colorful MCs (shogun) and drab fellow students (servants)
They never recovered from the humiliation of ww2, so they cope with a lot of stupid military Academy stuff in their pop culture
US uses it quite a bit too, just more lightly, and not as much nowadays.
Used to be literally fricking every father in every form of media, threatened to send their kid to a military academy at least once. Many of them actually did it; sometimes semi-permanently like malcolm in the middle.
FFVIII was their first attempt to insert romance into FF. Even the game's logo makes it clear that's what the story is all about - Squall and Rinoa.
This was very important for them to gather experience, so they could learn how to balance romance and other more traditional themes of the series, and the result was FFX
did you actually read the writing or did you read a butchered translation?
Whatever
>Like the guy who has a stomachache every time you talk to him that just makes you go "huh?"
Now I remember that one.
I admit it's cringe, but at the time that was it. I was a kid that was playing with a SNES just the year before. I got a PS1 and FFVIII (or FF8, if you homosexuals can't read Roman numerals).
That was the best time in life. What a time to be a kid. Playing football (not soccer, you gay word-changing morons), having a PS1, no groomers outside school, no drugs.
Simple as.
>not soccer, you gay word-changing morons
lol how ironic. soccer is british slang for association football, which used to be called assoc football as opposed to rugger football, now known as rugby. football is american slang for gridiron football. football in australia means australian rules football. they're all football. nobody changed the names. the british invented the term soccer for association football. ignorant douchebag.
>soccer is british slang
Pretty sure this is one of those internet myths. It's changed a bunch since I first heard it and the excuses get weirder. I could almost buy it if it was one subset of british people who called it that but the claim is constantly presented as if it was everyone who called it that, when it's actually closer to no-one.
Also don't trust wikipedia for anything. I've just checked and it's claiming it's a term from the 1880s. A few years ago people were insisting it was a popular term from the 1850s before any of the official teams (that all use "football" in their registered names) were founded. Every cited source on wiki was written this millennium with no credible prior sources.
I feel like I'm on the other side of the PSX debate.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140627210952/http://ns.umich.edu/Releases/2014/June14/Its-football-not-soccer.pdf
This is the paper which became the source for all of the articles written on the subject.
Fine, you smart autistic boy
Since you are so smart, and you want to prove you're always right, you take a plane to London, you go downtown, you enter a pub and you scream "I want to watch some soccer on the tv"
I bet those fat drunkards are gonna break their glasses and bottles of beer on your empty head
It's played with feet, so it's called football in english, fùtbol in spanish, calcio (literally kick in italian) and so on.
But I must agree that you're right, now if you can please go back to pretending being a girly girl on reddit.
FF8 is way more insightful, thoughtful, and well constructed than FF7. It's has the best narrative of any of the final fantasy games, it has incredible execution. Too many brainlets can't understand that they're processing the game from Squall's perspective, that Squall is NOT your typical protagonist, etc.
It's focused on teenagers, but it's the most adult story in the franchise.
How many people, their names, their faces, can you remember from when you were between the age of 4 and 10? Not adults, other kids that you saw every day at school.
I can barely remember 2-3 faces and only 1 name and I'm sure my memory is different than how it really was. I don't think I'd have been able to recognize most if any of them if I were to cross path with them 10 years later and I didn't have any Guardian Force messing things up in my head, and I actually was almost top of my class at school during that time so it's not like I had a bad memory.
You didn't get it.
VIII is quite good and the reveal half way through the game that guardian force eat your menories was epic,most enemies at that point can only be defeated with guardian force but the more you use it the more memories you lose to the point you won't remember anyone even yourself if you kept using it.
FF8 is a retelling of Wizard of Oz. Once you get that part it all makes sense.
Rinoa is Dorothy, Angelou is toto ect.
There's no place like home. The party members were chosen so they could fulfil an operation and return. Rinoa is the odd one out though she has the promise to Squall she will meet there at the orphanage...she should really be Ultimecia but never mind. It's probably the best written FF8 game.
To me it felt like 8 was simply not supposed to be funny and every situation that aims at that is an afterthought because they realised they do need some comic relief.
Thats also one of the things that make 7 greater in my eyes, it does have perfect mix of the moods.
>In an interview with Famitsu, Naora described that the game was generally designed to be a "bright, fresh Final Fantasy".[33] The main reason was that the team had dealt extensively with dark and "weird" imagery with VII.[38]
The game just failed at everything it was trying to achieve
I don't think Kitase cares for this one too much. He never talks about it much in interviews and wants to move on unlike VII, X, and XIII.
I always figured 8 is like if 7 just never came together properly in development
Like large elements were changed in different stages of production and welded together with throwaway writing they didn't think through, but in ff7 they just got lucky and it worked and in ff8 they had to publish what they ended up with
True but because they kept being pressured to make things grander and more epic so harder to manage
7 was pretty terrible. i liked the items and materia and the different ways i could build the party with them. i liked the characters like barret and red xiii and how they changed throughout the game. some of the characters were just trash. aeris was a stereotypical genki fanservice girlfriend. the overall story was nonsense and aeris' death was just a copout to get the writers out of the corner they wrote themselves into. barret even screams repeatedly that the story makes no sense. then aeris talks to the magic dirt and it explains the whole convoluted mess to here but she runs off to die before she can explain it to the party/player. apparently she couldn't take 2 fricking minutes to explain to her friends why they were risking their lives before she goes to get impaled. shinra tries to save the world from meteor with a giant materia bomb and for some reason the player spends countless hours trying to stop them because, um, well, i guess because they're shinra? the entire game slowly fell apart after midgar except for the items, materia, and certain character developments. i'm tired of hearing about how this totally mediocre jrpg is so great and 8 is somehow terrible. 8 was just another 7 with worse combat and better music. cloud became squall, aeris became rinoa, barret became some tool with tribal tattoos, red xiii became that teacher with a whip, and yuffie became whatever the ditzy magic girl's name was. it was literally 95% the same game as 7 and they both were merely decent.
>for some reason the player spends countless hours trying to stop them because, um, well, i guess because they're shinra?
Yeah, this part never made sense to me. The story really falls apart later in the game, like they are just throwing random shit out and hoping something works. It's lazy and shallow writing where they just tried to cram as much in as possible to seem deep and it's an incoherent mess.
Aside from the staff NOT being "the same person," my impression was always that they were trying to get the RPG genre away from being a nerdy, niche thing and into the realm of pop culture. The story is like a teen drama, popular with cool kids in the 90s.
I mean, they were pretty fricking close to winning. Harry Potter is just FF8 with more whimsy and Tolkien inspiration. If Square wasn't so hellbent on making FF a sci-fi franchise, they might have had a new billion-dollar property.
Good post. I never liked the sci-fi part of FF and it's a shame they chose to lean into that so hard, probably due to FF7's success. I agree, FF8 could have been huge if they'd taken more of a low tech setting like FF9.
idk it was pretty funny when squall dressed up like a girl and spent the night working at that brothel as a joke
>I WONT HAVE IT!
>I WONT BE TALKED ABOUT IN PAST TENSE!
its funny, lighten up
Worst final fantasy game, because once Squaresoft became squeenix FF became a zombie version of itself. FFX is the first zombie, faux FF game, and every installation after that follows suit.