I never understood this complaint. If you play the game properly, ie: level, acquire magic to junction, acquire gfs, etc, you turn into a god and hardly notice the monsters increasing in difficulty. The game can be steamrolled mostly from start to finish. Crying about level scaling seems like such a braindead thing to complain about.
The point is that even being GOOD at the game makes the game BAD. The series has never been super difficult by any stretch of the definition but this is a special kind of brainless.
Final Fantasy 8 is somewhat of a tragedy. Make no mistake, FF8 still has the Squaresoft-Magic in it, it was made with enormous passion and skil and love, yet the game suffered from one MAJOR overabition due to immense pressure of creating a sequel to FF7.
The area that suffered under this pressure was the gameplay system, or better combat system.
Instead of not messing around with the superb combat system of FF7, which just worked perfectly, they unnecessarily had to change it to the often cited draw system, which unavoidably broke the whole gameplay system. FF8 is a tragic example of unnecessary pressure in game development to "always" come up with something "new". If it ain't broke, don't fricking fix it, especially if something used to work beautifully in the first place.
Just imagine FF8 without the draw system, it would have been talked about way more fondly.
FF8 needs to be a lesson to all developers out there, to always rememer to not drastically mess with perfectly functional gameplay system, unless it is really necessary.
Terrible gameplay aside the story is still very crap, the characters are either annoying or uninteresting for the most part and the pacing is fricked. In almost all aspects this is a shit game, save for the art style and the music perhaps.
But even all of that would've been tolerable if the gameplay wasn't so fricked.
To be fair the limit breaks in 8 are pretty fun. Enjoy the drawing, junctioning, GF optimization, and crafting you'll have to do to be combat ready though. Who knows, this could be your new favorite game. Download and find out.
Because it fricking sucks. Square saw that people liked the characters of FF7 and their emotional moments and decided to jam a game full of them, not realising that it was the very balance of video game and traditional storytelling that people liked, not the emphasis on traditional storytelling. It's not complicated. Publishers are to this day crying that no-one likes their films-disguised-as-games. It's not that complicated: give us a game that's reasonably fun to play with a story/characters we care about. That's it.
Typical low IQ vermin behavior, immediately grasps for hyperboles and projects his mental illness on others when he feels threatened by an opinion on the internet
>Square saw that people liked the characters of FF7 and their emotional moments and decided to jam a game full of them
My favoufite part was how they saw people liked Cloud's amnesia and made everyone in FF8 an amnesiac.
Really boring beginning. I cannot fathom how you go from a terrorist group storming a power plant to...
walking around school, doing class assignment, going to school ball.
It's like you didn't play the game at all and are too moronic to read. You are a mercenary who is hired by a government to fight against a hostile invading force. The "power plant" is a communications tower and your team tries to reclaim it from the enemy. This is part of your military academy exam. You pass the exam and go to the party and dance with the hot girl afterwards.
And while I like how drawing lets you customize your characters, it makes no sense to have to actually draw magic in battle. Because drawing magic has NO effect in battle, meaning, if you can draw magic, it means you have to be able to skip a turn. If you can freely skip a turn in combat, it means that combat is either easy as frick, or boring as frick.
You can Draw and Cast in the same turn, but ridiculous RNG will kick in and frick with the spell's effectiveness. May as well just Draw 5 copies of the spell, then cast them normally afterwards.
She was scared SeeD (Stupid spelling) would kill her so she made a sequence of events in which SeeD (Seriously who thinks this is cool?) would specifically want to kill her.
I love FFVIII, but the reasons are obvious:
- less likeable main character.
- more confusing story line (yes, VII is convoluted, but the broad notes are much simpler: "we have to stop Sephiroth and save the world.")
- Much, much more convoluted battle system.
Almost nobody really hates FF8 despite it being boneheaded in a hundred ways, you shouldn't push your luck trying to get people to actually defend it seriously.
what?
it critically acclaimed almost everywhere on release.
you can find like one or two reviews that dip below 8/10 over the years, but overall people seem to like it.
>first disk >peter_griffin_this_is_gonna_be_a_fun_afternoon.wav >second disk >peter_griffin_ohhh_kaaay.wav >third disk >peter_griffin_hwat.wav >fourth disk >peter_griffin_ohh_cmon.wav
I admit I considered it a cool game at the time, but now that I'm a tad bit older I cringe at remembering how Squall did not push Quistis on the bed and showed her his "gunblade" (if you catch my meaning, dear zoomers, one day you will hit puberty and you will understand what I'm saying).
It drops the ball hard with the big twist
Also character design not as good as FF VII, FFVII is a miracle in character design because it's the perfect bridge between Snes and modern era agnostic JRPG.
They were weirdly proud of not being SD anymore when the game was coming out. I suppose at the time it was impressive that the characters finally looked more "Human" but as a result they feel less interesting as a result. It's not as if they're samey or anything they all stand out in the line up but outside the cowboy they all just kind of look like they dress at the mall if you follow. They're just too normal. There's no weirdo character. No people who really scream soldier. No warrior. Just... teens A through G.
it doesn't have the sense of adventure and journey that 7 has
it's just like a lame military geo political drama that a bunch of kids get invovled in for no real reason
>duller, more realistic characters that aren't too memorable or stand-out beyond fashion choices >autistic systems and mechanics >weird plot and themes
Fricking great music though.
>inb4 but duh reviews and reception
It rode in on a mountain of good will and Squaresoft being flush with marketing cash after 7. Of course people were gonna be like >"It rocks, guys... [plays stupid card game] doesn't it? [watches 20 minute GF sequence] I think...? [autistically futzes with junctioning for an hour]
I played all the ps1 final fantasy games for the first time about 5 years ago. I don't really get the hate for this one. To me it seemed like the games improved with each title until the quality jumped off a cliff eventually. 9>8>7
People are overly critical of 8 while ignoring the same flaws which are even worse in 7. Nostalgiagays ruin everything
>for the first time about 5 years ago
that is your problem
realize those games were state of the art when they released, dumb zoomer
the flaws mentioned here were debated over and over again since before you were born
it's the story. after the first disk it becomes such a cringey mess that fans came up with a lot of weird fanfics to not accept the simple fact that square, after ff6 and ff7, fricked up.
i doubt i'll ever bother to replay it again but i do think the gameplay is underrated, it's nice to know you can win it with skills and brain instead of tedious grinding.
I don't mind the broken combat system. That's standard for JRPGs. The real problem is the characters. None are as likeable or memorable as FFVII's. The "romance" is especially unconvincing, and it's forced into places where it's so out of place it breaks immersion. The root cause is that the characters are too young. The game sets itself the the impossible task of showing them as both angsty schoolkids and badass mercenaries at the same time and naturally fails. The Laguna sections are much better because they don't have this problem.
Perhaps because they tried to make it more realistic, but in doing so ended up making it too generic.
The story is even more convoluted than 7, despite having real promise it goes downhile after the first ifrit mission. I'm old enough to have played it on release and I still remember feeling progressively more disappointed after every hour or so.
They could have actually fixed the gameplay quite easily by removing the draw system entirely and just letting you junction GF and normal enemies to boost stats/abilities. Collecting swaps of normal enemy cards could even be used to buy higher lvl GFs.
Probably because it tried so hard to appeal to the Western and mainstream audience by replacing manga style of the previous games with "realistic" style
no sovl, no memorable characters
because hes the only good looking guy in the place, cant sustain a game purely on one husbando
>level scaling.
I never understood this complaint. If you play the game properly, ie: level, acquire magic to junction, acquire gfs, etc, you turn into a god and hardly notice the monsters increasing in difficulty. The game can be steamrolled mostly from start to finish. Crying about level scaling seems like such a braindead thing to complain about.
>Level scaling is okay because the game is piss easy anyways
It's like you're intentionally missing the point
And what is the point? You're too dumb to be good at the game?
The point is that even being GOOD at the game makes the game BAD. The series has never been super difficult by any stretch of the definition but this is a special kind of brainless.
>The point is that even being GOOD at the game makes the game BAD.
What does this mean?
>"The game is piss easy!"
>"So it's bad"
>"HUH?????"
It's no easier than any other FF game. Do you have any real criticism? Do you speak in sentences or just green text?
bosses have hard level caps
encounters in the final dungeon ignore level scaling
it's irrelevant
The writing isn't as good.
battles arent as good either
GF junction was trying to be some sort of job system hybrid thing and it doesnt really work
Because people expected Final Fantasy VII 2, they had no idea that the numbers in the titles meant it was an anthology instead of a singular narrative
Exactly this. When I first saw the game I was disappointed that all the familiar faces from FFVII were gone.
Final Fantasy 8 is somewhat of a tragedy. Make no mistake, FF8 still has the Squaresoft-Magic in it, it was made with enormous passion and skil and love, yet the game suffered from one MAJOR overabition due to immense pressure of creating a sequel to FF7.
The area that suffered under this pressure was the gameplay system, or better combat system.
Instead of not messing around with the superb combat system of FF7, which just worked perfectly, they unnecessarily had to change it to the often cited draw system, which unavoidably broke the whole gameplay system. FF8 is a tragic example of unnecessary pressure in game development to "always" come up with something "new". If it ain't broke, don't fricking fix it, especially if something used to work beautifully in the first place.
Just imagine FF8 without the draw system, it would have been talked about way more fondly.
FF8 needs to be a lesson to all developers out there, to always rememer to not drastically mess with perfectly functional gameplay system, unless it is really necessary.
Terrible gameplay aside the story is still very crap, the characters are either annoying or uninteresting for the most part and the pacing is fricked. In almost all aspects this is a shit game, save for the art style and the music perhaps.
But even all of that would've been tolerable if the gameplay wasn't so fricked.
Considering that I hate FF7 combat, you just made me more interested in it FF8
To be fair the limit breaks in 8 are pretty fun. Enjoy the drawing, junctioning, GF optimization, and crafting you'll have to do to be combat ready though. Who knows, this could be your new favorite game. Download and find out.
Because it fricking sucks. Square saw that people liked the characters of FF7 and their emotional moments and decided to jam a game full of them, not realising that it was the very balance of video game and traditional storytelling that people liked, not the emphasis on traditional storytelling. It's not complicated. Publishers are to this day crying that no-one likes their films-disguised-as-games. It's not that complicated: give us a game that's reasonably fun to play with a story/characters we care about. That's it.
>it fricking sucks
Yeah, sure.
It is the worst piece of software that ever happened to be compiled and released for whatever electronic system...
Please go back to your hormone replacement theory forums and stay there
Typical low IQ vermin behavior, immediately grasps for hyperboles and projects his mental illness on others when he feels threatened by an opinion on the internet
>Square saw that people liked the characters of FF7 and their emotional moments and decided to jam a game full of them
My favoufite part was how they saw people liked Cloud's amnesia and made everyone in FF8 an amnesiac.
Sometimes I wish I could program and completely remake Final Fantasy VIII using the Neverwinter Nights 2 engine to completely replace gameplay.
Well boy do I have news for you. You CAN do that! Now get to work boy.
Why is it that FF8 threads seem to almost universally talk about anything other than FF8?
The story is all over the place.
Really boring beginning. I cannot fathom how you go from a terrorist group storming a power plant to...
walking around school, doing class assignment, going to school ball.
It's like you didn't play the game at all and are too moronic to read. You are a mercenary who is hired by a government to fight against a hostile invading force. The "power plant" is a communications tower and your team tries to reclaim it from the enemy. This is part of your military academy exam. You pass the exam and go to the party and dance with the hot girl afterwards.
And while I like how drawing lets you customize your characters, it makes no sense to have to actually draw magic in battle. Because drawing magic has NO effect in battle, meaning, if you can draw magic, it means you have to be able to skip a turn. If you can freely skip a turn in combat, it means that combat is either easy as frick, or boring as frick.
You can Draw and Cast in the same turn, but ridiculous RNG will kick in and frick with the spell's effectiveness. May as well just Draw 5 copies of the spell, then cast them normally afterwards.
This, though there's always a chance it will do stupid more damage than a normal cast as well, so it's still worth messing with sometimes.
They just kinda goofed. First time Square's need to innovate each game game back to bite them
why did she want to kompress time again?
She was scared SeeD (Stupid spelling) would kill her so she made a sequence of events in which SeeD (Seriously who thinks this is cool?) would specifically want to kill her.
Cause it's awful
Shit gameplay even by JRPG standards
Also I didn't like any of the characters
Because it's a bad game
I love FFVIII, but the reasons are obvious:
- less likeable main character.
- more confusing story line (yes, VII is convoluted, but the broad notes are much simpler: "we have to stop Sephiroth and save the world.")
- Much, much more convoluted battle system.
You know exactly why.
Almost nobody really hates FF8 despite it being boneheaded in a hundred ways, you shouldn't push your luck trying to get people to actually defend it seriously.
what?
it critically acclaimed almost everywhere on release.
you can find like one or two reviews that dip below 8/10 over the years, but overall people seem to like it.
>first disk
>peter_griffin_this_is_gonna_be_a_fun_afternoon.wav
>second disk
>peter_griffin_ohhh_kaaay.wav
>third disk
>peter_griffin_hwat.wav
>fourth disk
>peter_griffin_ohh_cmon.wav
sneed
I admit I considered it a cool game at the time, but now that I'm a tad bit older I cringe at remembering how Squall did not push Quistis on the bed and showed her his "gunblade" (if you catch my meaning, dear zoomers, one day you will hit puberty and you will understand what I'm saying).
>one day
don't count on it
Oooh yeah, that's right!!!
It drops the ball hard with the big twist
Also character design not as good as FF VII, FFVII is a miracle in character design because it's the perfect bridge between Snes and modern era agnostic JRPG.
They were weirdly proud of not being SD anymore when the game was coming out. I suppose at the time it was impressive that the characters finally looked more "Human" but as a result they feel less interesting as a result. It's not as if they're samey or anything they all stand out in the line up but outside the cowboy they all just kind of look like they dress at the mall if you follow. They're just too normal. There's no weirdo character. No people who really scream soldier. No warrior. Just... teens A through G.
it doesn't have the sense of adventure and journey that 7 has
it's just like a lame military geo political drama that a bunch of kids get invovled in for no real reason
plus a teenage romance with an awkward antisocial butthole
the game would be 10x better if it was about only Laguna
>the game would be 10x better if it was about only Laguna
This is what low IQ contrarians who wear baggy jeans with wallet chains say
>duller, more realistic characters that aren't too memorable or stand-out beyond fashion choices
>autistic systems and mechanics
>weird plot and themes
Fricking great music though.
>inb4 but duh reviews and reception
It rode in on a mountain of good will and Squaresoft being flush with marketing cash after 7. Of course people were gonna be like >"It rocks, guys... [plays stupid card game] doesn't it? [watches 20 minute GF sequence] I think...? [autistically futzes with junctioning for an hour]
Orphanage sequence takes it from a 10 to an 8.
>Final Fantasy VIII: Netorare
Because Rinoa is one of the Squaresoft's Three Great She-Devils.
nobody mentions it. but the GF causing amnesia was a lame plot device
Everyone mentions it when they rip on the orphanage scene
I played all the ps1 final fantasy games for the first time about 5 years ago. I don't really get the hate for this one. To me it seemed like the games improved with each title until the quality jumped off a cliff eventually. 9>8>7
People are overly critical of 8 while ignoring the same flaws which are even worse in 7. Nostalgiagays ruin everything
>for the first time about 5 years ago
that is your problem
realize those games were state of the art when they released, dumb zoomer
the flaws mentioned here were debated over and over again since before you were born
I didn't play them on release because I didn't have a ps1, moron.
It's not fun to play. In fact, it's a chore to play.
it's the story. after the first disk it becomes such a cringey mess that fans came up with a lot of weird fanfics to not accept the simple fact that square, after ff6 and ff7, fricked up.
i doubt i'll ever bother to replay it again but i do think the gameplay is underrated, it's nice to know you can win it with skills and brain instead of tedious grinding.
>why isnt the second best rpg of all time better thanthe best rpg of all time
what a stupid fricking question
what's the best way to play this game? I don't have a ps1
>emulate
>2013 steam version (I have this one)
>remastered steam version
The story is a mess and the characters aren't nearly as likable. I still love it for what it is.
I don't mind the broken combat system. That's standard for JRPGs. The real problem is the characters. None are as likeable or memorable as FFVII's. The "romance" is especially unconvincing, and it's forced into places where it's so out of place it breaks immersion. The root cause is that the characters are too young. The game sets itself the the impossible task of showing them as both angsty schoolkids and badass mercenaries at the same time and naturally fails. The Laguna sections are much better because they don't have this problem.
It genuinely has the weakest story and cast of characters in the whole series until XV.
I always thought X was the weakest entry. 8 is my favourite
Perhaps because they tried to make it more realistic, but in doing so ended up making it too generic.
The story is even more convoluted than 7, despite having real promise it goes downhile after the first ifrit mission. I'm old enough to have played it on release and I still remember feeling progressively more disappointed after every hour or so.
They could have actually fixed the gameplay quite easily by removing the draw system entirely and just letting you junction GF and normal enemies to boost stats/abilities. Collecting swaps of normal enemy cards could even be used to buy higher lvl GFs.
Probably because it tried so hard to appeal to the Western and mainstream audience by replacing manga style of the previous games with "realistic" style