Final Fantasy VIII: Worthy of reappraisal?
My personal history with the Final Fantasy series is actually quite short, in all honesty -- Final Fantasy VII was my introduction (like most) in Christmas 1997, and it quickly became my mostest favouritest game, my default answer to that question for most of the last 20 years. Whenever I get the urge to play a JRPG (which admittedly isn't often) it's hard not to go back to the game even though I've run through it quite a few times and every beat of the story is written on my heart. I like the game so much that two years ago I did a considerably long video on it. As it goes, I've recently had the urge to play a big ol' RPG again - it's rare, but it happens...this time I wanted something a bit different. What about FFVII's much-maligned sequel, a game that really seems to get a pasting from most people and isn't even particularly liked by fans of the series? And so, that's how I've ended up starting a multi-part series on Final Fantasy VIII, the first part of which is out today.
FFVIII has a weird position in the series -- after the previous game had sold bucketloads and made RPG's quite the mainstream thing (at least for a while), the expectations and hype for this game were ridiculously high, especially in markets that either hadn't experienced an RPG hit that big in a long time (the US) or a market that literally hadn't seen a single Final Fantasy game before on any console ever without importing until FFVII (us poor Europeans). We obviously knew that FFVIII wouldn't be a direct follow-up or anything like that, although I'm not sure how well it was communicated to us that the game would be very different -- which was then pushed further by the game's highly unorthodox gameplay and design decisions.
Of course, all these little decisions are best explained in the video...it's funny -- I certainly wasn't intending to make a multi-part series based around Final Fantasy VIII. My experience with the game was brief -- I never finished it at the time and couldn't after it got half-inched (pinched, innit), and so I thought I'd only be good for one vid on this game...that thought quickly changed on playing it, and after a few hours there wasn't any way that I'd be able to avoid doing a big series on it, as I did with FFVII. Some of the ideas that the game has -- the junctioning system, the way it presents its protagonist, the story with seemingly half of the important justifications and expositions hidden away in NPC composition, the card game that's spread around the world...it's full of ballsy, ambitious ideas -- not all of which come off. But it sure took a chance, and even if there's parts of the game that falter? It might be worth a bit more love. If you happen to have 70 minutes or so to spare on this Bank Holiday Monday, then maybe you could spend it watching the first video where I start to piece together this strange journey of a game.
