Final Fantasy VIII is different from any of the other Final Fantasy games I’ve played. For one, you actually have a job that you get paid to do. You’re not just some unemployed schmo running around aimlessly. You can even climb the corporate ladder by achieving higher ranks to get paid more. Or you can unclimb the corporate ladder by achieving lower ranks to get paid less. When they explain this in the game they basically say, “do stuff in battle to change your rank.” Gee, thanks for clarifying that. Anyway, you are a Splinter Cell dabbling in international espionage. No really, you are. Kidnapping, assassination, and sabotage are all included which brings me to my first point, they expect you to do some really complicated shit. Entering the codes to detach the president’s car from that train is like hacking five retinal scanners in a row in Chaos Theory. On this one part, when you have to blow up a missile base, You run around literally mashing buttons on random control panels until you initiate the self-destruct sequence. Then you have to go to another consol and sabotage the missiles. For this part your character doesn't tap some buttons and then say "OK, done." You actually have to manually interface with the computer as if you were using a real computer. You have to flip through a bunch of tasks that you don’t really know anything about and make the correct changes while the base draws ever closer to it’s eventual destruction. Ultimately I don’t even think it makes a difference.
Derrrrrr... I'm the Jumbo Cactuar. My HP is higher than numbers can go. You'll spend hours trying to get me as a summon because I have a mustache.
The game seems like it’s designed to keep you from actually accomplishing anything. The characters keep passing out and going to a “dream world” where you play as a trio of soldiers. The first time this happens you don’t really know what the deal is but you do know that whatever this is, is either something that already happened or just a dream. So if that’s the case, why the hell do you have to play during them? Things that occur in this reality have no bearing on *my* reality, and I don’t know these soldiers. Why should I even care? This isn’t getting me any closer to my ultimate goal. Just make it a talking scene and leave interaction out of it. There’s also a time where you get thrown in prison and a time when you’re just stranded at sea, floating around on the academy airship. You're just stuck until it runs ashore. But this pales in comparison to all the times you’re asked to go find various people. You’re asked twice to go find the same person. How stupid. Cid is supposed to be the leader of the academy so why is he M.I.A. half the time? And why do *I* have to find him? Why can’t I just go beat the shit out of monsters like I was playing an actual Final Fantasy game or something? Then there’s the time you have to find the Galbadian Captain in Balamb. It took me like two hours to find that fucker! Balamb is probably the smallest town in the game. Even if you know where he is you can’t search that area without talking to like a dozen people in the correct sequence. The problem was I couldn’t find all those people. Little did I know that the two blurry parallelograms submerged halfway into the street in the background were apparently doors, not that that’s the answer to all your problems. Oh, did I mention that you’re trapped in the city until you can figure this out? You know what? I just changed my mind. The last level is the *biggest* waste of time. This is the sorceress' castle. First of all, the castle is so fricking dilapidated who the hell would live in it? Is the ultimate evil sorceress some kind of insane cat lady? Once you step in the door you lose every single command that is actually useful to you; magic, items, aeons, even being able to save the game. You name it, and you can't do it. The only thing you can use is attack. Well that sucks ass! I need that shit! I need all of it! Well, to get it back you have to fight several minibosses; one for each command. If that wasn't bad enough, you have to explore an overwhelmingly large castle and solve overly-complicated puzzles while constantly being thrown into random battles that you have to run from. Doesn't that sound fun?! What a fun game! Imagine if you're playing Myst and you're just trying to walk around an island to identify and solve puzzles but every 15 seconds the screen goes black for 10 seconds. Who's stupid idea was it to put monsters in here? You can't even fight them until you get some commands back! The minibosses that you have to kill to get your commands are scattered all around and usually require a solved puzzle to get to. When you beat one, you get to choose what command you get back. I thought this was cool at first but it's actually not. Every boss is different and you don't know what you're going to need to have for the next one. You have to basically guess and do trial and error. Actually I guess as long as you get your aeons back it doesn't really matter what happens after that but still when I came In here I expected to fight the boss and beat the game, not dick around for another three hours.
How 'bout you get an office and stay there the rest of the game. That way everyone will know where the hell you are!
There’s no shortage of instances where the game tries to get you to buy something useless for an exorbitant amount of money. Rent a car! Buy fuel for the car! Buy a map position indicator! Buy a hint! Under no circumstances should you rent a car, unless you just want to explore some place just before shutting off the game. If you’re going somewhere you can drive to, you should just walk and get exp from battles on the way. You absolutely do not need a position indicator for what happens to be the world's smallest dungeon. And even if I was desperate enough to buy a hint, what makes them think I’m going to save the game after spending 50,000 Gil to gain whatever information? It’s not like I’m going to forget what I was told if I reset the game.
Your battle party consists of three characters. You can’t switch them during battle. You can’t switch them out of battle unless at a save spot or prompted by the game. You can’t exclude the main character from the party. (It's like they removed an entire dimension from the RPG genre.) The characters in the game never learn any skills or spells, (except Quistis sort of). Instead they “draw” spells from enemies and sometimes these weird glowing miasma things that are scattered around. When they draw they get X number of whatever spell (usually about 5 to ll), meaning they can use that spell X amount of times before it runs out. After that, your out unless you draw or refine some more. Have you ever played a game where you went around picking spells off of trees? That’s just weird. And it sucks because when you get some rare and powerful spell , you don't want to use it because once you do it's gone and you may or may not get it again. Anyone can use any spell just about as good as anyone else. That kind of robs the characters of their individuality. I guess that's why they have overdrives. They can also all summon any GF (or Aeon) as long as you assign it to them. The spells and Aeons can both be swapped between characters which you practically have to do every 10 minutes in the first half of the game because you’re constantly toggling between two teams of characters and everyone is basically useless without an Aeon. You can actually summon an Aeon an indefinite amount of times in a single battle so there’s not even any point in fighting normally. And after you’ve used and swapped spells around a dozen or so times you forget who has what and end up looking through pages of spells during a fight only to realize that that character doesn't have what you needed. And since the game’s in real-time all you really accomplished was giving your enemies a couple of free shots at you. That’s another thing. Real-time menu-based RPGs are just a stupid idea. If movement has been eliminated from all battles and attacking happens when you choose something from a menu then there should be turns. If time is an issue in battle then just make it a fucking action adventure game. It’s not fair to make you rifle through a bunch of pages as fast as you can, trying to locate and select what you want to happen. All that does is remove strategy from the game. It's like playing chess against a computer and instead of taking turns when moving players’ pieces, the computer just keeps moving its’ pieces until you make a move.
In battle, I love how the cursor is white and transparent. It makes it so easy to tell who or what I’m selecting. As if the menu boxes obstructing my view of the characters wasn’t enough. When you beat a boss, instead of getting an ass-load of exp, the game says “Fuck you” and gives you three “Didn't receive EXP” boxes. Seriously, what the hell?! Why?! What’s the point of fighting if you don't get exp? How did they all fail to learn anything from a fight that lasts 30 times longer than a fight where they do learn something? All it does is make you have to go get in random battles to get the exp that the game basically robbed you of. Fuck that!
One of the most retarded problems this game, (and every other FF game has), is how useless status effect spells are. If you’re fighting an enemy that’s susceptible to blind or sleep it’s not worth casting them because the enemy is weak and the battle will be over sooner if you just attack. If you’re in battle with something that can kick your ass and is going to take a while to beat, the enemy is immune to the spells. Actually when you use one of those spells on an immune monster it will say “miss.” Well *was* it a miss? You don’t know! Why can’t it just say “immune” when the monster is immune and “miss” when you miss the monster? They’re different words. I don’t think if I look up “immune” in a thesaurus that “miss” will be listed as a synonym. If you don’t see through the game’s lying quickly, then you may end up wasting a lot of moves trying to do something impossible. Speaking of lying, the game does it every once and a while. Back when I was looking for that captain, some shithead told me to go look in the “town center.” There is no town center! I had figured that out before he even said that to me. Another time after beating Edea the second time, she escaped through the floor of the room I was in and someone said, “The auditorium is below here.” It's not. the auditorium is on the same floor. Unless there was some kind of bizarre spacial anomaly going on, it’s not going to be under us, ya know?
STUPID.
But wait, I've saved the best for last. This is by far the worst problem in the game. In fact It may be the worst problem I've ever seen in a game. When you go into lunatic pandora for the second time and save the game after beating Seifer, you can't get out until you beat Sorceress Adel. Don't ask me how you're supposed to know that. The first three bosses are relatively easy. Then you get to Sorceress Adel. Hopefully all of your characters are oh, somewhere around 55 or 60 in level. Otherwise you get annihilated. Don't ask me how you're supposed to know that. Most of my characters were around 30 and 35 in level. Well that's a problem isn't it? OK I guess I might be able to level-up from random battles inside lunatic pandora. Well, no you can't because for whatever reason every enemy you kill there will only reward you with one exp. Don't ask me how you're supposed to know that. Now lets review; I am grossly under-level for beating this boss; I can not leave the immediate area; I can not level-up in the immediate area. SO HOW THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO FINNISH THE GAME NOW?! I guess it's really my fault. Clearly I should have seen this coming. I should have been able to predict all of that shit because I'm a fucking psychic. I just spent 40 hours on a game that dead-ends. It doesn't even make any sense. If I was the correct level to beat Adel it would have made the previous bosses look like jokes. Were those weak bosses just there to lull me into a false sense of security? This isn't just a gigantic game flaw, I seriously think It's some kind of sadistic trap. Think about it. Someone decided that this would be the only place in the game where you can't level-up. I guess I'll have to make a note of that so that I don't repeat the same mistake when I have to play the entire fucking game over again. I'm being melodramatic. I actually had a save file just previous to the mistake. Ha! Take that you bastard!
Here's "sorceress" Adel. I don't know about you but I'd have to be pretty wasted to not see that this is a dude. If this is a woman why doesn't she cover her shame in battle. By shame I mean her highly defined pectoral muscles.
