It’s been about 18 years after it first came out and I’m pleased to report that it’s still good. This has been my first actual full playthrough, as when it first came out I was always watching my older sister play it, so the soundtrack and imagery is deeply intertwined with my childhood.
(Also. hey. pssst. If you don’t know about em, Piano Collections and Fithos Lusec Wecos Vinosec are super good).
Despite my memories of Squall being kind of a huge dork, it turns out having now gone through adolescence and several years of depression - he’s actually an extremely relatable huge dork. A lot of the character interactions are even more charming than I remember. Some of the more touching moments of the game retain their punch even though I decided to rename Squall and Rinoa Pikachu and Meowth this run.
Anyway thanks for reading this shoddily put together post about the video game I like, I would like to read your posts, too. It’s suddenly 3.30AM and I think I could probably have Blue Fields on in the background forever.
I remember back when it originally came out, the hair tech in the cut scenes was NEXT LEVEL. I mean it’s easy to look back on it and be all ‘whatevs, we’ve got better hair in engine now’ but at the time it was the bomb.
Also, square bowl (unfortunately looks like there’s only clips instead of the whole shebang in the VODs) did ff8 last time around.
We just finished disc one! I’ve never played this game before!
We named squall and rinoa, rhubarb and custard. We named angelo frasier (it’s short for ‘the dog from frasier’). our GFs have increasingly absurd names (spicy boy, jesus, chuckles…)
Junctioning is an interesting system that is kind of a nightmare but I’m into it?
Junctioning’s interesting but it gives way to incredible amounts of monotony if, say, you have an inclination towards compulsively min/maxing things. Then you end up in a situation where it’s like, I have all these Ultima spells that I sank time into stockpiling but if I use any of them my characters get worse so basically these spells aren’t actually spells anymore, they’re just some numbers.
I played FFVIII about halfway through when it first came out (I think it was the first game I ever pre-ordered) and then completed it in college six or so years later. I really loved it in high school but had fallen into the trap of relying too much on my GFs for attacking and hadn’t taken the time to draw spells and properly junction any characters so I got stuck pretty hard.
When I played again in college I really got my head around junctioning and liked it a lot. I really like how flexible it makes your party once you get the more advanced abilities that let you assign elements/status and such.
And, one big thing that’s not a big of a deal now, but the Diablo GF you obtain fairly early in the game allows you to turn off all encounters which just makes the game so much more fun. Farm when you want to farm, fight when you want to fight, go run around and explore the world map.
it kind of reminds me of the djinn system in golden sun, which has the same issue (perhaps slightly more pronounced?) where if you actually use your cool djinn attacks/summons it makes your characters worse
im playing thru ff8 for the first time (sort of) atm
i say sort of bc i got to a little after where u pick up rinoa and was like “u know what i am not playing enough triple triad” and started over specifically to fix that
so my review so far is: this is great, i have a problem
I did the clips that year! It should be possible to follow the story (inasmuch as this is at all possible with FF8) through those clips, though I suppose there must be a more efficient way to watch the game somewhere on the internet if one wanted to do that…
