Retro Corner: 'Final Fantasy VIII'

Available on:
PlayStation (eBay - £10-30 used)
PC (eBay - £10-25 used)

It's hard to believe that perhaps the most divisive Final Fantasy title had its western release ten years ago this month. Although it shares a lot of common ground with the others, such as turn-based combat, a stunning soundtrack and twisting, world-spanning adventure, it's considered the black sheep in the family, possibly less loved than the experience-less FFII and the real-time FFXII. The reason? Junctioning.

The Junction system was reasonably complex to get to grips with, but one that offered huge customisation. It did away with the usual armour and accessory equips for individual party members, instead allowing the player to assign magic and summons (known as Guardian Forces) to increase particular stats. Different spells had different effects, with Cure benefiting health more than Fire would, and Fire working better for attack than Cure. As the game progressed, more powerful curing magic such as Cura, Curaga, and later Regen and Full-Life would easily max out your health bar, and the same applied across the board to other stats.

Naturally, there were a number of trade-offs. For one, magic was a resource in itself, where every spell had to be drawn from enemies during battle or from 'Draw Points' in the field. Not only does the level of magic increase its strength, but so does the quantity you have stored. If you had a assigned a spell to a statistic and used that in battle, the equipped effects would decrease automatically. It meant finding a balance between what spells were most powerful and the ones you'd actually use in battle. And before all of this could occur, GFs would need to be assigned, all with their own preferences to party members which would buffer stats further. They too would need to be drawn, often from bosses, which can easily be missed if you didn't check at the time.

Again, on paper, it's a reasonably straightforward system, but one the game had trouble conveying, especially as the opening few hours were sluggish and full of tutorials. But once the training wheels came off, it was incredibly rewarding. In fact, towards the end of the game, it could be easily exploited if you knew where to look, and completely removed the need for the traditional grinding of levels. Anyone who wanted to take on the higher level dungeons sought refuge in the Islands Closest to Heaven and Hell, located at opposite ends of the world map, which were covered in awesome Draw Points and experience-rich monsters to match. Give Squall the right spells, have him permanently on low health so he could regularly bang out his ultimate Lion Heart limit break, and you would be literally unstoppable. While it seems cheap, it completely rewarded the player for taking the time to know how to work the system.

Aside from the turn-based fighting, the story and characters were just as rich and multifaceted. It had one of the most memorable casts in the entire series, such as the comical skate-boarding Zell, feisty school-teacher Quistis and bad-boy Seifer, taking the traditional Anime high-school plot and turning it on its head with floating, war-mongering schools and covert-operation field trips. While it almost jumped the shark when it came to a certain orphanage revelation and other outlandish twists, it was filled with memorable and incredible moments, from clash of Balamb and Galbadia Gardens, the Lunatic Pandora event and Laguna's numerous flashbacks, not to mention the travels through space and time.

Technically and mechanically, Final Fantasy VIII was a bold, evolutionary step for the series, rewarding the player with a unique and astonishing adventure with a rich story and literally hundreds of hours of content to do on the side (Triple Triad, anyone?). Although it is a distinctive outing, what it does share with the other PlayStation iterations is that the groundbreaking visuals have suffered in time (mainly due to low resolution of the platform) and that it's just as expensive to get hold of today. Hopefully Square will do it justice with a PSN re-release (like its older and more popular sibling FFVII) so we can fawn over it once more.

Do you have any fond memories of Final Fantasy VIII? Add a comment in the space below!