Final Fantasy VIII Conclusions

I ended up deciding not to reload from a previous save in order to farm up the items needed to beat Omega Weapon. Instead I just pushed forward to Ultimecia who I took out on the first try. She has an interesting mechanic I'd forgotten about. Like in Final Fantasy VI they put in a way to use all of your characters in the boss fight, not just one party's worth. In FFVIII the way that works is you get given 3 characters at random. When one of them dies you have a short window of time to bring them back to life or they get lost in time and replaced by a different character. I hadn't set up for this, so I had 3 worthless characters and 3 awesome ones. I ended up losing all 3 worthless characters in time, and 2 of the awesome ones, but Squall managed to finish her off. It was an interesting final boss fight for sure, and I could have easily lost with the no-prep I put in. With a save point right outside the fight I like it.

The game ends with a pretty fantastic FMV cutscene. Switching to the PlayStation really was a great deal for the series as the extra room for movies like this is a big boost. I've linked it below. One great thing about the movie is they use the full song "Eyes on Me" which was apparently the first video game song to win a mainstream music award in Japan.



I like how the ending cutscene ties into the intro cutscene. At the start of the game you really don't know why the pretty dark haired girl is standing alone in a field of flowers saying she'll be waiting there. But the final dungeon of the game takes place in a time compressed area. Once you kill Ultimecia time goes back to being a normal continuum but the characters in the party need to find their way back to the right time. Most of them have no problem with this, since they have actual ties to their time. Squall does not. He's a perpetual outsider, emotionally detached from his world. So how would he find his way to the right time? He wants to go to the right time. He wants to be with Rinoa. But he can't figure out a way to do it. They tried to set up the flower field as the place to go, but he fails. She ends up having to leave the field and find him lost in the desert, but once together they end up in the field after all.

It's the sort of thing that gets me thinking. If I was lost in time, where would I end up? Would I end up back here? Sometime random? Or just lost in the void because I have nowhere specific to go? Throughout the game I always felt like Squall was doing things just like I would do them and this is no different. I would be lost. Probably forever, as I have no field to go to and no Rinoa to force me to go there. On the plus side I doubt I'm going to actually get lost in time!

As for the game itself, I had a lot of fun playing it. Playing without gaining levels didn't make the game any harder at all. It made a couple points trickier in terms of needing to run/card/stone enemies but it didn't make things harder. Overall it probably made things easier. Except Omega Weapon, anyway!

I'm still not a huge fan of the spell draw system. I hate consumable items and turning spells into consumable items is not appreciated. The plus side is it tends to be really easy to get more copies of the spells so that it turns the consumable issue from one of hoarding precious resources to one of wasting time hitting the draw command every fight. I actually like the junction system. Especially when you have one spell that's much better than the others, so you have to make a choice between getting lots of strength, intelligence, or maximum health. I like the GF system too, where you choose what skills you gain as time goes by.

The music and graphics are incredible. The FMVs are miles ahead of the ones in FFVII, and those were pretty great too. The sound track for this game is my favourite of all the games. I used to listen to the full OSTs for the different games at work and FFVIII was the best.

I like the story and the characters a lot. Quistis doesn't have much going for her but I like the interactions between Selphie and Irvine. Zell is crazy in a good way. Even the bad guys are pretty great. Seifer is a jerk and a bully and I hate him, but he actually seems like a sensible jerk and bully. It's not like Sephiroth or Kefka who just seem crazy and evil. Seifer feels like he could easily be a real person. The same with most of the sorceresses. I mean, super magic powers aren't real so I guess that's a strike against them acting like real people, but if you take as an axiom that magic is real the way they behave seems to follow. Cid reminds me of Robin Williams for some reason.

The card game is the best mini game in any game I've ever played.

Final Fantasy VIII is tops in practically every category I care about among all the games I've played thus far in this marathon. Music, graphics, cutscenes, minigames, characters, plot... It falls behind in terms of leveling system thanks to the whole draw system. Leveling systems tend to be the meat of an RPG, so is that failing enough to drop this game down in the overall list? No. I can understand how many people would feel that way, but I don't. Welcome to the #1 spot, FFVIII.

Final Fantasy VIII: Omega Weapon

Final Fantasy VIII has a couple of challenge bosses. Ultimate Weapon is hidden in a secret dungeon (under Bahamut's cave I think) and Omega Weapon is in the final dungeon. Final Fantasy VIII is also set up such that when you enter the final dungeon you can't go back. In my current game I ended up meandering into the final dungeon without really realizing what was going on, and I played for a while after that, so either I reload old saved games or I give up on the secret dungeon and Ultimate Weapon. I remember him being quite easy, so I decided to press onward.

Omega Weapon, on the other hand, I could still try. I didn't remember anything about him except that he was harder than Ultimate Weapon, supposedly very hard, but that I beat him pretty easily when I first played the game way back in the day. I didn't want to look anything up about it until I'd tried him a few times first. Those few times made it clear just how hard this guy is for a level 7 party... The problem is he has an attack that hits the whole party for 9998 damage. And with me being level 7 and all, getting to 9999 max health is hard. I think I could have done it if I'd taken the time to farm up 300 copies of Ultima, but I hadn't, so I couldn't. The best I could do was around 9300 or so, which was not good enough.

I tried a bunch of different ideas for how to survive it. Protect? Nope. Shell? Nope. Float? Nope. I had a couple one shot items that made me invincible for a short period of time. Those would work. But I only had 2 and couldn't get any more in the final dungeon. The game doesn't have an auto-raise spell of some kind which would be my typical fallback trick for this sort of problem.

I went and did some reading on the internet and the claim is the fight is doable, but in order to win at level 7 you need to pick up as many copies as you can of an item that makes your whole party invincible for a short period of time. I didn't have any of those! But you can crush a card I didn't have into some.

I now have two options... Skip Omega Weapon on this playthrough or load an older game. If I was still transiting to work every day I might be willing to play the PSP more and do the reloading thing, but as things stand now I think I'm just going to skip him. I've beaten him before, I know it can be done, and I know I was on the right track with my own plan for beating him with the invincible consumable. If I ever play a low level game again I'll be sure to grind up Ultima spells and/or scoop up a bunch of invincible items.

Final Fantasy VIII: Good or Evil?

In pretty much every Final Fantasy game it's very obvious what side your party is on. You are good. You are fighting the obvious forces of evil. Sometimes the big bad guy is obvious, sometimes it's shrouded in mystery and there are plot twists along the way. But even when it's shrouded, like in FFIV, you still know your party is obviously the good guys. Something evil is going on and you're going to put a stop to it! FFVI has lots of plot twists, but it is again obvious that Kefka is _EVIL_ and it's a good thing that you're trying to stop him. Kefka is in favour of committing genocide for power. He gleefully poisons a town of civilians. Eventually he gets godlike powers and shoots laser beams at innocent people for sport. He is evil, you are good, and that's all there is too it.

In Final Fantasy VIII you start off as a student in a mercenary school. Your first mission is to help defend a town under invasion, which sounds like a good thing to do. But it turns out this invasion isn't meant to conquer the city; in fact the army withdraws soon after they arrive. They're only there to repair a broadcast tower they once owned. Were there negotiations involved? I can imagine where the army asked the city to repair the tower, and volunteered to do it themselves, and were rebuffed. Is deliberately suppressing technology from a former enemy something good people do?

Next up, my party gets sent out to help out a rebel group that's fighting for the freedom of their city. Sounds like a pretty noble cause. But there's not actually a fight going on. Instead we're brought in to kidnap the president and browbeat him into relinquishing control of the city. A city that presumably was conquered legitimately in a war many years ago. It's not really clear that the president could even trivially hand over the city even if he wanted to. If a group of Iraqi people kidnapped Obama in order to get US troops to leave would that be seen as an obviously good action?

That doesn't work, and the president in fact uses the broadcast tower from before to reveal that he's got a sorceress as his assistant now. A different sorceress was responsible for the big war in the recent past so people start freaking out. Obviously this new sorceress has to be planning to do the same thing, right? So my party gets put in charge of assassinating her. In a preemptive strike. This poor woman has done nothing except have some magical powers and rather than give her some rope to hang herself like most good parties would, we just head out to kill her off. I guess this is the sort of thing that actually does happen in real world politics, with Hussein and Bin Laden and such. US culture seems to think such strikes are good things. I'm not convinced. I certainly don't think they're obviously good actions.

A bunch of stuff happens. We take out the sorceress and her powers shift to a member of my party, who then gets mind controlled and takes some very poor actions and unleashes a lot of monsters. There's a way to freeze her so she can't do anything bad again. She agrees to do it. The main character decides to screw that. He makes the conscious decision that even if she turns evil he'll defend her to the end and breaks her out of stasis. And then we decide that our game plan is actually to help the ultimate evil person out. Ostensibly because we think getting the evil really close to finishing their plan is what will let us kill them for good. But it really seems like sealing Rinoa and killing Adel would fix everything without risk of having all of time compressed away. I'd almost say our plan is to let evil win.

Is my party good, or evil? Very little of what we've done, if anything at all, have been what I would call an obviously good action. There's no Cecil turning into a paladin moment here. In other games the good guys seal away evil instead of killing it off because murder is wrong. That's not the case here. We think the sorceress should die, so we try to assassinate her. I think my party is trying to do what they think is right the whole time (even when they choose love and friendship over saving the world) but what they think is right isn't always the standard fantasy good. And I think it would be easy to frame the world slightly differently and actually see my party as being evil.

And maybe that's why I like the story in FFVIII so much. It's not just the standard fare. It's more character driven than most stories. And when it comes right down to it, maybe I just like people doing what they think is right more than doing what is good?

Final Fantasy VIII: Addicted To Cards

My characters just got launched into space by a giant rail gun. Rinoa has been in a coma for a while and there are some doctors up here who might be able to help. Squall has been getting progressively pissier and pissier about the whole situation, and he's been snapping at the doctors. He's yelling at people to hurry up and get to work. Logically, I should run out of the room and try to find the head doctor to come look at Rinoa. Instead I turn to the assistant guarding the room and challenge him to a game of cards! Actually, more like 7 games of cards. He might have a rare card I can win, so I need to give him plenty of time to use it!

Lino asked me the other day if I knew of any stand alone games similar to the card game in FFVIII. He's tired of having to deal with all the annoying RPG parts of his CCG. I really like the RPG parts too, but the CCG is really quite good. I didn't know of one for him (Tetra Master, which came packaged with FFXI, has apparently been closed down) but if one does exist I am interested in finding out about it.

So... Does anyone know of any good positional CCG style computer games? Preferably without a 'pay a ton of money' feature.

Final Fantasy VIII: Limit Break Absurdity

The limit break system in the Final Fantasy series debuted in Final Fantasy VI. In that game you had a very small chance, upon issuing an attack command at low health, to do a super attack. You could only do one per fight, and it really wasn't worth trying. Most enemies died in one hit anyway, two at the most, so trying to do a 20x damage hit just didn't have a lot of upside. Enemies also did lots of damage back, so running around at low health was just asking to get killed.

Final Fantasy VII improved on the system. Now you have a meter that charges up when you take damage. When the meter fills up your next attack command is replaced by a super attack. Enemies, especially bosses, tended to have more health relative to your normal damage output so doing a limit break felt like it mattered more often. There was an interesting system where you had to use a limit break a bunch to unlock a more powerful one. You'd need to take more damage to fill the bar on the better limit breaks. It felt like a reasonable way to dish out powerful attacks on a reasonably infrequent basis.

Final Fantasy VIII has a twist on the system, and it's not exactly a good one. FFVIII decided to ramp up health on both players and monsters while ramping down damage. Fights take longer, and as a result are more tactical. It also means you can afford to stand around drawing 300 of every spell without worrying about getting killed. Coupling extra health with lowered damage means getting a limit break is a huge deal. Zell in particular can expect to do almost 40x as much damage with his limit break compared to a regular attack. Man, I sure want to do one of those! FFVIII got rid of the meter system from FFVII and went back to the system from FFVI where you have a chance, when low on health, to do a limit break. The difference is that while you needed to enter an attack command in FFVI and hope here in FFVIII you get told when the menu pops up if you got lucky or not. So you can limit break when it pops up, or do something else when it doesn't. Draw some spells, cast something... Or pass your turn.

Yes, that's right. You can do nothing at all and let the next person in line take a turn. If the rest of your party isn't ready to act the next person in line will, in fact, be you again. And you'll get another chance at having your limit break spawn. So you can actually, quite reasonably, have every action you take be a limit break. Zell has done almost all of the damage in every fight I've had for quite some time, pretty much all with his limit break. There's not even much risk to hanging out at low health in FFVIII since you can junction an awesome spell to your maximum health. Zell gets to limit break with more health than a character without HP-Junction would have! And since Rinoa is running that much health, and staying at full, there's no real risk of a wipe even if Zell somehow dies. She'll just cast life on him and he'll go back to punching the enemy.

It almost feels like cheating to do this, but the enemies have so much health and regular attacks do such a small amount of damage that it would take forever to kill them without using limit breaks. I feel like maybe the game designers gave the enemies more health because of the way you can limit break so often. Or maybe they let you limit break so often to allow people to beat their enemies with so much health. The only thing that seems really silly is the fastest way to win a fight when I start at full is to beat up Zell instead of the enemy!

Final Fantasy VIII: SeeD Rank

Final Fantasy VIII has a subsystem in the game that tracks how highly ranked you are in the mercenary group SeeD. I knew from previous plays that you made money over time based on how high your rank was, that there is a max rank, and that the best way to rank up is by taking little true/false quizzes. I also knew that the number of quizzes you could take is based on Squall's maximum level and therefore that my SeeD rank would likely be pretty low in a game where I never level. Is this going to cause problems? If so I could probably address the issue by maxing out my initial rank by doing well on the first couple missions. Is that worth worrying about?

The short answer was no. It isn't going to cause problems, and it really wasn't worth worrying about. Of course since I'd looked into it and figured out how to score highly I did the best I could (how could I not try to make a number get bigger) but it didn't really help out in any relevant way. All your SeeD rank does is gets you more money on each pay-day. And since there are other ways to make money, and since you could just run in circles to proc more paydays, it's really not a game breaker to make less money each pay-day.

One interesting thing I discovered was that you can actually kill the 'unbeatable' monster (X-ATM092) during the invasion of Dollet. Normally you beat it up a bit, it falls down, and you run away. You have a time limit so running away is how you survive the mission. But it turns out if you stand around it'll heal to full, and you can beat it up again. Do this enough times and eventually it stops getting up! Killing it is worth an extra SeeD rank, a ton of AP, and a powerful item. I actually gave this a shot and managed to kill it. Woo! Unfortunately it turns out that you don't get random encounters in Dollet while running from X-ATM092 but once you kill it they come back. And those random encounters are with humans (immune to the card ability) that are worth experience, and where you can't run from the fights. On your way into Dollet you have Seifer in your party and he can earn all that experience for you (after killing Squall and Zell off, which I'm sure thrilled Seifer to no end) but on the way out you have to eat that experience. I'm playing without leveling, which meant this was unacceptable, so I had to restart and go again without killing him.

It also turns out you can avoid a lot of the fights with X-ATM092. You can dodge him on one screen. If you use the walk button to move slowly you avoid him on another. A third time you can trick him into jumping over you to avoid a fight. And apparently there's a cafe you can hide in and he'll just run on by! I've got to say, I really like that all those things exist even if I never figured them out myself.

One final point on this topic... I think the idea of the SeeD quizzes is pure genius. What better way is there to teach the player about quirks in the game system. Just having NPCs talk about stuff (like how only physical damage will break sleep) is boring. But tieing that information into a system where the player gets to both make a number go up and earn more money over time by doing it is just awesome. And if you don't want to do it for some reason, you aren't harshly punished for it. Win-win!

Final Fantasy VIII: Dance!

I talk a bit from time to time about how awesome the PSX era Full Motion Videos are. Of all the videos in all the games, this one is by far my favourite. No other character in a video game makes me wish I was them as much as Squall does in this video. I wish the guy in this video had chosen the '...' response to Selphie, though.

If you find a PSX memory card lying around in my apartment (or possibly even still on Josh's or Byung's) you'll find a save game right before the start of this scene. I have one on my PSP now. So I can go watch the video when I feel like it!

The FMV starts at 1:45 in the linked YouTube video. I really like how they did Rinoa's facial expressions. The whole thing really shows off the power of the PSX.

Final Fantasy VIII Plan

Final Fantasy VIII may be the most controversial game of the series. A lot of people hate the game (especially compared to Final Fantasy VII), but a lot of people love it. I think the main reason so many people have a problem with the game is the magic and leveling system in FFVIII is so different than in any of the previous games. They took a chance for the sake of innovation and learned some harsh lessons. On the other hand the music, characters, and story in the game are all pretty great. I can experience all of those no matter how I play, though... Is there a cool way to play the game while skirting around some of the issues with the magic and level systems?

I guess the place to start is to look at the quirks in the system. To start, the magic system is essentially a consumable spell system similar to Final Fantasy Legend II. You own a set number of copies of a spell. You can cast it that many times and then you're done. The twist in FFVIII is the primary way to generate more shots of the spells. You have a 'draw' command that lets you siphon up to 9 copies of a spell from an enemy that can cast the spell. A given enemy will tend to have around 2 different spells you can draw and you can store up to 100 copies of a spell on each of your characters. Drawing 300 copies of a spell when you get maybe 5 on average means 60 uses of the draw command for practically every spell in the game. This unfortunately results in very long, boring fights with enemies the first time you meet them and then a complete disregard for them going forward.

But why do you want 300 copies of every spell? If you've been following along you know I rarely cast spells as it is. Even when you get all your magic points back by sleeping in an inn I'm more apt to have Rydia beat down than actually cast spells most of the time. So why bother drawing so many of every spell? Cure spells, sure... But do I really need 300 fire, and 300 blizzard, and 300 thunder? In some sense, no, I don't. But in two very real senses I absolutely do. The first sense is my desperate need for completionism. I have to catch them all! There's a number I can make bigger, and that has an absolute cap. Just the way my brain is wired this means I'm either going to completely ignore the number or I'm going to max it out. The other sense it matters, and this is a real one, is the junction system for getting more powerful.

The primary way you get more powerful in FFVIII is by getting the ability to 'junction' spells onto your stats. My base strength is 10. If I have 100 copies of the fire spell and junction it to my strength then my strength becomes more like 24. Each spell has a different ratio for improving each stat. Cure is really good for raising wisdom but not so good at raising strength. As such, if you want to optimize your power level (and I do) then you need access to 100 copies of a wide variety of spells. As the game progresses you get access to new tiers of spells (firaga is going to boost your strength more than fire did) so you need to keep collecting 100 copies as you move along to keep maxing out your stats. Possibly with a full list of spell-stat ratios you'd know in advance what spells to collect and which you could skip but that seems like a lot of work. It's just easier to draw 100 of everything for each character and then compare in the menus afterwards. More tedious, but easier.

A final problem with the leveling system follows from the above point. Your primary path to power is the junction system, but there is also a standard 'gain experience to gain levels' system. In what was likely an attempt to keep the game difficulty smooth the whole way through and make every fight remain relevant they decided to scale the monsters in every zone of the game to your character level. As you go up in levels, the enemies go up in levels. So wandering around in the forest outside Balamb will always be a comparable challenge at every stage of the game. This is contrary to something like FFIV where the imps outside Baron started off super easy and became trivial at all other points in the game. Or something like FFII where if you took one step in the wrong direction you would run into stupidly powerful monsters and die instantly. As the monsters level up they unlock new spells to draw, which made for a reasonable power progression. You gain xp, which levels you up, which levels the monsters up, which gives you access to higher level spells, which makes you more powerful. A nice idea!

The issue here is that there are other ways to get spells other than just drawing them from higher level monsters. You can find spells in dungeons, for example. You even gain the ability to temporarily level up a monster, so you could power up a single random encounter monster, draw really high levels spells out of them, and then run away. Beyond that, you also gain the ability to refine items and cards into spells. Cards is the big one, since you can play the card game at any stage of the game and win really good cards as ante against some people. Refine those cards into top tier spells and suddenly you've picked up most of the power you can by leveling without going up in level at all! This means actually leveling up is a bad idea. The monsters will gain the full amount of their power boost from your leveling, but you only get part of the power.

This leads to the unfortunate conclusion that the way to twink out is to actually never level up at all. The game seems to be designed with this in mind... All bosses are worth no experience. You can run from most other fights, and can use the card ability or the stone spell to kill the other ones off for no experience. I remember watching Byung play a game like this once and was intrigued. I don't remember if he killed all the challenge monsters like this or not, but I'm going to give it my best shot. The challenging part of this challenge, I believe, is to not gain any experience. The fights themselves should be pretty easy since fighting level 7 monsters when you have ultima/tornado/firaga junctioned to your stats should be a bit of a joke. We'll see, anyway!

Final Fantasy VIII: Intro Video

My Kobo recently got itself stuck in a frozen state. I'm pretty sure the fix is as easy as finding a thin pin and hitting the hidden reset button on the back, but I'm lazy and haven't gotten around to it. I spent the last couple days on the bus reading an actual book Andrew lent me but I finished that off yesterday. I could have started rereading a different book I have, or actually fix my Kobo, but I decided what I really wanted to do on the bus was play Final Fantasy VIII. So, today, I started it up.

I posted a couple times about the full motion video cutscenes in Final Fantasy VII. I remember not being very impressed by them when I played the game back in the day, but was blown away this time around. I mused that maybe the reason for that is I initially played FFVII after watching many people play FFVIII and the videos probably weren't nearly as visually refined. Well, the first thing I was treated to on the bus today definitely points in that direction...


Now, the actual stuff going on in the video isn't epic in and of itself. You've got a woman wandering around in a field. You've got a couple of dudes sparring with swords. You get some brief flashes of a regal woman. There are some words floating around. But the detail in the scenes is amazingly crisp. The music is incredible. There are nice little touches, like when Seifer (one of the sparring dudes) pulls out the old 'bring it' hand motion. It later goes to show that Seifer fights dirty, and then there's actual blood spatter when Squall (the other sparring dude) gets cut open.

This intro video is awesome. I hope the rest of the FMVs are as high quality as this one!