And you thought I hated X...

 So by now, I've made it clear how much I hate Final Fantasy X. I know I've been on a Final Fantasy bashing spree, and there's good reason for it. The series has taken an utter dive after VI.

 Let me repeat that. The series has tried everything in its power to become unplayable after VI. I'll be fair, Final Fantasy VII wasn't exactly the game I really wanted. I beat it once and took a lot of great things with me, but some equally bad ones. It's sad when I look back on the game and recall how bad the characters were, and then immediately go on to say, "Well, Cid was a pimp. Barret was Mr. T so that has to be awesome. Then there was Yuffie. Vincent was cool. Red rocked. Tifa was a kickass chick...."

 So basically, with Cait Sith being the clearly forgettable link, the memory of Cloud actually tainted my opinion of the entire roster as a whole. Anyway, there was a lot of mood and atmosphere going on that left a positive impression, and I actually liked the materia system put in place. What I didn't like was how random-ass the quests were to get some of these, and if anybody finished the gold chocobo quest, you should have shot yourself in the face long ago. I actually tried to help a friend get through it, and by the time I was halfway through, I realized how stupid the concept was and just told him to go ahead and beat the game since he was powerful enough anyway. The story itself was pretty good, but once again, Cloud pretty much mood-killed everything to the point where I didn't care by the end of the game what was going on at all. I won't say it's a bad game, because it's not, but it's not a game I want to play again. I've tried, and get disinterested about a third of the way through every time.

 XII didn't really bother me for some weird reason, but it's not something I could play a second time either. XI wasn't Final Fantasy, X was a joke, IX was OK, and XIII is looking worse all the time. Yet, the biggest offender is the one I haven't covered yet, because the rest of this article is going to explain just how bad the game is. Of course, I'm talking about Final Fantasy VIII.

 Before you think that I'm one of "them" who bashes this game for no reason, or if you think that I'm just looking for things to hate, I'll give you a little bit of my pride. This game isn't 100% shit-tastic. When I first picked the game up on release, I was so impressed with what was done with the first disc that I never even paid attention to all of the glaring shortcomings. The game boasted insane graphics for the time, an impressive musical score that wasn't immediately memorable but carried oomph, and it kept the player involved with what appeared to be an unfolding plotline of epic proportions. I mean, at the end of the first disc, you're sent to assassinate a super-evil world dominatrix who is capable of controlling the planet within a few days. How is that not cool? The junction system also looked to have promise, as the amount of character customization was seemingly endless. I was also particularly impressed with the mood I was getting, and I'll admit that I still get a nice little mood tingle every now and then when I think about floating an entire military academy across the face of the planet. It's a little tough to explain, but this world seemed at times to be a living National Geographic highlight reel at every corner, and having the freedom to traverse it with your magic schoolboat gives your brain a lot of imagery to work with. It seemed clean, magical, and modern....and it may not have given Final Fantasy VII's old, tattered steam/cyberpunk laced world any competition, but it left a mark nonetheless.

 So that's it, I'm done with that. There are no more good qualities to this game. Let's dive right in with what we mostly play RPG's for in the first place, and that's the story. Forget about deciphering the whole thing, because if you can actually "solve" the mystery of what Final Fantasy VIII is supposed to be about, someone from Squeenix will come to your house and take you away forever. At first, the game seems to be pretty standard. Take out the evil sorceress and save the world. Easy enough. The best plan anyone can come up with is to send a team of relative rookies into the field, and it shows, because the team can't seem to do anything right. I always hate Squall, but for some reason, his pessimism sums up whatever the player could possibly be thinking about. If you think it's a dumb plan, he's thinking it, too, which makes me hate Squall even more because he tends to lampshade every plot hole in the game this way.

 Plot points get thrown all over the place with no rhyme or reason. It literally feels as if there was a chalkboard of things that the CGI team had already completed sitting on the sideline while a group of interns played darts with plot points stolen from soap operas and television sci-fi to fill in the gaps. I'll let The Spoony One explain all about the prison/missle base disaster, but right after that you run back to save your base only to discover there was this evil bastard sitting in the basement the whole time who you'd never heard of before, and right before you fight him he throws it up in the air that the one giving you your orders has been married to the evil sorceress the whole time. It comes out of nowhere, and that's what the game is like. For no rhyme or reason, things just get thrown at you with no explanation. When someone tries to explain things, they usually say something like, "Yeah. That's about right. Weird, huh? Oh well, moving on."

 To some up the rest of the game, the sorceress isn't evil, but there's another evil sorceress that possessed her, so the mission hasn't really changed but things get a lot more confusing just to mess with your head. In order to stop bad things from happening, you come in contact with some people that you've been seeing in your dreams since the missions began. Turns out that these people weren't imagined, and your team had actually been looking into the past watching the lives of others. These dream people help you set yourself up to fight the sorceress, whose master plan is to create a time-loop that would basically destroy everything. I think. It's not really clear.

 If my "simple" explanation sounds weird, that's because there's no good way of summing the plot up. It just doesn't make sense, and it's so bad that fans of the game have come up with theories. These theories are supposed to explain a couple of plot holes meant for interpretation, and sometimes they go so far as adding in another layer to the plot. Spoony explained that someone wrote to him about a theory that at a certain point in the game, Squall died and the nonsense that happens after it is his broken limbo. I pretty much agreed with his retort, which you can check out on his site, but the point is that even fans of the game are trying to explain something that even they don't understand. Here's just a few other theories about what is actually going on in the game.

 The time-loop already happened before you picked up a controller. According to this theory, a few hints in the game such as the global radio interference, strange technological peaks and valleys across the planet, memory loss, the blackouts, and the crazy amount of coincidence suggest that time had already crunched. The world you explore during the course of the game is actually an entire span of time rolled up into one world.

 Rinoa is Ultimecia. If I'm getting this right, because it's been a while since I've heard this, either Squall dies or Rinoa gets near death, or something about the space scene doesn't go right, and Rinoa basically unleashes her inner beast at that moment to become Ultimecia. There's certain clues in the game to support this, but you have to be trying really hard to find them. One of the "giveaways" is that the ending makes it a point to wipe Rinoa out of existence in every way possible after you succeed. Or,

 Squall, Laguna, and Cid are all the same person, and by extension, Rinoa, Edea, and Ultimecia are all the same, too. There's actually a lot of these possibilities in the game, especially when people try to throw Raine and Ellone into the mix. It's a true clusterf***.

 Someone is dead, but no one actually knows who. This includes the Squall is dead theory. So maybe Squall didn't die at the end of disc 1, but instead, he dies at the end of the game. Or, Rinoa really is Ultimecia, and she dies at the end of the game and takes everyone with her. Or, the multiverse died but Rinoa was able to save one sole universe. OR, the multiverse didn't die, but Squall and Ultimecia seem to be strangely immune to everything, and while Squall died in one universe, another took up the task until he finally succeeded in at least one universe in what was basically a suicide mission, so that ending is actually his life flashing before his eyes in multiple universes. Don't ask. I could sit here and explain everything for hours and get nowhere, but people have come up with theories like this. Some make sense. Some make better sense than the story. Some make less sense but are more interesting. This is one of those that covers the whole gamut.

 Dear god, there's more, but I can't even go into it all. What started this whole theory craze was the fact that the story itself was extremely disjointed and utter nonsense. Squall gets a 4 foot ice spear lodged into his torso and survives without a scratch. The ending shows Rinoa either blinking out of existence, or something is happening with Squall, but you don't know what. Rinoa is shown dying in space in the ending, but she shows up again later as if nothing happened. Squall apparently dies at the end, but he comes back too. Too much of the game is based on memories, yet the references to why memories are important don't offer any explanation. People do things for no rhyme or reason, and stories get brought up in much the same way, so the fans made up their own ways to explain it all.

 Bottom line, the story sucked and was broken beyond repair. I say we get a few guys with guns, kidnap the SOB that wrote it, and sit him down in a padded room until he explains what the hell he was trying to do.

 The story issues go on for pages. A graduate student could probably develop a thesis around what the plot of Final Fantasy VIII is actually about and still not get any real answers, but at least the blame isn't entirely on the game's writer. Outside of the plot, there are a zillion sidequests that are even more random than the ones found in Final Fantasy VII. The single, most notorious piece of crap in this game is the Triple Triad game. Normally, I would find this game to be addictive and fun, except that it's not fun, and the amount of hell that you have to go through in order to just BEGIN on this quest is a special torture all on its own. Even the card players themselves don't make sense, as you will find yourself in the middle of saving your home base from a missile strike while at the same time fighting an in-house war, then turning to one of the people in the midst of this chaos and asking them to play cards. They couldn't be more delighted.

 The card game has a lot of rules that are impossible to keep track off due to the fact that they are regional and always changing. This would be fine, except that this really puts a hamper on actually getting anywhere in the grand scheme of things. You start out with a set of terrible cards, and through diligence, that deck can be expanded to include a few powerful ones pretty early in the game. You absolutely have to get some of the early special cards, or you have zero chance at getting good cards from other players. You never know if you're challenging a guy that carries the most dangerous Magic deck in the history of gaming or a guy who has a fistful of crap. That said, it's dangerous to even play anyone, because if you feel like casually playing a game of cards and throw in a good card just to make sure you have a little insurance, you'll get three high powered cards thrown in your direction just because you didn't save and the game hates you. Changing these rules and getting certain cards can be an absolute pain in the ass in what can only be described as a guide dang it moment, because in some cases you are forced to lose cards you would never purposely lose in order for an opponent to place his rare card on the board. You would never know this. Even if someone told you, "That Bob dude drops Bahamut," then you would still be wasting hours on Bob because who in the hell purposely loses their rare cards? There's no way to know without using a guide. You're just wasting the player's time at that point, because if you were going to be sneaky and make acquiring that card a huge secret, then why the hell would you immediately release the information to a guide maker? No one would actually find the card except by sheer accident or dumb luck, and for 99.9% of gamers who were looking to get that card, you basically told them that the card isn't secret enough to keep a secret, but we're going to keep all the BS of the secret intact so you have to waste 3 hours getting what you want.

 I never, ever played the card game, because it was fun as a game, but it was not fun as part of Final Fantasy VIII. You were encouraged to get these cards to refine them into spells and items as if it was an integral part of the game, so it was a campaign of its own.

 Then there was magic junctioning. Great idea....at first. Lots of gamers were straight up confused by all of the junctioning information thrown at them, and it was pretty necessary to learn it, because enemies leveled up in the game as you did. This was neat, at first (you'll be hearing this a lot), because regular enemies would keep up with you as far as the magic and item drops they would leave behind. Once you were at level 30, however, you did not want to gain ANY experience if you could help it. That would leave everyone in the game set to take on your level 30 guys while you accumulated enough magic junctions and weapons to take on the entire Greek pantheon all at once. This took forever to do, because you could either play the card game, draw the magic by hand, or collect items to refine into spells. This alone wasn't the deal breaker, as it allowed for a lot of options when it came to customizing your characters. No longer did you have to choose between the ice or flame armor set, because you could change everything down to the percentage point if you played around enough. Even better was seeing the visible results of drawing magic, as walking into a crowd of baddies and using your Cura-to-HP junctioned ally to siphon more Curas would cause your max HP to double or triple by the time you finished the dungeon.

 It just took so much work, and it was absolutely necessary to take a large amount of time outside of the game to set everything up correctly. You were spending half the time just switching things around in between your allies, and the other half was spent getting the spells to junction in the first place. That involves going into dungeons and potentially gaining levels, not to mention the fact that fights take forever to resolve, which would be great if you had a few sidequests to do.

 I mentioned that the card game was an annoying sidequest, but every sidequest is annoying, period. Between the dumber sidequests that involve UFO hunting and picking up rocks for someone's statue, you're given many sidequests that give you your basic endgame equipment. Through these sidequests, you will gain summons, powerful spells, and items that you don't really need, but probably want. First of all, good luck finding them. You get a little bit of freedom in disc 1, so you better use that time to talk to everybody under the sun. Do it twice for good measure, because one you ditch an area in the early game, you are never seeing it again. Not only will you be locked into the plot-event once you start it, but you will also have to follow it up hours upon hours of terrible story before you're even allowed to set foot outside a town. Once outside a town, the game nudges you pretty hard to finish with what you're doing.

 "Hey, you just escaped from prison. The bad guys are going to fire missiles at your home base in a few hours, so time is of the essence. To make it convenient for you, the missile base you need to go to is within spitting distance. Really, it's OK, just finish THIS part and you'll be free."

 But you're not! Don't EVER listen to this game when it tells you anything! If the game tells you that a HUEG emergency is happening ten feet away and that you REALLY need to go there without ignoring it, ignore it! Run away, far away, and never come back until you've done what you want to do. Lord knows that if you so much as fetch a little boy a lollipop, you will be sucked into the story plot for the next twenty hours with no hope of escaping. There are literally about three openings you get to explore the accessible world in the first disc and a half, and that's it. Finally, when you get the ability to float across the globe, you can barely do anything interesting except catch a chocobo, make a statue, and get your ass kicked by tonberries. The world is so barren that there are only about three or four towns you can access, and you're completely afraid to go to any of them for fear of getting sucked into the storyline again. What's worse is that most of the guides out there are suggesting that the very second I DO rejoin the plot, I will never be able to get to these quests again. I may just be reading that wrong, but the way the game works, it would not surprise me.

 Then, there are the characters. After the casting of IV, VI, and VII, you would think that these characters would be memorable, but they are not. Every single character is annoying and forgettable. About the only thing people have to say about the characters of this game is that Squall is emo and that Quistis was the hottest one. Name one person that has brought up Selphie or Irvine in a conversation that wasn't about annoying Final Fantasy characters. You can't.

 Which brings me to my last point I need to make before my head explodes from hatred. You can't f*** Quistis. Rinoa is the love interest, and you will never be able to change that. Even when Quistis decides that she's gonna love your nuts. Even when she's smarter, hotter, and better than Rinoa in every way possible. Even with Rinoa running around acting like an irritating 12-year old with Rockstar for blood. Even with Rinoa looking like an irritating 12-year old, you can never escape that you will never bag Quistis, nor will you get a choice in the matter. Of all of the worst decisions ever in a video game, Square decided at the time that it would be best if you were shown one of the few women in video game history that men would drool over and want to take home to mom, yet still force you to take the average looking dunce from junior high. That's a kick in the balls.

 Really, there's nothing to love about this game. Take what you will away from the experience, but playing the game is not fun, and wrapping your head around the insanity is only funny when you're making colorful insults about it to someone who knows what you're talking about. Otherwise, it's masochism. Not one character in the game makes a smart decision unless you make the stupid decision first, and not one action in the game makes sense. Spoony commented in his playthrough that there wasn't one screen in the game that he couldn't hate for some reason, and I thought that he might be only slightly overestimating things. I mean, I knew it was bad, but there had to be something decent, right? No, there's not. Ever. I walked into the very screen that would take place after Spoony cut his cam when entering the missile base, and it hit me that he was absolutely right. Not one screen of this game is completely immune. Even the music is boring for the most part.

 So, there you have it. The worst Final Fantasy game ever. Digg It Stumble it ! Reddit