I replay Final Fantasy VIII
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I’m replaying Final Fantasy VIII. The first time I played it is when I was 12 or 13. I didn’t even have my own PC and had to come to a neighbor’s or my cousin’s house to play. The last time is probably when I was 15 and we finally bought a computer.
Inaguably FF8 is the one influenced my gaming the most and to some extends, my whole life. I learned English from it (“items, junk shop, wanna, gonna, gotta, kinda”), considered JRPG as my favorite genre, and pretty much fueled my interests in computer. Well not enough to become a game developer, but still. I really hope that Square Enix will remake the FF8 at some point then I have no regret in this life.
Last time I played, my English was still quite limited and I couldn’t understand the whole story. Gotta rely on a walkthrough written in Vietnamese. It’s actually a very well structured and detailed guide made by MK Computer Group or something like that. They even published it in several volumes and sold it lol. I’ve always wondered who they were. Unfortunately their website was down even before I could access.
Back to this replay, this time reading English and following the story are easier, but lol the graphic is too blocky, even though I’m playing the Remaster version on PS4. I still remember it was the best graphic at that time and I enjoyed watching all cutscenes, but now this and FF7 are in the same category for me. Probably it’s not a good idea to play an old game on a semi-modern platform. Oh I read somewhere PS3 is considered retro platform.
A side note: After finished FF8 before, I gave FF7 a try but couldn’t continue because a) no Vietnamese walkthrough b) the graphic was too ugly compared to FF8.
It’s kinda fun to notice some features which are common nowadays were missing 20 years ago, and also some shortcomings:
- Dialogs cannot be run faster
- Cannot skip cutscenes
- GF summon animations are also unskippable. I think FF 10 has a config to make them short, but in FF8 because the longer the animation is, the better chance to use Boost ability to increase damage. Still one more reason for using GF less and less.
- Originally the game only supports d-pad for moving. Now with an analog stick, moving characters becomes harder but I’m so used to with it and cannot go back to d-pad.
But honestly, the true gem of FF8 is Triple Triad. It’s not an exaggeration to say I come here only for Triple Triad :)
