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I decided to replay FF8



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0
 01.23.2016 1:00am
Thread Creator (Edited on 01.23.2016 at 1:41am)

Thirdtwin
It's you guys' fault



I got a weird bug up my butt a couple weeks ago when they mentioned FF9 was coming to Steam, so I decided to play FF8 again. 

-Squall isn't emo.  People say this and say this and say this and it's not true.  He spends so much time suppressing his emotions that it's impossible for him to be emo.  What he is is a surly teenager. He is grumpy and pushes people away intentionally.  That's not the same as being sad or mopey, that's being jerkish and stand-offish.  Later on he switches between letting out his emotions and being utterly confused at the wacky shit the plot gets up to.  Oh yeah my school is secretly being funded by a war-profiteering Star Wars casting reject who put together a literal coup in my absence.  Oh yeah when I killed him my Robin Williams-looking headmaster literally put my 17-year-old ass in charge of my entire school that can also fly now.  Oh yeah the evil witch I've trained my life to fight is my adoptive mom.  Oh yeah my adoptive not adoptive sister can send my brain through time to inhabit the life story of a moron.  Oh yeah sis went to the moon and I have to chase after her by getting shot out of a mass driver shaped like a giant gun to a satellite while in a cold sleep chamber.  What?  Try and keep track of how many times some weird shit happens, and then Squall says "what?"  Because he is so done with this shit.

-I thought that after 15 years or whatever of having not played this game, coming back with new life experiences and understandings of stuff, that maybe I'd be more appreciative of Rinoa and the much-lauded love story this game is supposedly centered around.  ...nope still hate her.  Maybe not AS much.  But she's still basically a bourgeois playing at revolution like it's some kind of joke.  (granted Timber's entire set-up kind of makes fun of revolutionary activity but you'd think they wouldn't have made a slapstick comedy out of it).  She's pretty much a spoiled rich brat that, absent the panacea of shackling astral monsters into her memory centers and networking magic torn from the veins of the earth or other monsters into her physiology to make her superhuman, has no real place on the battlefield.  At least the rest of the Teen Hero Squad got vague special forces training of some sort. And they squandered the angel motif on her too.  Now I'll say this, the transition from annoying strangers to homies I bought, because Rinoa did make some effort to ingratiate herself into the team.  But from homies to Squall going head-over-heels in disc 3 just did not follow from that. As one of the comrades/team/nakama/whatever she makes sense, but there was almost no romance in the love story even after he flew down on that weird Galbadian contraption to save her like an endangered princess.  I don't feel the love, guys.

Also I named her Lenore because I like that name better.  It's kind of freaky when Ultemicia takes her over and makes her all V-ISM in the space station.

-Selphie's design is still boring but I actually have come to appreciate her more.  She's not just perky teenage girl with a train obsession.  She's a bit twisted, actually.  I like how a lot of her plans entail blowing the offending object to smithereens.  Also she held her shit together admirably at the wreck of Trabia. I like her unflappability.  She didn't invent "booyaka" though, it comes from Jamaica.

-Zell is still Zell. He still has a stupid haircut, a hot dog obsession, and can nearly derail trains with his punches.  I can't help but like the kid even if he is stupid and broke SeeD's confidence on literally the only live TV broadcast over air in 17 years. Also infinite combos.  Also, you know, for starting out a dumbass he actually gets pretty competent later on in the story.

-Quistis is still Quistis.  Best limits, best design.  We're just going to overlook the misplaced brocon sentiments she put on Squall.  (even if he was a dumb for not taking advantage of it.) 

-I actually have not used Irvine at all this playthrough except when I had to be him in FH, and I don't know why.  He's not like... BAD. I forgive him his goofy faux-cowboy mackery because he's like 17 or something, he's still a dumb teenager and dumb teenagers have facile, amusing justifications for the dumb stuff they end up doing.  (some of Squall's edgelord philosophy for instance).  But I just haven't felt the need to use him any. (By the way, there is a LOT of content in FH that you can just pass right over, and it does some good fleshing out of some of the characters.  I wonder why the fuck they made it so easy to miss, especially since the material rewards for doing it weren't so hot).

-Oh, Seifer.  Poor mindfucked Seifer.  As much of a psychopath as he turned out to be, getting zonked by Futurewitch isn't a fate I'd wish on anybody.  Never mind dragging Raijin and Fuujin into it.  Honestly I wish there had been one big fight with the three of them versus your party as a whole. 

-It's amazing how much of a difference low levels makes.  Grab a couple of good junctions from some serendipitous card playing, grind out some AP and all of a sudden you're one-shotting bosses while taking 1/300 of your life damage from them and ignoring literally every other monster. Not that it was a particularly hard RPG to begin with but intentionally avoiding XP makes it simple.  I almost feel like maybe they should have put in a hard mode or something just so that the OVERWHELMING POWER you can wield felt justified. Oddly enough I had all the parts for the Lionheart on disk 1, even the pulse ammo, but I didn't bother getting it until disk 3.  ?_?  Thank god for Triple Triad.

-Thank god for Triple Triad.

-I kinda wanted to go ON the moon.  I mean, I like the space station, I like the space ship, but it feels like a waste to have a whole spaceship and not go into space even once.  You got a spaceship in FF4 and went to the moon in that.

-Getting spaced is a horrible, horrible way to die. I think that's why Lenore got so horny after Squall saved her.  Seriously dude first thing she wants after getting out of the spacesuit is a hug, and after they kill all the aliens she gets all tight up on him and has him hold her and stuff.  The thing on her mind at that moment was to jump his bones and have some anti-gravity sexalation, and he missed this entirely.  He could only understand what the fuck was going on after the Estharians called him up and started threatening Lenore.  He can only conceptualize his feelings for Lenore as "something to protect," even after several successive attempts to get him out of his shell.  Which is a really weird moment to make the iconic love theme play out.

-I named Griever Bob.

-Thank god for Triple Triad.

More thoughts will come later.  I'm still on Disk 3.



TT




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0
 01.23.2016 1:26am


Jaran
I'm going to try SCIENCE!



I still have my original PS1 discs.

I may need to replay this.




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0
 01.23.2016 2:06am


SuperSquall
Shortening His Posts



Disc 3 is when I felt the game's pacing became a big problem, but if you can get over the hump and into outer space things pick up again and its engaging right to the end.  I'm enjoying reading your story.

And srsly... neither Cloud nor Squall was emo.  Squall is a bit salty but I actually almost always agree with what he's thinking or at least enjoy it (particularly on the occasions when he says one thing while thinking the exact opposite).

Given that FFX used narration to give us insight into what Tidus was thinking I'll take Squall's thoughts any day.




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0
 01.23.2016 3:38am


Ramses
Registered Member

Your not going with the Squall dies at the end of disc 1 playthrough?



2011 FFO Fantasy Football Champion




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0
 01.23.2016 4:24am
Thread Creator

Thirdtwin
It's you guys' fault



Ramses said:

Your not going with the Squall dies at the end of disc 1 playthrough?

no ull get that shit outta here

Really I think most "the whole story was secretly a fever dream of the main character as they lay dying" form of analysis is kinda played out though.  People throw that on shit like Pokemon and it's like "what?" Plus I actually read An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge in middle school so the "twist" has lost some of its luster.




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0
 01.23.2016 10:36am


Spidey
So Sigh Ety



I just replayed this 5 months ago. I don't think the term emo existed when FF8 came out so nobody called Squall that.

I actually really liked Rinoa this time around. I hated her as a kid, but now I liked her. I also felt the Squall Rinoa connection better.

but a recent replay made me realize that Selphie and Irvine had zero character development in there. But the rest of the characters were all pretty good. Heck if you don't put Irvine in your party he has maybe 15 lines of dialogue in the game.




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0
 01.23.2016 1:58pm
Thread Creator

Thirdtwin
It's you guys' fault



Nah they had emo back then.  Supposedly emo as a genre of music came out in the 80s, which I can't verify because I wasn't there, but certainly by late middle school I recall emo gaining cachet as a derisive slang term and that's basically continued to the modern day.  It came up in a topic about Cloud being in Smash on a board I was at most recently and I was like AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA STOP IT NO YOU ARE WRONG.  And even Squall's visual design elements don't make him look like a scene kid.  Maybe he could stand getting a jacket that actually goes down to his hips though.

Also Irvine actually talks a fair amount, between "I can't shoot my mom" and "guys we were all in the same orphanage."  I actually found his stuff kind of interesting because, as first it's all cocky cowboy-wannabe sharpshooter guy, then it's like, he shuts down when he actually has to do the job so he looks like a big-talking coward, but then it turns out that he recognized his mom as the megalomaniacal dictator the entire time and it's like, how do you shoot your mom?  So really his response to the whole thing was pretty rational.  Meanwhile Selphie I mean... I dunno I don't think character development is axiomatically necessary to make a character good? Sometimes a character is what it is, and events happen to it and it responds to those events the way a person of that demeanor might respond to things without necessarily having their core shaken to the bone and turning in a different direction and shit.  Like, Selphie is just Selphie, and that's okay.




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0
 01.24.2016 10:23am


Crusader
Not Even My Dad Hit Me



FUCK YEAH FFVIII.

Not a popular opinion even among FFVIII's fans, but I never hated Rinoa. I mean, yeah, she's a constant damsel and all that but at least she had some defining character traits which made her recognizable even among all the other JRPG damsels of the day (of today?).

Irvine petered out quickly, except to drop the Orphanage bomb, but the cocky front coming undone at the end of Disc 1 still holds up. And I prefer to think of it as the effect of the stress of the mission getting to him, rather than the subsequent orphanage scene in re: Edea.

And I love Selphie just because she's both the resident hyper-go-lucky girl but with a pretty dark twist, made even better because it's understated and left to the player to make the connection that she's a wee bit...off.








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0
 01.24.2016 2:49pm


The Hulk
Good Boy



FF8 is a worthy runner up to 7 for title of greatest FF.  Is it still generally shit on?  I thought people had got a clue by now.




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0
 01.24.2016 4:27pm


SuperSquall
Shortening His Posts



At the time it was coming after 4, 6 and 7 for consecutive North American releases, and most people have one of those 3 as their favorites.  That's a tough act to follow and it took some hate for it then.

Now that everyone has seen FFXIII I think VIII is forgiven for all of its sins and appreciated for the good game that it is.




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0
 01.24.2016 4:36pm


Inquisitor
Jericholic V2.0

I really need to replay this. Somewhere along the way I lost my original disc's but ended up rebuying them on amazon a couple years ago just to have a complete collection. Either way, This is the one Final Fantasy game from the late PS1/early PS2 era I have not replayed mutiple times. Would love to see what my perspective is near 20 years later. 




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0
 01.24.2016 10:43pm


reido
(\/)(o,,,o)(\/)



Still my favorite.  Still awesome, but flawed in really weird ways.

Best part:
Squall:  "Whelp, I gotta go save all those kids up in the classrooms and whatnot."
Everyone:  "NO YOU BIG DUMMY, GO SAVE RINOA AND LITERALLY NO ONE ELSE, WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?!"




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0
 01.25.2016 6:10am


kjonez
with a Z



I really enjoyed the game for the characters, story and unique yet easy to abuse battle system. But the thingss that I'll always find are my favorites from VIII are the settings and music. To this day I still love areas like FH and Balamb, and how cool it would have been to go to school at one of the Gardens. And I had the soundtrack in my CD player all the time. It's one of the few games I actually enjoyed playing on beautiful days because of how much I liked the game world.


And with all the feels in the ending, who could not love this moment?






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0
 01.25.2016 4:25pm


Colinp42
Registered Member

I've always loved FFVIII.  But I'm waiting for the inevitable PS4 re-release to do another replay.

Also...

R=U 4eva!!








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0
 01.25.2016 8:46pm


Spidey
So Sigh Ety



Crusader said:

FUCK YEAH FFVIII.

Not a popular opinion even among FFVIII's fans, but I never hated Rinoa. I mean, yeah, she's a constant damsel and all that but at least she had some defining character traits which made her recognizable even among all the other JRPG damsels of the day (of today?).

Irvine petered out quickly, except to drop the Orphanage bomb, but the cocky front coming undone at the end of Disc 1 still holds up. And I prefer to think of it as the effect of the stress of the mission getting to him, rather than the subsequent orphanage scene in re: Edea.

And I love Selphie just because she's both the resident hyper-go-lucky girl but with a pretty dark twist, made even better because it's understated and left to the player to make the connection that she's a wee bit...off.

You were just more mature than the rest of us dude. When i approach it with my current adult mind I appreciate that type of person a lot more. (The defining character traits)




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