Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #14885 in Video Games
• Brand: SquareSoft
• Model: 9768
• Released on: 2000-01-26
• ESRB Rating: Teen
• Platforms: Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows 95
• Format: CD-ROM

Amazon.com Review
With its tremendous success, it's not surprising that Squaresoft and Electronic Arts have ported the mammoth Sony PlayStation role-playing game, Final Fantasy 8, to the personal computer. However, current personal-computer hardware obliterates the PlayStation's capabilities; although Final Fantasy 8 offers hours and hours of addictive role playing, its game-play graphics and sound effects aren't up to par with the PC's best.

Gamers dive into the role of Squall, a scruffy cadet of SeeD, which is an elite military unit formed to fight the war brought on by a nefarious sorceress. The game opens in The Garden, a collection of training communities for SeeD members, where Squall must perform several tasks before completing his enrollment. Squall encounters dozens of unique nonplayer characters during his journey (some of whom join Squall in combat), and while the dialogue sequences are mostly brief, the characters exude personality through posture and animation.

Despite Final Fantasy 8's inconsistent game-play graphics--spell and combat effects explode with color, but background art and character models lack detail--its cinematic movie sequences are nothing short of breathtaking. Game play consists of completing missions and exploring new places to advance the story line. Along the way, you'll battle a diverse bestiary of enemies using weaponry, magic, or Guardian Forces (immense creatures summoned to assist during combat). If you're looking for a massive, story-oriented role-playing game with the best cinematic sequences you've ever seen, Final Fantasy 8 won't disappoint. --Doug Radcliffe

Pros:

• Addictive game play
• Gorgeous movie sequences
• Epic-sized game world
• Dazzling spell and combat effects

• Game-play graphics and sound appear slightly dated
• A console-game feel (no mouse support, etc.)

Amazon.com Product Description
More than a sequel to the top-selling Final Fantasy 7, Final Fantasy 8 is an entirely new story, following the adventures of Squall, a young military cadet. Aided by an unusual group of allies, Squall must deal with a desperate rival, a powerful sorceress, and his strange dreams.

Set in a world where magic and technology coexist, Final Fantasy 8 provides players with a variety of weapon, magic, and transportation options as they explore the vast game world. Maintaining the best features of its predecessor, Final Fantasy 8 allows those familiar with previous games to easily adapt to the battle, menu, and exploration controls, while providing unique story-line elements, features, and minigames to make for a breathtaking new experience. Characters and backgrounds take on a much more detailed, realistic look through enhanced 3-D graphics and are seamlessly combined with nearly an hour of stunning computer-generated cinemas.

GameSpot Review
In early 1999, Final Fantasy VIII for the Sony PlayStation sold millions of copies within days of its release in Japan. Now, one year later, the epic role-playing game has become available for the PC with much less fanfare surrounding its publication, probably because most everyone who wanted to play Final Fantasy VIII already has. What's more, the PC version of Final Fantasy VIII seems hell-bent on completely alienating its audience of innocently curious computer gamers, as they'll likely end up utterly bewildered if they ever made the mistake of buying it. That's because Final Fantasy VIII for the PC is a completely inadequate conversion of the attractive yet problematic console role-playing game. Final Fantasy VIII would have looked and sounded much better if it were originally a PC game. It might look good on a television, but on the PC you'll immediately notice all the flaws in Final Fantasy VIII's graphics. The characters are made of simple polygonal shapes, and they're painted with blurry, low-resolution texture maps. The background scenery fares even worse; the game's characters look sharper and much more detailed compared with the washed-out settings throughout the game. This makes everything clash and makes the whole game look much worse than it should. You can tell Final Fantasy VIII is a beautiful game underneath it all; the composition and design of virtually every scene are of exceptional quality. The game has a cohesive cinematic appearance, consistently inventive artistic design, and remarkably high production values throughout, even though its appearance is mired under what seems like a coat of dust. That's the problem: Although Final Fantasy VIII looked stunning on the PlayStation, its visuals seem to lose far too much quality in translation to the PC. You'll frequently get frustrated looking for the hotspot to exit a screen; then again, you'll also frequently witness some of the most impressive computer-generated cinematic sequences ever made. The game's frame rate is fairly smooth during most gameplay sequences, but it slows to a crawl whenever you're traveling between destinations on the 3D map. Even its soundtrack suffers from the translation, because it was originally designed to be played through the PlayStation's proprietary music synthesizer; but on the PC, the game's epic score just sounds twangy and annoying, because most PC sound cards are ill equipped to emulate the PlayStation's electronic instruments. Fortunately, Final Fantasy VIII generally looks good enough that you could learn to tolerate the shortcomings of its translated graphics and sound; the characters may lack detail, but they're so vividly motion-captured that they'll captivate you anyway. But Final Fantasy VIII's greatest technical feat has to be how it manages to interpolate 3D characters onto static backgrounds that seamlessly shift into pre-rendered full motion video. There are several scenes throughout the game that blend gameplay sequences with cinematic cutscenes so seamlessly and so beautifully that it's impossible not to be impressed at the sight of them. Though it may take some effort on your part to put up with Final Fantasy VIII's muddled visual quality, it'll be even harder to deal with how the game plays. Final Fantasy VIII features a great story that uses some of the most common, most obvious plot devices - love, friendship, time travel - and somehow manages to make them interesting and complicated, yet completely accessible and even rather plausible. But to get to the heart of the story, you must wade through countless random monster encounters and other tedious gameplay sequences that will try your patience to the very limits. Worse yet, because the PC version is a straight port of the PlayStation game, you must navigate the game's complicated menus and controls using just a keyboard or a gamepad. Yet the game's most embarrassing throwback to its console roots has to be its save-game system, which reads your hard drive as though it were a PlayStation memory card. Even so, as with the ported graphics, you might grudgingly learn to deal with the console-style controls. Unfortunately, coping with the game's gaudy and far-too-slow combat sequences will probably take a lot more effort than the game is worth. --Greg Kasavin
--Copyright ©1998 GameSpot Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of GameSpot is prohibited.

Customer Reviews

Simply Amazing
The graphics for this game are just too damn sweet!This is one thing you will hear alot about from this game,I recommend everyone who wants to buy an RPG for PC.

The only prob is that you need hella hardware just to get the damn thing working great.

Great Storyline and Gameplay make this a soild hit,please make sure you have alot of free time on your hands because this thing is Long as watching Private Ryan 30 times in a ROW! 90+ hours of great fun and excitement.

The only problem I have with it is that the backrounds are Pre Renered and are in LOW REZ,this would have made it A+ qaulity but the Lo Rez will get on your nerves.

A Sure Great a Solid Game,Your Money will worth it and Amazon.com has a great price for it too!

Sets the standard
Folks either love or hate this game, me.. I love it. I don't own a playstation so this was my only chance at playing this game which I'd been champing at the bit for since its release onto the PSX. Then it finally came out.

Every Final Fantasy game is different. They all take place in practically different worlds with different characters (except for a few recurring minor ones) but thet all have the same themes -- love, hope, destiny, and destruction. FFVIII follows the path of Squall, a young trainee trying to join SeeD, an elite mercenary fighting force.

The magic system is a bit difficult to master at first, but they help you as much as possible along the way and if it ever gets confusing you can always let the computer manage it for you. Spells no longer cost 'mana', and instead you simply draw a limited supply of them from points on the map or from monsters. New weapons are no longer purchased, but instead existing ones are upgrated with items you earn after battles or by stealing them from monsters.

My first impressions were that the polygon models looked a bit odd, and the characters were all very stereotyped. Squall was the grumpy quiet type, Zell was a hothead, Rinoa was the vunerable chick, Quistis was the bookworm, Irvine was the sentementalist, and Selphie was the ditz. But as I played through I found that the game only made me think that on the outside. These characters had desires, they had dreams, loves, and hidden secrets that made them what they were.

The game drew me in like a moth to a bulb. I wanted to find out what was going to happen next! I wanted my heros to win! I scrabbled along the numerous sub-quests and attacked every new plot thread that showed up.

Fourty hours or so later I finally emerged viceorious... and I wanted to play it again!

Really good game
-CG Movies --its runs fine in Full Screen using low resolution but you would see pixelation. If you select the high resolution, you would get the fantastic animation but the sound would lag behind. So I guess if you want to play the game with high resolution movies, a Pentium II is necessary. The movies are just amazing to behold!

-Battle Screen: -on my machine the character animation is ok and the guardian forces is wonderful. The camera rotates flawlessly and appropriately. In the later part of the game the animation sequences just skips and stops due maybe because of my lack of memory of the 3d card that I have or the slow processor of my machine. Otherwise all the animation is perfect.

-Menu system: -well, I'm a bit disappointed. Its a bit slow. It takes about 2 to 3 seconds of response time after you hit the button to load the requested menu screen. Compared to FF7, this shouldn't be any problem because the graphics are loaded from memory not the CD-ROM! Electronic Arts didn't have time to bother to improve this interface. The setup is similar, I meant identical to the Playstation version and the colors are all washed out and the graphics are in low resolution. On top of that there is no 'quit' option. YOu have to press a combination of keys before you could reset or quit the game. Yechh!

-Music: -hey what happenned here! I could tolerate MIDI music but the composition and arrangements of the music doesn't compare to FF2,FF3(SNES) or FF7. The overworld music alone would want you to cover your ears and turn off your speakers. The most annoying thing though is when you try to move your characters around the room the music frequently skips.

-Sound: -with EAX on and 4 speakers, its awesome! You could hear every cutting blow of Squall's gunblade or the Guardian Forces' attacks and the booming spectacular explosions.

-Graphics: -well the 3D characters are amazing with motion captured movements but the backgrounds are just awefull in full screen. It looks like paper props and doesn't 'blend' in with the characters. They might as well put black and white pictures in the game. The only solution is to set the game in quarter screen or move away from your monitor to lessen the pixelation or better connect your video card to your tv if you have a tv output.

-Gameplay: -well its a mixed bag. You can't buy magic so you have to 'draw' them on enemies which to me is very tedious and slows the game. There are no treasures to be searched for stronger weapons or magical items. You actually have to collect items from enemies or shops to upgrade your weapons and gain new limit breaks which is essential to win the game. To some this might be ok but to me its again tedious since in some instances you have to fight rare monsters and to equip proper GF abilities to get the items that you need. The worse part is there's nobody in the game that gives you any hint to get some of these rare items! The customization of your character using GFs is a welcome addition but the drawing of magic is again necessary and trust me folks it is really tedious and boring while maxing out your stocks. I remembered drawing magic for 1 hour just fillup all my characters of one particular magic.

-Story: -the dialogue is quite good compared to other Final Fantasy series and there are some instances that you will just couldn't stop laughing at some of the humour in some scenes. The cutscenes, transitions movies are really well thought out and developed like a big budget interactive movie production. The 1st and 2nd discs are non-stop action sequences and really force you not to stop playing. You would be just amazed and realized how Square really put a lot of effort in the plotline. As for disc 3 and disc 4....I don't want to spoil anything so you have to be the judge. All I can say is the story of FF8 is a bit complete than FF7 since there is a resolution in FF8's ending than in FF7--its not open ended.

-Conclusion: I think FF8 is a remarkable PC game if you own the recommended system listed on the FF8 box. It has a great storyline, breathtaking GF animations and most of all an amazing CG movie scenes. You could forgive the MIDI composition but the only thing that rained on the parade is poor programming by Electronic Arts: pixelated backgrounds, poor control and horrible menu system. The complicated GF system also added some wrinkle on the game and bogs down the progress of the story.

One final note: you wont appreciate the story and the ending if you don't analyze the relationship between the characters closely and the sequence of events. I see a lot of people saying the story "suck" but that is not true at all. There are several themes in FF8 that when analyzed is really quite good. Final Score: 8/10