Yes it does suck.  Sucks badly in fact.  But Paul, why does it suck?

Once you enter the final dungeon, the game cancels out pretty much every command except for attack.  You can’t save, use items, resurrect dead party members, draw or summon GF’s.  And you have to fight a string of about eight bosses.  After you defeat a boss you get to choose one option that had been cancelled out at the start of the dungeon.  So I chose GF so I could spam Cactaur.  I love that little green dude and he does 4,000 damage and arrives really quickly.

But Quistis died during the next battle.  I can’t use a Phoenix Down to bring her back, I can’t cast Life as magic is out and I can’t go back to a recent save as I haven’t been able to save in the castle.  Without her, I died in the next boss battle so I had to start over at the beginning of the castle.

So I fight the first boss all over again not letting Quistis die this time.  I’d really like to be able to save but I also want to use Draw and all the other options.  But if I chose to recover the Save ability then I’m sorta gimping myself for the next battle as I can’t cast Magic or Draw new magic or use items or…  You get the idea.

It sucks badly.  It basically guarantees that you have to repeat the dungeon several times, re-fighting the same bosses over again and hoping you haven’t chosen your skill setup poorly.  If so, you’ll be starting all over with the dungeon again.

Man this game is puzzling.  On the one hand there is a really interesting character development and battle system.  I wrote about this before but if I let myself, I could spend most of my time fiddling with characters, increasing their levels and stats and min/maxing to my heart’s content.  But I’m not sure I’d really enjoy it, ya know?  That sort of thing only carries me so far.

On the other hand, there’s the story and the characters.  I’m nearing the end of disc 3 so I’m guessing I’m less than 10 hours from the end of the game and my desire to finish the game is fading.  Last night I watched an overblown, long, drawn-out scene where Rinoa was floating through space, thinking to herself.  Then Squall arrives to save the day and it continues to drag on and on.  I was hoping for an asteroid to collide with them after about 5 minutes.

And it’s not really Squall that I don’t like.  Sure he’s a big penis-head but he’s manageable.  It’s the ensemble of characters that don’t work for me.  It’s the setting that seems very generic and without soul.  I can’t help but compare FF8 with both FF7 and FF9 and its shortcomings are getting more and more noticeable.

I’ll finish the game and I’ll write a review when I’m done.  But it’s starting to get a bit tedious for me.

So I’ve taken the time to really try to understand the GF/Junction system and I’m starting to like it a lot.  The tutorials don’t help all that much as they seem pretty basic and I was wanting some details.  So after some internet searching I came upon this thread at GAF which outlines some of the more advanced “basics” of the game.  I liked what I read so I’m going to quote it here in case that thread goes “poof” someday.  My thanks to Himuro from GAF for a very clear and helpful explanation.

The first thing one must know about understanding Final Fantasy VIII is that, that first and foremost, enemies level up as you do. Now, usually this would not be much of a problem, but in Final Fantasy VIII, enemy stats grow rapidly as they level up, adding new attacks to their repertoire, and even changing what items they drop. In comparison, your stats tend to not increase greatly. This is because levels do not mean much in FFVIII.

Now, in order to maximize stats in FFVIII, you must unlearn every thing you have been taught in RPG school: the lower the level, the better; Magic in battle tends to mean jack squat, instead, you use abilities and skills to get the most out of battle. Now, the fun thing about Final Fantasy VIII is its versatility; you can make the game much more challenging by leveling up, not upping your stats with GF abilities, you can make party members that concentrate on individual traits, or make them all the same. You will find yourself getting weaker while the enemies continue to get stronger: beat Ultimecia with a level 100 party without GF stat upgrades and all that fancy stuff, I dare you.

Final Fantasy VIII is a very versatile rpg, which allows a lot of customization and players can choose their own specific play styles, these are not required but I truly feel that they make the game a lot more enjoyable. I didn’t like Final Fantasy VIII the first time I played it, but a few years ago I gave it another shot and played it with more experience under my belt and began to fully appreciate what Square had did here: one of the best character customization systems ever. It became my favorite Final Fantasy after that, and one of my top 5 games ever.

How to get the most out of Final Fantasy VIII:

1. Levels do not mean much at all. The lower the level, the easier time you will have. The higher the level, the harder time you will have.

2. Junctions are crucial.

3. Drawing is not the only way to obtain magic. It is best to draw all you can from new enemies whenever they show up, and then convert those weak spells you got into higher level magic, thusly creating more powerful junctions. That, and converting monsters into cards for powerful magic, or items into magic can take you far.

I’ll use an example. At the beginning of the game, you can make your HP sooo high. Simply go to Balamb and buy tons of Tents, and turn them into Curagas. Heal magic works EXTREMELY well on HP. Antidotes, on the other hand, can be turned into Bio’s. Bio is a good early game magic for junctioning as well. Look into it. Experimentations is what makes FFVIII so fun.

4. In order to make drawing less tedious, you must have a good magic stat.

5. Using magic to attack is almost meaningless in Final Fantasy VIII, but I’m not going to stop you from using it. Me? I don’t use it because I need as much magic as possible for junctions.

6. GF abilities. This is REALLY important. The first thing you should always learn is boost. This allows you to boost your GFs and make their attacks more powerful. Simply hold select and mash on Square when necessary.

After that, you should definitely go for the elemental atk-j, elemental def-j, str-j, vit-j, mag-j. Elemental defense-J and attack-j allow you to guard against certain elementals, or attack with certain elementals. Obviously, the higher the stat, the more powerful the ability works. This is handy when fighting against certain enemies, for example, the giant Mecha Spider at the beginning of the game, it’s good to equip Thunder to your characters Elemental-ATK since it is weak against it. Strength-J allows you to customize your strength stat, likewise with Magic-J and Vitality-J allow you to customize those specific stats.

After that, concentrate on Magic-RF abilities. Abilities such as T Mag-RF, L Mag-RF, Mid Mag-RF, I-Mag RF;etc. These allow you to turn things into spells. With this, you can do crazy stuff like turn Tents into Curagas.

At the beginning of the game, the best place for AP is the Balamb coast, where you can fight the flying goldfish guys. They give 2 AP a fight, and are extremely weak. You can cover many GF abilities fighting them, in no time.

7. Specific GF abilities you can should concentrate on ASAP at the beginning of the game. We’ll concentrate on more powerful GFs later on while you guys are actually playing.

Diablos:

MUG - steal from enemies while giving them damage.

Enc-half - Decreases encounter rate to HALF the normal rate.

Enc-none - Decreases random encounters to zero. For players like me who like to speed run FFIVII, this is one of the first abilities you should get. Whenever you get to a new area, turn it off so you can update your magic from enemies through drawing and card’ing them.

Quetzacotl: Card - turn enemies into cards, for those of you doing a low level game, you earn no EXP.

Card Mod - turns cards you earn into items.

Ifrit:

Str+20% - increases str stat 20%
Str+40% - increases str stat 40%

8. Power gaming. Now, the key to getting the most out of power gaming FFVIII is the low levels. You will notice that some GFs have abilities that increase your stats by 1 point when you level up, which is STACKED ON TOP OF YOUR REGULAR LEVEL UP BOOSTS. To take advantage of this, you only learn such abilities at a low level. Let’s say my level 10 Squall equips a Strength bonus ability. When I ever decide to level him up, he will gain 90 extra points in str. That is how you maximize stat potential in FFVIII. Junctions can only do so much. Doing this not only allows you to stand toe to toe with the foes you face, it also frees up your GF command abilities, allowing you equip more interesting abilities like Devour, Mad-Rush;etc. instead of wasting space with puny abilities like Str+20%, Str+40%, HP+20%;etc.

Now, how do you stay at a low level the entire game? Many ways:

1. Running away - the most simplistic measure, but also the most boring.
2. Turning enemies into cards - This is the way I go. You not only gain zero XP, you also benefit from gaining a card of the enemy in question, which equates to more magic.
3. Break - Casting break petrifies enemies, which ends the battle immediately when all enemies are petrified. In order to take advantage of this trick, though, you have to cast it at the beginning of a fight. You earn any xp for whatever actions you did you against the enemy, this is why it’s crucial to cast at the beginning of a fight.
4. Enc-None - The best way to not level up is not fight at all!

It would be boring if you did this stuff the entire game, it entirely depends on your playstyle. I won’t stop folks from leveling up in the game, but at least take into consideration that there’s 1. More ways to obtain magic than drawing, 2. FFVIII is a very versatile game, and you can make it as hard or as easy as you want.

So that’s my game-plan for now.  And I have to say that working on my GF’s abilities makes the random fighting very useful.  The ability to level up GF’s and increase their range of abilities and, in turn, make my own characters more powerful scratches a very addictive itch for me.  It makes me want to keep playing for just a few more AP.

I’ve put in about 5 or 6 hours and have just finished hijacking the President’s train only to discover that he was a fake President and an easy-to-defeat boss.  I’m kicking serious butt early on in this game.

Third time’s a charm, right?

I’ve started and given up on Final Fantasy VIII twice now. Why? And why am I going to try to play it again?

I loved Final Fantasy 7 (dispensing with the roman numerals here before it gets confusing) right off the bat. It had interesting characters and a cool setting and a story that interested me. And it looked great at the time. When I heard that FF8 was coming I was excited. The day I bought it, I raced home and shoved it in my PlayStation and an hour later I was bewildered.

While Cloud was annoying at times, Squall was downright rude and unlikable. The characters were teenage students, not resistance fighters. And the Guardian Force and Junction system were completely impenetrable to me. In retrospect, I was unprepared for how different it was compared to FF7. And I resisted FF8 and really didn’t give it a chance. I tried it again a year or so later and had a similar problem and shelved the game.

Yet I kept reading about FF8 and what a great game it was. Articles like this (link) made me think that maybe I was missing something after all:

It can be a bit overwhelming, which is why a lot of gamers initially ignored the system in favor of spamming the summon beasts, each of which were accompanied by overly long, drawn out cinemas. As such, there’s a strange divide – if you fully understand the ins and outs of the system, you can totally break the game; but if you don’t, it becomes obnoxiously difficult.

Still, those who like to micromanage stats and completely beef up the characters — potentially the same kind that would find Final Fantasy V to be paradise — can feel right at home with Junctioning. So ignore the sloppy romance and the trashy love ballad that goes along with it — this is what Final Fantasy VIII should be known for.

So I’m going to give it another go. It’s been long enough since I first played through FF7 and I think I can keep my expectations more neutral now. Plus I’m a lot more seasoned in the RPG genre now so I don’t think I’ll have to be afraid to Junction anymore.

I just can’t do it anymore.  I’m done with Grandia II.  I’ve just had it with the annoying characters, the kludgy dialogue and the shoddy port to the PS2.  I made it about 5 hours into the game and it showed no signs of improving.

The sad thing is I loved the original and I still loved the combat in Grandia II.  But it was completely overshadowed for me by the above issues.

So I’m going to hang onto Grandia III just in case and change gears completely.  I think I’m going to play Final Fantasy VIII, which is a game I started and gave up on twice.  I’ll write more about that later and why I feel it’s time to give it another try.

I’m about 5 hours into Grandia II and my initial impressions are very mixed.  As always, the battle system is amazing and I really wish they’d license it out to other RPG developers.  There are so many strategic options that it makes wandering around and fighting monsters a complete joy.  I also love the fact that there are no random battles.  Once you clear an area of monsters it stays cleared.  It makes me feel like my little party of misfits is truly wandering the countryside and getting rid of the bad guys.

Then I get to a town or a conversation and everything becomes really painful.  First is the fact that there’s no way to adjust the text speed and there appears to be no way to speed through the text most of the time.  Then at the end of just about every sentence there’s a 1-2 second pause before the little arrow appears indicating you can press the button to advance to the next part of the speech.  That 1-2 second pause, repeated over and over, is murdering my soul.

Then there’s dialog like this:

If your idea of fun is wading through rivers of blood, gobbets of flesh and gut fresh upon your lips, then yes, it will be fun.

It all just combines into a relatively painful experience so far.  It doesn’t help that the main character is a completely uninteresting, whiny little bitch.

So I’ll play a bit longer and see if things improve.  So far it’s a great battle system with some completely bizarre design choices.

Slowly, and without really meaning to, I’ve begun playing Grandia II.  I purchased this game no less than 3 separate times (once on the Dreamcast, once on the PC and now on the PS2) so I figured I should at least see what it’s like.

And it’s… okay so far.  I’m about two hours in so I haven’t really formed a solid opinion but it’s pleasant enough.  They battle system is fantastic which was one of the things I loved about the first Grandia.  One thing I do hate is the inability to have characters show all their text at once.  You know… when they… do this… sort of… thing.  It just irritates the hell out of me when developers assume I have the slow reading speed of a 2nd-grader.

So, for now at least, it’s Grandia II.

I ended up playing a bit of Dreamfall and liked it well enough.  I have also spent some time playing through the Guild Wars Prophecies campaign and I’m nearing the end of that.  Then I started Final Fantasy IV again, fiddled with System Shock 2 over the weekend and then last night I decided I wanted to play more of Bioshock.  Sense a theme here?  I sure don’t…

Thus far I haven’t really stabilized on one big RPG that I want to concentrate on.  I’m going to wrap up some of my loose ends and then get back to playing and writing.

Unless I get distracted by something shiny….

I’m kinda in the mood for something a little different so I’ve decided to play through Dreamfall: The Longest Journey. I was a big fan of the original The Longest Journey game and really look forward to seeing where the story goes in the sequel. And while I’m not all that patient with some of the obtuse puzzles from adventure games I did manage to solve the puzzle with the monkey and the hat and the shadow that looked like a detective. You remember that one don’t you?

So I started Dreamfall earlier this week and I like it so far, except for the lame combat. I haven’t gotten very far yet but the main character is Zoë and she lives in our future and she’s sorta aimless and she’s learning martial arts. Yes I was pretty surprised when I got to my first fight in Dreamfall but I won it without a hitch. I’m hoping they leave any combat really easy as I don’t want to have to mix my twitch-skills with my adventure games.

I think I reached the point where the plot is developing as Zoë was just captured by commandos and interrogated. Seems good so far though it is a definite change from it’s predecessor. I’m going to try to move through this kinda quick and then get back to my regular diet of RPG’s.

Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King is the first Dragon Quest game I finished since the original Dragon Warrior. It was one of those games I started, got distracted and nearly gave up on. But once I returned to it, I was completely hooked and played until I finished it. Here are my final thoughts.

Story

I have to admit that I wasn’t particularly gripped by the story at first. Sure the characters were funny and Dhoulmagus was an interesting villain but I wasn’t sure why he had cursed King Trode and stolen the sceptre. It took awhile for the story to develop but once it did, I was much more involved and wanted to see what happened. It was pleasantly surprising to realize why Dhoulmagus had been killing people and the revelation of the actual evil presence behind the story was a lot of fun.

The story was fairly simple (or should I say straightforward?) and ultimately boiled down to “bad dude wants to destroy the world and good guys must defeat him.” There were no complicated, interweaving subplots and things seemed almost grade-school level compared to something like Final Fantasy VII and its complex and confusing narrative. But that was fine with me as DQ8’s story was told well, with a lot of personality. It’s nice to not have an angsty, dark hero at the center of things.

The real charm of DQ8’s story lies in its characters. All the major characters were great and I enjoyed finding out their backstories and watching their interactions. I think the developers did a great job of creating a party of three supporting characters that were distinctive and enjoyable to spend time with. Yangus, in particular, was a riot and I’d overhear my children saying “Cor blimey!” from time to time.

Dragon Quest VIII’s towns and their inhabitants were also a highlight of the game. I enjoyed all the side stories from Prince Charmles’ adventures to Yangus’ interaction with his love/nemesis Red to relatively minor characters like the ultra-virile Morrie. Usually I hate running through towns in RPG’s and talking to the residents there but I thoroughly explored every town in DQ8 and enjoyed speaking to every resident.

Dragon Quest VIII’s story gets a 9 out of 10.

Presentation

What can I say? I love cel-shading when it’s done well. Ever since I played Jet Grind Radio on the Dreamcast I liked the look of a cel-shaded game, and Dragon Quest VIII has to be one of the best examples of the technique. Playing through the world of DQ8 is like taking part in a high-quality anime, like a Miyazaki movie. Everything has this distinctive, consistent style from the cities to the characters to the monsters.

And I have to say the crazy monsters were one of the best things about Dragon Quest VIII. I couldn’t wait to find a new creature and my kids and I would grin at the silly animations. How many RPG’s have monsters that turn around and spank their bottoms, leaving your party members shocked and unable to move for the rest of the turn? The quality of the humor and the animations were definitely a high point of the game.

I understand that some gamers were turned off by the silly design and humor and wanted a “serious” game. That’s fine. There will always be games like Oblivion for them. But games overflowing with style like DQ8 are rare and something to be treasured.

Also remarkable is the draw distance in the game. I noticed this early on when I could see an object off in the distance and gradually work my way over to it, with no loading whatsoever. That’s just an amazing feat of programming for a system as “simple” as the Playstation 2. And even when there were loads, such as when we entered a city or a dungeon, they were brief and infrequent.

Almost as impressive as the graphics is the audio in DQ8, particularly the voice acting. With the exception of King Trode, who always had an irritating voice, every character was voiced in a very professional, brilliant way. Yangus was particularly great, but even the run of the mill characters were well-voiced. I don’t understand the reasoning for the Hero remaining silent, so the game gets a small knock for that. But otherwise I almost never skipped past a character’s speech and I usually get bored with dialogue and can’t wait to move on. Compared to Final Fantasy X, the voice acting in DQ8 was nothing short of a revelation.

Last comes the music. I know the Japanese version of DQ8 didn’t have the symphonic score that we North American types get, and that’s a shame for them as the music was uniformly great and the orchestral score really gave the game this grand scope, making it really feel like an epic adventure. It’s a testament to a game when I find myself humming tunes through the week while I’m at work, and that happened all the time with DQ8.

Dragon Quest VIII set a high water mark for presentation for a role-playing game. I give it an amazing 10 out of 10.

Gameplay

Here’s the thing about Dragon Quest VIII’s gameplay: it is, for lack of a better term, old-school. There are random monster encounters that happen frequently. Not so frequently that you can’t take ten steps before fighting but it’s definitely not a system like Final Fantasy XII where the enemies are visible and you can choose how to approach them. Battles are turn-based and can take a minute or two to resolve. This drives some people crazy but DQVIII allows several different strategies during combat. Do I put my enemies to sleep, beat the crap out of them, hit them with a fiery inferno or perhaps do the underpants dance and shock them into submission? I like this system but I understand that others don’t.

Character development is also a bit… barren. You can equip armor and weapons. You can spend points on any of the four different skill tracks for your characters, making them better at swords or bows or even magic abilities. You get new skills at prescribed times based on your level or your skill points. But that’s about it for character customization. There are no classes to change and no jobs to develop. You don’t really have a lot of choices that will influence the story or even some of the subplots.

DQ8 also suffers from being unnecessarily vague and could have benefited from more information given to the player. The alchemy pot was a big mystery and I spent (wasted) a lot of time trying to make something useful. Though the recipes were helpful, more clarity would have been nice. I also didn’t know what skills my characters would develop as they progressed up certain skill paths. I would like to have known more clearly what I was aiming for with my skill point allocations. I chose to specialize rather than spread my points among the four options so I was happy but I could see being really frustrated if I hadn’t done that and didn’t have access to some of the higher-level skills at the end of the game.

But despite all this there’s something very compelling about Dragon Quest VIII. The developers have managed to tickle that addictive nerve in me that makes me want to keep playing just a bit more. Part of it is that your characters are always learning new abilities and attacks. Part of it is the ability to make things in the alchemy pot that can give you a tremendous advantage in combat. I personally got quite addicted to the monster arena and enjoyed scouting around for notorious monsters to recruit and improve my monster team. And as I progressed I could take my monster team and call them into a battle which helped a lot with some of the later bosses.

It’s difficult to specify what makes DQ8 so addictive for me, besides just listing the things I liked. Part of the charm is just how “traditional” the game is. There’s a certain simplicity that I found really appealing. Compared to the overly-complicated systems in a game like Final Fantasy VIII, DQ8 almost seems juvenile but there are layers of depth that I discovered as the game progressed.

Dragon Quest VIII gets an 8.5 out of 10 for gameplay.

Conclusion

The true test for me of how much I liked a game is the replay factor. Would I ever want to replay this game again? And with Dragon Quest VIII the answer is definitely “yes!”. Even as I was going through it I was thinking of things I’d like to do differently on a second run-through. All in all, Dragon Quest VIII was a very polished, fun and surprisingly deep game. It had characters I liked, looked flat-out gorgeous and gave me a large world to adventure in. It’s honestly one of the best role-playing games I’ve had the joy of playing.

Final score: 9.2 out of 10