But the core of the game remains the same, and that includes somewhat complex elements like the junction system, which involves assigning magical spells to various attributes like strength or health to improve your character, and the pokémon-like Guardian Force beings that aid you in battle. You can speed things up and breeze past battles with a fast-forward option or you can skip enemy encounters altogether. “But in the end, we feel it was a good decision.”Īside from that, there have been a few changes designed to make it easier to get into the game. “It was challenging,” he says of the rebooted development process. So even though development was very close to mastering the build, we had to pivot at the last minute and started work on refining the characters.” He adds that a number of key members from the original team worked on this, including character modeler Tomohiro Kayano, designer Tetsuya Nomura, and Hiroshi Harata, who was a battle programmer on the 1999 release but served as game director on the remaster.
“But it’s been 20 years since the release of the original game, and televisions have evolved from CRTs to SDTVs and onto LCD high-definition TVs, so we decided that we needed to update the quality of the character renders. “In our initial plan, we were going to keep the graphics as-is for the most part, and simply release it for the modern hardware,” he says. But in the end, we feel it was a good decision.” According to Kitase, this level of update wasn’t always the plan. It still doesn’t exactly look modern (the backgrounds remain low-res), but it’s a big jump from the chunky, meme-inspiring visuals from the original game. The graphics have been cleaned up significantly, with new, more detailed character models that fit better with the pre-rendered backgrounds. This, coupled with some, let’s say, controversial game design choices, resulted in a title that always felt somewhat removed from the rest of the franchise. But it also resonated with fans, thanks to its almost single-minded focus on telling a story about love, which was a rarity in games at the time. It’s a winding, often confusing journey, as is so often the case with Final Fantasy stories. Amid this budding young love, the pair and their friends are drawn into a complex war involving, among other things, a time-traveling sorceress. It still takes place in a sci-fi world where you take control of Squall, a solitary student at a military academy who slowly develops a romantic relationship with Rinoa, the daughter of a high-ranking general. Squall and other members of SeeD, an elite mercenary force, join hands with Rinoa, a resistance fighter, to fight against Galbadia's tyrannical rule and to prevent Edea from fulfilling her ultimate goal.As a remaster, the new iteration of FFVIII doesn’t change things too much. The Republic of Galbadia, under the influence of the sorceress Edea, mobilises its great armies against the other nations of the world. The world, the characters, and the story create. Do we think it's one of the best Final Fantasy games? Not quite, but even now, a whopping 20 years after its initial release on the original PlayStation, there's a unique kind of magic to Final Fantasy VIII. Review Final Fantasy VIII Remastered - A Fascinating JRPG Classic, Gameplay Flaws and Allĭo we think Final Fantasy VIII is a bad game? Not at all.