Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 243: Final Fantasy VIII

Episode Date: September 2, 2019

Continuing our journey through the Final Fantasy series, Kat Bailey joins Jeremy Parish and Bob Mackey to talk about what makes Final Fantasy VIII such a weird and wonderful chapter in the series—just in time for the remaster! Just mind the spoilers...

This week in Retronauts, whatever. Everyone. Everyone, welcome to another episode of Retronauts, starring the Retronauts. That includes myself, Jeremy Parrish, and that guy over there. Hey, it's Bob Mackie, and I used to work in Irvine, and just like the character, it's boring and stupid. And also here in this episode, we have. Time traveling sorceress, Cat Bailey. I knew it.

That's why your name starts with a K. God damn it. Time compression. She's evil. Cat compression. And also Chris Kohler, whose name does not start with two K's, just one. He's not here for another Final Fantasy Deep dive episode because he's like Final Fantasy I don't care.

That's not a great game. That fool. He's missing out because Final Fantasy 8 is, to put it in the words of Shane Bettenhausen, the secret best Final Fantasy. Well, I don't know about that, but this is the next chapter in our Final Fantasy deep dive series, and it is about a game that I really love. It is a deeply divisive and pretty controversial entry in the Final Fantasy series. We'll get into that, but I love it for many of the reasons that people hate it. And that, to me, is the sign of a great or at least interesting game. But before we dive into this episode, where do you two stand on Final Fantasy 8?

Well, I got into Final Fantasy 8 like a year after it came out, and I had a lot of trepidation about it because Final Fantasy 7, I mean, everybody was like, oh, Final Fantasy 8, that's a bad one, because Final Fantasy 7 obviously had been amazing and everybody had loved it. And then everybody got Final Fantasy 8 and went, uh, no. And they were like, oh, it's so much more complex and so much more daunting and the story is kind of dumb. And I'm like, okay. But I was so into RPGs at that point in Final Fantasy specifically. I decided to buy it anyway. And to my surprise and delight, I ended up loving it. And I learned how to dig into all of the different systems and everything.

And that was the first time that I really kind of learned how to break an RPG. And I felt the ultimate power of the genre. And a few years later, I finished Final Fantasy 10, and that prompted me to go back to replay the PlayStation games. And I found myself having a hard time getting back in the FF7, whereas I replayed all the way through 8 and loved it even more that time. So that kind of cemented my love of Final Fantasy 8. Welcome to the right side of history. Bob, how do you feel? I got this game.

I preordered it because I was making it to Final Fantasy then as I am now. So I had it first day, and I played through it. I didn't dislike it, but I don't think I really got it. I don't think I really understood what it was going for, even though I sort of got the systems. It wasn't until a decade later when I think you, Jeremy, were doing your 10th anniversary coverage, and I was deeply, deeply unemployed. It was 2009. The economy was in the sewer, not even in the toilet anymore, and I was so unemployed. So it's like, well, there's never been a better time to fill my sad days than to play, like, a 10-year-old RPG.

And it was that time, like, listening to your discussions and reading blog posts and stuff, like, okay, now I get the game. And that's when it fully click with me. But I will say, as much as I did it and appreciate the game, it still has a ton of problems. And I hope we talk about some of those on this podcast. I think the people who hate the game and the people who think it's the best game ever, they're both wrong. And I've said it right now. Okay. There you go.

I agree. The game does have some issues. And a lot of that, I think, comes from just the crazy ambition. and it's hard for me to believe that this game exists because let's put it in the context of its time. This is the sequel to Final Fantasy 7. Final Fantasy 7 was so much bigger as a hit than Squarespaceoft, the creators,

could have possibly imagined. They, you know, they made these games, they sold pretty well in Japan, and then the rest of the world was kind of like, Final Fantasy 7 sold really well in Japan, like Dragon Quest well, like Mario Games well. And then it went outside of Japan, and it's sold just as well in America and in Europe and everywhere else.

It was a massive – is it the best-selling game on PlayStation 1? If it's not the best, it's right up there with Grand Turismo, yeah. It's like number two or three, you know, Resident Evil, Grand Turismo, Final Fantasy 7. Had an incredible attach rate in Japan. Yeah, it was tremendous. So this is the sequel to that. It's the next number. I mean, there was Final Fantasy tactics, and there was Chocobo Racing and Air Guys

and, you know, all these other games that were kind of Final Fantasy. but this was Final Fantasy 8. It was the next after 7. So obviously they would take this opportunity to do more of all the things everyone loved about Final Fantasy 7, right? To make a proper sequel with the same systems but better and just everything would be the same but different, right? No. They just said let's wipe everything off the table and rethink the entire concept of how RPG systems work and how these things fit together with the world and let's completely change the art

style and let's change the nature of the story and the just everything is like almost like a you know it's almost like a metal gear solid two kojima-esque you know surprise guess what you thought you were getting that's not it but it wasn't really meant to be like that whereas metal gear solid two was very much a reaction to expectations and you know cojima saying like Tough luck. You can't have the things you want. This was more like, okay, we did a cool thing with Final Fantasy 7, but let's just take this even further. And let's really just dismantle what the role-playing game is.

Let's get as far away from Dragon Quest as we can. Let's really think about the systems and the processes and the rules and just completely reinvent them. And they did not give people the follow-up they wanted to Final Fantasy 7. And I love the audacity and the brashness of that. I think it was suicide in a lot of ways, but they pulled it off. It's a great game. It's an interesting game. It's very unique within the Final Fantasy series.

And like I said, it's very divisive. I see why people don't love it. But, you know, if the systems click with you and you're willing to overlook some of the goofy parts of the story, what's not to love? Well, besides the summonses. But other than that, it's so great. Yeah, I will say that we'll get to this in the future podcast, but I really feel like my perspective is both eight and nine. were kind of like who cares entries for a lot of people that were had to, they had to be like rediscovered later. And 10 was the one that was immediately beloved again, just like seven.

So I feel like eight and nine, they were not appreciated for the time for what they were doing, very different things, respectively. I think different audiences appreciated eight and nine. Yeah. Like it wasn't the whole audience that loved either one, whereas the whole audience, more or less, love Final Fantasy seven. But there was like the futurist group that loved Final Fantasy eight. and then 9 came out and they were like, eh? And the people who loved, you know, vintage Final Fantasy, eight came out and they were like, oh, my God.

And then nine came out and they, oh, you love me. I saw that and I also saw like, well, eight was too different, but nine is two the same. Like I saw a lot of that too. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Where's my baby bear bed? You know, the porridge is just right. I felt like with Final Fantasy 8, it came out,

it was a huge event. It came out at the same time as the Dreamcast. It was PlayStation's answer to the Dreamcast. And a lot of the people who were introduced to the series through Final Fantasy 7 were like, I don't get it. Where's Cloud exactly? Why isn't this a sequel? Why is this totally different? This is too unfamiliar and weird.

I don't like it. And then when Final Fantasy 9 came out, it kind of was victimized by the fact that the PlayStation 2 came out almost right around the same time, like a couple months later. And it was also at this time that Final Fantasy games were coming out pretty fast because 8 had come out the year before. So Final Fantasy 9, because 9 came out in like 2000, right? Yeah, it was one a year for three a year. So 99, 2000, 2001. Yeah. So people were kind of going, oh, yeah, yeah, they're really cranking these games out like Call of Duties.

Though Call of Duty was kind of a not really a thing at that time. But you get what I mean. Tomb Raiders, like Tomb Raiders. And it wasn't. Like Mega Man. It wasn't until many years later. I feel like nine definitely had to be rediscovered. I think eight.

And it's kind of become beloved like Wind Waker, you know, controversial at first. Now everybody loves it. Eight is still controversial to this day. But at the same time, there are people who really love it. We had someone write to us through our Facebook page who just wrote to say, I'm so excited that you're bringing back Final Fantasy 8. I love that game more than anything. I cannot wait to listen to this episode. And I cannot wait to play the remaster.

And that's why we're doing this episode now. I was going to wait a little longer to give some more. Let Final Fantasy lie fallow for a while. We just did Final Fantasy 7 twice and then tactics. But because they finally announced a remaster for 8, the game that's been conspicuous in its absence on PS4 and other current gen systems, I feel like we should delve into Final Fantasy 8. And, you know, for people who played the game and were like, eh, I don't know about that, maybe this will help you reconsider it for people who don't know what they're getting into. Maybe this will help you kind of be aware that, hey, this is not Final Fantasy as it works by the normal rules. It is a different take on Final Fantasy.

But to me, that's what makes it worthwhile because it is, I feel like, well, no, I was going to say it's the last time that the Final Fantasy creators were just like, let's just go batshit and do whatever. But I feel like they still kind of do that. I think 15 has a spirit of eight. Yeah, I mean, I think the difference is that to me, eight feels deliberate in its weirdness and innovations and willingness to be different, whereas 13 and 15 and even to a certain degree of 14, at least with a realm reborn, were more like steered by, you know, technology and by logistics and by budgets into being what they ended up being. I don't know, like, there's definitely a sense within the Final Fantasy team, at least from the conversations I've had, where they're like, well, do people really want a traditional RPG now? You know, they have Octopath Traveler. They don't need Final Fantasy to be traditional. Final Fantasy 7's remake can be Kingdom Hearts.

It's fine. And so, yeah, I don't know. I feel like this is still, it just hits this really interesting sweet spot for me where it's very much Final Fantasy as you know it, but also not. And that's a really tricky balance to pull off. Some people don't feel like they did pull it off. But I feel like it works, and we'll talk about that in this episode. So with that said, I would like to put forward the claim that this is the third entry in a Final Fantasy trilogy. I think people tend to categorize Final Fantasy according to the NES Famicom games, the Super NES games, and the PlayStation games.

But I don't feel like you can really draw a line between Final Fantasy 7, 8, and 9. Like, they're using the same technology. Yes, they have the same kind of presentation style. But fundamentally, I feel like they are very different experiences. To me, Final Fantasy 8 feels like the ultimate sort of expression of what Yoshinori Kitase and Sakaguchi and everyone started doing with Final Fantasy 6. you know, Final Fantasy 5, the crystals explode, like the crystals that were sort of the centerpiece of the story for so long, they're gone, they're toast. In Final Fantasy 6, you don't have crystals, you have the Magocite shards, but they're not crystals in the same sense. You start breaking into this other style of Final Fantasy that is, you know, more tech-focused, more systems and mechanics focused.

they all have kind of like a similar concept of character building. So, you know, you have a – the idea that summonses are not tied to a class in Final Fantasy 3, 4, 5. You have like evokers and summoners and summoners – and they're the only ones who can call summon beasts. That's not the case in these games. There's a really serious connection between the – the skills that your characters can use, the powers they have, and the story, the world that did not exist in the other games. And they're also really focused on the character's internal lives, like their interior thoughts and feelings that you don't really see necessarily in, you know, the older games, and you really don't get so much in Final Fantasy 9 either. And also, they all have limit breaks.

So to me, like, six, seven, and eight are a trilogy, convince me I'm wrong. What does that make Final Fantasy 10? It's starting its own thing. It's starting a thing kind of similar to like 13. Yeah, it's part of a trilogy with 13 and 15, I think. That makes sense to me. I don't know what the hell 12 is. Actually, I think 12 is like 11, 12, 14, kind of like the MMO games.

But 12 is just like a single player MMO. And then 14 is both. 14 is an MMO and also like you can play it pretty much solo if you want to, if you want to take that approach. I think that's pretty fair. Yeah, I believe it. So 16's got to start a new trilogy or else they'll just keep remaking

seven forever and we'll never get another 16. I think the next eight games will just be seven's remakes. Yeah, pretty much. I'm up for a Final Fantasy 8 remake. Well, we're getting a remaster, but... Except a Final Fantasy 8 remake would necessarily take away everything that's insane and crazy and fun about Final Fantasy 8. And let's talk about those things.

First of all, what is Final Fantasy 8? How would you describe the game? is a Final Fantasy with the Roman numeral of eight on the name. And it's a place where a gun can be a sword and vice versa. Exactly. There you go. But there's also guns and there's also swords. Yeah.

And then there's the sword that is a gun or vice versa. I remember the promotion for this game and I remember a lot of the focus being put on the love story. And this was considered kind of a big deal. We are doing a love story. It's going to be a much more mature kind of storytelling. this is a sign of how video games are taking a step forward and becoming a more mature medium. And I thought, I can't envision this, but this sounds interesting to me. I mean, so the movie Titanic influence all pop culture, but I think especially Japanese video games,

there are so many Titanic things happening from like 1998 to 2003 maybe, and this is one of them. So you're saying that Ballam Garden is the Titanic and Travia Garden is the iceberg. Sort of, sort of. But like this and Metal Gear Solid 2 and even things like way characters are designed to look like Leonardo DiCaprio. I feel like that movie is such a huge impact on Japan's games and other media. Japan loves them some Leonardo DiCaprio. I think it was the highest grossing movie until Spirited Away and then now it's something else. Now it's your name, I think.

Which is interesting because Squall Leonhard is based on River Phoenix rather than Leonardo DiCaprio. And they're going for, they're definitely going for a quote unquote foreign look to it, but it's much more European than say. Yeah, I could see that. Yeah, then I don't know, something like Titanic, I suppose. But I can definitely see the connections with the love story and such. And, of course, Final Fantasy 8 was the game that gave us a song from Fay Wong, Eyes on Me, where they were going for kind of that pop culture hit. similar to Celine Dion style style story. They nailed it, at least in Japan.

I mean, that song is still on karaoke machines all over the place. It's one of the first songs I downloaded from Napster. Nice. I mean, it was a huge hit. And I think, you know, for a long time, there was speculation that Final Fantasy 8 remastered couldn't happen because of the rights tied around that song. Like, they wouldn't reissue it because of that. I don't know if that's true.

But it would make sense that, you know, they want to re-kind of remaster. the game and reposition it so they can sell it for a higher price and maybe make up the difference in licensing of the song. I don't know. It's all speculation. I don't think there will ever be a Final Fantasy 8 remake because I, unless Final Fantasy 7 remake is so successful.

No, no, the remaster is like, you know, they've kind of over all the graphics. Oh, I see what you're saying. But they can still charge, you know, more than they would for like a PSN reissue or something. No, that makes a total sense. But as for what Final Fantasy 8 is, I mean, so aside from the love story kind of angle,

They are definitely going for something a little more realistic in terms of the character models. They go from the kind of squished chibi characters in Final Fantasy 7 to much more realistic proportions. Yeah. And that realism is consistent throughout their depictions. Like even on the world map, it's still like a realistically proportioned male or female character running around. Yeah, you go from anime to J-Drama, basically. You still run into like a U-size city and then it like fades into an actual city. Yeah, there's still a lot of symbolic iconography in this game.

And there's also lots of weirdness. Like, you know, you have the goofy mumbas that are like, I don't know, they're kind of like red 13 but by pedal. And then you have Norg, whatever the hell that thing is, the large green creature in the basement of the garden. So they're not afraid to get a little dopey. There's a whole side quest that involves like finding a UFO and there's like an alien or something and it beams up cows. So it's still goofy and silly, but the core of the story is very much around, you know, the realistically proportioned teenagers at the military academy, which is now extremely a Japanese storytelling trope. But I don't know if that was really the case back then. Were there, like, was that a thing at the time of Final Fantasy 9 or did it kind of kick off here?

Like you have, you know, stuff like, geez, I don't know. Persona? Persona, not so much. That wasn't like a military academy. I'm thinking more like trails of cold steel and things like that. So like a school days kind of thing? I think it was definitely because, I mean, in America, certainly Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a thing. But not even the school days thing.

Like here's child soldiers going to school together in the military school dormitory. Yeah. I'm sure that it was kind of a thing in anime. I can't cite specific examples, but it feels like a trope that's kind of taken. tail as old as time, you know. I mean, I guess you could trace it back to Evangelion, where they had, you know, Class 4 or whatever the name of the class was, 4A, I can't remember, but all kids who, hmm, their moms were dead.

Where could their souls be? I wonder if they were inside a giant flesh robot. Yep. It was Nomura who suggested the kind of school days aspect of it. And I think, I don't think you really have to say that, like, Japan has a, like, maybe even a greater nostalgia for high school and that sort of thing. than maybe America does, so it ends up filtering into a lot of its pop culture and its media and such. Bob, how would you describe Final Fantasy 8?

I would describe it as, number one, is this the one that they started taking advantage of GACT? No, that was Durge of Cerberus, I think. Really? Okay. Well, I feel like it is the first one to feel like it is like a union of, like, Final Fantasy. fantasy and pop culture where seven it was sort of heading in that direction and be more appealing with like more anime style characters. This one does feel like more like mass market friendly in terms of being like an artifact of pop culture.

Yeah. I mean, Final Fantasy 7 definitely had some pop culture references like the, the Evangelion armor that you saw on the gold saucer and the My Bloody Valentine references and stuff like that. but it still felt like it was its own world, whereas this does definitely feel like, why don't we make Final Fantasy part of the real world? Yeah, and like a relatable, more relatable characters with more realistic problems happening instead of like, I don't know who I'm supposed to relate to in Final Fantasy 7 because their problems are so foreign and because it's very fantasy-based and magic-based

and stuff like that, but this is much more grounded, even though you still get all the crazy final fantasy things happening. Yeah. Well, if you compare Final Fantasy 7 and the same. and eight, if you compare the square that made those games, the square that made Final Fantasy 7 was a lot closer to the square that made, you know, 4, 5, and 6, whereas the square that made Final Fantasy 8 was getting close to the square pictures type thing. They envision themselves as a truly international company. And I think that ended up filtering a lot into the general

kind of international flavor, the pop culture aspects of it, this feeling that Final Fantasy had truly broken out and was maybe something even greater than a video game. They finally got a taste of that sweet, sweet international money and we're like, yes, we want more of that. So my description of Final Fantasy 8, according to the notes, is a brilliant, daring, broken, fearless mess of a masterpiece, which, um, I don't know. I feel like that hits on all the points. There's a lot of good stuff and also some points where you're like, man, what were they doing? They were having, they were being really experimental, weren't they? They were, yeah.

Like, you don't follow up your biggest hit with, you know, like this thing has to be a success. Hey, let's get weird. Who does that? No one does that. I mean, this game was still a huge hit. I think it actually sold better in Japan than Final Fantasy 7. I think they still had a little bit of that indie spirit to them because a lot of the originals were still there. You know, Sakaguchi still had a big hand to play.

And so they were like, we're at the height of our powers. We're at the height of our creative powers. We can do anything. Well, I think also video games still weren't quite expensive enough to create that it became impossible to take risks with a big tin pull release. Like, no one would do this now. Oh, because first of all, the franchise mindset, stuff like, you know, the MCU and such and, you know, Call of Duty and everything, people are like, okay, there's a formula.

Once you get to the formula, you got your formula. Don't mess with the formula. Why would you mess with the formula? Whereas maybe at that time, as you said, it wasn't quite as expensive to develop. You had people who kind of styled themselves as artists. And they're like, let's have some fun now. We got all the money. I don't think they thought they were doing something crazy or off, you know, the reservation or weird or whatever.

I think they thought they were being like, we're square. Yeah, it's like this game will be different than the last game. It's what we do with our video games. But at the same time, it was really different than what they had done before. And so, yeah, definitely caught people off guard. And people who were expecting another Final Fantasy 7 were like, oh, wait. But, you know, some of the changes they made, like, conceptually to the characters are really interesting because, I don't know, I feel like there's a lot of misunderstanding of Final Fantasy 7's story and character development. And maybe that's a function of the kind of iffy translation.

but I think people kind of misunderstand Cloud and they misunderstand his relationship with ERIS and with Tifa and even if you look at sort of the expanded universe Final Fantasy stuff, Final Fantasy 7 stuff, it seems like even Square kind of misunderstands what they did with the character. So here I feel like the characters are a lot more straightforward and also like I said, you know, you have more interior priority. A lot of the game's script involves just squall, the protagonist, his thoughts. Like, you see, he is definitely the main character here. You see inside his head constantly. Like, he's always thinking, wow, these people around me are idiots or, man, this is a pain in the ass. He's kind of surly and hard to get along with. But, you know, he grows over the course of the game. And everyone in the game is kind of flawed. Like his love interest, Renoa, is, she's like,

this sort of radical left wing pro-environmental borderline terrorist. Yeah, like hippie, hippie terrorist, basically. Except she has a very rich father, right? Yes, it's like a rebellious anti-daddy thing. And at the same time, she's also kind of bratty and obnoxious. That's the thing. She's a brat.

Yeah, and like, sometimes it's really hard to sympathize with her because you're just like, like the whole thing with the assassination plot in Delling City or whatever, where she's like, oh, wait, I don't even remember why what it was that she was like, oh, I've got to go off and do this thing. And it's stupid and pointless. And she's basically jeopardizing this entire mission that her little military organization is built around so she can do some dumb thing. It's got to apologize. Yeah.

Okay, that's it. Yeah. It's, that annoyed me to. I'm like, come on. But I mean, that's kind of, that's kind of the character's. Like, they have issues. They are not... They're kids, right?

Yeah, they're teenagers. Like, they don't make the best choices all the time. And the game is... The story is kind of about them growing up and becoming, you know, kind of growing into the responsibility of having to save not just the world, but like, all of time, all of history. That's a lot of responsibility for some stupid teenagers. But, you know, in the middle of this, Squall and Renoa become better people. And Squall has to kind of deal with...

with the reality that the girl he's got a crush on is actually like a super powerful evil demon sorceress who's going to destroy reality. That's kind of rough. That's, you know, a tough way to sort of have your first teenage romance. But, you know, that's kind of, you know, the sort of things they have to work for through. So it is more relatable, but at the same time, it's like, relatable in a way that's preposterous and blown out into really wildly exaggerations. Very latter-day Final Fantasy Yes For talking about the story

I feel that when I was replaying it back then I thought like up through the assassination It was a very grounded, interesting story But shortly after that it becomes too conceptual To the scope is too big And like once monsters start falling from the moon I'm like where how did we get here Like where like why is this happening

Sometimes the moon cries Yeah And monsters are everywhere Thank you very much. So someone mentioned Persona earlier. I think that was you, Bob? Okay. That's surprisingly not me.

Yeah. Yeah, right? I just assume Persona. Okay. I didn't play five yet. I'm sorry. But I do feel like Final Fantasy 8 is heavily influenced by Persona 1 and 2, where you have these characters in an academy who have the ability to summon a demon.

Like they learn to make demonic pacts to give them new. powers. That's very persona-ish. And also there's the romance element, which I guess didn't come into play until Persona 3, but anyway. Yeah, it's kind of a modern, fresh take on Final Fantasy that, you know, I think they looked at the persona games, which weren't nearly as big as Final Fantasy, but definitely brought something new to the role-playing genre to console RPGs, and they said, yeah, I want to get in on that. So that's what you end up with. But, you know, this is where you get to the whole summoning thing, which is both the most interesting part of the game and also it's kind of most annoying part.

Because it's like Square looked at the summon movies, the animations in Final Fantasy 7, which were over the top, like just these opportunities to show off the graphical prowess that Square's programmers could wield. And they were like, let's make this a core part of the game. So the game, like you can't uncouple the story and the characters and the mechanics. You can't take those things apart from each other because they are all one and the same. It's actually, it was hard for me to put together the notes for this episode because where do you start? Everything is all interrelated, which I think is really kind of the genius of this game. But it does mean that you are kind of reliant on summoning monsters with these unavoidable, unskippable animations.

And they said, hmm, we should make this less annoying for people. So should we let them skip? No, actually, they should just have to hit buttons while they're summoning monsters, and that really sucks. You don't have to, but it does make the summon more powerful if you do. Right. I mean, it's kind of pointless not to mash the buttons because, you know, if you just let the summon play out as it is, it's okay damage or okay healing or whatever. But if you manage to boost it properly with, you know, following the little icons on screen, you'll make it like 50% stronger, 100% percent. and stronger.

If I recall, you just hit one button. Yeah, it's just the square button. Yeah, just hammer it. It's not even like fun, like hit these buttons in order or whatever like this. No, you're hammering it. You're going hammering it, but there's like points where it stops and you have to kind of learn the rhythm. Otherwise, if you hit it at an off time, then you'll actually cut your summons power

in half. So there is this kind of risk reward thing where you're like, oh, wow, I just sat through this ridiculous Bahamut Neo summon and, you know, what the hell? It's like barely any damage. I just summoned Eden and it didn't do anything. I kind of wish they invested more in this like Mario RPG style timed hit kind of thing because like one character has that ability in its squall. No, there's two actually.

Oh, who else has it? Well, actually Zell. Oh, yeah. His limit break is actually like a timed button press game. Kind of like Tifa. That is a special occasion though. But I wish like they did that as I wish the battle system had more of that in it. It feels like weird where it's just like, well, one character.

can do this and that's it. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's weird because it makes Squall way more powerful than any other character in the game. Like you pull the trigger on his gunblade as you're making contact with an enemy and it'll do like a 25% damage. Yeah, yeah. It just felt like maybe that was an idea they were developing and that just was a remnant of a system that didn't work out. But things like that, I feel like just like a number of the ideas you see kind of surfacing in the game that aren't fully fleshed out.

There's an interesting contradiction at the heart of Final Fantasy 8, which is in Final Fantasy, I've been replaying Final Fantasy 7, and one thing that really stands out to me is that it almost feels afraid to be an RPG because it's constantly throwing in these little events or, you know, where you're hitting the buttons in a certain order, or you're doing a little mini game with the motorcycle or snowboarding, and it's kind of going, yes, there's RPG stuff is over here, but really, it's not, you know. And then in Final Fantasy 8, they seem intent on completely overhauling the RPG job. around. It's like, okay, it's time to redefine RPGs. I kind of think that's what maybe their mindset was because, you know, they're taking out things like magic points. They're rethinking things like earning money and grinding. They're changing everything, right? But then at the same time, they go down this ridiculous rabbit hole with the junction system, which is a very complex system if you're not really kind of all in on this kind of thing. Whereas like, you know, Final

Yeah, like they had kind of introduced a similar thing in Final Fantasy 6 where you also had summons that you could attach to people, but it was much more complex in the way that it affected your stats, the way that it affected your weapons, the way that it affected your magic count and that kind of thing. So I know a lot of people, a lot of my friends who were just getting in RPGs for the very first time, me among them, were like, whoa, what is this thing? This is insane. Yeah, this was Squares thing at the time.

They did that with Final Fantasy 6 a little bit. Final Fantasy 7 with Materia went way in. Final Fantasy 8 went even further with junction system. And then you got to Krono Cross with the element system. And it was just like, there's so much happening. What the hell? Nine really kind of pulled back a lot and simplified it quite a bit. Yeah.

That was why I was kind of disappointed with Nine. I was like, I want my chewy systems that I can break and exploit. I miss those. It was much more about nostalgia for sure. Yeah. So again, this ties into the summons. because that's how you power up your characters. Throughout the game, you...

Okay, so for one thing, summons in this game actually are creatures as opposed to just like, hey, I found a rock in a cave. Now I can, you know, summon a dragon from the moon. Now it's actually like, hey, I went and I beat a demon in a fire cave, and now it's going to serve me when I summit it. Oh, hey, I found the devil, and now the devil's going to do cool stuff for me because I'm stronger than the devil. They are usually in caves.

They are usually in caves. I found like a naked ice woman and she's going to like shoot people with ice now. That's great. So, yeah, so this becomes like a core thing. But each character can only have one summon junction to them at a time. And that summon monster will learn abilities and learn new powers and unlock, you know, skills as you fight through and gain experience, or actually as you gain AP, and so they gain new powers. By default, your characters can only attack and use an item and defend and run.

You can't cast spells or anything. And this is an interesting story thing with Final Fantasy A because there's no such thing as magic in the world, almost. There's paramagic, that's what you use. But actual magic is restricted just to one woman called a sorceress who is like this succession of power that travels through history going from woman to woman. She's the only one who can use magic. Everyone else is just faking it with the demons that they find or with, you know, like

some sort of scientific machine by a guy in floppy pajamas that you meet in a weird future city who's trying to figure out how to do the summons thing without, you know, actually using the demons, which is important because it turns out the summons cause your characters to develop amnesia. It's actually bad to make demonic packs to become more powerful than everyone else, as it turns out. So, yeah, that's kind of how that goes. But it means that your characters, in order to have powers, to be able to cast magic and

use summons and use those non-magic combat special abilities like full cure or whatever, you have to junction a demon to you or a guardian force is what they're called. And that will give you access to all the magic that is attached to those monsters. And so there's this. complex system like Katz said, you know, each of your stats on its own is kind of just your baseline stats. But when you have a guardian force, a junction to your character, then you can attach their paramedic to each of your stats. And this is a whole system on its own that allows you to basically turn your characters into tiny gods. But there's also really an interesting

sort of give and take. Like if you cast magic, you use that magic spell. Like, magic is not magic points. It's like I have 99 opportunities to cast Cure 3, or Cureaga, I guess, by this point. But if I cast it, then I've only got 98. And if that's junction to my hit points to make my hit points stronger, then my hit points are going to go down a little bit. So any time I use magic, I have to say, is it worth using the spell in combat or do I need to maintain my character stats? What's interesting was in Final Fantasy 7, people kind of got used to being in a little bit of a rhythm. where you could use some magic, maybe you cast a summon, and those were the most powerful

aspects plus the limit breaks, right? Certainly the summons were very powerful in Final Fantasy 7 and were a huge part of the combat. So people go to Final Fantasy 8 and they see these guardian forces and they're like, oh, wow, like, okay, so I just do what I did in Final Fantasy 7. I stockpile spells. I cast those. I use Guardian forces.

Man, man, the combat in this. This game's real slow, and I don't feel very powerful, and this is frustrating and annoying, not realizing, first of all, I think the disconnect for me, and I think for a lot of people, is not realizing how important the abilities that you had to earn were, because those were really at the heart of what would allow you to break the game. I think it was Ephraet or another G.F. early on, who gives you a huge boost in attack, and you just want to immediately get that because you're like, okay. And it turns out that in Final Fantasy 8, spells aren't that great, honestly. There are some decent spells like ORA, but the level three spells aren't nearly as devastating as they are in, say, Final Fantasy 7. You're using a lot more physical attacks for the most part. You're leaning a lot more heavily on limit breaks. And actually, if you're kind of running it properly, you don't even really use the GFs all that much.

And in fact, if you are too reliant on the GFs, at the end of the game, if you try to use a GF, Ultimisi will just break it. So it's like, uh, sorry guys. And then if you're kind of screwed otherwise, yeah. Yeah, this is a game that really wants you to rethink how you approach combat, because if you kind of go the obvious route, you're going to spend time

summoning monsters, and it's going to take forever for the animation to play out. And the way you gain magic is not by, you know, sleeping in and in and recharging your magic points. It's by actually acquiring those individual casts of magic. And there's a power called

draw that you gain really early on. Is that, no, it's not a fundamental power. It's basically like any GF you have junction to you gives you the power to draw. It's weird that you could set your menu commands. Yeah, like you pull magic from a target from another human

or from an enemy. It's basically like sucking their spirit, I guess. And that is one way to pull magic. And people think, oh, well, I need to max out my magic at 99, so I just got to sit here and draw 99 spells from this guy, it takes so long. But the thing is, the game gives you so many ways to approach that

and other mechanisms. And that's, like you were saying, Kat, that's really where the special abilities that the GFs unlock come into play, because Ketzel Quattle early on gives you the card ability. And that lets you turn an enemy into a playing card, which gets into a whole thing. We'll talk about triple triad later. But the thing about drawing or turning a an enemy into a card is that, one, you get a triple triad card. Two, you don't get experience points,

which seems counterintuitive, but is actually really helpful in the game. And three, you get a card, which can be used for something other than triple triad. And as you gain abilities, you unlock something called refine.

I think Ketzel Quattle also has that. And Refine lets you take elements that you've acquired, you know, items you've acquired like cards and turn them into magic spells. So it's actually much more efficient to go through the game and, you know, weaken enemies, kind of like in Pokemon, you get them down to critical status and then turn them into a card and turn that card into magic rather than drawing the spells.

Yeah, I remember when I replayed this decade ago, one of the first things I did was I just turned a bunch of enemies in the cards and like Junction 99 of one type of magic to my attack and just was unstoppable. Yep. And you can also find magic in the map if you have some sort of command you can unlock where you can find magic spots on the map and just collect magic and it refreshes over time. Yeah, there are certain like fountains basically of magic spells and you can pull them. And usually they're very common, but occasionally it'll come across a fountain of or a draw point of something really valuable. And those tend to recharge much more slowly.

So you kind of have these precious spells. You mentioned aura earlier, Kat. and there's only a few places in the game where you can get aura. Like Cipher. Cypher, yeah, when you fight Cypher, the rival for Squall. I would always be so overpowered against him that he wouldn't be able to do any damage to me. So I'd just sit there and draw Ours. Though one time I screwed up because I had Odin, and Odin automatically comes out.

And in the game, Odin will just come out and slice through some enemies. And he's like, yeah, thank you, Odin. Well, in this one, he comes out and he attacks Cypher. and Cipher slices through them and you're like, oh, wow, RIP Oden but then he comes back as Gilgamesh and finishes off Cipher and you get a much better summon

which is a cool Easter egg but at the same time I'm like, hey, I wanted this I need my auras. You can actually get, I remember farming aura there's like one island in the game that exists on but it's also closest to hell. Yeah, and there's like dinosaurs on the island

so you can I think you can get a command that can turn battles off that's one of these special abilities you can unlock, so I did that. Yeah, Satan Diablo gives you all the like encounter none, encounter half. Yeah, yeah, that's great. And leveling up is also an important part of it. So you want to, as you level up, enemies level up with you, which is the idea is that

it stops you from grinding. But if you want to get some really powerful spells early on, you definitely do want to level up a bit because, for example, when you get back to Ballam Garden and everything's in chaos, and there are monsters and loose in the garden. You will come across the T-Rex guy and you want to be at a high enough level that you can be able to draw earthquake from him. And then you're like, all right, I'm in good shape

because earthquake just sends your HP or I think it sends your attack through the roof. And then later on, when you're invading Trabia Garden and you're going to go fight Cypher, I think for the second time maybe, you can find an enemy who will give you pain and you've got to be a high enough level for that as well. And pain will give you so many benefits.

Either like it will add status ailments to your weapon or it will dramatically improve your HP. Oh man, we didn't even talk about that. But yeah, we talked a little bit about junctioning magic to stats. And, you know, there's kind of like a logic behind it. If you take a powerful magic spell, like an attack magic spell and put that on your attack, yeah, you're going to get your, your strength status is going to go through the roof.

If you do it right, you can one-shot cipher at the end of Disc 1. And if you put healing spells on your hit points, your hit points are going to go through the roof. And you get Carragas pretty early in the game if you refine the cards, which we'll get to. But which effectively makes you almost invincible if you want to. Yeah, pretty much. But, you know, you can also put status effect spells on your attack or defense. and you'll, it's just like having a specialized weapon, like, you know, a drain spear or something in Final Fantasy 4, where if you put drain on your attack, your attack power won't be very high, but you'll drain health from every enemy you hit, or else you'll give health to an undead enemy. Don't do that. You can also, you know, if you put poison on your defense, your defense won't be as high as if you put like, I don't know, break or something on your defense. But you'll be immune from point. poison or you'll have resistance to poison and the percentage of resistance goes up according to

how many poison spells you have stocked in adjunction to your defense. So there's a whole lot of factors to consider, and you basically have total freedom to build your characters however you want. There are no classes in this game, like character classes. Basically, everyone has kind of an analog with their limit break. Yeah, characters are kind of defined by their limit breaks for like Quistus is the blue mage, as it were. I don't know, Renault is supposed to be kind of a white mage in that she can cast a sensibility.

She's a beast master. That's right. She's got a dog. Angelou. Final Fantasy 6. That's another part of the trilogy here. All the characters. There's a, there's a campaign.

Indian dog, because Rufus has that dog. And if you want to beat Omega Weapon without using refining cards, you need to use Renoa. Because Angelo is basically the only way that you can survive the ultimate attack from Omega Weapon, which does more damage than you have HP, period. Right. So, yeah, there's, man, it's really hard to talk about this game because everything is so interrelated that I keep going off topic and forgetting what we were going to talk about. The fun thing about this game is you can kind of make it as harder or as easy as you want. I actually got to a point where I was like, oh, okay, I'm at the end of this game. Well, I want to make it a little harder for myself.

So I took some spells off, you know, and actually lowered my spells, my stats dynamically, just so that I can have a little bit of fun. Yeah, I'll say don't use aura if you want to make the game more difficult. Yeah. I mean, aura is pretty limited unless you know the very specific secret to getting it. but it's super valuable because aura puts you into limit break status. Yeah, it's like limit break on demand. Because, yeah, so limit break works a little differently in FF8

than it does in seven. It's more like six in that the lower your HP, the more chance you have to go into limit break mode. So if you go down to one HP and you're invincible and you have aura going, you're going to get, you're going to get limit break literally every time and so you could just spam lion hearts. And it's kind of awesome, actually.

Or you could take your chances and use selfies. slots thing, where she... Is it weird to you that? Selfies, the name's been ruined. It's been totally ruined. But she is the character in this game who would be the most likely to take selfies. Oh, my God.

She would be on the train taking selfies all over the place. I love trains. Train song. Yep. Hashtag train song on Instagram. Yep. Actually, selfie is my favorite Final Fantasy character. Oh, she's so great.

She's great. But I was saying, like, in combat, She's kind of the same class as Seltzer, or Seltzer. Seltzer. Seltzer or Ketchi. Sensor or Ketchi. She's the gambler, basically, so she can summon slots. And there's some really cool ones.

There's one called The End, I think, which basically, it kills, does it kill everyone including your party? No, it kills, bosses. Yeah, there's one that kills, like, your party. But there's also one, yeah. So, like, the field you see in the opening cinematic with the flowers and everything, and, like, sunlight comes down and then basically it just causes your enemies to ascend to heaven, even if it's like a super boss. I mean, it's slots, so there's only a certain number of chances for that to come up. Oh, sorry. I forget, were her nunchucks too spicy for the U.K.?

Did they change those? I don't know. Okay. I do know that her skirt is too spicy for the scanability. like you have a skill called scan where you can basically see the HP and skills and everything for characters but this one gives you like a 3D model viewer

and I did not find this myself but there were people complaining when the game came out that you can like view characters from all directions like all you know turn them over 360 degrees in any direction to look at their character model but selfie is limited you cannot turn her so you can see up under her tiny little mini dress.

And then that same year, Soul Calibre came out. You could totally do that in the character viewer. Oh, wow. Now we think the technology where under the skirt could just be a black void. That's true. The mystery. Anyway, that's a, yeah, that's a, I remember that way I don't want to go down. Gamerade just happening.

Yep, it was an early instance. Like, I'm going to buy the action figure and I'll look up the skirt herself, myself. Thank you very much. Just goes to show that stuff repredated Gamergate, didn't it? Yep. Anyway, so, man, I don't even remember where we got off onto some of these tangents. There was something like 20 minutes back that we were talking about. Talking about job systems.

You know, I think what we need to do now is take a break and regroup. This is game. I'll tell you what. I'm going to be able to be. I'm going to be. I'm going to be. Thank you. You know, I'm going to be able to be.

All right, let's see. We've been all over the place talking about stuff. But like I said, everything is interlocked. It's a crazy, crazy game. Let's talk about some of the systems that they changed. For one thing, someone stopped and said, isn't it weird that you earn a lot of money just from killing a random monster?

So you don't earn money from killing monsters. You have a salary. Like the whole game revolves around the garden. Maybe we should talk about that. We keep mentioning the garden. But this is the military academy that the kids belong to. And again, it's all tied into the story. The military academy was set up as a last resort effort to stop the sorceress who wants to take the world over in the future,

who passes on her spirit to the adoptive mother or like foster mother of all the kids. and so the kids all get turned into military soldiers so they can stop the sorceress and then none of them remember it because of the magic they have to use to stop the sorceress. Anyway, it's kind of convoluted. It's interlocked maybe not in a good way. But it does mean that you have a set stipend that you earn at regular intervals throughout the game. You'll be running around it all of a sudden. they'll be in a dungeon or something

or walking through town and all of a sudden your salary kicks in and hey you've got 500 extra guild to spend and you can actually level up the amount of money you get based on your performance in the game the actions you do you can take a test like an aptitude test at your desk in the garden

and there's like a little computer built in there and if you pass and upgrade your level your seed rank then you'll get more of a salary yeah I recall you don't actually buy a lot of things in this game In fact, your weapons, you find parts to upgrade that. You don't actually buy new weapons. And for a lot of the game, like a lot of characters that I just never found the right parts, but it never really mattered. Well, again, that's something you can get by refining things.

Yeah. You can acquire, you can turn cards into items, like junk parts, that you can use to upgrade your weapons. But yeah, every character has a weapon, cloud or squall has the gun blade. Different weather system. Zell has his hot dog eating fists of fury. Selfie has the gigantic nunchucks. Oh, in the UK, they're called Shinobu. But they're still nunchucks, but...

Shinobu. All right. Kistis has a... Or Quistus has a whip. Irving or Irvine. Is it Irving or Irvine? I think it's Irvine like the city... Okay, it is.

It's Irvine. He referenced earlier. Yep, yep, yep. He's got a gun. And who am I forgetting? Seems like there's someone... Oh, there's somebody else. Oh, Renoa.

She's got like a glave or something. She's got the star thing from Kroll. Is this the knowledge you seek? I think that's the whole party. Yeah, it's just like six characters. Well, you can temporarily have Adia in your party, but you can't upgrade her weapon, I don't think. And the guy, other guy, man with machine gun.

Oh, right. Well, that's different. Yeah. Oh, God, we haven't even talked about that. Wow. There's a lot to cover. There's so much in this game. Man, anyway.

So, yeah, every character has a, weapon and they stick with that weapon and you upgrade it, which is something you also saw at exactly the same time and sweep it in two. That game came along like a month later and got totally overshadowed and now it was very expensive. The same week as Final Fantasy 8 in America? I think it was the following month. I don't think they were exactly the same time, but it was very close together.

And it just got steamrolled by Final Fantasy 8. What a better game? They're both great. I love them both. I'm not going to, don't make me choose between my babies. I've built my entire career on value judgments I have two But sometimes you just

You just have to let it stand So one week before Final Fantasy 8 was Sue Codin 2 in America Wow That's like a steamroller man Because it came out of Konami was like Let's kill ourselves

It's insane Bad bad idea I remember getting mine Back when companies would break release They'd just they'd sell games When they got them I got my copy I think it was like 9-599

Or 929 It was like maybe a week before the actual release date of eight of eight yeah my my software etc that I visited the 20 years later disgusting disgusting store there the carpet has never been changed no no no it's game stop game there is no eby yeah yeah I forget they broke street data as everyone did in the 90s because who cares but um yeah that it's like so three days before that sweet code and two came out and nobody cared I cared I got them both. You're lucky. I didn't even know Sweakening 2 existed until Sweke

and 3 came out. Oh, by that point it was too late. It cost a million dollars. Very sad. Yep. Anyway, if you had leveled up your seed rank, you could have afforded to buy Swikin 2. See, I would always pass a test really early because I knew what most, I knew everything you had to do because there was a process to it where like when you go to doll it early in the game, which is kind of your first real opportunity to test out your characters, you're there with Cypher. You have to make a variety of decisions. Like, for example, Cypher will just kind of run off while you're supposed to be standing guard. And it's like, oh, do you go chase after him and everything? How you react to the characters changes things. At the end of the

mission, when you are being chased by a giant spider robot, if you manage to escape without getting into another encounter with it, you will get an increased seed rank, which is very hard because you have to know exactly where the spider robot is going to be jumping. Yeah, because it even like jumps over you and stops in your way. Yes, but you can do it if you have enough practice. And if you are successful in that regard, you can have a pretty solid seed rank at the end and make actually a lot of money. Not that it really matters. Right. And you can actually lose seed rank as you play along if you fart around too much. I don't even know what determines how seed rink is handed out and demarited. But basically, it just,

just gives you money. And yeah, if you take the time to level it up a little bit, you'll have more money than you'll ever need. Like you said, you don't really use it for that much, especially when you have the ability to basically, I think you can turn cards into potions and stuff, can't you? Yeah. Yeah. So you get megalixers off them. Yeah. Yeah. So it's a really good ones. Right, right. Yeah. Yeah, obviously. Yeah. So there's all kinds of stuff you can do in this game. and it's just, it's wild. What else am I missing here? Let's see.

I have something. This game had a demo that was a bit different than the final version. Yes, that's correct. It shipped with Brayfencer Musashi, a very good game except for Steamwood. And this game was featured as a demo disc, and it had a different, it had the, what was the mission in the game that you play? It was the Dalit mission? I think so, yeah, but it's like then you can hear the Hans Zimmer rip-off music in that version, which they had to change. But that game sold so many copies of Bray Fence, sorry, but just on the demo alone.

On the cover of the game says, comes with DemoDisc, Final Fantasy 8. It's like crackdown selling was sold by the Halo 3 demo. Yeah, the demo was huge and everyone was very excited by it. And it was a pretty meaty demo because you do like the entire Dollet mission from the landing all the way up to the tower. You get to like have your argument with Cypher and he kicks the dog. terrible. He's a jerk. You meet selfie. You go fight the demon thing up at the top. You meet Biggs and Wedge. You get blown off the side of the mountain. You fix the radar and then the spider robot chases you and then Kistis, whatever. She blows the shit out of it. Cool.

That's a pretty substantial demo. Yeah. The doll admission featured heavily in the marketing because you had, they would always show the picture of squall standing on the boat looking out. It's on the back of the box. It had one of the best songs. in the game I don't know if it was Han Zimmery but when that music starts cranking up you're like oh yeah okay

now it's time to get going when you're doing the landing yeah I mean it's totally stolen Isn't it called the landing? It is yes like they they basically Nobu Umato was like yeah the rock is really cool

we're going to make music that sounds exactly like it It was a period of development where it's like oh we can't do this anymore Right I think at that point they were like, uh, actually we're going to get sued. So let's change it. And I like what they ended up with. I feel like there's character choices here.

What's the outcome of this story? Do we talk about Triple Triad or do we talk about the soundtrack? Let's talk about the soundtrack. We should talk about the soundtrack. I mean, it opens with one of the best songs in RPG history, and I think one of the songs that Final Fantasy 8 is most known for, which is Liberty Fatali, which is a Latin coral, that was basically, this was Nubu Uyematsu spiking the football after Final Fantasy 7 with One Wing an Angel. He's like, oh, you like that, eh? Well, let's do it even bigger, folks. And it really makes you feel like, okay, this is going to be a game.

Oh, my God. Yeah, this game took the Parasite Eve trick of basically giving you an intro that throws a bunch of fragments of the CG animation that appears throughout the game into kind of like an incoherent mess where you're just like, I don't know what's happening, but it looks so cool. I can't wait to play this. But it also incorporates story in there. Yes, it creates the prologue of the story. The game opens, like the first playable scene, is actually derived directly from the conflict that happens. and the, like, the, here's cool stuff that's going to happen. There's also cool stuff that is happening at the moment.

Yeah. And then, of course, Squall, and you're like, okay, I'm super hyped up. Let's go. And then Squall wakes up in the garden. And everything becomes very sedate for a while. Yeah. Yeah. The garden theme is, like, so gentle.

It's very much the opposite of Final Fantasy 7, which I, like I said, I've been replaying Final Fantasy 7. The opening sequence in Midgar is so good. It's such a beautifully packed together like five or six hours of gameplay. It's basically perfect. Whereas the opening in like five or six hours up until you get to doll it are actually kind of a drag because. Yeah, so slow. It's very, very slow. It feels more like persona in that way.

We're just like, when is the game going to start? You're just wandering around the garden and you're listening to that very boring music, which sounds like a hotel or something? I don't know. You feel like you're in Erratusin. No, I like that music. Talking about the music, though, the instrumentation, well, I'm sure we're talking about it. It's so much better. It's no longer farting synthesizers?

Yes, like Ui Matsu had time to learn more about how to make a good soundtrack on the PlayStation because, of course, the composition of non-FF7 is good, but the instrumentation is poorer. And I never learned that more harshly than when I was at the PSX event. And we thought they were going to announce a Final Fantasy 7 remake, but instead, Final Fantasy 67 OG music starts playing through convention speakers that have to fill an entire auditorium. I was in pain. I was in physical pain. And at that moment, I realized, like, it was like a hearing test.

I was raising my hand. But it's so bad. You never realize how bad it is until you hear it fill an entire convention hall. But aid is so much better. Well, there's a lot of live instrument sampling in this. Yeah. And in fact, it's even credited in on the. the soundtrack. The Chokobo, Mods de Chocobo theme, it says featuring N's Stratocaster. So it's

Nobu Umatsu's own electric guitar. He like sampled it and got that surf rock sound in there. But then there's also acoustic guitar samples like in Fisherman's Horizon. Which a lot of people think is another like highly underrated piece of music. Yeah. There's a lot of, you know, like electric pianos and harpsichords. It sounds more like real instrumentation without being Red Book audio. So it's still got that kind of mechanical tinny sound, but you get vocal samples that sound a lot less like what's happening here than it wasn't one winged angel. It's just a very rich soundscape. And it's one of my favorite Final Fantasy soundtracks by far because it sounds great and the compositions are great. You can really tell just the first time you hear the opening

sting of the battle music in Final Fantasy 8, which just like, oh, it's a newscast. It's a deeper and richer than the one in Final Fantasy 7 and ultimately it gets a little repetitive faster than the one in Final Fantasy 7 but it's still the opening sting is where it like it's really good so and I am of the opinion that with turn-based battles you got to get the opening sting for a battle system battle music right yep and the soundtrack for the the tune for boss battles is more progressive rock than ever with that like crazy organ hammond organ sound going on. And one of my all-time favorites in Final Fantasy is the spy where you're sneaking around the other garden. And it's like this, like it's got that kind of 70s funky,

dirty sound to it. It was just like, yeah, it was such good, well-composed, well-mastered music. It really made a big difference to the game. Also, the music, first of all, the music in the entire battle with Ultimacia, I think blows the music against Sephiroth out of the water. Because it continues to progress, much like an FF6, with Dancing Mads through each version of the boss and continues to improve until you hit the extreme, which is a great piece of music. It is just high energy.

Yeah, it pulls in the Fethos, Lusec, Wicos, Wino-Sec, whatever, and then builds it into something. But, yeah, it's, yeah. Yeah, no, that's some of Nobuo Uwemanzu. He was like best work, in my opinion. And then, of course, Old Demetia's Castle is really good, too, doing the heavy organ kind of thing. It's good. It's like, Pennsylvania or something.

Yeah, I was at the Square Innix shop in Shinjuku a couple of years ago, and that's what they were playing over the speaker, like the PA system. Perfect. And they just kept repeating it. And I was like, man, this is, what is the message they're sending here? Can I just say that Altamesea's Castle is also a lot better than the crater in FF7? Oh, yeah. Whereas like the crater is just, it's a hallway, whereas in eight, with Ultimusia's castle, you go in with none of your abilities and there are a bunch of bosses and you can fight them in any order and you're trying to get your abilities back.

It's a great, but you don't have to. You don't have to. You can go fight Ultimisia and Griever and everyone without those things and die horribly, but it's possible. Yeah, it's really well done. In fact, everything from the moment you kind of enter the time compression all the way through the final sequence, like, is really Final Fantasy 8 at its best. It finishes really strongly, it might be. Which is kind of unusual.

Like, usually RPGs, you get to the final dungeon, you're like, oh, it's just going to be long and drawn out and really hard. Like, I think Final Fantasy 10 is kind of the definitive version of that where you go inside of sin. And there's just like all these crazy hard enemies, random encounters you can fight. But you can also just like run straight to the center and not fight anything and go straight to the final battles. And I was like, you know what? I don't care. I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing here. I'm just going to go finish the game.

Meanwhile, 10 has the worst final boss battle music of all time. Oh, come on. That's so bad. It's good. You've got to love it. But yeah, the final dungeon is really, really cool in this game. And I wish that more of the Final Fantasy games would kind of take that more experimental approach and just say, like, hey, we're upending everything that you expect.

And you have to go fight all the final bosses or final battles without any part. powers unless you take the time to get them back. Also, Ultimusia can really mess with you. Yes. Because when you're fighting her initial form, if you lose, if a character gets knocked out, she will make them send them into time and if they're lost forever, so you're screwed if that's what happens. Well, a reserve party character will come in.

But you probably don't have your good stuff junction to them. No, that's why you're screwed. So, yeah, for my experience with Final Fantasy 8, I've only fought the final battle once. I won by the skin of my teeth against Ultimesia because she kept knocking everyone out. So I ended up with just Squall and Renoa. And she has the ability to do something called blowing away your magic. So she will blow away all the magic spells you have junction to a stat. So not only can you not use that magic spell anymore for the rest of the battle,

you also lose all the stat boosts you have attached to that stat. So in the end I had like Squall who was struggling through basically carrying the battle at full strength of full hit points. Ranoa lost the Kuroga junctioned to her hit points. And so basically she was like kind of constantly casting healing spells on the two and then she would die. and then Squall would bring her back and then focus on attacking. It was just like a mess. It was this drawn-out, painful experience where I constantly felt like I was going to lose. But I won.

It was so satisfying. I was like, yeah, screw you ultimately. I still won me. We're in fact about the soundtrack, we've got to talk about man with the machine gun. Well, I think this is the point where we have to talk about Laguna, because there's this whole other thing about Final Fantasy 8, which is that, in addition to it being Cloud Story, or, God, ding it. In addition to it being Squall's Leon's story.

Leon's story, yes. It's also this other guy who just randomly shows up anytime Squall gets knocked on conscious. And Squall hates him. Squall is like... What a dork. Yeah.

At one point, like I think Zell says, man, I had this weird dream. It was really cool. And I think Selfie's like, yeah, he was so heroic. It was awesome. And Squall thinks,

I had a dream too, but it wasn't a nice dream. I dreamed I was a moron. So, like, that's one of my favorite lines. He's thinking it in his head. But it's one of my favorite lines in any video game. He's just like, who is this dumbass that I keep dreaming that I am? As an aside, this is one of the first projects by Alexander O. Smith.

And he really, I mean, Final Fantasy 8 is typically known as one of the first truly great localizations by Square, which is an entirely fair. I think there are other examples of great localizations, but FF8 definitely stood out after seven. The early PlayStation period was kind of bad for them because, like, the Woolsey stuff was pretty good, given what he had and what the time he had. But, like, seven tactics and Saga Frontier all before this were just miserable localizations, tactics especially. But this was a real turning point. And I think Parasite E was pretty good, too, before this, right? Yeah, it was pretty good. It was a much shorter game, way less text.

But that was sort of a turning point. this and that and Final Fantasy's 8. Yeah, you really filled the dialogue with personality and you could really read the differences between somebody like squall

and somebody like Laguna and was hyperactive and kind of nuts. But yeah, so you're on your way to meet Renoa for the first time in the resistance in timber, I think it is. You're on the train.

Timber owls. Yep. And you just suddenly flash to these Galbanian soldiers and you get to see Laguna go to a hotel where he meets a gal named Raine and she's playing what would become an instrumental version of Eyes on Me and the piano and he's kind of like, well, should I go talk to her? He gets like a leg cramp because he's so anxious.

So Laguna is this guy. He's the man with the machine gun. That's his battle theme. It's unlike any other Final Fantasy battle theme before it. It's like techno, EDM. One of the best. It's great. but he's this long-haired dude, you know, probably in his late 20s, a little older than the main cast,

and he wields a submachine gun, which is very, very different than any other Final Fantasy protagonist before him. And then he's got two partners, Kuros and Ward. Kuros is like lithe and uses these twin daggers, and Ward is this gigantic whale of a man who throws a harpoon. It's comical and weird. I should have named a Biggs and Wedge. Like, that should have been the Biggs and Wedger. They're elsewhere. I'm okay with it.

They're in the desert. Aren't they in the prison? They did not get killed by Elvorette at the top of Doulos Tower. They do show up elsewhere. The desert prison is the worst part of the game, by the way. And it's a bad start to the second disc. But anyway, Laguna. Laguna, Laguna.

Let's talk more about Laguna. He looks like Sandra Bullock. He does. Very odd. He's very pretty. He's a very pretty man. And then, so, I mean, a lot of the central mystery of the game is trying to find out, like, what's his connection to Squall and what's his connection to the story? And eventually

Squall does meet Laguna. But without realizing the significance of Laguna to his story. Yeah. Well, I was reading an interview. There's a lot of really good old interviews from, I forget, that have been translated on smuplulations. And at one point, I think it's Katase, who says, yeah, Numerra had all these ideas for how they would connect, but it kind of got lost. But you do see there's a strong connection to someone who you're also going after, who I think is Laguna's, well, Squall's mom, I want to say. Because Laguna is supposed to be Squall's father, right? And was it Ellen? Yeah.

And you're trying to reach her. And like she's a connecting point, I think, between Laguna and Squall. Right. But Laguna is Squall's father. We haven't actually said that explicitly. Yeah. Well, it's not really explicitly said in the game, is it? Or is it?

I think at some point someone actually says that. It's like heavily suggested. I think someone actually says that at some point, but at the point that Squall and Laguna meet, they don't actually necessarily know that. I think at the point. Or maybe Laguna knows, but he doesn't say, but Squall doesn't realize. And isn't she the one who's creating the visions with Laguna? Yeah, the mysterious girl who shows up the very beginning.

She has the power to, like, send people in the past. Because you see her in the infirmary, yeah. Yep. So, yeah, Laguna is Squall's father, and the woman who writes, Eyes on Me, Rain, is Renoa's father, or mother. So it's like this misconnection. They almost meet with each other, but like Laguna goes off on these weird adventures and his life gets kind of turned around. He ends up becoming president of the futuristic city of Esthard. He's an actor.

Yeah, it goes all over the place. but basically Squall and Renoa are the like the realization of the romance that never was and a kind of like, you know, once removed sort of way. Yeah, so the romance between Squall and Renoa, and maybe this is getting away from Laguna a little bit, a little attack of the clones-ish. A little bit, but I think it works better because you actually do spend time inside of Squall's head. And, you know, you actually feel like there is something inside of his head.

unlike maybe Anakin Skywalker. We never hear what he thinks about sand. That's true. Although they do walk across the desert together. The reason I bring it up is because in FFA, it's very much going for the love, love, love. Isn't this so romantic? These two characters must be together. It is their destiny.

We are going to get them together for the surfaces of the plot. They must be together. It almost doesn't work. I mean, I think a lot of people would say it doesn't work. It's like one of the key points of contention. So like you saying, Laguna and Rain is the realization of this misconnection. And I'm like, oh, boy, okay. Okay.

Well, I mean, I didn't say it was destined or anything. No, I know. They end up together and you're like, oh, okay, that's neat. It's like a thematic like misconnection thing. I get it. Yeah. It's a cute scene, by the way, with Laguna and Rain. It's one of my favorite scenes in the game.

In the hotel bar. He's like trying to be, where he's such a dork trying to go get up to her, she'll go talk to her, and then finally does and kind of makes him an ass out of himself. But she still thinks he's kind of cute. And he helps inspire the song that, you know, like Eyes on Me is the big song for Final Fantasy 8, but it's also kind of diogenic, like it is a song within the world, which is kind of a neat touch. Yeah, so the whole Laguna thing is interesting. And I feel like it's kind of inspired by the flashbacks and the weirdness in Final Fantasy

7. He feels like the real hero. He's a lot more. grounded than Squall. Like, he's a lot more likable. I think one of the problems this game has with romance is it makes the two main characters, Squall and Renoa, not especially likable. As you were saying earlier, Renoa's a bit of a brat.

Squall's just a jerk. He's such a jerk. Yeah, I think that's something that, I don't know, my understanding is that kind of doesn't come through correctly in the localization. Like, he seems really dismissive when he's saying whatever all the time. but what he's saying in Japanese is more like it's less of like I don't care about you

or you know like rejecting people and more just like oh okay I don't know like there's some context that I don't think whatever quite expresses but the game wants you to be like intrigued by this mysterious guy who's kind of a

seems disconnected from everybody and you're kind of living in your head but I think a lot of people were just immediately turned off by how everybody wants him to be kind of a, to be nice, and he's like, nah, whatever. Yeah, I feel like this is another kind of place where Final Fantasy draws from Neon Genesis Evangelion, because I feel like Squall sort of is coming from the same place as a Shinji Akari where he's withdrawn and doesn't necessarily want to be put in the position that he's in,

but he's, he's there and it's kind of thrust upon him. It's not, it's not the same because he's not like, I wish my daddy loved me. It was more like, I don't even know who my dad is because I forgot because I've got amnesia. But, you know, Headmaster Sid believes in me. And so I think people like, the idea, I guess, is that people see him. They see leadership in him. They see something admirable in him. And he doesn't necessarily recognize it in himself.

And he has to kind of grow into that and mature enough to accept, you know, the fact that, yeah, he is a good leader. And he makes good decisions. And he's inspiring. You know, whether or not they sell that effectively is a matter of debate. But I definitely see what they were going for. I think I hate this term because it's been completely corrupted, but the original term of like Mary Sue had been a character who the kind of the universe bends around them to make everything work, right? And squall is a complete dick and probably nobody should ever want to actually spend any time with them or trust him. and yet all of the

he becomes the leader of the party because by the purposes of the plot he must become the leader of the party Renoa takes an interest in him not because he's an interesting guy he's kind of just hanging out in the corner being a jerk he's the best looking guy here

he's a handsome jerk with a milty face and everything but she takes an interest in him anyway and like relentlessly pursues this romance until finally the game decides to let them be together

And so you kind of feel like the game is really forcing everything to come together, even if it doesn't necessarily feel natural. Again, you know, I look at the fact that they're 17 years old and kind of stupid. And like, you know, very horny teenagers. They're horny, stupid teenagers. It's not going to last. Right. It's fine. She's going to turn into a sorceress and destroy the world anyway.

He does go on a little bit of a journey and he has to get to a point mentally where he is going to save her. because, of course, she is going to be, like, frozen in carbonite because she's a sorceress or whatever. And he has to be like, stop. I mean, he doesn't really necessarily immediately like her that much. No, no. Like, he sees her as kind of a brat, too. And he kind of gradually grows fond of her. And then I think, you know, there's that sort of intense situation that they go through.

And they're like, oh, well, you know what? This is a good thing anyway. I actually love her. Now, let us have a zero-g cuddle aboard a starship. Exactly. After fighting some... Let's listen to your mom's music. After fighting some crystallids in the cargo bay who are like trying to eat us.

This is kind of horrifying. I forgot about that. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Who will kill the hell out of you if you're not ready, by the way? They're really strong. I'll take your word for that.

I don't even remember that part. But yes, it's been a long time since I've played this game. But I don't know. Like, they were shooting for the moon, literally. And they maybe didn't necessarily pulled off. I admire them for trying. There was definitely not a story that had been attempted, a story like this that had been attempted to be told in a video game before this.

No. Not a game like this. I mean, the idea of putting a love story front and center felt like a radical thing in 1999. It was just like, what? I mean, are you serious? We had had love stories in, you know, visual novels or in other RPGs like Final Fantasy 6 and whatnot.

But it felt kind of crazy because, I mean, I mean, if you looked at it. video games, 1999, male-dominated, very teenager, male-dominated. So to put a love story at the front center, felt like a risk for sure. Never sang my songs on the stage on my own. Whenever said my words, wishing they would be heard. I saw you smiling at me. Was it real or just my fantasy? You'd always be there in the corner of this time.

All right, so we need to wrap up pretty soon. I think there's two last topics we need to tackle. First, let's talk about the technological changes that were involved in Final Fantasy 8, because this really shows the innovations and the tech that they were pushing with Final Fantasy 7 kind of reach what they were trying to accomplish. The integration between the CG movies and the gameplay were much more seamless. And, you know, it was still a long way from true 3D polygonal worlds and everything like that, real-time action. But they were trying, God bless them.

And you had far more sequences where things were happening. that were playing out as a movie, but you still felt like you were part of them, like, you know, scenes happening all around you where you were controlling squall, running desperately not to die, or the whole garden conflict, which is just completely ridiculous. Like, your school academy is actually a vehicle that can fly around the map, and also so is the other garden, and they get into a big fight, and there's like armies of teenagers jumping at each other and clashing, and there's like airships. It's ridiculous, but there's all this stuff happening behind you as you're playing, and it's actually really impressive. That was always my favorite part whenever I was playing through Final Fantasy 8, because I played through that game, like, multiple times, and I would always be, like, so excited when the other garden would show up, and I'd be like, all right, let's go. It was Galbadia Garden. Travia Garden gets destroyed. It gets wiped out.

Yeah, it's good to hit my missiles. It's Galbadia Garden. And that entire sequence where the two gardens, because by this time Ballam Garden is flying, go to war is awesome in the way that they integrated everything. And I remember how like you're hanging from a drone with a soldier and you're flying up and you're punching one another. And then suddenly it flips up and you see all of the students and the soldiers all fighting in the background. and it really gives you a kind of an epic sense of scope that you definitely hadn't really had in a game before. It was really impressive in 1999.

It's unfortunate that a lot of that is going to be lost in this upcoming remake because at the time, it was very believable that all this stuff was happening around you because everything was at the same resolution. It was very low. And then you had the CRT blur to make it all like a very good illusion. But I feel like when I played it emulated, it was like a very clean polygon

model is like ice skating on top of a quick time video and it was like not really working anymore. It worked. Yeah, work on CRT televisions, but we'll see. There's not a remake though. It's a remaster. That's what I meant. That's the problem. And I mean, there was like a tiny bit of that in Final Fantasy 7 where there'd be a full motion video

where you could still kind of walk around a little tiny bit, but it was super limited. So you could tell like they knew what they wanted to do, but didn't have enough time to develop the idea. Yep. And this is where they kind of realized it. So very impressive. And then at the other extreme of video game

epicness you have triple triad we saved the most addictive for last actually I never really got into triple triad because I'm not a super huge CCG player but I know that some people swear by this game and they finally put it in Final Fantasy 14 right like they brought it back yeah

yeah and in fact they came back in the next game and there was no point within the game to play it no no Final Fantasy 9 had what was a quad mist which didn't make any sense and it was bad But Triple Triad was a very kind of straightforward, interesting game. And what was great about it was that it was integrated into the game mechanics. I mean, you know, turning enemies into cards to refine them.

Broke the game so much. Yeah, like it was kind of your avenue to all kinds of crazy stuff. But in addition, you could go and like challenge dudes you saw all over the world to cards. And there was actually like there was like the royal court of card players. There was like the king and the jack and the queen hidden throughout the world. and you would just like go up to random people, even in the middle of the dollet invasion or whatever, the garden battle,

you'd go up and be like, hey, want to play some cards and you could play cards and you could get some really amazing, unique, one-of-a-kind cards by playing with them. It was good unless you accidentally change the rules to random or whatever.

What is that? Like, I do that accidentally every... Okay, so like you can talk to the card master or whatever sometimes. Do you know how this works? The way it works is you... So each region has its own rules. and the moon, I think, is random, which is really annoying.

But if you talk to the Queen of Cards, you can transfer a rule from another region to a different region. And that's how you can get rid of random in another region. Or if you're really unlucky, accidentally transfer random everywhere and then you're screwed. I think I did that, yeah. Yeah, you have to basically get rid of random because otherwise you can be in a situation in which oh I don't know because when you're playing against an opponent and if you lose you will lose a card and they will take your best card and it is a huge drag to lose a really rare like character card or something to that effect but it's a beautiful little game I played an obnoxious amount of triple triad once I kind of like it got the hang of it and you know it's just the three by three square where you're putting the cards down and you have to place them correctly Right. So each card, we should explain, has a value along each side. It's like zero to nine, basically, right? Yep. And though I think there's a higher level one that can actually trumpet. And that's the ones that are like on the hero face cards. And basically you want to be able, you can also do combos if you do it correctly. And then as the rules get more complex, you can do some really interesting things with the cards.

So the fun of it is, A, like just the game itself is pretty entertaining and trying to win cards is really fun. And then the collecting aspect is a lot of fun too because you're trying to get all of the rarest cards and only, you know, the top players are the ones who have it. And so there's an entire side quest associated with this where you're already mentioning it where you go up the ranks in the garden to try to get to the top. There's the queen of cards as well that goes around to the. different regions. Though if you miss out on cards in the third disc, she'll just be standing there. And so you can just go and get pretty much all the cards that you ever want. Yeah, it just occurred to me that that's probably going to be a trophy in the PS4 remaster

of Final Fantasy 8, like mastering, like getting all the cards. I got all the cards, actually. Well, there you go. You just won a trophy. Because like I said, I played a lot of Final Fantasy 8 back in the day. But of course, as you get more and more cards, you can refine them and you can get things like Holy Wars. So if you complete the main kind of garden quest with the cards, and I think Quistis is the one who's the top card master.

Yes, that's right. If you beat her, you can get a card that you can refine into these invincibility potions that will make your entire party invincible, which effectively is a cheat code for being Omega Weapon. Though, I mean, you still have to have a well-set-up party to be able to beat Omega Weapon because Omega Weapon will kick the crap out of you if you don't do it right. Yep. And, yeah, Omega weapon is one of many random side, not random, but just like things you can do in the world. It's just standing there in Ultimesia's castle. It's kind of the game's Ruby weapon. Oh, wait, wait.

Maybe I'm thinking there's another weapon, though, that's in the undersea research facility. I think that's Ultima weapon. Okay. And to get to that, like, it's really annoying because there's like a sensor beam or something that will summon. That's an entire side quest. It's like the Wu-Tai kind of quest, but it's going underneath, under the ocean to fight a very hard boss. Yep. And then I mentioned the alien quest earlier with like the little cute little guys. And getting all the GFs have their own kind of thing. Like getting Odin is an entirely separate quest, getting Tom Barry's entirely separate quest.

Cactar is not a GF, but there is like this giant cactar in the desert. That was the first thing I ever saw in FF8, by the way, was somebody fighting the giant cactar and watching it do the thousand needles. Yeah, it destroys everyone. Yeah, or does it just do a thousand damage? Yeah, I think it just does a thousand damage. That's not that bad. But a triple triad itself, I think, is one of like the key parts of FF8's legacy because it's so involved. And I think that Square tried to capture the brilliance of it again with Blitzball.

And you could argue about whether or not it worked. So, yeah, even though triple triad broke the game, it didn't really matter because you were having a blast doing it. Yeah. Yeah, they just give you so many ways to play Final Fantasy 8. I mean, you can take the brute force approach where you just, you know, gain experience levels and enemies get harder and you're constantly drawing and you're constantly summoning and you're like, oh, why is this no fun? But you can, you know, mix it up, approach it however you want. You can change up your party however you want. You can, you know, use the play the card games.

You can not play the card games. you know, take the seed tests, do the, like, just wander around the garden and look at the bulletin boards on the computer. There's like a BBS where you basically very obvious aliases for people, yeah, like. That was hilarious, by the way. I loved Selfie's little diary. Yeah. That was good stuff. She's going to try to introduce the word booyaket, everyone.

The hot dog shortage. The great hot talk fan of 1999. ZS or ZD is very upset. set about the hot dog shortage. What was the thing that he said that became kind of a meme? Zell. Zell? Is that the thing of the guy's name?

Hot dog man. He said something. Um, I don't remember. I'll look it up. I need to find out. I know Selfie tried to make Buyaka a meme at the... Selfie's all about the means. She was ahead of her time.

She's great. Like, I was talking earlier about how she's my favorite character. Okay, selfie loves trains. She gets on the train. to timber, and she just spends the entire trip, staring out the window, singing a song about trains to herself, about how they're going to, like, take her away to a faraway place. She's very compassionate and really cares about her fellow students when Squall is sad. She puts together a band to play a music song for him.

Which, by the way, is really funny if you pick the wrong instruments. And also, she is really reflects the core theme of Final Fantasy Aid, which is, Nomura really wanted something a lot brighter after the darkness of FF7. And she is as cheerful and bright as they come. She wears a bright-e-a-mini dress and her hair looks like a chocobo. Like it was designed to look like a chocobo. And the only thing I don't like about selfie is that she ends up with Irvin, who's just like the worst. He sucks.

He's such a boring character. He's just kind of thrown in because they were like, oh, we need another character. This guy has a cowboy hat, I guess. How about a cowboy? Pretty much. A city full of office parks. Everyone has a flaw. I guess hers is bad taste in men.

But I always used Irvin because I liked the shotgun and he shoot laser beams from it, whatever. Yeah, I mean, he did have an interesting unique mechanic in that his limit break allowed you to use different kinds of ammunition. And you could create this ammunition and customize the approach you took during his limit breaks, which is like it's a very extremely detailed. kind of thing to do for a very situational skill. But then again, you know, Quistus had blue magic that you could pick up and she could only use that when she did the aura break. So the one thing I'll say about Irvin is one of my favorite bits in the game

is the entire mission to assassinate Edia. And I do like the moment where he's all set up to sniper and everything. And like suddenly he just completely panics. Like all of the bravado goes away. And you know, Squall's just like, what that are you serious are you kidding me don't trust the guy with a ponytail number one but then he finally a ponytail in a hat yeah he finally takes a shot and edia's just like boing like force uh force bolts away the uh the bullet and then squall gets stabbed through the heart

dies and they write theories about it on the internet the zealth oh sorry go ahead well talk about great cutscenes the entire cutscenes where he jumps down is running through all of the traffic and everything to get up to the to get up to the stage with cypher and idiot that's a really cutscene. Before we go, the thing I was thinking of is when he was called a chicken was. Oh, right. They had rid of both a chicken and a wuss together at last. We didn't even talk about the disciplinary committee, the disciplinary committee, discipline committee, whatever.

Yeah. It's a very Harry Potter-Potter-type thing where they're basically Slytherans. I mean, they're like the mean girls, except two of them were boys. But there's Cypher, Squall's rival, and then his two hench people, Rijin and Fugin, Rijin is like a very large, I guess maybe like meant to be Samoan. I mean, kind of like from the same cloth as the rock. He's like, you know, big friendly Islander, but also kind of like angry sometimes. King Hempo style.

Nah, not in that kind of ethnic, insulting, racist kind of way. Just speak in one screamed word? No, that's, that's, uh, that's, uh, that's, uh, that's, uh, the white-haired, like silver-haired tiny woman. I got them conflated. No, no, no, no. He's like, he's very friendly and kind of outgoing and it's kind of like, Cypher, what's up, dude? Um, whereas, they're supposed to be an, I think they were supposed to be an FF7, but.

Were they? Yeah, and, uh, they were designs as, as was, uh, E, or IDEA or whatever. But they, uh, but they had the Turks, so they didn't need them. Right. So, Fujin is the one who speaks in just. single screamed words. In Japanese, she just spoke in a kanji. So it's like she's like not speaking words.

It's just like symbols. It's concepts, which doesn't really translate. But I think they did okay. And then she has this really wild moment at the end where Seifer finally has this breakdown and she breaks kind of her character and turns around and talks to him and it's just like, Cypher, you know, we're your friends. We're with you. You don't have to be like this.

So it's just like this kind of like everyone does a double. take and is like, oh, she can actually use human language. That's weird. But yeah, they're great. I don't know. Like, yeah, there's all these like weird school subplots. There's, there's the girl in the library who has the crush on

Zell. There's just, yeah, it's a crush on Zell. What's that? Who has a crush on Zell? Another girl with bad taste in men. I don't know. I don't tell you. My favorite rendition of the Final Fantasy anthem, you know, the one that played over the Star Wars

text scroll in Final Fantasy 4. was the home video style recording. I was just about to say, yeah. And you see Zell totally choking on a hot dog. They're pounding him in the back. That's where he dies. Yep. But then at the end, squall smiles.

Yeah. Because Zoll is finally dead. Fuck that guy. Zell is dead. The new Final Fantasy E-3. I always thought it was funny that they got the Final Fantasy anthem in there, but they didn't have the crystal theme. Well, there were no crystals.

So there you go. There you go. Yeah, so I think that about wraps it up. I do like the ending of the game where everything comes full circle and you finally understand everything about who Adaya is and who... It's a stable time loop. Who Altamisha is and basically, yeah, you've basically created causality. It's a really interesting little finale. And, yeah, I don't know.

I like Final Fantasy 8 a lot. I want to go play it some more. I think if this conversation has shown anything, and I wrote a whole article on its anniversary of its Japanese, release over at U.S. Gamer titled Final Fantasy 8 was always good, where I was basically like, yeah, I mean, I'm trying to think of a Final Fantasy that came after 8 that was as distinctive and interesting. And there's so many, like, fascinating talking points about it. Like, yeah, you can totally rip on things like the out of nowhere revelation that, hey, they were all in an orphanage together, whatever. You can talk about the fact that time compression

makes no dang sense or that ultimatia really isn't that great of a villain. What the hell is up with Adele? Yeah, well, Adele was... Chunky sorceress on the moon. I mean, the whole point was that there are these sorceresses

and she's one of them and she was bad and also there are monsters on the moon. But for what it's worth, actually the entire segment on the moon is one of my favorite moments in the entire game because there is a real

kind of creepiness the music plays when Renoa's going to go set Adele Free. It's almost like something out of like a sci-fi horror movie or something. And then you see the lunar cry with all the monsters being sent to Earth. Like it sounds completely stupid and ridiculous, but the music and the use of the cutscenes was executed really effectively. And it worked for me. But getting back to your original point, bringing it full circle, if this is the conclusion of a trilogy, Well, this is kind of the ultimate expression maybe of what FF6 kind of started, where there's just so much to do.

There's so much to find. And you can just totally play this game pretty much however the heck you want. If you want to mess around with GFs, you can. If you don't want to mess with GFs, cool. There's this whole card game over here if you want to do that. There are all these GFs to find. It's good stuff. And then after that, you know, 9 still had a big world to explore, but it was more constrained.

It felt more constrained, yeah. And then by 10, it was much more like straight forward. 10 was a hallway. Yeah, 10 was a giant hallway. Some people would be like, people might take offense to that, but maybe we'll talk about that. We'll get there eventually. We'll get to our 10 discussion. It's retro also.

Oh, 10. 10 is coming up, what, in two years, two years, 20th anniversary? Yeah, I mean, we'll make it through to start in our, I mean, we've got some other games to talk about. We need to talk about Parasite Eve. You mentioned a giant hallway. I was thinking of 13. And that's all between years old next year. That really is a giant hallway.

10 and 13 are both cut from the same cloth. Definitely. Yeah. Anyway, Final Fantasy 8 is not. And it's weird and good and I love it. And I'm sorry if you don't. Maybe give it another shot when the remaster comes out. If you still don't like it, that's okay too.

Because it does a lot of things that don't necessarily work as well as they should. But I love that they tried them and that they do work to some degree. And how much that degree is, I think, is a matter of taste. But I've always been into the final fantasies that are like, hey, you know what, screw everything that's come before. Let's just get weird. And this is the king of that. It's many things, but it's certainly not boring. And it does have certain elements of actually, like, brilliance, certain elements of the soundtrack, characters like Laguna, the structure is really interesting.

The combat system is a lot of fun to kind of tinker around with. And at the end of the day, like, if you really take it what it's offering at face value, you can have an amazing time with this game. Like, 8 is definitely one of my favorites. All right. Well, we need to go. It's time to eat some food. I'm on East Coast time and very hungry. So we're wrapping up now.

Thanks, everyone, for listening. It's been another Final Fantasy deep dive. And we'll do more of these, like I said, as, you know, time passes by. But in the meantime, Final Fantasy 8 remastered is coming out or is out depending on when you're listening to this and you should give it a shot. Anyway, so this has been, yeah, a podcast and I continue to have been. You can tell it's the end of the day. Jeremy's going, yeah, we'd podcast it or something. I don't know. I don't know.

I'm still Jeremy Parrish. I know that much. And you can find me on Twitter as Gamesbyte. And you can find Retronauts, also on Twitter as Retronauts. And at Retronauts.com and on iTunes and on Lipson and many. other places. You can also find us on Patreon, patreon.com slash retronauts. And for $3 a month, you can subscribe to us, get the episodes that you're listening to a week early. That's six or seven a month, a week early each at a higher bit rate with no advertisements. Three bucks a

month. That's a pretty good deal. Help support this podcast and make it viable so that we can continue to live and to eat dinner. Folks, I really want to eat some food. I'm so hungry. So please introduce yourselves and let's go get some food. Hey, it's me, Bob Mackey. I'm on Twitter as Bob Servo. I talk about old video games here, but on my other podcasts, I talk about old cartoons, and those podcasts are Talking Simpsons and what a cartoon you can find those wherever you listen to podcast.

But if you want to support those shows, go to patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. If you sign up, you'll get all kinds of access to bonus shows, including our mini-series and dozens and dozens of bonus podcast there. Check it out. Help me out to at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons and Kat. Hi, I'm Kat Bailey. You can follow me on Twitter at the underscore CapBot. I have a podcast called Acts of the Blug-on, which is U.S. Gamer's RPG podcast, which I host in conjunction with Nadia Oxford.

We covered the top 25 RPGs of all time. In our estimation, you can go find that on U.S. Gamer. Also, we are doing a thing called the console RPG Quest. The last one that we did was the PC engine of this recording, which is a pretty interesting one. though I mean there's a lot more to go from there I'm really looking forward to getting to things like the PlayStation 2 which oddly enough I don't feel like we've talked about in that much death over on the show

and finally my day job is running U.S. Gamer which will serve us all of your video game needs news reviews features guys etc we're fun we're retro friendly come check us out all right and now it's time for us to go make like Zell and eat some hot dogs I'm going to be able to be. Thank you.