YRadio

Having being playing this game for the least 100th time I felt it was appropriate that it was the first game that I reviewed having talked about it in the game show this week. For those that are too young or been living in cloud coo coo land and not the land of the chocobos (see what I did there, well not if you haven't played any final fantasy games you wont) in final fantasy you play squall leonhart who is a student studying at a military academy called balamb garden in order become a seed mercenary. As usual in final fantasy games that really is a basic idea on the plot as the franchise prides itself on side missions, mini games and exploration of the world map in order to appreciate all aspects of the game.

As with many RPG's the game play revolves around you building the levels of your characters up as you progress through the game, which can be done in a number of ways. The usual way in most RPG's is killing monsters for experience and in FF8 that does not distract from that notion. The way to kill the most powerful of monsters is involving using a GF or Guardian force that can be summoned in a rather good animation for each GF that will attack the monster for a significantly higher damage than say an attack from one of your characters. You gain a significant amount of GF's through following the main storyline but you have the option of finding them throughout the world map which is one of the many extra features throughout the four disks of the game. Character building is far more complex such as magic that can be absorbed from enemies or found lying around that can be then stored on a characters trait such as speed, thus in the basic and less annoying way making your character stronger. One of the first praise of the game is not just the opening FMV but the tutorials make a complex sounding system easy to understand and id go as far as to say you can understand the basic principles needed to play the game fairly quickly.

I am being totally serious when I say that i love this game due to the card game that was included last minute due to cards being incredibly popular in japan. This is not uncommon in final fantasy as in final fantasy x you could play blitz ball, an underwater football like game that was also a favourite of mine from this series of games. They are essentially side quests where as the game progresses and areas become available you can find cards of monsters and characters that's not only fun to play but practical as they can be refined into magic. I freely admit I've sometimes turned on the game to play the card quests, that's how fun it is. Now you know why my generation loved pokemon!

So why do I love this game? I can honestly say, baring maybe Resident Evil 2 it's the only game I've ever played where it felt like someone had made a game solely for me to enjoy. When mentioning character development, the story gives a connection between the characters that totally makes you feel involved in the universe that squaresoft the makers created. The 6 members of your group of travellers, have unique characteristics and unlike simple generic games they fallout and have several layers that keeps you glued to the carefully plotted storyline. Think about the time that it came out? In 1999 we were coming out of the era where the idea was playing a game two player, together, co-operative play brought about through the arcades. We are also talking about a game that had subtitled speech which in my opinion is a better option than say my personally favourite Perfect Ace 2 where Virginia wade says 'oh my' every five seconds. So you had a game that made the game play go against the grain in playing one player that was made enjoyable through Final Fantasy 7 and in my opinion perfected by the 8th edition. Ok, the graphics are becoming jaded, but the FMV's still hold their own animated feel and the controls are a bit irritating, but after 11 years, it's still fun. If you don't believe me, you can download the whole game on playstation store for around a tenor! You wont regret it and will get 40plus hour of gameplay!

Overall YRadio Score

88%