Does anyone own FF8??

[Brillow_Head]

I had this game for the PC when I was a freshman in college. I had never played a FF series game before and I was totally blown away. The graphics were beautiful, the CG was amazing, the story (while a bit out there) drew me in and sucked me competely dry emotionally.

 

Things I liked: The steal spell abillity. I was maticulous when I played this game (kinda like playing GTA and going for the 100% compeletion, I didn't want to miss anything) I'd sit there and draw full inventories of spells each creature had for each character in my party before killing it. I was great when, for example, you didn't have a healing spell but your enemy did, so you stole their spell and cast it on yourself.

 

The Gaurdian Forces abilities. Not only did they act as uberpowerful spells, they had abilities similar to real characters that you could share with the character you junction to (See junctioning for more info).

 

The World View. I never had seen such an open system where you could wander around anywhere you want on a globe as long as you had the means to get there. You weren't restricted to a map with a red arrow pointing to the only way you could go to exit like in FFX (although it got a bit better when you got the airship).

 

The junction system. By far the highest learning curve to properly leveling your characters but once you master it your dudes were uber. It works this way...

Each character had abilities (just like any RPG) strenght, agility, luck, hp, etc. You had the option to junction (or join if you will) several Guardian Forces (summoned creatures) to your party characters. Now, depending on the abilities of the GF you could join spells to your atributes. For example, the healing spells came in three levels of power, cure, cura, and curaga...(curaga is uber). If your GF had the ability to junction to hit points, and your character had 99 curaga spells, and you junctioned curaga to the hit points atribute, then your hitpoints shot through the roof!!! There were huge tables of how well each spell would buff your atribute so you could go through and think..."if I wanted the max hit points, aggility, luck, etc etc, then I'd need to junction these spells to those atributes." Naturally, the biggest buffs came from the more rare spells...and hence the more rare creatures. Like, the spell Ultima only came from 2 boss creatures...and when fighting you pretty much had most of your time taken up trying to keep yourself alive and not stealling spells so I could only get like 20+ units of the spell...but when junctioned the spell to one of my characters his HP went from like 4000 to max 9999 hit points!!

 

This made customizing your characters sooooo fun and unique.

 

other things I liked included finding items that made weapons for your character, the strange card game (that took up my time)...but the cool thing was that in a card game if you won the game then you kept the losers cards (depending on the rules). And certain GF's had the ability to turn the cards into items. Naturally the more rare cards yeilded more rare and powerful items that I reluctantly chashed out before the final battles...wouldnt' have won without them.

 

I was also sucked into the love story (I was single at the time...go figure) and I related well to the main character, Squal. By the end of the game I was like....no, its over, more, I want more. Honestly, I was just emotionally ragged by the end (got over it tho). I also liked that I couldn't read into what was comming next, not like movies where you hit the end and you're like "sigh, saw that comming...borring!!"

 

Finnaly, it came with a desktop game. 2-D side scroller...very very basic. That starred a cactar (one of the creatures in the game world) who went around fighting creatures in basic RPG battle style and every battle he won meant he won items. The cool thing was he did this all on his own...you'd start the game, and he'd just go, fight, win, walk, fight, lose and recoup, fight...on and on and on without you having to be there. This may sound borring and pointless, but the reason you did this was because you could import his winnings into the FF8 game and if you left him running all night then you got a BUNCH of items. So creative.

 

I loved that game so much and haven't found one since of the same quality...even FF9 or FFX. I've heard stories about FF7, but I've never played it.

 

I let a friend borrow the disks a long time ago and I just came across the owners manual while packing and it brought back all those memories. Dont even know who has the disks or if he/she didn't get rid of them by now. Does anyone own this for PC and be willing to part with it (not sure it will even run on an XP machine...but I'd dual boot for this guy).

[emily]

I really didn't like FF8 that much, at least for Playstation. After FF7, I skipped playing 8 and 9 much until 10 just because I didn't feel the same interesting plot in them.

[appalachian_fox]

Emily's on a good path here: While you're waiting for someone to part with an FF8, you might look around for FF7, FF6 (FF3 as released in America on the Super Nintendo) and FF4 (FF2 as released in America on the Super Nintendo). I think that the others (FF1 = American FF1, FF2, FF3, FF5...) are also good games, though you have to make sure you download the English version if you go the emulator route.

 

Unfortunately, I don't know of anyone who has FF8 for the PC, but I know of a PS version I might be able to scare up for you if you want to go that route.

[k-wix]

FF8 has the best plot of any Final Fantasy - hands down. I'm a classic for love stories though, the ending is just pure class. I have a the PC Version.

 

Also, the underestimated FFX & FFX-2 has some pretty great clips, and some pretty deep emotional moments, if you can get to 100% completion.

Edited May 27, 2005 by k-wix