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More than a sequel to the top-selling Final Fantasy 7, Final Fantasy 8 is an entirely new story, following the adventures of Squall, a young military cadet. Aided by an unusual group of allies, Squall must deal with a desperate rival, a powerful sorceress, and his strange dreams.

Set in a world where magic and technology coexist, Final Fantasy 8 provides players with a variety of weapon, magic, and transportation options as they explore the vast game world. Maintaining the best features of its predecessor, Final Fantasy 8 allows those familiar with previous games to easily adapt to the battle, menu, and exploration controls, while providing unique story-line elements, features, and minigames to make for a breathtaking new experience. Characters and backgrounds take on a much more detailed, realistic look through enhanced 3-D graphics and are seamlessly combined with nearly an hour of stunning computer-generated cinemas.

Review

In early 1999, Final Fantasy VIII for the Sony PlayStation sold millions of copies within days of its release in Japan. Now, one year later, the epic role-playing game has become available for the PC with much less fanfare surrounding its publication, probably because most everyone who wanted to play Final Fantasy VIII already has. What's more, the PC version of Final Fantasy VIII seems hell-bent on completely alienating its audience of innocently curious computer gamers, as they'll likely end up utterly bewildered if they ever made the mistake of buying it. That's because Final Fantasy VIII for the PC is a completely inadequate conversion of the attractive yet problematic console role-playing game. Final Fantasy VIII would have looked and sounded much better if it were originally a PC game. It might look good on a television, but on the PC you'll immediately notice all the flaws in Final Fantasy VIII's graphics. The characters are made of simple polygonal shapes, and they're painted with blurry, low-resolution texture maps. The background scenery fares even worse; the game's characters look sharper and much more detailed compared with the washed-out settings throughout the game. This makes everything clash and makes the whole game look much worse than it should. You can tell Final Fantasy VIII is a beautiful game underneath it all; the composition and design of virtually every scene are of exceptional quality. The game has a cohesive cinematic appearance, consistently inventive artistic design, and remarkably high production values throughout, even though its appearance is mired under what seems like a coat of dust. That's the problem: Although Final Fantasy VIII looked stunning on the PlayStation, its visuals seem to lose far too much quality in translation to the PC. You'll frequently get frustrated looking for the hotspot to exit a screen; then again, you'll also frequently witness some of the most impressive computer-generated cinematic sequences ever made. The game's frame rate is fairly smooth during most gameplay sequences, but it slows to a crawl whenever you're traveling between destinations on the 3D map. Even its soundtrack suffers from the translation, because it was originally designed to be played through the PlayStation's proprietary music synthesizer; but on the PC, the game's epic score just sounds twangy and annoying, because most PC sound cards are ill equipped to emulate the PlayStation's electronic instruments. Fortunately, Final Fantasy VIII generally looks good enough that you could learn to tolerate the shortcomings of its translated graphics and sound; the characters may lack detail, but they're so vividly motion-captured that they'll captivate you anyway. But Final Fantasy VIII's greatest technical feat has to be how it manages to interpolate 3D characters onto static backgrounds that seamlessly shift into pre-rendered full motion video. There are several scenes throughout the game that blend gameplay sequences with cinematic cutscenes so seamlessly and so beautifully that it's impossible not to be impressed at the sight of them. Though it may take some effort on your part to put up with Final Fantasy VIII's muddled visual quality, it'll be even harder to deal with how the game plays. Final Fantasy VIII features a great story that uses some of the most common, most obvious plot devices - love, friendship, time travel - and somehow manages to make them interesting and complicated, yet completely accessible and even rather plausible. But to get to the heart of the story, you must wade through countless random monster encounters and other tedious gameplay sequences that will try your patience to the very limits. Worse yet, because the PC version is a straight port of the PlayStation game, you must navigate the game's complicated menus and controls using just a keyboard or a gamepad. Yet the game's most embarrassing throwback to its console roots has to be its save-game system, which reads your hard drive as though it were a PlayStation memory card. Even so, as with the ported graphics, you might grudgingly learn to deal with the console-style controls. Unfortunately, coping with the game's gaudy and far-too-slow combat sequences will probably take a lot more effort than the game is worth. --Greg Kasavin
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