The Brilliance and Flaws of Final Fantasy 8

It's weird to think of Final Fantasy 8 as brilliant when all you hear about this game is negativity: The Orphanage, GFs, Time Compression, Ultimecia, Angst, Junction. These are usually the topic of complaints when it comes to Final Fantasy 8. To me though, Final Fantasy 8 has always been a, "Well... I don't see what's so wrong with it." kind of game to me. I played it as a kid a whole bunch of times and I always found it to be a really fun game to pick up and play. It took me a long time to beat it, I remember loading up my childhood memory save where I was fighting Adel and I had 14 Fires Junctioned into Strength and like 20 cures in Vitality. That's it.  I was adorable.

I just got done replaying the Steam version of Final Fantasy 8. It was nice to relive my childhood on PC, challenge myself to a few new things and really delve into the story that everyone else seems to complain about. I kind of want to go over why I think Final Fantasy 8 is brilliant later on because I want to end this on a high note; I don't think Final Fantasy 8 is a bad game, I'd say it's a tad bit higher than average, maybe a 6/10. It's still worth playing! But like I said, I'll go into it later.

Disc 3. I think when the developers were making this game, when they got to Disc 3 they must have just gotten back from a long trip to Disney World or something because the mood of the game completely changes right here, and it's not a change for the better. For some stupid reason, you find out that everyone on your party knew each other as a child, your GFs made you forget over time, and that you must go on to fight a more powerful Sorceress from the future. Ever since the beginning of the game, small clues have been put on you about SeeD such as Seifer asking "What is SeeD?" and Squall couldn't answer.  But when the answer finally comes, it comes with a monsoon of absurdities, but I want to cover these little by little so I can fully grasp just how awful the storytelling is on this chapter.

You Knew Each Other As Kids: This in itself is not stupid, and I'll cover this later. But the way the game handles it is just horrible. The problem with this is, everyone was kind of teamed up against their will but made it seem random: Squall was intended to team up with Seifer and Zell in Dollet since he was a child. Cid knew that these kids had to be with each other... And that makes sense! Except how the hell did Selphie end up in Trabia and Irvine in Galbadia? And when Irvine joins you, it wasnt because of fate, but because of a rand
om coincidence that he was Marksman and they needed a Marksman.

GFs Make You Lose Your Memory: This is stupid on every possible level. This is nothing more than a lazy plot device for the developers to make an excuse to get everyone together but make them unaware that they knew each other. See, when it comes to the idea of GFs making you lose your memory, I kind of assume that it's like radiation; if you play with it for just a few moments, it wont harm you that much. The more exposure, the more it harms you. Except Quistis says "I have a confession to make... I secretly played around with GFs". Which to me says that, around Matron, who by the way was a Sorceress, you'd imagine she could sense Magic, she had to hide her GF from her. Maybe discard it somewhere else and I imagine she was under supervision for quite a while to the point where no one remembered or saw her use it. So this means that even with a tiny bit of exposure, she still had memory loss as severe as everyone else. It's inconsistent and lazy.

Irvine Knew All Along: That picture sums it up perfectly.  When you get a new job and you're assigned to B Division and you just to happen to run into someone you went to school with and they don't remember you. Your first reaction is going to be "HEY, RON! ITS BEEN SO LONG".... not completely ignore the fact because "well no one seemed to remember so I shrugged it off.", REALLY? You mean to tell me that you remeet EVERY. SINGLE. PERSON. you grew up with and you just.... shrug it off? Once again, this is just lazy writing because one person in the group needed to be able to confirm what happened since everyone else forgot. Well, it's more convenient to just say one person does remember but just didn't feel like mentioning it.

The Lunar Cry: I don't know what it is about this that just makes me roll my eyes. There's millions of monsters living on the moon that apparently one day are going to climb on top of each other until they make a bridge all the way to earth and.... invade. This sounds like something from a 12 year old's fanfiction. Why are there so many monsters on the Moon? How can they survive on a dead rock?  Are they feeding on each other? Do they not breathe air? How are they surviving the vacuum of space? How can they complete this bridge without any form of gravity to hold themselves together? Better yet, why are people of Earth not just launching high powered weapons at the Moon to eradicate all them? They have the Space gear, hell, they're able to maintain a Sorceress Prison that orbits earth... It's not like they're threatening anything else on the moon if they wiped out all life on it.

Junctions: I have a small secret with FF8 that I don't tell other people when it comes to Junctions. It's kind of funny actually because so many people complain that it's so hard to do anything and all you need to do is spam GFs to win fights. Well, I don't ever use my GFs because of one thing: Ifrit. Ifrit teaches you Strength Boost. Every time you gain a level, you gain 1 Strength. By the end of the game you'll be hitting quadruple digits without much effort on Junctions, however this does mean your other characters are hitting low though. I will admit the Junction system is pretty hard to maintain since your levels don't amount to squat. What I do is, I have Squall killing everything, I put 100% Death on someone's Status Junction and the other person does whatever... Then once I can get Cactuar, I train the real people since he also comes with STR Bonus. But yeah, Junctions aren't bad and can be broken.

One scene that really bugs me about Disc 3 is when Rinoa ( possessed by Ultimecia ) unlocks the first seal of Adel's Prison. She walks up to the computer, pushes a button and first seal is broken. Really? ANYONE could just walk up to this computer and just push a button and potentially release her? I mean, I know you'd need to break the second seal as well, but don't you think this seal deserves a LITTLE bit more security than just a random person coming up, pushing a button and presto?


Another thing that bugged me was Galbadia taking the Lunatic Pandora. You see, Galbadia has no ruler anymore: Deling is dead and Edea defected. Seifer was never anyone of power, she was just a knight for the Sorceress and didn't really seem to do much but his Sorceress' willing. All we really get is a small cutscene explaining this with Ultimecia telling Seifer to get the Lunatic Pandora over Tears' Point, but that's it. The state of Galbadia is never addressed or how Seifer has the power or pull to achieve something like this. You see, I'd imagine Galbadia to be a state where once the ruler is dethroned, the people would rejoice and reclaim the nation. People don't WANT to be ruled, Soldier's don't WANT to invade and conquer and especially with the morale blow of Deling's death AND the defection of the Sorceress... what exactly is motivating these people to listen to Seifer and continue being a dictatorship?

The Brilliance

Okay, now that I got all that out of the way*, I can finally explain what makes this game brilliant. So one thing that you notice when you beat the game is you go back to the past and find Edea, she tells you to go home because you're in the wrong time period and that's that. When I was a kid, this was all that scene was to me was just a scene for Edea to meet Squall for a second and then to watch her gain her powers, nothing more. Then it hit me.... The entire game is pivotal on this ENTIRE scene and I do not mean her gaining the powers.

When Squall meets Edea, he tells her what SeeD is, what Garden is, their goal and everything. Right here she learns her child in the other room is this man speaking to her, and she learns that she and her husband must create a group called SeeD within a Garden whose sole purpose is to hunt down the Sorceress. With this small conversation, your destiny from Disc 1 was set. So when Zell was teamed up with you in Dollet; not a coincidence. Cid knew that one day Zell would fight the sorceress with Squall. Cid knew from the very beginning to make sure that Squall became a leader and that these kids come together and fight.


This is why I said them knowing each other as kids isn't as silly as it sounds... If anything, I think it should have been handled like they found out that Cid has been purposely teaming them up for this and that he'd reveal all this to you versus Irvine being a douche bag.

One argument people like to make is: "So the game is pointless, if you defeat Ultimecia, she just goes back in time to redo the whole thing."

Well, yes and no. Yes because it's true that Ultimecia isn't dead. She passes her powers down to Edea only for her to be battled again by Squall. But also no, because in the timeline of Squall, once Ultimecia is defeated... her reign is no longer relevant. She wont bother anyone else anymore. Ultimecia is effectively stuck in limbo and that's what the whole time compression thing was all about. You see, Ultimecia knew she was in limbo and she wanted to crunch time into a single entity so that she can recreate it and free herself from this limbo she put herself in.

Squall's angst really makes sense to me as well, especially when the cutscenes showing his background: He was raised as an orphan to a war, he was picked on all the time, the person he depended on left him very early on ( Ellone ) and this all just devastated him. It made him insecure and cut off from the rest of the world. He learned to depend on only himself because the people around him picked on him or abandoned him. If anything, this environment was what made him into the leader he is since he pretty much didn't care what people thought of him when he lead people and no one held him back during his training**. I suppose if anything is to fault him for being angsty is that he's a teenager and the text boxers show thought regularly.

And finally the last thing that I think makes this game brilliant is Laguna. Everything his guy does is just remarkable...  he's another story to be told, he supplies exposition where it's VERY much needed and he's a very likeable person. In the original iteration of the game, Laguna was intended to be a second man character and I kinda wish that was still true because that would have been awesome to find out about since it contrasts heavily on Squall's depressive personality. One thing I thought was really cool was the scene where they were raising money, they did a TV show where they fought a Dragon and he was a knight.... for a sorceress. The same TV show that Seifer got his inspiration from. It's a small detail like this that could have been completely brushed off that they provided exposition for: Laguna was the Knight that Seifer watched.

All in all, I'm glad I replayed FF8 and got to learn all these neat little things and at the same time was reminded how awful the third disc was. I just hope FF9 comes to Steam soon.... I'd love to write something on that.


*- All this is speculation. If anywhere it's said otherwise, feel free to correct me.

**- Makes me wonder why he's training with Seifer if he's never once gotten along with him and doesn't rely on others for help though.

The Reason Path of Exile is Broken

So I recently got into playing Path of Exile. After playing Diablo 3 for a little bit, I was extremely underwhelmed by just what a mess that game was. I saw from a few reviews about Path
of Exile. I kept hearing about this game; it's made by huge fans of Diablo, it's pretty much suppose to be the answer to everyone who complains about Diablo 3's lackluster existence. It was suppose to be innovative, it was suppose to be pretty much everything that Diablo 3 was suppose to be. And when I first started playing the game, I thought all this too...And let me just say this, I don't think Path of Exile sucks, I just think that with a few fixes it *can* be better... But in the state its in right now, it's just another Diablo clone that tried and will be forgotten.

What makes Path of Exile a good game* is the Sphere Grid. I'm going to call it a Sphere Grid because it is a Sphere Grid. To call it anything else is lying to yourself.  But this isn't a bad thing.... The Sphere Grid is definitely what this game has going for itself, it allows you to customize your character how you see fit, like no other game before it. These are good things!

I also really like the Skill Gems. It kind of lets you pick and choose what you can define your character as and not to mention keeps you surprised about what skills you can find. This kind of system allows you to pretty much mold your character however you want, you can be a Mage that wields an Axe, a Ranger whose a tank, the possibilities are endless.

Now you might be saying to yourself, "Holy shit. After all this. This game isn't that great?".

Surprisingly, even to myself, yes. The overall game design is bad. It's a complicated mess of some idea that wants to be a crafting system but over complicates itself with it's "creativity". The way the game works is, you get these random orbs all over the place which either: Upgrades the quality of your items, identifies them, adds sockets, changes sockets, changes the stats, changes the rarity, downgrades the quality, grants passive points, etc. There's like 20-30 different orbs that you can collect which all do these different items.... In this list are those Upgrades and downgrades orbs which are *suppose* to be the way you get your items, though let me digress from this a minute.

I said previously, this is how you're *suppose* to get your items, and that's because... Because of this method of item creation...the enemies don't drop shit. You can kill 40 bosses or HQ mobs, but the items you'll loot from the drops will almost always be Uncommons, which are 1 or 2 random stats, or a Rare item which CAN be beneficial. See the problem this game runs into is, boss mobs are very hard to find, inconsistently drop items, and when they DO drop what you need... Odds are the items arent what you need. What Diablo did that this game doesnt do right is it keeps an armor set which is consistent throughout all classes: You will always start with leather, work up to breast plate, full-plate, scale, ring, etc.... THIS game however divides between Armor, Evasion, and Energy Shield. And BECAUSE this game divides *all* armor into these three different sets, you'll almost always loot armor that you don't need. I managed to get all the way to Act 3 with stuff I randomly found from Act 1. Your gear will *always* be inferior, and the entire game pretty much ended up me being one or two-shotted by everything.

Now, going back to the Orbs, with that in mind. The game WANTS you to make your own gear with these Orbs. Chaos Orbs can turn a White into a Rare, and some other Orb can return it back to White in case you aren't pleased. Now there's two problems with this: 1. You're going to have an entire inventory filled with these stupid Orbs, all of which boil down to parts of an orb, useless orbs or the very few actual useful orbs. 2. Getting the Orbs you need are *very* rare. I've found 1 Chaos Orb in my entire run, which means if I don't get whatever rare item I need, I'm screwed. I'm stuck trying to either hope to god something useful drops or this incredibly rare item drops. It's tedious and it's stupid. And on top of all these orbs, your stash will also be packed with all these Skill Gems. On my game, my stash is literally half skill gems, half orbs. It's so cluttered and a mess that it's just frustrating.

 What this all boils down to is, the classes you pick don't really mean anything in the long run. Remember when I said that a Mage can wield an Axe or a Bowman can use spells? Well this is because this Sphere Grid. It's like in Final Fantasy X. Lulu might be your Mage, but with enough time or the right Orb, Wakka can move to Lulu's grid and become the Black Mage; your class means nothing aside from how you start the game. If you want to be unique in the long run, you wont be. And BECAUSE of this, you end up being bogged down with Skill gems you don't need, gear you don't need, and even run out of Sphere Grid nodes that are actually useful to you. The whole game turns into this confused mess where it seems like the game itself doesn't even understand what the best route is to take. I have never been so confused when playing a game, it's like the way to be successful with this game is some secret that only patience and more patience will you learn.

The Sphere Grid also has its flaws. When you level, you don't get stats. You get whatever node you activate: 10 strength, +4% attack speed, +4% run speed and when enough time passes... Something fascinating happens: You run out of stuff to level. It turns into, "Uhh... I guess I could just put a level into Intelligence..." or... "Oh wow, in 8 levels I can get added Fire Damage.". Without a consistent flow of stat boosts, you end up falling behind as a character. Intelligence doesn't do anything but add Energy Shield and Mana. Okay, well if your defense is low and your damage is low that just means you're gonna take longer to kill, but you'll still die because your damage is lacking.

**And last but not least...  Defense. So the way the calculations for defense works in this game is pretty much what makes this whole thing not work. The way it works is, if the Enemy you're fighting is say...  100 damage and you have 10,000 armor. You will absorb about 80% of that damage. Which is good! Your armor is doing it's job! Now let's change this to 10,000 damage and 10,000 armor. Let's be realistic here, 10,000 armor is stupid, I'm not quite endgame so I'm not sure of the numbers, but I doubt it's quite 10,000 armor. But for the sake of examples, we'll do 10,000. Your armor will absorb about 11% of that base damage now and when it comes down to end-game bosses and higher difficulties, this amount of armor isn't doing anything for you! Combined with the fact that your gear is already a pain to get/make, and your sphere grid doesn't always work with you.... This all works against you and makes the game much harder than it needs to be.

I mean, it doesn't *suck*. PoE could very potentially BE a great Diablo killer. But where it is now? Me and all my friends quit because we were just tired of this system.

*Contrary to the title....

** Pardon me if my thoughts seem scattered here. This article took me almost a month to write....