Whatever the case, we'll know more on this as it develops. According to Nomura-san, the inspiration for the name Laguna came from none other than Laguna Beach, Calif. Unless you are new to video games or have been living in a cave, chances are you have heard of the Final Fantasy games.
This could very well be one of the most popular game franchises of all time. I have a small confession to make, though—I have never played any of the past Final Fantasy games, so FF 8 is my first exposure to this world. Do I think that all of the hype is justified? Not sure about that, but it is still a pretty amazing game. FF 8 is a four-CD romp through a huge world that develops characters like no other game that I have seen before.
Great graphics, great music and a deep storyline are the highlights of this game. The CG is nothing short of amazing and I can't wait to see what Squaresoft will be able to do with the next generation PSX, because what they have managed to squeeze out of the underpowered PSX will blow you away.
While I was playing through this game, I kept a detailed notes sheet next to me that I used to record things I liked about the game and things that I was not so crazy about.
To be honest, my list of things that I was not so crazy about ended up almost as long as the things that I liked, but that does not mean that the game was bad. I think that due to the enormous amount of hype associated with this game, I reviewed it with a much more critical eye than I would other games so as you are reading this review, keep this in mind.
As I mentioned above, I have never played any of the Final Fantasy games. Most of them were made for bit consoles so I never had a chance to play them. For some reason, I never played it either. For those of you who do not even know what type of games they are, let me fill you in: The Final Fantasy games are role playing games RPGs.
From what I have read on the past games along with playing this game, I think it is safe to say that they all focus on great storylines and character development.
Since storyline has been a staple of the franchise, let's start there. All I can really say is "wow. You will take your character through training, missions, and battles; throw in some romance and you will find yourself waiting for the next twist in the plot.
Nothing can prepare you for everything that this game has to offer. Let me just say that if you are big into the storylines of RPGs and who isn't? Going along with the storyline is great character development. You will meet and develop a ton of different characters, each with their own unique personalities.
You have the opportunity to change the names of some characters to your liking and I have to admit, this really helped me develop a bond with the characters. There are plenty of twists and surprises along the way and you will even end up controlling whole teams of different characters. Another thing that will be sure to please Final Fantasy fans is the length of this game.
You will not finish it overnight, that is for sure. It is made up of four CDs and each one will take at least 10 hours to play through. The game is so long that it almost starts to feel like a different game after a while not in all areas, though. Part of the reason that it takes so long to play through is also one of my complaints, though. I felt like a spectator more than a participant a lot of the time.
As the story unfolds, you will find yourself sitting back and just watching CG scenes or reading text dialog on the screen and there is no way to skip past it. Your are stuck watching and that means there is no way you can make the game go any faster. As long as we are talking about complaints, let me hit my biggest.
I really don't like turn-based combat. This may be insulting to some Final Fantasy veterans but I personally don't care for it. To me, it makes me feel completely disconnected from the battles: Press a button and just sit back and wait for something to happen that is completely out of your control.
Now they did try to add a small element of real-time action by allowing you to press a button just as your character strikes an enemy to try increasing the hit points that are inflicted on your opponent, but it really did not make me feel any more involved. Hell, I got to the point where I would just keep pressing the X button during battles without even really paying attention to what was going on.
Sure, there was the occasional magic that I would cast but for the most part, the battles were just so uninvolving that I lost interest. Speaking of battles, I have another complaint. There were way too many random battles. I like games where you can actually see something and choose to enter a battle or not.
I don't mind an occasional surprise attack, but every 15 steps is a bit much for my tastes. Since I don't really like turn-based battles either, this made the game all the more frustrating for me. I also thought the bosses took way too long to kill. Some took up to 30 minutes before they finally died and it just got plain boring at times. I can't tell you the number of times I yelled at the TV for the stupid boss to just die already so I could move on. And to top it all off, you do not get any experience points when you kill the bosses.
That sucks! I battle for 30 minutes and gain no experience? My final complaint with the game is that there were just too many instances where I was an innocent bystander and had no control over what was happening in the game.
There were times that I felt I was watching a semi-interactive movie or something. In my mind, a big part of what makes a game great is the way that it pulls you into the world of the game. Just as this was starting to happen in FF 8 , I would watch a cut scene or 15 minutes of dialog that I had no input on. This really made it difficult for me to get sucked completely in.
I don't know what to say here other than WOW! This game is absolutely amazing in the graphics department. Even though I just complained about the cut scenes, at least they looked awesome. Wait until you see the dance scene and then the train scene. These are two that you will encounter fairly early on and these alone will give you some motivation to keep playing. The in-game graphics are impressive as well. When summoning magic, you will see some of the best-looking graphics around.
It is just too bad that after you have seen the animations once or twice, you can't skip them if you want. One quick note on the audio of the game. First, the music was absolutely incredible and fits the game perfectly, but where are the voices? I don't understand why some games don't record voices. It would have helped out tremendously if the cut scenes and the dialog scenes were narrated. I know voices take up a lot of space, but hell, it is already four CDs long.
Rinoa Hartilli is a member of the Forest Owls, assisting the resistance in occupied Timber. Has an arm-mounted crossbow that fires a returning boomerang blade. Irwin Kinneas is a Galabadian sniper who also shoots with a mobile gun. Likes to flirt with women. Each character has his own characteristic called "limit breaks". This is a special ability that gives protagonists increased attack damage, as well as powerful moves.
Turns on in a state of critical health to give a second chance in certain battles. The site administration is not responsible for the content of the materials on the resource. If you are the copyright holder and want to completely or partially remove your material from our site, then write to the administration with links to the relevant documents.
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Excluding Off-topic Review Activity. Loading reviews There are no more reviews that match the filters set above. Review Filters. Spellcasting in FF8 is a very mixed blessing. On the one hand, you're unlikely to find anything this beautiful in any game out on the market right now.
Water effects, fire effects, ice, lightning, non-elemental - all of those were lovingly worked on by the graphics artists and are absolutely stunning to watch. However, the effect, unfortunately, does wear thin after a hundred or two castings. Some might actually start to hate it after three or four. Just to give you an idea, the animation of Shiva, the ice elemental, takes approximately 15 seconds to play out - while the animation of Eden, the most powerful Guardian Force in the game, takes a full 76 seconds.
Of course, the more powerful the Guardian Force, the more likely you are to have a tolerance as to the length of the animation - but an option to shorten them may have been quite nice. Same thing for movies: you cannot skip them, which can get to be quite a drag, especially for the intro movie though, again, it does look absolutely ILM [Industrial Light and Magic - the people who brought us all the Star Wars effects].
Though fortunately, once you discover the GF ability called 'Boost', it will entertain you endlessly, or for at least another couple of hundred castings, as you mindlessly smash the 'A' button to make your GF execute an additional points of damage.
Next up on the list is the modified magic system. To fill you in, in Final Fantasy VII, you would equip what was known as Materia the easiest parallel would be spells in traditional RPGs which would add certain capabilities to your character. Without going into too much detail, they would do things such as allow your character to heal himself, summon certain creatures, automatically retaliate when attacked without needing an extra turn, cast minor elemental spells, and so forth.
In FF8, while the idea of having spells was kept, the way it was implemented was drastically changed. Now, the main item in the inventory of any character is the Guardian Force or GF, as it is referred to in the game, and which is often cause for some rather amusing associations.
There are many GFs in the game, but the main similarity in them is that they don't come to you asking for wisdom and guidance, but you have to either defeat them or Draw them from your opponents - more on Drawing later on.
That can be quite a drag, since you will often not think about drawing it from an opponent, but in general, appears to be a good system. Drawing is new to Final Fantasy, and it works thusly. When you fight an enemy, whether a boss or a regular enemy, you can draw magic or a GF from him, and Stock it in your character's magic inventory.
You can then cast the Stocked spell using the Magic menu. The upside of this is that a character is not limited to the extremely low number of Materia slots like in FF7; on the other hand, drawing too much magic different kinds becomes extremely cumbersome in the sense that it's absolutely impossible to find anything in the menu anymore.
As well, as you draw more of the junctioned magic, its effect will increase. As you play on, you might draw 40 more Fire magics from enemies, and that statistic will automatically rise with each new magic joined. You aren't only limited to drawing from monsters, too - often, you will run across Draw Points, which look like several intertwining pink streams, but they aren't quite as frequent, and can only be used once, while the monsters can be drawn from indefinitely.
Unfortunately, what I said above doesn't come in too useful, or at least at the beginning of the game. Why, might you ask? In the specific example that I gave above, it assumes that you execute a physical attack on your enemy, whether with a gun, a sword, a whip, a fist, or whatever else can inflict pain. In FF8, though, almost never at least at the beginning will you use physical attacks - simply for the reason that they don't do nearly as much damage as they should to make them worthy.
Even with upgraded weapons, I don't seem to be able to do over damage with the special 'trigger' move of Squall - and that, to bosses that have 16, HP or more. Incidentally, in FF8, whenever you do happen to attack using your sword, you can virtually double the normal amount of damage that it inflicts if you press the trigger button E by default just at the right time - that is, when the blade just starts to touch the opponent.
Another complaint that I have about normal attacks is that limit breaks are extremely hard to achieve. Not cool.
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