/vr/ - Retro Games

I replayed the Final Fantasy VIII demo and it's crazy how much better it is as an introduction to the game. Every Final Fantasy opens in medias res with some kind of mission you know nothing about and only afterwards does the game slow down and actually tell you what's going on. FFVIII opens with Balamb Garden and the boring Ifrit cave. The Dollet invasion should have been the opening of the game and leave all the other stuff until after. It's shocking how pumped I am for a game I played already from a demo.

Post a video game that you think suffered from being born in the wrong era.

I've talked a good deal of shit about FFVIII in my time, and some of it was deserved. I never hated the game, and it grows on me a little bit each time I play it. I've always said that despite its flaws it's one of the better-looking and better-realized worlds in a Final Fantasy game. I love prerendered backgrounds but I think it did this game a disservice and it would have done much better in that regard on a later system.

As one of the few fans of the latest entries in the Final Fantasy series, I can say their worlds share a lot of similarities, and I think the creators were recreating a lot of what they couldn't do before with the limitations of the time. Having been conceived before voice acting was more common in video games (let alone that period where there was little to no direction for the actors and so the dialogue just came out silly), it was inevitable that a lot of their ideas would be lost in translation.

I wouldn't say I'd like to see a remake, and the game still has a lot of fundamental flaws that have nothing to do with technological limitations, but I have to admire their ambition to a degree.