Final Fantasy VIII
| Final Fantasy VIII | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Original title | フ ァ イ ナ ル フ ァ ン タ ジ ー VIII | ||||
| Studio | Square | ||||
| Publisher |
 Square ( PS1 ) Square EA (PS1) SCE Europe (PS1) Eidos Interactive ( Win ) Eidos Interactive (Win) Square (WIN) 
|
||||
| Erstveröffent- lichung |
PlayStation: February 11, 1999 September 7, 1999 October 27, 1999 Windows: January 25, 2000 February 18, 2000 May 23, 2000 |
||||
| platform | PlayStation , Windows , PSN | ||||
| genre | role playing game | ||||
| Game mode | Single player | ||||
| control | Gamepad | ||||
| system advantages preconditions |
for PC: 133 MHz Intel Pentium CPU , 32 MB RAM , 2 MB RAM graphics card , 8X CD-ROM drive, DirectX 5.0, 260 MB available hard disk space , Windows 95 or Windows 98 for PC, Steam Re-Release: 2 GHz CPU , 1 GB RAM , DirectX 9.0c compatible graphics card , 4 GB available hard disk space , Windows XP , Windows Vista , Windows 7 or Windows 8 32 or 64 bit |
||||
| medium | 4 × CD (PlayStation) , 5 × CD (PC) , Download (PSN, Steam) |
||||
| language | including German | ||||
| Age rating |
|
||||
| PEGI content rating |
|
||||
Final Fantasy VIII (OT: Japanese フ ァ イ ナ ル フ ァ ン タ ジ ー VIII , Fainaru Fantajī Eito ) is a computer role-playing game that was developed and published by Square (now Square Enix ); it is the eighth part of the Final Fantasy series .
The PlayStation version was released in Japan on February 11, 1999 , in the US in September 1999 and in Europe in October 1999 , with the PC versions following in 2000 . Since February 4, 2010, it has been available for download from the PSN Store for PSP and PlayStation 3 . A Windows version has been available as a download from Steam since December 5, 2013 .
action
The 17 year old protagonist Squall Leonhart is Kadett of the special unit SEED , which in the Military Academy Balamb-Garden of the continent Balamb is formed. The SeeDs are magic - and weapons competent mercenaries who are hired by various companies and nations. Some people fight with the help of so-called Guardian Forces (lit. about "protective forces"), magical avatars that embody various elements of nature. However, the constant possession and use of such Guardian Forces has the unpleasant side effect that the summoner loses a tiny part of his memory. So that Squall can pass the exam, he is entrusted with his first real mission: Together with his instructor Quistis Trepe and classmates Xell Dincht , Selphie Tilmitt and Cifer Almasy (his arch rival), he is to travel to the neighboring continent to see the port city of Dollet von free enemy soldiers. The attackers come from the Galbadia nation , notorious for its aggressive military policy. When it turns out that the soldiers only want to occupy the local radio and television tower in order to be able to broadcast something worldwide, the amazement is great. After the city is liberated thanks to Squall and his colleagues, Squall, Selphie and Xell attend the graduation ceremony. There Squall meets the pretty Rinoa Heartilly , the daughter of an influential colonel in the Galbadian army. After the celebration, Squall, Selphie and Xell are dispatched to Galbadia to join a rebel group called "Forest Owls" and to assassinate the recently appointed ambassador of Galbadia.
The new ambassador is called Edea and she is a witch . She soon turns out to be evil, power-obsessed and scheming: She surprises the SEEDs when they break into the Galbadian TV station and bewitches them. Cifer is kidnapped by Edea and allegedly executed. Since the new sniper, Irvine Kinneas , messes up the attack and a direct confrontation with the witch fails miserably, the heroes end up in a special prison for politically imprisoned people. Thanks to Rinoa and Irvine, the escape succeeds. In the meantime, Edea is destroying the Trabia Garden in the northeast with long-range missiles because it - like the Balamb Garden - was built on a mobile fortress and would certainly have allied itself with the Balamb Garden. Now the SEEDs have to thwart a rocket attack on the Balamb Garden, which ultimately succeeds because the Garden floats away in time. However, a control device is missing, which is why the Garden uncontrolled overflies the coast and lands in the water. Now the garden floats on the open sea until it finally collides with a port city called Fishermen's Horizon . Suddenly Galbadian soldiers appear and threaten the residents as well as the garden, which they try to enter with force. Again the SEEDs have to intervene and fight. The heroes learn about a mysterious nation called Esthar , which is said to be on the eastern continent of the same name. Squall and his friends finally learn the background to Edea's behavior:
About 18 years before the main event, a terrible war raged in the world, which went down in history as the witch's war . The western nation of Galbadia fought against the eastern nation of Esthar . The war was started by a witch named Adell , who was in search of ultimate power. To achieve this, she looked all over the world for a girl named Ellione , who Squall knows very well and has sorely missed since childhood. Ellione has the gift of sending people's consciousness into the past or future. Adell was dying to possess this gift, no matter what the cost. However, their plans were thwarted by the brave Galbadia soldier Laguna Loire and his friends Kiros Seagul and Ward Zaback , after which Laguna was appointed the new president of Esthar. The witch Adell was magically sealed and released into space. Esthar was hidden behind a high-tech device and cut off from the outside world. Squall and his friends find out about this through recurring fainting spells, during which they experience the adventures of Laguna as flashbacks . It turns out that Ellione is responsible for the flashbacks and now the SEEDs want to travel to Esthar because they believe that Ellione is calling for help in this way: Edea is now after her and wants to appropriate Ellione's powers. Before that, however, they visit the completely shattered Trabia Garden, where Selphie once went to school. During a conversation within the entire group of heroes (including Rinoa), the SEEDs realize that they have all known each other for much longer. As children, Squall, Selphie, Xell, Quistis, Irvine, Cifer and Ellione were raised together in an orphanage and later given up for adoption . However, through the constant use of their Guardian Forces, they seem to have forgotten about this. When the heroes can remember who ran the orphanage, the shock is great: The director was the current Garden Director Cid Kramer , the matron was none other than Edea. Squall and his friends are dismayed when they realize that they should carry out an assassination attempt on the former wife of their employer. Now they want to travel to the former orphanage, perhaps to get a clue about Edea's past and motives as well as Ellione's whereabouts.
But before they can put their plan into action, the Balamb Garden is attacked by the Galbadia Garden, which is now also airworthy, and the Gardens battle. It turns out that Cifer is still alive and has joined the evil Edea as a self-appointed witch-knight. After a duel that Cifer loses, there is another confrontation between SEEDs and Edea. This time, however, Edea loses, an eerie, glaring light shines in Rinoa and she falls into a coma. After the fight, it turns out that Edea was possessed by the ghost of another witch and is in fact a good and gentle person. She also reveals to the SEEDs who the other witch is: Her name is Artemisia and she comes from the future. However, she does have a time machine, thanks to which she can travel back in time and absorb the magical power of other witches. It was she who had manipulated the former witch Adell to get at the girl Ellione. With her help, Artemisia wants to compress time by merging the past , present and future, thereby creating a timeless world. As the creator of this world, she would henceforth be the only living existence. Ellione is believed to be in Esthar, which is why Squall and his companions travel there as well.
Esthar turns out to be a nation with incredibly advanced technology and fearful residents. Indeed, Laguna is still president. Now the heroes also learn that Ellione is currently housed in a space station floating in space because she no longer felt safe on earth. Hoping that Ellione might be able to get Rinoa back from the coma, the team and Rinoa go to the space station. There, however, Artemisia's ghost takes control of Rinoa and unlocks Adell's coffin. At the same time, Cifer has recovered and activated a mysterious, floating crystal monument on earth. This monument, the Lunatic Pandora , was once a miracle weapon created by Esthar. Now the Lunatic Pandora hovers over Esthar and triggers a so-called tear of the moon with its energy . In Final Fantasy VIII , the moon is populated by countless monsters who are born there and, with the help of the moon's tear, reach earth every fifty years. The Lunatic Pandora can artificially trigger this natural phenomenon at any time. This is exactly what happens and Adell's coffin reaches Esthar with tears, but is swallowed by the stone pillar. Squall and his companions also return to Earth. Rinoa has since been arrested for turning herself into a witch towards the end of the fight with Edea: Edea's powers had been transferred to her. And in Esthar people are especially afraid of witches because of their country's past. Squall frees Rinoa, however, and Laguna apologizes.
The team penetrates the Lunatic Pandora and meets Cifer there. After Cifer is defeated, he abducts Rinoa into the main chamber of the Lunatic Pandora, where the coffin of Adell is located. Adell breaks free and ties Rinoa to him to wrest her power from her. However, the SEEDs defeat Adell and Artemisia's ghost settles in Rinoa as planned. Ellione is summoned, she uses her gift to send Artemisia and Rinoa's spirits into the past. Then she transfers Rinoa's mind to the present, transports Artemisia's mind back to the future and causes a partial time compression so that past, present and future are close together (but not completely merged). Squall and his friends first travel through the past and subdue the ghosts of past witches, then they step into the future and confront Artemisia in their castle. This is where the showdown finally takes place . Artemisia demonstrates her true power during the fight by creating a Guardian Force named Griever directly from Squall's imagination and unleashing it on the heroes. When this fails, Artemisia merges with Griever. When that doesn't lead to the desired success either, Artemisia reveals herself in her true form and uses all her strength against the SEEDs. When she is defeated, out of revenge, Squall's ghost moves into a distorted zone to isolate him, rob him of all memories and drive him to despair. In this distortion zone, Squall is confronted with his past for the last time. In doing so he witnesses how Artemisia's spirit had traveled into the present and settled in Edea. After that, he begins to lose his memories until he passes out from despair and fear. He wakes up and recovers when Rinoa finds him motionless in a flower meadow and takes him in her arms.
background
The plot of Final Fantasy VIII is set in a world interspersed with numerous science fiction elements, which is threatened by a supposedly evil witch. As SEEDs, the mercenary unit of the military academy Balamb Garden, it is the task of the main character Squall Leonhart and his companions to kill the witch Edea through an assassination attempt. As is typical for Final Fantasy, the story stands out very quickly from this simple starting point and becomes noticeably more intricate and complex as the game progresses. What begins as a witch hunt develops into a tangible conflict that lets the group travel across the planet, but also into space and ultimately into a time-merged world in order to defeat the true evil power behind it all. Always looking for their own origins, lost memories and their destiny, the group seems chosen to prevent the annihilation of all existences.
Special attention is paid to the main character Squall Leonhart and his psychological development during the adventure, to which the young resistance fighter Rinoa Heartilly plays a not insignificant role. In this world, in which an increasingly devastating war threatens to spread, Squall learns superficially through her, but also through his friends, that love and trust are important, just as important as the correct assessment of the situation, and that one cannot do so without questioning should act as ordered by higher authorities. He learns to open up to his friends, to know that he cannot do everything on his own as he would have liked. Slowly, while the protagonists become more and more entangled in the adventure, a tender love between Squall and Rinoa develops, which Squall only seems to begin to become aware of when he loses Rinoa for a while.
The story of the game can be understood in the broadest sense as a story about growing up, in which the predominantly young characters develop, mature and deal with personal conflicts.
In addition, the plot has two further narrative levels, in the past and the future, which face the first narrative level located in the present of the game world. However, the three levels are related and are confronted with each other in the course of the game and their connection is explained after this is known neither to the player nor to the characters for most of the game.
Game system
As with the predecessor Final Fantasy VII, the fight party again consists of a maximum of three characters, but in this part there are only human characters in this part who also have a realistic body size and shape for the first time.
Final Fantasy VIII discarded many game elements typical of the Final Fantasy series and replaced them with new developments:
- Spells are no longer learned, but can be drawn at so-called draw points at which magic units of one type (e.g. fire, ice or lightning) are stored. The number of spells drawn depends on the character's magic value. Spells can also be drawn by opponents in battles - mostly those that the opponents can use themselves. In addition, spells can be won with the help of certain skills from objects or from playing cards of the card game occurring in Final Fantasy VIII. These spells can then be freely distributed in the group and used or coupled by the respective character.
- A central new element of the game are the Guardian Forces, or GF for short, protective demons, which either have to be defeated directly in battle or drawn by bosses - like magic. They are then permanently available to the group, can be "coupled" to a character and are then useful in many ways:
- Similar to the Bestia in Part X , the GF can be called to help directly in combat. The main difference, however, is that GF only has to perform one attack and then be summoned again instead of staying in the battle for a long time.
- Only with a paired GF a character can pair spells and use other abilities besides his weapon attack.
- Once a GF is paired, spells can be paired to increase various stats of a figure. Depending on the experience of the GF, which increases through battles as with the characters, spells can be linked to different numbers of status values. Correct coupling allows you to significantly strengthen your troops and, for example, make them immune to changes in state or to physical or magical damage.
- In addition to the linkable GF, there are also the non-linkable GF, which - if you have won them beforehand - appear randomly in combat to help.
- Since the coupling system is too complex for many players, the game offers the option of choosing one of three preset optimal settings, in which the spells are automatically coupled in such a way that either the strength, defense or magic value of the character is optimized.
- There is no longer any money for won battles, but a fixed pay as soon as you are a SEED mercenary. As such, you are divided into certain salary levels, which are increased, for example, through tests, which usually ask about the theory of the game, as well as through many fights without GF. However, it is also possible to lose levels by constantly escaping combat.
- There is no longer any armor or jewelry that changes status values.
- The only items of equipment are the character-specific weapons, which can be improved through modifications in the course of the game. However, as before, this is not possible with just money. Instead, different components are required for each level, which can only be acquired in combat or by converting cards or items. Notes on the parts required are given in instructions that can be obtained during the course of the game. Of course, depending on the level of expansion, these are always more difficult to find, which makes the weapon expansion many times more complex than in its predecessors.
Triple triad
An interesting, but rather insignificant innovation for the course of the game is the newly introduced card game called Triple Triad. The game is played on a 3 × 3 field. Each player has a number of 5 cards that he puts into play. Each card has four values that are arranged in a cross shape and range from 1 (weak) to A (strong).
The aim of the game is to end up having more, i.e. at least 5, cards than the opponent on the field. For this purpose, the opponent's cards are turned over and turned into your own.
Example move: Player A places a card, starting clockwise at 12 o'clock, with the values 1-2-3-4, in the upper left space. Player B now places one of his cards, which, starting clockwise at 12 o'clock, has the values 5-6-7-8, to the right of the opposing card on the upper middle field. The values 2 of player A and 8 of player B are now next to each other. Player B has a higher value. The opponent's card is thus captured and converted.
The game continues until the playing field is full, i.e. until nine cards have been placed. The winner may choose one card from the loser's hand and keep it if standard rules are used. But there are also special rules that affect the course of the game. Each region within the game world uses a certain set of these rules, so that in region A, for example, the cards that you want to introduce into the game can be freely chosen by the player, while in region B the "random hand" rule has no influence enables the composition of the deck. The "random hand" rule in particular turns out to be annoying, especially if you accidentally spread it in other regions of the world. Because it is quite possible to “drag” rules to other regions, where they are then adopted. However, by visiting the “Card Queen” in Balamb, the regional rules can be reset to their original state. All cards show motifs of monsters or characters from the game. The cards can also be converted into objects of all kinds with a certain learnable ability . The number of items available through conversion differ significantly in quality depending on the strength of the different cards. One-time cards that depict character motifs, for example, can be converted into particularly strong objects.
optics
The graphics have improved a lot compared to the previous part and appear more realistic, which among other things has a strong effect on the appearance of the characters. The game still uses a combination of rendered graphics for the backgrounds and polygon models for the characters. In the battle screens, the environment is also represented entirely by polygons. The cutscenes, which are breathtaking for PlayStation standards, merge seamlessly into the game graphics and are sometimes almost interactive when the polygonal characters e.g. B. run through an ongoing cutscene. Elaborate cutscenes have become a trademark of the newer parts of the series.
music
The soundtrack by Nobuo Uematsu should not be left unmentioned, as it contributes significantly to the atmosphere of the game. Above all, one of the main themes of the piece, "Fithos Lusec Wecos Vinosec", is now a classic within the Final Fantasy series. The title of the piece is an anagram of the words "Succession of Witches" and "Love", ie " Succession / succession / succession of witches "and" love ". The two pieces “Fithos Lusec Wecos Vinosec” and the sprawling Ending Theme were arranged by Shiro Hamaguchi and recorded by a real orchestra. The Chinese singer Faye Wong also contributed a sung song for the first time with the theme music " Eyes on Me ".
Other pieces from the original soundtrack were later arranged for real orchestra, performed live and also published on numerous CDs. Shiro Hamaguchi also arranged several pieces for solo piano, which were released as the "Piano Collection", both on CD and in sheet music. The "Final Fantasy VIII Piano Collection" is still very popular with fans today.
For the Final Fantasy Orchestra album , the Japanese singer Crystal Kay was selected to sing the theme song Eyes on Me .
Versions
Final Fantasy VIII is next to Final Fantasy VII , Final Fantasy XI and Final Fantasy XIV one of four previous Final Fantasy titles for Windows - PCs have appeared. In retail, the PC version included the game Chocobo World , which was not the case with the PlayStation version. Chocobo World was released for the PocketStation handheld console , which was only sold in Japan. In December 2013, Final Fantasy VIII was re-released as a download on Steam.
A playable demo has been published in various game magazines. Later releases of Final Fantasy VII included a demo CD with three render films from Final Fantasy VIII (at least in Germany). The films titled “Sneak Peek” showed the opening sequence of the game, albeit in a slightly different cut, and the prom scene that appeared relatively early in the game, in which Squall and Rinoa dance together. In contrast to the final version, this version is kept in a sepia tone and also contains other features of an older film, such as various image disturbances such as image stripes. The accompanying waltz music (“Waltz for the Moon”) has also been slightly alienated and additionally highlighted with the sound of a running film projector in order to further emphasize the illusion of old age. The third film is titled “Trial Version” and cannot be called up via the normal menu on the CD. The video consists of a compilation of render and game sequences, which is only accompanied by the chirping of birds. Some of the sequences shown are not included in the game in this form, for example Rinoa is shown at one point as a member of the team, although she only joins them later in the finished game.
Others
Due to the age of the game, graphics errors are common on modern computers with Nvidia graphics cards. A way was found within the fan base to solve such problems (see web links).
Web links
- Square-Enix Official Website
- Final Fantasy VIII in the Final Fantasy Almanac
- NVIDIA forum offering resolution for graphics errors on NVIDIA cards
- Final Fantasy VIII at MobyGames (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b http://store.steampowered.com/app/39150/
- ↑ Final Fantasy Wiki FINAL FANTASY Orchestra Album In Final Fantasy Wikia , accessed January 19, 2013