FINAL FANTASY VIII

Makes you sign in to a SQ account to play

Still a great game!

Absolute classic.

My personal favorite <3

rinoa.

The great soundtrack and setpieces just don't make up for the amount of bullshit that this game makes you go through. It's so close to being great but just barely falls short in just about every way possible.

Classic.

This is probably the most unique Final Fantasy games I have played.

Now, I'm not saying it's a really good game. I think it's a good game, and a good Final Fantasy game. When I play a Final Fantasy game, the thing I want most is a good story, and FF8 delivers a good story.

Honestly, I really enjoyed the story of this game. If I had a list of all the games I have played and rank them by story, it would definitely land in the top 25. But despite how much I love it, there are so much aspects of it that make no sense!

There's an entire storyline where you play as a different party to the main party. In fact, the main party dreams about these events all at once. These are events that happened around 20 years ago, and while it explains why this happens, there is nothing Squall and party can do to help change the past. It explains key events, definitely, but it just feels so weird to do it this way.

Another aspect is memories. The party of this game are forgetting a lot of their memories about their childhood. But this is something that comes out of no where near the end of the game, and really feels like it was tagged along there for shock value.

A lot of things are unexplained in the story. That works for better or worse depending on the situation. There are a lot of whacky things that happen in this story, like the main party going to space for like an hour or so. But there is a lot of great story moments as well.

When it comes to characters, the main character, Squall, feels a lot like a husk. You are a stand-off~ish guy and even though a lot of girls are throwing themselves at him, he's just like "whatever." and brushes it off. He just feels like he is going through the motions and that other people in the story are much more important. However, there are some brilliant characters like Quistis, Irvine and Seifer. I also really liked Sorceress Edea for a lot of the game, but my opinion of her changed as the game approached its climax.

When I got to the ending, and the final cutscene started playing, I was shocked. I was genuinely stunned by what I saw. I was thrown for a loop and amazed that was how the story ended. Now, the interpretation of the ending that I thought happened, is honestly one of the most debated topics in Final Fantasy, but it's not something I want to spoil, I just definitely recommend playing it and seeing for yourself.

So, as a Final Fantasy game, this one hits. It has a great story, music, and even a fantastic card game. That being said, I did get the odd crash when I was playing Triple Triad, I'd say there was about a 5% chance my game would try play Triple Triad. That's only because there is a lot of grinding for cards if you are trying to beat this game at Squall's initial level.

You see, in terms of gameplay, this game has a very unique system, called the Junction system. It means most of your powers is not based on the character, but by the Guardian Forces they use (which are basically summons characters can use.) It means you can beat the entire game without levelling up, and because of the level-based scaling this game has, it makes the game easier because of it. However, this is probably the most confusing part of FF8, something that won't be an issue if you use a guide but if you are going into it blind, please give it some research.

The music is again, spectacular. My favorite track is probably 'Boogie or Shuffle', which is a good thing because the song plays whenever you are playing Triple Triad, which probably took up a good few hours out of my playthrough.

Overall, this is good game. Great, but flaws story. The combat system is something you are NOT going to understand, so please look into it before trying out the game. Music is fantastic as well and I really enjoyed exploring the world Final Fantasy 8 has to offer.

It's a good game, but it probably shouldn't be your first Final Fantasy. Nevertheless, I recommend you give it a try.

can you play triple triad to the final boss instead of fighting normally

Controller Support Public Service Announcement

Saw some folks having trouble with this.

Open Steam Big Picture Mode.
Navigate to Final Fantasy 8.
Select the Controller icon.
On the Final Fantasy VIII Controller Settings page that opens,
select the rectangle beneath Current Button Layout.
On the next page, move from the Templates list over to Community Layouts.

Select a layout appropriate for your gamepad and enjoy.

Alternatively, you may use the Edit Layout button on the previous page, in conjunction with the Input listing in the Keyboard tab of the FF8 Launcher to create your own layout.

Do I recommend the game? I'm not certain cause I've only owned the game for over a decade and haven't gotten around to it cause of my backlog but my crippling Final Fantasy addiction says I do and that I'm not being held hostage at all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkOA_HAVoqU

Do I recommend the port? I always recommend playing on original hardware but if you don't have a PS1 and a disc copy then I do suggest you mod the FMVs and get the PS1 music.

Or you could just buy the Remaster. Unless, you're cheap, like I am.
Or you could buy it twice. Unless, you're insane, like I am.

I have it 3 times.

Cause I already owned the PS1 version on my perfectly working PS3.
I'm broke. What the hell am I doing paying good money for the same game multiple times.
Why did I buy Grand Theft Auto 5 five times? Why must I gotta catch 'em all?

Well, that's insanity for ya: some days it just doesn't pay to chew through the straps in the morning.

What were we talking about?

Oh, right! Enjoy your controller.

Thanks for your time.

its a good game. pretty close to the playstaion version

Forgot I had the launcher open as I looked around for some way to make the gamepad.. the CONSOLE GAMEPAD work for a CONSOLE PORT.

Yeah, it doesn't work with a gamepad. What a masterpiece of coding.

FF8 is my ultimate comfort game. If I could be buried with a single game, this is the one I'd take with me.

25 hours in! Guess where I am in the story?
That's right, in Balamb fighting Zell's mom!

Absolute classic

Can't eat. Can't sleep. Only Triple Triad.

(I would recommend getting mods for the backgrounds and PlayStation music - Tonberry, Angelwing, Rose and Wine - they're super easy to get, switch the ratio to widescreen, and enjoy. The gameplay is super unconventional for this franchise, but one you "get" it you sort of have a blast)

This game is always so funny because people don't seem to understand the junction system at all and claim its too difficult. If you gave a monkey your controller it could accidentally assign spells to boost your stats and make the game a cake walk. Fantastic game made even easier with the ability to give yourself all of the spells to junction without farming them.

เกมเวอร์ชั่นดั้งเดิม แต่ยังเล่นได้สนุก

I love FF VIII. Or at least I did on the PS2. I downloaded the game to relive old memories, and the game was fine until I tried plugging in a controller to my computer. It crashed and now I can't get it to do anything. Have reset all settings, but as soon as I try to load or start a new game, nothing happens and am kicked back to the "start menu". Any assistance that others have found to make this work again would be mega-appreciated...

great game

This game does not work with a controller in 2025

One of the best JRPG's ever made, after FFVII. Hoping for an eventual remake and a comeback of Triple Triad.

One of my favorite Final Fantasy games. Still good.

Final Fantasy 8 is my 2nd favourite final fantasy, after 6, and I have fond memories of playing it during my teens. I just wanted to revisit and have some nostalgia and with the mods current on the marketplace it was a good time to revisit for something slightly different. Laguna's involvement in the story is peak fun and i've left a save in Winhill with Kiros for some explorative fun!

This is the Final Fantasy that I love the most. The Junction system is really great. I love the Guardian Forces. There are a ton tp find and enjoy. Drawing Magic is great too.

The original game is great, this port is not good, mostly the midi music, and in the map you will find annoying that the UV mapping are screwed and the shadow of the character are screwed too (because 8bit pallete is not supported by drivers for some time, but... no fix in this game). I think its a lot better to just use an emulator and run the PS1 version than this. You can improve graphics a lot better in emulators than this bad port does, for example, FSR shader on retroarch improves the PS1 tittle a lot... Not to mention that the controller support are really bad in this port too, if you, like me, don't like to waste time, you'll need to import something on the steam controller config to make your controller work with this. Maybe it would be better to buy the remastered version than this really crappy port...

... Whatever.

they make you sign in to play an offline game and the controller I've used for other final fantasy games doesn't work.

nostalgia hits hard as you relive Squall’s journey

10/10 MUSIC

This is one of the games I played when I was a kid. When I got back to playing it again to clear all achievement after buying it for a long time until now there has a remastered version. It didn't take me long time to finish the game, but more than half of the time I spent clearing the game was spent on getting a single achievement. I think it's brutal me to have to kill 10,000 monsters. Even though I was able to finish the game with killing less than 500 monsters.

If anyone wants to reminisce about this childhood game, I think it's very fun. But I recommend playing the remastered version. The graphics are more beautiful and it's not as difficult to get all achievements as the original version unless you want to challenge the 10,000 kills achievements.

Hard to recommend to casual players, only play if you are a fan of the final fantasy series and would like to experience every game in the franchise. The story wasn't bad, but the execution leaves too much to be desired. The battle system is VERY unique (levels of FFII uniqueness) which can be extremely tedious to study and work around without a proper guide.

Another good but flawed game. bit of a rough port, but some simple mods can fix it.

Excellent game, also childhood memories.

I have mixed feelings about this game.
Some people love it so much, but this game really aged poorly in my opinion.
It feels like Square told a team of movie producers to make a game, so they came up with this
beautiful game ( at that time ) with great cinematic but poor game design choices.

Strange mechanics where u need to farm magic and the enemy levels up with u, making leveling up meaningless. Near the end of the game, I found myself in a situation where i did not own enough magic to progress ( cause i was trying to end the game quickly ) but were not able to get out of the final dungeon.

The "optional" GFs end up being actually necessary to move on with main story a lot easier.
I missed 1 GF that would have made my life a lot easier against 2 bosses close to the final boss,
because i just wanted to end the game quickly, didn't like it enough to justify spending time looking for it.

I kept checking 4 different guides because I didn't know what to do or where to go.
The story was ok, although i feel like it rips off some story from FF4.
But as a game, for me it fails.

A sick nasty collectible card game that even comes with an RPG

Great game as always but I hope the person who thought "Let's put a kill 10000 enemies achievement" on a videogame that literally wants you to avoid combat was fired.

My first FF and always be my fav.

Those people who find Junction and GF systems difficult, that's their skill issue. Literally you can be very OP even on early game. Just freaking farming magics and cards. Instead killing your enemies, turn them into cards using Quezacotl Card ability. Mod and Refine them, and then BAM you got yourself 100 Tornados (STR-Junc), Meltdowns (Vit-Junc), Regens (HP-Junc), Lifes, Curagas etc etc before Dollet mission. Put them on your Junction and you'll be amazed on how OP you're. You don't want to use GF in the battles because they're kinda weak. Instead, you want to use normal attack or LB. Keep your party levels under 20, then you just need a few hits to kill bosses. Oh have I mention that you can get Squall's and Selphie's strongest weapon on Disc 1? That's how easy this game is

Loved this game since the release on Ps1.

Classic FF! Hard to beat the OG characters and amazing story.

Final Fantasy VIII is a very difficult game to recommend since I can’t really put my finger on what it tries to do even after playing it twice, one of them being a completionist run. Subjectively speaking, it’s a mess. Let me start with its gameplay aspects. The whole game revolves around the Guardian Forces (GF) and the Junction System which a lot of people find very difficult to deal with. Since the whole game revolves around them, leveling up doesn’t make you stronger. Instead, it punishes you by scaling enemies to your level. In order to overcome your enemies, you’ll need some strong magic to junction to your stats and your GFs should learn the necessary junction abilities for that to happen. To teach them the new abilities, you’ll need to engage in battles and gain AP, only then you will be able to raise your strength, HP, or other stats. I could spend hours explaining the whole junction system to you, but we all know that it’d be a waste of time. Now another important part: Magic. None of your characters have MP that depletes upon magic usage, instead you “draw” magic from enemies and stock them. You can draw all kinds of magic as many as you’d like, you can even cast them on your enemies without having to stock them. Some bosses also hold new GFs for you to draw, so be sure to keep an eye out for them if you ever decide to go through this madness. As I’ve said before, GFs are very important but not only because they are used to junction magic to your stats, they are also used as summons to destroy your enemies and some of them have ridiculously long animations that you’ll need to sit through over and over again until you can get a strong magic to junction to your STR. And no, there’s no limit as to how many times you can use them in battle. Alternatively, you can use Limit Breaks that trigger upon low HP.

That about sums up the whole gameplay gimmick of FFVIII, but the real problem is the fact that it’s a completionist’s nightmare. I mean, I’ve gone through Final Fantasy VII, and I never had any problems with it when it came to the stuff I needed to do to attain a 100% completion rate. In that regard, FFVIII is horrible. There’s just way too much stuff to collect, many GFs to draw, and the amount of grinding needed for one specific achievement is just insane. Now I know I sound cliché when I compare it to VII, but come on, VIII looks better, its cutscenes are definitely much better, but it lacks everything that VII had and successfully pulled off. It didn’t have Triple Triad, VIII gets a huge point there, but it still isn’t enough to justify its questionable story and gameplay gimmicks. There’s also a separate mini-game called Chocobo World that you can play to find items that you can use. It was originally released only in Japan because it was played on Pocket Station and as you all know, it was a Japan-exclusive accessory for the PSX. And yes, you’ll need to do some grinding in Chocobo World if you want 100%. Funny enough, I had more fun playing Chocobo World than VIII itself mostly because I didn’t have to worry about many things in there.

Now, let’s talk about the story. I don’t even know where to start there. It’s full of inconsistencies, ridiculous plot twists (yes, I’m talking about that orphanage twist), and a dull main character: Squall. Squall is an extremely introverted and edgy guy who is a student in Balamb Garden which Cid and Edea formed. He usually fights Seifer, who happens to be the opposite of Squall. They introduce him as a grey character which makes him quite interesting, but later, they turn him into a simple villain without any depth and his only purpose becomes serving the Sorceress. The Sorceress also changes a few times throughout the story and at some point, you feel like they simply improvised the whole thing as they developed the game and they ended up with this mess of a story that heavily relies on fan theories to be justified. There’s also Laguna who I believe is the real protagonist of the game. He’s a cheerful guy unlike Squall and he’s way more relatable. The romance between Squall and Rinoa is… irritating mostly due to the fact that Squall’s questionable behavior, but it’s alright I guess.

However, unlike VII, none of the characters’ backstories are being explored and that is probably because of the ridiculous orphanage twist. I don’t even want to talk about it, it’s just bad. Very, very bad. Another point that bothered me about the story was how none of the important events such as NORG and Squall’s injury were mentioned ever again. Why? Why would you include them in the story if you’re not going to develop something upon them? Finally, the ending… Oh man, the ending… I actually love it. The whole time compression incident, Squall being stuck in there for a bit, then returning to Rinoa and his friends like nothing happened. Yeah, it’s quite interesting actually but only if it’s supported by crazy fan theories such as “Squall is Dead”. Hey, maybe I didn’t get it. Perhaps the ending was left to the player’s interpretation which is a good thing, but I can’t really turn a blind eye to all those inconsistencies in the story. I’d like to think of Final Fantasy VIII as a failed experiment and it’s a shame. It could’ve been a masterpiece, the potential was there, but it’s ruined by questionable writing and tedious gameplay mechanics.

TL;DR

An experimental entry to the Final Fantasy series that does almost everything wrong and tedious. The gameplay gimmicks such as GFs and Junction System could be complicated for newcomers, but they are not bad once you learn how they work. However, the story is very inconsistent, therefore; it heavily relies on fan theories to be justified. The only redeeming quality of it could be the soundtrack and the card game Triple Triad. Keep in mind that many people are blinded by nostalgia and they prefer to turn a blind eye to its critical faults, thus they praise it a lot, but in reality, it’s one of the weakest entries to the franchise. At least for me.

A real good game in the Final Fantasy game

I admit it is the weakest of the 3 PS1 games put is still worth a play

We have speed booster but no of course we won't let you speed through the startup.
Terrible controller "support" working only in the First screen, and of course steam's horrible input that still registers controllers even when disabled causing it to clash with the must have joystick mapper to even try and play this.

Why are you showing me the controls every time I start? Why tell me flashing lights are dangerous every time I start? Why can't I turn these off?

If you're not playing this solely for the ragnarok mod like I am, get it on an emulator and never look back. Steam practices at its finest.

Edit: And just when you thought it couldn't get worse;
ACHIEVEMENT SYNCED WITH SERVER.
ACHIEVEMENT SYNCED WITH SERVER.
ACHIEVEMENT SYNCED WITH SERVER.
ACHIEVEMENT SYNCED WITH SERVER.

classic love it since it came out on ps1

This is the worst Final Fantasy in the franchise. Not sure what the developers were thinking. I mean making 7 great hits back to back was maybe to much success for them. They took a risk and tried doing something new and it fell through the floor hard. Combat has been place with a thing called the junction system.You can only have 3 options of commands on your list so you might have to sacrifice the ability to use items to use attack or junction or summon. However your character do not matter because they game wants you to spam summon due to its over power nature. HOWEVER this whole game scales to your level so the best strategy to beat this game is to not fight in combat but to run away. There is no point to level up. There is no point in playing the game and the new system it tries to shove down you throat. So is the story good? Leon is bland and edgy the whole game. The romance in this story falls flat because there no time to develop any of the characters. Things just happen and your expected to just role with the punches. Also this game has a bad plot of time travel + amnesia. The original ps1 game is the worse looking FF game on the system and sounds gross. The world is empty and dull with nothing to explore. No love or care was put in this game , so why should I care. FF7 and FF9 had so much poured into them. This is like a really bad romance novel you find at book store thinking it might make you blush or have some type of emotions. The only thing worth of note is how dam hard the 4 phase final boss is. Not a fun fight at all. If your playing through all the FF games like I am. Play this one last so you don’t get a bad taste in your mouth. Let this game float in the vacuum of space. 1/10

pls remake this game

SELPHIE. 10/10 <3

This was okay. Its a higher definition of the same game but, I suppose there's a few things:

I didn't like that during battles, the user interface isn't 60 FPS, like in the original PS1 release, or over emulation.
-It flickers much slower like I'm playing on a ♥♥♥♥ Pentium or something
-This only happens during battles, its a minor thing but to me, it makes a huge difference because.. Final Fantasy lol

I did like that there's better functions for overall game-play
+Fast forward button, because loading in for fighting takes forever
+Better textures in-game overall

Cool coming-of-age FF, wild story, grinding can actually be a bit bad.
I'd say try it out if you've never played it and are interested.

I tried playing this and processed a return. Man, this era of gaming is rough. I just couldn't. I hope when they are finished with tenth intergarde FF7 thing, they do FF8 and make it playable to modern sensibilities.

Started playing the Final Fantasy Series in April and I gotta say, this series is by far a masterpiece. I've been living under a rock and I decided to play a lot more games for the first time. Tons of memorable parts and cut-scenes, I see why people love this Series so much!