Final Fantasy VIII (hereupon shortened to “FF8”) is probably my favorite of the series barring Tactics. The characters are likable, the story is coherent (mind-blowing even), the mechanics are one-of-a-kind, and Triple Triad is most definitely the best FF minigame. So let’s talk about this game.

In FF8, you play lonely edge-master Squall Leonheart, a gunblade specialist and student of Balamb Garden. Your rival is Seifer Almasy, some poser who’s probably been held back a few years now and also a gunblade specialist like yourself; between the two of you, he’s probably a better fighter, but you’re the better leader.

So the thing about Balamb Garden is that they’re like a PMC; they get hired to send student-mercenaries out for armed interventions of sorts. But whatever; in the latest one, you’re sent out with your rival and probably the most broken FF party member after Orlandu to assist the coastal city Dollet in repelling soldiers from Galbadia.

After a close fight with a spider mech, you return to Balamb Garden and graduate to become a SeeD, an official mercenary to be hired out by the Garden and given an actual pay – since you don’t actually earn money from fighting battles, this will be your only source of income. So you get hired out almost immediately following your promotion, and you embark on a journey to the Galbadia-occupied city of Timber, encountering a weird dream sequence along the way.

You arrive in Timber after your dream sequence and from there discover you’ve been hired out to assist in “the liberation of Timber” and will remain on duty until the resistance faction that hired you decides that Timber is free.

And that’s the start of the crazy adventures you end up going through just by having accepted this contract – an adventure that includes everything from an assassination attempt, prison, dream sequences, war and sabotage, transformation fortresses, more dream sequences, a tragic childhood back story,  Sorceresses, SPACE!, and time travel, among other things.

But that’s enough about the plot. Let’s talk about the fun things in this game, starting with the main equipment gimmick.

Similar to FFVII’s Materia system, where you needed to equip Materia to equipment slots in order to cast spells and summons or perform unique commands, FFVIII has you equipping your summons (called “Guardian Forces”, or GFs for short) in order to equip (called “junctioning”) commands and magic to your stats.

Wait, what? Equipping magic to your stats? It’s more game-breaking than you think!

Endgame-tier stats here. While definitely not optimized for maximum stats, you can see that even at the initial level, Squall still hits the STR cap just by equipping Ultima to the stat (plus some hidden passive abilities).

It’s no surprise then that you’re able to pull off a Contrived Finish run with little to no problem – with only non-boss fights giving EXP, it is just a matter of absorbing EXP in mandatory fights and avoiding random fights altogether.

Really, it’s all a matter of finding the stupid GFs and beating them into submission so they join your party and help you out.

“Then,” you ask, “what about regular equipment? What happens with that?”

Well, with magic-junction replacing the classic equipment system, we don’t really have a need for that. With weapons, you do direct upgrades that immediately replace your current weapon with whatever you upgraded to.

Although weapon upgrades weren’t too fancy in particular, Squall’s gunblade upgrades would unlock more limit breaks, and his final weapon (Lionheart, shown above) would unlock FF8’s take on FF7’s Omnislash, except with less hits but always hitting the damage cap (9999). The only trouble in this case would be finding the fancy magazines that would unlock these upgrades.

Speaking of items though, all the best stuff comes from cards and playing Triple Triad.

What is Triple Triad? You could probably find some outsourced Wiki article explaining the game. In any case, by winning cards and converting them into items with GF abilities, you’ll find yourself pretty well off despite missing many of the expectations that FF8 does not deliver – in particular, stores worth visiting (outside of the Esthar shops) and overworld treasure chests.

In any case, FF8 still delivers much of what you would expect out of a Final Fantasy title; from the tedious sidequests to the bonus dungeons, the superbosses to beat down to the min/maxing compulsion. For the players of past FF titles, you’ll see all the recurring elements as well as some new faces yet to be introduced.

There is also the classic airship, but unlike the blimp-type look of the Blackjack and Falcon from VI and the boat-like look of the Highwind of VII, VIII’s take on the airship, the Ragnarok, is something greater.

You meet in space. You crash into an ancient civilization’s superstructure. You travel through a time-locked world. This is the greatest ship of Final Fantasy history.

This one is definitely my favorite of the series.