FINAL FANTASY VIII - REMASTERED Reviews

The "cheats" available in remaster make the game infinitely more enjoyable than it was on PS1 as a kid. With mods, the game looks gorgeous. If you like FF, you'll love this version of FF8.

This is a fine remaster. A lot of mods destroy the original art and design by the director. This is a non square-pixel version of the the original game. The backgrounds are blurry but it's kind of part of the art or style imo. Would need to redesign the whole game for HD everything.

This isn't my favorite FF game, but it is the one I've played the most and probably the most underrated. Less of a fantasy story, more of a human interest story. This is a tale of orphans who become soldiers, tackling political and military threats, finding romance, finding themselves, developing into responsible adults, and eventually saving the world from a world-ending threat. The combat and junction system was innovative for its time, and Triple Triad remains one of the best side-content activities of any FF game. Easily a top 5 FF game after all these years. Don't let the enemy get any hot dogs.

Amazing story, one of the best and most heartfelt story out of all the Final Fantasy games I have played. The soundtrack is also amazing and it pairs so well with scenes in the game. The game came out in 1999 so gameplay is a bit outdated and slow but the 3x speed makes it bearable.

Amazing to be able to play the GAME that probably I enjoyed the most in my teenager era god so beautiful game, story, characters, times

Possibly the most musically, and visually stunning game of it's time.

It's much sharper visually than the original and the improvement in graphics is pretty great. I was just playing mine on the ps2 and then learned about the booster while was farming magic and uhh, that really made me want this, lol. But it's really nice to be able to toggle the speed boost on and off in and out of combat. I try to only use it for when i'm spam farming draw for magic to save time or when i have to redo something cause i messed up. I *did* have some issues setting up my controller to have the right config, it was quite odd to setup. I tried both within steam and within the game and it took me like 20 minutes to sort out. But I don't think I can blame that on the game, lmao. Anyway, the graphics are great, some cutscenes even clearer. Boosts make farming easy, but it's good to still enjoy the storyline and main fights on regular speeds. It's definitely worth it imo. Saves hours if you are the type to try and always do a lot of side things instead of rushing through the story.

My first Final Fantasy game is back on PC and no longer looks bad.

7/10 I've played this game back in the day, and it was AWESOME. Today, 25 years later, it still holds up pretty well. The story, the world, the characters, the FMVs are good. Of course, there are quite some cons: the navigation is clunky (you move in front of hand-drawn backgrounds, and you practically navigate between invisible walls), the interactive points are not shown, and even if you know there IS a point where you can interact (e.g. a ladder), it's still pretty difficult to reach the EXACT same position, where the game accepts the 'interact' command. The draw mechanics are BS (you can easily extract the maximum number of a given magic from one single enemy, you just need to be very patient and do the draw command over and over again for like 10 mins). The enemies are level matched to your characters, which makes grinding/levelling up pretty much useless, while the fights feel easy - except for the final boss battle, which is overly difficult (but it was the case for all the other FF games of that time, so I was not surprised, but not happy, nevertheless). Also, there are quite some labyrinth-like levels, which are just frustrating. The world is pretty small compared to today's open world games', and there are only a few settlements you can visit. The variety of mobs in random encounters is also very limited (like, there are places where there is exactly 1 kind of monster is spawning), which makes it even more frustrating (sometimes you just take half a step, and boom! another random encounter). I loved the card game back in 1999, and I liked it today, too, but again, it's just too frustrating now: the game is more often than not is using the random ruleset, and you have to play with random cards - which wouldn't be an issue if you could build your deck, but you can't, so ALL your weak cards are in play. When you loose, you loose your cards - even if it's a very rare/unique one. And you cannot just save anywhere. So, it could easily happen that you haven't saved for like 30 mins, you play a game, you get weak cards from the random match, and you loose your cards. BS. As for this Remaster version: There is no real full screen mode, the game runs in 5:4 (4:3?) mode, with black borders up/down/left/right. Pretty strange. The character models are upscaled and look decent, but the backgrounds are not, and they're very blurry. The fights are running in 15fps. The fonts are also upscaled. There is an auto save slot. And there are 3 'cheats': fast mode (3x the speed), no random encounters, and all magics to the max. Especially the first three are giving a lot of QoL. So, overall, this version feels pretty cheap, but at least it's working flawlessly on modern systems without any hassle, using a controller. TR;DR: FFVIII is still a pretty good JRPG, even if there are quite some cons compared to today's standards. Would love to see a FF7 style remake!