FINAL FANTASY VIII

                  Reviewed by Stefan Herber

Possibly the most successful RPG series on the Playstation, FF8 is
the second in the series to be ported for PC. Despite many flaws I
felt that FF7 was a marvellous game and despite knowing that all
the characters were new I really looked forward to this.

Sadly it's an also-ran. There are many good things in it but
effectively the plot reads as follows - "loner" teenager Squall
discovers by saving the world from an unbelievably nasty sorceress
who wishes to bend time (no I don't know what that implies but
it's not a nice thing apparently) that friends and love are
necessary for happiness. No deep philosophy this time.  Equally
the characters are very shallow and a bit too "nice".

It took me 100 hours to complete although I suspect one can do it
in less by ignoring some of the optional side quests.  About 40 of
these hours are spent watching the same animated cut sequence as
one uses the special powers allocated to you. The whole porting to
PC is incredibly lazy - the "save" slots are separated into 2
groups each for a Playstation memory card; there's no way to load
a saved game without restarting the game and as mentioned no way
to bypass the cut scenes. Control as in its predecessor is
keyboard (or joypad) only and very confusing. As for the random
monster encounters the less said the better, although late in the
game you can develop a power to minimise these.  The graphics
outside the FMV sequences are reminiscent of the early games in
the "Monkey Island" series - i.e. they come up very poorly on PC.
Magic cannot be bought - it has to be "drawn" from opponents in
battle. The major use of magic is to strengthen your fighting
ability by a method too complicated to detail here. The side
quests seem to have been grafted on to the game as an afterthought
- one of them involves seeking rare cards by winning them from
opponents - and I eventually gave up on this.

So is there anything positive? There must have been to compel me
to finish it. In truth it's nice to have a story line where
characters develop and aspects of their past which explain some of
their behaviour come to light. But it's not the emotional tour de
force that FF7 was. It should have been far better and would have
been with a proper PC porting but the financial failure of both
this and its predecessor in the PC market probably means that even
less care will be taken with the next in the series, if we see it
on the PC at all. If that doesn't materialise I doubt it will be
an excuse to buy a Playstation unless it's a vast improvement on
this.











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