The Observatory

My first Final Fantasy game was FFX, which my grandmother bought for me when I was in middle school. I knew little to nothing about the series beforehand, and I was completely blown away. I absolutely loved that game, and I still do today. I got interested in checking out the other Final Fantasy games after watching my friends play FFVIII. Unfortunately, the games tend to be both expensive and hard to find, so it wasn’t until this last Christmas that my grandfather managed to find me FFVIII, and not till recently that I ordered myself a memory card from online (since it’s pretty hard to find those too these days).

I’m only on disc two so far, but I’ve found the differences between the older and newer games interesting. Obviously there are some expected differences like the graphics not being as good and the characters not having voices, but there are also ones I hadn’t thought about.
For one thing, the pacing of the story is slower in FFVIII. I’m not completely sure why this is, but it seems like you have to do a lot more in between plot development than in FFX and that when plot development does occur it happens in much smaller increments. It’s possible this was done to make the RPG more story-based, which is supported by the fact that there’s a lot more non-combat tasks you need to complete. It would also make sense since the other thing I noticed was that the combat aspect of the game (aka, the ‘don’t die’ aspect) is really easy. I’ve only died once, and that was against something that could kill me in one hit. Other than that, there doesn’t seem to be much strategy involved since you can take out anything with a few hits from the GFs. As I said though, I’m only on disc two, so perhaps this will change later in the game.
The last thing I noticed was that the gameplay tends to be a bit vague and confusing at times. For example, a character will tell you to do something and then walk away, and because nothing suggests you should talk to the character again you try to do the task and wonder why you can’t. I’ve also spent a few times running all over the map looking for a place I’m supposed to go to before discovering the map button (which was never introduced to me) and realizing my destination was right next to my starting point the whole time.

Neither of the games can really be said to be better than the other. There aren’t any bad points I’ve found in FFVIII that I wouldn’t attribute to it simply being an older game, and you can’t hold that against it. After all, for its time it was pretty darn awesome. Personally I’m more a fan of FFX, but that’s based heavily on the story and my history with the game.

Now I’ve got to go figure out where that darn Captain is sleeping.