Worse still, none of these people ever develop a true personality. They are single character traits given form and sent running in and out of strange, peculiar, and sometimes unrelated, totally throwaway situations. You’ll spend half the game smacking your forehead at the boneheaded conversations they have, and the other half scratching it trying to understand why what you just did had any sort of meaning in the context of the assumed story. The overall premise, without giving too much away, is that there is a person who can send people back in time into other people’s lives, and there are goddesses who want that power. All of this is actually secondary to what the original plot starts out as; you as a new SeeD member - a new soldier in a mercenary army. A solider who gets wrapped up with a bizarre, childish revolutionary group who is going up against another army.

We’ll ignore all that and take a closer look to FF8’s battle system set-up; Draw and Junction. Here’s where the game truly falls apart. Take everything you have ever known about RPGs in general, and just toss it out the window. Draw is the new way you acquire Magic and many of your Monster Summons (Guardian Force in the game). Essentially, it’s the “Steal” option from Final Fantasy 6, but you stock all your magic now, not items. That means you want to go cast happy with Fire, you need to keep drawing Fire from the enemy that has it. So essentially, instead of grinding for permanent stats, you have to grind for a disposable property. Even worse, you Junction the Magic to your Stats - this is how you earn bonuses and raise your percentages. Which means...if you want to keep high stats, you need to keep the Magic stocked. If there was ever a brutal meaning of the word “Time Sink”, this it. More peculiar still, is that you can literally do nothing but Attack unless you Junction a Guardian Force to the character. Each of these Guardian’s have Compatibility Meters; the more a certain character uses that GF, the better their attacks will be. Which would be great, but to make sure you didn’t just permanently slap a few to each character, you are often forced to use different characters. Once you’re switched up, you will need to transfer everything to the new chosen character. Every time you swap characters...every....single...time. Micromanaging should be fun, if not offer a deeper sense of role-playing and game challenge. Instead it feels like you’re doing something the game itself should be doing instead. Much like the absolutely useless Grid system in Final Fantasy X, too much of your game session is looking at grey test boxes when it should be exploring a rich world.

Which is the other area that Final Fantasy 8 falls flat; exploration. Many jabs have been taken at Final Fantasy XIII’s severe lack of exploration; you would have thought it started with the one-way street that was Final Fantasy X. As it turns out, they were already tweaking it in 8. It is true you can run around the world map, but once you start to actually move around, you realize you really can’t go anywhere abroad. Each location is closed off by either natural walls or military blocks. Once you do actually get a real, actual airship that can take you anywhere, there’s only a smidgen of game left; it acts as a last minute double back for anything you missed.

The other big screw-up comes with the final dungeon. After all that grinding, collecting, compatibility building, your last locale on the planet strips it all from you - everything. You can’t even save until you earn it back. This means if you want all 8 or 9 skills back, it’s 8 or 9 boss fights, with each boss having a specific weakness. If you don’t have the Ability yet to defeat it, run and go figure out the other ones. Worse still, the castle has Resident Evil like puzzles that require to work in teams of two to sort out how to access all the stolen abilities. It all feels like a cheap attempt to pad the time spent in game. The most fun, however, comes in the hidden boss Omega. Essentially the Ruby and Emerald weapon of the game, he’s a beast of severe burden. This monster requires over 30 hours of prep work and 2400+ spells drawn, just to have a sliver of chance against it. He only has about a MILLION AND A HALF Hit Points and has multiple instant kill moves. Why? no idea.
When you finally reach the ending, and the final CG plays, most of the game still makes no sense at all. Regardless of a sense of closure, the ending simply insults the player with this strange psychedelic trip that leads into a cute little ha-ha video.

All of that said, it’s fairly depressing that such a mess is wrapped up in some of the absolute most beautiful graphics the PlayStation ever spit out. Great use of translucent effects, excellent texture works, some truly inspired and awe inducing locales wrapped up in a great, if not perfect musical score.
Final judgment of the game has always been split down the middle - a simple Google search will reveal that there’s no middle ground. Either you loved it or you hated it. Even more curious, there’s possibly two ways to view the game’s story. Please see the trivia section for an explanation. For me, Final Fantasy 8’s constant need of Drawing, Swapping, and a severe, SEVERE, lack of cinema skipping makes seeing a Fire Spell or a Shiva Summon get really old, really freaking fast. One day I may go back and try the game again, but I would be really, really hard pressed to ever open the game case again.

• Whole lot of variants, see below.
   
• Currently available on the PlayStation Store on PS3.
   
• One of Final Fantasy's 8's main problems is that it began the decline of originality in character concepts. Tetsuya Nomura, the person behind FF7, 8, and more, has openly complained about himself, though I can no longer find the online article. He claims Square refuses to add variety to the FF games. This is proven true with his much more dynamic designs in Kingdom Hearts and World Ends with You. Look below to see just how little truly changes between games...
  
  
• Part of what makes the game so frustrating is the insane amount of 'grinding' and collecting one has to do just to make even timid advances in given damage and stat raising. There are several great FAQs on this at gamefaqs.com, but a few of them take an extreme route. Due to the way the game levels up the enemies along side you, people have figured out how to completely maximize the Junction system to produce almost ludicrous results. The only catch is that it means playing Final Fantasy 8 in a way that makes even less sense the real way does. If you're a glutton for punishment and have a few hundred hours to spare, check them out.
   
• You don't actually get to use a Chocobo, the series flagship little creature, until Disc 3, and even then, it's more or less just a mini-game.
   
• The US version of the game still has the Pocket Station Chocobo mini-game. The Pocket Station was never released in the United States.
   
• First print runs of the game came with a mini-guide from Brady Games. These were left behind for the Greatest Hits editions.
   
• Squall is actually an interactive character. Thanks to his gunblade, when you perform a normal attack, if you press the R1 Button just as you hear his weapon's 'Swoosh' sound, you can fire a bullet into the enemy for extra damage.
   
• The Training Area inside the Garden is live with some minor monsters. Makes a nice little place to steal and fill up on Draw Magic early in the game. There's even a Save Spot inside to help you with multiple sessions.
   
• Final Fantasy 8 was a huge, huge marketing blitz for many retailers. Toyota was giving away a car based around the game, multiple retailers had exclusive versions of the Brady Games Guide book (shiny cover, poster, memory card stickers, etc), there were Demos for it all over the place, and of course, various TV and magazine ads. There were even bookmarks given away with the Guide Books in the shape of Squall.
   
• Apparently once Square and Enix merged, it must have created some bad blood between EA and Square, who had published several games together. In the Square-Enix versions of FF8, the 1st page in the manual clearly states, "Any inadvertent references to prior corporate entity are no longer valid and effective. This game is published solely under the management and operation of Square-Enix, Inc."
   
• While weighing in at a hefty 4 CDs, the era of multiple discs came to a slight closure at the beginning of the PlayStation 2's DVD era. While a few games then had 2 DVDs (Devil May Cry), the massive 4 Disc Game would not be seen again till the release of the Xbox 360 game Lost Odyssey. Oddly enough, that game was released by Mistwalker, who is run by the father of the Final Fantasy series.
   
• Squall carried the tradition of the water-related Hero name like the leads before him; Squall, Cloud, and Locke.
   
• Biggs and Wedge, in reality two X-Wing Pilots from the Star Wars films, were given their name sakes to two enemy soldiers in the Final Fantasy series. In FF6, they were in the beginning cinematic. Here in FF8, they appear in the first true boss fight, and reappear sporadically through-out the rest of the game.
   
• There is a scene where while at school Zell has a hover board-like device taken away from him. Later on, when you find out where he lives and enter his bedroom, the hover board is now in his bedroom with no explanation of how it got there. It also disappears for good on your return trip back to the room.
   
• WARNING: SKIP THIS PARAGRAPH IF YOU HAVE NOT PLAYED THE GAME OR DO NOT WANT SPOILERS! As mentioned on our Facebook page, there is an interesting theory over at Squall is Dead that believes the majority of the game is nothing but a dream. Essentially everything after the first disc is a dream, or some sort of hallucination Squall has as he passes away from the wounds he endures from Edea at the end of the first disc.
  
  Having finally played the game, and keeping both perspectives in the back of my mind, either could truly work, but there’s another angle that came to me after seeing the whole game. Specifically, there is a point in the game where the little Moombas refer to Squall as Laguna. It is never explained if they are mistaking him for Laguna, if they are alerting him to Laguna’s presence, or what have you.
  
  At the end of the game, there is a small cinema where Squall is brought face to face with Matron and his child-self. Matron (Edea) tells the younger Squall that there is only one real Squall. Just then, the Sorceress in her moment of death, appears and bestows her powers and her being into Edea, literally starting the cycle of the entire storyline. This means that Squall has seen the beginning of the game’s entire story line at the end of the events. Meaning...it’s all one giant time loop.
  
  Because of the time compression angle, it’s plausible that Laguna was sent into Squall just as he was about to die, and ends up keeping him alive. It’s never explained how much the time traveling affects the receiving party - the only time Laguna and Squall meet face to face is well into the ‘future’ of the game. Or, it is possible that Squall awakens in a different time line - inside himself. Ugh...who knows. None of it makes sense!
   
• Final Fantasy 8 was released on the same day as the Sega Dreamcast console launched in America. That had to have been really, really awkward. XD

It's important to point out that the Brady Games Hint Book only came with the first print runs.

The 2nd Variant comes after Square and Enix merged into one company. Disc art is changed, Logos are replaced, and the Copyright information is updated on the back. PSRM numbers now end in 1 rather than 0, and the SLUS numbers stay the same.

The third variant is essentially the same as the second, only now the ESRB information is redone and swapped with the Copyright text. For whatever reason, the information on the CDs were updated, too. If you look closely, the "Left side" ESRB discs have a full lower line of text, where the "Right side" ESRB has text that is shorter and centered.

Right now it is uncertain if FF8 ever had the possibility of being a Silver Bottom contender like the other releases were, but so far none of turned up.

As it turns out, there IS a Silver Variant Bottom Variant. Thanks to the Game Rave readers, once again we have the variant scans you all demand. The Silver Bottom is the exact same as the previous release, just with Silver Discs.

Final Fantasy VIII "Greatest Hits" Squaresoft Variant - Info the Same, GH Added to SLUS

Final Fantasy VIII "Greatest Hits" Square-Enix Variant - PSRMs now end in 1, Same GH SLUS

Final Fantasy VIII "Greatest Hits" Square-Enix, ESRB - PSRMS have 1 at the end, Same GH SLUS

Final Fantasy VIII "Greatest Hits" Square-Enix Silver Bottoms, Same As above, But Silver

Square was in a transitional state at this junction, and it was refreshing to see them bring their more sparse Japanese style of ad make it stateside.

With the 2nd ad, we have a great example of just how much hoopla was coming down the pipe with the game. Large car dealership, 9 different game stores, and who knows what else all burst from the page. While the contest itself isn't anything big now-a-days, take a look at that roster of stores.

Electronics Boutique became EB Games, Babbages and Funcoland merged into GameStop, and then EB and GameStop merged into one huge company. Kay Bee Toys is no longer around, Hollywood Video is gone, Warehouse Music is now a really poor web-site version of its old self, and Best Buy has been struggling on and off. It's amazing what 12 years in the industry does to a company.

Finally, a usual ad for the Guide Book form Brady Games.

Ad - Teaser (1 Page)

Ad - Toyota Give-A-Way (1 Page)

Ad - Brady Games Guide (1 Page)