I’ll be waiting – Final Fantasy VIII

Final Fantasy VIII changed my life.

It was not just my first Final Fantasy but my first RPG, my first console game that I got to play in my own home, my first narrative of any length translated from Japanese in any media. A friend lent me a PlayStation and the first disc, I finished it in little more than a week of rapt attention, and by a couple of months later I’d got the console for Christmas and was playing through both the whole of Final Fantasy VIII and Final Fantasy VII. And it led me to fanfiction, and internet message boards, and a new and wonderful set of experiences.

Final Fantasy VIII is the tale of a group of teenage magic mercenaries who become wrapped up in world-changing events, and it was on a different scale to anything I’d experienced in a game before. It was both more epic and more affecting and personal. I didn’t know games could look like this, equal parts real and fantastical, or tell this kind of story with such depth. The opening FMV alone, with its operatic music and dramatic action with real-looking people, was mind-blowing. And one the game started, the level of detail of characters and backgrounds was just as astonishing in its own way. Some of the tricks Square pulled off with combinations, integrating the character models into FMV or transitioning between the two, still impress now (the carnival/assassination sequence!). And it told a story that I loved, from its warm relationships to its wild overblown finale.

Before Final Fantasy VIII I already loved fantasy fiction, reading vast amounts even from the kind of series that got very repetitive. On my first complete playthrough I took up the option to rename the main couple of characters and instead of Squall and Rinoa I played through the story with Garion and Lyra, named after characters from books I loved. But everything I had read was European or American. Final Fantasy VIII’s mix of fantasy and science fiction made me think of Anne McCaffrey in a couple of places, and it has the usual Star Wars references, but it was also building on so much I was unfamiliar with. Even what I later realise were clichés were fresh to me. Mysterious flashbacks, buildings turning out to be giant vehicles, 75% of the playable cast having amnesia — I lapped it all up.

Alongside not recognising where Final Fantasy VIII used established tropes, I also didn’t get where it completely threw out accepted wisdom. The way it treats magic spells as a finite resource, drawn from enemies and set up as the basis for adjusting your characters’ stats, was a big departure from its predecessors, but didn’t seem weird to me at all. The game’s extremely serious menu screens of text on a plain grey background helped to reinforce the impression of depth to all of that, and even if first time round I didn’t know how easy it is to completely break the system in your favour, I liked the flexibility a lot.

I also didn’t think it strange, or even particularly understand, that the game gives enemies stats to match your level. It’s a particularly generous idea for the new player, since it’s forgiving to anyone who, like me back then, makes an early discovery along the lines of: “I can run away from random battles?? I’m doing that the whole time!”. My brother and I did end up buying a guidebook before we’d even finished the game, but it was to uncover the vast amount of optional stuff that the world is filled with (the weird alien who requests items, the fight to win over a giant cactus) rather than to be able to get through it. Final Fantasy VIII has some interesting battles in it, but it is more focused on character and spectacle than on gameplay challenge, and those were the things I fell for as I worked my way through it using the fraction of the game’s systems that I had a grip on.

That spectacle just keeps on growing over the course of the game too — its scale alone was awe-inspiring. Eventually you go to a super-futuristic city, fight monsters from the moon, and go into space for some life-or-death drama and some romance, and then get to travel around the world map in a spaceship with the world’s most invigorating theme playing. The way to top all of that for a finale is to break through the boundaries of time and reality to fight the powerful future sorceress Ultimecia. She lives in an imaginary castle and has been acting in the present day as part of her plan to compress all of time to one point. Or something like that. It’s pretty clear that her plan manifested right into our world, because how else do you explain a game released in 1999 whose most stereotypically millennial character is called Selphie? I cast Ultimecia’s words back in time to my Mortal Kombat entry in tribute. That whole end stage of the game is rather silly, but is filled with such creatively gothic pomp that I loved it all too. 

As great as Final Fantasy VIII is at spectacle, though, there is a lot more to it then that. It starts slow, with the confidence of being the sequel to such a spectacularly successful game and with knowing how many hooks its intro movie has thrown to get you to stick around. I found it really striking, playing through again, how often you spend time with the main cast sitting around waiting for decisions to be made or communicated. Waiting for the grown-ups to hand down their orders. Playing as Squall and his fellow students, one of the first things you have to wait for is your exam results. Even as you fight monsters with your gun-sword and summon ridiculously overpowered demons for your attacks, your agency in the story is pointedly limited for a really long time. You get shuffled from place to place, an inconvenience until there is a chance to be put in peril for someone else’s benefit, getting a pawn’s eye view of geopolitical chess.

The story gets going properly once your team gets sent out to territory occupied by the world’s major force, Galbadia, to help with a tiny resistance group led by Rinoa, idealistic daughter of a Galbadian military general. There are a lot of moments of tension as Squall and company make clear their lack of respect for the ragtag resistance. It’s barely even subtext that the disdain is a projection of their own insecurities about feeling like they are just children playing a part. The character to voice the biggest problem with Rinoa is Quistis, marginally more experienced instructor to the others. With an extra level of seniority to the part she’s playing, and not much confidence to go with it, no wonder her insecurities come out the most viciously of all.

There are very few individual moments of alignment of story with gameplay to compare to those of Final Fantasy VII, but there is one recurring one. In the game’s flashbacks, team members pass out and find themselves literally playing the parts of Galbadian army soldiers in the past. It’s a really strange and intriguing way of presenting two stories that take a long time to join up, but it’s also really fitting for the characters’ lives. After a cliffhanger in the main story at the end of the first disc, the next one opens in a quiet little village for a bittersweet vignette about one of the soldiers tentatively adapting to domestic life and responsibilities. It’s a masterful bit of pacing, and it’s one more way of showing your characters the adult concerns that their lives are in the process of colliding with. In a sense, stumbling through the whole game with a bunch of exciting new-found powers, but no real idea of what I was meant to do with them, was the best alignment of story and gameplay of all. That is, it was a perfect alignment of both with the experience of being a teenager.

Final Fantasy VIII’s characters often fail terribly at their missions through their own errors and inabilities to do what they’re meant to. It’s not very surprising, because they are teenagers with an unreasonable weight put on them. They all have glaring imperfections and a lot of growing to do. Most centrally to the story, Squall really dislikes opening up to other people, or talking a lot in general, and he acts that out in some pretty bad ways. Early on he responds to Quistis attempting to have an emotional conversation with him by telling her to talk to a wall. His impulsive rival student, Seifer, seems at times to be in the game because they needed someone to make Squall at least look a bit less of a dick by comparison. 

Watching over time as Squall learns and changes in tiny ways to actually allow himself to care about other people is really rewarding, and makes a lot of the conversations while the characters sit around worthwhile. Even some of the smaller moments succeed along these lines. The story doesn’t make much of it when he goes ahead and unlocks a train door for his fellow newly qualified trooper Selphie, because he knows she loves going to look out the windows, but it is rather touching. The dynamic of the group learning to trust and rely on each other is given enough time to be believable and charming even as the rest of the plot takes wild turns.

With its teenage concerns, the fact that I played Final Fantasy VIII as a fourteen-year-old has a lot to do with the massive impression that it made on me. Maybe if I’d played Final Fantasy VII first it would have made the bigger impression of the two, but I’m not so sure. Final Fantasy VIII’s terrified school students were easy to relate to deeply, even if it was a very different kind of school. I was shy and withdrawn too. It was not long since I’d had my own moment, like Squall, of standing awkwardly at the edge of a school dance and having a girl come up and get me to dance. “Waltz for the Moon” and “Tender” are not quite the same, but close enough. A story about discovering that opening up to other people, including girls, could be worthwhile and important came at exactly the right time for me. And it ended up part of my road to doing just that.

When I finished the game, I wanted more. My family had just got an internet connection and I turned to fanfiction, seeking out anything that expanded on Final Fantasy VIII’s characters and their lives. I ended up frequenting a forum connected to a fanfiction author and made connections with people online for the first time. That was where I learned to navigate message boards, making friends and broadening my world. And being honest about our feelings and our struggles wasn’t so hard when talking about a story that showed the importance of just that.

As I moved a little away from playing games and got more into music, it made sense to take the confidence I had developed to exploring similar kinds of spaces for music. I signed up to quite a few band’s message boards, and the most active one that I ended up spending the most time on was Coldplay’s. I met my partner and many of my closest friends on their official message board, and it probably would never have happened like that without Final Fantasy VIII. I have written about my experience with Coldplay and their message board at length before, and one of the things I talked about was how much my ways of thinking about what it is to be a fan were formed in a space where as a guy I wasn’t part of a majority. That too started even before then, on Final Fantasy message boards. There I found a community, with other people who loved a game about finding community.

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Top of the charts for week ending 30 October 1999:

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