Yesterday, Nintendo and Square Enix delighted Final Fantasy fans by announcing a whole bunch of new Switch ports. There’s Final Fantasy 7, Final Fantasy 9, Final Fantasy 10/10-2, Final Fantasy 11, and even the adorable pocket edition of Final Fantasy 15. But where’s Final Fantasy 8?
It isn’t clear why the adventures of Squall and Rinoa haven’t made the cut, but for some reason, Square Enix has left FF8 out of all its recent re-releases, which are now coming to both Switch and Xbox One.
On PS4, you can buy ports of the PlayStation versions of Final Fantasy 7 and Final Fantasy 9, as well as HD remakes of 10 and 12, but you can’t get 8. Similarly, both FF7 and FF9 are out for smartphones, but there’s no FF8 in sight.
FF8 is available on PS3 and PSP, and you can snag the old PC version on Steam, but as Square ports its games to new platforms, Final Fantasy 8 has been ignored. It isn’t clear why.
This doesn’t really make sense. (I asked Square why it’s skipping FF8, but haven’t heard back yet.) It isn’t as though Final Fantasy 8 is some reviled piece of history that the company should pretend never happened, like Final Fantasy 4: The After Years.
The pivot to realism and hard sci-fi might have been off-putting back when the game came out in 1999, but today it just feels like part of an eclectic RPG series that deserves to be preserved.
When I revisited Final Fantasy 8 as part of my Final Fantasy retrospective — which, I swear, will be back before the world comes to an end — I found that it was actually quite enjoyable, and that the story holds up pretty well. Let’s ask Squall what he thinks of this weird snub. Squall, what do you think?
Comments
16 responses to “Final Fantasy 8 Is MIA”
Your parting comments about Squall have opened my eyes to a magic 8 ball shaped like Squalls head that has comments like ‘fine…’ ‘whatever’ ‘forget it’ ‘I don’t know anything’ and ‘as long as you don’t get your hopes up’. It would be this dejected and depressing response generator.
Also yes, where exactly is FF8, I know more about that game than I care to admit…
This drives me a bit nuts. FF8 is the big one for me. It’s my favourite Final Fantasy.
This news sounds promising, but… if I go and play FF7 in 2019, will I be disappointed? Is nostalgia lying to me? Very fond memories of FF7 from back in the day, but I recently played KOTOR via back compat on Xbox One and, honestly, it was pretty crap: “what was so great about this?”
I wasn’t disappointed when I went back and played FF8 last year on the PS3.
Its worse for me going back and playing ancient games where plenty of much better modern examples exist but JRPGs aren’t as big as they were 10-15 years ago so you wont be constantly comparing it to modern games that did it better.
I recently played 7 for the first time.
I enjoyed the first disc, hated the second and didn’t even finish the third.
The combat system and characters were good, but the backgrounds were horrendous, it was either painfully obvious or actually impossible to tell what you could interact with, and the story was a convoluted mess.
I did play the Steam version if that makes a difference. It may have been that it was overhyped, and I was expecting it to be the greatest game ever made.
KOTOR was really overhyped in my eyes. Too limited and you were stuck on “rails” the whole game. Random encounters were “set” and you could not continue levelling up. And the game was very small and way too easy. Even at the time, I could not see what was so great about both games. Playable and enjoyable, but not worth revisiting.
Remaster, crossing my fingers. When it was released I was in high school and had a group that would meet at lunch too discuss the game and talk about strategies.
I used to love binding Death to your attack and seeing immune pop up on bosses, always got a laugh, like how do I kill that which has no life.
Also using a Phoenix down in the zombie boss one hit it
Card Mod is your friend. The NPC at the entrance to B-Garden will play tonberry and iron giant cards which you can win and mod into the mats necessary to build Squall’s Punishment gunblade before encountering Ifrit. Can further be used to access some great magic junction, especially meltdown which can trivialise many encounters (especially jumbo cactuar later on) and when junctioned to a defensive stat can make you pretty much unkillable.
Stus-Attack death as you mentioned is also available really early and stupidly powerful. After Dollet and acquiring Siren, you can grind Fastitocalon F on the beach to learn L-Mag refine, then card mod those tonberry cards from earlier into 30 death magic a piece. get your 100 on squall and then run around the forest outside of B-Garden hunting T-Rexsaurs to grind experience and dragon bones for quake magic. With this, it’s quite easy to hit lvl100 before even having your entire team available to you.
FF8 is time travelling and will be with you shortly.
Do they think no one will notice…? I couldn’t believe it when they announced pretty much every FF game except for FF8. So, so bizarre.
Agreed, if this was kingdom hearts I could understand forgetting a game here and there because to hell with their subtitle methodology, but one doesn’t count 7,9,10
“There’s Final Fantasy 7, Final Fantasy 9, Final Fantasy 10/10-2, Final Fantasy 11….” I almost had a heart attack when I saw you say 11, I think you mean 12 :).
Firstly, pretty sure you meant Final Fantasy 12 instead of Final Fantasy 11 in that first paragraph.. 11 is getting a smartphone/mobile remake, not on Switch.
Secondly, it’s glaringly obvious why VIII is missing. It’s simply not at the quality standard that VII’s and IX’s remasters are on Steam & PS4.. The Steam remaster has terrible FMV and audio glitch problems that still haven’t been patched. It’s just not ready.
That, and a certain anniversary for FFVIII is next year, more likely it’s being held as more of a spotlight for its own announcement in 2019. The ones announced are all ready.
https://twitter.com/shaunmusgrave/status/1040378351641276416?s=21
The VITA is a good platform for final fantasy – you can play 1-4 via the psp versions (and crisis core, Dissidia and tactics), 5-9 via the PS1 versions, and X and X2 HD remasters (and world of ff) via the VITA versions.
Final Fantasy 8 still holds up pretty well, all things considered. Still one of my favourite FF
FF8. Triple Triad. The music. The final cut scene with the ballroom. Best FF game by a long, long way.