Final Fantasy 8 Demo Review

By Gambus Khan

Ever sence the day that I played the game Dragon Warrior for the NES I’ve been hooked onto the RPG gaming scene, but when the first Final Fantasy game came out you could say that I had no social life for about a week or two. Role playing games back in the mid to late eighties were not about graphics, but were about exploration and were later about story. The first Final Fantasy was awesome, I remember staying up until 4 o’clock in the morning and then when I would wake the next day I would stay up until 4 o’clock in the morning doing nothing but playing this wonderful experience that was called a video game.

Role playing games today have changed just as much as they stayed the same. Graphics are now a big factor, and a great dramatic story is a must. We now have the storage media of compact disk and many other forms of media storage such as DVDs and GDs are on the horizon. The monumental release of Final Fantasy 7 was a pivotal moment in RPGs for the fact that it brought role playing games to the masses with its drop dead graphics and its beautiful CGI video sequences. This was both a good and bad thing, it was good because it introduced RPGs to an area of the U.S. public that didn’t even know what an RPG was, and it gave leadway to a huge storm of RPGs that would sweep the western world like never before. This also can also be looked at from a negative standpoint since FF7 raised the quality bar on the whole RPG scene, no other RPG hasn’t matched it’s graphical quality let………that is……until now!

Final Fantasy 8 is now available in the Land of the Rising Sun. It struck the island country like a massive hurricane as it has already sold 2.7 million copies in its first week of release. I’ve even seen the opening CGI sequence and I must say that it is, in my opinion, the second best CGI opening ever made (the best being Sonic Adventure).

I will not bore you by telling the only fragments that are available of the story, but I will tell you about my impressions of the playable demo disk that came with the game Brave Fencer Musashi. I must say that the opening CGI of the demo is some of the most beautiful that I’ve ever seen on the Playstation if not the best. Once you get to play in the gaming evorment it has the same feel as FF7, but the graphics are a step-up in the area of character polygon designs. The characters are no longer in the super-deformed style, but are now more realistically proportional. The magic system in this game is sort-of different since the magic spells are now treated as items that can only be used until you run out. A new feature that makes up for this is one where you can steal spells from the enemies that you face. The Guardian Forces are now the equivalent to summon spells in FF7. The Guardian Force that was available in the demo was the ever supreme Leviathan. Leviathan in this game is such a spectacular sight that it almost rivals some of the best summons in FF7 such as Knights of the Round and Seiphroth’s Super Nova. I can’t wait to see some of the later Guardian Forces in the final version, I’m sure that they will be awesome.

The demo takes about an hour to complete and boy what an hour. Throughout the course of the demo there many kinds of enemies such as troops, snake-creatures, a dragon, and a spider-like mech. that is a major pain. The difficulty of the demo totally blows away the FF7 demo, it is perhaps more difficult to beat the FF8 demo then it is to beat the full version of FF7, it’s that hard.

Overall, FF8 seems to be another standard in the RPG market. The whole idea of embarking on yet another Final Fantasy will be very interesting. It will also be interesting to see how the whole concept of love will be portrayed in this newest installment. In my opinion FF8 will be one of the greatest games for the Playstation, lets just hope it’s not the last.