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GameSpot editors' review
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CNET editors' rating:
stars
Good
Detailed editors' rating
- Reviewed on: 02/02/2000
- Updated on: 05/09/2000
- Released on: 12/31/1999
- Originally published on GameSpot: Final Fantasy VIII (PC) Review
In early 1999, Final Fantasy VIII for the Sony PlayStation sold millions of copies within days of its release in Japan. Now, one year later, the epic role-playing game has become available for the PC with much less fanfare surrounding its publication, probably because most everyone who wanted to play Final Fantasy VIII already has. What's more, the PC version of Final Fantasy VIII seems hell-bent on completely alienating its audience of innocently curious computer gamers, as they'll likely end up utterly bewildered if they ever made the mistake of buying it. That's because Final Fantasy VIII for the PC is a completely inadequate conversion of the attractive yet problematic console role-playing game.
Final Fantasy VIII would have looked and sounded much better if it were originally a PC game. It might look good on a television, but on the PC you'll immediately notice all the flaws in Final Fantasy VIII's graphics. The characters are made of simple polygonal shapes, and they're painted with blurry, low-resolution texture maps. The background scenery fares even worse; the game's characters look sharper and much more detailed compared with the washed-out settings throughout the game. This makes everything clash and makes the whole game look much worse than it should. You can tell Final Fantasy VIII is a beautiful game underneath it all; the composition and design of virtually every scene are of exceptional quality. The game has a cohesive cinematic appearance, consistently inventive artistic design, and remarkably high production values throughout, even though its appearance is mired under what seems like a coat of dust.
That's the problem: Although Final Fantasy VIII looked stunning on the PlayStation, its visuals seem to lose far too much quality in translation to the PC. You'll frequently get frustrated looking for the hotspot to exit a screen; then again, you'll also frequently witness some of the most impressive computer-generated cinematic sequences ever made. The game's frame rate is fairly smooth during most gameplay sequences, but it slows to a crawl whenever you're traveling between destinations on the 3D map. Even its soundtrack suffers from the translation, because it was originally designed to be played through the PlayStation's proprietary music synthesizer; but on the PC, the game's epic score just sounds twangy and annoying, because most PC sound cards are ill equipped to emulate the PlayStation's electronic instruments.
Fortunately, Final Fantasy VIII generally looks good enough that you could learn to tolerate the shortcomings of its translated graphics and sound; the characters may lack detail, but they're so vividly motion-captured that they'll captivate you anyway. But Final Fantasy VIII's greatest technical feat has to be how it manages to interpolate 3D characters onto static backgrounds that seamlessly shift into pre-rendered full motion video. There are several scenes throughout the game that blend gameplay sequences with cinematic cutscenes so seamlessly and so beautifully that it's impossible not to be impressed at the sight of them.
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