Final Fantasy VIII Remastered Review: That's what you wanted from the beginning

If you came here for a totally irrefutable critique of Final Fantasy VIII Remastered, I'm afraid you're out of luck. I am too fond of Squall and the band to pretend that I do not have positive feelings in this area.

But you have not come here for unbiased reviews. Like me, you're probably already a big fan of the original game and want to see if this remastered version ticks all the boxes you need.

TL; DR is simple; it's almost the case, it's so close to being exact that it's really worth buying and keeping your collection forever.

What are you going love about the Final Fantasy VIII Remastered

Before addressing the changes you will love, let's start with the ones they have not changed and that you will like. This is not a remake, like the new Final Fantasy VIII; it's the exact game you remember playing when you were young. Some people will say that it is negative, and it does not matter. This game is not for them; it's for you and me.

We know that a good remaster resumes the original gameplay and adds as little as possible, while blossoming graphically. Give us a game that plays as we remember with a new coat of paint and that's all we need. That's what Square Enix did with the FFVIII and I could not be happier.

This game has all the mechanics, you remember. ATB, break limits, the junction system – it 's really the best system, Materia is zero, come to my own Triple Triad is exactly how you want it.

The additions they made to the gameplay are thankfully entirely optional and add more to the experience than I originally thought. The new additions are the ability to play the game at a speed three times greater, to be able to remove random encounters and to have your ATB and Limit breaks always full.

The characters in Final Fantasy VIII: Remastered animate it in a way that you could not have imagined 20 years ago.

Even if I was skeptical at first – I'm always in the case of a random meeting – the possibility of speeding up tedious trips is extremely useful, especially when you embark on a continental adventure in the Ragnarok. Having the ATB full all the time can look a little cheat. This helps with the slow grind that exists at the beginning of the game and can be simply disabled.

I think that's what I prefer in these additions. they are not all the time. By simply pressing your thumb, you can easily activate or deactivate one, two or all three bonuses. The only one that I do not like very much is random rocking, because it's only half the pleasure of playing, it's the need to completely level your character. The game seems a little useless without the random appearances.

Improvements to the visual elements are correct. I hoped to see a little more than them, but we will come back to it later. All moving objects in the game have undergone a transformation, or perhaps all the moving objects with which you can at least interact. The backgrounds are always painted with slightly moving pieces.

So, all monsters, all heroes, vehicles, buildings – somehow, later – and even the draw and save points are remodeled in glorious HD. Strangely, the game is played in a window surrounded by black borders, which shows that they have not got any enlarged. That's why all these screenshots have black borders; you will also see them in the game.

Square Enix has placed the icons of the new skills in this black area, which is great news. There is not a lot of real estate, so having them there prevents them from hedging the action.

The game is however more fluid and the characters of Final Fantasy VIII: Remastered animate in a way that you could not have imagined 20 years ago. You can see that they are people now, not hideous monstrosities who are said to be beautiful.

What are you going Do not like about the Final Fantasy VIII: Remastered

If you look at the screen above, you will find that one of the main problems of Final Fantasy VIII: Remastered. Some of the new HD models are just terrible. Of course, these are now HD models, but if you do not add new textures, what is it for? It is clear that Square Enix had to make decisions about what they would upgrade and what they were not. It was perhaps to keep the cost down, I do not know, but there was very bad choice.

In the first film, each wave of a wave on the beach in the first film corresponds to a dozen images and thus looks like a poorly made GIF image.

There does not seem to be any work done on anything other than the 3D models mentioned above. I compared the remaster to the original game, and the graphics fidelity hardly seems improved. It's almost as if Square Enix had added a Gaussian blur to the backgrounds, corrected the color dithering and qualified it as good.

It's a little disappointing when you play PlayStation Pro, and the background is still poor. The cutscenes did not even improve. In 1999, the Cinematics of Final Fantasy VIII were above all that was out at the time, and I would be drooling anticipation – especially after seeing the work that they put into the remake of Final Fantasy VII – but nothing. It's almost entirely the same thing, just a little sharper.

The last graphical problem can be a complicated process to solve, but it seems to me that something must happen. Moving cinematics and sets play what appears to be a tiny picture per second. In the first film, each wave of a wave on the beach in the first film corresponds to a dozen images and thus looks like a poorly made GIF image.

The same goes for the backgrounds. Pay special attention to the curtains in Squall's room in the scene above. They have four, maybe five positions. I would have liked to see them interpolate or add frames to these effects, which would give us a softer and more modern impression of this remaster.

Do you have to buy Final Fantasy VIII: Remastered? Oh yes

Apart from these graphics problems, I enjoy every second I spend in this game. Of course, I had not finished the game before reread, I take no shortcut to play what I consider the best of the Final Fantasy franchise. I still have at least 200 hours left, but every minute is as good as I remember.

Do I want the game to receive a complete graphic revision like Final Fantasy VII? Of course, yes, but if that had been the case, Square Enix would have changed the whole game at the same time. This is not something I wanted to see.

4.5
out of 5

This is the game I love, on a console that I love, and every happy day I spent playing Final Fantasy VIII comes back to visit me when I play Remaster.

You should pick it up and play again. It's $ 20 for over 200 hours of nostalgic glory, and it's an agreement in the books of all.

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