I have been meaning to write a post about again about Final Fantasy VIII again for a while since it has been quite a while since I wrote about my favorite game of all time! And what better way to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the game than celebrating it with a love letter? (This game is 20 years old lol, I'm getting old! At least I didn't play it on release because I was too young!)
When I found Final Fantasy VIII (this was my first final fantasy game) it was somewhere around 2003 to 2004 and up to that point in my life, I hadn't really played a game with characters this real or a serious story line like this. For most of my early days I focused mostly on Nintendo games, especially Pokemon. My gaming life started somewhere in 1998 when I was gifted a Game Boy Color with Pokemon Yellow... I still play pokemon games to this day so you could also say that had a huge impact in me as well!
So you could say I was culture shocked when I jumped from the kid friendly environment you find in Pokemon games and jumped straight into an entry of Final Fantasy, let me tell you what happened! It changed everything!
Until the time I played Final Fantasy, I was never exposed to a real story line and suddenly I was throw into a world of many different complex characters, all with different motivations but with the same objective and a story that actually resonated a lot with me, this game opened the door for me to playing almost every other final fantasy game up to date and many other RPGs as well!
If you haven't played Final Fantasy VIII yet, there's no better time to start than today :-D! Although the situation could be better for the game right now, there's currently a massive campaign trying to get Square to port the game to modern consoles but on the year of its 20th anniversary, the fuckers instead of porting VIII they decided to skip it and port IX and made a lot of us butthurt!
But worry not, if you have a PC, 2019 is the best year to play Final Fantasy VIII anyways, just get the Steam version and go into the Qhimm forums where you will find a bunch of mods for the game by fans. You should in essence just need to get a couple of the 4k textures mods that upscale both environments and character models and makes them look amazing!
If you have never played a Final Fantasy game in your life, I believe that VIII is the best one to start, although the junction system can be a bit complex for people that don't play RPGs too often, the game helps you out with automated decisions and amazing tutorials to deal with it.
Final Fantasy VIII is my favorite game of all time and even the name I'm using here on Steem comes from that game! The Lunatic Pandora is a thing in the game but I'm not going to spoil anything just in case you guys really jump into it :-D