In brief defence of Final Fantasy 8

[votemarvel]

I confess that one of the things that makes Final Fantasy 8 my favorite of the series was that it ditched the super deformed style of character design. It was never a deal breaker but I really do hate that style.

If I wagered a guess, you're on the younger side, right?

Cause the deformed-style stuff was prettymuch exclusively 7, and the pitfalls of early 3d more then anything.

if you consider 41 to be young, sure!

 

[dscross]

I have incredibly low opinions of FF8. My rants are legendary on this matter. I feel as though the best rants on why the game is NOT good are somewhere between my writing and Spoony's videos. (Someone remastered those videos for him, so they're easily findable.) To put shortly, I found the character designs, writing, plot, battle system, and most everything else except for the music to be bad. It DOES have great music, but it's not any good, otherwise. Anyone looking for more detailed explanation, I actually favorite'd the most-recent version of the rant from a thread of my own making.

Did you at least like some of the visuals? The game had a very distinctive visual style. The first five installments of Final Fantasy borrowed freely from the medieval fantasy epics of Tolkien and his imitators, creating a landscape of fortified kingdoms, bucolic villages, and monster-infested dungeons. The next two games mostly followed this template, but added their own touches: the world of Final Fantasy VI seemed more pre-Industrial than medieval, while Final Fantasy VII added a dismal metropolis straight out of Blade Runner. The series clearly wanted to establish its own look rather than resorting to pastiches of other works, but it wasn?t until Final Fantasy VIII that it managed to get it right, in my opinion.

Balamb Garden is the epitome of the game?s unique style: a massive, colourful building shaped like a mountain, with an illuminated halo-like structure hovering above it. It?s a marvel of futuristic design that apes neither the bland sterility of Star Trek or Minority Report, nor the towering, baroque architecture of Blade Runner or Metropolis. The Garden looks almost organic, something both man-made and a part of the natural environment. The rest of the game?s cities and locations might not be equally as memorable, but they?re all inspired by a mix of imagination and different architectural styles from throughout history. Consider Deling City, which contains Parisian landmarks (it has a structure that bears a curious similarity to the Arc de Triomphe), an Asian-style shopping arcade, and an Edwardian mansion, and is host to a Madri Gras-like parade organised by the city?s fascist government in honor of their new leader.

 

[FalloutJack]

Snip of ages

The visuals were nice, I guess, but then that was half the point of the game, since Square was making full use of the Playstation at the time. At no point did I say the game looked ugly in my rants. I just appreciate the music way more than the visuals, being one who has enjoyed Final Fantasy 1, 5, 6, 7, 9, and 10. (I also have 4 and 2, but my response to them was a decided 'Meh'.) These are not redeeming enough. Most other RPGs I've played through would not make me feel like it was work. Not the Final Fantasies I've listed as my likes, not Chrono Trigger, not any of the Persona series games, not Skies of Arcadia (The Dreamcast version with more random encounters than the Gamecube version.), and not Crave's own Shadow Madness, whose graphics were kind of FF7-level with various up and down slopes...but the game was very enjoyable, different and fun. I've been around the block a few times. They don't do things like in FF8, and there's a reason for that.

 

[sXeth]

I confess that one of the things that makes Final Fantasy 8 my favorite of the series was that it ditched the super deformed style of character design. It was never a deal breaker but I really do hate that style.

If I wagered a guess, you're on the younger side, right?

Cause the deformed-style stuff was prettymuch exclusively 7, and the pitfalls of early 3d more then anything.

if you consider 41 to be young, sure!

Ah well. The theory was that maybe you'd played the handheld/mobile remakes, which do have a sort of deformed art style to them.

If you mean the NES/SNES ones, I don't know where "Deformed" would come from.

 

[dscross]

EDIT: From a story perspective FFVIII hasn't aged well, it's pure teen wangst and it doesn't work well any more, I'd almost love them to remake it but with more well adjusted and fleshed out characters, I think the story could be fun if the SeeD ops were a bit more professional. Mechanically it needs more reason for me to vary my party and the refining/junctioning system was very easy to break, but I like the magic-as-item system a lot and I enjoy the game for how customisable the stat blocks felt compared to just slotting materia. The story complaints aren't one of premise as I got what they're going for, but of execution. The characters feel flat and poorly fleshed out and nothing sells me on a bunch of 17-18 year olds being sent off on their own. I'd rather they either made them more adult or made them more teenage and built on that element more.

I can see where you are coming from, but I really do think there were lots of parts in the story that were quite under appreciated for what it was trying to do. There are lot of parts in there that truly deserve more credit. For example, one of the best parts of the storyline is purely visual and doesn't involve any dialogue or text whatsoever. The game's ending consists of a 15-minute computer-animated sequence that pushes its melodrama to operatic heights and blends it with an avant-garde surrealism - and it works beautifully. Final Fantasy VIII sets up this conclusion by explaining that its protagonists must travel to a dimension outside of space and time in order to confront the game's true villain, and that the only way to return to the real world afterwards is to focus on a reassuring place from one's memories.

For Squall this proves incredibly difficult. He wants to imagine a vast field of flowers where he promised Rinoa they would meet after the final battle, but he finds it impossible to remember what she looks like. He recalls scenes from earlier in the game, but every time her face appears blurry and indistinct. As Squall becomes increasingly desperate to remember the woman he loves, the montage of prior scenes begins moving faster and faster, the clips rushing by at a frantic pace. He finally thinks back to a moment in which Rinoa almost died, and for the first time her face is completely visible. Squall's body fades away into the light.

What's remarkable about this sequence is that it doesn't bother to explain exactly what's going on. Gamers will hopefully understand that this rapid-fire montage represents Squall's fevered imagination and that the shock of almost losing Rinoa causes him to snap out of his delirium, but the game doesn't spell this out in any way. If a mainstream Hollywood movie trusted its audience to handle a wordless, four-and-half minute segment like this, it would have been hailed as an extraordinary achievement. But since Final Fantasy VIII was merely a video game, nobody noticed.

 

[dscross]

Wow that's quite the in depth analysis. Putting aside the fact that FFVIII was largely responsible for giving JRPG's the reputation of having broody angsty protagonists, I didn't find the relationship between Squall and Rinoa(?) very believable. However that's not what killed the game for me. No, that was the fact that I found I could cruise through the game smashing down enemies with powerful magic and not even bothering tow upgrade my weapons, which was good since for some reason they decided that simply buying new weapons from a shop was too simple. Then I reached the boss that had partially absorbed Rinoa and thus my powerful magic was useless and I only had the dinky starting weapons. It didn't help that the last save point was past a point of no return. So I said "Fuck this shit, I'm done."

I think how they used Squall in that 'broody' way was a broader trend of the time. Final Fantasy VIII was released only two years after Buffy the Vampire Slayer debuted on television and the first Harry Potter novel was published in England. What all three works have in common is their use of fantasy as a rich, multi-layered allegory for adolescent pain. Their success paved the way for other genre crossbreeds like Pan's Labyrinth (childhood fears as nightmarish creatures), Battle Royale (high-school rivalries as ultraviolence), and Veronica Mars (high-school backstabbing as film noir), but while Buffy and Harry Potter have been frequently championed, Final Fantasy VIII has been mostly forgotten. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing, is what I'm saying.

From a gameplay standpoint, I do sort of get why it annoyed some people a bit (although I don't think it deserves abuse to the extent it gets). The battle system was a bit idiosyncratic, asking you to spend a lot of time robbing enemies before attacking them and punishing you for casting magic spells (usually the quickest and easiest way to win fights) by gradually making your characters weaker after each usage. Personally though, I think the Junction system probably took me less time than traditional level-building. I guess it depends how you played it. It sounds like you were a bit unlucky using the method you went with.

 

[dscross]

It seemed to me more like there were just giant gaps in the story that they meant to fill out before they ran out of time and money. The stuff with Hyne and the origins of the witches, for instance.

Laguna's story felt unfinished. We see tiny bits of it, then we see the eventual outcome, but not the in-between. I'd personally say it seemed like the more interesting storyline as well.

I didn't see the Laguna plot as unfinished at all. I think it was meant to be viewed more thematically to give you a bigger picture reason for Squall's character and, also, how the war had affected his generation more generally. The devastating war had cast a long shadow over the characters and put much of the plot in motion. But rather than a centuries-old conflict that has become the stuff of legend (like in other RPGs), the world war of this game ended little over a decade ago, and the game touches on the volatile politics and human toll that have been left in its wake. Squall's abandonment - first by his parents, and then by his friends who leave the orphanage one by one - teaches him not to trust or rely on other people.

 

[Auron225]

I would like to replay it sometime, but I feel like I'd need to follow a guide of some kind on how to just be OP. I played and finished it once back in high school, and it was fine until Ultimecia. The ONLY way I could win, was to get Squall the Lionheart (I think that was his best weapon?) so that I could use it's corresponding... limit break? Overdrive? Whatever it was called? The only method that gave me a fighting chance, was to keep Squall alive (Protect, Regen, etc) along with having Aura on him (that one that gave you a greater chance of using limit breaks). Everyone else was just there to keep him and themselves alive. Every turn, limit break (if I could). Hope for Lionheart, since it did like 14x 9999 damage. Keep doing that... for the 45 minutes needed to get through all of Ultimecia's health.

That fight alone dropped the game a whole 2 stars in my mind. There was absolutely no reason for her to have anywhere close to as much HP as she did, or why the majority of her attacks could insta-kill everyone.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

Wow that's quite the in depth analysis. Putting aside the fact that FFVIII was largely responsible for giving JRPG's the reputation of having broody angsty protagonists, I didn't find the relationship between Squall and Rinoa(?) very believable. However that's not what killed the game for me. No, that was the fact that I found I could cruise through the game smashing down enemies with powerful magic and not even bothering tow upgrade my weapons, which was good since for some reason they decided that simply buying new weapons from a shop was too simple. Then I reached the boss that had partially absorbed Rinoa and thus my powerful magic was useless and I only had the dinky starting weapons. It didn't help that the last save point was past a point of no return. So I said "Fuck this shit, I'm done."

I think how they used Squall in that 'broody' way was a broader trend of the time. Final Fantasy VIII was released only two years after Buffy the Vampire Slayer debuted on television and the first Harry Potter novel was published in England. What all three works have in common is their use of fantasy as a rich, multi-layered allegory for adolescent pain. Their success paved the way for other genre crossbreeds like Pan's Labyrinth (childhood fears as nightmarish creatures), Battle Royale (high-school rivalries as ultraviolence), and Veronica Mars (high-school backstabbing as film noir), but while Buffy and Harry Potter have been frequently championed, Final Fantasy VIII has been mostly forgotten. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing, is what I'm saying.

From a gameplay standpoint, I do sort of get why it annoyed some people a bit (although I don't think it deserves abuse to the extent it gets). The battle system was a bit idiosyncratic, asking you to spend a lot of time robbing enemies before attacking them and punishing you for casting magic spells (usually the quickest and easiest way to win fights) by gradually making your characters weaker after each usage. Personally though, I think the Junction system probably took me less time than traditional level-building. I guess it depends how you played it. It sounds like you were a bit unlucky using the method you went with.

Maybe so, but it still helped cement that reputation that JRPGs carried for quite some time and probably still do to some degree.
I was mostly fine with the gameplay up until that brick wall I mentioned.

 

[dscross]

Snip of ages

The visuals were nice, I guess, but then that was half the point of the game, since Square was making full use of the Playstation at the time. At no point did I say the game looked ugly in my rants. I just appreciate the music way more than the visuals, being one who has enjoyed Final Fantasy 1, 5, 6, 7, 9, and 10. (I also have 4 and 2, but my response to them was a decided 'Meh'.) These are not redeeming enough. Most other RPGs I've played through would not make me feel like it was work. Not the Final Fantasies I've listed as my likes, not Chrono Trigger, not any of the Persona series games, not Skies of Arcadia (The Dreamcast version with more random encounters than the Gamecube version.), and not Crave's own Shadow Madness, whose graphics were kind of FF7-level with various up and down slopes...but the game was very enjoyable, different and fun. I've been around the block a few times. They don't do things like in FF8, and there's a reason for that.

Is it mainly gameplay you have a problem with or the story as well?

 

[captainsavvy]

I haven't played 8 since it came out, so these are the impressions I remember having from way back then, so take that for what you will...


- The game looked fantastic after 7s polygonal models and having the party members running behind you was a nice touch. That waltz scene was gorgeous, and still looks pretty good even now.

- I wasn't a fan of the drawing system. It was so boring and wasted a turn in combat. In tandem with that I wasn't too hot on the junctioning either so I don't remember ever really bothering with it until the end when I had underlevelled party members (see next point).

- I absolutely HATED that the unused characters didn't level up in line with the party characters. It meant I got to the end and was screwed over because I suddenly had to use all the characters I'd hated and never had in the party.

- The story is one of my least favourites in the series as a fairly large portion of it relies on you actually giving a shit about the "love" story between Squall and Rinoa; if I could have let Rinoa float into space without getting a game over I would have... (-_-)
I would have preferred the story focus on Laguna, or more on the Sorceress's and their whole deal. That would have been far more interesting than a vapid love story about characters with the emotional range of a brick, and orphanage ex machinas.


All in all I definitely didn't hate FF8, but it's definitely lower on my list of favourites.
That's probably why I've never gone back and replayed it.


But then I'm one of the garbage humans that actually like the 13 trilogy, so maybe I'm just a shitlord with garbage opinions.

 

[dscross]

- The story is one of my least favourites in the series as a fairly large portion of it relies on you actually giving a shit about the "love" story between Squall and Rinoa; if I could have let Rinoa float into space without getting a game over I would have... (-_-)
I would have preferred the story focus on Laguna, or more on the Sorceress's and their whole deal. That would have been far more interesting than a vapid love story about characters with the emotional range of a brick, and orphanage ex machinas.

As I tried to allude to, it was more about adolescent pain than the love story. I don't think you needed to care about that love plot to appreciate it thematically (although it helped). That was a device to get Squall to open up to the world more than anything. The majority of it was about the effects the war and abandonment had on the characters and the reason for Squall's extreme introversion.

Squall's frustration at dealing with others comes to a head in an extraordinary scene early on in the game. He and several other graduates of Balamb Garden have been assigned to help a resistance cell fighting against a dictatorship. As they plan their next move, they receive word that Seifer, one of their former classmates, has been executed. Stunned by the news, the group takes turns trying their best to remember Seifer as a decent person.

Quistis says she doesn't have 'any good memories of him', then insists 'he wasn't really a bad guy'. Zell swears revenge despite having been tormented by Seifer, and Rinoa, lost in her romantic memories of their time together, seems to be imagining a different person entirely. Only Squall is heartless enough to realise the truth: Seifer was a bully who made their lives miserable and his death was largely the result of his own recklessness.

Intentionally imagining someone to be a good person because they're now dead is, of course, a complete lie -- a very human failing, but also a necessary one that protects us from our own feelings of despair and nihilism. It's a defence mechanism that takes some of the power away from death, even at the expense of what we know to be true. Squall's inability to participate in this group fantasy shows just how much he has hardened his emotions. He is too critical to accept these lies and too disparaging of Seifer to think of him in a positive light. His ability to keep both other people and his own feelings at an arm?s length might make him stronger, but it also makes him seem coldly inhuman.

The game twists the knife further when Squall realises that if he were to die tomorrow, everyone would eulogise him as a cheerful, likeable guy, cementing the fact that they don't know him at all. Upon understanding this, he storms out of the room, while the rest of the group is puzzled as to what's come over him. Too cynical to join their group fantasy, yet still dependent on the opinions of others in order to determine his self-worth, Squall is trapped in the singular hell of feeling alone in a crowd.

Moments like this illustrate Squall's troubled mindset, and Rinoa was a way to bring him out of that. It's much more interesting if you view it all thematically, in the context of adolescent pain (using fantasy as a metaphor to show this was a trend at the time) and of the effects of war on people, in my opinion. Just to give you an example, I liked Buffy The Vampire Slayer a lot when it was on, but I didn't give a shit about Buffy and Angel's relationship - I just appreciated the metaphors.

 

[EscapistAccount]

[snip

Without trying to evade discussion I think this is very much a case of variable tastes, I understood roughly what they were going for in terms of plot and underlying journey though you've thought about this far more than I have. My issue with the game's story is more that I find the scripting and dialogue subpar, I got what they were trying to do with Squall but I found his angst and moreover the flatness of each characters portrayal took away from actually enjoying them as characters.

Squall is a character who badly, badly needed more internal dialogue, he felt more like a mannequin than a person to me and while I get his feelings of isolation and detachment I also ended up knowing very little about him beyond that. I'm a big believer in characters being more about the aggregation of little things than being derived from one or two big things and Squall could have been humanised to a far greater degree with both an internal narrative at odds with his external actions and with a few tidbits that tell you more about him.

There were some interesting pieces to do with other characters what kind of achieved this, like Selphie just happening to really dig trains. I'd have been able to get into Squall's head far more if I'd known more things about him, what does he enjoy doing when he's alone, what are his private ambitions and so on. Obviously Squall is a more closed off character so there's not quite the same scope for developing these incidental details as there is with other characters but that's the kind of thing I'd have enjoyed. Why do these other characters follow Squall once they're out of sight of Balamb Garden, why do they keep following him after he screws up, what do they think about Rinoa's hairbrained train scheme and why do they go through with it and so on.

I guess I'm down with the overarching narrative drive of the game, I get the themes but I'd have appreciated more character moments, particularly ones that bind the team together a bit more. One of my favourite quests in a roleplaying game is the one from the Witcher 3 where Geralt, Lambert and Eskel get drunk together because it gives you insight into what Geralt is like around other witchers and what his place in the wider school actually is. I'd have liked more moments like that with the team where you find out why they stay together to the end. As I say you can't do that with Squall without ruining his character arc but you can reflect on him by using the other characters.

EDIT: What was it about Triple Triad that made Quistis decide she was going to essentially win the Protour? As a Magic: The Gathering player Quistis' ability to be basically the best Triple Triad player int he world would have taken no small level of time and investment, what need did that fulfil for her? Was it from her drive to excel or is it a stress release thing and it just turned out her pressure valve was something she was amazing at?

 

[captainsavvy]

It's much more interesting if you view it all thematically, in the context of adolescent pain (using fantasy as a metaphor to show this was a trend at the time) and of the effects of war on people, in my opinion. Just to give you an example, I liked Buffy The Vampire Slayer a lot when it was on, but I didn't give a shit about Buffy and Angel's relationship - I just appreciated the metaphors.

As I said, those were my impressions from when I played it as a 13 year old girl on it's release, and I haven't played it since
To me it was a story about an introverted loner learning to accept friendship, a supremely irritating and pushy girl that he was supposed to be in love with, sorceress possession, scumbag-GF caused amnesia, and time compression.

The problem I had was that I greatly disliked Rinoa; there was not a single thing about her character that I liked and as such I didn't care about any plot point she was involved in. Which was, unfortunately, most of them.
I still maintain that if you really dislike either Squall or Rinoa as characters (or both!), you will struggle to give a shit about the story in FF8. I had the same issue with FF12 and not giving a shit about half of the characters in that game. It made it really difficult to care about all the conflicts, especially when you have an intense hatred for Ashe and couldn't give a toss if she gets her country back.

I too loved Buffy and wasn't particularly invested in her and Angel's relationship.
The difference is that Buffy managed to make all the other focuses of the series (her friendships, enemies, struggles as a teenager) far more interesting than FF8 did; even if I didn't care about Angel, the rest of the show did enough interesting things to keep me invested.

I think that's what FF8 lacked for me. It lacked things that didn't involve Rinoa to keep me invested. Squall's emotional journey basically centred around Rinoa. The main plot of sorceress possession/time compression involved Rinoa. I couldn't bloody escape her!
Which is probably why I liked the Laguna sections because him, Kiros, and Ward were far more likeable as characters than most of the main group. I just wish there'd been more of them.

I guess that's the risk you run when you play a character heavy game; if one of the main characters end up rubbing you the wrong way, it can be hard to push past that and appreciate the other things the game is trying to do.

Maybe if I played it again I'd find something to appreciate in it, but it's not on my radar to replay any time soon. I'm currently drowning in a backlog of unplayed games!

Squall is a character who badly, badly needed more internal dialogue, he felt more like a mannequin than a person to me and while I get his feelings of isolation and detachment I also ended up knowing very little about him beyond that. I'm a big believer in characters being more about the aggregation of little things than being derived from one or two big things and Squall could have been humanised to a far greater degree with both an internal narrative at odds with his external actions and with a few tidbits that tell you more about him.

Was it FF8 where the English translation basically just added "..." to the speech bubbles when the japanese version had actual text? Or am I confusing it with one of the recent Fire Emblem games?

I also agree that getting to know the character as a "person" can go a long way.
Much like real life, people are complex; maybe the sullen, moody, silent guy over there isn't actually a jerk and is just someone that struggles with small talk and feels uncomfortable in crowds? Maybe the hyperactive guy that is overenthusiastic about everything is actually kind of insecure and overcompensating? Maybe the serious, sensible woman over there is actually hardcore Triple Triad player?

 

[Charli]

Oh I don't think it's a bad game. Not even a bad final fantasy, it just had the misfortune of being sandwiched between 7 and 9 which stand tall as the pinnacle examples of the series to me.

The story was...fine, the characters were kind of weak to be honest, and it had alot of problems technically which many above me have covered.

It's a fine game, it's just ...not the best one. And it's hard to see how it would be anyones 'best one'. But fair dos if it is yours.

 

[EscapistAccount]

Was it FF8 where the English translation basically just added "..." to the speech bubbles when the japanese version had actual text? Or am I confusing it with one of the recent Fire Emblem games?

I don't know, there was quite a bit of ... in the game but I have no idea how much was intentional. I do know the translation changed Squall's habitual '...sorry' to '...whatever', which changes his apparent attitude quite a lot.

 

[dscross]

Oh I don't think it's a bad game. Not even a bad final fantasy, it just had the misfortune of being sandwiched between 7 and 9 which stand tall as the pinnacle examples of the series to me.

The story was...fine, the characters were kind of weak to be honest, and it had alot of problems technically which many above me have covered.

It's a fine game, it's just ...not the best one. And it's hard to see how it would be anyones 'best one'. But fair dos if it is yours.

Lol - it's not. I said that in the second paragraph. 6, 4, and 15 are my favourites, respectively - I just talk about this because it gets unjustly (in my opinion) bashed a lot. But I don't agree that characters were weak for what they were trying to do with them (they just rubbed some people the wrong way for some reason) and I think story was full of metaphors and themes were much more ambitious than most Final Fantasies. I've explained it soooo much in this thread that I'd just be going over old ground to this point though. You can get my thoughts by reading a few posts above these.

I definitely didn't like 7 much as 8 story wise or aesthetically (which are important to me) - I think 7 had certain advantages that puts in ahead it the minds of gamers, not including the mechanics. We won't get into that though, it's a a completely different conversation.

However, I did really like the Materia system in 7 - it was much better than 8. They should have carried that over and people may have remembered 8 more fondly. 9 was basically a call back to the old Final Fantasies, which was great but I didn't feel like it had as much of a unique identity as 8. Great game though. Probably pips 8 slightly for me.

 

[dscross]

Snip

Was it FF8 where the English translation basically just added "..." to the speech bubbles when the japanese version had actual text? Or am I confusing it with one of the recent Fire Emblem games?

I don't know, there was quite a bit of ... in the game but I have no idea how much was intentional. I do know the translation changed Squall's habitual '...sorry' to '...whatever', which changes his apparent attitude quite a lot.

As much as I'm defending this game, I'm not excusing the translations. The English translation is passable at best, terribly awkward at worst. Given the sheer volume of text in a 50-hour storyline, it?s probably too much to hope for something that feels more literary (like Alexander O. Smith?s superb translation for Vagrant Story in 2000), but some conversations border on nonsensical.

When a character suddenly starts laughing even when nothing funny is happening, it?s clear that some of the details are getting lost in translation. The dialogue still makes it possible to follow the plot, but it?s difficult not to wonder if the original Japanese script had a little life or poetry to it. That's why I thought it was telling that the single best part of the storyline is purely visual and doesn?t involve any dialogue or text whatsoever (the ending, which I described in an earlier post).

Maybe this is one reason some people couldn't warm to some of the protagonists, but I also think this was true of a lot of RPGs of the time. I also think it was so ambitious in everything it tried to do (as I've argued extensively) that it's a partially excusable fault and it needs cutting some slack for it.

 

[FalloutJack]

Is it mainly gameplay you have a problem with or the story as well?

Here, you need my link [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.941929-Games-that-youve-played-that-were-NOT-well-received-that-you-cant-help-but-Lambast] to the thread in question with my rant. I made it and favorite'd it because I got tired of re-writing the thing. Apologies for the Top Gear intro not working. That's youtube's bullshit. Just pretend I'm impersonating Jeremy Clarkson as you're reading. It should answer all questions, from the mechanical to the 'Why the hell would this even make sense?'.

 

[Vanilla ISIS]

The worst part of the game was the fact that they gave you all these cool magic spells but you never used the best ones because those were reserved for buffing up your stats.

"Oh shit! this enemy is kicking my ass! I better heal myself!"
(uses Curaga)
"Great, now my max health is down. Thanks, game."

Who's idea was it? Why didn't anyone say "no" to that person?