The success of "Final Fantasy 7: Remake" has rejuvenated this old game from 23 years ago, and also made many old players more and more looking forward to its "sequel", that is, the remake of "Final Fantasy 8", if the time is dialed back to the country 20 years ago, the popularity of "FF8" is actually higher than its predecessors, in some media rankings, since the release of "FF8", it has dominated the popularity of console games for up to 3 years. It can be called the first god work in the minds of domestic console players that year.
The popularity of "Final Fantasy 8" is inseparable from the success of "FF7", the development budget of "FF8" is almost twice that of the previous game, the size of the development team has reached 200 people, which makes "FF8" achieve a leap in technology, the game uses a real-scale character model, the number of map scenes has increased from 500 in the 7th generation to 800, the included CG animation is not only of higher quality and longer time, but also can be seamlessly switched in the process, in order to load these contents, The game uses a capacity of up to 4 CD-ROMs.
I believe that many old players still remember the opening animation of the game, accompanied by the sound of the waves lapping on the beach, the sacred and high female voice gradually sounded, two beautiful handsome men in public armed fights, interspersed with the flashback screen of the fairy-like beauty, I don't know how many people became FF fans because of this CG, but when the players actually passed the game, they found out that in fact, this CG is just a comprehensive edit of the plot behind, and it looks like a decisive battle is actually just an exercise between students. As for the male and female protagonists who are not familiar with the game at the beginning of the game, if you put it today, I am afraid that you can sue the game company for fraud.
When the development of "FF8" was just started, the development team had already decided that the goal of this game was to tell the story of Skel and Linoya, and then Hironobu Sakaguchi proposed to take "love" as the theme, and Nojima Kazunari deepened the theme to "what happens after knowing that you have fallen in love with someone", although love depictions are not uncommon in the "Final Fantasy" series, but there are not many works like "FF8" that are completely based on the theme of love. This work is directly the image of the male and female protagonists designed as the game LOGO, until today only "FF15" has adopted this design, but "FF15" tells the story of four warriors, and the love theme was determined early together with the academy and the double protagonist, the college theme was first proposed by Tetsuya Nomura, and its motivation is to make the work appear easier and more hopeful, so that it is different from the bitter "FF7", the dual protagonist system was designed to be able to switch freely at the beginning. However, due to technical capabilities, it can only be changed to automatic switching according to the progress of the plot.
"FF8" is the first time in the history of the series to use live-action singing of the theme song, "Eyes on Me" at that time among Chinese players very highly sung, its singer is the well-known Queen of Heaven Faye Wong, Nobuo Uematsu did not know the identity of Faye Wong at the time, when he heard Faye Wong's singing deeply fell for it, so he took his own music team to Hong Kong to complete the recording of this theme song, in that era when even Chinese games were rare, "FF8" was "rounded up" under Faye Wong's singing bonus. It has become a MADE IN CHINA game, which is also an important reason why this game has long been loved by the Chinese people, and "Eyes on Me" is indeed very classic, the EP album of the same name has recorded 400,000 copies in the Japanese market, and Faye Wong also won the 1999 Asian Music Awards with this song, which is the first time that a Chinese singer has won this honor.
The well-budgeted "FF8" invested a lot of money before the release, the overwhelming publicity bombing made the global media shake, the game even broke ground with the Hollywood blockbuster "Thunderbolt Baby" linkage, in the movie appeared a group of children concentrating on playing "FF8" scene, and even when the game was released after the third plate with card level BUG, this should be limited to the game media news, by the major media as a major social news to expose, once again a wave of angry sense of existence.
"FF8" in the series is a deviant work, its game system is unique, so far no game has adopted a similar setting, yashiro uses a unique fusion system, this system is similar to the traditional RPG equipment system, but the character is not equipped with weapons, armor and accessories, but the unique ability of GF, magic and GF, of which GF is the series' consistent selling point "summoning beast", the summoning beast of this game can not only be summoned out to fight, but also has an independent growth system, There are many summon beasts in the game that will be missed, especially the well-known pit daddy such as Diaboros, I believe that many people have been pit by him at that time. The magic system has also undergone earth-shaking changes, the magic in this game can not be purchased, nor can it be learned through magic stones, or even the mp is not consumed to start, magic needs to be extracted from specific enemies or places, or exquisite specific props to obtain, because magic can intuitively improve the character data, so that players have developed the habit of "seeing the enemy must draw".
The value of the character in the game is mainly improved by the fusion system, and the upgrade can only bring a small increase to the character's ability value, but the strength of the enemy will be significantly increased with the level of the character, which will lead to the higher the level of the character, the greater the difficulty of the game, which is a contrary to the RPG tradition, so this work has also become the most recommended low-level clearance in the past "FF". "FF8" has a total of 22 summon beasts, of which 6 only need to use special methods to summon, 16 regular summon beasts have gorgeous animations when launching the must kill, and if the player frantically presses the square button during the animation process, it can also increase the power of the must kill, the strongest summon beast in this game is called Eden, its must kill animation length is nearly two minutes, can easily blast out 5 figures of damage, and later in the latest expansion film of "FF14" "Shadow Of the Flame", Eden will appear as a boss, The animation of that year has also been carefully remade.
"Final Fantasy 8" system has many different features, such as the main way to make money in the game is to organize the salary, in order to increase the salary of the protagonist also honestly take the exam, the transformation of weapons needs to read the "Monthly Weapon" magazine, driving will consume fuel, but driving backwards does not cost fuel, etc., "FF7" In the "FF7" the mighty extreme skills have become special skills in "FF8", as long as the character enters a dangerous state, it can be launched at will, and the powerful "super martial arts god slash" in the previous game In this game, there is also a corresponding skill, that is, Sker's continuous sword, not only the launch conditions become simple, but can be used at the beginning, but the strongest special skill is not the continuous sword, but Selfi uses the slot machine to turn out the END, although this move appears only 1/256, but as long as it is successful, it will directly obliterate the enemy, even the strongest hidden BOSS in the game is not spared, and the demonstration screen of this move is also quite warm.
Of course, it is not to mention that there is also a card game known as the "triad", the gameplay of this game can refer to the nine palace magic cards in "FF14", the process basically has a head and face of the character can play cards, and there are also a large number of card-related branches, there are card clubs, card queens These exclusive settings, this is probably the prototype of "a game of Quint cards", the cards won by the player can also be refined as props, which even has a powerful card that can refine 99 full invincible potions. It can be said that it is not wrong to play cards and clear the game.
"FF8" is the first work in the series to use motion capture technology, in which the boxer Searle and the head of the academy, Seiichi Morita, the first time that Morita Seiichi has taken on the physical fitness work, Linoya and Idya's physical fitness is played by Yuko Aogi, she is also the voice actor of Selfi in various later works, it is because of their outstanding performance in this work, for them to get the opportunity to star in "FF10", Morita Seiichi is the male protagonist Tida's voice actor and body actor, Yuko Aoki is the voice actress and physical actor of the heroine Yuna.
"FF8" since February 11, 1999 on the PS platform after the release of 7.86 million sets in the world, this achievement is second only to the seventh and tenth generations, ranking third in the series, of which Japan sold 3.63 million sets, even higher than "FF7", in fact, the popularity of the two works at the beginning is relatively close, but in 2003 "FF7" completion plan announced, with AC, BC, CC, DC four works soaring, which makes the popularity gap between the two works wider and wider, and " FF8 not only does not have any sequels, but even the ported works and HD versions of other host platforms have disappeared, which is very rare for Square Enix, who likes to fry cold rice, so there have been eight generations of lost source code messages.
In the long wait, the player may have long forgotten those exquisite and unique system designs, and even the love story of Skel and Linoa has lost its details, but there is only one thing that has made the players who love this game quarrel for 20 years, that is, is the heroine Linoa really the final BOSS Artemisia? The rumor was born because the GF altimisia owns has the same name as the ring that Skel gave to Lenoa, and the name of this ring is entered by the player themselves in the plot, and in the PSP game "Heresy: Final Fantasy", Artemisia and Sker will say "Come and dance?" when they meet Skel. This is also the line in FF8 when Linoa and Skel meet at the ball, and Artemisia's three weapons in Heresy: Final Fantasy also have the same name as Linoa's three weapons in FF8.
In the past 20 years, players have also asked Kitase Yoshihiro this question, and in 2017 he replied that "in the sense of witches, they are very similar, but they are not the same person", but even if the official conclusion is given, it still cannot prevent players from discussing the relationship between Linoa and Artemisia, after all, this has become the most profound memory of FF8. In fact, the plot of "FF8" seems simple, but in fact, it is endlessly evocative, and many places will make people reverie as long as they are carefully savored, such as whether there is a parallel world in the end, whether the whole story is a dream of Skel, whether the final ending of the black and white picture implies total annihilation, whether the timeline of the whole world has been circulating, etc. These in-depth excavations and discussions about the plot of "FF8" are the important reasons why it has become an eternal classic.
20 years later, the high-definition replica version of "FF8" was finally launched on the three major consoles of the eighth generation, this version is compared to the original work in terms of picture quality has been strengthened, especially the character modeling has a significant high-definition, in addition to adding triple speed, no enemy and other convenient elements, but compared to the "FF8" complete remake version is not in an order of magnitude, although I don't know what "FF8" will look like if it wants to launch a remake, but the players of the year have experienced love in reality, and they have seen this wave in the beginning, When singing and fantasizing about love, there must be a completely different perception of it and the theme of love it expresses.