Final Fantasy VIII

Has there ever been a final dungeon in the Final Fantasy series that wasn't an annoying painful slog through content that should have been optional? Because I certainly can't think of one. Final Fantasy VIII certainly doesn't fit into that category. Since the point of these blog posts is sort of to try to take a snapshot of my mindset during and immediately after I play a game, that's what I need to talk about right now.

It seems to happen at the end of every Final Fantasy game - I get to the final dungeon having fun, and then feel like I have to slog through a bunch of crap and cannot WAIT for the game to be over. Happened last year with Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy XIII, happened in X, it's particularly bad in IV, etc. Since it's not story related at all, let me explain why the final dungeon is a piece of shit in VIII:

As soon as you step foot in it, the game takes away your ability to do anything but your normal attack. I don't just mean in battles, either - you cannot use items or magic outside of battle at all either, without leaving the final dungeon. You have to earn the ability to use them again by beating bosses sprinkled throughout the dungeon. Here's the list of abilities you can't use:

Magic (all of it. No Curaga, no Haste, no Firaga)
Item (no Potions, no Phoenix Downs, nothing)
Draw (hope you don't fight the one boss in the dungeon with a new GF without this ability!)
Command Abilities (special abilities your GF give to your characters during battle, such as Treatment or Mad Rush, both of which I made heavy use of that were suddenly cut off)
Revive (THE WORST OF THE LOT. Even IF you have your magic or items again, you have to beat ANOTHER boss before Life or Phoenix Down will work on any of your characters! *kills self*)
GF (Summons.)
Save (That's right! You can't save in the dungeon until you beat a boss and pick this option! Have fun trudging back to the very beginning every time you beat a boss to save!)
Limit Breaks (The least offensive one to me, since I didn't use them much in VIII)

There might be one or two more, but those are the ones I can remember. Absolutely incomprehensible that anyone would design a game like that. There is literally no reason other than blatant padding that someone would do that in a game. Ugh.

Anyway! It may not seem like it, but I really do enjoy Final Fantasy VIII. It has some pretty good bits! The mechanics are quite fun, if a bit out there. Junctioning magic to your stats seems pretty complicated and annoying at first, but once you get the hang of it, tweaking your characters to be efficient fighters is really satisfying. For example, I turned Squall into a physical damage powerhouse, and routinely would cast Haste and Berserk on him to just crank out huge amounts of damage. But it isn't just your Strength stat that you can mess around with! You can also change your attack element, slap a status on your attack such as Sleep that causes your normal attack to inflict that status (and the more of that spell you have junctioned, the more likely it will stick). All of this is done by junctioning Guardian Forces to your characters and using their abilities to junction magic to different stats and abilities.

It sounds daunting, but it actually starts to make sense fairly quickly in game. The menus could be organized a bit better, though. It took a while to get used to figuring out which part of the menu let me junction magic to status attacks as opposed to stats, and the fact that you can't see what abilities a GF has in the Junction menu is stupid - you have to back out of the Junction menu and go to the GF menu AND press L1 or whatever to see which abilities that GF has. Ugh.

As clunky as Junctioning could be, it is my favorite part of the game. Really deep diving into the system and making my characters as strong as they could be was very satisfying. Then using some of the abilities to boost stats was fun, too (Str Up at level up was a fun one, since that made Squall or whoever gain a bonus strength point every time he leveled up). I enjoyed making my defense so good that Thundaga and Firaga did all of 200 damage to my 7000 HP characters. Nice!

As for the story... Well, it is full of holes. I ended up liking a big chunk of it though - he's kind of a pain to play as at first, but Laguna ended up being done really well overall. A lot of his story isn't really spelled out for you - you have to figure it out with the bits you have. But when you start to piece together what he was up to, it's actually pretty impressive. He's probably my favorite character in the game.

Not that the other ones are bad, though. Irvine didn't get much time to develop, nor did Quistis or Selphie or Zell, but none of them are offensive. Squall is a douchebag until disc 3, and Rinoa is fine I guess. Seifer's entire story arc doesn't make a lick of sense though. The payoff of the ending was fine, I suppose. Ultimately, there are parts of the story that are head-slappingly weird (the big one coming near the end of disc 2), but I still found even those parts enjoyable and charming. And even though there are parts of it that don't make any sense, I still enjoyed the story of VIII more than VII, as it's easier to follow.

I'm having difficulty placing VIII in the series as far as my favorites go, though. VI still has a deathgrip on the top slot, and it's probably still followed by X, but I have no idea whether I like VII or VIII better. I'm leaning towards VIII but I don't know. VII actually had a little challenge, whereas VIII was such a cakewalk I wonder if I'll ever have the urge to play it again.

Anyway, it's really weird that I've now beaten all the Playstation Final Fantasies (well, the PS1 ones, anyway. Still haven't even tried XII). As some more time passes, maybe I'll be able to rank them or something. Not sure which game I'll play next... I might jump into Luigi's Mansion, who knows.

Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga 2

"Why do you like this game?"

It's such a simple question, one that I struggled to answer. It was asked in earnest, not in any way mocking me, by my roommate, who also likes games quite a bit. He wasn't saying the game was shitty - he probably thinks so, though - but he just wanted to know why I was playing it. "Just to play all the SMT games?"

I suppose that's part of it. It's hard for me to define aloud, though, so I'm going to attempt to do so here, even if it comes out stupid.

There's just something about weird stuff, to me. I don't like the anime crap that pervades so many Japanese RPGs these days - full of trope lines like "That's the power of friendship!" and other groan-worthy moments such as that. The truly weird stuff, though - the strange worlds they seem to create for those games is a big one for me. How many games have you played made by somebody outside of Japan wherein the last dungeon takes place on and IN the sun, that has you delving deeper within by jumping into lotus flowers all the while fighting progressively stronger demons from actual world religions?

Not many, I'd say.

I'm sure there are subtleties to the story of the two Digital Devil Saga games that I'd appreciate if I knew more about these obscure religions (or even the not obscure ones, like Hinduism). There were parts I thought were neat as it was! But not having that context stripped out quite a bit of meaning, I'm sure.

So why did I end up enjoying most of my playthrough?

Although the two games can be boiled down to pretty big grinds (you don't HAVE to play it that way, but it's probably the easiest way to get through it), I did enjoy customizing my characters quite a bit. I'd say that's something that Japanese RPGs still do very well for the most part - Etrian Odyssey, Persona, and yes, Digital Devil Saga all let me tweak my characters down to a very minute level. DDS even lets me switch moves in and out of my characters' move pools at will outside of battle which is always fun (and makes the bosses interesting, since it's assumed that the player will have varied skills by the time you reach them). But I talked about that in my last post about this series.

I don't know, though. It's hard for me to pin down why I feel the need to play through these games. It certainly isn't masochism, I wouldn't play a game if I hated it or even worse, if it was absolutely boring (like I think the DemiKids games are). Maybe I want to be able to notice callbacks in future SMT games or something to that effect (if there even are any. Who knows). I don't really consider it a "badge of honor" or anything like that, because who would be "impressed" that I played through these games? Who would even care?

I guess it just boils down to the fact that I like experiencing weird things. I like being presented stuff without much context and try to absorb it and figure it out. I like dreamscapes. I enjoy grinding levels and customizing characters. I guess that's it?

As for Digital Devil Saga 2, I'm glad I played through it and finished it. It was a very strange ride, and figuring out how to set my party up for the bosses was pretty fun (especially once I finally beat the last boss - I went from getting beat up pretty badly to winning pretty easily with some tweaks and no grinding - satisfying!). I doubt I'll ever play through them again, but you never know.

My next project, after maybe Soul Hackers on 3DS in a few weeks, will likely be the Devil Summoner games. I played quite a bit of the first one, but I feel like I should restart and see how far I get, considering I know this series a lot better now.