This review contains spoilers
FFVIII is a game that no matter how many words I put into it, I still don’t fully get what they were thinking.
This game is, in almost every single way, a step back from FF7. Aside from the visuals that i am impressed they got working on a ps1, everything in this game in terms of combat, characters, story and world building is a far cry from the series previous entry.
This review is gonna be structured by disc, for every disc I finish I am adding more to this review and seeing how my opinion on the game changes.
Disc 1
After having beaten disc one I’ve come to a number of conclusions. The junction system is an interesting yet counterintuitive mess. The characters fairly one note currently. The story has mostly made sense and been interesting up to the assassination, where the sniper was positioned BEHIND the target that’s covered by a huge parade vehicle. Finally the areas look cool and are visually great but they can confusing at times (sewers, tomb, a lot of the towns).
Let me go into the combat system a little. Leveling your characters actively HINDERS you due to everything being scaled to your level, However that’s not entirely true. Whenever you level up your characters stats go up a little, the problem is that when enemies level up alongside you they gain more than what you gain. This means that if you’re level 20, a fight will be harder than if you’re at level 10 so it’s better to just not do fights altogether. This is enforced by the fact most bosses don’t even give exp and just AP for your Guardian Forces (GFs).
The game even encourages you to not level your characters as you can gain stats via levelling GFs which are what you junction to your characters. Now the levels of these don’t affect the levels of the enemies, So you can have them at high levels and not worry. On top of that, they can learn skills from gaining AP and these skills when equipped can give massive stat increases that essentially make you over levelled for every fight in the game.
Drawing spells is a fine mechanic and equipping them to give stat boosts is a unique feature however this feeds into the not needing to level as you can boost everything through equipping spells. Because of this I don’t want to use my spells as it would lower my stats so it using magic ends up contradicting itself and doesn’t work well. The stat increase from equipping a high number of spells is nothing to scoff at either, just drawing 40 Life magic from one enemy and junctioning a GF that has the ability to put this magic onto HP doubled my health from 500 to 1000, at level 8. This can go further and I can put stuff like Fire onto Strength and be doing a lot more damage than I’m meant to for my level.
The characters I can’t even really comment on right now as It’s too early to say. Selphie has one defining trait and that’s her love for trains. Zell is just there to be the funny comic relief guy. Rinoa has at least something going on with her conflict within her family and her will to change the circumstances around her yet Squall currently is just your average protagonist who has this inner monologue that I’m almost convinced he’s actually saying out loud. Overall they’re just fine and fun characters currently.
I’ve already briefly touched up on the story being alright at the moment with the exception of one section that makes no literal sense but the weird dream sequences or looks into Lagunas life are pretty cool and are the main crux of what I’m interested in currently. Overall having finished disc one I am interested to see what disc two has to offer.
Disc 2
Okay like I expected with the gameplay it’s basically the exact same since disc one but the main things I can really add on to it is some of the discovery’s I’ve made on how truly broken this system is. I’ve discovered that you can transfer magic from one character to another, meaning that Squall now has around 3000ish health and is only level 11. His damage is also ludicrously high after exploring the map not even for 30 minutes and finding a buyable draw point that has ULTIMA for some reason. This makes me do around 3000~ a hit and combined with the darkside skill, it’s upwards of 8000. Because of my ability to now one shot nearly everything the gameplay overall has boiled down to how fast I can click X due to not wanting to use the spells because that would weaken my characters as I’ve stated before. Because of the absurd damage that spells and GFs cannot reach using the GFs in battle is practically useless since they take longer to use so your best option really is just to attack attack and attack.
It’s also incredibly easy to completely break every character you have, just let the GFs learn the correct skills and use card on enemies (later on you can just kill cactuar) and you can gain AP relatively fast. Then just refine your items into good magic and you’ve practically won the game by that point. Completely breaking the game like this is something I really enjoyed doing in FF7 with stuff like magic counter knights of the round, anything to do with mime or final attack spam so being able to do it this early in the game is hilarious and probably the funnest part right now. This might be all I can say on the gameplay as I will probably have the exact same setup and strategy come the final boss.
Although the general narrative of the story has been relatively cohesive up to this point, some parts of the story really do just come out of nowhere. A great example is everything surrounding the Balamb Garden. Why is there an old rustic device that after Squall bashing his head against it a couple times makes the city sized building just MOVE and float over the ocean? Despite it being a cool addition in the story it kinda feels like a cop out that currently doesn’t have much of an explanation and is there for a solution to the incoming missiles. Also the other garden now being able to move must just mean this was something they all are meant to do and not just unique to Balamb.
Then there’s the alien guy, Like who? Suddenly we are told to go talk to the Garden Master and it’s some funny alien man who then we just kill by blowing him up??? This isn’t the first time a game I’ve played just has unexplained surprise aliens but I guess it’s more normal for this series than most so I don’t mind it too much, just a very funny occurrence. I did encounter more of these guys in some northern village after the garden started to move and they seem to worship Laguna in a way and they saved him after he slipped off the mountain.
Speaking of plot points coming out of nowhere, the insane info dump we get at Trabia reveals that every main team member including Seifer but excluding Rinoa are all from the same orphanage. For some reason Irvine decided to drop this on us now and supposedly no one but him remembers because of the side effects of junctioning. Also just to make it seem even more implausible the Matron is of course the Sorceress Edea and the “sis” that Squall mentions in his memories is Ellone. I mean i suppose all the characters now have some kind of connection with each other from the past but all of this being revealed so quickly felt like they really didn’t know how to tell you everything naturally and they had to rush it all out before the confrontation with Edea.
Now knowing that the dream sequences are a look into the past makes them pretty interesting. Also now knowing that Ellone is the one who lets you do this is cool. I’m not entirely sure why she can do that yet but I can only assume her motivations are something to do with changing some tragic event that happened to them all.
Squalls character is slowly getting more interesting. Him feeling like he should be alone because he’s afraid to lose anyone to time is a very nice core theme for him and his inner monologues do reveal a lot about his character that he doesn’t want others to know about. Rinoa is also still pretty good but the rest are about the same, fun personality’s but not much beyond that.
Selphies whole going back to her home that got completely destroyed was one of the worst instances of plot ponts never being given enough time. Her just going “wow this is horrible” to “oh well what’s next” in such quick succession was just outright bad. Even if the intention was to put on a strong face when she’s actually emotionally distraught they don’t convey it well at all and everyone just moves on. Like many things in this game nothing gets time to breathe and it’s just onto the next ridiculous plot point.
Beating disc two has left me with a few answers and a lot more questions. The motivations of Edea currently don’t really make much sense as why would she train a band of elite soldiers to fight the sorceress when she herself is the sorceress. Everything up to this point leaves me questioning where this game is gonna go.
Disc 3
Now this is where everything goes so catastrophically downhill.
I’ll get the fact that the gameplay hasn’t changed or my junctions haven’t changed since disc two so nothing new there.
But everything to do with the story in this section is completely out of nowhere. So we start with finding out that Edea was actually possessed by a sorceress from the future, which still doesn’t explain the point of SeeD. The running theory is if SeeD were to kill Edea then “ultimecia” wouldn’t have a person to control. So unless Edea knew about the fact she was being controlled and set them up for that reason (hasn’t been stated or explained yet) then I don’t really know.
Regardless we quickly visit a ship to try and find Ellone only to find out she’s in a place called Esther. Once we arrived there I couldn’t really fathom as to why we were suddenly in a country sized city that has architecture and technology that looks straight out of a early 2000s “this will be city’s in the future” kind of design. This is where the games story gets very silly to say the least.
We can now, for some unexplained reason, travel to space and several concepts and names just get dropped out of nowhere. We need to “take the lunar gate to space to meet Ellone” like what?? Since when has space travel been a thing? How have they managed to cloak an entire city in some holographic projection? What even is a Lunatic Pandora? And it’s not even like the rest of the continent doesn’t know about this, they were fully aware that Esther existed and has existed for ages, so why are we only hearing anything about this kind of stuff now.
Anyway we get sent off to space in cryo pods??? And suddenly there’s a rectangular structure called “Lunatic Pandora” which only got mentioned to us about 15 minutes ago. Despite our efforts, Pandora makes it to its destination and Squall has to run around the space station for Ellone. And then Rinoa gets possessed, throwing everything into chaos and releases the ancient sorceress Adel after only bypassing TWO LOCKS (awful security). Forgot to mention this is all taking place while the “lunar cry” is happening, an event which these scientists didn’t seem to be doing a good job of preventing. So an absolute maelstrom of monsters beams into the planet and lands on Pandora.
A running trend this game has is events just happing out of nowhere. The Lunar Cry could have been a really cool plot point for the story but because I got told how much of a danger it was about 5 minutes before it happened the game never gives itself time to build up to these big events. I’m not going to care about Pandora or the Lunar Cry if the game doesn’t let the characters care. If this whole sequence of events was built up too similarly to Cloud giving Sephiroth the Black Materia and freeing the Weapons it would be a great part of the story. I think this is a fair comparison since In both situations a main character (Rinoa/Cloud) aid the primary antagonist in a catastrophic event (Freeing Weapon/Seph and Freeing Adel) but its a stark contrast in how much better it was handled in FFVII.
Anyway after all of this happens Rinoa is about to die out in space, her suit has ran out of oxygen. Then they completely throw that out the window by having her emergency supply run out well before Squall can make it to her, meaning she should have died like 10 minutes ago. She ends up being able to breathe somehow and they spin around in space for a bit before the GIANT SPACECRAFT IS CONVENIENTLY FLOATING RIGHT NEXT TO THEM. Said spacecraft has also been lost for 17 YEARS despite it being very close to the space station.
For as much as Ive complained about everything in disc three up to this point, Squall and Rinoa get probably the best scene in this game so far while they are landing the spaceship. Their conversation was a great moment for both their characters and hearing the vocal track was a nice surprise and probably a first for FF games. Despite that I definitely felt like I should have been impacted more, but due to all the recent events and how many sudden turns this game takes it didn’t hit as well as it could’ve.
Speaking about the characters, all but Squall and Rinoa get a thing remotely moving or interesting. I know the game is primarily about those two and they do get a good couple of scenes together but everyone else gets the short end of the stick. I cannot tell you one interesting thing about Zell, Quistis, Irvine and Selphie since the end of disc one. They don’t even feel like a strong bonded team let alone friends in comparison to FFVIIs cast which is going to be my main comparison as these games are back to back.
So after all is done, Rinoa leaves for a grand total of 5 seconds before we get her back and we now have access to an airship, only it’s not nearly as cool as when you get the Highwind as you go to pretty much every area already in the story and there’s little to no new areas to explore, It just serves to make said exploration faster.
At the end of this disc we meet Laguna and go over a rescue mission for Ellone (again) and we head off to Pandora. We fight Seifer, he KILLS ODIN??? and Gilgamesh comes down and deals the final blow. Just after Seifer then runs off with Rinoa and awakens Adel.
Most of this segment may have felt like a plot summary, but that’s because it’s the only way I can talk about what any of that was. This was a completely nonsensical and outlandish turn for this game to go, giving nearly no explanations to the concepts presented previously and have several contrived plot points leaves everything feeling too sudden and having not much weight on the scenes that should feel impactful.
Disc 4
So time compression begins and everything gets extremely out of hand and we end up at the final dungeon. Really not much to say on this dungeon other than it was kinda a slog to kill all of the boss fights and get the ability’s back along with the confusing design of the dungeon really didn’t help. Then we get to the final boss. A 5 phase fight of doing the same thing I’ve done all game. I had to sacrifice less damage for max health because some attacks would one shot me but other than that and the rng of the party members at the start of the fight, it was alright I suppose. It felt very fitting that all my party members were “consumed by time” or whatever and Squall was the only one left.
After finally defeating the final boss the most bizarre set of scenes proceed to play out. After getting once again blue balled into the existence of SeeD (although I’m fairly sure what I stated earlier is true) the game decides to end it with one of the weirdest cutscenes I’ve seen in a game and probably the strangest cutscene in any FF game.
The series of repeating and morphed scenes of Rinoa and Squall were absolutely not how I expected this game to end. Time is compressing I get that but like many other parts of this game this scene is so out of left field. Squall walking through the desert and collapses in Rinoas arms, does he die? Well the final scene after the credits should make you believe he doesn’t. But what if the time compression was successful and they just went through with a faulty plan that ended up failing, it felt like it did fail considering what’s happening. But then Selphies video is definitely after the events of the game. Is it an alternative timeline after the “compression”, I don’t know and I don’t think I ever will. Considering there is an extensive theory on how Squall “died” after the end of disc one (it’s been debunked but still) shows how many questions this ending left for people.
Despite everything I’ve said though I can’t really call this game utterly unplayable. It’s definitely bad and at points very bad, and never really goes beyond okay. But it’s more just so convoluted for absolutely no reason and everything just happens because it “can” rather than if it “should”. I found myself going “what???” at just the extremely strange choices that they made throughout the story and it ended up with me wanting to see if they can repair this already damaged train wreck before it blows up again.
And I can definitely say they didn’t succeed.
3/10
This game is, in almost every single way, a step back from FF7. Aside from the visuals that i am impressed they got working on a ps1, everything in this game in terms of combat, characters, story and world building is a far cry from the series previous entry.
This review is gonna be structured by disc, for every disc I finish I am adding more to this review and seeing how my opinion on the game changes.
Disc 1
After having beaten disc one I’ve come to a number of conclusions. The junction system is an interesting yet counterintuitive mess. The characters fairly one note currently. The story has mostly made sense and been interesting up to the assassination, where the sniper was positioned BEHIND the target that’s covered by a huge parade vehicle. Finally the areas look cool and are visually great but they can confusing at times (sewers, tomb, a lot of the towns).
Let me go into the combat system a little. Leveling your characters actively HINDERS you due to everything being scaled to your level, However that’s not entirely true. Whenever you level up your characters stats go up a little, the problem is that when enemies level up alongside you they gain more than what you gain. This means that if you’re level 20, a fight will be harder than if you’re at level 10 so it’s better to just not do fights altogether. This is enforced by the fact most bosses don’t even give exp and just AP for your Guardian Forces (GFs).
The game even encourages you to not level your characters as you can gain stats via levelling GFs which are what you junction to your characters. Now the levels of these don’t affect the levels of the enemies, So you can have them at high levels and not worry. On top of that, they can learn skills from gaining AP and these skills when equipped can give massive stat increases that essentially make you over levelled for every fight in the game.
Drawing spells is a fine mechanic and equipping them to give stat boosts is a unique feature however this feeds into the not needing to level as you can boost everything through equipping spells. Because of this I don’t want to use my spells as it would lower my stats so it using magic ends up contradicting itself and doesn’t work well. The stat increase from equipping a high number of spells is nothing to scoff at either, just drawing 40 Life magic from one enemy and junctioning a GF that has the ability to put this magic onto HP doubled my health from 500 to 1000, at level 8. This can go further and I can put stuff like Fire onto Strength and be doing a lot more damage than I’m meant to for my level.
The characters I can’t even really comment on right now as It’s too early to say. Selphie has one defining trait and that’s her love for trains. Zell is just there to be the funny comic relief guy. Rinoa has at least something going on with her conflict within her family and her will to change the circumstances around her yet Squall currently is just your average protagonist who has this inner monologue that I’m almost convinced he’s actually saying out loud. Overall they’re just fine and fun characters currently.
I’ve already briefly touched up on the story being alright at the moment with the exception of one section that makes no literal sense but the weird dream sequences or looks into Lagunas life are pretty cool and are the main crux of what I’m interested in currently. Overall having finished disc one I am interested to see what disc two has to offer.
Disc 2
Okay like I expected with the gameplay it’s basically the exact same since disc one but the main things I can really add on to it is some of the discovery’s I’ve made on how truly broken this system is. I’ve discovered that you can transfer magic from one character to another, meaning that Squall now has around 3000ish health and is only level 11. His damage is also ludicrously high after exploring the map not even for 30 minutes and finding a buyable draw point that has ULTIMA for some reason. This makes me do around 3000~ a hit and combined with the darkside skill, it’s upwards of 8000. Because of my ability to now one shot nearly everything the gameplay overall has boiled down to how fast I can click X due to not wanting to use the spells because that would weaken my characters as I’ve stated before. Because of the absurd damage that spells and GFs cannot reach using the GFs in battle is practically useless since they take longer to use so your best option really is just to attack attack and attack.
It’s also incredibly easy to completely break every character you have, just let the GFs learn the correct skills and use card on enemies (later on you can just kill cactuar) and you can gain AP relatively fast. Then just refine your items into good magic and you’ve practically won the game by that point. Completely breaking the game like this is something I really enjoyed doing in FF7 with stuff like magic counter knights of the round, anything to do with mime or final attack spam so being able to do it this early in the game is hilarious and probably the funnest part right now. This might be all I can say on the gameplay as I will probably have the exact same setup and strategy come the final boss.
Although the general narrative of the story has been relatively cohesive up to this point, some parts of the story really do just come out of nowhere. A great example is everything surrounding the Balamb Garden. Why is there an old rustic device that after Squall bashing his head against it a couple times makes the city sized building just MOVE and float over the ocean? Despite it being a cool addition in the story it kinda feels like a cop out that currently doesn’t have much of an explanation and is there for a solution to the incoming missiles. Also the other garden now being able to move must just mean this was something they all are meant to do and not just unique to Balamb.
Then there’s the alien guy, Like who? Suddenly we are told to go talk to the Garden Master and it’s some funny alien man who then we just kill by blowing him up??? This isn’t the first time a game I’ve played just has unexplained surprise aliens but I guess it’s more normal for this series than most so I don’t mind it too much, just a very funny occurrence. I did encounter more of these guys in some northern village after the garden started to move and they seem to worship Laguna in a way and they saved him after he slipped off the mountain.
Speaking of plot points coming out of nowhere, the insane info dump we get at Trabia reveals that every main team member including Seifer but excluding Rinoa are all from the same orphanage. For some reason Irvine decided to drop this on us now and supposedly no one but him remembers because of the side effects of junctioning. Also just to make it seem even more implausible the Matron is of course the Sorceress Edea and the “sis” that Squall mentions in his memories is Ellone. I mean i suppose all the characters now have some kind of connection with each other from the past but all of this being revealed so quickly felt like they really didn’t know how to tell you everything naturally and they had to rush it all out before the confrontation with Edea.
Now knowing that the dream sequences are a look into the past makes them pretty interesting. Also now knowing that Ellone is the one who lets you do this is cool. I’m not entirely sure why she can do that yet but I can only assume her motivations are something to do with changing some tragic event that happened to them all.
Squalls character is slowly getting more interesting. Him feeling like he should be alone because he’s afraid to lose anyone to time is a very nice core theme for him and his inner monologues do reveal a lot about his character that he doesn’t want others to know about. Rinoa is also still pretty good but the rest are about the same, fun personality’s but not much beyond that.
Selphies whole going back to her home that got completely destroyed was one of the worst instances of plot ponts never being given enough time. Her just going “wow this is horrible” to “oh well what’s next” in such quick succession was just outright bad. Even if the intention was to put on a strong face when she’s actually emotionally distraught they don’t convey it well at all and everyone just moves on. Like many things in this game nothing gets time to breathe and it’s just onto the next ridiculous plot point.
Beating disc two has left me with a few answers and a lot more questions. The motivations of Edea currently don’t really make much sense as why would she train a band of elite soldiers to fight the sorceress when she herself is the sorceress. Everything up to this point leaves me questioning where this game is gonna go.
Disc 3
Now this is where everything goes so catastrophically downhill.
I’ll get the fact that the gameplay hasn’t changed or my junctions haven’t changed since disc two so nothing new there.
But everything to do with the story in this section is completely out of nowhere. So we start with finding out that Edea was actually possessed by a sorceress from the future, which still doesn’t explain the point of SeeD. The running theory is if SeeD were to kill Edea then “ultimecia” wouldn’t have a person to control. So unless Edea knew about the fact she was being controlled and set them up for that reason (hasn’t been stated or explained yet) then I don’t really know.
Regardless we quickly visit a ship to try and find Ellone only to find out she’s in a place called Esther. Once we arrived there I couldn’t really fathom as to why we were suddenly in a country sized city that has architecture and technology that looks straight out of a early 2000s “this will be city’s in the future” kind of design. This is where the games story gets very silly to say the least.
We can now, for some unexplained reason, travel to space and several concepts and names just get dropped out of nowhere. We need to “take the lunar gate to space to meet Ellone” like what?? Since when has space travel been a thing? How have they managed to cloak an entire city in some holographic projection? What even is a Lunatic Pandora? And it’s not even like the rest of the continent doesn’t know about this, they were fully aware that Esther existed and has existed for ages, so why are we only hearing anything about this kind of stuff now.
Anyway we get sent off to space in cryo pods??? And suddenly there’s a rectangular structure called “Lunatic Pandora” which only got mentioned to us about 15 minutes ago. Despite our efforts, Pandora makes it to its destination and Squall has to run around the space station for Ellone. And then Rinoa gets possessed, throwing everything into chaos and releases the ancient sorceress Adel after only bypassing TWO LOCKS (awful security). Forgot to mention this is all taking place while the “lunar cry” is happening, an event which these scientists didn’t seem to be doing a good job of preventing. So an absolute maelstrom of monsters beams into the planet and lands on Pandora.
A running trend this game has is events just happing out of nowhere. The Lunar Cry could have been a really cool plot point for the story but because I got told how much of a danger it was about 5 minutes before it happened the game never gives itself time to build up to these big events. I’m not going to care about Pandora or the Lunar Cry if the game doesn’t let the characters care. If this whole sequence of events was built up too similarly to Cloud giving Sephiroth the Black Materia and freeing the Weapons it would be a great part of the story. I think this is a fair comparison since In both situations a main character (Rinoa/Cloud) aid the primary antagonist in a catastrophic event (Freeing Weapon/Seph and Freeing Adel) but its a stark contrast in how much better it was handled in FFVII.
Anyway after all of this happens Rinoa is about to die out in space, her suit has ran out of oxygen. Then they completely throw that out the window by having her emergency supply run out well before Squall can make it to her, meaning she should have died like 10 minutes ago. She ends up being able to breathe somehow and they spin around in space for a bit before the GIANT SPACECRAFT IS CONVENIENTLY FLOATING RIGHT NEXT TO THEM. Said spacecraft has also been lost for 17 YEARS despite it being very close to the space station.
For as much as Ive complained about everything in disc three up to this point, Squall and Rinoa get probably the best scene in this game so far while they are landing the spaceship. Their conversation was a great moment for both their characters and hearing the vocal track was a nice surprise and probably a first for FF games. Despite that I definitely felt like I should have been impacted more, but due to all the recent events and how many sudden turns this game takes it didn’t hit as well as it could’ve.
Speaking about the characters, all but Squall and Rinoa get a thing remotely moving or interesting. I know the game is primarily about those two and they do get a good couple of scenes together but everyone else gets the short end of the stick. I cannot tell you one interesting thing about Zell, Quistis, Irvine and Selphie since the end of disc one. They don’t even feel like a strong bonded team let alone friends in comparison to FFVIIs cast which is going to be my main comparison as these games are back to back.
So after all is done, Rinoa leaves for a grand total of 5 seconds before we get her back and we now have access to an airship, only it’s not nearly as cool as when you get the Highwind as you go to pretty much every area already in the story and there’s little to no new areas to explore, It just serves to make said exploration faster.
At the end of this disc we meet Laguna and go over a rescue mission for Ellone (again) and we head off to Pandora. We fight Seifer, he KILLS ODIN??? and Gilgamesh comes down and deals the final blow. Just after Seifer then runs off with Rinoa and awakens Adel.
Most of this segment may have felt like a plot summary, but that’s because it’s the only way I can talk about what any of that was. This was a completely nonsensical and outlandish turn for this game to go, giving nearly no explanations to the concepts presented previously and have several contrived plot points leaves everything feeling too sudden and having not much weight on the scenes that should feel impactful.
Disc 4
So time compression begins and everything gets extremely out of hand and we end up at the final dungeon. Really not much to say on this dungeon other than it was kinda a slog to kill all of the boss fights and get the ability’s back along with the confusing design of the dungeon really didn’t help. Then we get to the final boss. A 5 phase fight of doing the same thing I’ve done all game. I had to sacrifice less damage for max health because some attacks would one shot me but other than that and the rng of the party members at the start of the fight, it was alright I suppose. It felt very fitting that all my party members were “consumed by time” or whatever and Squall was the only one left.
After finally defeating the final boss the most bizarre set of scenes proceed to play out. After getting once again blue balled into the existence of SeeD (although I’m fairly sure what I stated earlier is true) the game decides to end it with one of the weirdest cutscenes I’ve seen in a game and probably the strangest cutscene in any FF game.
The series of repeating and morphed scenes of Rinoa and Squall were absolutely not how I expected this game to end. Time is compressing I get that but like many other parts of this game this scene is so out of left field. Squall walking through the desert and collapses in Rinoas arms, does he die? Well the final scene after the credits should make you believe he doesn’t. But what if the time compression was successful and they just went through with a faulty plan that ended up failing, it felt like it did fail considering what’s happening. But then Selphies video is definitely after the events of the game. Is it an alternative timeline after the “compression”, I don’t know and I don’t think I ever will. Considering there is an extensive theory on how Squall “died” after the end of disc one (it’s been debunked but still) shows how many questions this ending left for people.
Despite everything I’ve said though I can’t really call this game utterly unplayable. It’s definitely bad and at points very bad, and never really goes beyond okay. But it’s more just so convoluted for absolutely no reason and everything just happens because it “can” rather than if it “should”. I found myself going “what???” at just the extremely strange choices that they made throughout the story and it ended up with me wanting to see if they can repair this already damaged train wreck before it blows up again.
And I can definitely say they didn’t succeed.
3/10