In June 2019, Square announced an upcoming remaster of Final Fantasy VIII.
I learnt about this because a friend who was watching the announcement livestream messaged me to say, 'hey, there's a present here for you.' Several hours later, I got a comment on my blog to say, 'This is utterly unrelated to the content of this entry, but I'm dying to know your thoughts on the FF8 remaster!'
It's nice to know people associate me so strongly with Final Fantasy VIII that they'll come straight to me with news about it. If this game is ever remade, I assume my friends will all kick down my door to scream in my face about it.
At the time, my reaction to the remaster announcement (taken from my blog) was as follows:
Final Fantasy VIII, THE VIDEOGAME LOVE OF MY LIFE, is coming remastered to modern consoles this year! I'm a little sad that Squall's in-battle model looks like it has a narrower jawline than the original (look, I really really love Squall and was inevitably going to be sad about any slight change), but I'm so excited that a whole new generation is going to get to play this game at last.
Realistically, there's a good chance the new generation will hate it as much as the original generation did. This game's a disaster. But, if it speaks to just a handful of new players in the way it spoke to me, that's enough. I screwed up my first playthrough so badly I had to restart from the beginning after reaching disc four, and I loved the game so much I didn't care.
I can't wait to go home to Balamb Garden.
I woke in the night and learnt this news and then couldn't get back to sleep because 'Blue Fields' was playing in my head and I was getting emotional about it.
I was so excited about this announcement! But, when the remaster came out, I didn't buy it. What went wrong?
In the end, there were a few small but pervasive details about the remaster that really bothered me. One is that Squall's range of motion has been reduced to eight directions, rather than the full 360-degree movement of the PlayStation original. It's just not Final Fantasy VIII if you can't run around in smooth circles and watch your teammates follow you in perfect step.
Another point is that the backgrounds weren't remastered; they were just blurred. Presumably the goal here was to keep the hard edges of the background pixels from being distracting in comparison to the higher-definition character models, but the upshot is that the backgrounds look a little worse than they did in the original game, and it's hard to sell me on a remaster that looks worse!
Plus, of course, there's Squall's narrower jawline and flatter hair. The Squall model in the remaster doesn't quite look like Squall to me, and, because I am absolutely insane about Squall as a character, that bothered me an irrational amount.
I'm still glad that the remaster exists, because it made Final Fantasy VIII accessible to a new audience! An imperfect Final Fantasy VIII for modern consoles is better than the game not being available on modern consoles at all. But I think it could have been done better, so the remaster makes me a little sad; it feels like a missed opportunity in some ways. For now, I'm sticking to the original game I fell in love with.
Anyway, if you were wondering why all the images on this site are from the original game, that's the reason! I'm just a weird Final Fantasy VIII purist, I suppose.