Squall Leonheart is a student at Garden, the world's foremost military academy. The characters don't seem like base archetypes or generic "heroes," but like actual people.
The decision to eschew a cast of dozens and focus on a central cast of six major characters appears to have been a wise one. The characters and their relationships are all extremely believable and complex moreover, the core romance holds up even under the most pessimistic scrutiny.
With Final Fantasy VII, Square showed that it had mastered the epic with VIII, it shows that it has mastered the personal. The core of any Final Fantasy game has always been its story, and Final Fantasy VIII's story is the best the series - and likely the genre - has ever seen.
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It was with some trepidation that I awaited Final Fantasy VIII's release: Would it be a return to the series' roots or a further digression into flash and brashness? In the end, any qualms I had were for naught Square has finally understood how to use the power of the CD properly. Some sections seemed like they were straight out of a Hollywood summer blockbuster: flashy, impressive, but ultimately unsatisfying. Final Fantasy VII was an excellent title, to be sure but with a Final Fantasy game, "excellent" is never good enough. Each of the English games has been analyzed, replayed, and studied as if it were a sacred text - and I'd be lying if I didn't acknowledge the Final Fantasy series as the primary impetus behind my Japanese studies.īut after the seventh game, my seemingly limitless faith in the series began to falter. And ever since I vanquished Chaos, I've been hooked. Heroes and villains, magic and mystery, epic quests and noble causes were all waiting to unfurl before my eyes. Poring over the pages, I just knew that I had to play this game, to live in this other world. I've been a Final Fantasy fan ever since the day the Nintendo Power strategy guide first arrived in my mailbox.