Review #750: Final Fantasy VII & Final Fantasy VIII Remastered - Twin Pack

 The forever fantasy.

 Hi! My name is Ignacio and thanks to Final Fantasy VII & Final Fantasy VIII Remastered: Twin Pack I can play my favorite game of all time anywhere, anytime. I mean, geeze, one of my first blog posts was about how great Final Fantasy VII still was, and I stand by those words to this very day. To be honest, while I'm sure most people that were gaming in the late 90s probably built stronger bonds with Final Fantasy VII and VIII than IX, there's no good reason as to why FF IX isn't on this card. I'm not too bothered about it since IX was my least liked PS era Final Fantasy, probably because while I played VII and VIII on PC no such port existed for IX, and by the time I got a PS2 and finally got to play IX there were many other fantastic games demanding my attention so I never spent too much time with it.

 Final Fantasy VII

 Still a classic, still amazing. I swear, while it looks crude by today's standards, hidden beneath its looks lies the best JRPG of all time, with brilliantly simple mechanics as well as a fantastic plot that thrives despite its poor translation. On a more personal note, whenever I wasn't playing the game I was visualizing in my mind what came after whatever part in the game I was in, and, lo and behold, I knew the game by heart. It's music transported me to my childhood, and by the end I wished the game had more songs so that it would unearth even more feelings of nostalgia. It's amazing.

 The plot follows Cloud Strife, Ex-Soldier First Class, as he finds himself helping AVALANCHE, a terrorist group that is opposing Shinra and their life-draining Reactors that are on the brink of killing the planet. It's not too soon before Sephiroth, Ex-Soldier First Class, re-emerges from Cloud's past, him too seeking to destroy the world, and thus begins Cloud's quest to save the world... and recover his memory. Yeah, it's the brooding amnesiac hero trope, but this game did it first and, arguably, did it best. There's a lot more to the story than that, and this being my 600th playthrough, I started noticing a ton of little details that foreshadow the plot twists oh so exquisitely. Every character in the game gets their own chance to shine and their own development, even the two optional characters get their moments, albeit being optional as well, which helps make you fall in love with everyone. The game also has a ton of very progressive ideas that were pretty much ahead of their time, such as giving you control during cutscenes in which you can't do anything to stop what's happening, building an atmosphere of futility and powerlessness which is nothing short of impressive for a game of its era. For what it's worth, while the translation is still a bit iffy, they fixed a few of the more glaring typos and errors.

 Gameplay is pure turn-based battling bliss. The game uses Square's trademark ATB system, in which your turns come once your ATB bar fills, and then you can: Attack, Defend, use magic, use items or use special commands. Taking damage builds on your limit bar, once full your basic attack becomes a Limit Break, a powerful attack that deals massive damage or has some sort of beneficial effect on your team. Characters have at least 4 different limit breaks each.

 But where the game truly shines is with the Materia system. It's so simple, but so much fun. Basically, Materia comes in different forms: Spells, Commands, Summons, Passive abilities, and depending on what weapon and armor you have equipped is how many Materia slots you get, and some slots may even be linked allowing you to couple Materia together for added effects, for example, put FIRE and MAGIC COUNTER linked and you'll counter attacks with Fire, put Fire Materia linked with ALL and you'll get to attack every enemy with fire. You also have to keep in mind that most Materia will put a handicap on your health and strength, while raising your MP and magic power, so you shouldn't just put every single Materia you've got on a single character. It's fun and it's simple, allowing for different strategies built on very simple rules. I love it. It also helps you build your party however way you want. Want someone who is strictly devoted to healing? Just put Healing Materia on said character, or, if you like, give everyone a Cure Materia so that everyone can serve as a healer!

 Alright, so the game is brilliant, what about this port? Well, the pre-rendered backgrounds during the exploration parts of the game are quite blurry, disappointingly so. Some backgrounds look as if they were smeared with oil. Speaking of visuals, you can't stretch the screen, so you'll have to make do with a black frame around the screen. The game also introduces three cheats: L3 for 3X speed, R3 for instant healing/turn/MP restore/full limit break and L3+R3 for no encounters. They are really quite useful. A few optional bosses will murder you even if you use the R3 cheat, but you'll probably be able to cruise through the parts that matter without much hassle. L3 is brilliant to cover long distances, and you can toggle both cheats together which makes grinding quite fast, and thus, quite useful. I read a lot about crashes and them being linked to the cheats, but while I didn't use them too much, my game never crashed. At all.

 Final Fantasy VII on the Switch is a great port of a great game. I wish the backgrounds were sharper, but I'll grant it that the new cheats make it quite convenient for casual playthroughs. Plus, when all is said and done, I can play my favorite game of all time on the go, so I'm all over the moon for this tiny little cart.
 10 out of 10

 Final Fantasy VIII

 Final Fantasy VIII is... it's a game alright. While back in the day I loved this game, I loved it so much I had a hard time deciding whether I liked this game or VII the most. But, as luck would have it, I replayed it a few years ago and.... I kinda, sorta, maybe hated it. Everything I wrote on this blog back then remains true, I don't like this game and I think the made a ton of poor design choices, so there's that.

 I won't go over the game again, since it'd be me just copy/pasting what I wrote back in the day, suffice to say that the things that make this game so annoying to play are: The fact that you can't skip the lengthy tutorials and you can't even trigger the X3 speed cheat on them. The fact that leveling up is pretty much useless since enemies level up with you. But worst of all, the Junctioning system. You don't have magic in this game perse, instead, you have to 'draw' them from enemies in order to stock on magic, up to 100 different casts of magic per character. But the game has no equipment, instead, you have to junction magic to your stats, and how much of a boost you get is entirely dependent on the quantity of stocked junctioned magic you've got. So you are caught in a bind, since you won't want to use magic since you want to improve your stats. Plus, drawing magic takes forever, since at most you'll get 9 casts on a draw. At most. In other words, you'll spend countless turns and in turn waste time drawing magic with all three party members, and magic you won't be using since you'll be tying it to your stats. It's horrible! The encounter rate also seems higher than FF VII's.

 At least, X3 Speed and the R3 cheat make grinding for magic a bit more tolerable, but only a bit. The R3 cheat is more powerful than in FFVII, since your ATB bar is filled ALL the time, which means, basically, infinite turns. So, y'know, drawing magic takes less time than before. And, to be honest, it does help the game, because I do think that, despite how soap opera-ish some of the plot twists are, I think the story itself is quite entertaining, and Squall and Rinoa's love story is quite engaging, so when the annoying game mechanics are made less annoying you can spend more time enjoying what's really good about the game, namely, its story.

 Besides the cheats, Final Fantasy VIII also got another enhancement: New character models. Characters now look almost PS2-quality-like, almost, they are quite pretty and look much more faithful to the official art, even if a few idiots want to cry about Rinoa's cleavage. That said, it suffers from the same problem as FFVII's port: extremely blurry backgrounds.

 All in all, Final Fantasy VIII is one of the Final Fantasies that have aged the worst, but this port did a few things to make it more tolerable. Honestly, I'd even go as far as saying that this might be the best way to play the game.
 5.0 out of 10

 Overall? Twin Pack is a fantastic package made up of two classic games.... even if one has aged like milk. While I absolutely think this pack should've included IX, I'll also tell you that this cart is worth it for FF VII alone, so I don't cry myself to sleep over it. If anything this collection is quite convenient, you can take it on the go with you, and you also get some neat Speed enhancements and battle enhancements to make the games enjoyable on a more casual level, which works great for games like these where plot comes before the gameplay. Luckily, Final Fantasy VII also delivered on gameplay.
 10 out of 10