When did this game undergo its critical renaissance? When it came out I remember it carried a lot of ire for a good while and the games on either side of it were hailed as "real" Final Fantasy games.I know it eventually bounced back and quite a few people regard it fondly now (meanwhile IX seems to have lost some of its acclaim). Was it the approach to leveling that killed people's enthusiasm for it at the time?
>>12527362Has it really bounced back?
>>12527376I feel like a lot more people played it to completion than in the early 2000s, where it seemed like no one wanted to finish it and just saw it as an insult compared to VII and IX.
I developed media literacy I didn't have when I was a child and could appreciate 8 to its full extent.Similarly, I stopped being mislead by 9's visuals and couldn't ignore the shit story anymore.
>>12527362People always shit on the new FF for not being the old FF.
>>12527362It never did. It's just a handful of chatty people online trying to rehabilitate its image because it was likely their first or second FF.
he's back at it. How many years by now, a decade?
>>12527519I wonder what makes people dedicate this much autism to astroturfing a game like this.
Nothing was wrong with it on release though? I remember it being quite well-reviewed and selling well
>>12528294Back then you had to actually play a game before you found out you hated it.
>>12528374Everyone I knew who bought FF8 and played it when it came out seemed to like it. They thought it was a little convoluted systems-wise but it wasn't really seen as a massively worse than FF7.You can literally go back to message boards of the era and count the number of SqualLeonhartFan1981s and RinoaGurls popping up everywhere.Obviously without the air of hype around it, opinions worsened over time. But people in 1999 loved FF8 enough for it to get multiple reprintings.
>>12528398This is mostly what I noticed too. The biggest disappointments were fans who came to the series with 7 and were expecting something that felt more like a sequel. Among my friend group I disliked 8 more than most in large part because I find Squall truly insufferable and would much rather the game to have centered around Laguna. But even then I thought it was over all a solid entry and a good amount of fun.
