Best game ever made? Here's a poll. UPDATE.

[Jumpin]

Sprash said:

Jumpin said:

Yeah, agreed, Final Fantasy 8 was an excellent game because of the amount of freedom the game gave. The draw skill was optional, and really only needed to be used to get certain summons; otherwise I never used it, it is much easier crafting enemy drops into magic. I don't even know why people who hate the draw system insist on using it instead of crafting; particularly since the crafting gets better magic anyway.

On the music front, FF8's music is as good as the FF series has ever been, and it's not even close. There are only a handful of tracks (Searching for Friends in FF6, Anxious Heart in FF7) in other games that even compare.

The freedom is really great and the difficulty also the game is either very easy (if you know how to do it) or really hard if you like me just use crappy magic to boost your stats the entire game.

Similar things can be done with any game that allows that kind of freedom. FF1 is another example of that, some job combinations make the game's difficulty trivial (BB, BB, BB, BM) while others make the game ungodly difficult (WM, WM, WM, WM). In RPGs, difficulty is always a measurement of effort required to boost characters, strategy and tactics are a smaller consideration - strategy and tactics can overcome a challenge before the stats are ready, but lower stats increase failure probability; and there is a bottom threshold for it where the probability of success becomes 0.

I'm a mathematically minded person, given my accounting background. As far as that goes, it doesn't get much better than FF8 as far as console gaming goes. Also, I'm a sucker for romance, and while some people see FF8 as bad, I see that element as the best it has ever been done in a video game. The Laguna and Julia tragedy, followed by the Laguna and Raine tragedy, followed by the sequel to both stories in Squall and Rinoa. Then you see that both tragedies yielded something of beauty. It is also possible that FF8 just might have more appeal for people of various European cultures, almost all of the aggressively hateful people of the game are American (particularly on YouTube), maybe the rare English. But I have seen plenty of Americans who love the game as well, so it is not a blanket statement, for sure.

One other element of the game I really enjoyed was how rich the FF8 world is, there's so much to it. Later FF games have always felt sparse to me. Even FF9 which had a few big cities, all close together, and everything else being sparse and empty, but it got even worse after that, especially getting into 12 and 13 where people began to feel less like people and more like trivial fixtures in the towns that all say variants of the same thing.