FINAL FANTASY VIII Remastered

This is by far my favorite final fantasy out of all of them. It also happens to be the first I have ever played. As stoked as I was to be playing it again on my phone, it is seriously under developed as a remake. Upgraded graphics, and playing it on my phone as opposed to an old console is great, but emulators have been allowing that for years, and with much better playability due to game hacking within the emulators. It wasn’t until i moved to IPhone that i lost the ability to play it on the phone. Adding a new game plus feature seems like it would be an easy feature to add to stand out above and beyond emulators. I don’t normally hack games, but I have spent 100’s of hours playing this game to have all cards, weapons, level stats, gf and abilities, and rare items. New game plus would make it so I don’t have to do that every time I want to play through again.

It's difficult to give this a fair review particularly because I've reinstalled the app twice so far and it will not play. - iPhone 11 Pro Max - ver 14.4.2 When opening the app you're greeted with the FF8 logo on a white background with the words "tap to play." Once you tap the screen fades to black for about 30 seconds. In 4 out of 20 attempts the app then crashed. In 3 a logo would start to roll on screen but would freeze before finishing the word and then stay locked up until the app was forced close. 10 tries the screen just stayed black. 1 try got to the second Square Enix logo on black background before feezing, 2 times the app made it to the "New Game, Continue, Credits" screen then when selecting New Game the app crashes. I hope this somehow helps with diagnosing a potential bug with the app. FF8 is one of my favorite in the series and it's one of the only games I can think of that ends in the beginning (though poor localization in the original release makes these dots difficult to connect). I'm looking forward to being able to replay.

When this was released I was hoping for something around the quality of FF6 or FF9 port, since it has been around for a while, hoping that Square Enix knows what they’re doing. But my expectations were slammed to the ground. This was a Day Zero purchase for me. As soon as it popped up in the App Store, no matter the price, I bought it. I was waiting for this for a very long time to be released on mobile. This was my first Final Fantasy game I played on PS. Now let’s talk about what’s horrendously wrong with this: - Instead of taking advantage of the iPhone’s full screen, they opted to cut almost half of the screen real estate, slap it on the sides and put a horrible kind of pattern on it and drop some ugly looking controls. - FF8 remastered has some pretty decent aspect ratio on other consoles (widescreen). But here? This looks straight up 4:3. It doesn’t even look remastered but the original FF8 from PS era. - Sound is horrible. There are some parts where it pops because of how low quality it os, and doesn’t have the oomph of the midi soundtrack that the game has. Think about something you recorded and just slap on a game without even tweaking it. - Controller Support? I slapped in my Backbone controller, I don’t know. Don’t even bother. I know this is an old game, but being charged a premium price for this, with a disgusting port, I’m only giving it an extra star for nostalgia’s sake, hoping this can be improved in the future. Don’t buy this at this state. It’s sad and I feel like crying right now.