Dead Malls & Light's Trick: a game review of Final Fantasy VIII

When I was fourteen, I returned home from school, got my wallet (imagine, not having to carry a wallet everyday, wherever you go) with $45 dollars in, and started walking. I knew the path - up the hill, then right, hop across the two lane exurb highway, then navigate the sidewalk-less stretch to the signal. From there, paved paths under the boughs of old trees - oaks and maples, generic trees - planted alongside rancher houses, which became two floor houses, which grew basements and decks, in-ground pools behind them, sprouting a satellite dish in the right light. This was the route to K-Mart.

The K-Mart had been a magical place, but for me, it was part of a binary with Caldor. K-Mart and Caldor, joined by the Chatham Mall, all 200 yards of it - Flickers, the arcade and my sole point of interest; the Dugout, the baseball card shop that carried all sorts of other gacha card packs, in which I lost interest as I began to note the sneer the loitering adults wore; a craft shop; a Mexican restaurant with white tortilla chips; a candy shop that promised, but cost too much; the vacuum shop we would have to drag our Electro-Lux to, year after year, Mom getting the most out of her warranty.

On one end, K-Mart, next to the arcade, with a Little Caesar's lurking at the rear entrance, connected to the mall, which seemed like a miracle to me - walking from one interior space into another. On the other, Caldor, with paler light, less red accents, but that yellow glass in the front, where the carts go, like a solarium. No, it was a department store, and I walked through its aisles in my mother's company, and by the time I was 14, it was gone. 

There are no photos I can find of Chatham Mall, this place which existed for decades, then lurked in the recesses of my mind, these prepubescent memories of dark afternoon light and low ceilings, pillars you could slap on your way out the front door, at the elbow of this superstructure, this multi-chambered organism which I wanted and did not want.

I was fourteen and the remaining K-Mart was my target. I was in eighth grade, slightly less crusty than I was the year before, and I wanted Final Fantasy VIII. It came out that day. In the electronics section, I asked for a copy, and the clerk - who was surely fifteen years younger than I am now, but then he seemed so much like an uncle - smiled as we walked to the sliding glass, maybe out of pity, or maybe not. We exchanged the cash, and I slipped the loose bills & coins in the bag, slipped the bag into my other pocket (which held no cell phone, no keys), and I made a faster path back to my house. All in all, it likely took about two and a half hours.

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Now, I am thirty-four, about to be thirty-five. And in the thick of COVID, my partner was off to her mother's for Christmas (all pre-quarantined and cleared by a test), my parents were barricaded in a deeper fear than hers, and I had nothing to do but play Final Fantasy VIII again, for three days.

Turns out, you can clear that bitch in 21 hours and 22 minutes! I did it with characters at level 90 or above, all the summons maxed, all the final weapons. And it is all thanks to that 3x speed-up on the Remaster! Whenever I had the speed on normal, the game felt sluggish - even the animations and the menus; I could've sworn it was a bug that happened after using the speed-up. Surely, games weren't this slow, and surely, you didn't spend so much time finagling your 3D character along a 2D background, trying to find the invisible geography laid upon the bitmap. But, you did. You really did.

This is the first time in ten years I played further than the first disc - the assassination mission - and I kinda remember why. Sure, the characters get better as the game goes, and you really do see a relationship develop between them, particularly the two lovers - a prissy rich girl trying to piss off her dad, and a possibly autistic emo kid who gave his jewelry a name, both of them mistranslated into this twenty-year-old mischaracterization. They're better than that, and so are the rest of your party, and the writers sorta get that.

But they also don't, as with each hour you get deeper into the plot, you get less of these teenage mercenary PTSD amensiacs. Like, who is Quistis after you get back to Balamb? Who is Zell after you free Balamb? Who is Selphie after Trabia Garden? Irvine, for as much as he Clearly Sucks Shit, gets one or two speeches towards the end.

No, all of that joy you feel in the faux-handheld camera movie that plays alongside the credits, of Zell devouring plates of bread and Selphie taking Irvine's hat - it is a trick of the light. Well, everything is, of course - in this game and in all art. Immediately prior to this, I played through 2/3rds of Final Fantasy VII, quitting once I started to feel any character writing fading away. Aeris dies, and I felt sad because she was the best written! Again, a game hamstrung by a quick translation, but fulfilled in spirit by the Remake. VII occupies its own strange, eternal space in my mind, and I had been replaying it in fits and starts over the last six months, so it was kinda expected to feel the air leak out of that experience. But VIII! I remembered how the game went, but not its particulars - so why not hop back in?

Turns out, my loose memory was as good as the experience, if not better. While I like the aberrant style of swords and future cities and renting a car and getting a paycheck and taking tests, it feels more hollow than either Final Fantasy to left or right of it. By the end of the first disc, you've seen pretty much all of the towns/cities in the game, barring Fisherman's Horizon (which barely qualifies) and Esthar (which is three locations divided by long paths and big backgrounds). And those towns felt larger, but emptier, with NPCs having less to say of interest, even in terms of flavor. The party had so very little to say about this weird-ass world, thus proving them to be a forecast of the full-bodied, long-legged bores of future Final Fantasies, of all of us in the 2000s, when we could fit into our girlfriend's skinny jeans (on a lark).

The clashing tone, the luxurious scenes in the background bitmap, IS the entirety of world-building. The hard left-turns of the plot, like time traveling sorceresses and the nature of magic and how monsters come down from the moon in a big red stream from time to time, are forecast in bits of dialogue here or there, but for most players, it's jarring in an unpleasant way. For me, even knowing how sorceresses have descended and how GF magic is "para-magic," the plot turns are unpleasant, or at least not worth the whiplash. Everyone had forgotten who they were, and I forgot that sentiment - forgetting the forgetting.

On the opposite end, the combat mechanics felt as famously broken as I remembered. I attempted to not over-draw magic, to not break down cards early to big stat boosts in junctioning, but with that 3x speed, it was hard to resist by the second disc. You really do become over-powered so fast, and if you know where to get what spells, if you know which bosses have GFs you can draw (which is an INSANE idea, hiding so much gameplay variability and power behind a thing you'd barely think to do (which I guess is not unlike secret characters in VI or VII, but it feels somehow a cheaper trick to pull, like they hadn't found a good spot in the world and plot to drop these GFs)), you become a god quite quickly.

And thus, most of the sidequests lose their luster, because who cares about doing all that chocobo shit when I'm already hitting for 4000 with just Attack? Why bother using the special commands when it's SO EASY to just spam Aura and hit those limit breaks? I think I took maybe 10-15 turns in the final fight, and it was done. Ultima Weapon took 3 turns. (I didn't do the secret ultra-hard boss because at that point in the game, I was ready to be D O N E.)

Perhaps it was the 3x speed-up that pulls the backdrop down, revealing how the game as a series of steps towards a conclusion. I filled in the blanks with my teenage mind, crafting a lovestory for the ages and a world that was unlike anything before or since; I embellished this with two decades of thinking on it, of touching VIII for a bit and then stepping away before I saw the boom mic drop into frame.

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The interim between the shine of K-Mart and the dark of my couch on Christmas night is twenty-one years: a life from birth to drink, from a first light to the precipice of knowing that you have lived through some history. That was a moment that might've been the peak of western civilization, the internet bloomed and Osama bin Laden was a light joke. The president was embarrassed but no one was afraid, not fully at least. Everything was possible, and possibly wondrous. I mean, Pets.com - that's cool as hell!

And here, at one of the bleaker nadirs of my American experience, I remember that Chatham Mall was obliterated for a reason. I have made inquiries and, this very night, I have posted on Reddit to see if any locals have photos. And I am contemplating deleting that post - not out of embarrassment, but out of a shaggy fear that I might not want to know. What if Chatham Mall was just another mall, with bright lights and happy couples strolling? What if the flooring was clean? What if it looks like everything else of its ilk - just another commercial site, built atop what was once farmland, which was once open fields and shady forests, born naturally and tended by the artless hands of nature.

What if it's just the same as the rest of Ellicott City, this mishmash of exurb desires made concrete and stupid, buffetted by parking lots and drainage ditches, places without humanity, that should not be, that shouldn not be remembered. Might that be why there are no photos of an edifice that hundreds of thousands beheld, passed through, where men might've made their business and perhaps some life for themselves? Squall has the orphanage, derelict as it was. There was that. 

And I still, all the same, remember Chatham Mall, a place where I walked as a young human through indeterminate light, just as I walked through Final Fantasy VIII, and floated and rode and flew and finished. Possibly full and possibly devoid, shallow to be forgotten yet intrinsic to the deep folders of my mind - that doesn't matter. I'm here now, as are you, among the things that are left and things that aren't.

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I award this game two jumpmen.