Final Fantasy VIII deserves to be celebrated for its worldbuilding

destructoid.com:

For one brief second, let’s forget both the monumental juggernaut that will be Final Fantasy VII Rebirth to wish Final Fantasy VIII its very well-deserved happy 25th birthday. You’re reading that right. Exactly 25 years ago, hundreds of thousands of Japanese players got to discover what was beyond that still amazing-looking beach (sorry, US fans, your anniversary isn’t until September).

Yeah, the Junction system made us too strong, too easily. Sure, the monsters’ level scaling system was dumb as hell. Yes, its story sometimes went too wild for our ’90s minds. And, okay, the main character is hard to like, but only if you quit the game before that character development magic starts to happen.

But the worst crime of all was it’s a different game from Final Fantasy VII. Still, I’d argue that it features some of the slickest worldbuilding I’ve ever seen in a game.

Not too long ago, Twitter mocked a dude for calling The Last Of Us Part II the Schindler’s List of gaming, then proceeded to mock Neil Druckmann, TLOU’s director, for trying to hold to that piece of praise for dear life. It was beautiful.

Comparing games to film as a positive inherently devalues this medium, as it paints the power of film as something that only a few miraculous games can hope to achieve.

But if there’s one game we should compare to a great movie, it’s Final Fantasy VIII, and the great movie is The Godfather Part II. The most obvious reason is that both entries in their respective franchises had the absolute largest shoes to fill. But more importantly, let’s look at how they both treat their narratives. While FFVIII’s plot will forever be divisive among fans of the series, the way it tells it should not be.

The Godfather Part II is heralded not only as one of the greatest films of all time but one of the few movie sequels that might surpass the original. However, at the time of its release, Part II didn’t fare that well with some critics due to its more unorthodox approach to narrative,