Khayl's PS1 Memories | Push Square

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I've had a love for words as long as I can remember. According to Adam family legend, this stems from my childhood, where I was impatient to play my older brothers' video games and taught myself to read at an impressively young age (the specifics are lost to time).

I have strong memories of him playing JRPGs, first on SNES and then later on PS1 with Final Fantasy 7; I know that once I could read well enough, he never did get the controller back. But while VII is the first game I can remember watching along with, knowing it was too advanced, it was the vastly superior Final Fantasy 8 that I would tackle alone, ultimately setting me on a life-long path.

I doubt that I got it at launch. We generally got games several months later in Australia back in the day, which many take for granted. Released in 1998, I was probably 11 or 12 when I got my hands on a copy, the perfect age to think the edgy Squall Leonhart and his gunblade was the epitome of cool.

To this day, I've never rolled credits on the game; there is no way of knowing how many hours I dumped blissfully wandering around the overworld or even over how long a span this took. But as it turns out, I played FF8 quite extensively, ultimately getting stuck on the final Seifer fight inside Lunatic Pandora, a point of no return, with no way to grind to overcome the obstacle. Great design, Square.

When I revisited the game as an adult over a decade later, I was shocked at how nostalgic everything about it remained: characters, concepts, music, and plot. There are so many incredible moments sprinkled throughout. The unforgettable introductory cinematic, the Timber train decoupling sequence, the assassination attempt on the sorceress, Edea, and the subsequent duel with her knight, Seifer, and the awe-inspiring Battle of the Gardens (the pinnacle of FMV and real-time action, at least in my opinion).

Particularly memorable was the sequence in space, where Squall has to catch romantic love interest Rinoa as she floats off