Even if they didn't upgrade the backgrounds, I think they should at least patch in analog controls and fix the FPS issues.

My heart broke when i discovered the lack of analogue... it was the first game in the series to use it, and it was a HUGE deal at the time... and many environments and paths are curved to make great use of it... it really feels annoying to play when you still have such fond memories of how good it felt back then :(

When I die, I want Square Enid to lower my coffin to the ground so that they can let me down one more time.

When you finally are the best looking guy in the room after 20 years.

Clearly most of the very low res textures were never meant to be filtered and details are lost when done so, they look so much worse then the original.

I'm going to wait until the modders fix this "remaster". God bless those people.

"The Definitive Version?" lol it's Square Enix, you already know the answer

One extra frame per second in battle!! Take my money Square!!!

Really wish Square-Enix actually gave a F about their remasters.

I actually like the PS1 dithering and the the original low resolution matched the background's. The higher resolution does absolutely no favor to those low res textures and I think the characters and other objects look out of place and simply don't go well together. I'd definitely emulate the original over this one.

I'm currently downloading this game on Nintendo Switch. It's my first Final Fantasy game. So excited to play it.

Why bother remastering these games if you arent going to go through the effort to rebuild them? Squares attitude towards their own legacy is kind of insulting

This texture filtering looks really really bad. I would rather run the game with totally unfiltered blocky textures that less gratuitously expose the uv seams than "nicely filtered" blurry textures. The texture filtering lowers the contrast by a lot and the removal of the dithering removes a lot of the high frequency detail. The road out of Balamb Garden shows this really clearly. In the original it seems to be a rough paved surface with white markings on the edges. In the remastered version, it just looks like an untextured polygon strip. Saying that they "are as on ps1" grossly misrepresents what has happened to the art by changing the texture filtering and dithering. The water has lost all the "sparkling" it used to do due to the new filtering blurring background textures and the up-res of the art cutting down local contrast, the snow does not appear to be white anymore, the greenery on the cliffs has been reinterpreted as a gradient rather than a speckeled distribution of small plants, the fx textures have gotten smaller and dimmer losing much of the in-texture bloom they had. They look colossally different. Even without the assets to do a rerender, I would rather the textures of the game be left totally unfiltered.

I might be in the minority here, but I'm glad they didn't graphically upscale everything. They simply cleaned up the elements that aged badly (like the heavily-pixelated character models) and preserved everything else so that it still has that nostalgic feel.

I'll keep playing my PS1 version, and I honestly think there are no downsides to it. Everything upscaled/filtered/remodelled in HD just adds to the sense of mismatch between the assets. I am happy there's a version available out there for people who don't have old hardware, though.

I am in the minority when I say it's my favorite Final Fantasy in the entire series, but I'm obviously biased considering I was 12 at the time, I was a hopeless romantic and became a sucker for the meeting a girl who gets a reclusive guy to open up and share his feelings with others he cares about. So yeah the game got me pretty good. I didn't really mind the draw system, I understand people are not as patient as I am though, I do understand their frustration but I think that's been rectified with this remaster considering it gives you a button to fast-forward the gameplay x3. BUT even on the huge fan I honestly don't believe this remaster is priced fairly. I'm rather disappointed with the result. I understand they didn't have the source material but that just means they cobbled together a very lazy version instead of taking the time to replace a lot of the textures with higher res versions. They could've taken a little time to create identical images. There are thousands of fans that would've gladly sent in high-quality art to be used to replace the background images. It could look so much better than what we got and I don't think it's worth the price. I think what we got is more like $10. I think everyone agrees that Triple Triad pretty awesome though :P

>The Definitive Version? No. Not by a long shot.

Low res backgrounds look like ass. They should have done something to improve that. It's definitely disappointing.

nobody at square enix thought it was a good idea to burn a backup of the source to a cd to their multi million dollar game?

I personally love it in spite of the flaws. This was always my favorite FF

"Minimum Effort Edition"

I've hated this game for the past 20 years. I finally decided to give it another shot with the remaster and now I think it's one of the best FF games if not one of the best RPG's I've ever played. Everything that I used to hate like the junction system and drawing magic is actually why I like it now. I think a lot of it has to do with the ability to use 3x fast forward to get through the game a little quicker and draw magic super fast.

Square always seem to ruin ports and remasters of these games by silly corner cutting. A pity. Put some effort in.

DF thank you for the hard work, I appreciate every video u make, u help me lot in decisions.

Well, looks like my personal 'definitive' version of Final Fantasy VIII will continue to be the one I have on my homebrew PSP.

Square Enix is now officially infamous for bad remaster and ports...

I'll be replaying this game on my SD CRT, with my PS1 using HD Retrovision component cables. The true 'definitive edition', released all the way back in 1999! I got every Triple Triad Card back then, and I'm damn sure I'll do it again!

I can't wait to see what the mod community does with this remaster. I hope they make it look like something that came out in 2019, give it a huge makeover! Every texture in the game updated to something smooth and believable. I believe the most talented mod developers who work out of passion to make things look incredible

I'll stick to my original PS1 copy and play it on a CRT, thank you very much.

Great Video as always Tom! Will you have a chance to have a look at Fire Emblem Three Houses?

This has got to be one of the laziest 'HD remasters' I have ever seen! You can do better with a PS1 emulator on a phone!

Better off playing the original on emulation, or with a PS1 and a crt TV, if you have the setup.

This Game deserve a much better work.

All of those shortcomings are okay in my book except for the menu fps. That matters in a tangible way the player can feel, especially if you like to play with the ATB set to active and the battle speed cranked up.

I can't wait for the full remake they'll eventually make! At this rate we should have it in... let's see... given the development time for the FF7 remake... maybe 40 years?

I personally don´t care about the backgrounds much but the removal of the analog controls is really disappointing not gonna lie.

Low effort remaster? Not worth buying a third time in my life. Or maybe I'll get the remake in 2034.

Would be interesting comparing it to the emulated PS1 version, with all the bells and whistles

Anyone remember 4 discs came to play the full game when it first came out I miss those days' "Please Insert Disc 2" ....Loading

I'll take the PS1 version. That looks like a great looking game of the era. This remaster looks like disparate assets mashed together.

This is one of the reasons I still have my Voodoo2 Win98 box with Yamaha MIDI table synth.

The midi music glitched into my game after I reloaded my Dollet SeeD mission save 😆.. thankfully it cleared up after the next cutscene. Also the Dolby surround track on the ps1 version sounds waay better on my 5.1 system than the remaster. No rumble..no 60 fps on the renzokuken bar..man little things like that just ruin the experience. Ah well..the 3x speed boost is nice..

They should have asked fans to help on this remaster. There are people who could have helped give us better backgrounds. Also the censoring is annoying too. What a missed opportunity.

The original seems so much more natural. Also i wish that there was a Terranigma Remastered. : *(

I'd personally love to see an eventual complete Remake (à la FFVII).

Thank you, DF for all you do. I was just going to buy this blindly assuming it had to be at least as good as the original. You informed me that I was wrong. Thanks for saving me money!

The textures are NOT from the PS1 version - the remaster took most things from the old steam-release, which was based on the original PC-release, which in turn had problems with the textures. That is the origin of why Balamb-Garden and other places look so bad.

Those blurry backgrounds are super distracting, characters don't look like they're part of the world. If they fixed that with some smart AI bg magic and fixed the battle framerate + added analogue stick support I'd buy it straight away

It looks really odd with the sharp high-res character models and blurry backgrounds. So much I actually prefer the pixelated consistent look of the original PS1. I played this game about 6 months ago and I think the sweetspot for me was to use the smoothing filter the PS2 can enable in PS1 games. I agree that a upscaling the pre-rendered backgrounds to let say 4K with machine learning would be an upgrade. This is just a cheap way to re-release an already good enough looking game.

"More consistent with the FMV renders" ? Some models look better but Squall looks terrible. He looks nothing like the FMVs, more like an anime doll with dead eyes like in Dissidia. And the backgrounds look worse than the fan made AI textures.

great research as always, thank you!

Really great coverage... Excellent freakin job.

So either wait for an update to fix those issues, or buy when it's 5usd or less

What a great review! Certainly it hurts that we don't get a Remaster with all improvements it should have for the time. But well, at least it is still very enjoyable for fans, and the bossters are really great for cutting the grind.

What about the Xbox One and One X, is it 1080p as well or does OneX get 4k? I'm happy with the version we got though. I remember playing the PC demo back in the day, and as I didn't have a Playstation I never got to play the game. I was able to borrow someones PS1, and game, but there Disc 2 give me many read errors, and I was only able to get to disc 3 before having to return the system so I never got to finish it. And its been so long I don't remember much about it. I do use the 3x speed alot during times when waiting for GF to summon and during there drawn out animation. I do remember turning off rumblle in the PS1 version as the amount of rumble during GF animations got quite annoying.

I would love to see you making a video of the Bulletstorm Port on switch!

am i the only one who prefers low poly pixelated graphics over the ultimate hd remaster?

love the soundtrack for this game..the nostalgic feelingss mm

I wish the remaster had an option to disable texture filtering. A lot of these textures weren't meant to be filtered, and they look better as raw pixels.

Excellent review. Nice attention to detail.

Ill stick to the ps1 version.

I was wondering why I was missing my Renzokuken timing on remastered, I never missed it on PS1 but feel like it only works 60% of time.

Before narration started, I guessed Tom. Was not disappointed.

What are the FPS and Frame Times in 3X Speed mode?

Maybe it's just me but while playing the game during the garden invasion the game uses the midi version of the soundtrack

The definitive version is everything and anything the modders will do to improve this game.

The only thing I noticed was having to press R1 slightly earlier but that was easy enough to get used to, at least there was no weird double models like with JENOVA Synthesis and Bizzaro Sephiroth or hit boxes in the field feeling misaligned like in the FFVII Remaster(and I swear Sephiroth in that one scene in Temple of the Ancients is supposed to stop in the middle of the screen).

I really want a remaster of this one!

I thought 30 FPS menus in FF7 ports were bad, but 16? Come on :(

Playing the original version on original hardware through a CRT is the definitive way.

i really hope they improve the backgrounds later on, i see it hardly possible, but who knows

3:19 Oh, god that funny caterpillar.

Is it just me or is Squall's character model the same one from Dissidia on psp?

Ah DF, you know just where to tickle to make me happy. As for the remaster, how freaking hard is it to run these backgrounds through an AI upscaling program?!

Thanks for the useful analysis DF, as always. It proves me right again in waiting for a sale on this, given the flaws of the remaster. I played FF7 & 9 for the first time ever this year but I waited for a sale on those as they were digital only and were not very ambitious in the way they were remastered. Seems to be the same with 8. The game is not worth 20€/$ in 2019 as is. I’ll wait until it goes 40% off at least. My backlog is huge on Switch anyway so not in a hurry for this one..

i do feel like the smoothing loses how textured the ground seemed in the og version

even in 2119 square enix will still be remastering the FF games from ten years ago

I think the original looks better. Chunky pixels is a visual language (i.e. retrogaming) but soft polygons with “oily” backgrounds are not.

3:17 *Selphie inside Squall* It's exactly what we wanted.

9-9-99 I'm in the store at 6am to grab this game straight out of the shipping boxes - this game's release was so hype, especially after playing the demo over and over for however long it was. Still own the game and the very CRT I played it on back then. S-Video was good enough for me then, and still is when it comes to "reliving" the experience. Maybe one day S-E can get something right and change my mind.

11:53 Squall's hand is on the wrong way around lol

It's about what I expected. The new models are nice though. The whole package could have been better.

It was a excellent surprise to hear and see that there is a remaster of final fantasy 8 right after I began to play he game again on Playstation portable.

Original looks pixelated but best integrated with the background. The more definition you want to get, the more the defects stand out.

Thanks for the video, didn't know that they took away the possibility for analogue movement. It's a dealbreaker for me, too bad...

Can't wait until modders pic up squares slack by properly using ai learning upscaling to give us fiting backrounds

Never got to beat this game when I was a kid. The highest point in the game I got to was like right after you get Irvine and then you switch to the second disc or something I think, then I'd got stuck because my disc was messed up lol and would just glitch and not work anymore. I was always extremely disappointed about this because FF7 became one of my favorite games of all time and I always had it in my heart to add FF8 to my catalog. I never got the chance to see through to whether it would go among my favorite games of all time alongside FF7 or not. One of these days, I'm gonna finally beat it tho and find out. Same thing with FF9.

The irony being is that this remaster could have been a lot better if the developers put more effort into the PC original version considering it was 1999 and 3D cards where out, this remaster could have been much higher resolution, 60fps and looked a lot better but as the PC original was more or less a bare bone port of the console port, we all pay the price with what they can do with the remaster.

Pretty sure all these shortcomings can be remedied via beetle hw libretro core in retroarch. They give us no incentive to purchase this.

no wide screen, blurry background after 20 years.. this is lazy remaster cash grab

A great way to play this is through Autobleem on a PS Classic with widescreen and high-res turned on.

This is a great game, REGARDLESS of aspect ratio/texture issues. Whether you're a newcomer or someone who has played it before, it's an amazing experience.

Thx, will keep my $20 for now. Would be nice for an android release.

Just now picking up the game after decades ago from middle school. Comfortable w/ remastered, and at price marked down for holiday sale was exceptional. Cant wait for Triple Triad 🤣

Perfect description. Loved the video

I never played a final fantasy game but IM IN LOVE with Bravely default/second and Octopath Traveler.... Which Final Fantasy game do you guys recommend to start, I heard 3 or 7 but idk.

You guys must be busy - looking forward to Gears 5 and Divinity OS II on Switch videos!!!!!

lol 15fps Congratulation, Square Enix.

What do you mean no rumble or analogue control? I’ve been playing the PS4 version since release and I’ve been using both features just fine.

07:22 Ow man, been worry as if there only me thinking about this~ The 360° direction !