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The two-CD Anthology is slated for an early October release. On May 15 in Japan, Square unveiled to an enthusiastic press the latest installment in what is undeniably the most popular RPG series in the entire world. Always careful not to reveal too much too early, Square has only released a few minor tidbits about the game so far, as well as some screenshots and information regarding the game's first two main characters, Squall Leonhart and Laguna Loire.

At the press conference in Japan, and then again at E3, they showed off a brief video of the game, showcasing mostly FMV scenes and some early battle sequences from the game, which according to Square, is currently about 20 percent complete.

The scene then changed to seven fighter jets airships? Afterward, we saw a fleet of huge ships forging through the sea. Standing on the deck of one of the ships was Squall, who checks out a map before suddenly dropping into a flashback sequence that shows him running through a desert, being chased by an armed vehicle.

After this sequence, the video went on to show various battle scenes filled with flashy special effects , more FMV clips and a few in-game scenes. A couple of scenes worth noting were the awesome Leviathan summon spell which is shown wiping out a huge spider-like mech robot , as well as the aforementioned satellite tower unleashing a massive attack on unsuspecting opposition.

Needless to say, the video was impressive. When asked about the theme of Final Fantasy VIII, the game's producer, Hironobu Sakaguchi, responded "There are lots of elements in the game, but one of the members of the team. Sakaguchi explained that he wants to pursue a more in-depth and detailed story line for FFVIII, and he's seeking a more effective graphical expression for the storytelling. He added that he hasn't forgotten about the interactive elements that make it a video game, though.

This too will help make the in-game characters look more like their FMV counterparts. And last but certainly not least, for the first time in the series, all of your party members will be shown on the field at the same time.

No more will you have one guy walking around when suddenly three people jump out of him to start chatting. Now everyone will be shown simultaneously, all the time.

The best news of all at this press conference concerned the game's release date. While it won't be released in Japan until "sometime this winter" which basically means anytime before the end of the fiscal year next March , the U. Another demo--this time playable-will come bundled with Brave Fencer Musashiden when it is released in November.

We'll have our own playable demo on July 14 when Brave Fencer Musashiden hits Japan, so expect more coverage of what will surely become the most anticipated game of real soon. Squall is a poker-faced, short-spoken man who carries a unique sword known as the "Gunblade.

He's a bit of a loner according to Square he has "little sense of comradeship for the people around him" , and he wears a necklace that bears a strange griffon-like symbol the same one that can be seen near the barrel on the Gunblade.

According to character designer Tetsuya Nomura, he wanted the character's name to have the meaning of a passing shower, which is how he came up with the name Squall. His last name, Leonhart, was the name of one of the main characters from an earlier 8-Bit Final Fantasy for the Famicom which never came to the United States.

This isn't the first time Square has brought back names from earlier games in the series Unlike Squall, Laguna is a man of heart. He knows love and respects his duties. According to Square, he's an optimistic and vigorous person who enjoys the confidence bestowed in him by those around him. Not much else is known about him yet, but we do know that he's a former soldier who now works as a journalist. Apparently, Laguna and Squall, while both main characters, reside on different worlds.

How their paths will cross hasn't yet been revealed, but the idea of possibly playing with two entirely different characters from the outset is quite attractive. Whatever the case, we'll know more on this as it develops. According to Nomura-san, the inspiration for the name Laguna came from none other than Laguna Beach, Calif.

Unless you are new to video games or have been living in a cave, chances are you have heard of the Final Fantasy games. This could very well be one of the most popular game franchises of all time. I have a small confession to make, though—I have never played any of the past Final Fantasy games, so FF 8 is my first exposure to this world.

Do I think that all of the hype is justified? Not sure about that, but it is still a pretty amazing game. FF 8 is a four-CD romp through a huge world that develops characters like no other game that I have seen before. Great graphics, great music and a deep storyline are the highlights of this game. The CG is nothing short of amazing and I can't wait to see what Squaresoft will be able to do with the next generation PSX, because what they have managed to squeeze out of the underpowered PSX will blow you away.

While I was playing through this game, I kept a detailed notes sheet next to me that I used to record things I liked about the game and things that I was not so crazy about. To be honest, my list of things that I was not so crazy about ended up almost as long as the things that I liked, but that does not mean that the game was bad. I think that due to the enormous amount of hype associated with this game, I reviewed it with a much more critical eye than I would other games so as you are reading this review, keep this in mind.

As I mentioned above, I have never played any of the Final Fantasy games. Most of them were made for bit consoles so I never had a chance to play them. For some reason, I never played it either. For those of you who do not even know what type of games they are, let me fill you in: The Final Fantasy games are role playing games RPGs. From what I have read on the past games along with playing this game, I think it is safe to say that they all focus on great storylines and character development.

Since storyline has been a staple of the franchise, let's start there. All I can really say is "wow. You will take your character through training, missions, and battles; throw in some romance and you will find yourself waiting for the next twist in the plot. Nothing can prepare you for everything that this game has to offer. Let me just say that if you are big into the storylines of RPGs and who isn't? Going along with the storyline is great character development.

You will meet and develop a ton of different characters, each with their own unique personalities. You have the opportunity to change the names of some characters to your liking and I have to admit, this really helped me develop a bond with the characters.

There are plenty of twists and surprises along the way and you will even end up controlling whole teams of different characters. Another thing that will be sure to please Final Fantasy fans is the length of this game. You will not finish it overnight, that is for sure. It is made up of four CDs and each one will take at least 10 hours to play through. The game is so long that it almost starts to feel like a different game after a while not in all areas, though.

Part of the reason that it takes so long to play through is also one of my complaints, though. I felt like a spectator more than a participant a lot of the time. As the story unfolds, you will find yourself sitting back and just watching CG scenes or reading text dialog on the screen and there is no way to skip past it. Your are stuck watching and that means there is no way you can make the game go any faster.

As long as we are talking about complaints, let me hit my biggest. I really don't like turn-based combat. This may be insulting to some Final Fantasy veterans but I personally don't care for it. To me, it makes me feel completely disconnected from the battles: Press a button and just sit back and wait for something to happen that is completely out of your control.

Now they did try to add a small element of real-time action by allowing you to press a button just as your character strikes an enemy to try increasing the hit points that are inflicted on your opponent, but it really did not make me feel any more involved. Hell, I got to the point where I would just keep pressing the X button during battles without even really paying attention to what was going on.

Sure, there was the occasional magic that I would cast but for the most part, the battles were just so uninvolving that I lost interest. Speaking of battles, I have another complaint. There were way too many random battles. I like games where you can actually see something and choose to enter a battle or not. I don't mind an occasional surprise attack, but every 15 steps is a bit much for my tastes.

Since I don't really like turn-based battles either, this made the game all the more frustrating for me. I also thought the bosses took way too long to kill. Some took up to 30 minutes before they finally died and it just got plain boring at times. I can't tell you the number of times I yelled at the TV for the stupid boss to just die already so I could move on. And to top it all off, you do not get any experience points when you kill the bosses. That sucks! I battle for 30 minutes and gain no experience?

My final complaint with the game is that there were just too many instances where I was an innocent bystander and had no control over what was happening in the game.

There were times that I felt I was watching a semi-interactive movie or something. In my mind, a big part of what makes a game great is the way that it pulls you into the world of the game. Just as this was starting to happen in FF 8 , I would watch a cut scene or 15 minutes of dialog that I had no input on.

This really made it difficult for me to get sucked completely in. I don't know what to say here other than WOW! This game is absolutely amazing in the graphics department.

Even though I just complained about the cut scenes, at least they looked awesome. Wait until you see the dance scene and then the train scene.

These are two that you will encounter fairly early on and these alone will give you some motivation to keep playing. The in-game graphics are impressive as well. When summoning magic, you will see some of the best-looking graphics around. It is just too bad that after you have seen the animations once or twice, you can't skip them if you want. One quick note on the audio of the game.

First, the music was absolutely incredible and fits the game perfectly, but where are the voices? I don't understand why some games don't record voices. It would have helped out tremendously if the cut scenes and the dialog scenes were narrated. I know voices take up a lot of space, but hell, it is already four CDs long. Why not make it five and include voices? I would say my overall first experience in the Final Fantasy arena was pretty positive.

I know that I harped on the negatives, but I think that it is important for people to see what I did not like about the game. Most of the issues were not really major but instead kept the game from being top-notch. As it stand, fans of Final Fantasy are sure to be pleased and non-fans should enjoy the game as well. Man, I just can't say enough about the graphics in this game either.

After you play all the way through this game, you will not be able to say that you did not get your money's worth, that is for sure. The wait for PC owners is finally over and the next installment of this popular RPG series is upon us. Taking on the role of Squall Leonhart or whatever you choose to name him you battle outlandish monsters to become the newest member of SeeD, a mercenary organization with a mysterious background.

Of course that is only the beginning, as a rebellion plans to topple a president, a powerful woman vies for power, and your party tries to get to the bottom of their own recurring dreams.

Once again mixing sci-fi and fantasy, the eighth in the Final Fantasy series takes you through even more plot twists and intrigue than ever before. The major departure is how you divvy up your abilities among your party members.

While in FF7 you attached special crystals to your weapons, and thus gained experience in the abilities associated with that specific crystal, FF8 links all abilities through your Guardian Forces GF.

These Guardian Forces have gone from being a unique once-per-battle special attack to becoming a staple of your attacks. Based on which GF you choose, you are able to use, research, and increase certain powers. At first, this process called junctioning is incredibly confusing, but after several hours of gameplay you will begin to get the idea and, more importantly, appreciate the amount of freedom this affords in character growth. While the Guardian Forces animations are as creative as ever and truly a highlight of FF7 and FF8 , I found they started to become redundant as I used them over and over again.

I began to wish I could just skip part of the full-animated sequence. Another annoyance is in the way that you gain your GFs. While some are attained through major plot points, some have to be drawn stolen off of main bosses.

As far as I can tell, if you forget to draw the GFs at the opportune time, you cannot come back later and pick them up. Since GFs, in my opinion, are one of the major selling points for FF8 , finding out that I missed a couple and would have to play the game from the beginning to pick them up again, really cheesed me off.

While the 3D graphics have been tremendously improved from the Playstation version, Final Fantasy 8 still looks dated and worst of all inconsistent. Why is that so bad? Imagine the frustration of seeing a beautifully animated cut-scene and they are truly great, much better than FF7 for PC and then walking through a 3D map where it is next to impossible to decipher that these blobs are forests and those round donuts are buildings.

For PC owners who are used to the 3D graphics of Homeworld , or even the 2D graphics of Riven , these sloppy pixel stews will disappoint. Like with the graphics, the audio department has the essence right but fails to take advantage of the PC platform.

The music is catchy, moody, and even climactic at times, but comes across like a midi file running on my old Why not fully orchestrated CD audio? Why not at least FM radio quality? Don't believe it! Final Fantasy Vlll's graphics differ from FFVII's in a few important ways First, more realistic looking protagonists have replaced the cutsey super-deformed characters.

Second, you can always see every character in your party inscead of just your primary characcer. The battles have also been enhanced svith cool new touches, like enemies who fell to the ground when they're defeated rather than just vanishing. Thankfully, some visual elements of FFVII--such as the pre-rendered backgrounds and the high-quality cinemematic interludes that helped pace the action--are still intact. FFVIII will support both the analog control, which is pressure sensitive your characters will either walk or un depending on how far you press the suck , and the Dual Shock, which adds some good vibrations during battle.

The developers at Square Soft have opted to do away with the Materia system from FFVIII but they Gid retain Limit Breaks devastating offensive maneuvers , For more control, you now perform them by pressing and holding the R1 button at key moments during battle. In the demo version, you play as Squall, a sword-toting soldier in charge of a three-person party. The soldiers under your command are Zell, a hothead who specializes in martial arts, and Rinoa, a fetching female fighter, who uses a boomerang-like projectile.

Water effects, fire effects, ice, lightning, non-elemental - all of those were lovingly worked on by the graphics artists and are absolutely stunning to watch. However, the effect, unfortunately, does wear thin after a hundred or two castings.

Some might actually start to hate it after three or four. Just to give you an idea, the animation of Shiva, the ice elemental, takes approximately 15 seconds to play out - while the animation of Eden, the most powerful Guardian Force in the game, takes a full 76 seconds. Of course, the more powerful the Guardian Force, the more likely you are to have a tolerance as to the length of the animation - but an option to shorten them may have been quite nice.

Same thing for movies: you cannot skip them, which can get to be quite a drag, especially for the intro movie though, again, it does look absolutely ILM [Industrial Light and Magic - the people who brought us all the Star Wars effects]. Though fortunately, once you discover the GF ability called 'Boost', it will entertain you endlessly, or for at least another couple of hundred castings, as you mindlessly smash the 'A' button to make your GF execute an additional points of damage.

Next up on the list is the modified magic system. To fill you in, in Final Fantasy VII, you would equip what was known as Materia the easiest parallel would be spells in traditional RPGs which would add certain capabilities to your character. Without going into too much detail, they would do things such as allow your character to heal himself, summon certain creatures, automatically retaliate when attacked without needing an extra turn, cast minor elemental spells, and so forth.

In FF8, while the idea of having spells was kept, the way it was implemented was drastically changed. Now, the main item in the inventory of any character is the Guardian Force or GF, as it is referred to in the game, and which is often cause for some rather amusing associations. There are many GFs in the game, but the main similarity in them is that they don't come to you asking for wisdom and guidance, but you have to either defeat them or Draw them from your opponents - more on Drawing later on.

That can be quite a drag, since you will often not think about drawing it from an opponent, but in general, appears to be a good system. Drawing is new to Final Fantasy, and it works thusly. When you fight an enemy, whether a boss or a regular enemy, you can draw magic or a GF from him, and Stock it in your character's magic inventory. You can then cast the Stocked spell using the Magic menu.

The upside of this is that a character is not limited to the extremely low number of Materia slots like in FF7; on the other hand, drawing too much magic different kinds becomes extremely cumbersome in the sense that it's absolutely impossible to find anything in the menu anymore. As well, as you draw more of the junctioned magic, its effect will increase.

As you play on, you might draw 40 more Fire magics from enemies, and that statistic will automatically rise with each new magic joined. You aren't only limited to drawing from monsters, too - often, you will run across Draw Points, which look like several intertwining pink streams, but they aren't quite as frequent, and can only be used once, while the monsters can be drawn from indefinitely. Unfortunately, what I said above doesn't come in too useful, or at least at the beginning of the game.

Why, might you ask? In the specific example that I gave above, it assumes that you execute a physical attack on your enemy, whether with a gun, a sword, a whip, a fist, or whatever else can inflict pain.

In FF8, though, almost never at least at the beginning will you use physical attacks - simply for the reason that they don't do nearly as much damage as they should to make them worthy. Even with upgraded weapons, I don't seem to be able to do over damage with the special 'trigger' move of Squall - and that, to bosses that have 16, HP or more. Incidentally, in FF8, whenever you do happen to attack using your sword, you can virtually double the normal amount of damage that it inflicts if you press the trigger button E by default just at the right time - that is, when the blade just starts to touch the opponent.

Another complaint that I have about normal attacks is that limit breaks are extremely hard to achieve. Not cool. The story is where SquareSoft always shines, in the best of times and in the worst of times.

The story of FF7 fascinated many and kept them glued to the screen of their TVs and their PCs for hours unend, battling the forces of evil, the Shinra, the Weapons, and all that bad stuff taken together.

FF8 differs little: while I haven't finished the game yet, so far, the story while not exactly out of a Hitchcock movie, where, to put it lamely, when someone opens a door you can't be sure it'll be opened all the way - much less about what's on the other side is quite wonderful. As many might know, the theme is based around love the "touchy-feely stuff" , and revolves around Squall, a newcomer to the ranks of SeeD, an elite for-hire mercenary force.

Before we go on, however, allow me a quick sidetrack. Why is it that SquareSoft's main characters are consistently named after weather effects? First Cloud, now Squall? And more, why does the adverse competing power always have a similar name? First Sephiroth, now Seifer? Anyway, moving on. As the story unfolds, at a first glance, you see an arrogant young man, caring little about those around him, and brushing off any emotional approaches from anyone as irrelevant and 'soft'.

But as the background of his childhood is revealed throughout the game, you realize that he isn't an arrogant asshole, but rather nothing but a scared child, who lost his sister in early childhood and spent most of it searching for her, needing her guidance, protection and loyalty.

For those of you into Japanimation, think of Ikari Shinji - that was the first thing I thought of. So as he moves through the world of FF8, Squall realizes more and more that he isn't alone, and he can't be alone forever, and more and more does he go deep into himself, searching, looking for his real self. His emotional problems are often revealed in quotes like " Why doesn't someone come and tell me what to do?

That means I'll be relying on others again It just so happens, as well, that he can't meditate in peace, either - an evil sorceress didn't see that one coming is trying to take over the world didn't see that one coming , and he is more or less the only person that can save the world didn't see that one coming , along with his ragtag band of friends and comrades. Though, fortunately, they are significantly more articulate - the translation is much better than FF7 - and you will no longer see phrases like "Shinra're the VERMIN for killing the Planet!

So shu'up jackass! So, what else is in the game? This is the stuff-I-forgot department. First of all, the Card Game. If you played Magic: The Gathering back in high school, you'll probably think this is familiar. Well, it's not, that's what I thought too. But it is the best analogy: you have monsters, and you make them fight. Sort of like gladiators, but not quite. You have monster cards, of varying levels, and each card has 4 digits on it, aligned in a north-south-east-west fashion. There's a board, on which the cards are laid, and depending on the rules of the game, there might be or might not be spaces that boost or retract from a card's digits.

The idea is, that once someone puts down a card, you want to match his card with a card of a higher value on the side that touches it: so if someone puts down a card that has a 3 on top, you'd want to put a card right above it with a 4 on the bottom or higher.

There are also other things you can do, such as defeat not one but multiple cards, through Combos, Pluses and others; but those are more advanced rules, and they serve no purpose other than unnecessarily complicate this explanation. As you travel around the world, you will gain new cards, and will encounter different opponents of varying strengths - and some will teach you new rules, whether bad or good.

Once you learn the new rules, you will distribute them to all other players you play with, so watch out that you don't distribute rules you hate to play with, such as Random which no longer allows you to choose your deck of cards, but they are picked at random instead.