I would like to preface this review by saying that Final Fantasy VIII is amongst my favorites in the series. I've always loved the gunblade wielded by Squall and the parts you find scattered throughout the world used for upgrading your characters' weapons. It's similar to VII but different enough to keep it refreshing.

At the risk of sounding negative, this remaster however seemed a bit lazy to me. The character models seemed to basically be the only thing that was redone, aside from a few gameplay tweaks like being able to disable random encounters and speed up the gameplay (great for farming magic and leveling). I can imagine so many things the developers could have done: updating some of the prerendered backgrounds, updating sound effects, upgrading the soundtrack from the old MIDI style to orchestral (like some of the beautiful covers/remakes that can be found on YouTube), adding more particle effects, cleaning up the menus, etc. But mostly everything has remained largely unchanged. Even the resolution is basically the same...the game is not running in true 1080p as you can see in some of the screenshots I've uploaded. The character models, as previously mentioned, were all redone for the main characters and some supporting characters but I'm not quite happy with them! If you compare the easiest example - Squall - to the cinematics, he looks completely different. I much prefer how he looks in the cinematics.

The remaster doesn't exactly cost an arm and a leg so I didn't expect too much, but after such a long wait for this to happen I was kind of hoping for more.

I still enjoy playing it because I've always loved FF VIII (and the series in general), and it's nice to be able to play on my Xbox, but I was definitely feeling a little underwhelmed.

I would recommend buying it if you haven't bought this version of the game on any other platforms yet and you're trying to play on a more modern platform, and/or if you love Final Fantasy or more specifically VIII.