Final Fantasy 8 Remastered vs Original Comparison - The Definitive Version?

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.

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

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.

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 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

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

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.

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'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.

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?

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

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.