It’s been a long time coming, but the polished-up version of Final Fantasy VIII has finally landed on the App Store. It’s been tweaked and prodded to make it fit better in the palm of your hand, and it fills in a glaring gap in Square Enix’s mobile output – you can now play every FF game from 1 to 9 on your iPhone.
Final Fantasy VIII is one of the most divisive games in the series. It was a pretty big departure from the smash hit that was FF7, changing up everything from the aesthetic to the combat system. It did have a sword-gun though, which we can all agree is pretty awesome.
The game tells the story of Squall and Rinoa, star-crossed lovers embroiled in a furious battle to save the planet. As you’d expect from a Final Fantasy game from the PS1-era there are big themes, quite a lot of angst, and more than a bundle of cut scenes.
The mobile version adds some extra tweaks to make the game a bit more pocket friendly. You can speed most of it up, skip battles altogether or set it so your HP and MP are always full. You can, of course, play the game how it was originally released as well.
Final Fantasy VIII is definitely worth playing. It’s a massive game full of interesting ideas, and probably doesn’t deserve its status as the bad egg of the PS1 FF games. You’ll need at least 2.55GB to install it though, so bear that in mind.
Click here and you can download Final Fantasy VIII: Remastered from the App Store. It’ll set you back $16.99. That’s a special price for the first week of its release, and it’ll go up to $20.99 on April 4th.