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 :(

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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'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.

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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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

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

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

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!

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

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!

"Minimum Effort Edition"

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

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

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

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

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

no, i dont want the backgrounds updated. I like that feel of walking around on a movie set, it adds a certain unexpected level of artistry that may or may not have been intended

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

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.

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?

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.

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

Ill stick to the ps1 version.

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

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

This Game deserve a much better work.

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

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

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..

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

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

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.

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

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

This is a very good comparison! - I watched too many videos the last few days and none of them even mentioned the fps-issues and such. So thanks for the clear explanation and comparison footage! Unfortunately I already bought this new version and I was super disappointed after playing it only for a few minutes. Well, time to wait another 20 years and MAYBE we'll get finally a new version, which comes close to the original game.

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.

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.

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

I've been "umm"ing and "ahh"ing over whether to get the remastered version for months now. Thanks to your descriptive, informative and comprehensive comparison, I've decided it's not worth my time or money buying the new version. If even only for nostalgia's sake, I'll stick with the original. Thank you so much for this video.

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

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

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

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

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.

Thank you so much. I am so disappointed I might skip this. This is one of my favorite games of all time and I don't want to play it broken. I'd rather emulate the original and play it in HD that way.

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.

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

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.

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

3:19 Oh, god that funny caterpillar.

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

I played this game in 8th grade in 99 on a TV as old or older than my NES weighed more than the AC unit in the window. It everything Full Nob channel flipper, a dial to adjust the frequency for every channel, 5 more smaller nobs for color, contrast ,etc..., and finally a state of the art black box w/ red led numbers and a chip that got 70-80ish channels of cable for free.

Hot take: a fan retranslator patch for the NTSC PS1 version is a better way to play the game.

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

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

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

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

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 🤣

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

Id much rather play the original ps1 on my old CRT i still like the aesthetic.

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?!

The FF8 remaster may suck, but at least Digital Foundry is as amazing as ever. Probably my favourite channel on RU-vid now. It’s nice listening to actual experts who so clearly know their stuff.

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

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

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

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

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.

Thank you for this video. I love FF8, but after watching this the remaster for me is a hard pass.

Really great coverage... Excellent freakin job.

Hm, so save the $19.99 and just play my old digital PS1 copy on my PS3? Got it. :-P Seriously though, what a disappointment. This is one of their crown jewels and they left the twenty year old backgrounds in, kept the battle frames per second to 15 FPS (!?!?!), censored several characters to placate their Western-oriented puritanical "ethics department," and effectively just re-released their buggy PC version with improved character models. If I didn't know any better, I'd think Square Enix doesn't value their own back-catalog and is just churning out subpar versions of their previous masterworks for some quick bucks... and that's depressing. Say what you will about the company, but I expected much better treatment of this franchise than what I'm seeing.

I'm enjoying the game a lot, but I had't played it again since the PS1 days; that said, something felt a little off from what I remember, which after seeing this video the reasons became clear: the lack of analog control and the lower framerate of the menus. This is a shame, as I can understand now being able to increase the resolution of the background images, but having less framerate for menus and losing analog controls which the PS1 version had is a little absurd. Thankfully the model updates are very nice, the gameplay is just as good, and the soundtrack hasn't lost any of its charm!

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

We really need Moguri Mod for this. Works perfectly with FF IX and makes game whole lot nicer to look.

What about the Xbox & Switch versions?

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.

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

The lack of analog controls and rumble support hurts the most. The battle framerate issue sucks but seems like it'd be harder to patch. I'd be willing to pick it up if the controller issues are fixed but would be reasonably satisfied with it if both were fixed. Better backgrounds would be nice too but they're tolerable as-is.

You know you can crit every normal attack as Squall with RB/R1, right? =)

great research as always, thank you!

plus this version have huge borders bottom and the top,which is just cut off in video. the main reason to play this,is to take trophies which was earned in childhood. thats it. best place to play is ps one originals on Vita. btw - boosters are for youngsters newcomers. speed x3 is ok,but others and especially on PC is for noobs. in summary - version for trophies ,but you can cheat them.

The 3x speed and battle assist did wonders for grinding and made it quick. I keep them off during boss battles

lol 15fps Congratulation, Square Enix.