For about 20 minutes, Final Fantasy VIII completely changes genre and it’s fucking awesome. About midway into Disc 1, Squall and the SeeDs are enlisted to kidnap the president of Galbadia from a moving train. As soon as you get on the train with the Timber Owl dissidents, FF8 stops being and RPG and it starts being more like Fast & Furious, the other FF we respect here.
Before the mission even starts, Rinoa walks the team through the mission with the help of a model railroad. This leads to maybe the single funniest line in the game, when Selphie criticizes the quality of Rinoa’s train model:
Jesus, Selphie.
Then the mission begins, and for my money, it is pound-for-pound just as good as the best action sequences in Metal Gear Solid or Driver or whatever other action games were out at the time, and, what the hell, any of the 90s Bond movies, for that matter.
Squall and his team have five minutes to sneak across the roof of the train, avoid guards, and separate the train cars. The game wrings absolutely everything it can out of the PlayStation to create the illusion that you’re on top of a train hurtling through the woods. Periodically, it transitions to a pre-rendered cutscene of the train careening down the tracks, during which you can still control the party! It feels like wizardry for a PS1 game. Square knew that players could tell the difference between in-game graphics and cutscenes, so it merged them together.
Nothing else like this happens for the rest of the game. There are other one-off activities over the course of the story, but nothing at the level of THIS.
And that’s not all that happens! There’s a recurring comic relief cutaway to a Galbadian soldier who’s fretting whether he can afford an engagement ring for his girlfriend. After you hijack the train car with the president, it turns out he’s a body double who turns into a giant skeleton mutant named Gerogero who looks like the mascot of Iron Maiden! Fuck! What the fuck!
I was trying to nail down why I liked this so much, other than the fact that it’s super goddamn cool. I think it’s about genre.
Final Fantasy VIII is not by any stretch an action game. In fact, there’s not really any action-y elements to the train heist, even though it’s an action set-piece. But whatever’s happening here is clearly not a role-playing game as they are usually defined. It makes me think about how much time in RPGs is spent walking around and talking to people, not fighting or managing your stats (if those are part of the game at all!). I think you could argue that for a game as loosely structured like this, the progress of the story and the characters is more important than systems and battles.
It does not feel out of place for FF8 to shift gears like this, because it makes sense for your party to go on this kind of mission! It’s not like there’s a racing game out of nowhere. You’re doing SeeD stuff! Your first mission in Dollet involved a bunch of fighting and a chase sequence, and now this mission involves a train heist. I feel the same way about this scene as I do about the Kasumi loyalty mission from Mass Effect 2: It’s creating a new experience within the template of the game by coloring a little outside the lines.
Games need more moments where they’re allowed to try new things and breathe outside their genre. A game that’s technically in the same genre as Dungeon Master should be allowed to have a train hijacking stealth-action sequence like a fucking Fast & Furious movie. If you don’t agree, you suck. If you don’t like the Timber train mission, you suck.