Want to experience Final Fantasy VIII without struggling against enemies or waiting on super-long cutscenes and dialogue sessions? An update for the PC version of Square Enix’s 15-year-old RPG makes it so, so easy.
When Final Fantasy VIII showed up on Steam late last year, it came complete with a “Magic Booster” cheat, which granted players mass quantities of magic spells to play with. This week’s update greatly expands the Booster.
Now the Magic Booster not only gives players 100 of each spell in the game, it also gives them the maximum in-game currency available. The Battle Assistance booster ensures players always have a full ATB gauge, full hit points and always-on Limit Breaks. The 9999 cheat makes most attacks, Limit Breaks and summons hit for the max 9999 damage, while AP Max gives players max ability points for levelling up their Guardian Forces.
As if all that wasn’t enough, High Speed Mode speeds up many game events by up to five times, making it the perfect tool for speed runs.
Final Fantasy VIII is currently on sale at Steam for $US7.19. If you’ve been itching to play, now’s the time, cheater.
Final Fantasy VIII now updated with new features! [Square Enix]
Comments
28 responses to “Final Fantasy VIII PC Update Brings Fresh Cheats, High Speed Mode”
Yeah, lets take all the challenge out and make it a “push x to win” game.
Final Fantasy, particularly from that era, is about story. I know personally I always felt combat in FFVIII was just completely unapologetic padding. It’s a JRPG, combat is never a challenging it’s just something to turn a story into a 90 hour game (I’d argue it was always push X to win, it was just set up your characters then push X a freakin’ lot to win). I mean 99% of the time you’re fighting against stuff that dies in a turn or two and doesn’t even fit in with the game world. If the NPCs acknowledged that there were monster kites flying around outside it would completely shatter the atmosphere.
I’m a completionist so in the old days I was happy to sink countless hours into a JRPG, but I’ve got better things to do with my time now so if I ever go back to these sorts of games using a trainer or emulator tricks is probably the only way I’ll do it. Although I will say I’d prefer it if they just removed the padding, made it so that the fights that remained in the game had pre-determined stats/etc on everything and retuned it all to be a sort of a story based game with battle sequences. This sort of Action Replay style stuff isn’t exactly a clean way of streamlining.
I love FF7 & 8 story, but the battles are pretty boring by todays standards. Its a chore to play through. This is why id love a remake of FF7 to re-experience the story, not the actual gameplay.
Games aren’t about measuring your penis, guy.
If I ever met someone who used the booster, I’d spam renzokuken (the PROPER way) on them and call them a chicken wuss. As much as I adore FF8, I acknowledge its brokenness and easiness to breeze through it, so there is zero need for this cash grab
100% Agree – The magic booster is the most childish disgusting way to ruin a great game.
~If a game is not challenging then the only person your cheating on is yourself~
I dunno, the magic booster is the only one I’d consider using because I just don’t want to draw 100 of each magic in battles again.
Lmfao, chicken wuss
CRY BABY ZE-ELL!
Why is the GP booster even needed. Do a few SeeD exams and you have more money than needed already
The earlier magic booster was fine because while it did make you kind of overpowered earlier in the game, by about disc 2 It really only saved you from grinding draw-magic off enemies for junctioning and you could fairly easily make your characters more brokenly powerful without it in the base game given time. These latest additions just seem way over the top.
They wasted time doing this but ignore the endless cries on the forums for them to fix the music like they did with the ff7 pc port last year.
Why put effort in to fix what the (amazingly dedicated and totally deserving of recognition from Squeenix) community will fix for you? Roses and Wine!
RaW mod will fix that right up 🙂 even adds some new unique music in palces too.
What about those who would love to relive the story but just don’t have the time for a proper play through, especially when there are so many other games they have yet to play? As soon as school holidays started, I used to move the TV into my room and sink hours upon hours into a start to finish 100% completion run of the game. It has been awhile since I have been at school, so I don’t have the time nor inclination to do that, but would love to experience the story again.
Hell, I’d pay for a version without random encounters and only main bosses where the game let you chose to automatically be re-leveled, or fought for you.
I didn’t even wait for school holidays. When I got a new game I’d come home after school, turn on the TV and play until I had to go to bed (or back to school). The only reason these games lasted more than two weeks is that I insisted on maxing out as much as possible. I’m just lucky I couldn’t afford to buy all the games I wanted. If I had of had a non-stop stream of these things I would have never done anything else. =P
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I don’t see how speedrunners would like this. Speedrunners like to complete the original game in the shortest amount of time possible. Getting the ability to skip cutscenes is nice, but getting the ability to skip the game via cheating kinda goes against the idea of speedruns.
LOL @ skipping the cutscenes… wth
That’d be like skipping the cutscenes in MGS.
@neo_kaiser That’s sort of a bad choice of words. They mean ‘all scenes’ in the sense of all of the game scenes, not all cut scenes (I think they even confused themselves when writing the description). It doesn’t skip anything it’s just a toggle that removes the frame rate limit. So if you’re doing a long and tedious battle you can just toggle high speed mode and compress a 30 minute fight into 2 minutes.
Still not that useful for speed runners though. I would imagine if they were going to use a feature like that they’d measure off the game clock not a real clock, so they’d want it to slow the game down not speed it up.
Now I’ve played around with these I think I’m going to just use High Speed mode and skip the other boosts. If they had one to remove/reduce the amount of trash fights I’d probably use the others to make boss fights work, but as it is they’re pretty pointless because you still have to do all the fights.
Where’s my FF9 re-release!?
^That would be nice but i want FF6, Xenogears and Vagrant Story more
Already played through the PC version when it came out, was still easy enough then 😛
The old endlessly respawning Elnoyle in Esthar with No-Enc trick continues to pay dividends 15 years later.
Hit the training room and get to level 20 before Ifrit. Job done.
FF8 was one of the great games where it didnt matter if you fought enemies or not as they leveled up with you so it never mattered if you had to be a higher level before you got to an area or not plus some of the magic that reduces or increases enemy levels made the game more interesting as well plus give awesome experience.
Only thing I disliked was the Seed system once you got max level but it could drop your rating if you wern’t playing well enough and I don’t think it could increase again if it did.
I would like a version of ffviii in which you put in you name, press x and let the cpu do the rest of the work while I sit back on the couch and watch.
Now that I think of it, the whole idea of putting in your name and pressing x sounds like to much work. Surely there must be a easier way
You just invented Youtube Let’s Plays!
So many elitist assholes.