This Valentine’s Day, why not go and play the greatest love story ever told in gaming?

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It’s probably no surprise that the most romantic Final Fantasy game was inspired by Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, is it? Final Fantasy 8, set with the unenviable task of following on from one of the most successful RPGs ever released, needed to rewrite the series’ DNA. It couldn’t simply retread the ground of Midgar and conjure up some facsimile of Cloud and Sephiroth’s story. No, it had to pull the series up by the roots, and start growing something wholly new.

This post contains spoilers for the events of Final Fantasy 8 (and Romeo & Juliet, but come on, we all know what happens).

Fitting, then, that our story starts in a Garden. That’s the name of the school-cum-mercenary academy in which the main character, Squall, sets out on his journey. In an operatic, cinematic, and didactic opening cutscene, we see Squall engaged in a gunblade battle with erstwhile rival and antagonist, Seifer Almasy. Here, the stage is set: our young, floppy-haired weirdo is the hero, and his blonde, handsome friend is the villain. They wear black and white, but not the way around you expect. Because in the world of Final Fantasy 8, nothing is quite as binary as that.

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