The Best Video Game
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Final Fantasy VIII was one of the biggest selling
games of 1999. The next installment is set to repeat the success.
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There
are three things that matter in a movie, goes a joke beloved of
Hollywood film producers: "The script, the script and the script."
Fitting then that Final Fantasy, from Japan's Squaresoft, should
be the latest computer game to get the big screen treatment. What
sets the series, now in its ninth installment, apart from other
games is its storyline.
In Final Fantasy VIII you play Squall Leonhart, a surly ball of
17-year-old angst. Your mission: graduate from your elite military
academy, save your land from a warring neighbor and find love with
the free-spirited beauty Rinoa Heartilly. Mix in a dozen characters,
magic, action and betrayal and you've got a plot that the average
gamer can lose themselves in for months. So far 6.6 million have.
Episode IX looks set to repeat the feat. In its first month of release
in Japan it has sold 2.8 million copies, taking the tally for the
entire anthology to over 30 million units. That's a blockbuster
in anybody's language.
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