May I have two beafboals?

Next in the FF line came Final Fantasy 8, and with it came a boatload of super-hype. I mean, it was following number 7--could it possibly be even BETTER???

Kurse all SEEDs. FF8 was so stinky I never bothered to own it--I just played through someone else's copy. Not before uncovering the game's debug room, however. I can't show you as many pictures because I gave it back a long time ago and this is off a tape I made; BUT I CAN show you one of my most favorite quotes from any game ever. It's in the room at the bottom left corner....

While mildly amusing, that's not the quote. I did find out who "Moriya" was at one point, but now I've forgotten.

There's only two people in the room(not counting the party you've got), but one "student" will let you listen to any song, hear any sound effect, watch any movie, play the card game, or change the disc. Being able to change the disc is greatly appreciated--no other debug room lets you do that, and you saw the results in the FF7 version.

Choosing to listen to music makes her talk to you as you sift through the list.

"I'm hungly; may I have two beafboals" is the greatest moment of FF8, and the greatest Final Fantasy quote ever. It tops both "You spoony bard!" and "This guy are sick." It almost redeems the game. Well, not entirely.

A few months before FF8, Square released a game called Xenogears. It too had its own debug room, and

Okay, maybe it's not the most polished thing you've ever seen, but it has more options and gives you more "power" than any other debug room. Let's enter!

I don't know if I want the "demoflag" down or not, but it didn't have much bearing on anything that happened in here. I bet you didn't know that in Xenogears, taking to a cow's rear end will let you listen to any song or sound effect in the game. But that's not all, the middle door is the fabled "DOKODEMO DOOR":

This will let you easily watch any cinema in the entire game. I don't mean just FMVs, I mean any scene where you don't control a character. In a Xeno-game, this happens a lot...even more so in Xenosaga for the PS2, which you didn't play so much as watch and occasionally press something. I think you'll understand when I say that the Xeno-series is boring. Or maybe you won't....there is a legion of fans who will defend this game to the death, including my own cousin.

Nevertheless, the debug room is the only thrill I get out of this game.

I'm now in the beginners' town of the game with two of the same guy, a lamb, a cow with his own desk, an invisible cow, and some glitched-up thing. I think I'll visit with the glitched-up thing first.

I have to know a "pasward" to talk to this thing? Well aren't we exclusive! I have two other options, "test with face" and "test with no face." Um.....I'll test with face.

Umm...I think I'll have a better chance figuring out the "pasward."

Choosing "to start" gets you a menu that is half-Japanese and half boxes with X's through them. Choose an option on that, and you get another menu just as messed up. Choose from that, and I guess now it wants the password. Pushing the Triangle button makes the Playstation go, "Meow!" Pushing the Square button makes the Playstation go, "Fart!" Oh no, it's a SOUND password! I didn't stand a chance. I still don't know what this thing is supposed to do.

I thought I'd try some of the other areas instead. In this place, you're in your robots and there is a gigantic polygonic bot in the middle of the room, twitching for no reason. Whoever owns that, please clean it up.

You really have to see this one in motion to fully grasp the total strangeness of it. Those people are spinning around and around in circles, and those boxes are flying everywhere. As for options, the people in here only take you to places you could already get to through the Dokodemo Door, making everything pointless. But as this room proves, pointlessness is good.

Speaking to this dog-person changes the members in your party...only in Japanese, so you have no idea who you're changing yourself to. Now I'm the poetic cute thing from that first room! AIIIEEEEEE!!!

Now I'm in...THE BAR! The only unfreaky place in the area, where everybody knows your name. As long as your name is "Youkoso."

Talking to a lady on the right side gets you infinite numbers of any item. I got 99 Hob-Steaks!

The bartender lets you change party members, see any FMV movie, and recover yourself. If I select any movie from Disc 2, she just says "Disc2" at me and does nothing. I'm told this is the only way to see a hidden cinema on the second disc, and I couldn't make a Disc 2 debug room save because to do that I would have had to play all the way to Disc 2!

Here's the last area, and it has...only one guy in it. He doesn't do much either. You can run to the end of that road in this place though, and see where it meets the sky. Other than that, there's no action here.

It was around the time FF8 came out that hackers started finding debug rooms in Square games, and Square must have heard, because from 2000 on all the debug rooms from their new games have been removed. What nerve. Debug rooms can make a great game better and a lousy game ownable. If the floor talked to me in FFX, maybe I would have liked that one more.


Thanks for sharing that. I guess now I'll test you with no face as well.