Final Fantasy VIII is a fantastic game, the best game its developer has ever put out by a mile.  It takes a pair of established genres, decides they're much better off helping one another out, and runs with it, delivering a game that has little room for improvement.  Sure, the story's a bit bland, the ending felt rushed, and the interface is clunky, but the important matter is that not nearly as many people have played this game as it deserves.

Squall, the main gun-toting quiet man of this game, makes a great protagonist because he never says anything to get in the way of the story.  It just keeps moving on, allowing you to feel like YOU'RE the one being carried along on this journey.  In a mix of sci-fi, fantasy, and original elements all its own, you get to explore a world filled with guns, strange midget creatures, and flying pterodactyl creeps, and you get to kill them all!

::Whatever.gif, captioned "Whatever."::

This game is, in essence, an RPG, but it goes out of its way to mess with convention in ways that make a whole lot of sense.  Rather than giving you an unlimited pool of resources to kill things with, you have to run around and gather your ammunition from enemies, in a process called Drawing that isn't really all that annoying.  It's a neat difference from the standard RPG formula and is pretty fun!

While these RPG elements are all well and good, Final Fantasy VIII tapped into the universal truth that we all just want to shoot shit.  Every now and again, you get to control a man named Laguna (who combines with the main story in an interesting way) and shoot the living bejesus out of things, in little extra sequences that feel completely different from the rest of the game.  I find it amazing that the balance of shooting and RPG mechanics was kept as well balanced as it was.

...

Wait a minute, hold on, I got mixed up.  I've been describing a shitty game while thinking of a good one. Let's try this again.

::Borderlands::

Borderlands is a fantastic game, the best game its developer has ever put out by a mile.  It takes a pair of established genres, decides they're much better off helping one another out, and runs with it, delivering a game that has little room for major improvement.  Sure, the story's a bit bland, the ending felt rushed, and the interface is clunky, but the important matter is that not nearly as many people have played Borderands as it deserves.

Action RPGs have, for the most part, gotten predictable.  They are defined mainly by a template that Diablo perfected, with not much in the way of wholesale variations on the formula.  This isn't a bad thing, it's just stale unless done really well (like Torchlight).  Gearbox Software, apparently, noticed that while there are certain things in an action RPG that are rather integral, the actual killing of monsters doesn't have to be a point and click slash fest, and the genre doesn't have to be fantasy.  Borderlands decides to take the guts of an action RPG (find randomly generated loot, do lots of quests and kill lots of dudes) and graft it to a first person shooter.

Blending first person shooters with RPGs has been done before, with Bethesda's games (Oblivion, Fallout 3, Morrowind) being the most obvious candidates.  Those games, however, deliberately slow down the action either by using some sort of stamina meter (Oblivion) or in the case of games with guns, deliberately making the most efficient method of killing things *not* the live-action shooting, but one that skews closer to "traditional RPG stuff" (Fallout 3).  Borderlands figures that a game doesn't have to be slow-paced at all to be an RPG, and so it goes for a run and gun style that is a LOT more accessible to people who don't normally play RPGs.

::screenshot of damage coming out of something::

The shooting and RPG elements are put together in a very satisfying way.  Things that you shoot have damage numbers fall out of them, and things that are set on fire have a constant stream of damage numbers come out of them.  It's quite satisfying to see "persistent damage" like that instead of basically taking the game's word for it that the enemy is in fact taking damage.  This insistence on making the feedback to the player visual whenever possible extends to the loot.  And boy howdy, is there a lot of it.

::guns.jpg if I can find it::

As any ARPG nut can tell you, what can make or break a game of this type, first person or no, is the loot drops.  There needs to be a clear sense of progression in loot, making you feel powerful consistently.  It can't just be minute changes in numbers, you have to somehow be able to SEE the difference.  Again, Borderlands obliges visually using a combination of having the guns be all sorts of pretty colors as well as actually changing their shape based on their stats.  Have a weapon with zoom? It'll have a scope on it.  Extra magazine size?  The clip you load in's probably going to look massive to reflect that.  Is it an elemental gun? Expect little explosions of extra crap as you shoot. The guns themselves draw you in, and so do the little pillars of light that extend from them.  It's a neat touch, and works towards the goal of getting you addicted to finding loot.  You're constantly on the lookout for an orange or purple pillar, because that instantly signals RARE LOOT!

And what rare loot there is.  One of this game's biggest assets is how ridiculous the guns get.  Sure, the guns have randomized statistics and name prefixes and suffixes to match, but how many games have you played where you can pick up a shotgun and discover it shoots rockets?  How many sniper rifles have you picked up in Call of Duty that burst fire when you're aiming down the sight?  Sure, some of these hidden modifications are ridiculous or impractical, but it's fun to play with them just the same, and it's just one more thing to keep you hunting for loot.

I've spent probably too much time going into the nitty gritty of the game, I think, so I'll get to the point.  There are two things that make this game impressive and worth a look by just about anyone.

First is the way that fast-paced first-person shooting and RPGs have been successfully combined in a way that doesn't compromise much of either genre.  The gunplay is fast, feels powerful, and rewards skill as much as it does "I have more experience than you".  The role-playing, while not the deepest in the world, is well-balanced, easy to learn the terminology of, and gets out of your way when needed.  Neither genre ever pushes the other out of the way, which is damned impressive.

::coop::

The second is its fantastic coop experience.  What a lot of developers seem to forget when they emulate Diablo is that the online multiplayer provided more lasting power than the singleplayer did.  Gearbox remembered that this is just as important, if not more so, than the singleplayer campaign, and did things right all over the place here.  Especially on consoles lately, the idea of drop-in coop seems about as quaint as four-player splitscreen.  Hell, the idea of local multiplayer on consoles is a rare one, but you get 2-player local coop as well as 4-player online shootfests.  The game scales to accomodate the extra players, and the fun really gets going as everybody has to work together to take enemies down with any semblance of speed (or without dying).

Borderlands is like incredibly delicious mayonnaise.  Oil and water have no business working well together, generally speaking, but there's mayonnaise right there, and it's awesome.  Same thing with Borderlands.  It takes a deft touch to mix role-playing and shooting in a way that leaves neither feeling compromised, but Gearbox has achieved it.  You should try it, if you haven't already.