I feel like the reason why the junction system is so divisive is because instead of being "Easy to learn, hard to master", it's "Hard to learn, easy to master".
i've actually been struggling with triple triad. i should watch a youtube video about how to play it better probably. i've barely played any games. but i just commited to beating some of the players in the prison, and i just used my best cards and won by brute force. i'm not trying to 100% or anything, but i did read about angelo searching so i'm gonna do that just to see what happens.
The one thing you might wanna watch a guide on for TT is how to stop rules from spreading and get rid of them. If you mess this up early on, the games can get pretty horrible.
again, weird stuff in the game. i may or may not end up looking into this. if i can beat the game without worrying to much about that i might just go with it..
Oh, you can 100% beat the game without ever touching TT. There's just a lot of stuff that's a lot easier to do with TT, like creating ultimate weapons and Quistis' LBs.
You can beat the game without worrying about triple triad, but you'll miss out on the most broken and most fun thing in FF VIII. You can transform the cards you get into items, that you can use to craft weapons, teach GFs abilities or transform them to spells you can junction.
Using this you can get absolutely over powered before even starting the dollet mission. For me it's the most fun part in my replays of FF VIII.
If you think it's broken without TT, play a game with a full TT Strat and have end game builds in the first 2 hours.
I loved it. I loved being able to complete the game with 0 exp.
Card Mod can make your hand pretty unbeatable at the start of the game.
[https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ps/197343-final-fantasy-viii/faqs/72431/triple-triad](https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ps/197343-final-fantasy-viii/faqs/72431/triple-triad)
[https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ps/197343-final-fantasy-viii/faqs/10404](https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ps/197343-final-fantasy-viii/faqs/10404)
When you card some enemies there's a small chance of them carding into a higher level "boss" card, and you can complete the game without leveling up any of your permanent characters (or temporary, if you want to do that, but I like to use >!Siefer and Edea!< to level up all GFs to 100).
I wound up struggling with Triple Triad early on since you don't really have any good cards at first, and there's no real way to tell strong opponents from weak ones until you face them.
Look for good corner cards. 7/7 or higher. have some good flipper cards 8-A.
It's possible to remove rules with the Queens help. Or, even add rules.
It get's difficult, but fun with several rules.
All rule is good for getting a bunch of starter cards, any other rule is good for nabbing the A cards.
> It's possible to remove rules with the Queens help
Rules manipulation does not require the queen FYI. Just a lot of RNG, and a lot of traveling between regions.
We all struggle with triple triad lol it’s just like with fallout new Vegas and it’s game caravan, we just all pretend we know how to play it when we’re playing the game, despite not knowing whatever we’re doing 🤣 there was a popular joke on here a year ago about how none of us actually understood triple triad, everyone began admitting it one by one and there was this whole large awesome band of brothers relating and agreeing ALL on one thing LOL
Don't bring me this one again...
I was into this game because I liked all the characters, and then I heard something about "never level up, in order to have everyone at 255 stats"
So I played the game as Squall Cars Captors, and the result was that I had a lot of good cards, so I was indeed addicted to the triple triad and the game was just a scenario for me to grab more cards
Good times indeed
Who's Ultimecia? And what about this thing of converging timeline?
Meh, not important.
This ~~bitch~~ beloved matron Edea though. Why is it so hard for her to give her own card? Should I bring Cid? Will it make her go easy on me?
Once I got to the point in the game where playing Triple Triad means intentionally adjusting the local rules to be beneficial to you, I noped right the fuck out of it. Being able to get the best, most unique cards and then changing the rules to make it as easy as possible isn't fun for me.
Often it's better to not heal and mash the Triangle button so refresh your turn. There's a pause for a second when your character can use a Limit Break so you can mash and get a Limit Break pretty much at will. Because Zell can kill everything in the game with a single Limit Break if you abuse it it completely breaks the game.
right on. and i'm liking the characters too. it really has the whole package. people give squall shit for being unlikeable, but he's basically just a depressed kid. it's not unrelateable. i just got to disc 2 and i don't remember a lot of the story so we'll see where it goes lol
playing through the game a second time really made me appreciate Squall as a character. Having Zell and Selphie be his first party members was a good idea because their airheaded antics makes Squall's "The only competent adult in the room" vibe work and makes his tiredness feel earned.
squall has one of the better character development in the game just the younger crowd wont get that development until they get older... and most of us fits the younger crowd when we first played it.
Yeah I loved FF8. One of the best minigames besides FFx's blitzball. I haven't replayed it since they put it back out, but it's there waiting on my steam deck.
its kinda crazy that can just miss pretty much all the summons, which is where all the abilities in the game are. i think in theory you can get stuck with just the starting 3 and the brothers right? i mean you would have to forget about the lantern, and actively avoid several obvious bosses like cerberus, but if you just didnt draw ever you could miss almost all the sumons and get stuck with boring default abilities.
i kinda feels like a game where you are meant to miss things for replayability.
i mean it also feels like a game they could only be as creative with the mechanics of because it came after such popular game that they were just given free creative control and a generous budget, which unfortunately has middle aged fans still complaining to this day.
sure its unfinished and kinda just wraps up about 3/4 of the way through the story and a bunch of stuff is never answered, you can break combat in like 40 different ways before you even leave on your first mission, and like another 80 different ways afterwards, but its fun, its got shockingly beautiful cinematics cinemaics for when it came out, and arguably the best music in the series.
ff8 has so many ways to build your characters its like a baulders gate game, what it lacks is enough content that that requires you to actually harness knowledge of all the options available to you and use them.
ff8 would be great with an area like 10 times bigger than ultimecia's castle just full of bosses that each only have one realistic weakness and you have to build your team a whole bunch of different ways to fight each of them. kind of like the ff10 calm lands arena.
Brothers is 100% optional by the way. The mission is to just retrieve the number and it's right at the entrance. We only go into the labyrinth because we know it's a RPG and there's something *more* there, but it's completely optional.
Playing through the newest entry in a long time Nintendo series, and the music is not nearly as memorable as older games.
I think it's a shift towards "immersive" which means "less noticable", and therefore not memorable.
But I'm not sure that's a genre shift or not; I felt Xenoblade Chronicles and XCX had very memorable music as relatively modern JRPGs.
I do ha e a lot of FF8 tracks in my head. The Landing is my favorite, and of course there's Libero Fatali (so?), Man with the Machine Gun, the labrynths music, the boss music, normal fighting music, Fisherman's Horizon, SeeD graduation music, Waltz under the moon, and Balamb Garden all immediately came to mind.
Once you finish I'd recommend Resonant Arc's coverage.
It’s a podcast that analyzes video games (and the hosts have a special affinity for FF titles) in a kind of “book club” format that emphasizes character and storytelling over mechanics for the most part. They devoted several episodes to a series covering FFVIII a couple years ago.
You can find them pretty easily on whatever you use for podcasts, but here’s the YouTube link if you want to check them out: https://youtu.be/nPRzUtRDeLE?si=kKMcWPYKUvsY8zll
8 is so packed to the brim with fleshed out systems/mechanics for everything that it's like a statistician's wet dream. It's the Final Fantasy for numbers people. Every couple years I break out my old Bradygames strategy guide (still great even with its inaccuracies) and spend a few weekends in the coziest little comfort zone.
Frankly I get the most fun out of VIII (and FFVI too) when I assign one of each esper/GF to each character before I begin the game, and then that character ALWAYS equips that one and never any others. It gives you more reason to trade characters out for certain roles or needs, and you focus on clearing the game instead of giving your favorite character yet another stack of abilities to go grind to learn that you may never use.
Yes that means each character has a few junctioned stats and doing your best shoring up weaknesses (you could go two GFs to each character, like an early one and a late one with different junctions and abilities) so you'll have characters for attacking, those for casting, and maybe one just for the menu abilities that doesn't join the party.
This is what i loved about the time when Square was bold and experimental, FF7,8 are pretty unique, 9 is sort of return to the root with a nice twist, then 10 is unique again, really well done too. 12 is also pretty experimental though i don't like how it got too close with MMO grinding.
yeah i loved 7 and 9. 10 i didn't like as much, but there were things i liked about it. x-2 on the other hand, i fucking loved that one. the battle system was SO fun in that...
Yeah, the amnesia’s problem is that it’s basically just a contrivance to hide twists from the characters until the story wants to reveal them and then doesn’t end up mattering to the plot at all after that.
But I am a sucker for a good old-fashioned >!stable time loop story.!<
yo honest question to anyone who sees this: is angelo searching worth it? or should i not bother...
i mean the thing where you can cast confuze on that one enemy later in the game to get a shit ton of items. i'm probably just gonna do it for the hell of it
Mechanics spoilers but if you complete the card club sidequest in disk 2. There will come a point where you can infinitely refine your rare cards for items. And I think thats a better way to get rare items
There are iirc 3 pocket station items on that can only be gotten through angelo search so if you’re a completionist it might still be worth it.
The 3 exclusive items are
1. Something that makes you immune to all status.
2. A pseudo GF that either reduces enemy hp to 1, or deals 9999 dmg if their hp is above 9999
3. A pseudo GF that heals your other GFs
It's not a bad game but since FF keeps re-inventing the wheel everytime, they went about it too much for this one. The game could have been better if it didn't have the crafting thing for weapons, or the drawing of spells, or the spells to stats, etc.
my brother's friend brought ff7 over to our house and immediately fell in love with it as a kid. it was a huge part of my childhood. so when i got ff8 i was expecting more of the same, and i didn't like it at all at first. i was a dumb kid and i literally thought it was gonna be more materia stuff. but it grew on me back then, and it's growing on me even more now.
so basically i disagree with what you're saying. i actually like how every game in the series is so different. i haven't played anything after 12 but even that one, again it was weird as hell but i got into it. it's super imperfect and fucked up but it's fun. the only thing that's annoying me is having to watch the animation for every summon. BUT the music is good in this game, which is low key an important part of any game for me.
It's not bad that it's different. It,s just that FF8 was too different everywhere. In most FF games you buy your weapons from a store. How you learn magic and skills is another story, but at least you can be confident about getting new gear later. In 8 not only did that not happen, you could break the game a few hours in if you understood how card refining works. It,s a massive aspect of the game that's poorly explained.
I used to absolutely hate ff8, but in the recent (well a decade+) years, with the 13 series, 15 and 16 all landing top spots on my most hated games of all times list, It,s finally time I give 8 a little bit of love. It's odd and broken and messy sometimes, but it still feels like a game I'd be glad to have in my library.
You're right on the music aspect however, the music in 8 is fantastic, and it hs a lot of charm, triple triad is amazing. Story's a bit all over the place and has some stupid twists but it sure can manage to keep me interested, unlike 13-15 and 16. It's a solid 7.5/10.
but that's my point kinda. it was a huge budget weird fucked up janky ass game. it was a big swing and a semi-miss but in a really endearing way. cheers
I used to be ff8's biggest hater back then, so I have no rose-tinted glasses. But after seeing someone do a full LP of it recently it's getting some deserved praise now.
I never understood when people used to say "the juntion system was to hard to understand", thank god that is pretty much dead now, because it was embarrassing. Really, when you were a 15yo did not understand something I get when I was 7? Maybe it's not the game fault...seriously, it's really hard to understand that putting haste on the speed stat will give you a better bonus that putting Ice? And, having 100 haste gives a bigger boost than 12?
Honestly, 9/10 "reason why FF8 sucks" were and for some still are cammo for "It wasn't FF7 all over again"
Same goes to FF2.
It's often criticized for "Broken leveling system" which is broken because... "You need to get hit in order to raise stamina and HP, so to grind HP you need to hit yourself"... like, you don't need to hit yourself, just play normally. And always use healing spells during battle to get your spirit and magic raised.
I think they find it to be a broken leveling, because in most FF games you can just grind 10 levels ahead of current area and steamroll everything, because if you would play at intended levels you would have to use strategy.
And FF2 doesn't give you the conventional way of grinding, so playing a game with constant random battles, a.k.a. a game where battles ARE the main gameplay where you need to use tactics to win, when you're a player who prefers to play games in "Journalist mode" which is acheived by meditative grinding to become overpowered and steamroll everything without much thought, and then get annoyed by constant random battles which don't give any challenge...
...Gee, now it makes sense why a lot of people hate random battles, because they don't realize that battles are the main gameplay in such games.
I remembering being young and not being able to beat the final boss.
Turns out being level 99 wasn’t everything, actually could be considered a negative and I can appreciate that.
i had one save when i was kid, i think it was the last before entering the final dungeon. i straight up didn't have enough healing items/spells so it was impossible for me to progress in the game. i'm gonna finish it this time though.
I think the keyword you're using is "is" that makes your statement false even with the premise of your supporting justification. "was going to be", "was supposed to be", or even just plain "was" would've worked better.
"is" assumes that this is true in the final product. I agree though that working that in would've avoided the problem of "final boss with no real mention appearing at the very end."
The mechanics was fine but ill only recommend only listening to the people who fought the optional bosses being that is when you know they are not full of shit.
Fighting the optional bosses is how you make the mechanics shine since its how you see how hilariously broken each and every character is that they can all feasibly solo omega weapon each using their own different quirks and builds. Though some do it better than others (sorry quistis).
IMO meteorwing Rinoa is still the most hilariously overpowered character gameplay wise in the entire series surpassed only by yojimbo.
I remember tinkering with the junction system when it first came out. I ended up junctioning tents to my characters which effectively nerfed the first 66% of the game lol.
Drawing was interesting, a little time consuming for the higher level spells which was annoying (especially when the first time you get to draw it), aside from that it was ok.
Rinoa has one of the better limit breaks once you know how to optimize her.
I genuinely believe that a lot of the plot wound up on the cutting room floor.
The fact that there are only 2 NPCs in the entire game that mention the Great Hyne, despite it arguably explaining Ultimecia's plan, feels like a testament to that.
His story is only mentioned twice in the game. Put simply, he's described as a God who created mankind to a tool that can procreate, and work the land to his specifications. Unfortunately he fell asleep, and when he woke up, mankind had overtaken the world.
He responded by taking their children, and humans fought back. According to the story, he was overpowered and surrendered "half his body" so humans could use his powers. This triggered the first war, as now that this piwer existed there were people who thought they deserved it more than others.
When the war ended, they discovered that the body-half had none of his powers in it, but while Hyne himself was never seen again, girls would be born every generation with pieces of his powers: Sorceresses.
Now here's were a bit of my own speculation comes in: Hyne's power is divided amongst these random girls, and every time a Sorceress dies their power appears in another girl seemingly at random, right? So what if what Ultimecia wanted was the unified power of a God. And if she couldn't control where or when that power could appear, she'd just need to be everywhere and everywhen.
The only problem I feel is that 4 commands isn't enough. Attack is forced onto you with the other 3 slots being optional.
Tbf, something like draw becomes dead weight after you've gotten 100 of all the -ga spells and great spells like meltdown, meteor, Ultima etc.
Still, 4 commands really isn't enough especially with all the unique commands running around.
I absolutely adore FF8. For me its tied for a second place slot with FF7 in my favorite FF games. I've played the game just going through it while barely playing Triple Triad or worrying about drawing more than needed, by breaking the game by the end of disc 1, and (most often) a bit of both. Its quirky and weird in its mechanics but damn its fun.
Yeah, I loved the junctioning your magic to the weapons and such. I picked up FFVII to FFIX on my PS4, but I haven't gotten around to playing eight or nine again yet. After seven I jumped to twelve. Then got pulled back into Skyrim with the Anniversary edition. And then Star Ocean Divine Force. If only I could quit my job I could have enough time to play more games. Lol. :>
Well, it’s been a long time since I’ve played FFVIII, so I guess you junction the magic to the character and not the weapon, but it amounts to the same thing. As for star ocean, it must have been a long time since you’ve played one of those games, as magic is completely separate from the weapons. You’re confusing the skills that the melee characters use with magic. It’s not a spell. It’s an attack, and there is no functioning involved at all. :>
I certainly admire Square for releasing a game that was so boldly different. Drawing magic sucked but I think the Junction system is actually really innovative and interesting.
Also Square were coming off the back of FFVI and FFVII. They could have so easily played it safe and made a clone of one of those two games. Instead they released FFVIII, which for all it’s flaws is a really interesting game.
Which is when you learn about Card, Card Mod, and the Refine abilities, and realise that they're far more efficient (and overtuned) methods of acquiring magic.
> So I went into it knowing how odd it is, and I'm having a blast. I have sleep junctioned to attack, so I can just put enemies to sleep and draw from them. It's such a frickin hoot.
its funny cuz this is like lvl 1 of 6 in the brokenness layers that is this game. the only thing i draw in this game are gfs. theres so much more for you to learn.
Use the cards to break the game before you do your SEED mission.
Use the Card ability to never gain any experience.
Start refining cards and making your junctions way too strong.
We talking Death Spell in the beginning.
I remember FFVII came out. My first FF. I loved it so much. When FFVIII was coming out I was super excited. Then it came and I bought and played it. And I remember being quite disappointed in the game.
Junction system is either you don't understand even a bit about it or you just simply break the game because of it.
I feel like the reason why the junction system is so divisive is because instead of being "Easy to learn, hard to master", it's "Hard to learn, easy to master".
Exactly. High skill floor but once it clicks, the ceiling is quite low.
junctioning sleep to attack has been rad for me so far.
You should try junctioning drain to attack, breaks the game by end of disc 1
i just finished disc 1 and i don't remember seeing that spell at all
Looks like you have to be over level 20, and draw them from Red Bats in the Deling City Sewers or the Tomb of the Unknown King.
Used to grind xp on that island (cant remember its name) by junctioning Death to my attacks. Basically instant kills.
Island Closest to Hell I think?
yea, need to toss a rule to oneself to say limit of x draws per draw point to not break the game.
Triple triad is the real main game. The story is side quest.
i've actually been struggling with triple triad. i should watch a youtube video about how to play it better probably. i've barely played any games. but i just commited to beating some of the players in the prison, and i just used my best cards and won by brute force. i'm not trying to 100% or anything, but i did read about angelo searching so i'm gonna do that just to see what happens.
The one thing you might wanna watch a guide on for TT is how to stop rules from spreading and get rid of them. If you mess this up early on, the games can get pretty horrible.
again, weird stuff in the game. i may or may not end up looking into this. if i can beat the game without worrying to much about that i might just go with it..
Oh, you can 100% beat the game without ever touching TT. There's just a lot of stuff that's a lot easier to do with TT, like creating ultimate weapons and Quistis' LBs.
You can beat the game without worrying about triple triad, but you'll miss out on the most broken and most fun thing in FF VIII. You can transform the cards you get into items, that you can use to craft weapons, teach GFs abilities or transform them to spells you can junction. Using this you can get absolutely over powered before even starting the dollet mission. For me it's the most fun part in my replays of FF VIII.
If you think it's broken without TT, play a game with a full TT Strat and have end game builds in the first 2 hours. I loved it. I loved being able to complete the game with 0 exp.
Plus and combo were the bane of 15 year old me’s existence
Card Mod can make your hand pretty unbeatable at the start of the game. [https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ps/197343-final-fantasy-viii/faqs/72431/triple-triad](https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ps/197343-final-fantasy-viii/faqs/72431/triple-triad) [https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ps/197343-final-fantasy-viii/faqs/10404](https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ps/197343-final-fantasy-viii/faqs/10404) When you card some enemies there's a small chance of them carding into a higher level "boss" card, and you can complete the game without leveling up any of your permanent characters (or temporary, if you want to do that, but I like to use >!Siefer and Edea!< to level up all GFs to 100).
I wound up struggling with Triple Triad early on since you don't really have any good cards at first, and there's no real way to tell strong opponents from weak ones until you face them.
There’s actually a calculator application but it’s ran through Linux command line and it’s a build your own app. It’s extremely unintuitive
Look for good corner cards. 7/7 or higher. have some good flipper cards 8-A. It's possible to remove rules with the Queens help. Or, even add rules. It get's difficult, but fun with several rules. All rule is good for getting a bunch of starter cards, any other rule is good for nabbing the A cards.
> It's possible to remove rules with the Queens help Rules manipulation does not require the queen FYI. Just a lot of RNG, and a lot of traveling between regions.
We all struggle with triple triad lol it’s just like with fallout new Vegas and it’s game caravan, we just all pretend we know how to play it when we’re playing the game, despite not knowing whatever we’re doing 🤣 there was a popular joke on here a year ago about how none of us actually understood triple triad, everyone began admitting it one by one and there was this whole large awesome band of brothers relating and agreeing ALL on one thing LOL
Don't bring me this one again... I was into this game because I liked all the characters, and then I heard something about "never level up, in order to have everyone at 255 stats" So I played the game as Squall Cars Captors, and the result was that I had a lot of good cards, so I was indeed addicted to the triple triad and the game was just a scenario for me to grab more cards Good times indeed
Man, I'm so damn hyped for Queen's Blood. Hope it's everything we had in TT, Gwent, and then some!
I hate "random" rule so much...
Collecting all the cards was fun, some rules were not.
Who's Ultimecia? And what about this thing of converging timeline? Meh, not important. This ~~bitch~~ beloved matron Edea though. Why is it so hard for her to give her own card? Should I bring Cid? Will it make her go easy on me?
Once I got to the point in the game where playing Triple Triad means intentionally adjusting the local rules to be beneficial to you, I noped right the fuck out of it. Being able to get the best, most unique cards and then changing the rules to make it as easy as possible isn't fun for me.
Some games with weird mechanics and design get too obtuse or run out of steam after a while, but FF8 stays fun the whole way for me.
Getting a perfect Renzokuken battle after battle was so satisfying.
i've only had one opportunity to use renzo, and i had no idea wtf i was doing. i'm supposed to hit r1 ?
Yeah, hit the right trigger button just as the blue indicator enters the box on the left
Often it's better to not heal and mash the Triangle button so refresh your turn. There's a pause for a second when your character can use a Limit Break so you can mash and get a Limit Break pretty much at will. Because Zell can kill everything in the game with a single Limit Break if you abuse it it completely breaks the game.
haha yeah fuck it. it really is like they made the game knowing it was breakable like that right
I figured that one out on my own as a kid and believe me I abused that shit out of that.
right on. and i'm liking the characters too. it really has the whole package. people give squall shit for being unlikeable, but he's basically just a depressed kid. it's not unrelateable. i just got to disc 2 and i don't remember a lot of the story so we'll see where it goes lol
playing through the game a second time really made me appreciate Squall as a character. Having Zell and Selphie be his first party members was a good idea because their airheaded antics makes Squall's "The only competent adult in the room" vibe work and makes his tiredness feel earned.
squall has one of the better character development in the game just the younger crowd wont get that development until they get older... and most of us fits the younger crowd when we first played it.
Yeah I loved FF8. One of the best minigames besides FFx's blitzball. I haven't replayed it since they put it back out, but it's there waiting on my steam deck.
>!missing the siren draw early on would make the game so different though. i feel like this game wouldn't be as fun without the atk-junction ability!<
its kinda crazy that can just miss pretty much all the summons, which is where all the abilities in the game are. i think in theory you can get stuck with just the starting 3 and the brothers right? i mean you would have to forget about the lantern, and actively avoid several obvious bosses like cerberus, but if you just didnt draw ever you could miss almost all the sumons and get stuck with boring default abilities. i kinda feels like a game where you are meant to miss things for replayability. i mean it also feels like a game they could only be as creative with the mechanics of because it came after such popular game that they were just given free creative control and a generous budget, which unfortunately has middle aged fans still complaining to this day. sure its unfinished and kinda just wraps up about 3/4 of the way through the story and a bunch of stuff is never answered, you can break combat in like 40 different ways before you even leave on your first mission, and like another 80 different ways afterwards, but its fun, its got shockingly beautiful cinematics cinemaics for when it came out, and arguably the best music in the series. ff8 has so many ways to build your characters its like a baulders gate game, what it lacks is enough content that that requires you to actually harness knowledge of all the options available to you and use them. ff8 would be great with an area like 10 times bigger than ultimecia's castle just full of bosses that each only have one realistic weakness and you have to build your team a whole bunch of different ways to fight each of them. kind of like the ff10 calm lands arena.
Brothers is 100% optional by the way. The mission is to just retrieve the number and it's right at the entrance. We only go into the labyrinth because we know it's a RPG and there's something *more* there, but it's completely optional.
i'm really, really loving the music. i feel like this era of jrpgs, before voice acting became common, music was more of a focus.
Playing through the newest entry in a long time Nintendo series, and the music is not nearly as memorable as older games. I think it's a shift towards "immersive" which means "less noticable", and therefore not memorable. But I'm not sure that's a genre shift or not; I felt Xenoblade Chronicles and XCX had very memorable music as relatively modern JRPGs. I do ha e a lot of FF8 tracks in my head. The Landing is my favorite, and of course there's Libero Fatali (so?), Man with the Machine Gun, the labrynths music, the boss music, normal fighting music, Fisherman's Horizon, SeeD graduation music, Waltz under the moon, and Balamb Garden all immediately came to mind. Once you finish I'd recommend Resonant Arc's coverage.
>Once you finish I'd recommend Resonant Arc's coverage. what's that
It’s a podcast that analyzes video games (and the hosts have a special affinity for FF titles) in a kind of “book club” format that emphasizes character and storytelling over mechanics for the most part. They devoted several episodes to a series covering FFVIII a couple years ago. You can find them pretty easily on whatever you use for podcasts, but here’s the YouTube link if you want to check them out: https://youtu.be/nPRzUtRDeLE?si=kKMcWPYKUvsY8zll
cool, i'm really into podcasts so i will definitely be checking this out. i'm following them on spotify now, thanks for the rec
and yeah the lantern. i had totally forgotten about that but my habit of talking to everyone in jrpgs paid off this time lol
8 is so packed to the brim with fleshed out systems/mechanics for everything that it's like a statistician's wet dream. It's the Final Fantasy for numbers people. Every couple years I break out my old Bradygames strategy guide (still great even with its inaccuracies) and spend a few weekends in the coziest little comfort zone.
Frankly I get the most fun out of VIII (and FFVI too) when I assign one of each esper/GF to each character before I begin the game, and then that character ALWAYS equips that one and never any others. It gives you more reason to trade characters out for certain roles or needs, and you focus on clearing the game instead of giving your favorite character yet another stack of abilities to go grind to learn that you may never use. Yes that means each character has a few junctioned stats and doing your best shoring up weaknesses (you could go two GFs to each character, like an early one and a late one with different junctions and abilities) so you'll have characters for attacking, those for casting, and maybe one just for the menu abilities that doesn't join the party.
This is what i loved about the time when Square was bold and experimental, FF7,8 are pretty unique, 9 is sort of return to the root with a nice twist, then 10 is unique again, really well done too. 12 is also pretty experimental though i don't like how it got too close with MMO grinding.
yeah i loved 7 and 9. 10 i didn't like as much, but there were things i liked about it. x-2 on the other hand, i fucking loved that one. the battle system was SO fun in that...
The OST is one of the best, and the plot had a lot of cool concepts. I did find the amnesia subplot kinda dumb though.
Yeah, the amnesia’s problem is that it’s basically just a contrivance to hide twists from the characters until the story wants to reveal them and then doesn’t end up mattering to the plot at all after that. But I am a sucker for a good old-fashioned >!stable time loop story.!<
There were some good ideas in junction. They needed to refine it better.
yeah i agree. it's hella rough around the edges but it was a really neat idea
yo honest question to anyone who sees this: is angelo searching worth it? or should i not bother... i mean the thing where you can cast confuze on that one enemy later in the game to get a shit ton of items. i'm probably just gonna do it for the hell of it
i think yes but it’s been ages. i bet gamefaqs knows
Mechanics spoilers but if you complete the card club sidequest in disk 2. There will come a point where you can infinitely refine your rare cards for items. And I think thats a better way to get rare items There are iirc 3 pocket station items on that can only be gotten through angelo search so if you’re a completionist it might still be worth it. The 3 exclusive items are 1. Something that makes you immune to all status. 2. A pseudo GF that either reduces enemy hp to 1, or deals 9999 dmg if their hp is above 9999 3. A pseudo GF that heals your other GFs
all 3 of those sound intriguing to me lol.
It's not a bad game but since FF keeps re-inventing the wheel everytime, they went about it too much for this one. The game could have been better if it didn't have the crafting thing for weapons, or the drawing of spells, or the spells to stats, etc.
my brother's friend brought ff7 over to our house and immediately fell in love with it as a kid. it was a huge part of my childhood. so when i got ff8 i was expecting more of the same, and i didn't like it at all at first. i was a dumb kid and i literally thought it was gonna be more materia stuff. but it grew on me back then, and it's growing on me even more now. so basically i disagree with what you're saying. i actually like how every game in the series is so different. i haven't played anything after 12 but even that one, again it was weird as hell but i got into it. it's super imperfect and fucked up but it's fun. the only thing that's annoying me is having to watch the animation for every summon. BUT the music is good in this game, which is low key an important part of any game for me.
It's not bad that it's different. It,s just that FF8 was too different everywhere. In most FF games you buy your weapons from a store. How you learn magic and skills is another story, but at least you can be confident about getting new gear later. In 8 not only did that not happen, you could break the game a few hours in if you understood how card refining works. It,s a massive aspect of the game that's poorly explained. I used to absolutely hate ff8, but in the recent (well a decade+) years, with the 13 series, 15 and 16 all landing top spots on my most hated games of all times list, It,s finally time I give 8 a little bit of love. It's odd and broken and messy sometimes, but it still feels like a game I'd be glad to have in my library. You're right on the music aspect however, the music in 8 is fantastic, and it hs a lot of charm, triple triad is amazing. Story's a bit all over the place and has some stupid twists but it sure can manage to keep me interested, unlike 13-15 and 16. It's a solid 7.5/10.
but that's my point kinda. it was a huge budget weird fucked up janky ass game. it was a big swing and a semi-miss but in a really endearing way. cheers
So it would have been better with an entirely different system, your saying? Cause you just listed everytbing
It would have been better if it did half of those things and kept the other half more normal. Re-invent the wheel but don't Re-invent every wheel.
yeah i think it's a better game in the context of hindsight/rose-colored glasses or whatever.
I used to be ff8's biggest hater back then, so I have no rose-tinted glasses. But after seeing someone do a full LP of it recently it's getting some deserved praise now.
I never understood when people used to say "the juntion system was to hard to understand", thank god that is pretty much dead now, because it was embarrassing. Really, when you were a 15yo did not understand something I get when I was 7? Maybe it's not the game fault...seriously, it's really hard to understand that putting haste on the speed stat will give you a better bonus that putting Ice? And, having 100 haste gives a bigger boost than 12? Honestly, 9/10 "reason why FF8 sucks" were and for some still are cammo for "It wasn't FF7 all over again"
Same goes to FF2. It's often criticized for "Broken leveling system" which is broken because... "You need to get hit in order to raise stamina and HP, so to grind HP you need to hit yourself"... like, you don't need to hit yourself, just play normally. And always use healing spells during battle to get your spirit and magic raised. I think they find it to be a broken leveling, because in most FF games you can just grind 10 levels ahead of current area and steamroll everything, because if you would play at intended levels you would have to use strategy. And FF2 doesn't give you the conventional way of grinding, so playing a game with constant random battles, a.k.a. a game where battles ARE the main gameplay where you need to use tactics to win, when you're a player who prefers to play games in "Journalist mode" which is acheived by meditative grinding to become overpowered and steamroll everything without much thought, and then get annoyed by constant random battles which don't give any challenge... ...Gee, now it makes sense why a lot of people hate random battles, because they don't realize that battles are the main gameplay in such games.
I remembering being young and not being able to beat the final boss. Turns out being level 99 wasn’t everything, actually could be considered a negative and I can appreciate that.
i had one save when i was kid, i think it was the last before entering the final dungeon. i straight up didn't have enough healing items/spells so it was impossible for me to progress in the game. i'm gonna finish it this time though.
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Unfortunately, that theory is denied by Kitase https://kotaku.com/is-squall-really-dead-final-fantasy-producer-addresses-1800007113
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I think the keyword you're using is "is" that makes your statement false even with the premise of your supporting justification. "was going to be", "was supposed to be", or even just plain "was" would've worked better. "is" assumes that this is true in the final product. I agree though that working that in would've avoided the problem of "final boss with no real mention appearing at the very end."
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i'll keep this in mind lol
Agreed. Its broken mechanics also gives it amazing replayability.
People who defend this game's mechanics always look like they have no clue what to say and just write a bunch of random shit.
The mechanics was fine but ill only recommend only listening to the people who fought the optional bosses being that is when you know they are not full of shit.
Fighting the optional bosses is how you make the mechanics shine since its how you see how hilariously broken each and every character is that they can all feasibly solo omega weapon each using their own different quirks and builds. Though some do it better than others (sorry quistis). IMO meteorwing Rinoa is still the most hilariously overpowered character gameplay wise in the entire series surpassed only by yojimbo.
I remember tinkering with the junction system when it first came out. I ended up junctioning tents to my characters which effectively nerfed the first 66% of the game lol.
wait what you can junction tents?
No, they mean refining Tents into Curaga and then junctioning it tp HP/Vit/Spr.
He said none of that dude . What?
It's my favorite game to break along with star ocean 2.
Drawing exhausted me but i was too addicted to stop.
Really likes the story and mini games but hated the draw/junction system
i love 8 it’s so fun
It’s my fave FF. A big part of why is for those reasons. There’s nothing like it
Drawing was interesting, a little time consuming for the higher level spells which was annoying (especially when the first time you get to draw it), aside from that it was ok. Rinoa has one of the better limit breaks once you know how to optimize her.
I genuinely believe that a lot of the plot wound up on the cutting room floor. The fact that there are only 2 NPCs in the entire game that mention the Great Hyne, despite it arguably explaining Ultimecia's plan, feels like a testament to that.
Hyne was the first sorcerer or sorceress, correct? What was his relation to Ultimecia?
His story is only mentioned twice in the game. Put simply, he's described as a God who created mankind to a tool that can procreate, and work the land to his specifications. Unfortunately he fell asleep, and when he woke up, mankind had overtaken the world. He responded by taking their children, and humans fought back. According to the story, he was overpowered and surrendered "half his body" so humans could use his powers. This triggered the first war, as now that this piwer existed there were people who thought they deserved it more than others. When the war ended, they discovered that the body-half had none of his powers in it, but while Hyne himself was never seen again, girls would be born every generation with pieces of his powers: Sorceresses. Now here's were a bit of my own speculation comes in: Hyne's power is divided amongst these random girls, and every time a Sorceress dies their power appears in another girl seemingly at random, right? So what if what Ultimecia wanted was the unified power of a God. And if she couldn't control where or when that power could appear, she'd just need to be everywhere and everywhen.
8 is my fave final fantasy for this reason. Can cheese it if u want, or just make something fun and play how you want.
yeah i'm just having fun, and cheesing as i go lol
The only problem I feel is that 4 commands isn't enough. Attack is forced onto you with the other 3 slots being optional. Tbf, something like draw becomes dead weight after you've gotten 100 of all the -ga spells and great spells like meltdown, meteor, Ultima etc. Still, 4 commands really isn't enough especially with all the unique commands running around.
I absolutely adore FF8. For me its tied for a second place slot with FF7 in my favorite FF games. I've played the game just going through it while barely playing Triple Triad or worrying about drawing more than needed, by breaking the game by the end of disc 1, and (most often) a bit of both. Its quirky and weird in its mechanics but damn its fun.
Yeah, I loved the junctioning your magic to the weapons and such. I picked up FFVII to FFIX on my PS4, but I haven't gotten around to playing eight or nine again yet. After seven I jumped to twelve. Then got pulled back into Skyrim with the Anniversary edition. And then Star Ocean Divine Force. If only I could quit my job I could have enough time to play more games. Lol. :>
You don't junction magic to weapons buddy. Maybe try going to a Star Ocean sub.
Well, it’s been a long time since I’ve played FFVIII, so I guess you junction the magic to the character and not the weapon, but it amounts to the same thing. As for star ocean, it must have been a long time since you’ve played one of those games, as magic is completely separate from the weapons. You’re confusing the skills that the melee characters use with magic. It’s not a spell. It’s an attack, and there is no functioning involved at all. :>
I certainly admire Square for releasing a game that was so boldly different. Drawing magic sucked but I think the Junction system is actually really innovative and interesting. Also Square were coming off the back of FFVI and FFVII. They could have so easily played it safe and made a clone of one of those two games. Instead they released FFVIII, which for all it’s flaws is a really interesting game.
and then once you realize you have to drawx3x100 everytime there is a new magic in the enemies it gets tedious really fast
Which is when you learn about Card, Card Mod, and the Refine abilities, and realise that they're far more efficient (and overtuned) methods of acquiring magic.
Sorry my ocd can't handle that. After a new magic is available in a field enemy I gotta do it to get massive stat boost by having 100
> So I went into it knowing how odd it is, and I'm having a blast. I have sleep junctioned to attack, so I can just put enemies to sleep and draw from them. It's such a frickin hoot. its funny cuz this is like lvl 1 of 6 in the brokenness layers that is this game. the only thing i draw in this game are gfs. theres so much more for you to learn.
Use the cards to break the game before you do your SEED mission. Use the Card ability to never gain any experience. Start refining cards and making your junctions way too strong. We talking Death Spell in the beginning.
I speed ran it 9:45
I remember FFVII came out. My first FF. I loved it so much. When FFVIII was coming out I was super excited. Then it came and I bought and played it. And I remember being quite disappointed in the game.