Sadly I basically have to agree with everything Broodwars writes about FFVIII. It's a mess of a game, but just for the sake of throwing in a few positives:
+Soundtrack is very good.
+The first disc of content is honestly pretty decent, story-wise. (Admittedly this is mostly because you're in the dark about a lot of stuff and the eventual explanations are garbage.)
+Triple Triad, the internal card game, is really fun on Disc 1 as well if you're into simple cardgames at all. (They ruin it for you later on unless you follow a guide.)
+The idea of attaching magic to your stats is neat once it clicks. Fire magic works better for your attack stat, while putting Cure on hit points is a better idea, etc. I have many problems with the junctioning system (especially if you draw the magic from battles, and it makes characters largely interchangeable stat-wise).
+You get a lot of options to basically eliminate combat altogether.
Final Fantasy VIII is a game with really dense systems, the only way it becomes fun is to
utterly break them as early as possible. Here's how you should play it: don't bother with random battles, experience points are worthless because enemy levels scale with you. Battles actively make the game harder for you, not easier. Don't bother drawing magic from enemies either, it takes forever. Don't do any summoning after you've seen the animation once or twice, it gets tedious.
Instead: win a few strategically chosen card battles, refine those cards into items, sell the items for outrageous prices. Now, with the world economy basically shattered a few hours in, you do the opposite; buy certain items in bulk, refine them all into magic spells, attach stupidly overpowered spells to your level 9 characters.
Voila, now you're slicing through bossfights with ease, and with ENC-NONE enabled you've completely removed random encounters from the game. Just gotta play some cardgames in specific spots, which is one of the better aspects of the game.
You're still playing a really dumb story with even dumber characters, but at least this way you can eliminate a lot of the gameplay quirks early on. Definitely be selective about sidequests too; I did them all like an idiot and spent 90 hours trudging around the game world when the game had stopped being fun 25 hours in.
So yeah, can't honestly recommend FF8 at all, but there's some compelling aspects you might like.
I highly recommend this guide. It's crazy detailed and you definitely don't want to be doing everything here, but FF8 is one of those games where you really want a heads up about certain things.
The level scaling utterly ruined my first attempt at the game, basically locking me in one spot with 5 underleveled character and one main character you can't switch out who's used to determine enemy levels. Also, the game really hates you having fun with the card game and will try to introduce bullshit rules at every opportunity. This guide helped me avoid those unlike my first attempted playthrough.
Topic: E3 2019 (Read 18147 times)
