Final Fantasy VIII

Final Fantasy VIII is a game with a ridiculously overdone level of customization for combat and leveling, the now completely abandoned junctioning system. Since this game was kinda mediocre for the series and I'm a bit bored, I'm going to start off this entry with an attempt to explain just how the hell the whole things works. This will in all likelihood be pretty boring for those uninterested, and I don't blame you if you'd like to skip this entry completely. I just want to see if I can make sense of the whole thing and perhaps provide a decent explanation should anyone else on the blog eventually attempt to play Final Fantasy VIII. Ok, let's start from the beginning. Each character has 4 active abilities and 3 passives- don't worry about the passives, they don't come into play until a while into the game. The four active abilities are the four options a player can pick in battle. One of these is fixed as 'attack'- no matter what, a player will always have the option to perform their physical attack. At the start of the game, you'll have four other options for each character to fit into those last 3 ability slots. These four options are Item, Magic, Draw, and GF. Item is self-explanatory, and GF stands for guardian force- basically you can summon whatever powerful beast is assigned ("junctioned") to that character to come in and inflict some major damage. The other two, Magic and Draw, are closely related. Unlike other Final Fantasy installments, magic does not require any 'points' or anything, you simply have a stock of each kind of spell split up between each character. The characters can trade spells amongst eachother depending on the situation. So using the Magic option allows you to select any magic spell already assigned to the character. So where do these spells originate? This is where the Draw command comes into play. A player with 'Draw' assigned to him or her can 'draw' spells from an enemy in the midst of battle, with the option of either casting it immediately on either enemy or ally, or stocking multiple spells for use later. Players with Draw can also stock spells at random 'draw points' located throughout the game. Ok, so those are the active abilities you'll be dealing with to start the game. Now I mentioned 'junctioning' earlier- Final Fantasy VIII gives you a total of 20 GFs to summon throughout the game, and you can 'junction' all of them to active party members. Each time you win a battle with a GF junctioned to a player, regardless of whether the GF was summoned or not, they will receive a certain amount of AP- basically experience points for summons. These experience points help the GFs level up, but also learn abilities that the player can decide on. Each seperate GF has 22 total abilities to learn, and while some of them are simply there to make the GF stronger, many are used for those active and passive abilities I mentioned earlier. Remember, you only get three active abilities aside from 'attack' so if you want to include an option like Resurrect or Mug then you'll have to remove one of the basics like Item or Magic. Once a GF is un-junctioned from a player, they lose those abilities. Same thing with passive abilities- Once a GF has learned a passive ability, you can add it to whichever character the GF is junctioned to- up to three total passive abilities. These include things like increasing speed or total HP, or lowering your rate of encounters, whatever. So that basically covers how to junction a GF and use him to your advantage in and out of battle. But in addition to junctioning a GF, a player can also junction his own individual magic spells to individual stats. This is where the customization gets seriously deep. For instance, if you have the maximum 100 fire spells junctioned to your strength stat, the damage you deal with physical attacks will greatly increase. 100 cure spells junctioned to a character's HP will result in a higher maximum HP. This works best when the spell you're junctioning has something to do with the stat you're looking to change- offensive magic for offensive stats, stuff like that. In addition you can eventually open up things like elemental and status junctions. This means if your player has 100 sleep spells junctioned to his status defense, he will never be put to sleep. Or if you junction thunder spells to your elemental attack, then each physical attack you do will contain an extra charge of electricity. With all of this magic junctioning, you're able to take a look at a boss's strengths and weaknesses and quickly turn most into a piece of cake. Of course not all of these stat junctions are available at first, but must be learned by the GFs as I explained earlier. I appreciate a good deep combat system, and while Final Fantasy VIII's is very tough to pick up with to start off, late in the game when more and more abilities were getting unlocked I had some serious fun with it. However, knowledge of how the whole system works has lead to VIII being dubbed the most breakable game in the series- there's many options to use an unexpected strategy and make yourself final-boss ready before the first disc is over (there's 4 discs in total). Before I explain one of them, allow me to back up a bit. A little while go I mentioned how every battle nets GFs some experience. Well, they also net the players themselves some experience points, EXP. The problem is that this EXP is not only useless, it can at times downright hurt the player. Grinding through random attacks, while a boring but necessary strategy in all other Final Fantasy games, is completely unnecessary here. This is because all enemies, including bosses, level up with the characters themselves, so there's really no point in making yourself powerful through endless battles for EXP. Instead it makes sense to run away from all random encounters and focus solely on leveling up your GFs, allowing them to make your characters more powerful without increasing your level- or your enemy's level either. What makes this easy is that bosses themselves provide no EXP, but a hefty amount of AP (the GF experience points, remember?). And late in the game you can find an island of random-encounter enemies who provide huge amounts of AP and no EXP, allowing you to easily grind for all of the abilities your GFs haven't learned yet. Ok, so to get back to breaking the game on the first disc. Very early on you will get your first GF, Ifrit, the fire summon. Junction him to main character Squall, and then set him up to begin learning some passive abilities that will increase Squall's strength. Squall can then grind for AP at a nearby beach, allowing Ifrit to learn those strength-enhancing passive abilities while leveling up Squall himself minimally. Then Squall can draw 100 water spells from the same enemy and junction them to his strength stat. Suddenly in a matter of minutes Squall has become a potent physical attacker who can just straight up murder any boss on the first disc without breaking a sweat. Unfortunately I did not use this strategy as by the time I figured out how junctioning worked I was well into the game. But this is not the only strategy to make the game very easy. There's also some card game I never bothered to learn that can also apparently break the game in a number of ways and make things incredibly easy. Anyway, Jesus, look at how long this has gone. I'll briefly wrap this up. One thing I must appreciate is the beautiful CGI sequences. Final Fantasy VIII came out 13 years ago when 3-D gameplay was still relatively new, and the graphics are for the most part terrible like every other game from its generation, but Square litters their games with cutscenes that manage to stand the test of time- what they lack in CGI realism they more than make up for in imagination. Overall, the game was pretty average when compared with other Final Fantasy, which means that in the grand scheme of things it's actually a very good game. My only real beef is the main character Squall, easily the least likable protagonist in the entire series. This includes the early game when the characters hardly ever said anything. Other than that, FF VIII was a joy to play throughout, and I only have two more games in the main series left.