gamingobsessed.com

If you’ve looked at the layout of the site since about the day after its launch, you probably came to the realization that I am a Final Fantasy fan. Well, I am, but Final Fantasy VII is the only game of the series I’ve actually beaten. Between randomly buying them as a child and getting four or five of them from a friend last year, I have FF1 and 5-9, but of the ones I’ve tried I’ve just stopped because of something. In Final Fantasy 1 it was the grind that killed me. In IX it was that, at the time, I sucked at everything not named Pokemon that remotely resembled an RPG. I was sick today and couldn’t really do much, so I plugged up my PS2 and played about five hours of Final Fantasy VIII. I actually knew a lot about the game from the start because of Noah Antwiler’s hilarious review of the game, but I was a little unprepared for the game when I actually started playing.

So what did I do during these first five hours, and why am I writing an entire blog post about it? I spent almost the entire time drawing magic. For those that haven’t played the game, FFVIII differs from other Final Fantasy game in that the magic system is vastly different. Rather than buying new magic spells and using an MP bar as is the norm, you instead must “draw” magic. You can have up to 100 draws of each magic spell, and can cast them without fear of depleting a meter. How can you get these? One way is to fight wild monsters and cast “Draw”, getting 2-7 or so draws per turn. Another, much more impacting way early on, is to refine cards and items into draws.

This doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it can be because of the junction system. You are able to “Junction” a summon you have to a particular stat, and then junction spells you have drawn to that stat. How much the stat improves is based largely on how many draws you have of it, meaning that, to have great stats, you need to draw lots of magic. Fortunately, since you can crank up the battle speed, drawing magic from monsters is, at most, annoying. The really annoying part is the card battle portion.

Why? Well, although drawing magic from monsters is fairly easy, it won’t ensure your character the greatest stats. The only real way to do that without being late in the game is through the game’s card minigame Triple Triad. You are able to refine cards you win in Triple Triad into items, which you can then refine into sometimes very powerful draws of spells. If you know what you’re doing, you can have an ample supply of some of the most powerful magic very early on. The problem? It takes a seriously freaking long time. Games of Triple Triad usually don’t take more than two minutes a piece, and of your opponents arsenal of cards, one of those may be able to be refined into, say, 20 Blizzaga spells, the most powerful type of Ice spell. To have the biggest benefit from them, you would have to get five of those cards. Out of every game, you will win, at most, five pre-set cards. I don’t know how many cards each opponent has, but out of the three cards I needed, getting five of each took me at least two to three hours.

Of course, this whole ordeal is entirely optional, but in an RPG, I tend to take advantage of all the help I can get, and hesitate missing any sidequests. So after a grueling five hours of playing cards and getting that annoying Triple Triad theme stuck in my head permanently, I’m finally ready to truly start the game. I don’t really mind it, as long as this work was actually worth it, but it was definitely time consuming.