Ajarat said:
XenoScifi said:
I enjoyed FF8. I liked the story and the card side games were fun. I will say I did not like the draw system.
The ONLY thing I didn't like about the game was just a small aspect of the draw system... in that it took so bloody long. I've spent a vast majority of the game just on drawing, juctioning, and rejunctioning than anything else, and I'm a bit of a completionist. Other than that, the game was just fine imho.
The first Final Fantasy that I never cared much for was FFXIII... I watched a friend play it (it was her first FF) and I was bored to tears with the constant clop-clop down the same-looking hallways for days on end... THAT was no story, no fantasy, and more akin to a nightmare to play. It's almost as if Square forgot what a GAME was at that point, something to play rather than a test of patience, which I've found is lacking in Final Fantasy titles as of late, even including FFXIV which is heavily derivative of all Final Fantasy titles as if they couldn't come up with anything original besides an unholy amalgamation of all titles.
See I've never understood that point about the draw and junction system. The Junction and Draw system was to me obviously an attempt to simplify and whittle away the grind, excess palaver, and the materia system that were the only real drawbacks to VII. You had to fight a couple hundred or so fights to level up materia, and you had to do that for each piece of materia, and I had dozens of materia by the time the game was over... grind, grind, grind, grind... for thousands and thousands of combats. On the other hand, in VIII I could draw a spell 300 times in 5 or 10 minutes in 1 fight and NEVER HAVE TO DRAW THAT SPELL AGAIN. Effectively meaning you only had to A: fight creatures that had a spell you didn't, and B: you only had to fight them ONCE. Adding to that the fact that you could play the game at any pace because the difficulty scaled; FFVII not only reduced the excessive grind in VII, they very nearly ELIMINATED the tedious grind in a FF game. That turned a kids game (because only kids have that much spare time) into a game for adults with responsibilities, jobs, and social obligations.
I was in college when VII came out, and I barely had time to finish it back then. After joining the work force as an adult it would take me YEARS to invest the kind of time it would take to finish a game like VIII. Whereas I can retrogame for a couple of months and bang out a playthru of VIII.