As of this year, I’ve beaten every main numbered Final Fantasy, but I still feel like my understanding of the series is incomplete. I played Final Fantasy VIII and XII over long periods of time and struggled to thoroughly understand their mechanics. I wasn’t able to get a clear picture of what these games are and how they fit into the series.
We’ll get back to Final Fantasy XII at a later date, but Final Fantasy VIII was just the classic case of me refusing to learn the systems of a game. Specifically, I ended up botching the junction system. It’s been so long since I played the game that I’m a bit unclear on exactly what I did wrong.
My ignorance made me struggle in the latter half of the game. Instead of reevaluating my character builds, I decided I’d brute force it and grind to the max level. I just wanted to steamroll through for the story. But once I finished capping my character levels out, the game actually got harder. I had no idea that enemy levels scaled with you in Final Fantasy VIII. So the more my characters leveled up, the more insufficient their builds were.
I beat the game, but by the end I was just spamming summons to make up for my failing stats. That’s a lot of time rapidly pressing the square button during the summon cutscenes to boost their damage. In the end, it took me over an hour to defeat the last boss. It was ridiculous, but I deserved it.
Clearly I was playing in a way that wasn’t intended. It was frustrating and time consuming. I would have been better off starting over.
On the bright side, I really liked the story and characters of Final Fantasy VIII. I’d like to revisit the game some day, but it’s hard to say when or if that will happen.
