Originally Posted by
calthaer
No, it's not just a matter of digging into the systems themselves and figuring out how they work. Many of the best items / spells / cards / whatever are available only in one town in the game that you can access only during one small section of the story. You can never return to it - you have to have foreknowledge of what's coming ahead. After you leave, a band of marauding cactus-men (who appear entirely out of thin air - nobody in the town, the ministry of defense, the surrounding countryside, or anything seems to have any idea that such dangerous foes are wandering about and / or on their way) descend upon the town and everyone there giggles to death from the absurdity of it all, and the one person who happened to have the rare thing in their possession is dead - of course, you can't search their corpses for valuable loot. Or, you have to choose twenty different and (at least as it's translated in English) seemingly random conversation tree options in order for some diddly little fisherman in some out-of-the-way place to suddenly catch some piece of prototype weaponry in his fishing net - or some other completely random B.S. like that. Or, it's some rare drop on some monster that shows up 1% of the time in a forest that you normally breeze through in ten minutes, so in order not to miss that - or anything else in any other area - you have to spend an hour grinding in every area just to make sure you don't miss the monsters or drops that rarely appear. Unless, of course, you use a guide and gain knowledge of how and when to find these monsters.
You try to make it sound like figuring it all out is some sort of intuitive process. It's not - it's all random, from the player's perspective, and for all the non-Japanese-otakus in the world it's counter-intuitive. If some unique feather from some random bird was really worth a bajillion dollars when put together with slime jelly to make a piece of advanced weaponry (forgetting, for a moment, that it's absurd in and of itself that some slime jelly and a random feather would make the Penultima Blade, which can slice through six layers of advanced adamaticarbonitica metal and kill the big end boss of the game), then some company would be breeding those suckers like rabbits and farming them, and you'd be able to find out where that farm is and get some. Instead, you alone of all the people in the world happen to have come upon this and every other discovery in the game, and get to walk around like gods - IF you play through the game 100 times and figure all this out. Or, look at a guide.
Also, FF8's story sucked.