Just finished it. I had forgotten Ultimecia randomly picks your party members and since I have only three junction setups I ended up with a superhuman Zell and completely empty second and third characters (Quistis and Irvine). A few limit breaks later and Zell single-handedly saved the universe with nothing but his fists.
The podcast is one hour, fourty eight minutes. Holy hole in a donut.Originally Posted by Collector_Gaming
Anyone care to point out where the "story" is in the podcast. Assuming its worth hearing.
I'm not overstating the life-saving event that the game was a part of.
While I don't advise skipping the entirety of the episode to hear the story (we touch on a lot of great subjects in this one) if you must it's at the 1 hour 45 minute mark.
"And the book says: 'We may be through with the past, but the past ain't through with us.'"
This quote represents what I dislike about RPGs in the PS1 era. It represents the point where RPGs stopped being games you could actually learn on your own and started being that genre where a Strategy Guide was basically the instruction manual.
Give me classic Dragon Warrior any day.
What?
I would much rather have a battle system with complex layers then the Attack, Magic, Item that was the norm for so long. It doesn't make a strategy guide a requirement but rather for the player to dig into the mechanics on there own and learn what was effective and what was not. I was kid when these games were coming out and I never had to look at a strategy guide to figure out where to go next or what the most effective X to junction or equip or whatever was. I got a lot of fun out of both FFVII and VIII trying to figure out new ways to boost my stats or just outright break the system. I know its just a difference of preference and probably simply what each of us experienced first but your post really did make me say what out loud to myself since the deep battle systems were one of the most enjoyable aspects of PS1 RPGs to me. lol
Anyways I loved Final Fantasy 8 when it came out and is on my regular PS1 RPG rotation. I also think most criticism of the game are valid in that the story is too convoluted (Elone just to start..), Squall is mostly an asshole, and the battle system is far too easy to break. I always felt that the game was rushed in comparison to VII and I missed not having nearly as much to do outside of the main storyline as its predecessor. In that way the world map felt too large to me like they were going to have more locations but never ended up putting them in the actual game, especially with all of the different train stops that went nowhere and cars you could rent which ended up being worthless.
That being said I always loved the music (still have Eyes on me memorized :P) and overall aesthetic of FF8. I liked Squall despite being a asshole because for a while I was very similar in overall outlook on everything, and also the rest of the cast especially Laguna. I have fun both breaking the battle system and playing through the game without exploiting the various loopholes. I mostly like it because it has a real feeling of adventure and to me that is what defines a good Final Fantasy game.
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.
Last edited by calthaer; 02-27-2012 at 10:24 AM.
You are startled by a grim snarl. Before you, you see 1 Red dragon. Will your stalwart band choose to (F)ight or (R)un?
I mostly agree with the above. Final Fantasy games since 7 seem to have two ways to play: with a guide, or not caring if you miss stuff. I prefer to just not care and play through the game. If I miss some unique sword, I don't care. More specifically, ignorance is bliss. If I don't know the sword exists in the first place, I don't miss it.
While all those complaints are legit for many games, I don't think FFVIII necessarily fits that mold and it's certainly not the worst offender by any stretch of the imagination. Anything truly missable is pretty insignificant, certainly nothing like the ultimate sword of destiny or that one spell that renders the super boss a weakling. And any missed rare cards with the exception of one are winnable at the end of the game. Although one thing that did strike me as particularly ridiculous given the lack of direction is one puzzle in Ultimecia's castle with the paintings. The solution, involving a clock and figuring out which paintings have which combination of Is, Vs, and Xs, is extremely arcane. Without a guide most people will simply brute force it.
Of all Final Fantasies, FFXII is probably the worst offender. The "right" way to get the Zodiac Spear (one of the best weapons in the game) is probably literally impossible to figure out on your own, requiring you to specifically avoid opening certain chests throughout the game, chests which are otherwise completely ordinary in every way. Open one and you miss out on the item. Even if you get lucky and stumble on it you'd be hard pressed to connect the dots. The real slap in the face isn't even that you can't get it if you miss this method. The slap comes when you realize that the alternative method requires extreme repetition running back and forth in a specific area hoping a specific randomized chest with randomized contents appears and offers up the spear, itself a process that would require a guide. And this is only one of the many instances where FFXII plays games like this for the top items. FFVIII isn't even close. And it's certainly not any worse than FFVI which has at least a few instances where if you aren't careful you can lose actual characters.
I don't necessarily mind the player being asked to make a decision on less than complete information. Mass Effect uses this tactic to great dramatic effect. But I do have a problem with games asking players to make important decisions without letting them know that they're making a decision in the first place, especially in older RPGs where decisions are usually of the "but thou must!" variety.
Last edited by TonyTheTiger; 02-27-2012 at 11:42 AM.
A lot of RPGs have almost impossible to find secrets. Although it's usually one or two minor things.
Probably the biggest secret is on the original Wild ARMs. I could tell you I had probably everything. I was wrong. It wasn't until later that I found that there's a secret dungeon in the game that you have to have Rudy with the lowest luck possible, punch the ground in front of a teleporter, and then go into the teleporter, and trying a a few times or a couple hundred, it'd send you to The Abyss. The normal battles are the most powerful in the game, and the boss Ragu O Ragula, is the hardest of all the secret bosses, giving you the Sheriff Star which is pretty much a Ribbon that also raises all stats by 100.
As for having a good portion of the secrets unable to be found without a guide? I'd say Final Fantasy 10 receives that honor. If you say you've found all the secrets in FF10 without a guide or any help, you're either, a, a fucking liar, or b, you spent a couple thousand hours on the same save file trying literally everything imaginable.
Last edited by kupomogli; 02-27-2012 at 12:04 PM.
Everything in the above post is opinion unless stated otherwise.
The quote I was replying to was quoting a quip on the FF8 battle system so yeah that is exactly what it was about.
I won't deny that many of the top tier items in that era had stupidly cryptic paths you had to walk down to acquire them but that does not mean that you need an Guild as an instructions manual to play the game. It means that if you want every single piece of equipment or spell or whatever your going to have to be lucky and search everywhere for every little clue and even then your unlikely to get every ultra powered thing. If that's what your so pissed about I can't think of an RPG where I got every single piece of equipment on the first play through both pre and post PS1 era. That in no way means that you NEED to have a guide to play the game or has anything to do with weather you have an interest in Japanese anything, it just means you WANT a guide to get every little out of the way item in a quick and efficient manner.
Final Fantasy VIII is hilarious, and so are the people who didn't have sense enough to take the whole thing as a comedy.
Getting one of the rare cards before the last disc involves losing a card and then backtracking to a random spot and starting a card game with an NPC that isn't even rendered – he's an anonymous blob in the background. (And he might not even play the card the first time you challenge him.) It's pretty hard to top that.
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." --Bertrand Russel (attributed)
Every time I try to finish FF8, something stupid prevents me. The first time, my system stopped working. The second time, my save got deleted somehow. The third time, the disc just...stopped working.
I conclude that FF8 is so bad that reality warps in on itself to prevent me from finishing it.
It's not just finding all the top items and weapons that earned my "Guide is the instruction manual" comment. The basic game mechanics, to the best of my memory, were so convoluted (and poorly explained in-game) that you had to have someone looking over your shoulder to make sure you were doing it right.
I've seen a lot of comments so far to the effect of "FF8 is totally easy if you do X and X and X" but keep in mind, a guy playing it for the first time, without the benefit of a Guide, won't know about X and X and X, he'll have to figure out everything on his own. And its a long and tedious process, drawing 99 of every spell from each new enemy, experimenting with cards to see which ones yield what, finding out what every possible option does. On top of that, the game punishes you for levelling up, and is completely linear. I mean I'm all for letting the player choose their own path of development in a game like Oblivion where if a task is unsuited to your skills, you can go somewhere else and do something different, but in a more linear game where you're railroaded onto one story, you need more guided development.
It wouldn't be so bad if the interface was up to it, I think. You end up with dozens upon dozens of weird miscellaneous items in your inventory, and there's no easy way to sort and navigate through it all.
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." --Bertrand Russel (attributed)
Oh no! The screen changes when I ... press the button to make it do that!
Without a guide or any tricks I found myself in a situation near the end of FFVIII where I was underleveled and couldn't figure out a way to level up quickly to beat one of the final bosses, so I gave up. I probably could have gotten past it eventually but I was trying to beat it on a rental. I used to do that all the time, rent RPGs, get to the end, and then be tragically underleveled and unable to finish them before I had to take it back.
Final Fantasy 8 didn't have much outside of its basic layer, so there really wasn't much to figure out. At the very beginning they told you everything you needed to know, and then each GF you got later it was your choice to test it out or not. Unless you put absolutely no effort into discovering the mechanics of the game, then of course you're not going to know anything about it. It takes less than a minute to scroll over a GF skill and read what it does, then you can try that ability out once you learn it. It's not difficult and it's your own fault if you don't attempt to learn the game mechanics.
As a new player I had no problem completing the game. I played a lot of Triple Triad, and as far as common sense goes, I attempted to draw from every boss in order to get new summons... er Guardian Forces. You'll get a few rare Triple Triad cards, and the first GF you get has the ability to change cards into spells or items. The one that you get after the mission that was in the demo allows for you to change items to spells. While I never changed any of the cards as I wanted to keep them all, it was simple to find out that Tents created Curagas, allowing me for very early in the game to have a high HP value. I'm sure that if I wanted to use a lot of those cards that I won, then yes I would have also been overpowered, but I kept the cards to play in more Triple Triad.
Now stuff like how to fight the Doom Train and acquire it as a GF, then yes. You have to have a certain number of many different items in order for the item to work. No where does it tell you what items you're required to have. I'd understand if people complain about that, but it does nothing to the main game.
Last edited by kupomogli; 03-01-2012 at 11:44 AM.
Everything in the above post is opinion unless stated otherwise.
Maybe I'm just spoiled since, in comparison to other games, FFVIII is arguably one of the best in terms of telling you what to do and leaving alternatives should you fail the first time. It's mostly a numbers game anyway so as you're building your arsenal of spells, just playing the "this number is bigger than that number" on the junction screen should be effective enough to make the game a cakewalk. And since the most useful abilities like Card Mod are available almost immediately, you can quickly see which cards make which items/spells as you gradually build up your deck. There's actually very little guesswork, certainly less so than the alchemy bullshit you'll find in the likes of Star Ocean.
Granted, I do prefer games that don't do that kind of cryptic shit at all but within the Final Fantasy series itself, FFVIII is better in that particular instance than FFVI, FFVII, FFX, and FFXII. Arguably the biggest element of guesswork in FFVIII comes in the form of figuring out that leveling up is counterproductive. The fact that you really should avoid killing enemies is counterintuitive and it could take a guide to tell you that. Although that's arguably not by design and is simply a side effect of a broken engine.
Last edited by TonyTheTiger; 03-01-2012 at 01:50 PM.
I don't get why people keep saying that killing enemies is counterproductive. Actually, some enemies gain new spells when they level up, meaning you can draw another 300 of them after drawing 300 of the spells when they were at their previous level.
For starters, you never fight the Doom Train. And secondly, you do get told (or at least get hints regarding) what items you're required to have. It's in some of the magazines found randomly spread out in the game. Of course, it's possible to miss some of the magazines and never be able to pick them up again later. Still, it's a lot less hopeless than, say, the UFO hunting. Or the NPC that mumbles about the Tonberry King in his sleep.
Last edited by Jorpho; 03-01-2012 at 11:04 PM.
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." --Bertrand Russel (attributed)
The "Level Up" and "Level Down" techniques handle that for you without having to actually level up your own characters.I don't get why people keep saying that killing enemies is counterproductive. Actually, some enemies gain new spells when they level up, meaning you can draw another 300 of them after drawing 300 of the spells when they were at their previous level.
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