All right Yea Forums what can I expect from this game? The only other FF games I've played were 10 and 13

how can one post be so wrong

All this 10 hate, all I remember hating about 10 was Tidus's gay ass and dodging 500 lightning bolts. Blitzball was FUN and those cut scenes were lit at the time.

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>15 is light years better
As someone who has played both again, I can safely state that you are retarded. Not like, "Lol, ur retarded," but like, "This person has an IQ of below 70, qualifying him as mentally retarded." That is the only way you can call FF15 light years better than anything.

FFVIII is objectively shit

My favorite FF, but it is deeply flawed. Zell literally breaks the game, for example.

15 is the best ff though

You're clinically retarded.

Oh, God, you're so retarded that you thought your little post was somehow better than "no u," despite the fact that it portrays the same message.

It's time for you to swallow a bullet.

I beat 15 AND got the Platinum, calling it "the best" is just trolling.

Fantastic first 20 hours or so, followed by a slow decent into bullshit. Combat system is wonky as all hell, but junction system is flexible and quite cool if you know what you're doing. Triple Triad is the best FF card minigame of all time, get the Card skill on your GF's asap. Also, brace yourself for some fantastic music.

To expand on this if you care:

The combat system removes Mana/MP and instead treats magic as if it were an item. You draw magic stock from draw points around the world as well as from enemies.

The junction system allows you to equip magic to stats in order to boost them based on what skills a Guardian Force has. Having a stronger spell or a greater stock of said spell will increase the effect. You also can equip spells to Status Attack and Status Defence, EG equipping Death to Status Attack gives your melee strikes a small chance to instantly kill enemies that are vulnerable to death (non-bosses). A greater stock of the death spell will make this more likely to occur.

As such, the game somewhat discourages the actual use of magic because doing so would have an impact on your stats that use that magic. At the same time however, if your magic stat is high, spells can be devastating.

Limit breaks aren't based on a gauge, they trigger randomly based on how low your health is. If your HP is yellow (low), there's a chance it will appear which increases the lower it goes. You can cheat the system by hitting triangle (PlayStation Controls) to re-roll that chance repeatedly and guarantee yourself a Limit Break every time.

Guardian Forces are basically a minute long (sometimes shorter, sometimes longer) that do modest damage. Typically you'll be able to do much greater damage in the same real life time by not using them, so you won't rely on them very much. Be sure to use them at least once though, the animations are pretty fantastic for a game of it's age.

Enemies also scale to your level. Sometimes, it'll be easier to tackle a boss at a lower level than a higher one, which is kinda weird.

The above isn't an exhaustive breakdown of the combat system but the jist is, it's troubled. Not completely horrible, but not exactly a good system.

An awesome card game with a nonsensical side story that only gets worse as you go along.

The games plot starts off strongly and remains strong for the entire first disk (which wraps up after the parade in deling city if you're playing this on a newer platform). After that, things go down hill. Not rapidly mind you, the majority of the games second disk is pretty good, definitely not as good as the first but hardly bad. It's a slow decent, but you'll hit rock bottom towards the end. The plot is kind of a mess, many of the characters are very hard to like and the twists and turns later in the plot kind of ruin the stories strength from earlier in the game. I'd definitely suggest seeing it through, but don't expect to love every moment of it.

This game, like 9, has a card game built in called Triple Triad. You can challenge many NPC's in the world by pressing Square when you approach them. When you win, you get one of their cards (or all, under certain conditions). There are varying rules around the game world which can freely move between regions (which you can control to a degree). It's one of the best minigames Final Fantasy has ever had, to the point that XIV adopted it some time ago. Play it liberally.

Finally, the music. FFVIII's soundtrack has it's ups and downs, but it's the first game where the PlayStation's sound hardware was used to it's fullest. There are some absolutely fantastic tracks in this game that hold up to this day. Strongly recommended in this regard, but if you're playing the Steam release, make sure you download the Roses and Wine patch to replace the MIDI tracks that Squeenix recorded from the built in Windows MIDI emulator to MP3 with the original PlayStation tracks. I don't know how the console versions fare in this regard. All I know is that last I checked, they never really cared to fix it even though they did for VII.

Either way, it's a good game, far from a perfect one but there's plenty to love about it

I'd be a lot more forgiving of the combat system if it was just its first iteration, and was refined in subsequent games. But it was just a one-off, and as such, it needs to be judged as it is, rather than its future potential.

Personally, I loved it in theory. Yeah, it needed a LOT of work, as it was ripe for abuse, like giving Zell 100 Hastes in his speed, junctioning auto-haste on top of that, and hitting him with an Aura in battle was pretty much a guaranteed way to break the entire game (even more so if you slap 100 Pain to his attack when you finally get to draw it). But I've never had a game where an entire team of characters could be personalized so well. I really wish they stuck with it, and refined the junction system.

Finally, feel free to stop playing after the Deling City Parade. It's only down hill from there. Take it that Squall dies and move on with your live. It's only down hill from there.

And to clear any bias, FFVIII was my very first Final Fantasy. I may have been 7 or 8 when I first played it. I loved it to bits as a kid, but as an adult I saw it for what it was. It's not a masterpiece, although it has elements of one. It's not perfect, although it has moments of perfection. FFVIII is flawed. Deeply flawed. It's miles from a 10/10. Hell, it's miles from the best Final Fantasy game. But there are some moments of absolute magic in this game and I wouldn't discourage anyone from giving it a go, at least while knowing what to expect from it.

Have fun!

I agree. I loved the ideas behind the junction system, and the system itself worked reasonably well. It's just that it was tied to a wonky combat system and was very easily abused. I'd have loved to see the Junction system return in a later game with a better combat system to go with it.

With a sound foundation and a few iterations, it could have been one of the most flexible, customisation and fantastic systems in a JRPG. It's a real shame that things didn't go that way. It was a hell of a lot better than the absolute lack of customisation FFIX had, as much as I love that game.

Are you playing the PC version? Then BAD music unless you mod it up.