This game is hard D:

This is my first playing of this game. I just recently started it. What I have to say so far is WTF?!

This game is hard. I never die this much on any rpg. I also don't like how you get summons early. It feels like I never have to do anything but use those guys cause they do the most damage and there is no restriction. YET it's still hard. It's as if you have to use them. Which then I think is kinda stupid that you put in the whole gunblade mechanics and such and then all you do is use those.

So I think this game is kinda hard. Opinions, comments, questions?

Anything I should know to do that I could miss since i'm new to this game?

I remember playing the game for the first time and having the same experience. I used GF's all the time and relied on them all up till the final boss fight basically. And if you play that way then it IS hard, no doubt.

What I'd recommend is that you really try to sit down the Junction system and work out how it works. Actively draw lots of magic and junction it in efficient ways. Once you start doing that then suddenly simply using a regular Attack will become really effective, and limit breaks will become so effective you won't ever want to summon a GF ever again.

If you really know the Junction system and know some other tricks then the game can be made absurdly easy pretty much immediately when you start.

I use to play with summons as my main force but i couldnt get past the second diskand had to start again.

The enemies scale based on your level so its better to stay at low levels and get most of your strength from drawing magic + junctioning.

2 things to make the game dead easy:
- learn the Card command
- draw magic early on as much as possible.

Even when you encounter those bite bug and caterchipillars in the beginning just outside of Balamb Garden - draw all the magic you can. Then junction the magic to boost your stats. Pay attention to the tutorials from Quistis on junctioning, they help. It is good to be somewhat selective when drawing magic as fire, ice, thunder and cure boosts your stats better than scan.

Once you learn the card command, card everything you fight instead of defeating it. That way you gain AP so your GFs can keep learning abilities for junctioning, yet you don't get exp and level up. When you don't level up, neither do the enemies in the game. Your stats will be boosted much more with junctioned magic than levelling up, and you will be far more powerful than most enemies. So back to carding, in order to card something you have to attack it until most of its HP is gone. Then the card command will work.

Then learn the card mod ability, which allows you to change your acquired cards to items and tools, which in turn can be refined into magic. Of course you have to learn each magic refinement command first, but these can be learned early on as well, so learn these abilities as soon as possible.

Try this, and the game will be easy. Even Edea at the end of the first disc will be a joke, and don't forget to draw whatever magic she has that you don't!

I think a lot of people find the game hard the first time they play it because Square took such a radical departure from the normal "fight battles, get stronger than enemies" approach. Not only does an enemy's power scale with you, but you won't become much more powerful unless you learn how to junction properly.

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Originally Posted by crazybayman

Once you learn the card command, card everything you fight instead of defeating it. That way you gain AP so your GFs can keep learning abilities for junctioning, yet you don't get exp and level up.

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Even without doing that this game is dead easy.

Step 1: draw 100 of every spell you can
Step 2: Junction those 100 spells to your stats
Step 3: Learn more stat junction abilities
Step 4: Learn the refinement abilities that let you refine spells from items and more powerful spells from weaker ones

Congratulations, you just broke the battle system. And you haven't even learned encounter none and spent time drawing from the islands closest to Heaven and Hell yet.

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Originally Posted by Vivi22

And you haven't even learned encounter none and spent time drawing from the islands closest to Heaven and Hell yet.

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Drawing powerful spells from those islands is so tedious.

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Originally Posted by Vivi22

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Originally Posted by crazybayman

Once you learn the card command, card everything you fight instead of defeating it. That way you gain AP so your GFs can keep learning abilities for junctioning, yet you don't get exp and level up.

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Even without doing that this game is dead easy.

Step 1: draw 100 of every spell you can
Step 2: Junction those 100 spells to your stats
Step 3: Learn more stat junction abilities
Step 4: Learn the refinement abilities that let you refine spells from items and more powerful spells from weaker ones

Congratulations, you just broke the battle system. And you haven't even learned encounter none and spent time drawing from the islands closest to Heaven and Hell yet.

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Magic drawing can be ignored by playing Triple Triad for a few hours, then using Card Mod.

OMG what's this card stuff you're talking about D:

Yeah I don't like having to steal magic from things.

When you leave Garden for the first time, you receive the GF Quezacotl. He can learn the Card ability, and after learning that, the Card Mod ability. The Card ability, once equipped, lets you turn enemies into cards if their HP is low enough (generally lower than 50%, but the success rate will be higher the lower their HP is). The Card Mod ability lets you turn cards into useful items, many of which can be further refined into great spells for junctioning by using other GFs' refining abilities (early on, examples include Shiva's I Mag-RF, Quezacotl's T Mag-RF and Ifrit's F Mag-RG, but you'll learn plenty more later on).

If you'd rather earn cards by playing them, talk to a guy on the bridge on the 2nd floor of Balamb Garden (I think he's there randomly so leave and come back if he isn't there) to recieve a few cards to start with. It'll be a bit hard in the beginning, but it quickly gets easier as you gain better cards.

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Originally Posted by Flying Mullet

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Originally Posted by Vivi22

And you haven't even learned encounter none and spent time drawing from the islands closest to Heaven and Hell yet.

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Drawing powerful spells from those islands is so tedious.

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It takes a while, but only because you need to wait for the draw points to recharge. Have one person draw all of them while walking around with encounter none equipped and you'll have an unstoppable killing machine with so little effort it's sickening. It really is ridiculous how with even a small amount of understanding of the junction system you can break the game.

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Originally Posted by Marshall Banana

Magic drawing can be ignored by playing Triple Triad for a few hours, then using Card Mod.

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I figured since they were new to the game I'd teach them the most straight forward way to break it. Sure there are more efficient methods, but they'll probably learn them in time anyway.

First off,try reading through those tutorials again.Seems like you skipped them.
Second,when you learn from the tutorials,if you are in the beginning of the game,draw magic from enemies and juction the magic spells you have to your stats to increase them.That makes your physical attacks,HP,magic power and immunity increase,so you don't have to rely on GF's so much.

Personally,my first playthrough was a mess,I only relied on GFs,I didn't get the junction system and my game was pretty much stuck in some parts and kinda boring just using GFs all the time.On disk 4,when time started compressing I pretty much quit because I knew I was weak and I couldn't defeat Ultimecia.I started all over again.

My second playthrough,when I figured it out the junction system,went smoothly.It's pretty easy,really.Just know how to junction,level up so your GFs can learn abillities and that's it.The thing is,in this game you don't have to level up to increase your stats,just junction.
So you can be level 15 and make 5000 of physical damage.

There are abillities that your GFs can learn so you can refine useless itens you win in battle,to magic spells.So you don't have to draw constantly from enemies.

If your GF has learned Boost you can hold select (I think it is) and mash one of the buttons to make their attack stronger during their summon animation. I don't know if someone mentioned that. I tend to scan /lazyasshole

You can go into the menu somewhere, I actually think it's in the tutorial section at the bottom, and take a SeeD test. When you answer correctly, it increases the amount of money you get when Gil magically pops up every so often. Just go here as a cheat sheet. Get Siren to learn her Refine ability. Buy a bunch of Tents with your huge money you earned from taking the SeeD test. Refine the Tents into Curaga. Junction the Curaga to HP. Now your characters have massive amounts of his points. This can be done early on.

If your HP is in the yellow zone, they can initiate a Limit Break. If it doesn't pop up, just smash triangle until it does. Squall's is pretty mothersmurfing fierce. Honestly, if you have huge trouble, you can purposefully keep him low and just limit break everyone.


I tend to use their Refine abilities to get myself junctioned. It turns items into magic that you can then junction to stats. I hate Draw and my princess self does not have the goddamn patience to draw smurfing 100 spells from anything :mymelontd: Maybe now and then, especially important ones from bosses, but bleh.

Okay. Now just put the best strongest magic you have on STR to increase their attack. If you get a strong enough magic slapped on your STR stat, you can just hit attack over and over and ignore GF altogether.

People use the Card trick because it means GF learn abilities but the enemies don't level, thus putting you far above them in power. It's kind of cheap, but oh well.

Running on roads eliminate random encounters.

imho Selphie's Limit Break sucks unless you're willing to use a trick that takes too long. Quistis' takes too much effort for me. Rinoa's can be good but it takes a tight set-up. I suppose what I'm saying here is use party members with penises. But again, tbf it's imho.

I hardly ever turn anything in to cards in this game unless I need their card to card mod into an item. The ability really isnt that necessary since you can keep up and surpass enemies fine w/o having to worry about your lv. My last playthrough everyone absorbed every element in the game, was immune to all (or a huge majority of) status effects, had max hp and str w/ a supercrappy spell on hp (like fire or blizzard) and mid-lv spell on str, and Rinoa had 200-230 in every stat she didnt have maxxed. Junctioning is pretty much the only reason Ive found people dont like this game b/c it makes it too easy if you know what youre doing with only a few exceptions. Once you are able to get that junctions that let your stats grow higher every lv its even more retarded.

Also, I used GFs (including Eden) hardly ever. I used Shiva to beat Ifrit to make the 10 min time limit easier to beat, and I used Quezacotl vs the guy on top of the communication tower (I think). After that I pretty much never summon for the rest of the game unless its for fun (cactuar for best summon animation ever imo) or if I dont feel like casting meltdown on a boss so I use doomtrain to drop its vitality to 0 and hope for it being susceptible to some other random status effect. BTW every boss in the entire game is susceptible to the 0 vit status effect from meltdown/doomtrain once you get those, which means you cut through them in 5 sec.

Another note, I used items for the first time ever on my 203843240th playthrough a couple weeks ago. I'll admit I was just getting tired of omega weapon so I used 1 war trial and that was that. :x imo items are overall pretty useless in this game unless outside of battle for for GF abilities like magic refinement or modding or w/e

STOP! Don't use the Card ability, don't draw 100 magics of everything, they take too long and take all of the fun out of the pacing of the story and the game in general.

When you find a new spell, have each member draw once or twice and exchange all of that magic to one user, find which stat junction will benefit the most from it, and move on. This way, you can draw and junction a decent variety and quantity of magic just by playing the regular battles as you go along.

Most importantly is the pay attention to the magic you're getting and learn to effectively use it in different areas. Some enemies will be susceptible to elements and status ailments, and you should learn when to do that with the spell Scan (or trail and error).

Finally, Demi, or Gravity, is the most important spell in the game. A lot of the time the enemies will have much higher HP than you hit for, and it's a great way to drastically reduce that. If you use double or triple on it then you have the best combination in the game.

Dude, FFVIII is all about the story, you should be enjoying the story and its pacing instead of running around performing meaningless tasks all for the sake of breaking the game. Keep up the pace as you go along but don't try to get bogged down in mundane tasks.

This reminds me of a review talking about all these techniques and how time wasting they are.

I had a hard time my first playthrough, too ;_;

Now that I know all the little tricks it's waaaay too easy though :(

If drawing magic from enemies all the time is a pain for you, don't worry about it. In the beginning of the game you may want to draw a little, but you don't need to spend five minutes of every battle drawing to do well in the game. My personal strategy is to have GFs learn Junction and Magic Refining abilities first. I start the game out drawing every now and then, and I do this less and less as I learn more refining abilities.

The card refining method is excellent. 100 Dino Bones that refine into 20 Quakes each and 100 Black Holes that refine into 30 Demis each before disc two! Just collect a couple of GF cards for easy games and save before each game. Most of your good stuff will come from the GF cards so you don't have to do that a whole lot anyway.

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Originally Posted by Darth Cid

This reminds me of a review talking about all these techniques and how time wasting they are.

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Drawing magic from enemies and refining it from items takes me less time than level grinding in any other FF game would if I found myself under leveled. Once you can refine magic from items the game is so incredibly easy it's not funny. Buy a few tents, get a bunch of Curaga and marvel at your thousands of HP on the first disc.

I never said to try maxing stats through the junction system as soon as you start the game, but it can take less than half an hour to beef up one or two on each character and make them fly through the game like the enemies aren't even there.

This game is not hard, you just don't know how to junction. Summons are utterly useless except for two or three late game summons. This game will be too easy once you learn to junction magic to your stats. You will overpower everything at that point.

Also, one thing you should know is to teach the bonuses like str + 20% 40% etc. to your GFs first because some of them will eventually let you learn an ability that will give you +1 to strength (or magic, or spr, vit) every time you level up.

Also dont forget to put pain and death as your status-atk-j (can get 100 deaths really early in the game easy with drawing magic from items).

You guys are making it seem blah. I don't want to waste my time doing mindless crap. I want to experience the game not take forever trying to "beat the system". :/

The story kinda stinks too, all the "theories" have gotten me addicted to checking on this forum.

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Originally Posted by Freya

You guys are making it seem blah. I don't want to waste my time doing mindless crap. I want to experience the game not take forever trying to "beat the system". :/

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You could try your hand at Triple Triad. You'll have the Ifrit card after the fire cavern, so that should help win games to aquire cards. Meanwhile learn the card-mod ability, and refinement abilities, and refine magic 'till you go bonkers.

As soon as you get a magic lamp from Cid, save and use it. Winning that battle gets you a good card as well.

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Originally Posted by Freya

You guys are making it seem blah. I don't want to waste my time doing mindless crap. I want to experience the game not take forever trying to "beat the system". :/

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Except it isn't really beating the system, though. It's how it's supposed to be played I guess, but having played the game some times (or even just one time) makes you more experienced in what to do, and what not to do. Same with every other game.

But seriously, draw magic and junction like crazy.

You really don't need to do it excessively just to make the game less hard. Just keep in mind that junctioning beats levelling by far. Draw a few spells here and a few spells there, you don't need to spend too much time on it.

I max out spell drawing whenever I see one worth it to junction since I'm pretty much a power gamer so I cant not do it. If you dont want to do it then dont. You could just leave Zell at low hp and kill everything with his limit first round by doing is o-x, ^ v, o-x, ^ v, etc till his timer runs out, which makes things easy mode too despite what you have junctioned. I got 4-5 hits per sec off his timer doing this, which is why he's the best chara in the game.

1. learn Hp-J, Str-J ect so you can raise your stats with magic.
2. Draw as much as you feel like.
3. Junction the magic to your characters.

Next after that I would learn refine abilities. So far everyone has said the first time they played they relied on GFs so your not adnormal there. If you have a hard time with drawing, boost your magic as high as you can get, set your curser to memory in config, go fight desired enemy. Draw what you want with each character and tape or hold down the ok button.

GF's will always hit more (well most of the time) but they also take longer. So if your dealing half of the damage your GFs do, remember you can attack a lot faster. So its your choice.

I think I just hate the fact that everyone becomes a blue mage. I hate Blue mages. xP EF YOU QUINA!

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Originally Posted by Freya

You guys are making it seem blah. I don't want to waste my time doing mindless crap. I want to experience the game not take forever trying to "beat the system". :/

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You're gonna get your ass handed to you everytime then.
How do you wanna be strong without junctioning? There is no other way.
Read the posts,it's not about leveling up,it's all in the junction system.Try to understand and you will be happy.

Drawing magic repeatedly is no more mindless than killing the same bunch of enemies 50 times, to be quite honest.

I didn't draw a lot of magic really, but I didn't find it very hard. If you hate spending time drawing magic, use magic refinement from items instead, it's super effective!

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Originally Posted by Freya

You guys are making it seem blah. I don't want to waste my time doing mindless crap. I want to experience the game not take forever trying to "beat the system". :/

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Please don't be discouraged! It's really a lot of fun once you've mastered junctioning and the like. In saying that, I completely agree with the person who said earlier in the thread that the player should be more focused on the story, etc. The first time I finished it, I barely digressed at all.. so you should be fine. :)

The thing is,how do you intend to get to the end of the game and defeating Ultimecia without junctioning? :confused:

Oh, plenty of people have done that :p

Luck. I managed to get to the start of disk 4 no problem my first playthrough and I barely used any of the strategies mentioned in this thread. You just have to do little bursts of drawing or card gaming to slowly build up your stats. Keeps the fun that way.

Though to be honest I'm now the type to power-draw 300 of each new spell I encounter.

Stopping and taking some time off for either drawing lots of magic from enemies or playing cards and modding them into magic can be less waste of a time than having to summon GF's constantly for the rest of the game. It's so annoying to see Shiva headbutt an ice crystal for the 120th time. D:

You don't really have to learn which magics are good for what attribute either really, just get lots of magic and let the auto-junction do the job.

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Originally Posted by Mirage

Drawing magic repeatedly is no more mindless than killing the same bunch of enemies 50 times, to be quite honest.

I didn't draw a lot of magic really, but I didn't find it very hard. If you hate spending time drawing magic, use magic refinement from items instead, it's super effective!

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This. In fact, Drawing 100 of a spell generally takes less time than leveling in previous games, and as Levian said, it's a lot shorter than watching summon animations repeatedly.

And of course, once you can refine magic from cars and items you don't really have to draw again for the rest of the game. Seriously, if it were that hard or time consuming to become real powerful in this game I might actually like the battle system. But as I've said plenty of times in the past, this game has the easiest battle system to exploit and it can be done in such a short amount of time it's not even funny.

This is probably the first time I've heared anyone call this game hard. As soon as you learn the junctioning system, it becomes the easiest out of all the FFs.

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Originally Posted by Freya

You guys are making it seem blah. I don't want to waste my time doing mindless crap. I want to experience the game not take forever trying to "beat the system". :/

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Drawing magic 3 times from an enemy in FFVIII = Leveling Up once or twice in another FF. You really don't need to spend much time at all, unless you want to become so powerful the game becomes boring. All you have to do is draw a couple of spells in every other battle or so, and it will still not be harder than most other FFs. Finally, turning items into spells is another great (and actually even better) way to do it. Keeping your level low actually makes the game easier, by the way. So if you think it's too hard, power-leveling will not be the answere. Juntioning and limit-break spamming is what this game is all about.

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Originally Posted by Mirage

Oh, plenty of people have done that :p

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Must have been a pain in the ass.:eep:

You don't have to go out of your way to take the time to do most of the strategies people have suggested. GFs just learn things as you go on, just like how you level up as you go on. By the way, leveling up just makes the enemies tougher, so I wouldn't recommend level grinding.

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Originally Posted by line_genrou

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Originally Posted by Mirage

Oh, plenty of people have done that :p

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Must have been a pain in the ass.:eep:

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I think they actually called it a challenge, but I agree with you :p

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The thing is,how do you intend to get to the end of the game and defeating Ultimecia without junctioning?:confused:

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No you don't understand. I don't want to take a lot of time drawing magic from monsters when I can just progress through the story. Not that I'm not going to junction at all. Sorry that I have to explain myself.

You don't really have to draw a lot if you don't want to. If you play the card game for instance, you can get lots of magic from items refined from cards. You can also turn monster drops into magic, and turn bought items into magic.

With 10k gil you can buy 10 tents and refine them into 100 curaga spells. Junction that to HP and you've got a *ton* of HP. If you get an abyss worm card, you can turn that into windmills that refine into tornado magic (I think it's 20 tornados per windmill), if you get a mesmerize card you can turn it into a mesmerize blade (also dropped from the actual enemy) which refines into regen :p. These are just a few examples.

I always found the card game really enjoyable so I got most of my magic through that :p.

^ 1 mesmerize blade = 20 regens, crazy overpowered and easy to get for junctioning, regen > curaga btw :P

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Originally Posted by Freya

No you don't understand. I don't want to take a lot of time drawing magic from monsters when I can just progress through the story. Not that I'm not going to junction at all. Sorry that I have to explain myself.

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It's already been stated that it doesn't take very long. If you're finding yourself underpowered where you're at and you don't have the ability to refine magic from items yet then get in a battle and draw one spell until you have a hundred of it. It helps to turn the battle speed up as high as it will go and set the cursor to memory.

Because I was curious about how long it would take, I actually started a new game today and saw how long it took to get 100 of every spell for Squall and Quistis that is available before you go to the cavern to get Ifrit. It took me under half an hour. If you only do one or two spells it might take 5-10 minutes tops. Once you're done you can junction the spell and move on. Drawing as you play through the game will still give you easy access to every spell you need or could ever want, and it won't take you long if you have everyone draw once or twice every battle. I really don't get why you're so concerned about it taking forever, when you'd easily spend more than half an hour leveling up if you were under leveled at any point in another FF.

And just so we're clear, in the new game I started, by the time I had finished the Dollet mission I had Quezacotl's Mid Mag-RF which meant I could easily refine low level magic like Cure into Cura, essentially meaning that even if I never refined an item or a card into magic I would be set for quite a while, and it was all done with no more than half an hour spent not pursuing the story. This game is ridiculously easy to exploit even when all you do is try to get through the main story as fast as possible.

I'm the odd man out here cause I didn't use summons much at all in my first playthrough but I was burnt out on long summons after VII anyway and VIII just put the idea of cinematic summon sequences to the grave with me.

I actually found in my recent playthrough (cut short due to a scratch on Disc 3) that the magic you Junction alone isn't what really makes the game broken its the stat % abilites... Seriously, My Squall with 100 Flares junctioned to strength does 3x more damage with the Str+40% ability. He literally went from doing 2000-2500 to suddenly doing 5500+.
I kept finding myself having more fun this time by actually ignoring the statistical increase abilites and just sticking to special moves like Darkside and Devour.

The other thing I would like to point out is that early in the game having a Mag-J ability is really useful cause your draw rate is based on the Magic stat. Once you start getting the Refine abilities and Mug, you should no longer have a terribly difficult time getting magic. Only spells like Holy (which is surprisingly not as useful as you would think), Meteor, and Ultima are hard to come by but you seriously don't need them. Just use the auto junction feature to sort out the stats and just remember to occasionally use draw. Hell, it becomes even less stressful later when you can start draw/cast defensive spells from the enemies themselves and not have to worry about carrying them around. Just try to enjoy yourself and ignore power grinding.

Ultima and Meteor on Strenght makes you give very powerfull phsysical damage.

Yes that's true, but the game doesn't make it imperative to use them, as I said, with Flare equipped and the Str.+% abilites I was already doing over 5k of damage in the game and that's more than enough especially if you have low levels in which you will be one hit killing most random enemies. Ultima itself is literally salt in the wounds for the bad guys when you obtain it.

I usually put Ultima on my elemental defense. Add Life or Full-Life and I'm absorbing every element!

At the end of the game you can have everyone with 4 things on status and element-def-j, which makes it easy to be immune or have high resist to all status effects, and you can be absorbing 80-100% of all elemental dmg.

Next you have whatever you want on str and hp since theyre easy to max out with +60% from your junctioned support abilities. Put haste (I think thats the best one) on speed or junction auto-haste.

While leveling just have a "bonus" junctioned for every stat possible so you have incredibly high base stats before even worrying about junctioning.

With all this I had Rinoa with 230+ in str, vit, mag, and spr + auto-haste. She was only the 2nd best in my party, but I guess 2nd's good enough with Squall there. I pretty much was was easy mode once I used Mighty Guard with Quistis (used Zell on my other playthrough but that just wasnt fair lol) since in this game it gives haste, aura, shell, and protect (wtf op).

You keep your level low until you have the HP, Str, Vit, Mag and Spr bonus abilities.

Then you junction a select few (say, Str, Vit and spr for squall) and level him up to 100.

When your done you'll have a base str vit and spr of about 150.

Then with normal magic junctioning you can raise those stats to 255 and nothing can hurt you. (Vit increases defence against physical attacks & spr increases defence against magic attacks).

A few of the GF can learn these abilities. Some learn only one, and I think the Cactaur or Tonberry you can get later on have all.

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The enemies scale based on your level so its better to stay at low levels and get most of your strength from drawing magic + junctioning.

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exactly!i am lv.17 at the moment and those fights are harder and harder!i have alot of sleep magic so i am not so vunerable to sleeping gas now.......

you know how you like to use your GF,heres another way to use them.....
when poisoned,summon your GF,and the poison does not effect you!(until it hits)

wild-one, please use the edit button to add to your earlier post rather than posting several times in a row. Thank you. :-) -Rantzien

originally posted by mirage:

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use magic refinement from items instead.its super effective!

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yes
because if you waste your time drawing magic,your gonna get hit
i only disagree if you are fighting either Bite Bug or Red Bat
and it also doesnt count with Buel either..draw until your tired of getting hit,hit once,draw more,and final hit...BAM!battle finished

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Step 1: draw 100 of every spell you can
Step 2: Junction those 100 spells to your stats
Step 3: Learn more stat junction abilities
Step 4: Learn the refinement abilities that let you refine spells from items and more powerful spells from weaker ones

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good idea!
a tip to get tons of Silence or Sleep:
step 1:go to the training centre
step 2:find a lone grat
step 3:use the draw command,select Sleep and cast
step 4:stock as much magic as you can until grat wakes up
step 5:hammer it down with SHIVA!
repeat until you have 100 or more!
you also have more chance of getting more than 100 this way