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Thread: Too Easy?

  1. #46
    Bolivar's Avatar
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    I don't know, guys... I used to be all "oh, well you can spend time grinding in other FFs and it's the same!!!" back in the day when people just drew all day long, but nowadays??? You guys are doing all kinds of item refining, carding, and enemy locating. I guess in this thread you've already established that all this stuff takes little time, most of it happens along the way, but...

    I DON'T DO NONE OF THIS CRAP!!! I play the game. I don't play Triple Triad, I spend little time drawing, I go for a nice mix of abilities instead of refinement immediately... I don't do the SeeD tests, so tents aren't as abundant as you all make them out to be. They're expensive! And yes, somewhere along the second disk I have an insane amount of HP because Curagas do eventually come easy, but... I don't know... If you spend 20-30 min.s grinding in other FFs you can definitely coast enough to make FFVIII's breakability redundant but not substantively different, it's just an added feeling of accomplishment from finding an awesome thing that's hidden in the game for pro players like ya'll, right???

    ...Right!?

  2. #47
    Memento Mori Site Contributor Wolf Kanno's Avatar
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    So... basically the game is challenging to you cause you don't play it competently...

    You can do that to any of the games in the series as well. The issue here is that the game is just highly exploitable. In most FFs you either need to level grind like hell or just access some end-game game breaking item to get the same level of brokenness in VIII. The problem here is that by the end of Disc 1 its easy to actually have a party competent enough to beat the game. Outside of grinding to level 60+ you can't do that effectively in the rest of the FF series, and its sure as hell is going to take much much longer in those games to achive this because VIII has the enemy leveling system and also has a static level requirement for your party. So its actually easy and quick to power level a party and get access to spells like Holy and Flare before the first Disc is over. This is just one way to exploit the game, their is also item refinement, card modding, hell whether you power level or purposely keep your levels low, its still and easy game thanks to the enemy leveling system. Outside of purposely playing stupid, you cannot make this game any less easy.

  3. #48
    Bolivar's Avatar
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    Holy and Flare by the end of Disc 1? Geez... what are you guys doing to get that, what abilities do you need to do it, how do you find the original source of it, and how long does it all take??? That's just insane.

  4. #49
    This could be Dangerous! Carl the Llama's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Bolivar View Post
    Holy and Flare by the end of Disc 1? Geez... what are you guys doing to get that, what abilities do you need to do it, how do you find the original source of it, and how long does it all take??? That's just insane.
    Holy and Flare by the end of disk 1 is a piece of cake, just level your party to 30 and then use the magical lamp to fight Diabolos, from level 30 onwards he has both the spells.

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    Eggstreme Wheelie Recognized Member Jiro's Avatar
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    The thing about VIII is that you don't even need Holy and Flare to kick ass. You can win on either end of the spectrum - higher levels early so you can access the powerful spells, or low levels forever to keep the enemies trout. I played through dead in the centre of the two strategies and only saw a game over because I fell asleep in a boss battle one time

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  6. #51
    Slothstronaut Recognized Member Slothy's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Mirage View Post
    The information about easy refinement of curaga from balamb wasn't widespread, neither was most the other stuff either, like where to get really good cards early on that refined into powerful magic.
    See, I actually don't fully agree with you here. No, information wasn't as easy to come by on the internet, unless you had heard of and made full use of Gamefaqs, but it didn't really have to be. Getting Curaga early breaks the game by itself. Other more obvious strategies include things like refining low level magics into higher level magics. A bit more time consuming, but still pretty quick to do as you go along in the game and easy enough to discover on your own. As soon as I understood that junctioning spells increased stats (something which you'll understand as soon as they finish telling you) and that GF's could provide abilities to refine higher level magic from lower level magic, cards, and items (something that's hard to miss if you look at their abilities), I made a beeline for as many of those abilities and stat junctions as I could. And it only takes until the point that you get the ability to refine items for you to stumble on Curaga, because no FF player worth their salt goes anywhere without at least a few tents.

    I could see not catching onto this stuff if the player is very young and/or just doesn't understand the game mechanics right away, but even a very minimal amount of understanding of the game can lead a player to stumble upon these things very early. And like I said, once you've found the secret to early Curaga, you've basically hit the point where the game will never challenge you again because not only are you basically unkillable then, but you only get stronger the longer the game goes on.

  7. #52

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    Quote Originally Posted by Mirage View Post
    The information about easy refinement of curaga from balamb wasn't widespread, neither was most the other stuff either, like where to get really good cards early on that refined into powerful magic.
    I found out about Curaga as soon as I learned Siren's curative magic refine ability.

    All I did was look through the items I could refine, and noticed that a Tent refines into Curaga. Tents aren't exactly rare, so I walked a bit to get a salary, then refined 100 Curagas for each party member.

  8. #53
    Recognized Member Jessweeee♪'s Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by KaiserDragon View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by Bolivar View Post
    Holy and Flare by the end of Disc 1? Geez... what are you guys doing to get that, what abilities do you need to do it, how do you find the original source of it, and how long does it all take??? That's just insane.
    Holy and Flare by the end of disk 1 is a piece of cake, just level your party to 30 and then use the magical lamp to fight Diabolos, from level 30 onwards he has both the spells.
    I did not know this! I love how every time we have this thread I learn something new.

  9. #54
    This could be Dangerous! Carl the Llama's Avatar
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    This game (or at least one aspect of it) isn't easy: The fight against the Malboro, that guy is so amazingly hard for the unprepared person its ridiculous it goes something like this: fight begins malboro: Bad Breath - Party stand around and do nothing - malboro massacrer, seriously without the right protective spells junctioned to status defence your wide open for a can of whoop ass.

  10. #55

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    The hardest playthrough of FF8 I ever ran was one in which I deliberately leveled to 100 before having any Bonus abilities. The early bosses (Seifer, Edea, etc.) were absurdly easy because they have level caps, but the later game got quite tough. Even with good junctioning magic (such as Tornado for HP, Flare/Meteor for Strength, Meltdown for Vitality, Triple for Magic, Reflect/Curaga for Spirit, Haste for Speed, etc.) it still took more ability slots than usual to max important stats, slots I prefer to use on good abilities like Auto-Protect. Meanwhile I was also dealing with monsters at their toughest. Ruby Dragons with high HP using Breath for the entire game are a pretty serious threat if you have three living party members. You have to kill one off just to draw Meteor from them.

    As for strong on disc 1... that's not even very tough. Heck, I've had the Lionheart on disc 1, albeit by robbing myself of long-term stats via gaining levels early. 100 Holy is a snap compared to that and you don't even need a single level gained. Just by playing Triple Triad (which is quite addicting if you use Diff trading rule) you can get Holy Stones from refining Krysta. For that matter, you can amass Meltdown from the very, very common Gayla card and Tornado from the almost equally common Abyss Worm.

    I will admit, however, to agreeing that when it comes to FF8, enjoying the story, particularly Laguna's backstory which IMO is the high point storywise of the FF series, and enjoying the soundtrack are much more important than the gameplay, even more so than in the rest of the FF games.

  11. #56
    A Big Deal? Recognized Member Big D's Avatar
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    For me, FFVIII was a big challenge the first time through. It didn't start getting easier till I learned more about the junction system and started exploiting the stat boosts.

    Now, whenever I play I get Card Mod, Enc None and the magic refinement abilities as early as possible. This combination means my characters keep their levels in the single digits, since Card Mod doesn't award any EXP while still giving you AP for each victory. A low-level team means low-level monsters, so you can then easily gain phenomenal stats using Junctioning and magic refinement. It's quite a lot of work for the first few hours of the game, but the rest of it is a walkover, with easy fights and no random encounters.

    But then, no-one knows about Junction exploitation on their first play through, unless they've been peeking online. I sure as hell didn't know about it when I first played the game back in '99, before I had an internet connection.

  12. #57
    Eggstreme Wheelie Recognized Member Jiro's Avatar
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    The first time I played FF8, I just used draw a few times and auto junctioned magic and left it like that. The majority of my magic was coming from draw points, and I would stock up a few times whenever I encountered something new. I started getting my ass handed to me, so then I tried levelling up... bad idea It was only when I was stuck against a rock and a hard place that fiddling with the junctions occurred to me and saved me a world of trouble. It's not always obvious at first glance though!

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    I think on my first playthrough in ~2003, I had Water on strength, Demi on magic, and Curaga on HP from early disc 1 all the way into disc 2 (lol). For some reason I leveled up Squall, Rinoa and Irvine a lot after Selphie's little base mission (60+), got Pain & Flare, then figured out those were good for strength, magic, and status-defense. The end result was that those 3 characters got stuck way behind the others in base stats at the endgame, with Squall actually having a lower base strength than Zell and needing STR + 60% to reach 255 (I think he reached the 240s with just 40%). Although I did get 600 Triples between Cerberus and Odin, and figured out how good they were for magic/drawing stuff, for some reason I didn't get Tornados until disc 3 despite finding the desert well before then. End result: crap file, but at least I figured out which junctions were good for which stats before my second file.

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