Junction, Redux

[Slothy]

The thing that most of us mean when we say it's broken is that the junction system is so easily exploited to make your characters really powerful that there ends up being no challenge to the game.

It's very easy to get fairly high level magics early on by quickly teaching GF's the refinement abilities. Even just teaching them mid magic refinement and later high magic refinement, or whatever it was called in the game makes it easy, if somewhat cumbersome, to get more powerful magic than you should have and start junctioning it to your stats to up your HP, attack, and everything else.

The example I always use is that once you gain the ability to refine healing magics from items, Curaga becomes absurdly easy to get since you can refine it easily from tents.

Basically, if you want to make your characters more powerful, the key is to learn the refinement abilities and status junctions as early as possible, and draw from enemies while keeping an eye on what new items can be refined to make, and where you find them. Even without a lot of experience with the game you can make your characters strong enough that you'll probably never die.

[Vincent, Thunder God]

Ah I see! I never even knew a refinement system existed in the game - but I still almost got all the way through with GFs alone! Next time I play I'll have to try it out, thanks for the info. BTW I see you're a Neil Peart fan! He's one of my favourite drummers and Rush is one of my favourite bands. Never thought of him as James Bond, but it's pretty funny. Alex Lifeson is in the background too! xD

[Mirage]

All of these changes are unnecessary except making magic spells more powerful relative to physical attacks. The problem here, of course, is that physical attacks are extremely overpowered, especially when it comes to limit breaks, and because almost every mob that actually is resistant to physical attacks can just be Meltdowned.

The best way to make magic more worthwhile is to make more enemies be resistant to physical attacks, and also resistant to meltdown.

Or actually, I guess one change that the game could make is to tell the player about magic refinement in the opening tutorials.

[Wolf Kanno]

^ I think that would only partially fix the problem, the other issue is the fact you can make yourself defensively overpowered as well. I mean getting near max HP by the end of Disc One and having high defense and elemental/status resistance kind of kills the fun as well. Even if you nerf physical, it won't change the fact you can make an invincible tank with the system as well.