10 Years Later...

[Slothy]

I'm confused about this. Do you mean you didnt like the junction system b/c it was too good,

Seriously? You really think it was too good? I'm glad you're not a game designer.

and why didnt you like triple triad? At least this game had a good card game instead of the crap IX had. You could actually get good stuff from it too. I'm pretty sure IX was the mistake with its horrific card game, dumb cast, terrible excuse for an extra boss, pushover final battle, and a random bs final boss that came from Zidane's liquid diarrhea. =/

This explains it. Truly great games are apparently lost on you. If characters with some actual depth who develop well throughout the course of the game and in a way that makes sense means they're dumb then give me the dumb cast over FFVIII's thanks. I find it funny that you accuse FFIX of being too easy yet say the Junction system was good (unless I'm misunderstanding you there). The junction system was a great concept but it was ruined by being easily exploitable right off the bat. It was too easy to turn characters into utter powerhouses who never run into anything they can't wipe out in a few turns throughout the entire game. Where's the fun if there's no risk or challenge? Not to mention that magic was useless for anything other than junctioning. You'd have to be stupid to use any when you can easily have characters hitting for crazy damage and walking around with a few thousand hit points in a matter of hours. Great concept, but terrible execution. At least if you found IX too easy it was probably because you were grinding too much.

All that out of the way, I mostly agree with The Abominatrix about VIII. It had it's good moments plot wise and some of the characters are enjoyable if a little two dimensional. If the plot didn't fall apart towards the end and Square had bothered to balance the gameplay at all we'd have one of the better titles in the series on our hands. Instead we got something that's as meh now as it was 10 years ago. Maybe a little moreso since there have been some truly shining examples of story telling since then that make the plot look a little worse then it did then.