Do you think FFVIII's Game Design had an Impact on the series?

[Skyblade]

I feel the fact VIII decided to get rid of Armor and meaningful weapon upgrades in exchange of integrating it into the Junction system was a pretty big departure. There really wasn't a game before that tried it. While spells are still limited, technically the ability to draw and simul-cast meant it was possible to have infinite spells in some battles, and the way it integrated with customization, many players found themselves to stock up on spells to use as makeshift armor and buffers for stats. You still equip Skills through the GFs but VIII makes it far more limiting, at first but then you also get the ability to remove them and replace them. Making them technically more flexible than V-VII's systems. The shear fact they introduced a "steal spell" mechanic in itself was pretty interesting and has never really been done since which is a shame because I feel it could be expanded into something cool. The leveling system itself also brought in some major new dynamics to the game that most gamers at the time took for granted. Not many games punish you for gaining levels.

You know, I've actually said this before, but FFVIII's junction system was a wonderful concept. I mean it, I really love the idea of the junction system. It was new, it had never been done before or since, and it allowed for some pretty cool customization potential. The only thing I hated was how absolutely unbalanced it is. I wouldn't have a problem with requiring either very deep knowledge of the game and mechanics, or a lot of luck, to break the gameplay, but in this game, even a small amount of understanding of what you were doing made the difficulty disappear.

Sure it has. Go play Golden Sun.

I would love to see another company take up this system (or do something similar) and balance it well. Of course Square could revisit it themselves, but I don't have a lot of faith in them these days to get much right.

Camelot did it. With Golden Sun. And it's brilliant.

One of the biggest problems with the junction system as I see it is that there are so many ways to get new magic in the game with almost zero risk, and you gain them all so early, that there's no incentive to not spend a few rounds drawing each battle until you've stocked a couple dozen more spells for each character, then wipe out your opponent. Or buy as many tents as you can and refine them into Curaga's. I don't think there's any easy solution to that and certainly no single solution. It'd require a tweaking of pretty much every system at work in the game to fix it.

Actually, I've been working on tweaking this myself. It started out with just a couple minor modifications, but it blossomed into a pretty huge endeavor that completely revamped the magic system, increased the difficulty, and gave some balance to the whole idea, if my thoughts pan out properly. I'll post more on that later.


As for impact, I think the biggest impact it had was in basic concepts, as well as what hasn't been repeated. The "Double Edged Sword" idea (which was originally present, though negligible, in FFVII's Materia system) has been almost completely junked from the series. The card game and collection ideas, which were bigger in FFVIII than in any previous title, were massively expanded in later games (for good or ill, I'll let you decide).