Final Fantasy 8

[Target]

Has anyone played this game? I'm thinking of getting it what do you all think of it?
Cheers

[Iron Greasel]

I played a few discs, but got bored and didn't finish it. It's mostly just basic Final Fantasy. You fight random encounters, get money and items, become more powerful, watch pretty cutscenes and save the world. You don't get any new weapons, but you can upgrade your existing ones by collecting some trinkets and paying some money to the weapon-upgrader-man. You can't actually learn any spells, but you can draw them from your enemies or special tiny glowing things you find lying around. You can blast your enemies with dramatic summoning spells, and the summoned monsters themselves get more powerful, and make you learn new abilities.

Grinding combat and an epic plot. If you liked other Final Fantasy games, you will probably like this one.

[Target]

I'd heard it had an odd leveling up system or something, I read a bit about the junctioning system on Wiki, and just got very confused.

[Iron Greasel]

Junctioning may be a bit confusing, but still pretty easy to get the hang of once you start playing. You can junction summonable monsters to get access to a bunch of abilities, ranging from combat abilities to static "HP+30%"-type boosts to special stuff like converting playing cards into items. When you kill stuff, the summonable monsters you have junctioned get experience, and when they have enough, new abilities. You can also junction magic spells to your stats and combat thingies, to get stuff like elemental resistances and simple stat boosts. Everything is explained in greater detail in the tutorial sections the game throws at you near the start.

[Firestormalpha]

Reading about junctioning it's very confusing. Play with it for awhile and you figure it out. The Card system was actually pretty cool, but there's one pseudo-GF (summon) that isn't all that useful without some obscure peripheral that I've never encountered in the US. All in all it wasn't too bad, but it's mostly for of the same. Differences being you don't get money from combat, you get paid over time by the SEED organization. You don't buy new weapons so much as you acquire parts for them and pay someone to build them for you. Enemies level up with you (to an extent). I found it kind of fun, but by far the gloomiest FF I've played.

Should you choose to purchase this game, remember, Draw from Every single boss you encounter, many of them have powerful spells and sometimes even GFs. Oh and in general DRAW DRAW DRAW. You can get ahold of an ability early on that lets you upgrade/refine your spells up to the next tier.

[Target]

The Card system??? Ehhh
Draw??? This is making me more confused??

[Iron Greasel]

There's a card game involved. As usual, no one tells you the rules.

Draw is when you steal magic from your enemies.

[Firestormalpha]

Draw is the method by which you obtain magic, whether from an enemy or a "draw" point. The card game can seem complicated, but it's easy to pick up for some, my brother beat the card jack, queen, king and Joker.

It seems complicated but then so does the Job system in FF tactics still a fun game, hard to find the original PSone version but they've just released a revamped version for the PSP, almost tempts me to get the system, almost.

[Kakero]

I like the story and characters of FF8 but I dislike the leveling system whereby if you level up you opponent also will level up. To me that's a big no no. Plus spending weeks and weeks of drawing magic from enemy is just too time consuming.

[Target]

Thanks, that's made things a bit less confusing.
Just spotted a FF& and 8 double PC pack on ebay. very expensive, but I think I will go for it...or suggest it as a chrimbo pressy
Of course deciding which one to play will be a big decision, and hopefully there won't be any probs playing these games on Windows XP.

Let me know if you have more FF8 stories, tips etc