The Final Fantasy Series

[sutocorporation]

Yeah I like it too.

[TheLastFortnight]

Yeah, I love the junction system too, when I played it, I spent so many time drawing the magics from enemies, I became addicted to it . The only time it got annoying was in the end of the game, I shared my GFs to make my six characters junctioned, it was tough I made so many items from cards to customize the GFs, but in the end it was worthwhile, the entire party became strong and almost invincible. It was one of the early FFs to allow the player to leave almost every attribute at 255. It was strange, because rather than make my characters level up fast, I tried to slow it, to make them level up later in the game using the bonuses abilities.

[animelover32]

If your talking about the Junction system from VIII, I hated it. It was the worst out of all FF battle systems. The best was VII's with the materia.

[Tyrien]

Originally Posted by XjapanFOREVER

I'm replaying VIII right now...
I'm on disc 2, just left Trabia Garden...

I REALLY like the junction system...

The junction system is great, but it's idiot proof at the same time. If you actually spend some time into it you can make yourself invincible before the end of disc one. This doesn't even involve grinding, just stacking magic from the right monsters.

Don't even get me started to how overpowered it is once you hit end-game lol.

The materia system was one of the best. Though it too had it's downsides once you got later into the game. Especially once everyone had 8 slot weapons (yea they had no growth but there were stacked 2 and 3x growth weapons that were still pretty strong).

Going through Crisis Core since I got it I'm really starting to love it more and more.

[TheLastFortnight]

I don't think so, the junction system was great, the problem is that the characters level up too fast, but it aren't related to the junction system itself.
The idea of equip magic, rather than armour was very original and intelligent, it would be ridiculous if the characters of such a futurist game equip helmet, shield and these kinds of things, like a ridiculous living medieval tin. And about the magic, it isn't just draw the magic, you need to learn the ability of the GF that allows the junction in the attribute (and learn the abilities of the GFs spends a lot of time...), the quantity of the magic equipped defines how much the stat will raise, so you need to spend so much time collecting it from the enemies, and some magic is only available to draw when the enemies reach certain levels...
The enemies level up as the characters do and if it allows to become stronger earlier, it's because the levels raise too fast, but if you make your characters reach a high level in the beginning of the game, you will regret it later, because the attribute don't raise that much normally and later in the game you can find the bonuses abilities, without this you can't make some stats reach the max, even with the best magics equipped, of course you can use devour, but, you know, it SUCKS!
I agree that the materia system is better, but FFVII is very easy too in battles... too easy. Also the summons at FFVIII, the heart of the junction system and its menu abilities, make the game system very rich and interesting. You can create your own items and magics and even call a shop anywhere, it's so cool. And at the end of FFVII, the characters get even more overpowered, you can equip how many commands you fancy, deal 4 attacks of 9999 with each character, and the Phoenix + Final Attack makes the party almost invincible and even the weapons become piece of cake, but of course it's cool though .

[Tyrien]

Originally Posted by TheLastFortnight

I don't think so, the junction system was great, the problem is that the characters level up too fast, but it aren't related to the junction system itself.
The idea of equip magic, rather than armour was very original and intelligent, it would be ridiculous if the characters of such a futurist game equip helmet, shield and these kinds of things, like a ridiculous living medieval tin. And about the magic, it isn't just draw the magic, you need to learn the ability of the GF that allows the junction in the attribute (and learn the abilities of the GFs spends a lot of time...), the quantity of the magic equipped defines how much the stat will raise, so you need to spend so much time collecting it from the enemies, and some magic is only available to draw when the enemies reach certain levels...
The enemies level up as the characters do and if it allows to become stronger earlier, it's because the levels raise too fast, but if you make your characters reach a high level in the beginning of the game, you will regret it later, because the attribute don't raise that much normally and later in the game you can find the bonuses abilities, without this you can't make some stats reach the max, even with the best magics equipped, of course you can use devour, but, you know, it SUCKS!
I agree that the materia system is better, but FFVII is very easy too in battles... too easy. Also the summons at FFVIII, the heart of the junction system and its menu abilities, make the game system very rich and interesting. You can create your own items and magics and even call a shop anywhere, it's so cool. And at the end of FFVII, the characters get even more overpowered, you can equip how many commands you fancy, deal 4 attacks of 9999 with each character, and the Phoenix + Final Attack makes the party almost invincible and even the weapons become piece of cake, but of course it's cool though .

Not really. How you leveled up was completely irrelevant because monsters leveled with you. You can beat the game at level one.

Sorry to word it this way but maybe you weren't that good at FFVIII, which is why you don't see how overpowered that system was. It was a good concept but it didn't have the limitations it needed. You could turn every character into god. You could do that in FFVII too, of course. It wasn't the same as FFVIII. In VIII even with basic magic you could ascend your characters to an unreal status. VII however you didn't achieve that until closer to the end of the game and even then you had to put extra effort into it in finding all the proper materia. Even then you were still limited because you needed to master a materia to give it to other people which required a lot of grinding. The only magic that was limited I can think of in FFVIII was ultima. Everything else that was "rare" was easy to find or not worth junctioning.

[Hackimoto]

I've known so few people who even liked the game. I think because it's so story driven with less action and huge swords and spikey hair and that stuff. And because it was so romantically themed and it gets pretty mushy in parts. That's partly what I liked about it. That, and how much I identified with Squall at the time. At that time in my life we were very much the same. I would say I more closely resemble Laguna nowadays. And I don't think I've ever been more genuinely concerned for a character's well being as when Rinoa is marooned in space and is about to die. And yeah, the junction system was cool, I liked being able to focus on a particular stat like that. Plus I like when there's a lot of hidden dialogue and other stuff like that. You can see that a lot of programming went into the game. I sometimes like to go out of my way to see hidden stuff like that just out of respect for the people who took the time to put it there. And the graphics were amazing, especially for the PS1, and it was cool the way they integrated the FMV into the real time gameplay. I thought it was a bit ahead of the curve for back then.

[TheLastFortnight]

Originally Posted by Tyrien

Not really. How you leveled up was completely irrelevant because monsters leveled with you. You can beat the game at level one.

Sorry to word it this way but maybe you weren't that good at FFVIII, which is why you don't see how overpowered that system was. It was a good concept but it didn't have the limitations it needed.

How can you say I'm not that good at FFVIII? You don't know me, kid... For me it was completely piece of cake, as VII was too, they both are the easiest games of the series. And about overpowered system, do you have a problem with strong characters? For me, it's very cool. What I like in FFVIII is the idea to equip magic through the GFs, rather than armour and those kinds of things, the Square never had the intention to make it a difficult game, because most people would have to take time to understand how it works. And about FFVII, there's nothing hard in this game, as in FFVIII, 100% of battles are 100% easy (the weapons too...)! For me the old games, like FFIV and V are so much more difficult...

[XjapanFOREVER]

That's like the only thing I didn't like about VIII.
It lacked the simple RPG concept..
If you want to you can spend hours leveling up, then beast through the rest of the game, VIII prevented that, but at the same time gave us something similar that was even more powerful...

Originally Posted by TheLastFortnight

For me it was completely piece of cake, as VII was too, they both are the easiest games of the series.

X is the easiest game in the series..
It is pure turn based strategy, you hit me, I hit you. As long as you're not a little kid it's almost impossible to get stuck on something... and if all else fails, use cheer a couple turns...
it also has the easiest final battle ever, you're auto-auto-lifed (hope you got that), you can't mess that up..

[TheLastFortnight]

Originally Posted by XjapanFOREVER

X is the easiest game in the series..
It is pure turn based strategy, you hit me, I hit you. As long as you're not a little kid it's almost impossible to get stuck on something... and if all else fails, use cheer a couple turns...
it also has the easiest final battle ever, you're auto-auto-lifed (hope you got that), you can't mess that up..

I don't think the X is the easiest one, although you don't need to give the commands quickly and you can even switch the characters, it has other difficulties. It makes you use different character to defeat each monster. I found it a bit hard to make each character grow strong, at least annoying, to fill the grid of each character every time and it takes so much time and you need to use each one of them in battle. In the end of game, I almost died to maximize the attributes of each one of my characters, also get the Celestial Weapons was a f~ hell, gosh, that mini games were so annoying, specially avoid the lightning and Blitzball thing. I also spent so much time to give Ribbon for them all, it costs 99 Dark Matters, although some Dark Aeons drop some armours with them. In the end, I left each character with more than 30,000 HP and 255 in all attributes, except for luck, I left it at 150+, I got Auto-phoenix, Ribbon, BHL and Auto-protect in the armours of the entire party and all the Celestial Weapons, but I died for it...
I played the International version of FFX, so I fought against the Dark Aeons, when I first saw one, I found the battle almost impossible to win, but later when I complete my training at the arena, and it took so much time, and after I got the Celestial Weapons it was a bit easy. Also I defeated Dark Yojimbo so many times to get armours with BHL and Ribbon and Dark Matters. But even with my party fully strong I got some hard time fighting Penance, it took more than 2 hours of fighting, but was a great and epic battle for me. I think it's the hardest optional boss of FF until now, you can say Yiazmat is hard too, because you need to spend 5 hours or so, but I think Penance is the tough one.
You're right about the final battle in FFX, it's impossible to lose, maybe because you need to fight against your own Aeons, it could be hard if you're weak with your characters and strong with Yuna and the Aeons, but of course it's so easy, but the great challenge in FFX is the optional bosses of the International version, in the normal version you still can fight against Nemesis though.