This game was my first jrpg as a kid. Well after Mario rpg and Pokémon. But I guess it always classified it different as it was a more serious game.
I was really young so it’s cool to play it now and better understand the story.
But I did not remember the battles being so long. It seems that every encounter so far has been a really long experience.
I just graduated seed training, so not to far into the remake. Im not worried about spoilers as I’ve played through this game when it was new, and watched a speed run of it a few years ago.
FF8 is a strange beast since a lot of traditional JRPG tactics like grinding low level encounters to power level actually puts you at a major disadvantage due to the flawed level scaling. As a result it’s necessary to get creative and look for good magic for junctioning on your characters while avoiding too many non boss battles. I usually end up playing the card game and use the card to magic conversion ability to get large amounts of high power magic like Tornado for greatly increasing strength stats.
In battle, I avoid Summons since ain’t nobody have time to sit through the same animations multiple times every single battle. This was fixed in FFX maybe FFIX. As soon as I can, I try to get some Aura magic to use Limit Breaks along with regular attacks to demolish most opponents.
It also helps if you play in a PSX emulator and can run the game at a higher speed through the more boring and repetitive parts.
9 was even worse for that, every fight drags on for ages. It’s the only one I struggle to replay.
For 8, it’s generally best to avoid combat anyway because of the way level scaling worked. Enemies get stronger much faster than you do, even with good junctions. And it seems like the devs knew this a, since Diablos is available so early and built for low-level play. It lets you reduce or eliminate random encounters (and very cheaply), lets you refine status magic that comes in handy at low levels, and its attack has great utility against hard targets.
The slower fights aren’t as big of a deal when you aren’t doing as many of them, they feel more “cinematic” instead.
I recently played through the original version(non remake) on steam. There was a way to speed up battles / tools to add magic to your characters so you didn’t have to spend all day drawing magic. I would be surprised if the remake didn’t have any of this. (I used to leave chocobo world running when I wasn’t playing)
Fully recommended playing emulated with a speed mode. None of the old jrpgs respect your time and I legit can’t play them without that feature anymore.
I don’t think it’s fair to say that they didn’t respect your time. They were designed with specific priorities in mind on the limited hardware that was available at the time.
3D graphics were still considered the hot new thing at the time, and leaning into the spectacle was a selling point of the FF games (you could even argue that’s still the case). Now consider that all of that spectacle needs to load in real time from a very slow CD drive, and it starts to make more sense why the animations take so long to complete. The devs are hiding the loading process with long and (by today’s standards) very slow animations. It makes the games feel very slow, but I prefer that design choice over showing a generic loading screen or progress bar every few seconds in the middle of a battle.
I totally understand the limitations of the time and still love the games, but really that doesn’t take away from the fact that these games require a ton of time to complete. Newer JRPGs take this into account and attempt to address it in various ways which I very much appreciate.
Oh absolutely. I wasn’t trying to argue that they don’t require a massive time investment, because they absolutely do. I was only arguing against the assertion that they require a large time investment because the devs didn’t respect the player’s time, at least in the context of the battle speed of FF8 that was mentioned by OP.
Older games like FF6, Chrono Trigger, etc. don’t feel nearly as slow to me as FF8, Chrono Cross, etc. The former are 2D cartridge based games while the latter are 3D CD based games. All of them required pretty big time investments to complete, but battles don’t feel slow on the cartridge games.
Yeah totally. I don’t think they intentionally made decisions in that way. I just don’t think those game design concessions aged well. Thankfully we can work with them now though. You’re right though that the animations in the disc era really padded battle lengths. Jeez, just thinking of using summons in the FF series is giving me flashbacks lol.
What do you mean by a speed mode? Is it a rom havk? Or just a speed up mode in the emulator?
It’s usually just a function in most emulators that speeds up game play and the toggle can be mapped to a controller. I’ve used it on basically all jrpgs from ps1, ps2, snes, gba, etc. Makes grinding a breeze.
I remember playing this on the PSX was so hype with the graphic coming from FF VII . I remember playing a lot of the card game.
I remember playing it on a demo disk at my friends house and loving it.
The demo let you have a bunch of guardian forces and you payed through the fist part of the storm the beach mission.
