I have this game marked as "Shelved" but it's honestly somewhere between "Shelved" and "Abandoned"...
I can see how the gamplay system driven by the Junction system as being innovative and cool...however, I found it to be mostly tedious. 90% of my battles ended up becoming "putting it on 3x speed and smashing Draw until its 100". And with the combined adaptive enemy levels, it just gave no uniqueness to party members if they get the same junction with GF/spells. And considering how much this game loves to party swap, I feel like I spent the majority of the game moving GFs and spells around different members when the game dictated it.
So with the gameplay system not really working for me for the most part, I was largely relying on the characters and story to carry me through. I honestly found the majority of the characters in this game to be insufferable. Squall, in particular, never voices his own opinion because of his broody lone wolf attitude and is essentially made to do the story beats by other characters (Cid in particular who is useless and terrible). Despite there being some real stakes and quality scenes coming at the end of Disc 1, the story being largely consisting of melodramatic YA romance plot and the mercenary school did nothing for me as someone who was way past that age when I started this game.
But what ultimately broke me from being able to continue this game is how linear it is. I'm somewhere in the middle of Disc 2 and I rarely got a chance to explore an open terrain, training my party and go off the beaten path. Combined with obtuse changes to gil, weapons, gear, limit breaks and overworld travel was basically making me feel like FFVIII took away everything I enjoyed about playing a Final Fantasy game. I assume that the game opens up with an introduction of an airship later but how has this not happened at 15 hours?!
I will say that Triple Triad (at least the base rule) and the music is very good though!
I can see how the gamplay system driven by the Junction system as being innovative and cool...however, I found it to be mostly tedious. 90% of my battles ended up becoming "putting it on 3x speed and smashing Draw until its 100". And with the combined adaptive enemy levels, it just gave no uniqueness to party members if they get the same junction with GF/spells. And considering how much this game loves to party swap, I feel like I spent the majority of the game moving GFs and spells around different members when the game dictated it.
So with the gameplay system not really working for me for the most part, I was largely relying on the characters and story to carry me through. I honestly found the majority of the characters in this game to be insufferable. Squall, in particular, never voices his own opinion because of his broody lone wolf attitude and is essentially made to do the story beats by other characters (Cid in particular who is useless and terrible). Despite there being some real stakes and quality scenes coming at the end of Disc 1, the story being largely consisting of melodramatic YA romance plot and the mercenary school did nothing for me as someone who was way past that age when I started this game.
But what ultimately broke me from being able to continue this game is how linear it is. I'm somewhere in the middle of Disc 2 and I rarely got a chance to explore an open terrain, training my party and go off the beaten path. Combined with obtuse changes to gil, weapons, gear, limit breaks and overworld travel was basically making me feel like FFVIII took away everything I enjoyed about playing a Final Fantasy game. I assume that the game opens up with an introduction of an airship later but how has this not happened at 15 hours?!
I will say that Triple Triad (at least the base rule) and the music is very good though!