Well, since I am one of the biggest complainants about the Draw/Junction system in Final Fantasy VIII. I suppose it is best that I step up again to discuss this topic. Bring on your torches!

Let me start by saying that I played Final Fantasy VIII for the first time around a year ago. So I didn’t experience the game on release and my opinions are new skewed by the designs of modern gaming.

I think the world is wonderfully designed, a really REALLY good story(Minus a couple eye-rolls), and pretty solid characters. The game design is impressive with just how much of the game you DON’T have to do. Once you get the Garden or the Ragnarok, the sheer amount of extra areas that exist is REALLY impressive.

But, then we have the stain that is the Draw/Junction system.

I can see where they were going with this system, but it is horribly executed. They have a 32 page tutorial (Exaggeration) stuck in a computer that they HOPE will allow you to understand this really convoluted system. It is not very intuitive at all and you just kinda have to hope that it works.

The strength of your junctions is based on what spells you have and HOW MANY of that spell you have in the stack. So using your magic weakens your over-all stats. This makes you want to NOT use magic, which really shouldn’t be the case.

Here is the biggest issue though. If you are playing the game normally, and not exploiting systems like Card-Mod, you will most likely go through the game GROSSLY underpowered. You won’t initially think that you should NEED to sit there and Draw endlessly until you have 100 stacks of spells. You will probably draw what you consider to be “enough, so lets say somewhere around 20 of a spell.

This will get you by, OKAY. But you are going to encounter some bosses that are going to completely WRECK you. It is going to raise its arm and the sound of a baseball bat hitting a wet garbage bag is what shall follow.

OP. You claim that it is nice you can junction magic to defensive stats to negate an enemy. Yeah, that is nice and all. But ONLY if you KNEW that enemy was coming. You can’t change your junctions DURING fights, so chances are good you didn’t predict you needed Ice-Def and are now a dead, frozen popsicle.

Drawing a pile of spells is a boring, droll practice to have to do. I have the spell, running out of said spell feels silly. Sure, you can compare it to grinding in other games. But it feels very different to me. Grinding means I get to attack and kill things and run around and see different mobs and monsters. I can go to different places or kill things in different ways. I could enjoy seeing the GF animations. Not with Draw! Nope. You get to stand there and watch little light balls flow from them to you over and over and over. On top of that, there is the randomness of the draw. Sometimes you get 8 copies of a spell, sometimes you get ONE. Yeah, getting 1 makes you feel like complete shit.

The game does a terrible job of balancing ANYTHING around the draw/junction system.

You can draw 10-20 of a spell to try to keep your sanity, but now you are going to be underpowered. You can draw 100 and now be completely over-powered and smash through everything. Should you maybe try 60ish of each spell? Will that make the game balanced? Good fucking question, you don’t know, the game doesn’t know and it doesn’t care either.

I really liked the game as a WHOLE, but the draw/junction system is complete garbage in my opinion.

I definitely think it could be fixed without changing it too much.

If spells didn’t stack at all, just one and done and you now have that spell forever, and instead provided a set power bonus when junctioned. That fixes one issue. No more losing stats when you use magic, no more having to drool your brain out your mouth trying to get stacks of spells.

You would need to adjust how enemies level against the player, since currently grinding levels does LITERALLY nothing and they basically have zero reason to be in the game. This should become a second option. You talked about options OP, this should be one. If I want to run around and slaughter enemies in droves to gain some strength (like EVERY RPG in history){This might be a false statement} I should be able to do so.

You could still hunt through cards for the special ones that mod into super-spells. So you could still break the game in that way if you wanted. Might have to make some cards a bit more difficult to get or rework the card system slightly. Since if we do the “one and done” version of spells, it takes borderline ZERO time to get the broken spells. But it would make the game smoother for those of us that DON’T want to do that without changing much of the overall experience.

Feel free to disagree or present counter statements to this. I would love to discuss your ideas.

If all you have to say though is “The system is fine, quit bitching” please take that garbage somewhere else. It isn’t constructive to this conversation whatsoever. I presented the issue I have with the system and how I would like it to be improved.

If you are still reading this long-winded response, thank you for sticking it out with me.

Schwahn