Spoilers

At least Vaan grows up sooner and his issues were slightly better than Tidus:

He was angry at the empire for killing his Older Brother Reks who was a soldier for Dalamasca.

I'll take your word for that, 'cause like I said I only played X and it soured me. I still have nightmares where I'm Tidus' therapist and have to listen to him. And I don't MIND troubled characters, main or otherwise. Fuck, I prefer 'em. But Tidus is just a focus of all hate.

Never play VIII. Tidus is great, especially when compared to Squall.

No FF requires grinding, ever, apart from maybe some of the older ones if you're particularly slow. X is the easiest FF too, with exactly 2 (mandatory) battles in the game actually proving a challenge.

I've seen a video playthrough of 8, *shudder* so I know what you mean. And I'm sure you're probably right about the grinding not being necessary, but it's like the game makes you think it IS. Other than that, the ENDLESS BATTLES still suck. What's that? A flying thing, get dudebro. An elemental, get gothy. Cookie-cutter repetitive battles? YAY. Sure, most games,and especially RPGS, suffer from that, but not to this degree.

Kind of sounds like you hate the concept of random encounters. That's kind of a common thing in JRPGs and was pretty much in most Final Fantasy games (not including XI, XII, XIII, XIII-2, etc.).

FF8 literally requires no grinding in battles, you get the Enc-none junction skill pretty early, and enemies level scale with you, so if you find a way to refine spells (preferrably through the great card minigame it has) you can junction a billion spells to increase your stats with and never deal with random encounters ever.

C'mon. At least Squall kept his mouth shut for most of the game!

(Unlike Cloud who if he wasn't crapping on about how cool he was at the defense of Nibelheim, he would sit around bemoaning his existence and questioning who he is). ;)

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Cough. Grinding is still needed to beat the stupid optional bosses (remember the Weapons in FF7?)

You'll probably say but they're not required. I give you that. But many of the older FFs still require some grinding. Also their field/dungeon encounter rate is way too high. Take a few steps and Bam another battle. Ugh. :(

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I second that.

(BTW if the only FF you've played was FFX, do you mind me asking if you have played many other JRPGs? No offence, just curious as to what you are comparing FFX with).

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Oh no. I just remembered why I didn't enjoy FF8. I accept that there must be some players who mastered (and even loved?!?) the spell draw/junction system, but for me, that ruined the whole game.

(Just near the end of FF8, I just couldn't keep going with its battle system. But I still wanted to finish the game. So I hit the debug room XD )

Um. Having high level stats does not prevent random encounters occurring. :(

No but Diablos's Enc-None junction skill prevents random encounters.

Some GF's ability switches them off completely.

ninja'd by a cat in a tie!

:) In response to your earlier post about games near the end of the SNESs lifetime pushing it to its limits but not Chrono:

* StarFox released 1993. Chrono Trigger released 1995. = StarFox was not released at the end of the SNESs lifetime.

* Also StarFox isn't really a valid argument for pushing the SNES console to its limits because SF had the unfair advantage of having a custom chip (Super FX) built into the game cartridge. In other words, the polygonal graphics weren't coming out of the SNES hardware, they were being generated by the custom chip in the cartridge.

(Which, although I didn't say it, was the main reason I excluded the three JRPGs in that previous post - not so much because they were never released outside Japan but because they were released at the extreme end of the Super Famicoms life and all had very impressive graphics & even voiced music pulled off by their custom chips).

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Ah. OK

(See? This is why I hate FF8s battle system. All the other FFs that I've played didn't have their battles this complicated. I'm including the FF Tactics spin-off franchise in this statement! :) )

I second that.

(BTW if the only FF you've played was FFX, do you mind me asking if you have played many other JRPGs? No offence, just curious as to what you are comparing FFX with).

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I think I've only played one other Japanese RPG, but I can't remember the name. Random encounter-wise I just compare it to other games with random encounters and not since the AD&D goldbox games has it been so repetitively annoying.

Considering you don't actually see Cloud up until half of Disc 2, yeah, it's kind of a big deal for him.

Optional bosses are optional. Beating the main game and most sidequests requires no grinding. Older FFs are simply "harder" in the sense they don't forgive mistakes and you need to stock up on items - but then again it's not complex or challenging like, say, SMT games. As for random encounters, it's a relic of the past these days, but the mechanic can work quite well with certain modifications, some of which FF itself tried, like VIII's Enc-None (hell, XII eliminated them and introduced spatial positioning).

Actually I just remembered.

Teh cardinal sin of JRPGs is "miss-able items". Sux0rz.

(Yeah worse than grinding and long dungeons - at least once they're past, they're past. But miss-able items - who really wants to restore an earlier save and redo hours of gaming because they overlooked getting One-of-a-kind item in a village/dungeon/shrine that is now destroyed/lost/vaporized? I've done it).