#videocrazy

Final Fantasy 8 is probably the best example of what I mean.  For anyone reading this who doesn’t know, in FF8, monsters got stronger with you.  The idea is that they always pose a challenge, but the best way to get stats is through the Junction system.  Effectively, if you weren’t keeping your junctions up to date, leveling made you relatively weaker to your enemies when it counted.  Also, abilities existed that allowed you to turn XP gain off, convert monsters into cards, cards into items, lower class items into higher class items, and items into magic.  It meant the best tactic was to get high-level magic more or less from the word “go” and never EVER level up.

Perhaps I’m biased.  I got knocked around by this mechanic back before I really understood these mechanics.  However, one of my favorites, Final Fantasy 6, also frustrates me because of attempted innovation.

This example is significantly less egregious, but the fundamentals still drive me nuts.  See, when you level up with Magicite equipped, you may gain additional stat boosts depending on which Magicite you have.  This balances itself out in general play, since you also need to equip Magicite to learn abilities, but there’s a few sticking points.  First, if you have no Magicite, you can’t gain the boosts, so optimization means as few battles as you can get away with until the Factory.  Second, not every Magicite gives bonus stats when equipped.  Lastly, and this is the one that really irks me, exactly one Magicite (Odin), who you lose if you follow the sidequest you get him in to the very next step (about 30 in-game steps), and is the only Magicite that grants a bonus to Speed.  As in, the rarest stat, and the thing that makes the ATB charge faster.