Does Final Fantasy 8 get harder?

I've started playing this - having been somewhat of a Final Fantasy virgin, and after a fairly convoluted and confusing tutorial for about the last 6-7 hours using a guardian (which appears to have unlimited use and pretty much doubles HP pool) can wipe out almost all enemies in 1-2 goes.

It's more or less acting as a "button awesome" atm.

One thing that turned me off (at least following the guide I was using at the time) is that the enemy strength corresponds with Squall's level. This tends to unbalance the game somewhat as, most of the time, Squall's level is miles ahead of other party members, so unless you stick with the same two party members all the time, you'll be having a hard time against foes by the middle of disc 1. This, combined with the need to grind excessively to get useful GF abilities and attempting to balance the party levels, caused me tons of headaches. These nuances also make the natural jump from FFVII difficult. What I may end up doing next time is take a different approach towards these issues.

I'm about 6 hours in and it's generally still a case of GF = instant win. I certainly hope it gets more difficult, at this current stage it's almost 1 tap wins.

FF 8 is shit. Why are you torturing yourself?

This, seriously. You should have went with either VI, VII, or IX to start with.

Are the others more challenging than this? I don't understand the point of any stats or skills if you guardian forces are so powerful.

Amen.

That didn't really answer the question.

No matter.

No, I don't remember it getting harder. I beat it years ago (I was a kid) and it was the easiest Final Fantasy game I have ever played. I didn't find any of them that challenging, to be honest. But I've only played the main ones up to XII, and excluding XI.

It's easy if you know what you're doing. I used auras, float, and triple to do those special attacks and protect myself. It's a lot of grinding to get these draws and abilities, but it makes you super OP.

It is pretty easy in the beginning but gets harder later in the game. But it's easy in general.

Most FF games are easy unless you go out of the way to find the hardest bosses (Ruby Weapon, yes yes).

Gave up on it a while back dude. Gonna give that one releasing next week a try, hopefully a better impression.

Which one is that?

http://store.steampowered.com/app/637650/

Fair enough. I'd go with , 6 7 or 9 over this though.

I strongly agree. I'd lean more towards IX specifically.

If anything it becomes easier as the game goes along. Don't remember having trouble with a single thing in that game. 7,9 are better as you guys have said, hell I think any of them are better than 8.

It's not that good anyways.

@uninspiredcup: With the exception of optional and end bosses, most FF games really aren't that difficult. What makes a lot of JRPGs more challenging is all of the optional equipment, abilities and summons and such things that are very difficult to obtain, and optional events and things that require you to be completely anal and stressed out in order to get to. Some people probably wouldn't even think it's fun or worth it, but to a lot of us JRPG fans we love those goodies.

I like FFVIII, it's pretty much as good as the other first ten FF games. One thing you always get really caught up in with that game is trying to amass a huge collection of Triple Triad cards - it also helps that the mini-game is pretty addictive to play. From the start, you can easily wind up spending many hours just going around and dueling people around Garden to obtain multiples of the first few rows of cards.

The Draw system also plays a huge role in 8, since the number of drawn magics you have directly corresponds to how powerful a junctioned spell's effects are in the junction system. I can easily sit there drawing spells for a really long time until I get 100 of each one for everyone in my party.

FFIX might be the most stressful one to play, since you have to accomplish things in time limits to obtain certain items, and there are tons of aggravating mini-games that hide many of the game's rare items. There's even another card game, though it isn't as fun as Triple Triad. On top of that, you can steal items from enemies and bosses....but even when you 'Scan' them, it won't always show every single item they have on them - you might have to deal a little more damage to the boss and then suddenly they will be holding some other uncommon item. So Draw is effectively replaced with Steal in that game.

But you don't have to worry so much about accomplishing every last thing, if that isn't important to you. If you just want to enjoy the story and the main game, then relax and do that, and if you like the game enough then maybe you'll want to restart and get more OCD about things.

The game will get near impossibly hard if you keep playing that way. Not to mention battles will begin to massively drag.

As metalman0616 pointed out, the enemy level scales in accordance with yours, and if you're killing enemies that means you're essentially levelling up the bosses that you'll fight down the line. This is a big problem because the stat boosts the bosses get from levelling up are considerably larger than the ones you get (honestly, the difference between a level 10 character and level 100 character is so slight it's laughable).

As counter-intuitive as it is, you are better off drawing/stealing everything you want from an enemy... and then running away: You want to progress through the game keeping your level as low as possible.

If you want to power up your characters you should refined lower grade magic into higher grade magic. The game will still be easy this way... but you won't have to sit through long-ass summon animations all the time so it will at least be more interesting.

@uninspiredcup:It gets harder and in my first play through there were times when I couldn't beat a boss for two weeks. GFs are an instant win at first but later not so much. Just dont look at guides and it should be a challenge (but if you know what you do it is the easiest game ever)

I played this the way uninspiredcup was, and I'm pretty sure I got myself into a situation that was unwinnable. I had gotten bored of finding weapon parts and only upgraded then halfway, so in disc 3 when I finally got to a powerful boss you can't use my best GFs against (without spoiling much, there is a hostage with the monsters who would get killed by attacks that hit everyone). The battles in the area weren't strong enough to grind, the game wouldn't let me back out to the map, and my weapons were too weak for the boss.

It's an easy game and the toughest challenge the game will give you depending on how good you are will be Ruby Dragon, Bahamut, and Ultima Weapon at the Deep Sea Research Facility on a very small island on the southwest corner of the map that is reachable by an airship.

The game was fun though as it had a lot of secrets which is always good to have.

Not really... the game systems are utterly abusable even by someone who is playing the game for the first time. Believe me, you'll be overpowered without even trying.

The problem with FF8 was....it wasn´t half as good as FF7. FF7 is easily my top game of all times. So how could one follow up something like that. FF8 was a let down..

BUT.. This was a game that tormented me for years. I got stuck in a bossfight and gave up the game. Coming back years later to finish it again gave me a long lost satsfaction. I could finally move on.

@uninspiredcup: You may want to look for YouTube videos telling you which FF game you can start with.

Personally FFVIII is not the game that you can start with to get into the FF series. The "Draw" function is decent but gets too tedious when you spend too much time extracting every spell from monsters. Also, the junctioning of spells as stat boosters is sometimes annoying, especially when switching spells. Even the SeeD salary system is time-consuming.

I can assume that you've played other RPGs before, haven't you? If so, and you want some challenge, I can recommend starting with either FFV or FFVI. FFV is more gameplay-oriented and has various job classes for you to swap back and forth, but it varies depending on how you use the classes. However, setting up your characters with just weak jobs can make the game more difficult, but that also applies to FFI and FFIII (not to be confused with VI). FFVI requires more strategy when forming two or three teams in some areas, especially in the final dungeon.

FFIV has tougher monsters in some areas, including ones that can annihilate you in one strike, so I'm unsure whether to recommend starting with it. It has various versions. From what I've read, the DS/iOS version is a little tougher because HPs of bosses are spiked up. I played PSX version (i.e. official translation of the SFC version), and it's tougher than the SNES (NA) version.

Otherwise, if any of FF game after FFI looks too convoluted to you, I can say FFI for now, which is the most basic and simplest game that I've ever completed (actually the PSX version). I beat the final boss. Nevertheless, the plot is a little dated. Personally, I want to say FFII (not IV) because I completed it, but many gamers have issues with the unorthodox stats building, i.e. no exp. points system is used, and so-called repetitive gameplay.

FFVII is the most-beloved game ever made and made the FF franchise more popular especially in the West, but I don't know whether I can recommend starting with it. Holding the cancel ("X" in PS1) button to dash is more tedious, might risk affecting the "X" button, and has been surpassed by control setup at FFVIII. Also, seeking enemies that can earn you Ability Points (AP), which helps improve Materia, would require preserving knowledge of where such enemies are. Furthermore, the graphics have been tremendously surpassed by other games, especially FFVIII and FFIX.

I haven't played FFXV yet, but the game has mixed reviews despite many critics praising it. It's a little more simplistic, and the gameplay is action-oriented, but I figured that the fanbase wouldn't recommend starting with it. FFXV has been in development hell for at least a decade, and the gameplay is considered too "weak" and uninspired.