Hopefully Conquering Final Fantasy 8: Part 1

I’m sure you’ve all heard me complain about it, many times before, but I was never able to beat Final Fantasy 8.  I think it was due to a complete lack of understanding as to how Junctioning works, along with the fact that enemies become more powerful the more you level up, that accounted for my struggles with the game.  Rarely do I fail to complete a game I have started, but after many hours of struggling against the final boss, barely able to leave a dent in their lofty HP, I had to accept that victory was miles beyond my reach.

Several years have since passed, and I have returned.  And this time, I mean business.  By business, I mean that I am taking advantage of every piece of advice anyone has ever given me, and consulting an online walkthrough, because darn it, I am not going to work my way through four discs just to fail again!  I am drawing magic like crazy, trying extra hard to learn how to properly Junction magic, and…playing cards?

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How Retro Can You Go: A Discussion of Spooniness

There are some gamers who openly admit that they have no desire to play older games because they prefer the more advanced, better looking games of today.  There are others who say that gameplay is the only thing that matters, so if a game is good, no matter how old it is, they will play it.  I am usually in the latter category, but over the past year, I have realized that I, too, have a limit for how far back into the past I can go and still enjoy gaming.  I think every gamer has this limit.  Mine is the SNES, with a few exceptions.

You see, I once believed that I could play any game, despite its age, and enjoy it as long as it was a good game.  I had plenty of SNES games I loved, and one day, I thought I’d travel just a little farther back in time and download a few Virtual Console games for the NES.  These games were the original Legend of Zelda and Metroid games.  Being classic games that marked the beginning of two amazing franchises, surely I couldn’t go wrong.  Right?

Wrong.