Aspect Analysis - Final Fantasy VIII and Junctioning

There is a lot of things I dislike about FF VIII, though for now, I am going to focus solely on the junction system and the problems I have with it. Both from a Narrative standpoint and mechanical standpoint, FF VIII's system is just frustrating.

When I say it's frustrating mechanicaly, I don't mean it's hard to understand. It's actually rather straightforward in a way. You 'equip' magic spells you gather to your stats, and which ones you can equip depend on which Guardian Forces's (Summons that are equipped to a character) you are rocking on that character. Right out of the gate, my main concern with this is that in the long run, the only real difference between your party members in battle is their limit breaks. There ends up being very little difference between two characters using the same GF and Magic junctions, and thus we end up with a similar problem to FF VII where the usefulness of a party member boils down to how good their limit break is, and little else.

Then comes the issues of how counter-intuitive the system itself is. Let's say you spec out your character as a physical attacker. What you do is put your strongest magic onto your attack stat, and there you go. Simple and efficient. Do you want to be a caster? Well, you'd better not put your strongest magic onto your magic stat. Because each spell has a stock that you can collect (I'll get to that later), and the higher the number the bigger the boost to the stat. Meaning if you actually keep casting that spell, your magic stat becomes weaker. Now, you could get around this by either not using your strongest spell in combat, or simply using a weaker spell on that stat. You could keep on hand cards or items to refine that spell from items (Again, more on that in a bit), but you end up in this situation where in order to focus a character on magic, you are putting in more thought and work for, quite frankly, no major advantages over simply being a physical attacker. The system makes casting more tedious work then it actually needs to be.

Next comes the methods of actually acquiring stocks of magic to cast. It may be a separate system then junctioning technically, but the fact is acquiring these stocks is essential to Junction, meaning its flaws are relevant as well. The first method is drawing from enemies mid-battle. This is a painstakingly slow process, as you can stack up to 100 of a spell, yet can draw as few as zero on an attempt, or as many as five if memory serves. And each character gets their own stack. If you want to stock up on spells, this is easily the worst way to do it.

Next up is getting a GF that allows you to refine Items into spells. This ends up being the easiest way to acquire magic stocks. And yes, it's nowhere near as time-consuming as drawing from enemies. That said, it's still mildly time-consuming and ends up being, much like drawing itself, more busy work to buy up several items and break them down just to find out what they make. Yes, you can use a guide to speed up the process, but I'm always personally bothered by needing to look at sources outside the game to have to figure this stuff out. Yes, it's easily doable without a guide, but without the guide, it's also more time consuming then it should otherwise be.

And finally is Card Refining. Card Refining allows you to turn cards from the in-game trading card game into items, and then into magic stock. The real reason you would use this method is to gain access to high-end spells earlier. Whether this is even an option for you is whether you enjoy playing that card game or not. As someone who hates it, this method is just not doable for me and makes it the absolute worst method. If you do enjoy playing the card game, however, it may take a good chunk of time but at the very least you will find the process enjoyable.

There are also random draw points you can find on the map, but honestly, they give so few it's hardly worth mentioning. It's nice they are there just to do a quick grab of some spells, so it's good to include them. Just nothing that does enough to alleviate the systems tedium.

At its core, every single method of acquiring magic stocks just feels like it's wasting your time, and that is the biggest issue of this entire system. You spend far to much time acquiring all this magic just to put in on your stats to never use it. Unless of course, you do want to cast a fair bit of magic, which then requires you to enter back into the grind of acquiring stocks just to keep your magic efficient. The system seems geared towards punishing you to be a magic user. It ends up being a lot of work for no gain if that's the route you wish to go, making the system far more restrictive then it appears at first glance.

Now that the mechanics are out of the way, the flavor of the whole mess. What is Junctioning? What are stocks of magic? What does the process of drawing entail? What does it mean to Junction a GF to you (thus far I have been saying equipped GF's for simplicity)? There is no attempt to explain any of this. Yet it's not something that is purely mechanical in nature, it's something with consequences in the game world. Junctioning GF's has the side effect of erasing some of your memories (That's a rant for an entirely different article/review), and at one point at the end of the game the villain Junctions herself onto a GF. Which I guess is possible, but there is no semblance of understanding of what any of this actually means. Previous FF's were had things like Job Crystals in FF V, which grants you the knowledge and power of the jobs stored within the crystals. The Same basic concept with VI and it's Espers, though done differently from a mechanical standpoint. FF VII's Materia? Also explained pretty well. But all of these were simple from a story standpoint, so not much explanation is really needed to except.

FF VIII gives you absolutely nothing, however. The whole system from a narrative standpoint is a nonsensical mess. While there is an extent this can be applied to FF IX in which you learn abilities based off the weapons and gear you are using (It's an odd system) at the very least in IX it doesn't try to pull that system up for the plot like FF VIII does, so it doesn't bring as much scrutiny on itself.

In the end, FF VIII's Junction set up is an unfriendly mess to work with, making you put in what feels like pointless busy work for no real reward, and on top of it all from a fluff standpoint, the system doesn't even make sense.