Okay, so I'm on Disc 3, and I noticed that I've barely leveled up Zell, Selphie and Quistis so I've been trying to level them up and get them up to speed with Squall and Irvine, but the problem is when I try to grind these characters, Squall keeps leveling up and getting a huge advantage over these characters which makes my party feel really unbalanced. Is there anyway to level these characters up with leveling Squall up as well? I realize I can just kill Squall and not revive him, but I feel like that makes leveling up harder as I only get to use 2/3 of my party in battle. Is there any other way to do this?

Hm, I think you have to kill off Squall. If I can remember correctly, the game's enemies scale with Squall and Laguna's levels, respectively. Once you have your characters catch up with Squall, I think Diablo has this special ability called "Enc-None" which disables random encounters entirely, so you can keep it that way.

All you should really do is go to http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Islands_Closest_to_Heaven_and_Hell and stock up on the draw points and make your characters stronger that way. They made the game insanely easy with draw system and being able to upgrade low level spells to higher ones. But this is my opinion only.

Hm, I think you have to kill off Squall. If I can remember correctly, the game's enemies scale with Squall and Laguna's levels, respectively. Once you have your characters catch up with Squall, I think Diablo has this special ability called "Enc-None" which disables random encounters entirely, so you can keep it that way.

All you should really do is go to http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Islands_Closest_to_Heaven_and_Hell and stock up on the draw points and make your characters stronger that way. They made the game insanely easy with draw system and being able to upgrade low level spells to higher ones. But this is my opinion only.

While I'm sure there are benefits to leveling, focusing on draw points and exploiting the junction system is a better goal, but it's been a very long time since I played FFVIII and I don't know your specific context. I just remember finishing off the first disk, with almost 7,000 max HP with my core three characters. The Junction system might be the most dense and unfriendly system to initially "get-into", but once you do "get it" and what spells to go after, the entire game becomes a cake-walk.

@Dysnomia: Another trick to make this game easy to is to always keep Squall in yellow health and keep cancelling his turn until he gets a limit break. You can do this as much as you want.

Leveling up in FF8 is only going to hurt in the long run.

Island Closest to Heaven and Hell as well as the Deep Sea Research Lab (Eden makes the game so easy). I completely leveled every character for some pointless reason.

@Dysnomia said:

@groin: I do that whenever I need to quickly kill monsters. Aura also works pretty well.

@VelvetLore04: Why? I understand that grinding levels could get tedious and some point, but how does it hurt?

@auspiciousqueue: Yeah, I've been training there, the only problem is Malboros, or whatever they're called. I hate those things with a passion.

Enemies level up with you so the higher level you are the higher level they are. This includes random enemies to bosses and even the secret uber boss.

Okay, thank you for all your advice everyone. I've got a fairly good idea on what to do now.

Hexadragons on Island closest to hell is worth about 1800XP, so allmost two levels. Killing off a character won´t do any good, so just pick two weak ones and have Squall in Yellow HP and spam Renzokuken with him ;)

The only purpose leveling has is to get enemies having better magic. The higher their level, the better their magic. This goes for bosses as well. Just focus on drawing good magic from enemies or the environment. As was said above, you should really think about drawing the magic found on both Heaven and Hell islands for your three main characters. Yes, it is long and tedious, but well worth it. Just listen to a podcast while doing so. You'll be done before the podcast. Really.

Note: there is an attribute that influences the number of magic spells you get while drawing. I don't remember which exactly. I think it's Spirit. Not so sure; check Google.