Total letdown
Final Fantasy VII was my favorite game when I played FFVIII (and still is one of the best games of all time). My expectations for the next game in the series were higher then any game could realistically live up to, I admit that. But this game is the worst of the Final Fantasy series in my opinion.
Here are the positives – Card game could land you valued items in the main quest and good graphics (although I have seen better for a PC game because the graphics were not updated from the Playstation version).
Here are the negatives – Boring story, poor save feature, GF’s take forever to animate, and you can’t rename all characters. Those are the minor ones. The big ones are the junctioning system and leveling up design. The junctioning system requires you to junction magic to all your stats. To avoid handicapping yourself, you have to steal 100 spells for each type of magic for each active character. This takes 10 minutes per magic and is about as exciting as watching paint dry.
The biggest problem is if you level up normally, you become weaker by leveling up. What were they thinking?! Your enemies level up as you level up, but they can gain points faster and be harder to defeat. You can avoid leveling up for the entire game until you get a bonuses for key stats that make you extremely powerful as you level up. This strategy makes the game way too easy, and makes your enemies a joke to beat. This system is terribly unbalanced and the game is was either too hard or way too easy, but never just right.
My advice, is to save yourself the frustration and don’t play this game.