This game was my first jrpg as a kid. Well after Mario rpg and Pokémon. But I guess it always classified it different as it was a more serious game.
I was really young so it’s cool to play it now and better understand the story.
But I did not remember the battles being so long. It seems that every encounter so far has been a really long experience.
I just graduated seed training, so not to far into the remake. Im not worried about spoilers as I’ve played through this game when it was new, and watched a speed run of it a few years ago.
FF8 is a strange beast since a lot of traditional JRPG tactics like grinding low level encounters to power level actually puts you at a major disadvantage due to the flawed level scaling. As a result it’s necessary to get creative and look for good magic for junctioning on your characters while avoiding too many non boss battles. I usually end up playing the card game and use the card to magic conversion ability to get large amounts of high power magic like Tornado for greatly increasing strength stats.
In battle, I avoid Summons since ain’t nobody have time to sit through the same animations multiple times every single battle. This was fixed in FFX maybe FFIX. As soon as I can, I try to get some Aura magic to use Limit Breaks along with regular attacks to demolish most opponents.
It also helps if you play in a PSX emulator and can run the game at a higher speed through the more boring and repetitive parts.