[Tyrien]

Originally Posted by TheLastFortnight

I don't think so, the junction system was great, the problem is that the characters level up too fast, but it aren't related to the junction system itself.
The idea of equip magic, rather than armour was very original and intelligent, it would be ridiculous if the characters of such a futurist game equip helmet, shield and these kinds of things, like a ridiculous living medieval tin. And about the magic, it isn't just draw the magic, you need to learn the ability of the GF that allows the junction in the attribute (and learn the abilities of the GFs spends a lot of time...), the quantity of the magic equipped defines how much the stat will raise, so you need to spend so much time collecting it from the enemies, and some magic is only available to draw when the enemies reach certain levels...
The enemies level up as the characters do and if it allows to become stronger earlier, it's because the levels raise too fast, but if you make your characters reach a high level in the beginning of the game, you will regret it later, because the attribute don't raise that much normally and later in the game you can find the bonuses abilities, without this you can't make some stats reach the max, even with the best magics equipped, of course you can use devour, but, you know, it SUCKS!
I agree that the materia system is better, but FFVII is very easy too in battles... too easy. Also the summons at FFVIII, the heart of the junction system and its menu abilities, make the game system very rich and interesting. You can create your own items and magics and even call a shop anywhere, it's so cool. And at the end of FFVII, the characters get even more overpowered, you can equip how many commands you fancy, deal 4 attacks of 9999 with each character, and the Phoenix + Final Attack makes the party almost invincible and even the weapons become piece of cake, but of course it's cool though .

Not really. How you leveled up was completely irrelevant because monsters leveled with you. You can beat the game at level one.

Sorry to word it this way but maybe you weren't that good at FFVIII, which is why you don't see how overpowered that system was. It was a good concept but it didn't have the limitations it needed. You could turn every character into god. You could do that in FFVII too, of course. It wasn't the same as FFVIII. In VIII even with basic magic you could ascend your characters to an unreal status. VII however you didn't achieve that until closer to the end of the game and even then you had to put extra effort into it in finding all the proper materia. Even then you were still limited because you needed to master a materia to give it to other people which required a lot of grinding. The only magic that was limited I can think of in FFVIII was ultima. Everything else that was "rare" was easy to find or not worth junctioning.