I was 10 year old. I couldn't understand English. I had never played the game before.
I still managed to figure out how to draw correctly.
Go to configurations, set your battle speed high, set memory cursor on, draw once manually, put something on X-button and wait, read or something. Very soon later you have a lot hp because of all the spells that you can actually leave the room and just listen to the sounds and come back to retarget.

The drawing phase is unnecessary. You really don't have to do it, it's just luxury to ease up the game. Very quickly you get all the magic you ever need from GF's abilities and you'll never have to draw again.

Even with the "proper" way of drawing magic, the concept is still gameplay flaw. If you have to go off and entertain yourself while playing a video game, an object designed to entertain you, then obviously there's something wrong with the game design.

Even knowing everything you just said (hell, I'm playing FF8 RIGHT NOW), that still doesn't make up for FF8's terrilbe design. You shouldn't have to read a book while playing your game, and even if you move on to refinement for all your magic needs you still are going to be drawing early in the game and some times against bosses. On average, you might spend a few hours of your total FF8 experience drawing magic when you shouldn't have to spend one minute doing that shit.

And don't try to defend drawing with refinement either, because refinement is the biggest design flaw in the game. After 3 hours of playing FF8 all my characters are 3000+ HP and Zell inflicts Death on anything he touches. Maybe the card game isn't as bad as he says it is either, but you get to a point where you're only doing it to card mod random shit and it's just boring as hell.

i never stopped to draw magic it was lot easier to use GF's abilities to change items to spells.

it was horsesh** anyway i prefer the ff7 way much more this crap it took way too much time

I hated FFVII's Materia System. If I'm gonna get Heal, or Cure, I better frikkin KEEP IT after it's learned. I shouldn't be dependent on a ball of condensed lifestream to give me power!

That said, I still hated FFVIII's forcing you to draw magic. It also made you not want to USE magic because of the junctioning.

This game is best played while listening to "Don't Stop Me Now" by Queen.

xD

I gave up on this game. I have never, ever, in my life given up on a game. No matter how hard it was, no matter how unforgiving it may have been, I wanted to see the rest of the game.
But ... not Final Fantasy VIII. I got to the part where you are in space, and I just lost it. The plot made no sense, the gameplay was beyond repetitive, and the magic summons (usually the best/most efficient way to fight the bosses) were long and boring, with no option to skip what you've already seen hundreds of times. It was just ... bad.

This was the very first FF I beat. I was 8 i believe. I really didn't draw that much and relied on magic I found, but still other FF games are better. When I beat it, I was confused about what just happened. I didn't know. The plot is...stupid. Games I beat later FFIV (II) and FFVII are far superior

2 SCANS FUCK YOU!!! lol

Seeing you do all of that gave me flashbacks of my time during FFVIII when I did the exact same thing just because I felt that if I didn't and I got beat down by an enemy, it was because I didn't stockpile and link them to my attributes properly. I know we don't have to do exactly what Spoony just did, but the temptation just to do it and get it over with was at times just too much.

YOU ff fan boys are so wacky

I'll probably get rated down to nothing for this, but everything said is the truth:

This is just a common example of someone who doesn't know how to play a game, complaining because they can't understand simple English. Like a comment above me said, the drawing feature is completely OPTIONAL. Hell, I got to the end of the game with 255 Strength.... without using a single Junction into my Strength. Considering that 90% of this review is him whining about having to Draw, if you actually knew how to play the damn game correctly. Rather than this being put into 2 parts ( the first part all the more irrelevant since it was just more ignorant whining ), it may just be a 3 minute review.

This is just another example of failure. =)

This review is not a failure. He didn't knew it's optional. And that's because it's a nightmare to learn all the stuff in this game, you need to be a gaming nerd to actually take your time to bother about optional things. Why the hell would a game have it optional to just be playable or not? It makes no sense.

dude i feel so sorry for you but think of all the people you saved from playing this game

that is just fucking horrible
im never gonna play this!!!
thanks for saving me 3 dollars to rent this catpoop;D

Go watch some Angry Video Game Nerd video's and you will know what I mean(since basically thats who your ripping off, but so are a lot of people these days).

/facepalm yes AVGN created the bad video game review genre, THIS is the type of AVGN fan that piss me off.

Well mister AVGN fanatic, AVGN did NOT create this type of review others have done it before him and others will do it after him have at least some respect for spoony.

If you had bothered to see his other works you probably wouldnt say anything because this guy DOES NOT need to swear like a drunken sailor to be funny he has his own thing going just like other reviewers have, Different styles dont equal the AVGN everyone has his style of game reviews and i apreciate the work they all do.

Now before you judge me i am an AVGN fan just not a retard who talks out of his arse.

Noah doesn't have a style, that's the point. He's just funny. He doesn't have to try hard to be funny.

And once again;

No, Drawing is NOT optional. The game tells you to do it. The game makes you sit through several tutorials on it. The game assumes that you have the decency to not have a strategy guide or GameFAQS ready when you boot the game up, because otherwise there is no way in hell you are going to know how card modding / refinement works within a few hours of your first playthrough.

Two, Card Modding / Refinement is even more bullshit because it breaks the game. In 2 hours of playing my characters have 3000+ HP and Zell has 100% Death to his attack. Just at the end of disc 1 my characters have max health and Squall's ultimate weapon. How many enemies did I fight? Just enough to get card mod and the refinement abilities. Then I got encounter-none and have been coasting through the game at level 10, LEVEL GOD DAMN 10. Card modding is beyond broken, it's cheating. It literally makes me feel like I'm playing the game dishonestly, but it's the devs fault for including this shit.

So you do get an option. Boring game with boring mechanics, or boring game with broken mechanics.

Though I love a good rant, I feel this is a bit unfair, as it's not until near the end of the game that you need to have 100 of anything. And by the time you DO need it, you should have item refining options from your GFs, and there's also that island with all the crazy draw points on it (IIRC, that's how I got the important stuff to 100 for the final dungeon)

But then again, it is a horrible system, because Magic is _usually_ the disposable resource in an RPG, as you generally recover it when you go to an inn. When ALL of your healing sources are consumable (Magic and items), you do have a big problem. And it encourages you to never cast spells. Which I guess is ok, because most of the kinda suck anyway, except for stuff like Aura.

Another bad design choice (which I will yet see if you mention by the end of the series), is the fact that levelling up doesn't help at all. Regular EXP actually penalizes you, because the enemies level up just as much as you do. So ridiculous.

I know a lot of people think Spoony is too hard on FF8, but really, come on, he's just as frustrated a reviewer as the rest of em so that is logically the point of these vids, i mean both the NC and AVGN overreact in their vids occasionally but we dont hate them for it.
Just because Spoony had the balls to have a go at reviewing FF its a big deal all of a sudden and half the people on this site seem to dislike him some way or another now.
Also if you use common sense this game just has began design written on large portions of it.
And i still dont hate Final Fantasy even though i had to play the game several times through before i realized how everything worked.
I just mean to say Spoony games FF8 what it got coming and these vids where a revelation to me the first time i saw them on his site.

And also i forgot to mention the one FF game i really didnt like, being the only one i didnt even finish once was FF2. I just really disliked the leveling system there also i was just 5 at the time so i really didnt get much of it and it bored me quickly just no hear the sound and getting the happy message you just gained a level, i mean who doesnt love that?

i agree that the leveling system in FF II was bad, but i lived trough it to just be stuck in the last dungeon -_-

Ok, i swear this'll be my last post in a row but i keep forgetting things. I remember that when i played this it was so much more complicated then FF7 and also so abstract indeed. The tutorials where just so boring, it was no fun whatsoever trying to grasp this system.
Because of that the first time i played did i only grasped the basic draw system and spent about 20 hours drawing all the spells for all my characters.
Also i remember on the PSX being unable to skip the summon animations and i remember Eden's being the longest one with approximately 1 minute.
And lastly i dont hate minigames, in fact some games are great in that aspect, but since FF8 many games have those dreadfully elaborate minigames that might as well be games by themselves, my most recent memory of that being the bug catching game of Rogue Galaxy

To summarize it, FF8 would have been half as boring, or twice as fun if thats more appropriate and half as long(because this game took me about 120 hours to do the first time...) without all the crap.

talking about long summons, FF VII - wich is the far best FF game I've ever played, if not the best game I've ever played - had way longer summons, for example, the knights of the round spell, wich I actually timed because I tought it took so long time, it took 1 minute 22,2 seconds, and also there is the supernova spell of sephirot - kinda cool to watch actually - but takes so much time o.o

That is a great way to torture someone you hate!

WhytePanther, I like that the enemies level up with you in this game. I thought it was more annoying to have to roll through the opening areas of Midgar again in VII and have to wait through all the load time for encounters that did absolutely nothing for me. I spent more time with loading and with the end of battle screen than I did in the actual battle and all that inconvenience just to see that I gained 7 exp when the next level was about 20,000 away. This is more acceptable to me.

To clear the air, I really liked FF8 but I still find this review pretty funny. But I'll just say one thing, if you didn't want repetitive game play then the first mistake you made was picking up a traditional Japanese RPG with random encounters and turn based combat. Repetition is kind of the name of the game with these titles.

i really dont think this review is an accurate description on FF8 this was the first FF game i played and thought it was great. Drawing is a tiny part of the game and when i had finished the game i had used draw about 20 times 5 of those was drawing GF's from bosses. Sure FF8 isnt the best game in the series but this review hardly show people anything about the game, its just you nitpicking on parts of the game you dont even need to go through to complete the game

I haven't played the game yet so i did not understand much of the drawing stuff but, i actually understodd it after reading this post o.o

Could you review chrono cross and Chrono Trigger those were real fun games. I liked them better than Final Fantasy.

you read the title? yeah, go get one.

At about half-way into the video you said that there are other ways to get magic and you said you "don't care enough to learn them", I haven't played this game, and I love your reviews, but you are ragging on the game for an issue that can be fixed but you just don't want to fix it? Why?

That's like me saying; 'I hate Halo because the starting weapon sucks' It wouldn't be a problem if I would just take the time to pick up another weapon, then the game wouldn't suck to me. (I love Halo BTW).

I am just wondering why you took such a strong stance on one issue that you don't have the strongest base on. I'm not a FF fan, I don't even like the series, but I'm just saying you should've chosen a better thing to make a video on.

The drawing system does get repetitive but it's a lot more easier with more party members and faster battle speed. Other than that, I gave up on the game almost after the ballroom scene, it just didn't grab my interest.:'(

This is one of my favorite Final Fantasy games, but I still enjoy watching you nitpick it, even if the points you bring up don't really bother me in the slightest.

dats crazy i cant beleive the horror of FF8