Some more Final Fantasy VIII hate (4)

The Triple Triad minigame was met with mixed reactions: deeply appreciated for its complex mechanics or toroughly hated because of its pervasiveness. You could have a match with most of the Non-Playing Characters in the whole game, and succeeding was a must for completionists and card collectionists. Card pictures other than monsters include Guardian Forces and Characters, which I think are unique in the game.

Around the beginning of the game you get a deck of cards, each representing a monster found in the game; each card has specific statistics, which give it what you would call an 'attack power' depending on where you put it on the playing board, a 3x3 grid. You and your opponent take turns placing your cards, and each time a card is played, cards placed near it may be 'flipped' (netting you a point each) depending on the attack power balance of adjacent cards.

It's a lot more complicated than this: because of various and ever-changing rules, matches can require different strategies, or even be almost entirely luck-based. At the end of a match, you may win and/or lose cards, according to the current rules.

The good part about this minigame is that, thanks to some Guardian Force abilities, you can turn the cards you win into useful items and spells, therefore making the drawing process less important, if not entirely optional, for maxing out your characters' statistics. The bad parts are: it's still relatively time-consuming to get the best cards, so if you don't like the game (I bought FFVIII because I wanted to play a JRPG, not a card game) you're better off not playing it, because it requires practice, and one mistake could cost you one of your rare cards (i.e. a reload of your last save).

Final Fantasy VII already had its share of minigames, but they were just mindless pastimes compared to this, and you could play all of them in one place (except you had to go around catching Chocobos for the race game). As you may have guessed, I really didn't like Triple Triad, so I was stuck with drawing spells and killing monsters to sate my lust for stat-maxing (in retrospect, it served me right...).

I'll just take one more paragraph to add something to the growth system of the game: every time you defeat an enemy, your characters gain experience (except for 'bosses'), and eventually get to higher levels, which means getting stronger. In this game your enemies level-up with you though, so gaining experience is either useless, or it makes the game harder, because enemies may get stronger with the same amount of levels as your characters. So you have to balance things out by getting spells and junctioning them to get better statistics and survive.