I played some Final Fantasy VIII over the weekend. There are big, gaping holes in my memory about this game, and one aspect in particular is the battle system. I vaguely recalled you could equip summons to people and during the animation sequence you could mash a button to increase the damage points, but that was about it. Now that I'm playing it, I realize this was a terrible fucking concept and it's no wonder why they never used it again. Magic is consumable. That's already kinda weird, but I could deal with that if you didn't attach that magic to your stats. So for example, fire increases your attack. Or Cure and Life increase HP. The more magic you have stocked up, the higher the stat increases. Let's say Zell's base HP is 750. With 100 Lifes added, it raises to 2500. With such a large difference, you have a huge incentive to stock up on magic.

Except doing so takes fucking forever. You can "draw" the magic from enemies, and if you want to sit around for an hour that's great. Even if your people are pulling nine a turn, that's still ten turns. And usually they don't; five is the average. Considering that's out of a hundred, that's insane. There are other options, like turning items into spells, but those aren't too many and are depleted quickly. And then of course once you stock a hundred, you move onto the next area and find enemies with the better version of the spell so you have to start the process anew. So most of the fighting is spent doing tedious tasks just to have the basic stats you'd have in any other game. God almighty, my complaints were about the storyline and characters. I didn't realize the battle system was going to be part of it too.