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I can tell you the game gets significantly harder if you end up getting your characters to max level while farming weapon parts, giving the enemies a significant bump to *their* max level. Which is what I did when first playing the game and not really using the junction system to its fullest, with the result that I barely scraped through the end-game by the skin of my teeth. I think I had one party member alive when Ultimecia went down.
While it has been a LONG time, so I can't speak with full authority, I remember this being strictly, mostly untrue. If you look at the monster stat growth charts for most baddies in the game, including the final boss, their stat growths mostly trail off after a certain level. Early monsters will still increase levels, but their stats plateau at the early levels. The final boss stops seeing rapid stat growth at around level 60-70 IIRC. If you overlevel, you'll still be able to easily spank stuff. It's less about the equipment you get and more about how you're junctioning. If you apply the right spells to the right stats, you can basically "break" the game regardless of what level your characters are at or what they're equipped with. Plus, if you farm Aura magics, you can use it to basically abuse the Limit Break system and plow through most of the worst enemies in the game with ease. (Squall's final limit break is stupid strong.) And if you've been getting all of the best Triple Triad cards in the game, then you can transmute them into rare spells that do game breaking stuff for the final bosses like, oh say, complete invincibility. There's a LOT of customizability in FF8, and the game is more than happy to let you tinker with the systems until you're a demigod trampling everything in your path. You just have to experiment and be ready to grind a lil. I never did these level 1 runs that people talk about, and never had a hard time with the game. The only problem with FF8's leveling is that it's easy for Squall to get ahead of your other characters in levels, and you don't want that to happen *too much* because the enemy monsters levels are pegged to the highest level. So if Squall is level 80, but Quistis is still level 30 in the final dungeon, you're gonna have a hard time. Other than that, it's probably one of the easiest mainline Final Fantasy games I've played.
I hadn't, and I usually don't discuss S2's music because I actually find it not as interesting or as good as its immediate predecessor's or its sequel's. But that's a harsh comparison when the music is still objectively really really good. It's just kind of uneven at some places. (Oh lord the minigames music.) It's still got so many great standout pieces though, and it really makes excellent uses of its soundtrack to accent poignant moments in the best ways. And when it recalls and adapts S1's OST is often very special as well, which greatly helps lend the sense of continuity and connection between the games. Some of my favorite tracks:
30 hours seems like a really low estimate to me. You can absolutely beat this game in only 30 hours if you wanted to. (If you know what you're doing, you can easily beat it in 10.) But the average gamer taking their time, thoroughly exploring things, and making a good faith effort to recruit all 108 Stars of Destiny, your playtime is more realistically in the 50-60 hour range.
This is helpful, thanks! It's still not a 80-100 hour JRPG, which would make it way too hard to add to my backlog right now.
That was my strategy - on demand Renzokuken Lion Heart just chews through boss HP (especially if you junction up Squall's Strength). But to be honest I think that (and maybe Rinoa's limit break) is really the best use case for that technique.
So obviously the solution is that you should leave Squall dead as much as possible.
It's not theoretical, I've done it! In order to see the Clive side quest to its fullest conclusion, you have to basically beat the game in 12 hrs. This isn't really hard at all, you just:
This is the perfect opportunity to go on a side tangent about how IMO Luca Blight is not actually the main villain. He's a symptom of the esoteric nature of the world's primal forces having a proxy war against each other using people to fight, powered up by the True Runes. Kinda like that dumb tree in FFV/IX, but way more thought out and interesting. That's why the final bosses are the Beast Rune made incarnate, and then the duel with Jowy. Jowy doesn't want to fight, but he's compelled to do so by both the Black Sword Rune and the Beast Rune. And that's actually way more interesting to me, especially when this game is just one chapter in a long drawn out saga of the forces of chaos versus the forces of order, that comes to a head in Suikoden III.
It would be worse. This way we have both games to play!
