Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]

[Kuja]

Sure, Final Fantasy VIII's moon is magnificent, the devs are rightly proud of it. But it feels like it's framed in a way that centers the moon as especially important, and it… Isn't? Adel wasn't on the moon, she was on a space station at the Lagrange Point. The Lunar Cry was very impressive, but it ended up not really mattering. Hyne's body buried on the moon was just a legend, and the world of monsters a point of background detail. We never set foot there. It dominates every shot of the sky across the entire game, and it's just… Not that big a deal.

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I have a theory I developed during the course of the LP.

At some point in preproduction, the moon was supposed to be FF8's endgame.

Consider the story of Hyne the Great. There are two versions in-game, with a third being published in the companion book FFVIII Ultimania (in the framing device of a SeeD professor lecturing students):

Long, long ago... When this world was just made, there was a strong god called 'Hyne'. This god was very, very strong, but after fighting a lot of monsters, he became very tired. So he made 'people' like you and me to do all the work, and the god went to sleep. [...] However, the god was very surprised when he awoke. Surprised that there were so many people. Hyne decided to reduce the number of people by taking away the children. [...] Of course, everyone was scared then, too. And so, the battle against Hyne began. Even though the people were small, they all got together, and finally cornered him. Hyne didn't know what to do. Out of desperation, he gave half of his body to the people and ran off with the remaining other half. Well, he was a god. Anyway, it turns out Hyne tricked the people. The half that Hyne ran away with was the half that had the stronger magic. Hmmm... It might be close by, actually. It might even be watching you.

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Once upon a time, there was a person named Hyne. Hyne was the ruler of the world. He became lazy and decided to make a tool to make his life easier. Hyne made a neat tool. His tool could make more tools by itself. Soon there were a lot of tools in the world. These tools were actually people.
When Hyne woke up, he was surprised because there were a lot of people. Hyne wanted to reduce the number of people, and used magic to burn up a lot of small people. The small people were children. The people cherished the children very much. So the people rebelled against Hyne. Hyne used powerful magic to fight them. The people couldn't use magic, but they had wisdom.
Eventually, Hyne began to lose the war, because there were too many people to fight, and they were getting smarter. Therefore, he decided to make peace with people by offering them half of his body along with his powers. Hyne cut his body in half and gave the people half as he promised.
Then, another war started. People began to fight over the power Hyne offered them through his body. This war lasted decades. Finally, King Zebalga and the Zebalga tribe emerged victorious and demanded Hyne's body-half to get its powers. But the body ignored their commands.
Then, Vascaroon came to the rescue. He appeared before the confused Zebalgas and revealed to them that Hyne's body-half was corrupt and possessed no real power. The body-half was actually Hyne's cast-off skin. The Zebalgas were angered by this truth, and decided to destroy Hyne. The Zebalgas never found Hyne. People began to call him "Hyne the Magician" and continued to hunt him for centuries to come.

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At this time, daylight had not yet come, and everything was covered in night.
There was a being called "Hyne". "Hyne" created the world, and battled many beasts all the while. Because of the magic "Hyne" used, he was eventually able to win the battles. Thus, "Hyne" was the governor of this world.
"Hyne" seated himself upon his throne, from where he thought he could see all around. However, from the location of his throne, "Hyne" was unable to view the eastern sea because of a mountain. Because of his long battles, "Hyne" had become too tired to destroy the mountain and needed a tool to carve it up; he had an idea of what to apply to this task. This tool would be able to function of its own accord, and be able to increase its own numbers. "Hyne" named these tools human beings. Their males and females are the origin of human beings, and we descended from them.
The human beings increased their numbers while carving up the mountain. When their work was finished, they decided to ask "Hyne" what they should do next. However, "Hyne" was sound asleep due to his fatigue. There being nothing they could do about it, the human beings made changes to the land at their own discretion.
When "Hyne" awoke, the appearance of the area had completely changed. He was most startled, though, by the number of human beings there were now. "Hyne" decided to reduce the number of human beings, and used his magic to burn up smaller humans. The small human beings were called "children" and were very important to the humans. They wept intensely and protested to "Hyne". However, he told them they were his tools, and his words angered them. They cursed his words when they heard them.
The humans began a rebellion against "Hyne". He retaliated with his magic, but the humans were able to increase their numbers in abundance.
Besieged, "Hyne" bargained with the humans. He offered them half of his own body and power. At the idea of having half of this power, the humans decided they should agree to the deal."Hyne" split his body in half and gave half to the humans. With this, a peace was drawn between "Hyne" and the humans. However, humans began to quarrel with one another for the first time, coming together in groups that wanted the power of "half of Hyne's body".
A long, long battle began. Many countries were established at this time.
The battle was eventually won by the clan of the dark king, Zebalga. Within a forest, they convened to command the power of "half of Hyne's body". However, the "half of Hyne's body" was unresponsive to their commands.
Sage Vascaroon came to consult with Zebalga. He was wise, and knew the answer to the problem with "half of Hyne's body". "Hyne" had given them a corrupted part of his body. What the humans had thought was "half of Hyne's body" was really just the "cast off skin of Hyne". When they heard this explanation, the Zebalga clan was furious. They vowed to destroy "Hyne".
However, the other half of Hyne's body was nowhere to be found. The humans began referring to the missing "Hyne" as "Hyne the Magician", and sought him for generations.
It's to be expected that the "magic of Hyne" could not be found. Because of people's feelings at that time, it concealed itself in bodies, in the form of women, people who it was thought should be protected.

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Hyne's legend hints at something fascinating: a world where the planet's lifestream, rather than creating people and animals and plants and spirits, instead coalesced into a single being of unimaginable godlike power who then in turn created all such things until a living, breathing world existed.

There then follows a predictable turn of events where said god creates humanity and, in his hubris, attempts to force them to do his bidding like an abusive parent. Very "Cronus eating his children" stuff.

But the interesting part is the idea of the 'halves' of Hyne. One half, the weaker, given to humanity to get them off his back, while he absconded with the other half. Where did he go that primitive humanity never found him? Well, not too far. Somewhere close by, actually. He might even be watching you.



The moon. A place well beyond humanity's reach.

But Hyne was still arrogant, and his plan backfired. The moon was never meant to hold even half the amount of power in a planet's lifestream. Hyne's powers of creation bubbled to the surface in a swarm of nightmare monsters that occasionally burst forth to attack the planet below.

And what about his body? The corrupted half that he sloughed off to trick humanity? Well, in most Final Fantasy games, the power of the lifestream and the natural energy of the world takes the form of crystals.

A crystal.

From a single, godlike being.



I think at some point in preproduction, there was no Adel. Artemisia (named for the lunar goddess) was the ruler of Esthar, and seeking to become the most powerful being in existence and end the persecution of sorceresses forever by ruling as god-queen, she intended to take control of both halves of FF8's creator deity. 20 years ago, a whole Final Fantasy title starring Laguna & Co took place to stop her first attempt. Except they fucked up; by putting her into orbit, they gave her exactly the proximity to draw Hyne's power from the lunar surface. At that point, all she needed was a wake-up call.

But then a swerve happened. Someone came up with the idea of a time loop. A villain from the future. Lunatic Pandora was rejiggered to be a crystal from the moon that can conveniently call the monsters, while the moon itself was stripped of its place in the story, reduced to an outer horror production factory with no particular origin. Except that some of the storyboards still featured it because of the legacy. Artemisia was moved into the future and Adel took her place as the setting's deposed tyrant.

 

[King Prussia]

Yeah, uh, all the images were fine on my end at first and now some aren't.

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Top 10 things convincing me Time ruins everything and Compression was necessary. :/

 

[Zap Rowsdower]

Yeah, uh, all the images were fine on my end at first and now some aren't.

I... Think it will fix itself over time??? Maybe???

I have no idea how this works

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For what it's worth, I right click and 'open image in new tab' on one of the broken images and the error message it spits out is
'429. That's an error.

The rate limit for this service has been exceeded. That's all we know.'

which, when googled, says the solution is basically just to wait

 

[Vinpupx]

Yeah, also getting those rate limited errors. RIP for now. Will read later.
EDIT: Read through. Always love your summaries.

 

[fictionfan]

I remember enjoying FF8 as a kid. A just liked grinding drawing all the spells. I didn't understand the story, but I thought that was because I had missed something.

 

[Broken25]

Well, i think it's pretty clear. Selphie banishes her enemies to the orphanage in the past, where Edea then finishes them off.

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My brain it's huge.

 

[Amidatelion]

All the images are fine on my end, whatever that means.

 

[Project 501D13R]

Prepare to meet a knight with the most retail-worker 'I can't lose this job' energy you've ever seen.

 

[Parabola]

Polite clapping at Omicron

No, really. They gave her an inexplicable accent where all her hard 'c's become 'k's. Why!? This isn't trying to reflect anything in the JP script as far as I can tell, the EN translator just decided it would be funny if she talked like that for some reason! I don't even know what that's supposed to sound like!

Is this because she's a descendent of Odine using his technology???

There's no explanation. She's just Like That.

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What makes this even more baffling is that she doesn't speak at all like this when possessing Edea!

Safer Sephiroth eat your heart out. This is one of the coolest FF final boss designs of all time, except for the ridiculous, ridiculous wings on top of her head.

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I think the blame for Monstrous Evil Women with large wings emerging from their heads can ultimately be placed at the feet of Sirene from Devilman.

I will forever approve of head wings.

In many ways Ultimecia is the opposite of Sephiroth. Where the white-haired bishie had a very clear backstory, psychological stakes, and new reveals regarding his true heritage dispersed across the game, but personally became a total cipher halfway through the game and just vanished from the narrative, Ultimecia is a constant presence, her schemes hounding our heroes' every steps, hiding her identity, possessing our friends, suggesting a complex backstory of persecution and revenge, only to ultimately look at the camera and say "I am a generic evil witch who wants to rule/destroy the universe and be worshipped by all in the hell I'll create."

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There's definitely some intentional similarities and contrasts here.

• Sephiroth is a former SOLDIER who turns traitor; Ultimecia is persecuted by actual soldiers, SeeDs.
• Sephiroth's role in VII and how it unfolds entirely has to do with the past; Ultimecia's role in the story has to do with the future.
• Both of them use proxies throughout most of the game, but while Sephiroth's proxies are monstrous Jenova clones, Ultimecia's proxies are attractive and already-existing women - Edea, Rinoa and Adel.
• Both want to become gods and seek to accomplish this by enacting a world-destroying/transforming scheme.
• Sephiroth is a mostly physical fighter with a giant sword who only occasionally uses magic, Ultimecia is a sorceress who fights almost entirely with magic and only uses physical attacks when merged with Griever.

I do find it disappointing that she doesn't have more to her character, honestly. I really like Squall's line way earlier in the game about how good and evil might just be a matter of perspective, and it would have been good for the game's themes if they'd leaned on that by giving Ultimecia more sympathy.

This is obviously a much more conventional ending than VII's. And I am going to come out as a basic bitch here, but I like it much better.

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This is wisdom. Have you seen the effort it takes to be an advanced bitch? It's not worth the investment.

Jokes aside, I definitely think the conventional ending was the way to go with this one. Everything to do with Time Compression was complicated enough that making things simpler in the end is for the better. You want an emotional resolution for this, not some pseudo-intellectual continuation of what it means to emerge from Time Compression, or elaboration on where or when the group emerged from it.

 

[Dybbukpossesed]

Genuinely shocked that his edgy fursona showed up in the final boss fight. Even more shocked that it also has Shadow the Hedgehog's (the ultimate lifeform) black and red color scheme. Did Sega take inspiration from Griever for their own design? Or is it just that black and red are the ultimate edgy color combo?

 

[silentorphan]

Or is it just that black and red are the ultimate edgy color combo?

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Ultimecia (black wings, red gown) can be described with many adjectives, but I personally don't think "edgy" is the right one for her.

 

[Solsticegelan]

I have a theory I developed during the course of the LP.

At some point in preproduction, the moon was supposed to be FF8's endgame.

Consider the story of Hyne the Great. There are two versions in-game, with a third being published in the companion book FFVIII Ultimania:







Hyne's legend hints at something fascinating: a world where the planet's lifestream, rather than creating people and animals and plants and spirits, instead created a single being of unimaginable godlike power who then in turn created all such things until a living, breathing world existed.

There then follows a predictable turn of events where said god creates humanity and, in his hubris, attempts to force them to do his bidding like an abusive parent. Very "Cronus eating his children" stuff.

But the interesting part is the idea of the 'halves' of Hyne. One half, the weaker, given to humanity to get them off his back, while he absconded with the other half. Where did he go that primitive humanity never found him? Well, not too far. Somewhere close by, actually. He might even be watching you.



The moon. A place well beyond humanity's reach.

But Hyne was still arrogant, and his plan backfired. The moon was never meant to hold even half the amount of power in a planet's lifestream. Hyne's powers of creation bubbled to the surface in a swarm of nightmare monsters that occasionally burst forth to attack the planet below.

And what about his body? The corrupted half that he sloughed off to trick humanity? Well, in most Final Fantasy games, the power of the lifestream and the natural energy of the world takes the form of crystals.

A crystal.

From a single, godlike being.



I think at some point in preproduction, there was no Adel. Artemisia (named for the lunar goddess) was the ruler of Esthar, and seeking to become the most powerful being in existence and end the persecution of sorceresses forever by ruling as god-queen, she intended to take control of both halves of FF8's creator deity. 20 years ago, a whole Final Fantasy title starring Laguna & Co took place to stop her first attempt. Except they fucked up; by putting her into orbit, they gave her exactly the proximity to draw Hyne's power from the lunar surface. At that point, all she needed was a wake-up call.

But then a swerve happened. Someone came up with the idea of a time loop. A villain from the future. Lunatic Pandora was rejiggered to be a crystal from the moon that can conveniently call the monsters, while the moon itself was stripped of its place in the story, reduced to an outer horror production factory with no particular origin. Except that some of the storyboards still featured it because of the legacy. Artemisia was moved into the future and Adel took her place as the setting's deposed tyrant.

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Ah, damn, you beat me to posting about the three different versions of Hyne's story - the one and only thing that I decided to look up around when the Lunar Cry was happening because I was really, really interested in the deal with Hyne and the Moon. I was largely... not quite dissapointed, but certainly underwhelmed.

As someone who's been experiencing this game vicariously through Omi without any spoilers or outside awareness, I've largely come to hold the same conclusion as him about Rinoa and Ultimicia - that at some point, they were the same person before the plan and story changed. I've come to another conclusion about Hyne, Sorceresses, GF's, and what was and wasn't meant to be true somewhere along the line - what I alluded to earlier.

As it stands, the takeaway from the final version of the story of Hyne very much makes it seem like the power of Sorceresses is, in fact, one-half of Hyne possessing young women, fleeing from person to person, a parasite of a god hiding among what they understand to be the weak, vulnerable, or otherwise protected humans - young girls, children, mothers; something that I think resonates well with a lot of what FF8 tries to put down. It also works well with the sort-of-dropped plotpoint of Sorceresses being "Hyne's descendants" - something that either is true of everyone or can't be said to be true for most people.


Adel's face melted when she was defeated. Ultimicia has a hollow face at the very end, when compressing all of time. Rinoa's shattered astronaut mask in the final cinematic, the hollow in Squall's own face, the recurring themes of loss of memory and identity and childhood...

I can't say for sure what happened to Hyne's skin, or all the other background elements in the final version of the story. But I do believe that the other half of Hyne, the more powerful half, is what become the Sorceress's power; passed on from generation to generation, junctioned to them like a GF, consuming and overwhelming them. Because...

One of the things that's stuck out to me all this time about the way people talk about the Sorceress' power is how they make it sound inevitable that the sorceress will turn against humanity. That their morals will rot, that they'll set themselves apart from other people, so forth and so on. There's even the entire massive theme of a Sorceress's knight - their emotional and moral anchor, keeping them human. And their association with angels! Adel stands out for her lack of wings, but Rinoa and Ultimecia just have wings, and Edea's outfit makes her look like she has them.

Hyne's resentment for humans eating away at people, his goals and his purpose and his general divine otherness eating away at those unable to keep a hold on their identity, is what makes the most sense to me. People persecute sorceresses because sorceresses become like Hyne because their power is Hyne's - this even works well with Adel's making the people bring her children, young girls in particular, and them rising up and getting angry at her with it! With Adel screaming at the world for years and years...

A miniature version of whatever's going on with the moon. (Lost in development, or toned down from an intended moon dungeon.)

I'm gesturing and grasping at straws, here, at themes and ideas that I can see by putting together things left from older drafts of the story and the final product we got, but I hope I'm painting an effective picture, here. I can see the lineage of sorceresses, the way that sorceresses crawl out of reality during time compression, one of them like a caterpillar - like all sorceresses are for Hyne's power...

I wanna tear my hair out figuring this out because "Hyne wants to put himself back together and undo their greatest mistake, humans" is a striking overarching narrative to put what's happened inside of.

 

[Terrabrand]

Genuinely shocked that his edgy fursona showed up in the final boss fight. Even more shocked that it also has Shadow the Hedgehog's (the ultimate lifeform) black and red color scheme. Did Sega take inspiration from Griever for their own design? Or is it just that black and red are the ultimate edgy color combo?

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Red and Black is just the like, stock villain color scheme.

Whether it's like, The Dominion in Starcraft, the Brotherhood of Nod in Command and Conquer, or whatever else you care to name (those just being a couple examples off the top of my head) it's a super common villain color scheme.

It's not really all that notable unless you can point to something more particular than Red With Black.

 

[Egleris]

This, I suspect, is another reason why @Egleris suggested the scheme I used earlier of junctioning GFs to characters, rather than to 'packages'

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Guilty as charged.

Although the other reasons I provided at the time were also true: I just think it's a better and less stressing way to play the game overall, and it helps the characters have more of a mechanical personality if they all always keep the same powers. I like character having mechanical personality.

Also, gives me a great extra reason to always keep Selphie in my team as the one who has priority on junctioning Doomtrain.

Did I ever mention that the Italian translation renamed Doomtrain to Kharonte, as in the one who ferried the dead to the underworld in greek mythology? Because that's a thing, and it adds an extra layer to why he's just the perfect GF for Selphie.

More than I realized, because I had not seen that the plan was to throw Ultimecia back to Adel's childhood.
How did that impact the past? Was that possibly the source for how Adel learned to "junction" others for their power?

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I mean, we don't have the mean to prove it, but certainly the "absorbing powers from other Sorceresses" plan she was carrying out does seems to have some similarities with Artemisia's own goal, doesn't it?

Adel stands out for her lack of wings

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Look at her model again: Adel does has wings. Stylized, skeletal ones, but they are there. The best shot is in the 15th image of update 32.B, where she's standing right in front of the team with Rinoa bound to her chest; the wings are very clearly visible there.

On the whole, it's one of the weaker entries in the franchise up until this point. I'd put it above 1, 2 and maybe 3, but that's it.

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Care to defend this statement with actual arguments? It's fine if you don't want to, I'm not trying to start a fight, but I am incapable of understanding how you could have come to such a conclusion. And I am the one who thinks FFV is better than FFVII, which I repeatedly stated is better than FFVIII; however, the idea that FFVIII isn't superior to FFVI in every single measurable respect is impossible for me to wrap my head around.

 

[dinomannitro6]

ironic that the game's story itself is like time compression in some ways, events getting mixed or dropped and removed from their proper context, but the emotional bonds of the characters still are strong throughout it and hold things together.

oh and since omi started the dropping of dope remixes:

View: https://youtu.be/aGLRISPbX7M?si=XlHXROP4E_fYV0SS

 

[Entropy Judge]

Probably getting ninja'd, but ...

She literally Drew Griever from Squall's mind. He made up an OC so powerful, it is the ultimate GF. The implications are… What?

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Oh! I know!
Gozer: The Choice is made!
Dr. Peter Venkman: Whoa! Ho! Ho! Whoa-oa!
Gozer: The Traveller has come!
Dr. Peter Venkman: Nobody choosed anything!

... I think, anyway. Makes sense to me, at least.

This is when Griever unleashes an attack called 'Shockwave Pulsar.'

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Which when used by Quistis can break the 9999 damage cap.

Squall, his identity erased, his face replaced by a black hole like Ultimecia's own.

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Not gonna lie, twenty-plus years ago? Spooked the hell out of me when I first saw it. Yeesh.

Rinoa looks up, awestruck, and then down at Cloud's face

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Like I said, probably ninja'd, but ...

 

[Etranger]

I still cannot believe that after all the lore and that entire space sequence, you never go to the fucking moon. What's up with that? You get so close! It's literally right there, doing bad shit to the planet! Everyone's just like, "Welp, guess we're stuck with monsters falling from the sky, forever"?? How is fixing that not the plot of the game?!! It's not even connected to the existence of the sorceresses! You barely address the consequences of it happening right in front of you! aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for FF8's love story, but I will die mad about the moon thing.

 

[GilliamYaeger]

Care to defend this statement with actual arguments? It's fine if you don't want to, I'm not trying to start a fight, but I am incapable of understanding how you could have come to such a conclusion. And I am the one who thinks FFV is better than FFVII, which I repeatedly stated is better than FFVIII; however, the idea that FFVIII isn't superior to FFVI in every single measurable respect is impossible for me to wrap my head around.

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*gestures at all the frustrating bullshit Omi's gone through over the course of the playthrough*

FF6 may have its flaws, but at least it isn't immensely frustrating to play through.

 

[silentorphan]

Oh! I know!
Gozer: The Choice is made!
Dr. Peter Venkman: Whoa! Ho! Ho! Whoa-oa!
Gozer: The Traveller has come!
Dr. Peter Venkman: Nobody choosed anything!

... I think, anyway. Makes sense to me, at least.

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Wouldn't this exchange be more suited for the beginning of the battle when Ultimecia is selecting her initial opponents, rather than the Griever sequence?

 

[Zap Rowsdower]

You're wrong about one thing in that summary.

Griever's ultimate attack is not Shockwave Pulsar.

Griever's ultimate attack is Squall now having to live down the merciless taunting that shall follow him for the rest of his days from his comrades over having his edgy teen OC fursona paraded for all of them to see in all of its glorious cringe.

edit: (Griever's strongest literal attack being Quistis' limit break is obviously because when Teen Squall was creating his Edgy OC Fursona, the strongest ability he could think of to give it to show how cool and strong it was was the strongest ability his combat teacher had)

 

[Egleris]

FF6 may have its flaws, but at least it isn't immensely frustrating to play through.

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I suppose this might be a matter of taste - I found FFVI to be enormously more frustrating than most of the others, and I enjoy FFVIII the most; the most frustrating aspects of FFVIII are easy for me to neutralize or minimize the impact of, whereas those of FFVI just won't stop getting in the way of any possible enjoyment the game might have offered to me.

 

[Entropy Judge]

Wouldn't this exchange be more suited for the beginning of the battle when Ultimecia is selecting her initial opponents, rather than the Griever sequence?

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That exchange is Gozer choosing the method of destruction by pulling a thought from one of the characters' heads. Said method being the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, because one of the characters accidentally thought of it and how it could never hurt them, or something.

 

[silentorphan]

Griever's ultimate attack is Squall now having to live down the merciless taunting that shall follow him for the rest of his days from his comrades over having his edgy teen OC fursona paraded for all of them to see in all of its glorious cringe.

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Isn't Rinoa the only one who actually knows the truth about Griever and Squall's "L-I-O-N" imaginary beast because no one else was around when he told her? For all the others know, Ultimecia just grabbed it from some rando's daydreams in time compression.

Although...talk about perpetual blackmail material on your significant other... 🤔

 

[SCO]

FF8 is a game where thinking of might have been is quite fulfilling, right now in this thread multiple people thought of dropped (too) ambitious plotlines that might have been, or might have been intended to be before the director pulled the brake and called the writer a downer nerd and 'we'd never have the GF be killed by the party you nutter, did you see what the fans did to us with the ff7 post ending cutscenes, so help me god just do a standard romance ending or you're fired'.

 

[RubberBandMan]

As someone who hasn't properly touched the game in years (outside of my abortive play-alongside that ended in disc 2), I think I'll mull over the plot and ending bit and see the wrap up.

But as someone who played these games as they were coming out, I think the mechanics of the game, in comparison and reaction to FF7 is worth pondering over.

Omi got Squall up to level 93 mostly by accident. In spite of several times trying to keep him in line with the rest of the party, he shot really far ahead because he's always there. If he had gotten to 100, the rest of his XP would have been (I think) split between the other two party members making them level faster.

The same feat in FF7 would have taken dozens of hours, as XP does not scale, a monster gives in XP what a monster gives in XP, and while there is XP up materia (as the wiki tells me), you seem can only get one, and any additional ones come from mastering/duplicating that one.

Which brings us to non-level combat systems. FF7 had swapable spells and abilities, freely changable but limited. It works fine for most of the game without issue, it's balanced well enough that keeping basic combat or healing materia on your characters means they'll get rank ups about when you should, plus or minus some grinding.

The real problem is what happens when you get to end game. Lots of the best materia you only get one of. And there is the huge materia side quest, which requires mastering every type of a particular colored materia in order to fit more materia then the max 16 slots. Even if you don't want to fool around with the Frog materia, you have to master it if you want one materia to have Fire 3 and Raise. And mastering even one materia takes forever. You could use AP boosted equipment, but that's just trading leveling 8 materia normally for leveling 2-4 at boosted rates. It doesn't really speed things up if you're trying to master a bunch of materia.

And while the end game dungeon is only a moderate spike over the rest of the game, there are end game super bosses that incentivize you to level up and gain power in the RPG way: Getting levels and abilities. There is incentive to treat them like a Proto-MMO and grind out materia and levels so that you can finally last six or eight or however many turns it takes to beat the Emerald weapon when you don't have a guide.

These are all problems FF8 does not have. Magic is consumable, but it only takes a couple minutes to go from 'have none of these spells' to 'have 300 of this spell'. You aren't seeking out the same enemy again and again, going through finding it, fighting it, victory pose, reward screen, fade back in. It's mindless, but once you have an enemy with flare in front of you, you can be set for the rest of the game.

Compare again to Materia, where you'd get a cool new materia but have to level it up to get it's actual good stuff, even if dropped in the final dungeon. Meanwhile in FF8 you don't even need to stock a new magic spell to try it out on an enemy to see what it does, new enemies can, viture of their draw list, introduce new mechanics to the player they can then take with them. (This is an aspect that is underutilized I feel)

Likewise, instead of leveling getting slower as you get closer to end game, it goes faster. More XP as monsters level up, but the same 1000 xp per level for characters means your power boosts happen faster and more often, not going to a crawl as level 75 to 76 takes longer then level 50 to 55.

Now I don't think that the battle system was created, specifically, to avoid a 'pre-final dungeon ennui' situation. Most players do just walk the path in front of them and barely notice any side paths, only roadblocks. But I think FF8's mechanics show a fascinating glimpse in how you can solve some common problems, while introducing new and novel ones.

I respect the FF series for being willing to start from scratch each mainline series, to really try something new each time, but I have fond memories of tinkering with the junctioning system, of mastering it to be functionally invincible, without having to level grind. I wish they played with this sort of system to radically alter stats when you wanted, of magic doing more then being a thing you cast with MP or ATB charges, and actually had an impact on your character and what you can do.

And that they tried it again, in a game without ATB and it's fucked up stupid system that should have been in the ground long before it went 3D, I hate hate hate it.