During my last playthrough of FF8, I used the Card Mod ability only once. At the very last minute before Ultimecia’s Castle, I went out of my way to get all the ingredients for Squall’s ultimate weapon Lion Heart, because I wanted that final Limit Break finishing move. It was 100% worth it. See the featured image on this post, in which I finished off Ultimecia with the Lion Heart move. Amazingly cathartic.
Weapon crafting is a surprisingly big part of FF8, and I felt a little bad not taking advantage of it. All throughout the game, you can find magazines that give you recipes for crafting new weapons for your characters, and this is the only way you can get them. Unless you’re looking for all the hidden magazines and seeking out crafting items like Screws, you’re probably going to be using the same default weapons for the entire game. FF8 bucks a lot of the trends for the series by removing things like armor and accessories and putting all the stat management in the Junction system, and this is one of the biggest departures.
There was clearly a lot of thought put into this system, but it just wasn’t what I was interested in doing. I’ve talked about this here before, but I think I prefer games that cut to the chase and give you the good stuff right away. I love the Halo series because of their famous “30 seconds of fun” loop that gets you in and out of the action, over and over. Survival games and farming games don’t really do anything for me, because they’re so much more about the process.1 When I played Minecraft with my internet friends, while everyone else was building max-efficiency diamond mines, I spent my time digging enormous holes in the earth or constructing massive cobblestone monoliths to confuse people.
For FF8, the crafting system is especially time-consuming2 because it ties back into the card system and Triple Triad. The most efficient way to get the ingredients you need is often to mod your cards into their raw components or Refine your items into other items, which can feel like a big ask if you’re not already invested in those systems.
The good news is that FF8 has so many different ways to approach it that you don’t NEED to use the crafting system! If you’d prefer to max out your GFs’ abilities and find interesting combinations for them, knock yourself out. I used my GFs as my primary form of dealing damage, but I know other folks use spells way more. I am sure there’s someone out there who studiously collects every issue of Weapons Monthly and beat Ultimecia just using physical attacks. That’s great! It’s a very good quality that FF8 has in common with FFV, another underrated game in the series. Player creativity is fun!
If you missed out on weapon crafting, you don’t have to feel bad that you skipped one of the game’s major systems. There are twelve other systems you got to play with instead.