After being lectured by Ben Starr at The Golden Joysticks, I’ve finally startedFinal Fantasy 8. I’m only an hour in, which is far enough to get a taste of the Junction System. Instead of learning spells and abilities when you level up, the eighth game is all about drawing spells from environments and enemies before using them to learn abilities or add specific buffs to existing stats. Summons also play a much bigger role, available for Squall and friends to use from the opening battle instead of being earned several hours in.
I’ve always been used to levelling up and growing more powerful with skills and abilities as I progress, so suddenly being given all of these powers right away threw me. I’ve heard about this system before, but in practice it’s bizarre, even after a handful of mandatory tutorials did their best to explain everything. I’ll get to grips with it eventually, but for now I want to touch on how much it reminded me of another fantastic game in the series. Yep, Final Fantasy 10’s Sphere Grid.
Final Fantasy always tries to reinvent itself with each game, so long as the moody anime boys and melodramatic nonsense remain intact.
Final Fantasy 10 introduced a lot of firsts for the RPG series, including voice acting for most its characters and a linear approach to narrative that would become the industry standard. Released in the early days of thePS2, it remains a beloved classic fans constantly return to. It’s aged pretty well, and that goes double for its Sphere Grid approach to progression. While your characters still level up in the regular way and will see many of their stats naturally improve with time, you must dive into a sprawling board game to earn new skills and use a variety of spheres earned in battle. If you try to skip it, well, good luck making it past the first couple of dungeons without getting your ass kicked.
It’s an additional layer of strategy to an already compelling RPG, essentially offering us the equivalent of a miniature board game for each character. What the game doesn’t tell you is that all of your party members actually reside on the same plane, but far enough away from each other that you’ll need to play for dozens of hours before the streams begin to cross.
Characters are positioned in a place that best matches with their class archetype, so Lulu (Black Mage) is located next to spell nodes and magic improvements, while Yuna (White Mage) is situated right next to a bunch of supportive spells and abilities. You’re encouraged to keep moving forward in a single direction to make things easier, but the real chaos comes from ignoring the instructions and turning each character into a rowdy mixture of abilities.
The International release and 2013 remaster also brought with it three Sphere Grid variants in the form of Regular, Standard, and Expert. All of these came with different immovable nodes and placement which allowed repeat playthroughs to shape character progression in radical ways, meaning battles were far more interesting and less dependent on predictable synergy between party members.
Much like Final Fantasy 8’s Junction System, it’s daunting at first but quickly unfolds into a fun and approachable means of spicing up each character. Levels still play a role, and the serotonin that comes from huge loads of experience points will never go away, but this additional layer turns Final Fantasy 10 into an RPG that’s a joy to replay.
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