Final Fantasy VIII

• Don't grind. Enemies level up with you, so just go through the game at your own pace.

• Draw all the magic you can, and junction in to your stats for major stat increases.

• The magic system involves drawing magic from enemies before you can use it. This may seem tedious at first, but you really only have to do it in the beginning. You can get most of your magic in the game from draw points, or from refining cards/items.

• Most abilities are not learned by your party members, but by the Guardian Forces (GFs, kind of like summons) they equip. You also use the GFs to enhance your stats (like Strength) with spells (like Fire). This is called the junctioning system, and a lot of people seem to find it confusing. The tutorials in the game do a good job of explaining things, though.

• If you enjoy the card mini-game (most people do, I think), you'll have an easier time with the main game, because the cards you win can be refined into useful items and spells.

• Enemies level up with you. That means, as a general rule, EXP (raises your level) is bad and AP (teaches your GFs different abilities) is good. Turning enemies into cards (with Shiva's Card ability) gives you AP but no EXP, and a card in your collection. It's very useful.

• Always check to see what can be drawn from bosses. Many of the GFs can only be found by drawing them from bosses. A boss called Elvoret is the first example of this if you want to see what I mean.

• Junctioning: In general, Offense spells to Offense stats, Defensive spells to Defensive stats. Protect would give a far higher Vitality than Fira, for instance. The auto-junction can do a fairly decent job, but you'll want to adjust some things to fit.

• LEARN THE REFINE SKILLS. Being able to convert your junk into magic or other items is critical to an easier time. Here's an early example-the fish enemies you can encounter on the beach at the very beginning of the game drop Fish Fins. These refine into Water magic, which is pretty powerful for stats at the time.

• It's been noted that grinding for raw EXP hurts you-The enemies power up more than you do through levels. With this in mind, you want to take steps to make sure you don't get EXP. To that end, the 'Card' command is your best friend, especially as cards can convert into more magic by turning them into items that can be converted through the skill 'Card Mod'. Bosses cannot be carded, but then bosses don't give EXP.

• Limit breaks become more common and more powerful the more bashed up your team is. Please note that this is relative to Max HP. Junction something hefty to HP and defenses and don't heal the 'damage' from the increased maximum and you've got 'free' Limits for the firing.

• In most cases, your highest spells will be saved for junctioning. This doesn't mean you can't cast. Use your lesser spells. The boost from your junctioning will mean they will pack QUITE a punch.

• Draw success rate and number of spells gained is based off your Mag stat. Keep it high.

• It's a fun game. Remember to draw Siren, though TEMPORARY-DASH-CHARACTER without spoiling any plot details, you draw it from a boss relatively early on in the game. I'm sure that there are other GFs that need to be gotten that way, and it sucks not having and levelling them for a _long_ while.

• If you don't get Siren, for instance, you won't be able to use the save point near (boss name spoiler:)Ultima Weapon, forcing you to go through 45 minutes' worth of battle before facing it. And it sucks, believe you me.

• Get Mug as early as possible. Once you get the Magic Lamp (after a certain story event) use it to fight Diablos who will then become one of your GFs. He can be pretty hard, so you might need to grind just a little, but if you can stock up some gravity magic and use it against him it shouldn't be so bad.(Counterpoint: There's no need to grind to beat this boss. All you need to do is cast blind on him. He'll have an extraordinarily difficult time killing you when he can't do physical damage. his gravity spells can get you to 1 HP but no lower.)

• If you Mug an enemy they won't drop an item. I learned this very late in the game and it frustrated the hell out of me. Some enemies drop different items than you steal from them, so you'll occasionally not want to steal. Of course, GameFaqs has all the giant charts of drops and steals.

• Once you can make mid-high level magic out of lower magic, go ahead and use all your lower level ice/fire/thunder spells to do this. There's no reason to keep weaker magic, especially since your characters can only hold a finite number of different spells.

• Stock up on water spells. They really make the first half of the game a lot more manageable.

• You can get Limit Breaks any time your HP is in yellow, sometimes just before, as well. Since there is no meter or anything, you can just skip that person's turn until their limit break arrow shows up. This means you can do a Limit Break every single turn. This comes in particularly handy in Disc 3 once you get The Ragnarok and can fly. On the map, the Eastern-most island is the Island Closest to Hell and the Western most island is the Island closest to Heaven.

• Hell Island has Marlboros and Ochus, and Heaven Island has Red Dragons and Grendels. All four of these enemies give large amounts of XP and AP. They are also easily defeated by using Quistis' limit break Degenerator.

• Also, if you have Enc-None from Diabolos, both islands have probably more draw points than the rest of the world map combined TEMPORARY-DASH-CHARACTER and all the draw points are spells like Holy, Ultima, Meteor, Flare, and Full-Life.

• Use the config menu to set cursor to "Memory". This will repeat your last action in battle if you just hold down X -- very useful for drawing loads of magic without selecting the command every turn.

• Also, talk to Cid at every opportunity. More than once he has an item to give you that you can't get anywhere else, and that he'll never give you again if you move forward with the plot (or even off the current screen) before speaking to him.

• Finally, if you don't mind grinding, there's a great way to get a huge advantage early in the game. When you go on a training mission with Seifer, put one GF on each party member and kill off Squall and Zell in battle. Then level the shit out of Seifer. This will level your GFs, who will learn new abilities and become very strong. Then when you end the mission, your main characters will not have gained levels, so enemies will still be at a low level, but you'll have three very powerful GFs to kick ass with. This trick can be repeated with another temporary character later in the game.