FF8: Triple Triad

With the release of FFXV, I dug up my old copy of Final Fantasy VIII for the PC to reminisce on the good old days and boy was Triple Triad (TT) rules a pain to manage.

Why bother with TT? The real rewards for it are on disc 4 when you want to power up your characters, assuming you have completed the CC group side quest. From Vilurum on GameFAQs:

Your most time-efficient sources of each stat-up are as follows, so without being able to multitask as you'd hoped, you should really only focus on the Minotaur, Eden, and Irvine cards:

HP Up: Buy 100 Giant's Rings, GFAbl Med-RF to 10 Gaea's Rings, Forbid Med-RF to 10 HP Ups. (This is faster than refining Ward's card 3⅓ for 10 HP Ups.)

Str Up: Mod Eden's card for 3 Monk's Codes, Forbid Med-RF to 3 Str Ups, reclaim from left Diamond. (Better card to Str Up exchange rate than you get with Zell's card.)

Vit Up: Mod Minotaur's card for 10 Adamantines, Forbid Med-RF to 2 Vit Ups, reclaim from left Diamond. (Gilgamesh's card also results in 2 Vit Ups, but has an extra refinement step: card -> 10 Holy War -> 2 Knight's Code -> 2 Vit Up. This makes it slightly slower.)

Mag Up: Buy 100 Hypno Crowns, GFAbl Med-RF to 10 Royal Crowns, Forbid Med-RF to 1 Mag Up. (This is faster than refining Edea's card 3⅓ times for 1 Mag Up.)

Spr Up: Buy 100 Force Armlets, GFAbl Med-RF to 10 Magic Armlets, Forbid Med-RF to 1 Spr Up. (This is faster than refining Rinoa's card 3⅓ times for 1 Spr Up.)

Spd Up: Mod Irvine's card for 3 Rocket Engines, reclaim from left Diamond, and repeat. Every 5 Rocket Engines, Forbid Med-RF to 1 Spd Up. (5 copies of Irvine's card = 3 Spd Ups.)

Luck Up: Save yourself the trouble and don't bother. Or use a cheat device. If you want to do it anyway, and do it legitimately, your fastest option is to mug fixed Tri-Faces in Deep Sea (Ultima Weapon must be left alive, meaning Eden must come from Tiamat) for 6, sometimes 8, Curse Spikes apiece. Every 100 Curse Spikes, Tool-RF to 1 Dark Matter, GFAbl Med-RF to 1 Luck-J Scroll, and Forbid Med-RF to 1 Luck Up. You're looking at hundreds of hours to max Luck, and it's totally not worth the bother. (If you do decide to do *some* Luck raising though, feed any Luck Ups to Zell and Irvine first: they benefit the most.)

To take full advantage of the above, there's an 'infinite' money cheat that is best achieved after learning Tonberry's "Call Shop", "Familiar", "Haggle" and "Sell High" abilities.

1. Buy as many Tents or Cottages as you can.
2. Refine them into Mega-Potions using Carbuncle's "Recovery Med-RF" ability.
3. Sell the Mega-Potions for a profit.
4. Repeat steps 1 to 3 until you have enough money.

Now to continue on to abolishing pesky TT rules for some regions that I came across during my replay for future reference.

Disc 1

Trabia - Abolish Random, Plus

The first time you head to Galbadia Garden after getting Irvine, it is possible to setup TT rules for Trabia using the transfer student at Galbadia Garden. From Architeuthis over at GameFAQs message board - Abolishing Trabia Rules:

First spread Open to Trabia. After that, get the Galbadia rule set, save in the big room just past the ticket gates at the Garden, and then hard reset.

After reloading the game, immediately run to the Trabia student in the ice rink locker room. Challenge him twice, but quit before going to the TT screen to abolish Random.

Get the Galbadia rules again, save in the same room as before and hard reset. Go back to the locker room, and examine the draw point in the locker room 17 times without drawing. After that, challenge the Trabia student and quit to abolish Plus.

Disc 2

Galbadia Prison - Rosetta Stone

Not technically TT rule related but one can get unlimited Rosetta Stones (teaches a GF Abilityx4) from the prisoner who plays card for 200 Gil on floor 11. The trick is to run consistently between each reset with Enc-None equipped, then challenge and reject the prisoner 54 times before finally accepting and winning the game. Apparently the RNG ticks approximately every 0.5 seconds on each screen except within the prison cells (i.e. the save on floor 10 and the cell with the prisoner) and with each challenge so the exact number of times needed depends on how fast you run, give or take 2. You can view a sample run by Timothy Burrows to see how it goes. (I guess I must have ran faster as my magic number was 56 rejects to get the Rosetta Stone on the 57th challenge.)

Disc 3

After getting Ragnarok

This is where the fun starts and you work towards getting all regions with the desired rules (probably just Open). There are plenty of guides out there and you can refer to the guide by bover_87 on GameFAQs for details on how to abolish each rule. The only problem here is that all guides are based off Forte's original guide on the GameFAQs forum and they all use the Dollet pub save to manipulate the RNG. This didn't seem to work well on my PC version but there is a simple workaround - 'talking' to a draw point uses one RNG, which gives the same effect as checking the magazine pile. The best draw point to use for this is at Fisherman Horizon, next to the save point on the railway tracks.

Hopefully that helped some of the folks out there having trouble with TT rules. Have fun establishing Open as the only rule in the FF8 world!

Known bugs on PC port

Just in case you are playing on the PC port of FF8 (2000) like me, take note that a bug with the cards may cause one or more of the following issues to occur:

1. Unable to initiate battle of the Gardens at the end of disc 2
2. Unable to locate White Seed Ship on disc 3
3. Unable to encounter and complete Pu-Pu sidequest
4. Unable to locate and complete Obel Lake sidequest
5. Unable to initiate Lunatic Pandora sequence at end of disc 3

The symptom of having the card bug is when you have randomly missing or additional Level 1 Bite Bug, Red Bat, Gayla, or Blobra cards. While you may be able to avoid encountering the issues listed above by ensuring the number of affected cards are always kept at zero (card mod them whenever you get the cards), the best way is to patch the 1.2 patch. Do note that there are two versions of the patch - one for GeForce users and the other for non-GeForce video cards so make sure to patch the correct version.