How PS1-Era Final Fantasy Got Card Games So Right, Yet So Wrong

What is it that makes playthroughs of some RPGs so outrageously long? Sometimes, the main story itself is quite modest in length and veteran players breeze through it. It’s the sidequests and minigames that are the true time sinks. Final Fantasy 15 players probably remember having to stop to engage with another sidequest every thirty seconds along the highways of the game.

There’s an awful lot of optional content in the series (as with so many other JRPGs), from quick one-off detours to substantial minigames. During the PS1 era, card games became big examples of the latter, in the shape of Final Fantasy 8’s Triple Triad and Final Fantasy 9’s Tetra Master, the virtual card games to play long before the neat likes of Marvel Snap arrived on the scene. Both are certainly engaging pursuits that can easily add tens of hours to a playthrough, but are they truly good? Well, personally, I’ve never quite been able to make my mind up on that one.

Have you ever found yourself coming back to something again and again, but not been sure if you’re actually enjoying it? I think that sums up my feelings on Triple Triad and Tetra Master. Before we get into that, though, let’s refresh our memories on each of these minigames in turn.

Simple, Engaging Card Game Concepts

Very early in Final Fantasy 8, a fellow Balamb Garden student who isn’t really feeling Triple Triad gives Squall their cards. Being Squall, he’d probably just dismiss them with an uninterested “whatever,” but while I’m in charge of his actions, you’d better believe that he’s going to be traveling the world to play endless hours of this game and collect them all. Earning that coveted star next to the card section of the menu is appealing, but it wouldn’t be enough if there wasn’t adequate reward for doing just that. Fortunately, the game makes Triple Triad worth the player’s while, ensuring that high-level magic, powerful junctions and weapon upgrades can be acquired much earlier by doing so, by using Quezacotl’s card Mod to get items to refine.

In and of itself, though, Triple Triad is a very easy game to follow. Each card has a number associated with its four edges (top, bottom, left, and right), from 1 to A (the latter essentially being 10), and the player and CPU take turns to place a card on the game board. If placed directly next to an opposing card, the card with the highest number of the two sides facing each other will flip the other, with the side in control of the most cards at the end of the match winning. A lot of additional wrinkles are added to this simple, quickfire card game in the shape of rules, which does help vary things up, but some of them have a huge negative impact on the experience (as we’ll see later).

The basics of Final Fantasy 9’s Tetra Master are very similar. In this game, cards can have arrows both on their corners and their edges, with a total of eight being possible. Taking turns to place them on the grid, players will flip an adjacent CPU card under their control if an uncontested arrow faces it. Arrows facing each other initiate a card battle, in which each card’s power level comes into play to determine which of them is flipped. After that’s resolved, a chain (known as a combo) can take place depending on the positioning of other cards around the battling pair. This can make for some spectacular ends to matches, but the whole idea can open the game up to too much unfortunate RNG.

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A Card-Collecting Odyssey

A full-blown sidequest awaits those who want to obtain all the Triple Triad cards, as certain NPCs will only play specific ones when the conditions have been met (General Caraway will never play Rinoa’s card until the player has lost the Ifrit card to him, for instance), and those conditions and the NPCs’ locations can be quite obscure. The Queen of Cards travels around the world, and her story is quite unique: Her artist father will create new exclusive cards when he’s “inspired” by others she shows him, and this also requires relinquishing a different rare card to her in a match.

Collecting Triple Triad cards is a campaign-long endeavor that takes you to places you may not otherwise go to, or interact with NPCs you’d otherwise pass by. In its own way, it enriches the world of the game, and it really is enjoyable to build up a collection of powerful cards depicting party members, Guardian Forces, and certain bosses as well as the regular monster cards. I enjoyed hunting down the members of the CC Group in Balamb Garden and defeating them in turn for their own unique cards. I found all of this made for a sidequest much more far-reaching than even the best the latest iteration of the series offered. Different regions of the world use specific rules or sets of rules, and Squall and company can spread them elsewhere as they travel from place to place and engage NPCs in the game.

These rules can change play itself. Elemental, for instance, adds different elemental tiles to the board that can make, say, a fire-element monster one point stronger than the numbers displayed on its card, while having the opposite effect on cards placed in that space that don’t match. This is largely harmless enough, but inadvertently spreading the random rule (which can be a real pain to get rid of afterwards) can make it much, much harder to win cards you want. When trying to win a rare card, who wants to use a random selection from the cards they own rather than their most powerful ones? Nobody, that’s who.

Final Fantasy 9’s Tetra Master cards don’t serve a practical purpose beyond the game itself, but similarly, obtaining them all is no mean feat. Some of the most prized cards are hidden away as chocograph treasures, and anyone familiar with the game knows exactly what that means: several hours of KWEHHHing at the ground in Chocobo Hot And Cold.

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Complicated Rules Can Make Things Very Hard To Follow At Times

The thing that confounds many of those same players is this: Triple Triad is, by and large, easy enough to understand and play. There’s no chance involved: A higher-number card, Elemental shenanigans aside, will flip a lower-number card. Every time. In Tetra Master, your card’s power level can be higher than the opposing card’s, yet still be flipped. There’s less chance of it, certainly, but it can happen. If you’re gung-ho with your card flipping, you might find yourself on the receiving end of a devastating combo in the last turn or two of the game that you absolutely did not see coming.

The reason for this is that the first number on cards, the power level, doesn’t relate to a set stat, but rather a possible stat range. This is also true of their physical and magical defense (the final two numbers), and the four different classes of card (denoted by the letter) can also affect things in unexpected ways. Cards can also level up, and it all makes for a card game that’s much more involved than it appears at first, but which can be incredibly confusing and frustrating for newcomers in particular.

Both Triple Triad and Tetra Master consumed hours of my childhood, and though I spent about half of that time enjoying collecting the cards, the other half was probably spent trying to figure out how to manipulate Triple Triad rules through the Queen of Cards or just what the heck was happening before my eyes in Tetra Master. Nevertheless, at the root of both is something far more than just a throwaway card game, and a Final Fantasy tradition I was thrilled to see return more recently in the shape of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth’s gripping Queen’s Blood (which boasts 141 different cards to collect).

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