The thinga bout the card game is this: They g8ive you the Diablo card as soon as you get him as a summon. If you mod his card, you get 100 megalixers, which makes you essentially invincible. T
Too easy of a game.
The difference between “active” and “wait” is only when you’re selecting items or magic. As long as you don’t have a submenu open, it’s active.
There have been three methods used for determining who moves next in combat throughout the series. 1 through 3 used the melee system, where each character got one command per round; their speed and a random number generator determined what order commands were executed in. Personally, I hated this system.
4 through 9 used ATB. In this system, each character has a timer that has to go to zero before they can act, and they can act as soon as it hits zero. A random number generator determines how full the timer is at the beginning of the battle, but after that, it only depends on relative speeds. This is probably my favorite, although it’s easy to abuse. In FF8, if you junctioned 100 “triple” spells to Quistis’s speed when she’s at level 100, you could have her attack, and she’d be ready to attack again as soon as the animation from her attack finished.
The last is the CTB introduced in FFX, in which the only thing that matters is who’s next. The character’s speed and the action they take determines how many turns will pass before they can act again. This is interesting, and I’d like to see what they do with it in the future.
My main problem with FF8 is that it’s not so much a game as a movie. None of the puzzles or battles is particularly hard (save Ultima Weapon, Omega Weapon, and the last boss), especially if you use the junction I did, which is essentially game-breaking (the only enemy I ever had to worry about was the red dragon, and even then they only had a small chance of killing me).