Final Fantasy VIII

Triple Triad Power Up Strategy
Tips and Tricks

The Triple Triad Power Up Strategy may appear straightforward, yet it leverages game mechanics accessible to players early on, often overlooked due to a lack of awareness regarding just how important they are.

This strategy proves crucial in enhancing your character's stats and overall effectiveness in battles, underscoring the importance of recognizing and employing it early in the game.

The Strategy has two important elements:

1. Playing Triple Triad often and early on to stockpile lower level cards.
2. Using Quezacotl’s Card Mod ability to refine extra Triple Triad Cards into items that can then further be refined into powerful magic.

Becoming a Triple Triad Master

The first important step of this strategy involves getting reliably good at Triple Triad and playing this mini-game early and often as you progress your way through the earlier chapters of the story.

Triple Triad is not a difficult game to play. Check out the Triple Triad section for more information on the rules of the game:

You can begin playing the game as early as the very first chapter of the game where you can pick up some free cards from the student on the second floor of Balamb Garden. It isn’t until after you have obtained your first high level card (the Ifrit Card after completing the Fire Cavern) that you should really get into playing a lot of matches.

Even more importantly though is to complete the first Queen of Cards steps outlined on the page below so that you can increase the number of cards you win each match:

After that, its time to play as many Triple Triad card games as you can manage while you stockpile up important cards. Some things to consider:

• Its always worth stocking up on Elnoyle Cards as 10 of them can be converted into an Energy Crystal which is a very important and very rare item.
• You may also want to consider stocking up on some Blue Dragon Card and turning 4 of them into a Fury Fragment.

So you’ve played a bunch of Triple Triad games, and you’re pretty good at it; you’ve managed to stockpile a vast array of low leveled cards. Now what?

Refining Cards into Magic

There are actually two refinement steps that need to take place:

1. Have Quezacotl learn its Card Mod ability and use it on your extra cards to convert them into various refined items that will go into your inventory.
2. Have your other Guardian Forces learn and use their Mag-RF abilities in order to convert these items into powerful magic. This includes the following refine abilities (to start):
   • F Mag-RF
   • I Mag-RF
   • L Mag-RF
   • ST Mag-RF
   • T Mag-RF
   • Time Mag-RF
3. Use the Junction functionality to have your characters start junctioning your magic to your abilities.

The more of each magic you have, going all the way up to having the maximum of 100 in stock, the more of an impact the junction will have on the stat. Therefore, you should push to have 100 of all the available magic on each of your characters.

Continue Refining

The Triple Triad cards that are available early in the game are fairly low lever, but more and more powerful cards become available as you progress through the game.

For example, in Galbadia Garden there is one card player that plays with Level 6 Boss cards. You should challenge her to more games to get even more powerful items which can be refined into even more powerful magic.

Too Powerful?

Its worth mentioning that this strategy has the potential to make your characters absurdly powerful compared to the early game bosses and enemies that you will be facing, and some might say, even takes some of the challenge and the fun out of it.

That being said, the goal of any game should always be to maximize the efficiency and power of your characters, rather than artificially making the game more difficult than it needs to be, but just something worth considering.