Lots of people go straight to the guard at the front gate or the Trepie in the cafeteria, but these two are so easy to beat when you only have the starting cards. If you need Elnoyle, Abyss Worm, Tonberry King, Adamantoise, etc. just head to the library as soon as you get your first cards. These two are seriously bad at Triple Triad and drop everything you need in the early game.
I am definitely guilty of making a beeline towards the character cards.
I'm actually pretty good at the game so long as the god awful random mode isn't on. Even with "weak" cards, there are excellent tactics for playing off the weakness of your own cards! I love the 'same' rule.
It's hecking great to see some FF8 content on Lemmy! My favorite game ever!
Random is extra bad for me though because I'm a collector. I'm one of those guys who tries to 100% down to getting every item and every card. Gotta get all the Rosetta stones and megalixers and never use them. 🤣
I've played through the game like 40 times collecting everything; damn near 4,000 hours of FF8 despite how it fails traditional replayability standards. What really fucks me up though is that I never had a pocket station!!! Motherlicking boko stuff ruled out!!! I have the steam version now and could do it all again, but I straight up cannot get over the whole 16fps menu bs and being locked to 8 directions.
The Playstation emulated version should have rumble and omnidirectional movement. AFAIK, the PC version doesn't have rumble and is limited to 8 directions.
Edit: The upside of the Remaster version is that Angelo Search can find a bunch of items that you could only get from Chocobo World.
The FF wiki says that Chocobo World is playable directly from the original PC port.