There's something a little strange about playing Triple Triad. The story of Final Fantasy VIII tells you that Squall is socially inept and tries to avoid interacting with people; the gameplay tells you that Squall is perfectly comfortable challenging every stranger he meets to a game of cards. But Triple Triad is fun, so I'm not complaining.
Fun fact: when I was a kid, I used to play Triple Triad with my friends at school.
My brothers and I made the cards ourselves at home. We drew the designs on printer paper, nine cards to a sheet of A4, then went down to the local newsagent to get them photocopied. We backed the photocopied sheets with cardboard and cut out the cards. Ta-da: we had a handmade Triple Triad deck.
We used really thick cardboard, for some reason, so the cards were unnecessarily unwieldy. I don't know why we didn't just use cereal boxes.
At one point, some classmates who weren't familiar with Final Fantasy VIII came over to ask what my friends and I were playing, and we roped them into a match. They beat me, alas! I remember buying them a packet of Haribo Tangfastics sweets as a prize.
I still have our Triple Triad cards somewhere, I think! I'll dig them out and share some pictures. They're not well drawn, but they're a fun little piece of my personal history with Final Fantasy VIII.
Got them! Here we go.
My hand-drawn Triple Triad cards, created when I was probably about fourteen, fell into three main categories:
This is the most straightforward category. They're enemies from Final Fantasy VIII. They look... reasonably like those enemies. Maybe they're not perfect, but, if you were told they're something from Final Fantasy VIII, you could probably guess what they're supposed to be.
Why is Ifrit called Kyrail? That's just what I named him when I first played Final Fantasy VIII. He's not named after anything in particular; 'Kyrail' was just the first thing that popped into my head.
The symbol in the lower left corner of the Ifrit card, if it's not clear, is a capital G combined with a capital F. I love that I made up a little symbol for the GF cards; I'd forgotten that I did that!
A more confusing category. These have the name and stats of an actual Triple Triad card, but the drawings look absolutely nothing like what they're supposed to be. Bahamut is a dragon, so I just drew a dragon. Red Bat is a bat, so I just drew a bat. Geezard and Glacial Eye are... whatever they are. I tried to draw them from memory and failed catastrophically.
I gave Bahamut a webbed tail because I used to be obsessed with the Dragonriders of Pern series, and that's what the dragon tails looked like on the covers of the editions we had.
Interesting that I made Bahamut a wind-elemental card, too; the in-game Bahamut card doesn't have an element! And... now that I check, the stats for Bahamut aren't correct, although they're similar. Did I decide to simplify things by getting rid of the A rating, or did I just make things up because I hadn't collected the Bahamut card and therefore couldn't check it?
My cool new designs for Final Fantasy monsters. Call me if you want to use these, Square Enix.
I suspect I copied a photograph of a snake for Ryskia; that's a better snake drawing than I'd be capable of without guidance! Possibly from a children's encyclopaedia, or from our collection of Animals of Farthing Wood magazines. I think it's supposed to be a poison elemental card, even though that clearly isn't the actual Triple Triad poison symbol. (We never played with the Elemental rule, so I don't know why I bothered giving these cards elements!)
Kikurana is, I suspect, inspired by the Neopet Kiko. I once talked my little brother into creating a Neopets account, and he was so delighted by Kiko's design that he insisted on having four of them. I found this hilarious. It never occurred to me that I was being a hypocrite for judging, given that I had three Shoyru.
Finally, here is a card that one of my schoolfriends made:
Look at Plonk. Incredible design. I love Plonk. I want Square to remake Final Fantasy VIII just so they can put this monster in it.