Again, nobody gives a shit about the monster arena. It's a sidequest made specifically to force you to grind. You can't even fight those monsters without grinding to even unlock them. I'm talking about a normal playthrough never involving anything more complicated than Summon > Attack for 95% of all combat.
Also LOL at it not taking time to gather 50 rare cards or farm 20 chocobos. You're spending more time playing cards than it takes to finish all the mandatory boss battles in FFX combined.
The frame of reference we're talking about here is a blind playthrough of FFV vs the rest of the series, in which case FFV will force you to change your strategy most often. You'll find bosses that are immune to your melee spam, or kill your tankiest characters, or permanently cripple your strongest attackers even after reviving them. You'll have to think about the fights and change things up to win these battles, and most of the boss fights are like this. This happens in FFX like twice before the end of the game, with the aeon killing gimmick and a boss where you don't have yuna.
Alright then, if we're going to ignore the hard content in the game it's much easier to complete Final Fantasy 8.
- It takes no more than an hour to get a full set of Junctions by playing cards in Balamb Garden, once you have this you can finish all bosses in the main story line.
* 5x cards won = 100 Tornadoes
* 10x cards won = 100 Meltdown
* Walking into any shop and buying tent = 100 Curaga
* 1x Zells card = 60% STR
That's the minimum, and it'll take less than 30 minutes to win that, 1 hour if you're picking up a few other cards too.
- You spend 10 minutes extra on killing the machine in Dollet mission (as many times as you want) to gain over 200AP for your junction abilities.
- You can pick up No-Encounter from Diablos rather quickly by breaking T-rexes so you don't level up. Once you have no encounter equipped, you'll never enter any random combat.
- With no encounter you'll not level past level 10, this means that you'll never fight bosses that are higher level than 10. This in return means that you'll be able to kill 70% of the bosses in the game with ONE normal attack (Seifer, Lizards, etc)/limit break (Edea, Elryon, etc) from Squall and they'll die. You don't have to spend time in a summon sequence, you don't have to do anything, just attack/limit break the boss once.
Let's put that into perspective. You're not going to be fighting any random encounters, in the entire game, you'll be fighting bosses at level 10 with you having stats that belong to a level 80-90 from spending ONE hour in Garden. Fighting bosses at this level means that 70% of the boss fights will take you 5-10 seconds at the most.
This will be my last post on the subject, as it seems like you have no idea what you're talking about. You can complete Final Fantasy 10 much faster by NOT using any summons. Leveling up the correct characters, using the right overdrives and early game the correct weapons (Elemental strikes, poison, darkness, petrify, slow, etc). Why summon Shiva that will deal 2,000-4,000 damage (end game, without farming) a hit when you can have Rikku give Wakka 9,999 per hit and then have him do a 12x wheel?
You have no idea what you're talking about, thank you for the discussion.
[Edited]: Visit any forum (Gamefaq, etc) where they have a large Final Fantasy playerbase that spend time on challenges and you'll see forum threads on which is the game that you become the most powerful in/is the easiest to break, and you'll have 10+ pages with people arguing between 7 and 8. People don't mention Final Fantasy 10, I wonder why?
http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/197341-final-fantasy-vii/41255245
"Junction system in FFVIII was broken,oyou could get most of the best stuff before you leave the garden the first time"
"FFII and FFVIII wins this category."
http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/928790-final-fantasy-xiii/47379941?page=5
"VIII, I abused the junctions"
"Wow. A lot of stupid posts here. FFX is not broken, its just really easy... FF8 is however, completely broken."
"You don't really need to invest much time at all in FFVIII to make your characters overpowered though."
Those are only a few of many threads, and they all say the same thing.