The best part of Final Fantasy 8 is now on your phone

If you've ever dug up your old PlayStation and Final Fantasy 8 discs for a few rounds of Triple Triad and thought there has to be a better way, your wait is over. The Final Fantasy Portal App is live on Android and iOS with a fully featured Triple Triad game, filled with tons of cards and characters from across the series' long history.

Triple Triad plays just the same as it did back in FF8 (and in Final Fantasy 14), complete with optional rule tweaks. You can win new cards off of AI opponents to fill out your deck, and even fuse dupes to produce new variants. Once you're happy with your selection, try a few hands in online multiplayer or through a local Bluetooth connection.

Unfortunately, Triple Triad isn't the hip new Hearthstone kind of free-to-play: playing a match costs you one "crystal," one of which recharges every half hour. The default cap of five crystals should be plenty if you just dip in for a game now and then, but if you crave ever more grid-based card battling, you can always buy some more.

You can get extra crystals just by playing in Triple Triad's introductory event, which also offers more powerful cards and extra Portal Points through August 31. Oh, did I mention that playing Triple Triad gets you Portal Points to spend back in the Final Fantasy Portal App proper, which you can then use to buy cards for Triple Triad, or phone wallpapers, or mysterious "item codes?" Or you can just get points by reading Final Fantasy news updates. The Final Fantasy Portal App is weird.

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Connor Sheridan

I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and now I'm a staff writer here at GamesRadar.