I feel like the ammo aspect is a big part of what makes the game challenging. Like others have said, you can always get more ammo by using the opposite beam (i.e. killing enemies with the light beam gives dark beam ammo and vice versa), and you can also use the charge beam for a free shot even with 0 ammo.

All of that put together can lead to some of the most exciting boss battles where you’re out or almost out of ammo but still have a chance to get the final blow in before they do. Infinite ammo wouldn’t necessarily ruin the game overall in my opinion, exploring would still be fun and exciting. But it would certainly rob you of those exciting moments.

Oh absolutely. I wasn’t trying to argue that they don’t require a massive time investment, because they absolutely do. I was only arguing against the assertion that they require a large time investment because the devs didn’t respect the player’s time, at least in the context of the battle speed of FF8 that was mentioned by OP.

Older games like FF6, Chrono Trigger, etc. don’t feel nearly as slow to me as FF8, Chrono Cross, etc. The former are 2D cartridge based games while the latter are 3D CD based games. All of them required pretty big time investments to complete, but battles don’t feel slow on the cartridge games.

I don’t think it’s fair to say that they didn’t respect your time. They were designed with specific priorities in mind on the limited hardware that was available at the time.

3D graphics were still considered the hot new thing at the time, and leaning into the spectacle was a selling point of the FF games (you could even argue that’s still the case). Now consider that all of that spectacle needs to load in real time from a very slow CD drive, and it starts to make more sense why the animations take so long to complete. The devs are hiding the loading process with long and (by today’s standards) very slow animations. It makes the games feel very slow, but I prefer that design choice over showing a generic loading screen or progress bar every few seconds in the middle of a battle.