Influenced what the player did getting to grips with very loud final game (8)
I believe the answer is:
affected
'influenced' is the definition.
(thesaurus)
'grips with very loud final game' is the wordplay.
'grips' becomes 'acted' (I can't justify this - if you can you should give a lot more credence to this answer).
'with' means one lot of letters goes inside another.
'very loud' becomes 'ff' (musical abbreviation).
'final' indicates one should take the final letters.
The final letter of 'game' is 'e'.
'ff'+'e'='ffe'
'acted' going around 'ffe' is 'AFFECTED'.
'what the player did getting to' is the link.
I am not very happy about this link. Some or all of it may be part of another bit of the clue.
Can you help me to learn more?
(Other definitions for affected that I've seen before include "Pretentious, designed to impress" , "Influenced or touched by an external factor" , "attacked" , "Impacted on" , "mincing?" .)