A truly godawful entry to the series. Extremely broken gameplay mechanics. There are at least a half-dozen ways to break the game (see: Gamebreaker on the main page). But not only is the gameplay broken, it is boring. The Draw System is a true marvel at test a player's patience as they do nothing but draw magic from enemies for several minutes at a time. Magic is truly worthless as it's almost always linked to either your stats or your equipment. The Summoning System also is a massive test of patience. Overlong with button mashing sequences to boost its effectiveness, overpowered, and completely spammable. You can get through most foes just be spamming the Summoning system alone.

It also stars a cast of genuinely unlikeable characters. Squall is a Wangsty emo boy who'll probably get on your last nerve by the end of the first disc. Rinoa is a skank Damsel Scrappy who quickly jumped from her current boyfriend (whom she was told had just died) to Squall almost without missing a beat. The rest? To call them one-dimensional would be a massive overstatement. It doesn't matter much as the game all but forgets about them after the first disc.

And the plot? What plot?!? Was there a plot to FF8? The story kept changing at every scene. The story is so disjointed and muddled I could shuffle the pages to any of the Harry Potter novels and it still be more coherent than this. One moment, your a part of La Resistance. The next, you're saving the school from somebody, and after that, you're In Space. Almost every story segment and Contrived Coincidence end up having little to no relevance to one another.

The only thing redeemable to FF8 was the minigame. Other than that, the game was pure, unadulterated garbage. This began the trend of Squaresoft being more concerned with style over substance which culminated with the movie, which nearly sank the company. If this didn't have the Final Fantasy name on it, it would've been sent to the bargain bin within a week after its initial release, never to be heard from again.