Christ, it's an essay. Sorry.
You know what I really hate? When people tell others to "deal with it" after they state an opinion on a message board which ASKS THEM TO STATE THEIR OPINION.
Moving along....
I have a lotta beef with this game, but I'll try to be as unbiased as possible. Also, I'm not just gonna bitch since the actual question for this thread is "What would make it better," I'll give my suggestions.
You want reasons the Junction system's a royal pain in the ass?
1. Casting magic reduced your stats. This could be avoided by not casting the magic which was junctioned to your stats except that the only magic with enough of a boost to bother junctioning to your stats also happened to be the only magic powerful enough to bother casting.
2. Drawing enough of a given spell to bother with casting OR junctioning took a really long time and was really boring.
I see two possible solutions to the Junctioning problem; either have two separate "compartments" to store drawn magic - one for stats and one for casting (though this doesn't solve the problem of three-hour-long draw-fests), or incorporate MP. Even a moderately priced consumable item for increasing the amount of a given spell already in your possesion would have helped this out. Coulda balanced it by dividing the spells into power levels and having the items come in varying potencies and priced accordingly.
Moving along....
The characters, INCLUDING the two who supposedly underwent the primary "character development" were two-dimensional and stiff. Rinoa was a whiny little baby throughout the story, showing no discernable signs of growing the hell up. She verbally claims to be experiencing an increasing maturity as a result of her experiences with the SeeDs, but her actions would seem to imply otherwise right up to the end.
And then something, somehow convinces the cold Squall to come around and really like her. However I felt that whatever it was Squall saw in her, it sure as hell wasn't shown to the player. Made it look like Squall just changed his mind for no reason.
To fix this? Well, I'm going to try not to get into the plot too much since in my opinion it needs a complete reworking from the ground up. The pacing was all off. As has been stated, the character development was next to nil. And the expertly woven plot twists I'd come to expect from Squaresoft at the time were replaced with "Oh I know how to cover this plot-hole! We all forgot!" I wrote better dramatic twists in 8th grade; nearly anyone could have. It's not genius-level creative writing knowledge that for something to be a believable part of your story, you have to incorporate it into the world BEFORE it comes into major play in the plot. Deus ex machina may have worked for the Greeks but audiences today deserve a little more credit.
So: better pacing, more depth of characters, more development of romance ("develop" being the primary operative word here), believable and/or forshadowed plot elements.
More diverse music. The music the game had was great, I just got tired of hearing the same piano tune in EVERY dungeon.
I won't go into the optional stuff like the card game (which sucked) because the player wasn't forced to sit through that junk to learn the story.
The ending made little to no sense. Let me run it by you in simpler terms than they gave it to you in the game. "Ultimecia wants to compress time...because...she can! So the big plan is this: We allow Ultimecia to compress time...and then beat her up!" Ever see the movie Ghostbusters? There's a part in the beginning in a library. Peter claims to have a plan and intructs his colleagues to follow him as they sneak up behind the ghost. When they get close, Peter merely shouts, "Get her!" and lunges forward - through the apparition which then flips out and goes all stop-motion on their scientific asses. This is essentially the same plan, only in FFVIII it works out - "Thank you deus ex machina!" *smiles, cocking head to one side and looking into the camera; teeth twinkle*
But I said I wasn't going to talk about the plot. The world was not as immersive as most other games I've played. There was never a reason to linger around any town for longer than you had to.
Trading magic amongst your teammates was cumbersome yet necessary. Many times a character you may not have been using much is forced into your party by a story event, but they won't last the night until you get your Junction on.
Possible solution: grant the characters not in-use a level gain based on an average of the highest levels of the in-use characters. Like VII had. Actually, I can't remember if VIII had this or not. If it did, maybe it was the moster leveling that tripped me up, since the monster LVs were based on the average highest LVs in your party.
Oh and the plot promised to have a political undertone in the outset of the game what with the whole SeeD thing, but that just kinda fell by the wayside when Edea showed up (Edea recieved ZERO development). The game would have been much more enjoyable for me if you had kept receiving SeeD missions (and maybe even, I don't know, completing some of them?) like assasinating political VIPs, or guarding shipments of valuable materials, or protecting political VIPs from assasination, the list could go on....
And last: STABILIZE THE SeeD RANKINGS!! I tried my damndest to haul ass to the mission objective to prove somehow that I was a good soldier only to have my SeeD ranking (and my salary) decrease. Then later...milling about with no goal in mind...it inexplicably rises. I saved, turned the PSX off, and couldn't bring myself to play it for two days. What the hell? Am I dense, or was the SeeD ranking system just really elusive?
Well, I think that's all I have to complain about the game (I also think that's everything IN the game). So I'll close this by saying that all-in-all despite all these shortcomings I really, really despised Final Fantasy VIII. But it could have been good. It had potential. Utterly squandered potential.
