Is FF8 worth playing?

[Karellen]

What was broken about the gameplay?

Junctioning made Magic useless. Other than that, it was fine.

You can also make your characters exceedingly powerful very quickly very early on, which takes the challenge out of a great deal of the game.

It's probably worth noting though that this generally won't effect people who are playing the game for the first time, since they probably won't have a great enough knowledge of the junctioning system to be able to abuse it, so it isn't really something the OP needs to take into consideration.