This looks like a discussion my girlfriend and I could be having You see, she was the one that loved cRPGs (mainly BG and its sequel), and I was the FF nerd. I asked her to play VII (she then played VIII and BoF4 and wants to play CT and IX) and in turn I played the BG series (along with Planescape: Torment, after which I started playing NwN and Icewind Dale). We both loved the games, but agreed that they are actually very different kinds of games. The great thing about western RPGs is that they are open-ended, non-linear and have tons of side-quests. Whereas jRPGs concentrate more around the atmosphere, the characters and their relations (Torment had superb characters, but it's still done in a different matter than in jRPGS). Considering this, FFVIII, like many have said before, would turn out to be a completely different game, were it done by BioWare. And I wouldn't want that. I wouldn't want Baldur's Gate to be made by SE, for that matter. The reason these games are great is because they are what they are, what, and by whom, they were made.