Final Fantasy 8 is the best one out of 'em all.

[Zerokku]

I'll post why I disagree with you -

Plot
For one, I'm a bigger fan of Medieval settings then I am of more modern-ish ones like VIII had. VIII's world didn't feel very believable compared to VII and IX's. Ultimecia's Time Kompression just felt boring even after a mediocre villain like sephiroth. Another strike against VIII is that it has one of the most facepalm-worthy plot points of any JRPG I've played -

(SPOILER)"Oh hey, we all actually knew eachother from our childhood together in this orphanage, but competely forgot it because We've been using GFs!" If it had been hinted at through the game up to the point through party dialogue, or even had more and more clues dropped about possible negative side effects of Guardian Force junctioning, it'd probably have been a nice, dark twist to the plot, especially if it were expanded upon afterwards. Instead, we got something along the lines of: "GF must've destroyed our memories! Let's keep using GF!" and then nothing is spoken of it again.

Characters

The supporting party characters (read: people not named Squall or Rinoa) more or less spoke with the same voice. Aside from their brief introductory bits, they never really felt like individuals to me.

And, even as a semi-angsty teenager myself, Seifer never felt legitimate to me. He's just too obvious and ham-fisted for me to take seriously. Maybe that's the point, but I remember loathing his appearances in the game when I played it a decade ago.

Irvine has pretty much no development after the first disc, and the rest of his character basically amounts to "Hey dude, you think I gotta chance with Selphie?" "Hey, I think I'm making some progress on Selphie" "Man, I'm totally getting shut down by Selphie" "Dude, stop hogging all the hotties, atleast give me Selphie!"

The cast basically stopped acting as a group after disk 1. Quistis got it even worse, she was barely relevant after Squall became a SeeD, and that happens about two hours into the game. Selphie got a section at Trabia and at the Garden Festival, so she probably came out of it with the most screen time; Zell got the whole thing with the Balamb infiltration. Other than that it was all Rinoa and Squall.

VIII had a lot of wasted opportunity. With such a small cast they could have really focused on the characters and made it a very interesting and personal story of a small group of young people, and up until the end of disk 1 it looked like that was what we were going to get. But then disk 2 was spent with half the group separated, and after disk 3 began it all just went to .

Ironically enough, IX pulled it off much better, even though it had more characters and about half of them weren't very relevant (Freya, Amarant, Quina). At its heart it was about Zidane, Garnet, and Vivi, and it does it incredibly well. Steiner is also pretty well-developed, but he's definitely a supporting character, albeit a well-done one (good in his own right, believable, but the story really isn't "about" him).

Battle System

Outside of the Obvious ATB system -

1) The summoning system in VIII is too useful. If you overused it the battles became very repetitive. It even got annoying at times. The fact they were just as strong as standard FF summons, but without any cost broke the game in a way.
2) The Junction/Draw system in VIII was annoying. Magic was pretty worthless in general, but say I junctioned my Curaga to Spirit or something. If I used a Curaga spell, my spirit stat would go down because I've used one of the spells thats being junctioned -_- Or you could go the reverse and junction 100 death to your weapon and have insta-kill abilities.

Graphics & Soundtrack
The closest game to compare it to would be IX. Graphically theyre both about on Par with eachother, though I would say IX edges out slightly ahead. VIII goes for a more realistic style while IX opted for a more cartoony style, and because of that IX has aged a slight bit better. It also has more impressive prerendered backgrounds imo.

I was never terribly impressed with VIII's soundtrack outside of a few select songs (Ultimecia's castle and Man with the machine gun to name a couple).

Over all, It's definitely a pretty game, but I think it falls flat in many areas. It's more pretentious than artistic, IMO, and a lot of it feels forced. It doesn't help that the game's seminal moment is home to one of the most grating songs I've ever heard.