My biggest issue with the game was that basically only two of the characters in the entire game mattered at all and everyone else was pretty much just there. Also the overall story seemed to come second to the personal love story between Squall and Rinoa.

Compare that to FF7 where all the main cast was developed well and it also had a very defined overall story. Cloud's love story with Aeris or Tifa was just a part of the plot.

FF8 is a difficult game to take the entirety of it and still really enjoy it/love it. There are pieces here and there that you can focus on that you can like or love but much harder when you are trying to take the game as a whole. I think the game was always intended to be an experiment game though and experimental projects often do tend to be polarizing.