i'm pretty divided on the game, though i definitely enjoyed it. On the one hand, i thought too many of the characters were cookie-cutter imitations of real people, despite that the game is so character-centric. Quistis could have been an excellent character if only she'd been developed better, and her (SPOILER) sorta-kinda interest in Squall had been more fleshed out. i firmly believe that alone would have given her room to be a much better character. Zell, Irvine and Selphie were akin to packaged stereotypes. The storyline, quite simply, annoyed me. None of the revelations in the game were too shocking or interesting, and - again - seemed so very flat. For example, when we discover that (SPOILER) the characters were all from the same orphanage , it came off as silly and cliched to me - when it could have been a great plot point. Not to mention that the whole (SPOILER) time compression thing is just damn dumb, in my opinion. There were some other, more curious holes too, such as: let's go into space for no flippin' reason!! Grr...

But on the other hand, i thoroughly enjoyed Squall. Lots of people said he was too much of a jerk for his character to ever reconcile himself, or absolutely hated Rinoa. Though, since i've come to this board, i've realized that Rinoa may not have been that great a person, i still think she was what Squall needed - at least for a little while. The most interesting aspect of the story, and the story for which i continued to play, was the growing bond between those two. Anytime the rest got iffy, i siply held out for another step in the love story.

The actual gameplay pretty good. Outside of the battle system, everything was standard FF fare, which was fine with me. Though i didn't like the really open-ended town setups. i like scouring every inch of the cites i visit in a game, and FF8's multiscreened, zillion-pathway city setups left me wandering around far too long sometimes. i liked the junction system, though it did get tedious at times. i had no problem sitting for half an hour just drawing magic, but it got to me that i was doing the same draws for every character. Sucking out the exact same magic for the sake of filling up the exact same stock, six times over... it got annoying. i know it would would be far beyond FF8 to adjust the draw system for each party member, but it doesn't change that the magic system got rather slow at times.

Monsters had too many hit points!! What should have been short battles took far too long.

As critical as i am about this game, i really enjoyed it. i liked that Square invested more time in the 'love' aspect of the game, definitely; 7 and 9 may have been intriguing, and we all may have been rooting for the hero to end up with his girl - but within the scope of the games, we didn't see much unfold relationship-wise. Junctioning, no matter how crazy or confusing or tedious, was highly original; kudos to Square for that. And maybe the music sucked at times (*cough* Ragnarok-in-flight score *uncough*) but in the end, i kept playing it. Playing the game through to its ending and being satisfied sits many plinths above all else in my personal rating system. And that's what really matters. To sum it all up, i suppose, FF8 was far more than the sum of its parts.

All in all, i'd say it was a damn decent game. Not spectacular, but pretty decent. Besides,
how easy can it be to follow up a game like FF7?