First I gotta give a shout out for FF4, I'm surprised everybody dislikes it. I thought the story in FF4 was very involved, if nothing else than because there were way more characters involved and they are all fairly well developed. The gameplay doesn't have the customizability that the others do, but imho that's not a bad thing, and in fact they moved closer to that in 9 and 10 by giving each character a unique skill set.

Which brings me to my least favorite game, FF8. The story is kinda complicated, but the characters in your party are not all that involved. You basically have 3 characters: Squall, Rinoa, and "everyone else". Seriously, there's absolutely no distiguinishing characteristics - they even all freaking grew up at the same orphanage! (puke). And game-play wise, there is essentially zero difference between any of the characters, the only difference is their weapons / limit breaks which is a very minute difference. You might as well be playing a party of clones. At least in, say FF5 or FF1 your characters distinguished themselves over the course of the game. Here, you can switch someone from a figher to a wizard with 3 clicks of your junction.

the game play system is kinda stupid too, cuz it requires you to sit there for hours on end drawing 100's of copies of spells from enemies. What ever happend to actually *fighting* enemies to build up your characters? It's also unnecessarily complicated, with two separate layers of customizability (GF's plus spells). And then you have the dichotomy of not wanting to cast your spells cuz that makes your junctions weaker.

And to top it all off, you have one of the most boring final bosses ever. Seriously, what kind of name is Ultimecia? She has no real interaction with the story except for "some random person who's trying to take over the world." They haven't had a boss so boring since FF1.

one more thing: I don't think the series is called "Final Sci Fi".