I can honestly see how people can hate this game. The junction system is very weird, the story can be complicated at times to understand and the combat is also difficult to learn. All of these however are the main reasons why i fucking love this game and think that it barely just barely surpasses FF6 for the best game in the entire series. The junction system makes character stats and combat so customisable, and its up to you how difficult you want to make the game or how much you want to break it, the devs don't care and they probably want you to go for it. The drawing system of this game has been criticized, but i personally find that you can just skip it altogether in favour of using triple triad (best ff minigame btw) and item turning to your advantage. There are so many choices in how you approach this system and this is why i love it and think it's the best combat of the entire franchise. The story also manages to balance epic stakes with just the right amount of personal moments, making it feel less like an epic journey and more like a personal one, despite the big threat in the horizon. Squall Leonhart is one of the best videogame characters ever made and he alongside the rest of the crew are written so beautifully that you can't help but love everyone of them and feel every happiness or sorrow they feel as well. The setting is one of the best in the franchise with some of the most beautiful landscapes that have aged perfectly fine in my opinion due to the sheer scope and magnificence of every single one of them when you first encounter them. And the music HOLY SHIT THE FUCKING MUSIC AAAAAAA. This right here is Nobuo Uematsu bringing in all the big guns with heavyhitters like Liberi Fatali, Force Your Way, Don't Be Afraid, The Extreme, The Man With The Machine Gun, Only A Plank Between One and Perdition, Succession Of Witches, Fithos Lusec Wecos Vinose, Balamb Garden, the chocobo theme, Shuffle or Boogie and so many more, this soundtrack is one of my favourite soundtracks of all time. If you can't already tell, i love this game and i seriously can not do this game justice with this review. I feel its best people give it a shot themselves to see the magic of this game.

Overall: Final Fantasy 8 Remastered is worthwhile for fans of the original thanks to the updated graphics, added features for ease of gameplay, features that were already strong in the original (such as the soundtrack) and nostalgia. Newbies might find the plot convoluted, the junction system broken, and the game dated.

Pros: Updated HD graphics for character models look great, same outstanding cutscenes and soundtrack from the original, same fun battle system from the original, added features make the game easier to get through without frustration, one of the most unique games in the entire series.

Cons: Story is convoluted, junction system can be tedious and annoying, aspects of the exploration are extremely dated, backgrounds are a blurry mess like every other PS1 era Final Fantasy remaster.

This could have been my favorite Final Fantasy game if a) I understood what was happening plot-wise, and b) the game didn't sabotage itself at every available opportunity.

The plot is really great (what I understood of it), and I really liked and cared for these characters. Although Laguna's scenes did start to lose their novelty after a while, Squall and the gang were well written characters, and kept me hooked.
The game is GORGEOUS, and the remaster absolutely helps with the whole spectacle of this. I was in absolute adoration at the CGI cutscenes, or the moments when the background is a CGI battle scene that the characters are running in front of. Those last couple of cutscenes were the coolest cutscenes I have ever seen. It has a great 'movie' quality.
And that's a bad thing, because the gameplay falls by the wayside in a lot of ways (along with other aspects):

- The draw system was actually not that bad of an idea, if it had been executed right. I like not running out of MP in dungeons anymore, but now since your stats get higher the more spells you hoard, you've created a system that doesn't incentivize using magic at all in battles.
- Since using magic makes you weaker, and attacking does the equivalent of a wet noodle, combat eventually just boils down to "summon Diablos/Eden" until you win. Summoning is so broken in this game, but is the only way to actually win.
- The game now has an in-built cheat button, which is so easy to just spam when you encounter some new boss bullshit. And this game is HARD. Like, really hard. All bosses move way to bloody fast, and hit with moves that delete your health in a manner of seconds. And it's not like you can just farm to get stronger, because guess what? The enemies in this game SCALE. That means if you're struggling with a boss, you're always going to struggle with that boss no matter how high your stats get. I know they did this to try and eliminate farming, but I still spent several hours drawing magic from random monsters so that I could boost my stats, so that didn't really work out now, did it?
- On the topic of levelling, FFVII did a thing where all characters would level up when you completed dungeons, even if that party member wasn't in use. That prevented massive level gaps between characters. FFVIII doesn't care. Rinoa is gone for half the game and doesn't level up while she's away. So if you want to go for the poetry team at the end with Rinoa and Squall, you end up with a Squall who is a tank and cuts his way through anything, and a Rinoa who dies in one hit and tickles everything.
- The final boss is actually really fun and intense until Griever shows up, and team wipes you unless you went through a long complicated process of shelling and protecting your whole party. And then the guy can just destroy entire stacks of magic from a character (you know, those things you boost stats with), making some characters unable to heal. Thanks. Technically, if you spend too long fighting these final bosses, you could run out of magic. And its not like you can summon GFs to win, because they are immediately killed if you try. Well then if I'm forced to not use summons, LET ME USE MY SPELLS INSTEAD OF GETTING RID OF THOSE TOO!
- Limit breaks are also a big issue, and kind of encapsulate what's wrong with the entire game. Like, limit breaks are powerful. Not ultra-powerful (unless your name is Rinoa), but decent tools that can get you out of a pinch. But instead of getting them after taking X amount of damage, you have to be on critical health to use them! Why would I bypass healing a character just so I can use a limit break that isn't even very good? I could just use a summon to triple the damage I could have done with Rezouken.
- And did Nobuo hire an intern to help with the music for this game? Because the soundtrack is filled with the best music in the entire series, or the most irritating, grating tracks in the entire series. There is no in between.
- A character can only have four abilities. Why? What's the goal here? What does limiting the number of abilities achieve? It's not like the ones you can unlock are good enough to warrant swapping out GF, magic, or Draw. But if I want to use items, I have to. Which sucks.

But if you fix literally all those issues, this was a really enjoyable game. I just wish I didn't feel like the whole thing was a hollow victory because I used the ez win button instead of torturing myself with yet another OP boss fight for a further four hours.

Also, RIP Odin, who made the ultimate sacrifice for a cool scripted moment in a battle.

Final Fantasy 8 is easily the worst RPG I have played, and I say that knowing I played Sticker Star and Chrono Cross. There is next to nothing redeeming about it and all the ideas it introduces have problems somewhere along the line.

The game literally tries to force this weird romance with Squall and Rinoa, but never really grows past the idea of teenage love. Literally all the characters introduced in this are pushed at the way side in order for their relationship to develop, and it never does beyond Rinoa being a simp, and Squall getting horny enough to have emotions. At literally one point it's revealed that literally everyone in the party just has amnesia, and they do literally nothing with it. You go to the future, and they do nothing with it. The game constantly switches you back and forth with party members to the point of annoyance, and literally none of the party members have fighting ability beyond using the GFs, and the majority of switching is bullshit to began with. Squall literally should not have been the main character; it makes no narrative sense for him to be the main focus when he barely interacts with anyone. Cid is the absolute worse in this game, being a cuck for life. There are so many threads that just literally go no where, and a war that just isn't resolved. It's literally just one big mess, and that's only discussing the story!

The main game junction system is so obtuse and hard to understand, and the draw system is horribly slow. The fact this game literally works better by avoiding battles is such a big misstep that I'm legitimately surprise the franchise didn't end here.

I really wanted to like this game more than I did but there's just too much tedium for me to enjoy it. The junction system is intriguing but the game does a terrible job of explaining it. The shorthand for all of the abilities and stats makes no sense. Creating spells from items and items from spells is very interesting but gets incredibly convoluted fast. In short, you're going to need to use an online guide for this one (I recommend https://guides.gamercorner.net/ffviii/). The inventory menus are clunky and slow. Occasionally the story will just un-junction your team and you have to set it all up again. I really loved triple triad, but then they add region specific rules that completely broke the game. To disable these rules, you have to follow some hyper-specific instructions that are based on RNG. The remastered version has a different set of instructions than the original, which I didn't realize until about an hour of trying to disable random in Centra, at which point I gave up on Triple Triad altogether. I can see the appeal of the story, but in my opinion it does not hold up. There is too much that is totally unexplained, and the only likable characters are Rinoa and Zell.

I'm glad they took risks with this one and can see why people hold it in high regard but I don't see myself coming back to this one.

Despite being very flawed in a bunch of different ways, Final Fantasy 8 is fucking awesome. The soundtrack might be the best soundtrack in any game. Nobuo Uematsu is a genius. The soundtrack is honestly probably one of the main reasons why this game works for me. While most of the characters aren't that deep or anything, it's very fun to see them all interact, which leads to big story beats being all the more emotional. I really fucking love Squall and Rinoa, but other than that the other characters were fun, but a little bit lacking. There are a few story moments that don't really work and make you sit in front of your screen like "wtf just happened" but in a bad way. If this game got a remake like FF7R, then it could possibly be one of the greatest games of all time. But yeah overall really good I loved it

For whatever reason, despite going in knowing that this one isn’t the most praised Final Fantasy game, I knew that I had to beat it. This is by far the most interesting Final Fantasy game to me.
For cons, the story is confusing and strange at times and contains a combat system that I got the hang of like 18 hours in, which can prove problematic. And while it actually became kind of fun after a while, I can’t ignore how unwelcoming this can be for someone who just wants to experience the game.
But for the pros, this world was incredibly fascinating for me to explore. The art design's contemporary esthetic is just so appealing that I found myself getting sucked in by the atmosphere. The characters are a lot better than people give them credit for, with many of them being greatly enjoyable to spend time with. My favorite one obviously being Laguna, who deserves the world and more.
And the music is honestly so fantastic that I could never do it justice.
If the FF7 Remake ever comes to completion, this game would be a godsend if remade, with voice acting and a restructured story, it would be so good man.