The oddball entry in the PS1-era Final Fantasies, VIII tends to have a polarising reception. I'm afraid I fall into the less happy category; to me VIII is an absolute mess of a game.
We follow Squall, a student at Balamb Garden, a school for training child mercenaries. He, along with some fellow students, are sent off on a mission to aid some rebels but it doesn't take long before the world erupts into war and Squall is caught in the centre of it. Because it's about child soldiers, there's a powerful, evocative system of abuse baked into the core of VIII's story, which makes it all the worse that the game barely ever remembers that and instead focuses on its absolutely moronic cast of characters. Every member of your party is insufferable, from Squall's constant self-loathing whines to Zell's pure unfiltered idiocy, and watching them bumble through the game's events is a source of genuine frustration.
Making things worse is one of the most obtuse set of mechanics ever tried in a JRPG. I'm all for experimentation, but when you push the boundaries sometimes you hit a stumbling block and VIII is that. You have a bewildering amount of menus to manage to get by in VIII; you've got your Guardian Forces which are summons you equip to characters to augment their stats, but they're also capable of learning skills which need to be assigned to your characters as well. You need to grind enemies to find the loot they drop since that's the only way of improving your weapons, but equally level grinding is discouraged because of the level scaling so you're caught between a rock and a hard place in that regard. Oh, and don't forget having to waste countless hours of your life drawing spell charges from enemies so you can cast spells - but don't actually cast them because doing that weakens your stats! VIII is an utter cacophany of bad decisions and attempts to reinvent the wheel.
We follow Squall, a student at Balamb Garden, a school for training child mercenaries. He, along with some fellow students, are sent off on a mission to aid some rebels but it doesn't take long before the world erupts into war and Squall is caught in the centre of it. Because it's about child soldiers, there's a powerful, evocative system of abuse baked into the core of VIII's story, which makes it all the worse that the game barely ever remembers that and instead focuses on its absolutely moronic cast of characters. Every member of your party is insufferable, from Squall's constant self-loathing whines to Zell's pure unfiltered idiocy, and watching them bumble through the game's events is a source of genuine frustration.
Making things worse is one of the most obtuse set of mechanics ever tried in a JRPG. I'm all for experimentation, but when you push the boundaries sometimes you hit a stumbling block and VIII is that. You have a bewildering amount of menus to manage to get by in VIII; you've got your Guardian Forces which are summons you equip to characters to augment their stats, but they're also capable of learning skills which need to be assigned to your characters as well. You need to grind enemies to find the loot they drop since that's the only way of improving your weapons, but equally level grinding is discouraged because of the level scaling so you're caught between a rock and a hard place in that regard. Oh, and don't forget having to waste countless hours of your life drawing spell charges from enemies so you can cast spells - but don't actually cast them because doing that weakens your stats! VIII is an utter cacophany of bad decisions and attempts to reinvent the wheel.