I'm sorry, you're right. Here, I'll take your review and look at it up close.
I think I've given my critque of FF8 before, but if not, I'll give it agian.
I'll start by saying that I really enjoyed the first part of the game.
Now, we move on to why I don't like it. Lets start with characters. It seems like every character in the game was given some social disorder. Squall is an anti-social despression, Rinoa is an over-hyper monster, Selphie is too cheerful, Zell is a wuss. Irivine is a "cowboy". The only character that doesn't really have a social disorder is Quistis. Laguna is alight though, I guess. Meh, to awkward with him some times though, and his group seemed to be bumbling idiots.
Actually, Quistis' problem was that she was unfit to be a teacher, and Laguna was definetely not suave or good with words or great with people. It's not a "social disorder" or whatever, it's a character trait, a realistic chracter trait that defines their weakness, makes them human. And with each weakness they have, they have something else about them that equals the balance. It's quite well done, actually.
Next is story, don't read if you don't want spoilers.
Story was good at the start. A mercenary group, fighting in battles. Then we move past that. Story is decent most of the game. Its the story between characters that sucks. There is the super awkward Squall-Rinoa thing going on. Half way through the game, guess what! You find out that every one of your characters grew up together, and didn't even remmber each other, and all winded back up together! What a coincidence! Lame. The whole time compression thing at the end was confusing too. But overall, the story is passible.
End spoilers, for now.
Have you ever been in a situation like Squall and Rinoa? If you had, you'd understand that it
is awkward. I rather appreciated it because it's very accurately protrayed.
And man, I thought the growing up together thing was awesome. You thought it was lame. Well, that's opinion.
Also if you play it more than once, the Time Compression thing makes more sense. I was confused my first time through, too.
We move on to gameplay. The draw and junctioning system. This effectively punishing you for using magic, and at the same time makes the game super easy. The draw system makes magic into items. You have limited amounts of them. The junctioning system punishes you for using them. You see, the game encourages you to add the magic to your stats, thereby giving them stat boosts. A good thing, right? No. Firstly, it lets you beef up your characters way past where they are supposed to be. Makes it too easy. Secondly if you actually do you your magic, it takes away the stats you built up.
Uhm...I don't see it as any more beefing than the materia usage in FF7, and it's actually easier to beef this up than 8, where you have to make the effort to find and draw magic. Plus if you don't junction at all, you're characters are rather weak, so it's almost necessary to do
some amount of junctioning. The balance makes perfect sense to me, it doesn't make your characters all that ultra-powerful. That comes with leveling up enough, like any good RPG.
Now, even with the beefed up stats, we have another toy. GFs. They are nessisary. Basically, later in the game, you become dependant on these. Summoning and summoning. And it takes forever for their animation to get done. Dependancy on GFs is a bad thing for gameplay.
The length is obnoxious, yes, unless you're good at boosting, which is rather handy if you ARE good at it and don't get uber tired doing it all the time. But no, you don't become totally dependent on them, especially if you level up enough. I never have, at least. Except for Omega Weapon and Krysta in Ultimecia's Castle. And a few other boss battles earlier in the game. I really can't agree with this statement.
Zeality, let me assure you the debate on FF8's quality, and the debate on Chrono Cross's quality are much different. People who don't like CC don't like it because its not CT2. While it may be somewhat similar in the FF8 case, FF8 is a love it or hate it game. Its not because people want it to be FF7-2. Its because, well, what I said above.
You are right about the love it-hate it thing, absolutely. But the reasoning behind whether you love it or hate it DOES have ALOT to do with people having played FF7 before it (AND FF7 was their first RPG, in most cases) and judging it accordingly.
As I said, it's all opinion.
