Final Fantasy VIII is a good game, at the end of the day. It's not great, and it's heavily flawed. The best way to summarize the game is to call it a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces were thrown together in a very slapdash manner, nothing quite fitting right. This can be seen in virtually every part of the game aside from its visuals, which are all-around excellent.
Musically, the game is great in places and weak in others. The majority of the town themes, Timber aside, are pretty dry musically, as are most of the dungeon themes (which are few, and are really just Find Your Way from the Fire Cavern repeated over and over). Its score is best when dealing with sorceresses, fighting with Laguna, engaging in boss battles, or running from things, but I don't think it's an excellent soundtrack overall. There's something it seems to lack – either the melancholy of VII's soundtrack or the heart and charm and perfection of IX's soundtrack, and I can't quite put my finger on it. Obviously, VIII was the step Square made towards orchestral work, which can be felt to this day in the fantastic classical work in XIII and XIII-2, but here it seems Uematsu was trying to find his footing and ended up coming out worse for the wear because of it.
Gameplay-wise, we once again run into the jigsaw-puzzle effect. Junctioning is a great idea in theory, but allows you to break the game open in the first two hours, erasing any difficulty the game once had. Paired together with GFs that give you game-breaking abilities equally early, the overall experience comes off incredibly one-sided for the player. Drawing is an incredibly tedious, mostly worthless mechanic when anything you'll ever want barring GFs can be refined or made in some other way; it ends up being a rather annoying, useless mechanic. Even allowing enemies to level-scale with you is still offset by game-breaking abilities and overpowered Limit Breaks. The game is built to rip open, but that ultimately makes it a very rote experience; you can artificially add difficulty, but why bother when there's none already there?
Triple Triad, despite being a fun card game, is mired in a lot of RNG bullshit if you want to ever play the game without ridiculous rulesets. Because of that, I actually feel that it's not as great of a minigame as I had heard it was. It's a mess, much like Junctioning can be (and the majority of what you'll ever learn about Junctioning comes from a tutorial at the very beginning of the game only accessible in the first classroom).
FFVIII's worst offender is its story. In my opinion, it's the worst story in the franchise and that's not because of any one bad writer, or because of a Datalog, or whatever other complaints people throw at the games made by Square today. FFVIII's story is the epitome of the jigsaw-puzzle effect. It tries and fails to throw in about a billion different story ideas at once: Child soldiers, war, magic, sorceresses, magic amnesia, contrived romance, rivalry, technology, alternate races, time travel, acid trips, and other such ideas. The problem with this is that none of these ideas mesh into a cohesive whole. The first disc is easily the best part of the game because it's tight-knit: You have a goal, you're introduced to all your characters, you're a mercenary-for-hire uncovering the secrets of a nation bent on conquering the world and at the heart of it all is a magic-wielding sorceress who is manipulating the populace.
With these cards played right, it could have been a good story. It could have spanned four discs. Instead, things became superbly convoluted; time travel is introduced, the romance between Squall and Rinoa erupts out of nowhere (the analogy of Squall “losing a toy and then crying over losing it” is pretty apt here), witches seem to pop in and out of the story for no reason at all and there's no consistent antagonist making the whole journey seem worthwhile. As a player who grew up with Final Fantasy, and returned to the older games time and time again, I've left FFVIII by the wayside because none of these plot elements come together, or work at all. You feel no emotions towards the Sorceress-of-the-Moment enemy; not Edea, definitely not Adel, and most assuredly not Ultimecia. Had the story focused on Seifer being the primary antagonist, there would have been something there; we knew who Seifer was, we knew the dynamics he had with Squall and the party, and it gives some gravitas to the journey at hand. Let's not even get started on the fact that no one in the game aside from Squall or Rinoa is given development.
Even the ending feels shoehorned; everything is “okay” but there's no explanation as to why. Ultimecia just mysteriously “disappears” after entering past-Edea (when the whole cycle should really have just started again) and then Squall is okay and so is Rinoa and so is everyone else. It's an example of the worst type of Hollywood ending where everything is wrapped up in a bow but the contents of the present are empty, the box itself just a plothole. There's no explanation as to Squall's drug trip, or the whole empty space where the characters run around in some sort of void. You could speculate, but it wouldn't really answer anything.
This also bleeds into the central story of the game: Rinoa and Squall's romance. Throughout the game, we're treated to Rinoa whining at Squall, Squall saying nothing but thinking too much, and we're expected to believe that she's falling for him (because, I guess, she thinks she can change him). Even when she's about to die, hanging off the cliff of the Garden, he only rescues her because everyone else bitches at him to do so. It is really only when she's taken away from him that his interest in her begins to appear, but by then you're left wondering... well, why? We're repeatedly shown that Squall has zero interest in her, and it's only when she's gone that he suddenly falls in love with her and is willing to do anything, including breaking the logic of the game itself (by using Ellone to physically teleport him through time), to save her.
It's a love story where the first page is written, then about two-hundred pages are blank, and then it's the very end. It's an example of how not to write a romance. It's also an example of how not to write characters in general. Characters have to evolve gradually, unless there's a specific reason why they must accelerate their development (i.e., traumatic event, life-changing moment, etc.). While they tried to make Rinoa's possible death one of these “life-changing moments”, it would only have worked had Squall shown her even a modicum of interest at any point beforehand. Overall, it's a textbook example of taking a character, flipping a 180 on them, and then expecting the player to believe it. Perhaps a good deal of us, when we first played the game at young ages, bought into it... but it doesn't hold up over time.
And, ultimately, the game doesn't have a lot that holds up still. It's a game that was sandwiched between one that broke new ground for the genre, FFVII, and one that more or less perfected the genre, FFIX. It's a game that somehow feels less than the sum of its parts, because its parts are thrown together in the worst way possible.
However, it's still fun, which is what I can say about nearly every game in the series, so kudos to Square for that.
