I liked FF8. It was a big graphical improvement over the crappy FF7 polygons, and the Junction system was oh-so-exploitable.
On my first playthrough, I skipped playing the Triple Triad card game along with the story. On the second, though, I totally got into it; collecting the unique cards was
serious business, more serious than, say, saving the existence of timespace.
It got a bit tricky later on, when I found out that FF8 is an anti-grind game; keeping your level as low as possible makes the game
easier, since monsters scale their level to yours, but you can still junction more powerful spells to your stats. At that point, the game difficulty curve was broken, as I would constantly be in the yellow to pull off limit breaks every turn. And then there's Zell and the "
Super Ultimate War God Breaking Punch"...