Uno de los FF mas polemicos de todos los tiempos, pero siendo realistas, Square ya habia podido seguir surfeando la ola de éxito de FF6 con FF7 y volver a hacer otro MEGA hit que detone la industría por tercera vez, sería algo dificil.
Personalmente es mi FF favorito, el sistema de combate (Junction) es algo dificil de entender y tiene partes que, una vez tenes totalmente dominado el sistema, se le pueden ver claras fallas.

Lo que núnca voy a convalidar, son los comentarios que se leen por internet, diciendo que el juego es "malo" porque se pueden hacer estrategías para romper la dificultad desde el CD1. Esto es algo que leí hasta el cansancio online y me es increíble como todos pueden repetir semejante boludes.
Por supuesto que hay estrategias que banalizan la dificultad (lo mismo podemos hacer en FF4,FF5,FF6 y FF7) pero un jugador nuevo el 99.9% de las veces le va a ser imposible descubrir estos elementos por su propia cuenta, se requiere muchisimo conocimiento de los sistemas de juego para hacer esas estrategias, son cosas que uno saca en un segundo playthrough máximo.
Ahora, si se ponen a jugar un videojuego con una guia en el otro monitor (lo cual respeto completamente), leyendo exactamente que es lo que tienen que hacer, que items usar, que habilidades subir y cuanto tiempo subir de nivel, no se me pongan a criticar la dificultad después....

En otra nota mas positiva: mucha gente esta de acuerdo que este juego tiene uno de los mejores Soundtracks de la franquicia, y eso en FF, que esta acostumbrado a tener los mejores compositores de la industria, dice muchiiiiisimo.

This game has quite a few good things and bad things.
The ost is amazing, one of the best in the saga.
The graphics are considerably improved over the previous game and it has the best secondary card minigame.

BUT

The junction system is very bad and completely broken.
The characters are very flat and empty and the story is bad. It had potential but they play with timelines and there are many plot holes.
From the end of disc 1 the game stops making sense.

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.

FFVIII foi um jogo marcante na minha vida mesmo antes de tê-lo, finalmente, zerado hoje. A primeira CG que eu assisti, ainda criança, foi a dança entre Rinoa e Squall, que me deixou muito intrigado não só pelas animações, expressões faciais e um gráfico que "parece até filme", mas também porque... eu me apaixonei pela Rinoa, de alguma forma? Queria saber mais dela, saber o que ia ser do casal, e ROMANCE nunca tinha se mostrado ou sido percebido como uma possibilidade em videogames! Só é uma pena que eu não tenha tido habilidade pra entender o mínimo do sistema de combate dele. E eu ainda não entendo. Se não fosse por isso, vai saber quem eu seria hoje se naquela idade, em que se absorve tudo como uma esponja, eu tivesse chegado até o final megalomaníaco, bizarro e "coração quentinho" dessa história de amor.