A great game that is reduced to a being a "good" game by a few bad decisions. The draw system is interesting and certainly has positive points, but often results in players unnecessarily grinding for magic or refusing to cast any of it, just because of the psychology that's now in play. Making several GFs only obtainable by drawing from unmarked bosses throughout the game is either cool or cruel depending on who you ask. Level scaling every enemy in an RPG is just... pretty much always a bad idea. The game's whole difficulty curve can be annihilated early on just by buying a few select items on the cheap, and while it's easy to say "well don't do that then," it still speaks to ill-considered balance. Many players including myself find themselves confused about what is and is not supposed to make their party more powerful, and that sort of confusion just doesn't speak well of the game design. Several story beats are conveyed in ways that make them feel too absurd to be taken seriously, even if upon close inspection their internal logic is relatively sound. Flaws aside, FF8 is just fucking cool, and it's worth experiencing. It's far from the best FF, but it certainly isn't the worst.