Final Fantasy VIII is the worst Playstation Final Fantasy

It's still a better game than 13 or 15, but the game's an absolute mess.

The junction system isn't what I would call complicated, but it's so easily abused that the game itself has practically no difficulty curve whatsoever. I'm not even sure what the "right" way to play would be. If you're not junctioning 100 magic on each stat, you're just artificially inflating the difficulty.

The card system just breaks the game. All you need are a few rare cards then it becomes almost impossible to loose at the card game. You refine all the extra cards you win for insanely good items/magic.

The plot is just awful. You're a member of an elite group of teenage mercenaries who meets up with a bunch of strangers and is tasked to assassinate an evil sorceress, and you all eventually "remember" that you grew up in the same orphanage together and the "big bad" was your nanny. You defeat your nanny only to realize there's another sorceress from the future who wants to compress time because reasons.

I don't even know what "compress time" means. So far as I can tell, it just means I can't visit towns on the world map.

There's some word salad explanation for how to defeat the sorceress. You do all the things and then are treated to a psychedelic fever dream of an ending.

Unlike 7 and 9, none of the party members have any development whatsoever. There's just a really awkward romance between Squall and Rhinoa. Squall is the typical late 90s emo introvert and acts like he doesn't give a shite about Rhinoa (who is an insufferable character) until he does then he's borderline obsessed with her.

The final boss of this game is an example of everything bad about JRPGs of that era. You have 4 phases of BS mechanics starting with the first phase placing you in an entirely random party where you just let your neglected party members die so that your main team slowly spawn in. Then, you're at the mercy of RNG gods to just pray that the boss doesn't completely wipe away any magic junctioned to your best stat and/or healing abilities.

Finally, the boss has a move that wipes the entire party's HP down to 1 and she loves spamming it. Hope you have elixers/megalixers and know how to abuse the limit break system.

Then, as if that's not enough. Even after exhausting all of her HP, she still hits you with her strongest attacks while she monologues before finally dieing.