Why FF8 is a Great Game (Despite its Many Flaws)

[This video contains major spoilers for FF8/FFVIII throughout, light spoilers for FF10 and FF12]

A deep dive/essay on why FFVIII is my favourite of the mainline Final Fantasy franchise. I figured it’d be fun trying to outline why I like this game so much considering how generally maligned it is in comparison to the other games Square was putting out at the time. Hopefully by the end I can convince you that I’m not just some dickhead contrarian who likes what people don’t like, and hates what people do like (even though it kind of works out that way sometimes).

As I mentioned in the video, this video was heavily inspired by Plague of Gripes video where he outlines the problems with the Draw System, and workshops some solutions to it.
   • Redrawing Final Fantasy VIII's Draw S...  
If this video sounds like I’m aping his style, it’s probably because I am. It wasn’t intentional, but during the writing for this video I was watching his stuff a lot, and I think that had a pretty big effect on how it turned out. Whoops. I’ll work on getting better at script writing in the future.

The script for this video started as a response to Plague’s video, as I wanted to point out why I’m one of those people who like the Junction System, despite the clearly broken state it is currently in.
Then I tried to workshop my own solutions to the Junction System while trying to incorporate it into the story somewhat (IE: Having Rinoa able to use the magic command without a GF after disk 2) In the end I scrapped that entire thing, as it seemed pretty silly to make a video centered around fixing a single system while essentially talking about the entire game. You can still hear remnants of the old script in there, but yeah. That’s why this video is so long and why it’s such a mess.

I feel like I’ve said this with every video, but “boy, this project really got away on me.”
I’m going to work on making “shorter videos” (wink).

Anyways, please hit me up with any comments/criticisms you have. I’d love to talk about stupid fan theory stuff, or elaborate on some of the stuff I didn’t have time to talk about in the video.

- Timestamps -
0:00 The Intro
2:43 Getting into the Flaws
4:13 The Tutorials and Pacing
6:47 Problems with the Junction System
9:28 Problems with Leveling
11:08 Problems with Story and Characters
13:41 Getting into the Positives
14:06 Triple Triad
15:20 The Soundtrack
17:50 The Merit of the Junction System
23:18 The Junction System's Mind Goblins
25:47 How the Systems Affect the Story
27:07 Acknowledging My Bias
27:56 The Party Dynamic
33:20 Laguna Tangent
34:43 Squall's Character Arcs
36:10 The Leadership Arc
39:19 The Love Story
43:04 Addressing the Plot Twists
43:32 Wacky Amnesia Hijinks
45:56 Swapping Out The Villain
47:54 The Rinoa is Ultimecia Theory
54:34 Closing Thoughts and my Interpretation
56:55 The Outro

Music Credits
Youtube doesn't like pastebin links.

Stuff I Referenced:

FINAL FANTASY 8 BE LIKE… By Cloudie McDoom
   • FINAL FANTASY 8 BE LIKE...  

Distant Worlds: music from FINAL FANTASY live with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra
   • Liberi Fatali  

The Fandom page on the Rinoa is Ultimecia theory (I don't really recommend going here)
https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/...

My own silly FF14 video I couldn't stop referencing (I also don't recommend going here)
   • I Spent 1000+ Hours on the Final Fant...  

My (Stinky) Patreon:
Patreon.com/user?u=114582266