Final Fantasy VIII Review

Nothing else in the series divides people this cleanly, and the reason is the junction system. Magic is a consumable resource you draw from enemies and attach to stats, so casting spells makes you weaker and hoarding them makes you strong, which inverts the entire genre and rewards an hour of drawing over any tactical thought. Layer on enemies that scale with your level and you get a game where grinding actively harms you. Anyone who works out the card game and refine chains breaks it open in the first disc.

Anyone who plays it straight fights a slog. Around that sits some of the finest production work of the era, with prerendered backgrounds that still look extraordinary, realistic character proportions the series had never tried, and Eyes on Me tying the whole thing together. The story starts as a mercenary school drama and ends somewhere involving time compression and a sorceress from the future, and the amnesia explanation is a famous shrug. Fascinating, gorgeous, structurally a mess.