I played and beat it back in the 90s. I remember finding it to be pretty boring overall, with the junction system as tedious. Oh and this is the last FF game where you couldnt skip the summoning animation scenes, so everytime you would use one you had to sit through a 30 second+ movie, which really sucked as some of them were overpowered early on. I also remember the difficulty scaling wasnt perfect [square was using this game to pioneer it at the time], if you got to high of a level and didnt augment your spells correctly, then even some trash mobs could one shot your party with spells [which seemed to scale far more than on a 1:1 basis with your level]. The one part of the game i remember being VERY well done were the two or three dream sequences in the game, where you played as 3 different characters from their point of view in the past, its as though the developers themselves felt bored with the characters and main story line they created, and yet found this small alternate atmosphere fun to design. The card game was very fun, square could take that and release it as a Android/Iphone networked game with some updates and sell it for a cheap price.
Edit- My opinion has not changed on the game. Its still boring overall, but thats not to say it was or is a bad game, its just a ok game but it couldnt stand on its own today [unlike IMO FF6 or FF7]. The real issue with FF8 imo is that Square/Final Fantasy was put up on such a high pedestal in the 1990s-early 2000 that expectations for this game were immense - and this game seemed to have been the one to have caused that pedestal to begin crashing down. Id liken it to the expectations of a new Zelda game today, people expect alot [and Nintendo seems to still deliver surprisingly though].
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