I've never found it so painful to play a Final Fantasy game as this one. Initially, the game is impressive. We're shown a lot of directed moments, spectacular cutscenes, and the combat system initially seems interesting.

But after a few hours, you realize that Final Fantasy 8 is not a good game. And all the positives of this game, however significant they may seem, are overshadowed by its shortcomings:

The battles themselves are very sloooooooow because the combat system is based on summoning summons, and each of their attacks takes about 20-30 seconds to play out. This also applies to regular attacks. Maybe it was impressive in 1999, but today, without 3x speed, it's impossible to play.

The role-playing system is broken. Firstly, the game features auto-leveling, which makes leveling up pointless, but you'll still have to grind due to the magic system. Every spell in the game is a consumable that you draw from enemies. Before any tough storyline moment, you'll have to grind to max out spells for your characters.

The plot is rather silly, especially after Final Fantasy 7. It has a lot of deus ex machina moments and unremarkable characters. And Squall, as the main character, is downright annoying most of the time.

The only merit of this game is the Triple Triad card mini-game; it doesn't get boring, and collecting cards is interesting.

A few words about the remaster: it's pretty bad. All they did was add cheats to simplify the game and improve the character models. Instead of replacing or upscaling the game's backgrounds, they just applied a blurry filter, which looks awful.

When getting acquainted with the Final Fantasy series, you can easily skip this part and you won't miss anything

I played the original back on PS1 and wanted to play again on PC. This game comes with three boosters ATB/Limit/HP Assist for battles, encounter none (which functions the same as diablos), and triple speed. I enjoyed playing through this game and experiencing the story again, but there are a few caveats you should know before purchasing:
- They really only updated the graphics (such as character models) to make the game look nicer
- There doesn't seem to be wide screen support so I played the whole game in 4:3
- It seems to be missing features exclusive to the JP PS1 version, but tries to make up for it via angelo search.
Other than these three things if you're looking to experience for the first time or want to play it again, this may be the best way to play it. This is among my favorite FF games, so I am a little biased giving it a thumbs up.

The game itself is ok. I only recommend this if you are already a fan of this series and you just want to experience this. It helps that the game is dirt cheap.

The story is maybe one of the more ridiculous in the series. Don't want to spoil anything.

The combat system is weird and probably the worst part of the game. Leveling is discouraged because the enemies sale with the player level. the draw system is cool, but also ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. It's cool that you can draw magic from enemies and use this to buff your stats, but the downside is that the stat boost is scaled to the number of magics you have. This means that casting any spell that is also attached to your stat is discouraged because this will decrease your stats and you'll have to find an enemy to draw more from (or craft) to replace the missing inventory.

The best part of the game is the mini card game Triple Triad. It's a really fun and simple card game that requires some strategy.

This "remaster" is barely a remaster. The character models look like they were given more polys and AI scaled textures. The backgrounds are just as pixelated as they were when this game came out. The only plus side is the ability to speed up time, avoid all encounters, and invincibility (kinda) features you can toggle.