I consider it to be one of the best game's I've played. That said, I found fault in a few things.

-The combat is too slow. That might seem childish, but it takes way too long for guages to fill, and the longer fights were almost unbearable before I got Haste.

-The Limits were really irritating. You had almost no control over them, which made them basically useless without painstaking preparation.

-Trying to escape from battle is nearly impossible until later in the game. Too many times I ran into monsters I couldn't fight, and couldn't run away from.

-The story hits a few snags, and some plot points are never properly resolved or explained.

-As far as I know, the card battle game was completely useless. Not a big one, but I really see no point to it.

-The end of the game comes out of nowhere and doesn't make a lot of sense.

It's easy to put these aside, and the game is easily a high-9 for me, but it's not perfect.

I definitely prefer VII to VIII. I know it gets a lot of flack from people (not entirely undeserved) but I still think it's an excellent game.

Exactly. It's so counter-productive to actually play the game, but if you ignore the gamplay it's just lots of walking around. And because junctioning magic is so much better than using it, I never actually cast it until the literal end of the game. As for drawing, I pretty much just played a couple hours of triple triad to get the junctions I needed and I was set for the whole thing...

Funnily enough, I agree with most of your complaints.

-While I'm very much aware the game is pretty slow, that has never bothered me. Ever. Not even in my first playthrough. I'm not sure why that is.

- Trance is easily the aspect of the gameplay that I find the most flawed. Making thwm activate automaticaly was a bad decision, I can't remember a single time when the thing activated when I actually needed it.

- To be fair, every single rpg it's kinda hardto escape from enemies that are too powerful. Never had that kind of problem though.

- I'm perfectly fine with the story, can't remember a single thing I didn't enjoy about it.

- The card minigame was pretty boring and had no effect on the actual game, yes. But Triple Triad requires a lot of time to give results/rewards, so...

- I assume you're talking about the final boss? Yes, it does comes out of nowhere, and it's not clear if he did anything on the plot of the game. I really enjoyed the ending itself though.

I'm not afraid to give this game a 10/10.

It had all of the annoyances of the early stage FFs without any of the charm, imo.

-Part of it was when I played it, coming right off finishing FF7, where the max game speed was much higher (about 1.5x faster, if I remember). By comparison, the same sort of battles seemed to crawl in ff9 (not helped by the longer battle intros and more steady damage curve). It might not be entirely fair to make that comparison, though, I will admit.

-Agreed, though one thing I did like was how they actually made Limits story-relevant. :P

-True, though it wasn't just strong enemies. I was fighting some enemies outside Treno, I think. They were weak, but they cast blind on my party, and I spent about 2 minutes trying to hit them before deciding to just flee. Except that after 10 minutes of watching my characters run in place, I was still in battle. It took me another 5 minutes to actually kill the slippery things after I gave up on that. Later on, you get a skill that lets you run away more successfully, but until then it's nearly impossible.

-It's a great story, one of the best I've played. But I felt some questions about Terra, or the Jesters, for instance, were never fully resolved.

-You are right about Triple Triad. My only issue in 9 was that, at one point, you were required to play (and I think actually win) in order to progress.

-Yeah, mainly the boss, and the lead up to it. The ending itself was just brilliant, though I had to watch it again before I actually got it.

I think a 10 would be more than fair for the game. It really was great.

VII

Did not really work that way for me, or my group of friends (anecdotal yes). When XII came out we thought that it might even top X, and when X came out we thought it was the best game ever. VII was most peoples favorites though. Even now though FFXII does not get a lot of praise but I still think it was a pretty good FF.

Now when XIII came out, I scarcely remember anyone liking it. My roommate started FF on XIII and he hated it and all FF games based on that one experience. Me and a few other people kept telling him to try any other FF game and he tried VII and enjoyed it. I am sure a lot of people did like XIII though.

@ OP: I liked FFVIII the best, and disliked FFXIII the most.

Why's that?

FFII for sure. There's also a special level of hell for X-2 and XIII for choking the life out of the franchise.

FFXII was a great game, if not superb by FFXIII's standards, however it never quite had the FF feel for me, open world battles, MMO style gameplay just wasn't the same as what I'd experienced before.

Also, I can't see why people are dissing FFVIII, especially as their reason is 'Draw' part of the magic system, if you play the game right, Draw is not even a factor, it's about GFs, making them learn abilities. Get a GF to learn certain abilities and you never have to draw ever.