For one Chrono Cross had basically no character development for like 40 of the 45 characters due to the nature of the way you were set up.

Then you have the settings and locations and everything else that makes no sense when you consider that it's supposed to be set shortly after Chrono Trigger. (Since Lucca was still alive.)

Including but not limited too the race of Dragonians... which you think would of been something you'd heard about/come across in Chrono Trigger... unless all the time travel stuff happened "after" the previous time travel.  Which doesn't even make any sense.

Which is another problem.  The time traveling functions make no sense.

Lavos  appearing in "The Darkness Beyond Time" also doesn't make any sense... i could literally go down an entire list of things that didn't make sense consdiering it was based off Chrono Trigger... before even going in to the regular story.

routsounmanman + FFVII = L.F.E

 I underestood it.  Just thought it was bad a plot roughly equalling a bad action movie.  (which often actually involve such things as cloning, elite solider groups,amnesia, tradgety involving the death of family members and badasses that never get to be happy.  Though granted those badasses actually tend to look like dudes in the action movies.)

I could go into it, but really don't see the need to for the 50th time.

I will say though I'm not sure where you get Cloud never becomes happy from FF7 itself... as far as I remember the end of FF7 leaves that pretty ambigious... showing the world recovering... which in turn would suggest that the characters themselves were slowley recovering from their internal wounds. (Until square realized that by keeping them emo in future events = cash money.)

First of all, the junction system is utter crap. You can break it so hard, so fast it's not even funny. My characters all had well over 3000 hp and OHKO'd most enemies before I even fought Edea. I like uber cahracters, but not that soon.

Worse still, the game actively encourages you not to play it. Gaining exp is bad. In fact, I'm sure many people found the game almost unbeatable because they overleveled. Stupidest leveling system ever.

Also, the characters are weak. Squall goes from pretty hard to like to still being pretty hard to like, yet he has a pretty significant change of attitude. If he were real, I wouldn't want anythign to do with him before or after that. And worse still, the change isn't gradual or sensible, it just sorta happens out of the blue. If you go past him, everyone else is pretty much an archetype taken to the limits, and so either people love the characters or they hate them, and there's not much middle ground. Even my favorite characters have traits that I can look at and say "yeah, I know why people might hate them."

Then there's the story. It was pretty much hopeless. It started off fine enough, though hardly FF-like. Then it decends into pointless stupidity. The same orphanage? Save the girl from dying in space? Stop the missles? Blech. Nothing was original, and every aspect was done better by another game at some point in time, let alone what books can do for a story. Take for example the torture scene, which wasn't that good. In "Wizard's First Rule" the main character gets tortured, and the torture scenes there delivered. I didn't like Squall and wanted to see him really get tortured, and the most that happens is he gets shocked a few times. Richard (frome WFR) was tortured for days, or even weeks, and the way he got out of it wasn't anti-climactic like in FF8.

Also, there wasn't a singular villain to despise. In VI you had Kefka and in VII you had Sephiroth. Both were pretty badass as in their own ways, and both did plenty of things that could lead the player to hate them. In FFVIII it kept switching. Often times the bad guy was just someone being possessed and you jsut sorta felt bad for them. And then when you finally do come across the villain, there's not much oomph to it. There was no time to build a hatred, and winning didn't leave a sense of fulfillment.

So it didn't play well, the story was weak, the characters were simply archetypes personified, and it didn't deliver on any of the promise it had. What's there to like, really? There are dozens of RPGs that surpassed FF8 in any given aspect a player may care about, and there are a handful that easily surpass it in every aspect.

Advent Children shows you Cloud never became happy, nor did Tifa, but you could have know it already because of how these to were in the game itself.. and I forgot to mention that Biggs, Wedge and Biggs died too.. and now you start about CC's story being empirically judged bad, get the hell out of here man, I can say that about FFVII's story being proven to be great as it is considered one of the greatest rpgs of all time, and that wouldn't be possible if the story sucked objectively, certainly not for a rpg to be considered so great whith a failing story, maybe you should search the problem with yourself and not with the game..

and you compare FFVII's plot with a bad action movie? and you probably want people to still take you serious right? i think Kitase and Kojima have never been insulted as much before like you just did..

 Chrono Cross had one of the most retarded stories ever. Just take into account that you would only learn several points crucial to understand the plot 10 minutes before the last boss (told by 3 ghosts and one of them should not even talk). But that does not mean that it works. Another funny thing is that every character would say the same thing (with different accents and capitalization) at important points in the game. It is really funny that Poshu, the scarecrow and the troll thing who spent most of her life in an parallel dimension knew as much as Kid knew about Lucca and Lavos. That game plot is a mess and everyone who played CT should know it. Someone care to explain how the Reptites survived after you killed Azala? Where were the Dragon Gods in CT? Where was El Nido? Why every relevant item or person to save the universe is located in a small archipelago? How could the humans be Lavos creation, if we saw it land on the planet with Ayla in 65.000.000 BC? Why did Lavos plans change from "evolve into the ultimate being by sucking random planets energy" to "destroy all existence".

OT

Soriku you are young and impressionable. In that age we usually can not tell good an bad apart very well. I used to think that FF VII story was genial until I played it again last year. I did not even understood most of the story the first time I played. Today I can see that it is full of plot holes, pacing problems and confusing and meaninless plot twists. FF VIII has a crappy story and gameplay. Try it again when you are 18 and you will understand.

Which was my point. Advent Children isn't FF7.  As for game reviewers.  People don't look at things objectivly like other critics.  Read Rocketpigs recent editoral.

Nah, I'm sure they have. 

The story was just horrible, and the pacing was even worse.

people didnt like the junction system, and that it was different from ff7