FFVIII battle system was really flawed. Drawing magic was soooo boring. Magic was way too weak, you were much better off drawing 100 of the "strong" spells and junctioning them to buff up your characters' normal attacks and never use any spells.

My favorite battle system to this day is the materia system from FFVII. The customization allowed by linking the effect materia to others was so fun. Counter => KOTR, Added Effect => Hades, Final Attack => Life 2, etc... So many possibilities!

I'm with you Rei

Well, I did everything in that game (XII), and I mean EVERYTHING (all quests, killing the 50 million HP monster included ) it was the first challenging Final Fantasy game in ages (the hardest one of the 3D era, definitely) that was a welcome plus and the gameplay was a great part of that. I just loved to be able to rotate the camera around at any time specially in battles.

After I finished playing the game (or finally put it down after doing everything humanly possible for me) I tried playing FFX and I felt BOXED inside the pre-rendered stages and battles, oh no that felt so last-gen. I wish they never get back to that style, if they must go with turn-battle for XIII because of style or cinematic purposes I would understand I just wish they'd make the system like a cross between the old-fashioned X and the freedom of XII. A Chrono Trigger kind of battle environment could be the answer, I'd hate the old spawning encounters out of nowhere system.

The battle system wasn't the problem, the problem was the upgrade system, evryone could be equal, there were practically no job classes and I hated that

I'm going to have to say no aswell.

I too enjoy having characters with a bit of individuality in terms of their abilities.

On top of that, I hated the pseudo action battles, because they weren't set out to be turn based (so you don't expect battles to stall at all) and they weren't as fast as an action game (so you felt like combat took forever to complete commands).

It's the first FF main series (including X-2) game that I haven't devoted more than 10 hours to (it was more like 3)

It's not a bad game, and the battle system has it's quirks, but I'm not a fan.

FFX battle system plus Chrono Trigger way of finding enemies is the way to go.

^Yeah!

Unless you actually wanted to optimize your ability for your level, in which case you did specialize. If you didn't, you were much weaker than you would have been.