10/10
It's not a game, it's a great work of art, it's a touching movie, it's a romantic and moving epic. FF8 is the most worthy of the title FINAL FANTASY in the whole series, and it's one of the most fantastic and romantic works in the whole game history.
Most importantly, it often reminds me that at one point in time, mankind was still so purely in pursuit of innocence and beauty, of a love that no evil could ever desecrate. The kind of purity and true love that human beings used to try their best to describe and portray, the kind of love that they are willing to give up everything for someone, is totally different from the post-modern full of nowadays, which is full of questioning and mocking everywhere.
The best FF in my heart, bar none. Nowadays I can't help but get mesmerized and weep just by hearing its OST.

I had to leave the Ps1 on when i was a kid cause i didnt have a memory card and now i finally played it through again. love this game -Tons of thing to d-o on the side

When I first played this game, not long after it's original release, I wasn't very keen on it. It didnt help that it followed FF7 and then had FF9 come along after it, with both of those being some of my favourite FF games. But I've grown to appreciate this game a lot more over the years and have a much higher opinion of it now.

With hindsight I think this game was just ahead of its time as it shook up the formula quite a bit with the junction system. Once you understand how to use the junction system, it's a lot of fun. If you're willing to spend the time farming the items and cards for refining into spells you can make your characters massively overpowered early on but it isnt mandatory. You can get by the majority of the game with just gathering spells from monsters, draw points and the occasional card game at a steady pace.

The way Guardian Forces are handled is probably my favourite use of them in any FF game. Having them learn abilities that can provide more functions for battle or further boost your stats complements the junction system nicely although I'm not a big fan of the overly long summon animations.

The fact that enemies scale with you in this game always seemed like a controversial choice but it's nice that you are never really pressured to grind battles to gain levels. In fact its more advantageous to keep your level low.

The main characters and story I think are probably one of the games weaker points. Other than Squall and maybe Zell I feel like the other characters aren't as memorable as ones from other games. They story is good but again probably overshadowed a little by some of the other games and it can be a bit hard to follow at times. However the soundtrack is amazing and is one area where it definitely stands above a lot of other FF games.

Looking at the remastered version itself, it kind of feels like a low effort remaster. The character models have been upgraded and while they do look nice it clashes badly with the backgrounds which havent been upscaled at all and still look as they originally did. The FMVs also are unchanged from their originals so any changes are pretty much limited to the character models. You could pretty much get the same result with the original version and some graphics mods. I didn't encounter anything gamebreaking or anything like and it runs well enough. it just doesnt feel like much effort went into it.

So to sum it up. Final Fantasy 8 the game is definitely worth trying, as it's one of the better FF games. The worth of the remaster itself is probably down to whether you're happy or not to try and mod the original version.