… which circle of Hell will they send me to?
It has to do with timing, for sure - 8 was the first one I beat entirely by myself as I had just become old enough to be VG-autonomous. But at this point I feel as though I know both 7 and 8 through like the back of my hand, and yet 8 is the one I return to. I like GFs and junctions better than materia; I like the end credits party better than I like Aeris’s face in Meteor.
I want your thoughts. Abuse is invited.
I bought them both at the same time, back in the early days of being a PS2 owner (ps1 games were cheaper!).
8 instantly gripped me. I loved everything about it.
7 lost me, and I never beat it.
So, at the very least, I’m on your side.
I’ve never gotten a chance to play either (though I watched somebody play some of both, hated 8, thought 7 was okay). But I know several people who vastly prefer 8 to 7, I don’t think it’s as much of a sin, even among the FF community, as you make it out to be. Now, if you said VI was a terrible game you may get a different response form people (in my experience).
For the record, though: gunblades are stupid. 
But dude! Lionheart!
Incidentally, 6 is one I never beat either. My brother and I picked up Anthology, and when he started playing 6 I was obligated to do 5, and now I vastly prefer it.
Now, how much will I get jumped if I say I liked FFX?
Incidentally, that’s the last Final Fantasy I liked. FF12 (or whatever the one that opens with dudes on chocobos fighting on a castle rampart with gunships) was really awful in my opinion. I was 15 hours in and still had no idea who anyone was or what I was doing. Yikes. I put the controller down and never played it again.
Also, somehow the inventory systems get worse every single game. I can’t imagine what exec looked at the inventory screen in FF12 and thought “yep, nailed it.”
I do think 10 gets a majorly bad rap. I think a lot of was totally stupid, but where it failed as a story it totally succeeded as a video game in ways that more self-serious earlier sequels didn’t quite.
I agree about 12. They really didn’t try hard enough to make you care about what was actually happening. I wasn’t hooked.
Now you’re really gonna think I’m crazy when I tell you that I really liked 11…
I definitely didn’t like 8. I played it for a good 12 hours or so hoping it would get better but hated every minute of it. I really enjoyed 7 at the time, though I felt the materia system was a little simplistic and basically made all the characters identical. I don’t really think the graphics in either aged very well, particularly the popeye arms in FF7. But really, for me, FF8 was the beginning of the end of the franchise for me. I’ve tried every one since then, except 11, and didn’t get very far in any of them before getting bored with the game. Though 9, 10, and 12 were just boring, where 8 was actually painfully bad to play. However, I can’t really condemn you that much since I’m not the sort of FF7 fanboy that seem to be all over the internet.
Either way, IMO, the golden age for Final Fantasy was SNES, 4 and 6 are both masterpieces. If you like 8 more than those, that is most certainly a sacrilege.
10 suffers from regrettable voice acting. An evil god causing a recurring embodiment of evil to rampage a world, requiring a noble sacrifice of summoner and guardian to defeat, knowing they’ll become that embodiment of evil in the next cycle, is fine as far as stories go. It’s got pathos and humor and railing against fate and all those classic Greek dramatic elements. I liked the reveal of the Al Bhed, the “bad guys” kidnapping summoners, were actually good guys who rejected the cycle of sacrifice and corruption. That was cool.
But holy crap, Tidus, Yuna, and Rikku had bad voice actors. The goth chick and Wakka were pretty bad too. Auron was cool, though. And really, who names these characters?
I still don’t get what everyone’s problem with 8 was. I guess it was kind of easy to exploit the Junction system, but at the same time all the enemies would level up with you and so the boss fights wouldn’t lose their challenge, at least on the first play-through. And the music, man!
I still think Triple Triad is one of the best mini-games.
And it had a kick-ass theme song.
Triple Triad was awesome. No doubt about it.
I liked FF8 just fine. I think it takes too much flak. It’s tied for 3rd as my favorite (after 6 and 7). I didn’t like it so much initially but it really grew on me on a 2nd playing.
That said, there were some problems with it. The characters were unsympathetic, for starters. Coming back to it, Squall really is a whiny, emo kid masquerading as the strong, silent type. He comes across better in Kingdom Hearts.
And gunblades are really dumb. To be fair, it’s no less dumb than the concept that a bunch of random guys with swords and spears and stuff are taking on machine guns and eldritch horrors from other dimensions.
And the Junction system meant you took at least some penalty for using any magics you happened to junction. But stronger magic was also the best stuff to junction. So, for example, if you junctioned Curaga to STR, you’re STR stat might end up lower at the end of a dungeon crawl than the beginning, which is counter-intuitive. And it also provided an incentive to grind it out for a while simply to max out the number of spells you carried for your main party or else simply accept that you’re being lazy about giving your characters every advantage. So, the game incentivized NOT using your magic and also grinding. That’s a poor game design decision.
That said, Triple Triad was a good mini-game (and better than the modified version they used in FF9). And beating Omega really was a good challenge without being ridiculous, like it has been for several ultimate boss fights in subsequent FF games.
I spend 5 years of my life in the cycle of wake, work, 11, sleep. You ain’t crazy.
I had the strategy guide for 8, and the first step of its strategy for Omega Weapon was “craft an invulnerability potion.”
The grinding part, I’ll grant you. I actually consider the Junction trade-off a pretty good bit of design. It applies a built-in opportunity cost to using magic, and thereby (at least theoretically) introduces a new strategic element to the gameplay. You have to weigh the value of using a spell against its value as an ongoing buff, and you can rearrange your junctions to adjust your approach if your strategy isn’t working.
In practice, of course, there were balance problems with it. The optimal approach was almost always to make the strongest junctions you could, pretend you don’t know those spells, and beat the crap out of everything physically. Weaker junction buffs, stronger spell effects, and more balanced defenses for enemies could have shifted the balance point so that you’d legitimately have to weigh the opportunity cost. It was still a neat idea, though.
For the record, I like 8 just fine, though I can’t say that I prefer it to 7. Gameplay aside, there were lots of little moments I liked. “Woo-hoo, we’re flying!” springs to mind. 
8 was probably weaker game overall, but to be blunt, 7 was nothing special. It was new, but it wasn’t necessarily all that good. Both games suffered from shallow characterization and atrocities early 3D inflicted on eyeballs everywhere. Both had enough good ideas to make up for the fact that FF has not done so hot in the post-SNES era.
Also, FF8 actively punished you for levelling, which I despise. it runs counter to good games design in so many areas.
I liked XIII of all things. I’ll admit it had way too many flaws to really be a “good” game. The combat took too long to get interesting, the story relied on you reading exposition dumps, and it was paced and organized pretty terribly. That said, I was fond of the characters (even Vanille… okay, maybe not Hope), and once the combat got good it was really good… even if the inability to influence where your characters moved made things a bit random.
I hated XII, though. Which is odd since you’d think I’d like it, what with basically being XIII with more control over the characters. But no, I found it too… how can I put it… obfuscated. I felt like I was constantly underpowered, had very little idea of what gear to buy for people, or how to develop their license board. Even the shops only showed a couple stats when buying items, despite the fact that there were way more stats than that that could be affected. It felt like the game was constantly trying to get me to call an old Sierra 1-900 help line. There was also too much menu dicking around (early in the game at least), every 10-15 minutes it was a game of playing with your gambits more. Maybe if you either had access to all gambits up front or something I would’ve liked it more. As it was it felt like an unusually infuriating “baby’s first scripting language in a partially-observable world” tutorial.
I have to agree with Astral Rejection. FFX was my favorite in the series, hands down. I even got to avoid the bad voice acting thing, since I played it in Japanese 
I hated FF8. I’ve tried to play it twice, and both times I’ve quit only about 15 hours in or so. What did I hate about it? I honestly don’t remember. It’s just been so long. I liked FF7 well enough, but never fell heads over heels for it the way some people did. Maybe because I didn’t play it until years after it first came out.