My favourite Final Fantasy game, and a great change of direction for the series.
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Pros:
+ Characters & Humour: This game has some of the best characters of any Final Fantasy, and of any game point blank; I really cared what happened to these people. Squall, in particular, is incredibly well-realised through the simple process of letting you hear his thoughts, and I have never felt so strongly attached to a character as I did with him. Also, the game is often deliriously funny (particularly when Laguna gets involved), and probably has the most entertaining dialogue you'll find outside of FFIX - it's a close thing, though!
+ Limit Breaks: The Limit Breaks for each character are the most distinctive and useful of the series, striking the perfect balance of making each character varied in battle, without making some of them so specialist as to be potentially useless.
+ Junctioning: Another fiendishly clever system, and while it may have been a little confusing at first, the options it gives you are quite immense.
+ Freshness: Unlike many Final Fantasy games, this one took a huge amount of risks, and a great deal of them payed off. There's still no game in the series that's quite like it.
+ Secrets & Sidequests: Inconcievably, this game has more secrets to it than FFVII did, and some of them are so obscure and hard to find, you could play the game through multiple times without ever realising they were there at all.
+ Triple Triad: A great little card game to play on the side; it's got simple yet endlessly varying rules, and besides the inherent fun of playing it, you do get some pretty great rewards if you pursue it.
+ Music: Again, another wonderful soundtrack - how does he have room in his head for so many great tunes?.
Cons:
- Battle Abuse: It's all too easy to abuse the Junction, GF and Limit Break systems and become unnaturally powerful at an early stage, for relatively little cost.
- Less Cohesive Story: Compared to the wonderful pace and momentum of its predecessor, FFVIII doesn't really find the drive in its story til you get quite far in, though it gets away with it for offering a brilliant experience all the same in the meantime. Also, the game never really finds a strong, well-developed villain, in the way that FFVII did (but then again, the overall tone is lighter, so a heavy quest for vengeance may not have slotted in so well).
- Levelling: The fact that all the creatures in the game level up along with you, while well-intentioned as a means of keeping the challenge up, really means there's not much point in the levelling system at all - I think a better system have have been for levelling to increase the amount of magic a character can hold at once, since it's through the magic-junctioning that you really power yourself up anyway.
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While I can understand why many people think FFVII is better, and indeed the best Final Fantasy outright, I still find that FFVIII is my personal favourite (only just, though). While it stumbles in a few places and doesn't quite have the 'epicness' of FFVII, the things it does right are so unique and perfectly achieved that I just can't help but be amazed at the overall experience. This game took a lot of risks, and for me, the majority of them really payed off.