The music was great, the Triple Triad card game actually was fun and had depth, card and item crafting was excellent, the draw system required a totally different approach to battles, it had a unique atmosphere, an open world map that actually had secrets to explore and not just an illusion of freedom to frame the story, interesting unique characters compared to most RPGs... I could go on.

I made so many Reddit comments on threads where everyone was falling over themselves to talk about VII and IX, got routinely ignored, but never doubted VIII was worth defending.

[–] SuperSynthia@lemmy.world 6 points 8 months ago

The junction system made min maxing actually fun, as well as being ahead of it’s time with the ability to get rid of random encounters. Fantastic game