My Favorite and Least Favorite Things about Final Fantasy VIII

Story and Setting

• Favorite Town: Winhill Village was absolutely gorgeous (all those flowers! those cute little cottages!) and revisiting the town again and again made me happy. Shumi Village was just as cozy, but Winhill was prettier and more nostalgic for me. It's like the perfect cottagecore village.
• Least Favorite Town: Esthar after it got attacked. You have to go on long walks to get anywhere because the public transportation is all broken down, you get randomly attacked by OP monsters on the street, and the kiosks at the mall are a pain in the ass to use, even though you can get some really cool stuff there. (I hate kiosks in real life, too. I'm only slightly more extraverted than Squall and I secretly hate most social BS, and even I prefer talking to a clerk over using a kiosk.) You can't land the Ragnarok near the city center; you have to land it on the outskirts and walk through what is essentially a maze to reach the city, risking random encounters with powerful enemies. I wanted to like Esthar—and I did at first—but the Galbadian army and those damned behemoths and tiger things ruined it.
• Strangest Town: For me, Fisherman's Horizon feels eerie, probably because it's so isolated and in the middle of the ocean, and much of it frighteningly high above it at that (and I'm not even afraid of heights). Add to that the fact that so much of it looks like it's rusting and falling apart and it gives me abandoned Rust Belt ruins vibes despite neither being abandoned nor in the Rust Belt. I like it and I find parts of it oddly comforting, but it also looks and feels haunted.
• Favorite Dungeon:
• I loved everything about the Tomb of the Unknown King. Hell, I even revisited later on to grind and stock up on magic!
• Favorite Side Quest: The scavenger hunt at the very laid-back and cozy Shumi Village, another place I enjoyed revisiting.
• Least Favorite Puzzle: The painting puzzle in Ultimecia Castle. Has anyone ever solved it without consulting a guide first and, if so, after how many failed combinations of words? I get the feeling that this is one of the puzzles that the authors of The Grand List of Console Role-Playing Game Clichés had in mind when they listed "something that is unsolvable because a vital clue in the dialogue was mistranslated out of Japanese" (or—more likely in this case—Latin).
• Wildest Twist: The name I chose for Squall's lion totem (Cymbius, the same name I gave my white cat muse) becoming the name of Ultimecia's GF at the end. I did not expect to have to fight the Cymb.

Characters

• Favorite Playable Character (as a character): Laguna! He's so adorkable! My favorite from the main party would be Quistis.
• Least Favorite Playable Character (" "): I don't like Squall or Rinoa very much as characters. I don't really think that anyone is supposed to like how Squall acts at the beginning of the game (even if they relate to him like I did), and I do like how he gradually opens up and becomes nicer to his friends, but, at the same time, he also ends up as obsessed with Rinoa as Jean Paul Desmond from Strange Paradise is with Erica. It drove me crazy, particularly when I wanted to leave the Lunatic Pandora to grind/hunt for weapon materials and he wouldn't let me, screaming, (read in Jean Paul's voice) " No! I must go back inside to save my beautiful Rinoa, and, as my guests on this island, all of you are coming with me!" (Yes, it's a paraphrase and I added the island bit, but even so, he really got on my nerves during that part of the game.) Rinoa is pretty much self -explanatory: she alternates between damsel in distress and faux action girl and monopolizes Squall's romantic attention when, quite frankly, Quistis would be a far better fit for him personality -wise, even if that particular pairing wouldn't work as well within the overarching story with its theme of fate. (To quote this old song parody, "Here's to you, fair Instructor Trepe / Why you end up single, we don't know!") I don't hate either of them, though, the way I hate Yuffie; I just find them both annoying.
  I agree with this quote from a very old fansite about Rinoa's role (or lack thereof) in Squall's character development:

  She changed Squalls heart? Pshaw. Da efforts of da entire team, and realization of a purpose in his life made him come outta his shell, plus remembering what really happened. Rinoa didn't do any of that! He never showed any affection towards him at all! She just liked ta imagine that she changed his entire life, but she never did! What changed his life was entire thing with Ellone and stuff like that! His life was fairly normal, even when Rinoa was screwin around in it. It was da time travel that messed everythin up.
  Rinoa thinks she's so important, she has ta be everythin in Squall's life, and everyone should love her and worship her, and everyone needs ta care about her when she whines about how she's scared or how she needs Squall, when Squall has so many better things ta do.

• Favorite Character to Play: Zell! I love using his Duel Limit Break.
• Least Favorite Character to Play: Rinoa, at least until I junctioned the living hell out of her stats. Her attacks are weak and Angelo/Budwisr didn't run out nearly enough to help her most of the times that I struggled while playing her.
• Favorite Villain: Ultimecia/Possessed Edea. (I'm surprised by how many people consider possessed Edea and Ultimecia to be different characters, despite it being stated in canon that the evil "Edea" was actually Ultimecia possessing her.) Seifer is my second favorite, not to mention the subject of most of the fics I've read. (I haven't read as much FF8 fic as I have FF7 fic, but a little over half of the FF8 fics I've read were Seifer-centric.)
• Favorite Alternate Names for Characters: In my file, I renamed Angelo Budwisr (after the late Bud, whom he instantly reminded me of) and Griever Cymbius. I kept everyone else's default name.
• Funniest Canon Character Name: Squall! When I first learned his name, I wondered if his mother had named him after the first sound he made after he was born. (I imagine him as a very colicky baby, squalling all the time.) Griever is also a funny name IMO, because it's exactly the kind of name that someone as emo as Squall would give his lion symbol.
• Craziest Sorceress Outfit: Although Ultimecia's and possessed Edea's outfits are both very unusual and impractical, I think that Adel's very confusing outfit takes the cake. How the hell does her dress(?) even stay on? Does she have to glue those straps onto her chest to get them to stay up? Are those straps, or are they tattoos/body paint? Is her skin really that color, or does she spray-paint/magic herself purple? Is that even her real chest? (I read recently that some cosplayers, drag kings, and transmen wear silicone shirts molded to look like an idealized male chest and arms. Maybe Adel wears one of those?) Her outfit is a cosplayer's nightmare.
• Craziest Outfit Worn By a Non-Sorceress Character: Doc Odine with his enormous collar, which reminds me of the massive ruffs that most of the Polish characters in Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible (one of my all-time favorite movies) wear. That has got to get in the way in the lab! (I guess he needs something to keep him from licking himself?)
• Funniest NPCs: The old man who asked Squall if he liked "beverages," the children who charged money to let Squall look out their window and (IIRC) at their adorable cat as well, and the employee at Timber Maniacs who didn't know when to shut up. For whatever reason, all the funniest NPCs were concentrated in Timber.

Gameplay

• Favorite GF: I love Cerberus, because I like using magic attacks (especially after I got really bored of watching GF animations over and over). He helped me in particular when I was fighting Adel, because I didn't want to use any attacks that might hit Rinoa as well as her.
• Least Favorite Aspect of Gameplay: Having to depend on your GFs for pretty much the entire first half of your game—until you have amassed a decent supply of good magic and can start significantly improving your stats via junctioning—makes battles really monotonous and kind of boring, once you get bored watching the GF animations. Having to grind all the time to get materials to generate magic and upgrade my weapons also got annoying.
• Funniest Gameplay Experience (and Stupidest Gameplay Mistake): While I was playing through the flashback to when Laguna and his friends explored the crystal cavern that later became the Lunatic Pandora, I had the hardest time going down one of the ladders. I really thought it was some kind of glitch in the game and even Googled "ff8 ladder glitch," only to find that no one else (or at least no one who posted on GameFAQs or similar sites) had the same problem. Turned out I was pressing up on my game controller while trying to climb down the ladder, and I didn't consciously realize it! In short, I had a Laguna moment while playing as Laguna.

Fandom

• Favorite Non-Canon Pairing: Laguna/Kiros.
• Least Favorite Pairing: Laguna/Squall. He's his dad. Enough said. The only way the pairing could be worse is if someone wrote (serious) Laguna/Squall mpreg (and I wouldn't be surprised if there were some lurking on some site somewhere).

Miscellaneous

• Favorite BGM: "Eyes on Me." Enough said. (Sure, I don't care for the canon pairing of Squall with Rinoa despite it being necessary for the plot, but I still like the song—and it was originally written by Rinoa's mom for Laguna, anyway.)
• Most Ironic Thing about the Game: The fact that the game actively encourages you to use and collect GFs—to the point of being insanely difficult to play without them for the first twenty-five hours or so without constantly getting killed—when the same GFs are the reason why the SeeD members from Balamb Garden can't remember their childhoods. And yet, somehow, you can continue playing with GFs all the time the entire way through the game, enough for your entire party to(at least theoretically) go senile, without them forgetting any more of their memories thanks to your heavy GF use.