Some more Final Fantasy VIII hate

Some posts ago I expressed my dislike for the eighth chapter in the Final Fantasy series. It could be said that a lot of people who played and enjoyed the previous one as their first JRPG would have hated this game just because it's not another Final Fantasy VII, it doesn't have story or characters in common with it (all Final Fantasies didn't, but many didn't know), and it introduces a completely different growth system. I'm sure it isn't just that.

I wanted to put in this post some of my other reasons for hating this game. Maybe it will take more than one post to list them all, but here goes...

First of all, when news and screenshots of FFVIII I was really excited, but only for a very brief moment: some graphical effects shown in the pictures looked great to me, but then I looked at the concept art and started disliking it. Characters, settings, the gunblade (basically a gun with an extremely big bayonette), I didn't really like any of them, maybe because they were going for a more realistic and serious look. In hindsight, I wish I didn't followthe development of this game so much, as I probably would have enjoyed playing it more. I barely knew anything about Final Fantasy VII before playing it.

Some time after the initial information was released, I read that the magic system wouldn't use MP: simply said, instead of using a single pool of magic-casting energy for all spells, you could have up to 100 casts of each spell for each character. This meant two things for me: using magic was going to be much like using items, and the MP-based system was gone. These impliy that going to rest wouldn't replenish your magic-casting ability (as it was in all previous episodes), and the simplest way to get more spells would have been to 'draw' it from enemies (there are other ways, but they're either harder or less efficient). I had played other RPGs before that, videogames and pen&paper alike, and frankly the MP system was my favorite for simplicity and flexibility; it's just my personal preference though.

Wow, I guess this is gonna take a lot more posts than I thought! I'll be back for more.