I would say the biggest problem with FFVIII is the gameplay. I didn’t like the story much, but I could have tolerated it were the gameplay not so terribly tedious and boring. Mobs scaling to your level is not inherently a bad thing, but it is if your battle system sucks. It ensured that through the early game you always had to be casting 10 minute GF spells repeatedly, even in random battles…either that or drawing magic. Junctioning was like an even shittier version of materia…you had to track all these stats and other convoluted bullshit just to perform basic, empty customization that added nothing to the game.
Then there are so many bad scenarios in the game. There’s so many areas where the doorway to progress is badly displayed in the CG background, blends in and isn’t obvious…there’s points where during your first play through you basically have to spend 20 minutes straight running against every wall in every room of the town or dungeon to figure out where to go next. Then in the middle of a mission they suddenly grab you and stick you in the shoes of this random Laguna guy you don’t know, don’t care about, in some area clear across the world you don’t have a clue about…and then they expect you to wander around fighting level-scaled mobs with GF’s over and over wondering where to go next for this dude you don’t know doing god knows what in the middle of god knows where?
And don’t forget, the prison breakout segment where you have to run back and forth through 10-20 copy and paste floors of the same damn shit fighting tedious mob-scaled random battles with repeated GF’s and drawing while annoying sirens and shitty music play.
Fuck FFVIII and its terrible, tedious, godawful gameplay.