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Its also the first game to have "angst" be a main quality in a main character.
No, FF4 was. Cecil's entire story was angst ridden, complete with him starting out as a Dark Knight.
This whole argument is fucking stupid and I'm getting tired of reading this thread, but I want to add a comment. This may be outdated by now but fuck reading three more pages of this.
Enemies leveling with you was a wonderful mechanic to an RPG. There is nothing more infuriating than just waltzing through the very last dungeon and boss because i spent a few too many hours exploring or what have you. It made for a degree of difficulty in a genre of game that catered to people wanting to do 9999 damage to something as soon as they saw it. That Red Dragon enemy is a terrible example anyways, since it was a normal mob on 1 island very far out of the way of everything that was mostly meant for maxing out your people and your GF's, iirc. I liked the draw system, but i know why everyone else didn't, and the fact that enemies could do it too was a big mistake. Draw is good system, but they just flopped it pretty horridly, and now no one is willing to chance it for fear in following in FF8's footsteps.
No, Draw was a complete bullshit and trash system, and enemies leveling with you was also supremely shitty, or at least it was so badly implemented in FF8 that the only solid example we have of it shows that it sucks goat sack.
Draw was a nice concept but it failed horribly. Having to draw 11 times per character, minimum, the moment you see a new spell, in order to max out your stats? Fucking gay. Boring as shit. I'd rather just kill enemies to gain levels over them. There wasn't even any creativity in the system - which spell raises the numbers more? OK pick that one. And then you can break the system wide open with incredibly simple "tricks" like sticking drain on your weapon. Brilliant.
And let's not even get into how much it makes you not want to cast spells. Nevermind that most of the spells in the game sucked.
And then they introduced Aura. LAWL.
FF8 is quite possibly the worst, it was saved slightly by having very good graphics and presentation as well as a fairly decent combat system, but the overall game mechanics were a complete trainwreck.
Roughly tied with FF8 would have to be Xenosaga 2. It was so flawed in so many ways it's almost disturbing that it's sandwiched in between the solid Xenosaga and the exceptional Xenosaga 3. It had so many neat concepts that were poorly executed, and just a few minor adjustments could've made it so much more fun to play. Hell I bet I could rebalance the game engine as-is and make it 100% more playable in about two weeks of testing... -_-