FF8 Remastered Beaten:

I beat FF8 Remastered, in that I defeated the last boss Ultemecia.  However, I've yet to defeat the toughest enemy in the game, Omega Weapon, despite trying all day.

This game is strangely fun, despite its numerous and obvious flaws.  Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of FF8 is that leveling actively harms your characters instead of improving them.  Every level makes you weaker relative to your enemies, who scale up faster than you do.  At the same time, the Remastered version of the game allows you to play with no random encounters, and no boss fights give experience, so it is possible to avoid leveling, at least for the most part.  It's a bizarre game of cat and mouse where the game tries to make you level and you try to avoid killing anything.

I collected all 16 junctionable guardian forces as well as Gilgamesh on the side.  I went to Cactaur Island and got all my GF's to max out their abilities.  I've actually trashed the game pretty thoroughly already.  Just one last boss, with most of my characters still below level 20.

Omega Weapon is a devilishly hard encounter though.  He has this endless cycle of attacks that you have to dance around perfectly if you wish to survive.  It goes 'Meteor = Ignore', then 'Meggido Flame = summon a GF first,' then 'Gravija = Ignore', then 'Terra Break = Defend/take a hero potion', then 'Ultima = heal up', then 'Light Cannon = cast full-life on the unfortunate victim,' and then it cycles back to Meteor.

Though there is a proper answer to every single action he takes, he takes them quite quickly, and if you slip up even once you'll never recover.  That's only half the problem though.  The other half of the problem is Omega Weapon has an enormous amount of life.  I have no idea how much, only that hitting him for max damage, 9,999, over and over again, doesn't even leave a dent.  You can't just sit on the defensive the whole time as your guardian forces will rapidly attrit.  You have to be attacking inbetween each of your appropriate defenses or you'll never win.  Which means an already difficult tap dance doubles in difficulty as you try to fit in some counterattacks.

If I could ever play perfectly, use every defense at the appropriate time, never misclick or mis-target a spell -- if I could do that and I still lost, I would be content with trying to power up some more via building better weapons or drawing better spells.  But since I've never actually played perfectly and lost, it's still possible I could win with the power I've already accrued.  I want to at least try.  I want to see the other side of perfect play -- what's the horizon like over those green hills?

As for the rest, thank God for triple speed.  Without triple speed the game would be unplayable.  The summons take too long, the spells take too long, even walking around takes too long.  Drawing, the central mechanic of the game, would be unbearable without triple speed.  FF8 Remastered really knew how to improve this game and did so marvelously.

Squall and Rinoa are as lovable as I remember them being, and the FMV's still look great.  The game is actually quite short at triple speed, the plot moves along ferociously and there really isn't much dialogue per character.  When it comes down to it, Squall and Rinoa's relationship can be narrowed down to just two moments -- when Rinoa forced Squall to dance at the ball, and when Squall rescued Rinoa who was adrift in space and almost out of oxygen by jumping out with nothing but a spacesuit to catch her.  (Kanata no Astra did a good job ripping off this scene)

Those two defining moments are as powerful as they were 20 years ago.  The love really shines through between those two axis.

Other than the FMV's and Squall + Rinoa's love story, the only thing that's better than Dragon Quest XI is the music.  On every other front -- gameplay, graphics, leveling, cityscapes, landscapes, duration, plot, minigames, sidequests, supermoves, villains, everything is better in DQ XI.  Arguably, you could just listen to the FF8 soundtrack, watch the FMV's on youtube, and be as well off as the people who actually played the game.  But Rinoa is mai waifu so I wanted to go the distance for her.

FF8 Remastered is infinitely better than the original -- and it's still infinitely worse than DQ XI.  Unless you've played DQ XI already, don't bother picking up this game.  DQ XI has shown the true potential of a well designed, modern, turn-based RPG.  It's absolutely peerless.  FF 8 Remastered is no match -- and FF 7 Remake isn't going to be turn-based.  Now that I've seen what a true turn based RPG PS4 game could be, everything else feels like a letdown.

PS:  Omega Weapon down!  Rinoa got lucky and cast invincible moon + I played perfectly and down he went!  I knew I could do it!