I have mixed feelings about this game, because although it is my fourth-favorite FF game, its design was singlehandedly conducive to the end of the golden age of Final Fantasy, because this game served as a precedent for ff designers to consider "realism" in an FF game to be a virtue in its own right, and substitutable for some of the emphasis which they had previously placed on originality, continuity, and integration of the various aspects of a game. Starting with FF8, every game in the FF series is very epic in scope, but fails to fill the framework of its design with sufficient plot and character-related details. In Final Fantasy VII, there are so many tiny, optional events which round out the mythos of the game's world in ways that may be unappreciated at first, but collectively contribute a sense of groundedness to the fantastical setting. Take the discovery of Gast and Ifalna's videos in Icicle, for example. Final Fantasy VIII still has these types of details, such as the ability to read about GARDEN on Squall's workstation terminal. It just doesn't have nearly enough such details to flesh out the world, and after FF8, this element of the series only gets worse. Upon reaching Esthar, the largest city in FF8, the player almost as quickly leaves it, and less seems to be happening there than in the small island-town of Balamb.