Final Fantasy, once one of the biggest names in gaming, is now something of a laughingstock to many people.

To a lot of these detractors, it was the Final Fantasy XIII sub-series that triggered this feeling. (Many of said detractors have not played Final Fantasy XIV, incidentally, refusing to even try it because it’s an MMO. Fair enough, but it’s also the best Final Fantasy in years.)

To others, though, Final Fantasy VIII is an object of ridicule — and the recent rerelease of the game on Steam has caused all these people to come out of the woodwork once again.

It will undoubtedly prove somewhat unsurprising to you to hear that I played and enjoyed both, and feel that they both get an undeservedly bad rap.

Let’s start with Final Fantasy VIII. After my friends and I discovered JRPGs with Final Fantasy VII and promptly played it through a good seven or eight times, Final Fantasy VIII shot straight to the top of our most-anticipated lists. And it looked amazing; gone were Final Fantasy VII’s weird super-deformed polygonal models, to be replaced with much more realistically-proportioned character models along the lines of what we now recognise as the “Final Fantasy look” today. Gone was the “magical disaster threatening to destroy the planet” plotline, to be replaced with something that was, above all else, a love story.

Final Fantasy VIII did a bunch of weird, unconventional things, and I loved it for it. Its character-driven story was much more intimate and personal than my limited experience with the genre at the time — hell, it was much more intimate and personal than a lot of games I’d played up until that point, period. It was one of the few times I’d encountered a convincing love story in the context of a video game; Squall and Rinoa were both interesting, flawed characters and I felt myself rooting for them throughout the game.

The battle system was enjoyable, too. The Junction system was really, really odd, but made sense once you got your head around its extremely abstract nature. The reflex-based actions, where you had to pull the trigger on Squall’s gunblade for additional damage, or hammer in button combinations while performing Limit Breaks, or repeatedly bash the Square button while summoning a “Guardian Force”, gave the battles a feeling of “action game” intensity when they were essentially still sort-of turn-based.

And the final boss? Easily one of the most spectacular final confrontations of the PS1 era, even if the plot in the immediate run-up to it started veering into seriously odd plot-related territory. “Time kompression” was a bit weird, yeah, but it certainly didn’t undo all the good work for the many hours beforehand, and damn, those last battles were genuinely exciting.

Fast forward a whole bunch of years (I’d work it out, but I can’t be arsed right now) and we have Final Fantasy XIII. Again — I’ve covered this before — this did things markedly differently to past Final Fantasies, replacing the open-world MMO-style gameplay of Final Fantasy XII with more linear progression that opened up into an interesting, enjoyable open world towards the end.

People hated Final Fantasy XIII for its linearity, but in practice it really wasn’t all that much more linear than previous Final Fantasies — it was just more obvious about it. Previous Final Fantasies had provided the illusion of freedom through their world maps, you see, but your progression was still railroaded by being unable to cross certain types of terrain until the story dictated that you got your hands on a particular vehicle. And, like Final Fantasy XIII, these games would tend to open up towards the end, giving you freedom to explore.

There’s always been a reason for that linearity in Final Fantasy games, however, and that’s to push the story along. Because you didn’t get a lot of opportunity to stray from the path set out in front of you, the story was kept pacy and snappy, and maintained its momentum — something which many more open RPGs, and not just those of the J-variety, really struggle with. By the time you reached the more open part, you had an extremely firm grounding in the game’s mechanics — more than enough to take on some of the extremely tough challenges that said open world presented you with.

As for the characters? I liked them a lot. Sazh was an interesting character in that he was an older, black character who didn’t resort to Mr. T stereotypes like Barret in FFVII. Vanille was cute and adorable. Fang was badass. Lightning was enigmatic, intriguing and all-business; Snow was her perfect foil with his laid-back attitude. And Hope, whom many people accuse of being “whiny”, watched his parents die towards the beginning of the game. I think being a little emotional is perhaps understandable in this instance, no?

Ultimately I know that if you’ve made up your mind about Final Fantasy VIII and XIII I’m probably not going to change your mind, and that’s fine; this post simply outlines what I feel about these much-maligned installments in the long-running series. The thing that annoys me, I think, is how people feel the need to declare them unequivocally “crap” when what they really mean is that they didn’t personally like them.

But then this is nothing new to the games biz, and I’ve spent the best part of the last couple of years playing and adoring games that many people think are “crap” if you believe Metacritic scores and the like. Each to their own, I say, and if you can eke out enjoyment from something that isn’t popular, I say good on you. And if you can’t, maybe try not to make other people feel bad about liking it?