The music was great, the Triple Triad card game actually was fun and had depth, card and item crafting was excellent, the draw system required a totally different approach to battles, it had a unique atmosphere, an open world map that actually had secrets to explore and not just an illusion of freedom to frame the story, interesting unique characters compared to most RPGs… I could go on.
I made so many Reddit comments on threads where everyone was falling over themselves to talk about VII and IX, got routinely ignored, but never doubted VIII was worth defending.