All that I have here now is information. It's not pretty to looke at, there's no pics, and half of this stuff is probably some rumour that a crazy college guy with no free time made up. But believe me, I'll try to make this place better. Or not.

Characters:So far I've heard of 6 possible characters, they are Squall, Laguna, Zell, Roina, a moogle named Kiko, and Squall's rival from the garden Seifer. It appears right now, that Squall, Rinoa, Seifer and Zell are set in one world, and Laguna in another. I'm not sure if they're different planets, or dimensions or what, but it's a neat idea. Another couple of rumoured characters are Cid, Wedge, and Biggs.

Summon/Guardian Force:It looks like summoning has been replaced with a system called "Guardian Force" Square hasn't released much information on this topic, but I do know that the creatures that you call upon have hit points, and experiance points of their own, so they can die, and get stronger, like the characters.

Battle:From what I've read, the battle system has been given a major face-lift. The menu at the bottom of the screen has been removed, and the only permanent, on-screen display, are the hit-points of everyone. When a command needs to be filled in, a menu will pop up in the bottom corner of the screen. It seems that they have brought back desperation attacks from FF3 (U.S.), whenever your character's HP are under 100 or so, they stagger around, and you can then choose two types of attacks the normal one, and the desparation attack (I don't know if it's called that). I'm not sure about everyone, but Squall has at least 2 types of desperation attacks, in one, he goes nuts attacking the baddie over and over, and a bar fills up at the bottom of the screen. Everytime the bar reaches a triangle, if you push R1 Squall will utilise the gun part of his gunblade, and shoot energy at his opponent. For Zell's desperation move, he jumps in the air, charges up a fireball and crashes into the enemy (life Ifrit from FF7).

Spells:It's really quite amazing what Square does when you think about it, over all of the FF games there has almost always been a dramatic change in... something. This time I'm pretty sure that it's the Spell system that's getting an overhaul. Even though a lot of people praised the Materia system of FF7 of being the most custom magic system around, Square decided to move it up a notch.
Instead of being able to purchase magic, you have to steal it. Once in each battle, a character can use the "Draw" command to draw forth the magical spells of their enemies. It's a bit like "Enemy Skill Materia" except the bad guy doesn't have to use the spell on you first. After drawing the spell from the baddie (sometimes it's unsuccessful) you can chose to either use the spell right there (and lose it), or you can "Store" it, for use later. In the magic menu, beside each spell name, is the number of times that you have "Drawn" the spell from an enemy. In other words, each time you draw a spell, you get to use it once and only once, unless you've drawn it before, then you can get another chance to use the spell.
I think that it's a very tricky.

Story:To tell you the truth, the stroy isn't very stable at the moment, I mean, there's only 5% of the game on the demo CD, and I only have the information that Square deems me worthy of knowing. Anywho, it appears that the main storyline exists around love, or a love triangle (perhaps between Laguna, Squall, and the lovely Rinoa) i.e. the logo. Kinda like the Logo for Final Fantasy 7 showed how thw game was about a meteor/appocalypse. It also looks like FF8 is a bit more mature than FF7 was.
Here's something that I'm sure of, in every country, there's a thing called a Garden. What a Garden is exactly, is a military training center for children (age 6-15 for enrollment, 15-19 graduation). A hand-picked section of the best students become enrolled in a Special-Army called SeeD (I don't know why the "D" is capital) Apperantly Squall, Zell and Seifer are from the Garden, and Seifer and Squall are from SeeD, or trying to get into SeeD. The two "S's" are also rivals (oooohhhh...)

Final Fantasy 7	Main!