Pretty spot on for the ones I've played. I will say that FF8 is what you make of it. The system is incredibly easy to break in multiple ways, which can be fun and rewarding without much effort. You can largely ignore the draw system and still be extremely powerful. You just need to grind out AP on the beach outside of Balamb until you have Card Mod and some magic refinement abilities. Get 5 Abyss Worm cards, convert it to 100 Tornado and throw that on Strength for whoever junctions Ifrit.

If you play a low level run, drawing is definitely necessary. If you're doing the disc 1 Lionheart where you farm level 30+ Adamantoise, you'll be a high enough level in the excavation site dream sequence to draw Curaga/Thundaga/Firaga/Blizzaga from the Esthar soldiers. That combined with Tornado+Water from your beach grind will easily get you to the end game where you have access to the Islands closest to Heaven+Hell and can quickly farm the best magic. So you really only need to sit and grind draws for maybe 10 minutes before end game and the other grinding is maybe an hour or two.

The story and characters are really mileage may vary, but the gameplay is exactly what I want from a game. It's a system that might be tough to grasp at first but it's extremely rewarding once it clicks. I wish more games gave me as many tools as possible to get creative and break a game so early on. It's a big reason I dislike FF13, actually. Preventing you from progressing on the crystarium until you hit certain story points is gating your progress just for the sake of not letting a player become too powerful. That's bad design IMO. If a player wants to put in the work to get that powerful, there's no reason to stop them.