According to Wu, Final Fantasy VIII was so kickass something in Wu's game was an homage to it.
As someone who enjoyed FF8 despite its flaws, I'm not gonna give Wu too much shit over this, since Triple Triad was so fun someone made a PC clone that you can lose hours on alone, the Junction system made for a nice bit of meta gaming for the spergy types who enjoy juggling statistics, and it was the first Final Fantasy that really tried to show off some outstandingly beautiful graphics (based on the Parasite Eve engine, which was stunning in its own right), which only makes Wu's game look like crap in retrospect, because FF8 really tried to look awesome on the PS1 and succeeded while Wu has better hardware and R60 looks incredibly dated for it's time.
As for why Wu's an idiot, FF8 had a mega shoehorned backstory for the characters and the love story was pretty forced.