MonoGame is not just for mobile, as I’ve been doing. Open VIII is a Final Fantasy VIII game engine written in C#/MonoGame and currently works on Windows and Linux (not sure about Mac). Other games in the series have been ported to other platforms but not FFVIII, so that’s why the project was started.

The instructions for Open VIII on Windows suggest Visual Studio 2017 but I imagine 2019 might also work as MonoGame 3.8 has templates for it.  As the project says “OpenVIII is an open-source complete Final Fantasy VIII game engine rewrite from scratch powered in OpenGL making it possible to play the vanilla game on wide variety of platforms including Windows 32/64 bit, Linux 32/64 bit and even mobile!”

As with virtually all open source reimplementations, you will have to provide your own game assets such as images and sound. You can do this apparently by buying the original game on Steam. I took a look and sure enough it’s there and there’s an official remastering by Square Enix. I’m not sure why the Steam search brings up FF VII as well but hey that’s search for you… I’ve added a permanent link to the C#/MonoGame links page.