So glad I exited Final Fantasy with X, utter garbage since
12 was the best in the series though. 
(In before Walrus' irrational hate of 12 because he's a weeaboo)
Whoa there. Walrus might be a guy who plays guitar at a party but even I have to agree with him there. Don't gotta be a weeaboo to see that the only cool things in FFXII were the hunts, Balthier the Judge armors and nothing else.
Yup, 12 was straight garbage with some decent parts in a great world but mostly garbage. I avoid talking about the game though because superfans.
Weeaboo (like seriously, have I ever seen you play a western game? :p) detected. 
12 is vastly superior to HA HA HA Fantasy 10. Don't even lie.
I mean if we're going to be flippant and pull a Ronito: FF10 only has Auron and that's it.
Also, the worst upgrade pathing possible for a RPG. Yeah yeah the Zodiac version has pre-defined class boards, but the majority of people played the version where not using a guide meant getting the ability to use spears when you really wanted a dagger.
Summon system was also fucking weird and getting summons meant getting a fuck ton of MP for some reason.
Yeah, there's some fundamental issues with vanilla FF12. But International really fixed a lot of the problems. The summons are still pretty shitty from what I remember of International (waiting for the re-release to play through again) but if you can't admit there's vastly better systems for JRPGs to take away from it in regards to giving JRPG's a shot in the arm that they need for the market now a days... I dunno what to tell you.
I hope the main thing we can all agree on is FFXII's soundtrack is awful. Definitely the worst 3D Final Fantasy soundtrack and maybe the worst soundtrack for a high budget JRPG game.
Also, the worst upgrade pathing possible for a RPG. Yeah yeah the Zodiac version has pre-defined class boards, but the majority of people played the version where not using a guide meant getting the ability to use spears when you really wanted a dagger.
Summon system was also fucking weird and getting summons meant getting a fuck ton of MP for some reason.
The music was good for the game, but it's not the kind of music I'd listen to outside of the game as it's not melodic. But the towns and fields had nice tunes, there was some good battle music and the opening FF theme mix is probably the best version of the crystal theme yet.
Upgrade path was cool except that everyone is exactly the same, yeah. So you had to go out of your way to make the characters different but by the end they all ended up the same character. Summons were kinda cool. I liked the combat and gambits a lot, story was awesome for like half of it and then it goes nowhere and falls apart.
At the end of the day here's the deal:
FFXII (started in 2001) was a development fucking mess, Matsuno eye cancer, unfinished game pulled together at the end by staff not initially involved giving a mish mash unfinished feel to everything.
FFXIII was a mess of a game but actually out of the last 15 years of FF this is the only game development that went smooth and they cranked the whole thing together into a mostly polished graphical edge pushing title in a 3 year development period. But conceptually and story-wise the game was a mess and then the whole FFXIII-2, LR trilogy was a mess of throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks with sinking budgets
FFXIV was a development mess so bad they had to remake the entire fucking game again
FFXV is a development mess that's taken 10 years of on/off development and at least 3 years of major development only to still be consistently changing based on feedback with no core idea of what they are making
So since 2001, there's been 15 years of every FF title being a fucking mess. I don't think there's any other franchise in history in any format of media that's had 15 years of non-stop we can't do a single product right even with all the money and time in the world.
It's a clusterfuck and I don't see how it's gonna change unless the change is SE goes out of business. At least Kingdom Hearts with the Osaka team seems to be going much smoother with their development pipeline (BBS -> 3DS -> III in probably late 2017). The sad thing is that even if the KH Osaka team was given an FF game (say XVI or XVII) after KHIII, it'd still probably be a fuckup as it seems like what's been killing FF for 15 years is less the lack of talent and more the Warner Bros DC problem of the studio consistently interfering with the product because so much is riding on each mainline FF and the ship is sinking and every exec thinks they know how to correct it. If they just let the developers make a fucking FF game in 3 years on their own, it might not be great or save the franchise, but it would probably be better than all these disasters.
Or they fire everyone in the whole company except Nomura and Nojima and let them hire people and run the studio. In the last 15 years of SE, almost every single product released from the Square side that Nomura wasn't involved in has been a disaster outside maybe Bravely Default but that's debatable with the 2nd half and all that, whereas TWEWY, Crisis Core, Dissidia, KH BBS and KH 3DS all turned out fine. I don't think anyone can comment on Versus without knowing wtf happened behind the scenes, which I doubt we ever will know.
The other option is take the FFXIV team that made the GOOD version, and give them 3 years to make an offline MMO-ish SP mainline FF and don't studio interfere. That'd probably churn out a decent FFIXish title.
You mean the Nomura that took 10 years(!) to make FF15 and then still couldn't release it to where Square to scramble to PS2-ize it to get it out the door? That Nomura?
I think we can all agree that since like post-1999/FF8-9 era, Square has been floundering.
Actually 10 & 11 were smooth developments that sold great and most fans loved. The problems with the mainline FF pipeline didn't start until the XII disaster.
And like I said, we can't really comment on Versus without knowing the behind the scenes. During this timeline Square didn't have the budget/team size to make more than one mainline FF at a time and they we're working on the FFXIII trilogy mess, meanwhile SE was also afraid to fully commit resources to a PS3 exclusive when X360 was a huge market in the west and JP sales were dying. Nomura was handling multiple other projects and staff was constantly being removed from Versus to work on other games. There's a good chance SE studio execs never gave Nomura more than a skeleton crew for pre-production until around 2012, then after a year for whatever reason (maybe because they wanted KHIII out already and needed him to lead that) they took his team off and brought in Tabata and crew. Who knows.
At the end of the day even Matsuno made nothing but tight development pipeline games that turned out well until he got stuck making a mainline FF and then blew it, so it's definitely possible Nomura similarly went from a great career to fucking up his chance at a mainline FF. Who knows.
Would be nice to one day get a insider ninja to tell the story, but we still don't really have a clear picture of what happened in FFXII's development, so who knows.
At least Nomura's still in the industry making KHIII, Matsuno made a great Tactic Ogre port, a dinky 3ds downloadable and then vanished off the face of the earth. FFXII ruined Matsuno's career. Hopefully Versus didn't do the same to Nomura.
