I don’t really care for them anymore. I think they’re still very well crafted games from a passionate team, but I haven’t really felt great about a FF game since 10. Ignoring the MMOs:

12 was decent but the story was pretty dry in the first half and Vaan was just not a compelling protagonist at all.

13 was reasonably fun to play after finding the “rhythm” I think they intended from the combat, but I never loved the story or any of the characters aside from Sazh.

15 had a lot of potential in the story, I actually liked the “dudes on a road trip” concept, but that awful sword hanging mechanic was always so unreliable that it eventually killed my progress in its tracks.

After that, I skipped 16 entirely.

The 7 sequel was actually really good, but everything I liked about it came directly from the original or built on top of it in a transparent way. The spooky ghosts and action combat were changes I strongly disliked and endured just to see the extended original story, but I thought they were huge steps back. It was a very good game that constantly had me wishing they just stuck to expanding the original story which is plenty convoluted on its own.

I still haven’t played the 7 sequel part 2, but I expect I’ll feel pretty much the same - in awe of the world and expanded story but constantly annoyed by spooky ghosts and mediocre action combat.

I really think the 7 sequels show that the Final Fantasy franchise has a place in the modern JRPG scene, but they would benefit from a return to form. I’d love to see the next FF game sporting a fast paced Persona-style turn based combat system combined with maybe an Akira-style dystopian techno-futuristic setting. All the parts are in there somewhere, they just need to figure out how to put them together in the right order.

Yeah, this isn’t an inflation problem, it’s a corporate greed problem. Prices have doubled for a lot of this stuff, sure, but quantities have halved, plus the little bit that’s left is packed with awful tasting fillers. Money aside, why would anyone keep buying smaller packages of worse tasting junk food?