I was fine with the series until XII to be honest. Yes the voice acting sucked in X but the story itself was pretty solid in FF terms:
A good ol fashioned antagonist causing mayhem and destruction with the typical band of heroes to stop him BUT with some twists in the tale along the way, we had some character development with all the characters ( i especially liked Auron's one) and while the leveling system wasn't the best, the actual combat was one of the best of the series....but then again i am a lover of turn based stuff.
The thing that got me with XII was that it just didn't feel like a FF to me, the combat of FFs were never "gripping" but the way XII had the MMO approach made it an even bigger grind than usual with no real feel of tactics, just press x for each character and wait until victory.
The sidequests, although quite cool at first glance were probably the most monotonous i've ever had to deal with (except perhaps the Ultimate Weapons in X....less said about lightning dodging the better) in FF. I mean, i've just run through a 20 level dungeon which took 2 hours to get through...and now i've got to get back to lv 19 to kill a mark? So the way i relax from dungeon crawling is.....more dungeon crawling? No Golden Saucer, no card games, no blitzball, just more combat.
Oh and the storyline? Ripped straight from Star Wars, which is no real biggie i suppose if the characters actually developed during the story. Vaan just repeats "I wanna be a skypirate" for the entire game and Penelo is little more than a piece of poorly made cardboard scenery...It just all stank to me
Anyways i suppose its not all that bad, i do boot up the game every so often to grind some more, seeing as i still haven't got all the espers....*shudders at the thought of the Limit Break/Espers*
Right ill shuttup now, i think ive repressed my hated for XII for way too long and now its all bursting forth!