No, I don’t think so. They are just different and people don’t like change. For context, I’m a massive JRPG fan and I’ve played: 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12 and 15. And of course tons of spin-offs. Planning on playing 7, 8 and 13 - don’t care for MMOs and 16.

Out of these, I love of course the obvious early ones: 4 and 6.

However, 10 is my favorite overall. It has the most solid gameplay (fuck ATB tbh) and a great story, even though we sideline Sin way too much for Seymore who I don’t care for. It’s biggest problem are the minigames though, I hate Blitzball and especially the Cloister of Trials.

9 could be better, but the steam version crashes so much I didn’t get to finish it.

Now, after 10 we got a lot more experimental:

12 was fun but had massive problems. It’s biggest was the autobattle mechanic alongside the speed up in modern releases. You basically don’t play the game and you don’t even strategize. It’s always faster to sprint a few minutes around the map and get back with more levels which ultimately killed any interest I had in the battle system. But I dislike programmable party members in every game, so your milage may vary. The worldbuilding on the other was awesome.

15 was a great game. I think it’s reception isn’t wrong necessarily because of how much it differs from trailers and such. However, I played it years after release and without having seen a single trailer. I had a blast throughout. The writting is among FF’s best, not because it’s such a great story, but because the relationships between the main party are so strong. I even liked the battle system - it’s different and has a lot of potential I think. It’s biggest failure is that you need to watch a series, a movie and read lots of other material to grasp the story - a lot of it isn’t in the game.

16, I can’t say much about. I’m honestly not very interested in basic medieval fantasy settings, they’ve stripped out the RPGs mechanics and quite frankly I just don’t own a system I could play it on. Maybe I’d like it after all, I don’t know.