#and looking at the tags related to FF1 lead me to that weird spinoff they did

[game-boy-pocket]

Question for long time Final Fantasy fans if I have any among my followers, ( and I mean long time, like you were playing since SNES, if you started on like PS3/4 then i'm not asking you ), this question comes from the perspective of an outsider who's only really completed the first Final Fantasy game and the GBA port of the 2nd one, gotten pretty far in the DS version of 3, and just a little ways into 4 and 6 on SNES... I dabbled in 9 and don't know how far I am, but I got bored with how linear it was. And I didn't make it out of Midgar in 7, I'd like to give all of these games another shot eventually, as they come up...

My question is... are yall okay with what's become of the series? Like, I'm such an outsider only familiar with the very earliest games and only like surface level. All of my friends who liked Final Fantasy when I was a kid are either gone or they don't really play FF anymore. And I'm looking at more recent games in the series and like... they're riding around in real-ass cars talking on cel phones, wearing nike tennis shoes, jeans, and a sweat shirt, and one of the protagonists looks like every american action movie protagonist ever with his shaved head and stubbly face, looks more like he should be in a FPS than a JRPG... also seems to lean more toward action game than RPG.

Like is this direction widely appreciated by long time Final Fantasy fans or is it kind of met with a lot of disappointment, and only people who started playing video games in the last fifteen years like it? I'm curious to take the temperature of long time FF fans about the state of the series.

#I'm premptively playing the original FF now before it comes up in NP later #and looking at the tags related to FF1 lead me to that weird spinoff they did #where Garland looks like Doom Guy