Final fantasy changed some core gameplay elements that, unfortunately for me, took them away from games I wanted to play.

I like turn based combat. I liked relatively straight forward leveling and character/weapon progressions. I liked essentially a single gimmicky system like materia. Or the card games in 8.

I hate the full action battles all the time now. It feels like the game is much more intense and twitchy. It ruins the pace of the story for me. It used to be something I would read my way through, explore at my own pace, take a journey. Stories aren't always fast action, and that's what I feel like the more modern battle system make the game feel like.