No Western development team has yet made an RPG which has hit the button in the way that many Final Fantasy games have. If you take a top 20 poll of the best characters in RPGs, they'll all be from Japan, many from Final Fantasy; if there are any Western characters in, it would only be as a charity.
That said, it doesn't make sense to tell Square NOT to evolve the series, and then say it wasn't until the 7th one that you started loving the series. If you REALLY did play Final Fantasy from the NES onward, then you would have loved the series by Final Fantasy II (4) at the latest; and if you were like me, you would have considered Legend 1 and 2, and Adventure Final Fantasy games at the time of their release; and I can't think of how anyone could have played Legend 2 back in the day and not loved it, Legend 1 had the battlesword thing in Byakko's world which was frustrating but was awesome otherwise, and Adventure was awesome too (I liked it better than that bastardization, Sword of Mana).
I describe myself as a little dose of toxic masculinity.
