Gaming has a plethora of long standing franchises with numerous entries, and a lot of times it's hard to know where to start with eventual gaps that have developed in your own path. I was thinking about this as I wanted to try to get into Final Fantasy more and then figured many of you also have franchises you kind of want to get into but don't know where to start. So this thread is to ask the rest of the community for their recommendations on where to start with franchises.
I'll start by asking, where should I get "started" with Final Fantasy? I say "started" because I did play FF13 about 8 years ago and it really left a bad taste in my mouth. I hardly paid attention to the story (I found it convoluted and pointless at the same time) and the characters irked me. I also gave FF15 a shot but only made it about 15 hours in before I found the open world nature tedious. And I guess a big secondary question is should I play FF7 original before Remake or would it be possible to jump into the remake right away?
For some context of my JRPG background, I really enjoy Lost Odyssey, the Dragon Quest series (I've played 7, 8, and 11), and Chrono Trigger (which I only played about 7 years ago for the first time). I loved Tales of the Abyss on 3DS but haven't been able to get into another Tales game since (tried Symphonia, Vesperia, and Zestiria) because I don't think the gameplay can hold up for the ~60 hour lengths. I also played Xenoblade Chronicles 2 and tried 1 and X but those games are a fairly large commitment so I didn't get more than a dozen hours in.
