Have you ever played Final Fantasy XI? Those storylines are better then some of the main entries.

RE6 is better than original RE games, IMO. So FF has to be the fallen one of these series.

Summons are immensely useful until you get to the endgame content.  Even then they're not useless. 

in which game?  I found buffs to be the most effective in 10 of all the games. 

Clearly you've never played Final Fantasy VII, where the final boss instantly gives you Omnislash.  Some battles are there for story reasons, not to be challenging.  Besides, you just fought Sin, Jecht, and the summons. 

It's a Loot-based system, nothing wrong with that.  it's not the end of the world, promise.  

Plain wrong. 

Again, wrong.  

that's called strategy, it means you have to switch through your party members frequently, and you have to know HOW to kill them.  

Also wrong. Lots of battles had more than 3 enemies in both X and XII. 

Again, Strategy.  

I think you just suck at the game, dude. 

Neither have fallen. People want the game to stay the same for some reason. I don't get why anyone would want a franchise not to become something different I hear people bashing CoD all the time about it being the same game and yet when a company tries to do something different all they hear is moaning and groaning. For a while now i haven't even payed attention to someone who doesn't give a legitimate excuse as to why they think Resident Evil or Final Fantasy are bad. Actually i think people just want something to complain about no matter how dumbfounded there arguments are.

magus sisters are awesome, not to mention you can add attributes, to all the aeons with I think rikku's abilility I don't remember.

I felt I could have enjoyed XII a lot more had it had the elements described above (and if Vaan and Penelo weren't in it). It always felt like unfulfilled potential. I remember really getting into the storyline with all its intricacies, but my interest gradually waned as the game went on. It's not like it's a bad game by any stretch, just could have been so much more.

By forced design from my understanding. It certainly felt forced throughout the game. They would have been better off keeping the focus on Basch and Balthier from the start. As I explained in my post to ishiki, I didn't dislike the game like I did XIII, I just felt it had more unfulfilled potential.

I'm talking only about FF X.

Like I said, three characters get more turns that one (which usually is slower unless you have summoned Shiva) which leads to more damage. Summons are only needed to prevent your guys from getting killed or turbo attacks.

Can't cast multitarget healing spells (except for pray), Barrier or Magic Barrier.

I never said that Final Fantasy VII did that right.

But it kills the fun. Remember when in other games after the effort put in defeating a boss you get cool stuff? That is gone. And it gets inmensely annoying when trying to get Ribbon armors (just for borderline paranoid perfectionism) without crap abilities you can't remove like Fireproof or Iceproof. It takes forever to get enough items to create a decent ability in a weapon/armor, then you can't pass it to the new armor you bought later. Doing so before the post-game is a loss of time.

Attack/Quick Hit deals always 99999 damage and recovers faster than anything else. Of course you can do 99999x2 doublecasting Ultima to an enemy with 1 point in Magic Defense, but that enemy wasn't going to be hard anyway. Against enemies with higher MDef Ultimax2 deals less than Attack/Quick Hit.

Show me a video of somebody doublecasting Holy. Or Curaga.

Strategy? More like linearity. This is how you "play" this game right:

1) Put your three fastest characters as your active party members.

2) Enter a battle.

3) Since your characters are faster you'll get the first three turns before the IA.

4) Replace the active character with the appropiate one to kill the faster enemy in one hit. Repeat until all enemies are dead.

5) Enter menu to put the three fastest characters again.

The only time you can't do this is when you get ambushed (shit happens) or when the big enemy of each area appears. If a big enemy appears use limit breaks to kill it before he can attack as well.

If you do what I said enemies won't be able to touch you. Not bad for somebody that sucks at the game.

The game forces you to play this way so much that it gets ridiculous. A Dingo from Beasaid (first area of the game) have 120 MDef (and 1 PDef) to prevent you from killing him with magic. To put thigs in perspective Lulu will have around 70-80 MAtk... when you beat the game. Source.

There isn't much to think, most regular enemies are palette swaps with slightly improved stats and changed elemental affinities than a 5 year old would notice (yay, an ice flan in the ice area, I guess fire will hurt him badly).

After checking an enemy database to refresh my memory the only places that have random encounters with more than three enemies are Bevelle (you can enter that place once in the game), the Calm Lands I mentioned, two group of enemies in Zanarkand, one group inside Sin, and the enemies in the water part of MT Gagazet. Every other area in the game doesn't have a single battle against more than three enemies.

Travelling through the areas is a chore. After defeating a certain boss in Macalania Woods the game tells you to backtrack to the first area (with random encounters, of course) to get some orbs that give Auron his limit breaks. That would be... 40, 50 minutes maybe? Ridiculous. The same thing happens when you try to sign a guy for your blitzball team from the first areas that begin in a team.

More funny stuff: Luck is more important than Accuracy when trying to hit an enemy. It is also more important than Evade as well. And increasing Luck is a pain in the ass. It is also the reason attacks miss so much against the Dark Aeons.

As you played them 2 years ago the effect wouldn't have been the same. You need to put certain games into the context of the time they came out. When the original Resident Evil came out it was one of the few genuinely scary games and came out at a time when cinematic games were just taking off (lets face it, that voice acting wouldn't wash now, I assume that's why your wife was laughing, lol). The sequels didn't capture the magic in the same way as the original, but they kept much of the atmosphere and I remember getting freaked by Nemesis constantly chasing me with that blasted rocket launcher.

Anyway, my point is that much of what made the games great has to be placed into the context of their time. The new games are failing replicate that effect when put into the context of the modern age and genre.

yeah okay.  If you say so.  Even if everything you said was true, little things like "You can't do this one niche ability" or "the random encounters don't give you enough enemies to fight" or "the loot system isn't concise enough" are not good reasons to think a game is poor.  if you don't like it, that's cool and you're totally entitled to that negative opinion, but you'r epicking the game apart for minor things when the major selling points of the game (mostly the story, characters, graphics, audio, and tactical gameplay) are all largely ignored.  At least when I complain about Final Fantasy XIII my issues are basically game breaking issues, not nitpicks.