Thank You! I can't believe XII gets so much hate. The battle system is what carried that game for me. Honestly, I have no idea what the story was about and the characters were mildly interesting. Personally, I'm much more into characters and story development than gameplay (I'm one of those people that adored Folklore). But in FFXII's case, the gameplay really was good enough to carry the mediocre story and characters.

 To sum up: Random battles are the DEVIL. Chrono Trigger FTW. 

I agree, random battles suck, but the gambit system was horribly broken. The only time you even needed to hold the controller in combat was in a boss fight, and even then not always. I'll take random encounters over the gambit system anyday.

 Well I agree with that,  I am in fact hoping for a SO/Kh mix fighting system.  Just walk around as one of the characters and fight the enemy (like in KH but with an option where you can switch between Characters).

 im fine with random battles, but they need to make the transitions faster.  it should take literally 1 second for everything to be in place and fighting.

 ff12 was kinda polar.  they made a good combat system, but it was set up so u did nothing.  and then u would fight the bosses and either barely survive or get destroyed (im looking at u, boss which petrified everyone).

 as much as i love kh, there is a limit on how that combat system should be used.  once in a while its fun.  it also wouldnt be ff.  main ff's are time based combat.

although speaking of that, im happy that ffvs13 is an action rpg. 

Honestly, after FFXII I have no intention of buying FFXIII, regardless of reviews. I just know I'm going to hate it at this point. I'm tired of paying Square money for them to disappoint me. That's not going to stop me from buying a PS3 for the other RPGs I want like White Knight Story and Star Ocean 4 (we know it's coming), but I am not paying Square for their crap anymore.

Though I liked 12 in some ways, it was admittedly the only Final Fantasy I have actually not been able to finish, simply because it did not draw me in. I never used gambits for whoever I was controlling, which made it a little more interesting.

 lol, luckily i hadnt played an rpg for a bit before ff12 so i only wanted a good game.

The great thing about the gambit system was that it was completely optional. I never used it. I think I basically only used it to equip "heal under 15%" or something. Without using gambits, the game is still basically a turnbased RPG without the random encounters, which is just perfection for me.

VII > All IMO for my own personal reasons.

However, I do love IX a lot. IX had an awesome story.

I endorse this thread. I didn't start playing Final Fantasy games until I learned about emulators in '00 or '01 (even though I'm old enough to have played the very early ones if I would've known about them at the time), so my first Final Fantasy game was FFVI, played on my PC. I enjoyed it.

After eventually getting a PS2 and giving the PS1 Final Fantasies a try, none of them really stood out as anything that special - except for IX (even though I haven't finished it yet). I still think most of the die-hard VII fans are those who were too young to play the SNES titles and were introduced to the series with the Playstation I. VII, at least to me, is very boring.

Oh, and while I'm mentioning Final Fantasy vi, I loved the humor and that game.  The Opera scene, Kefka, etc. were all hilarious.