Already pre-ordered it. It will be fantastic !!

It doesn’t show he lost his way at all.  What’s showing is how you’ve grown blasé and cynical.

Wow, that's certainly a take and-a half. I still enjoy games and gaming, but I've grown to sift away the generic, formulaic stuff, something which the industry is overflowing with. Look at the release schedule for 2023 and tell me about all the orginal and exciting concepts on their way.

I used to love FF, I even loved FFXII the most, despite it taking a turn away from the classical recipe, combat-wise. What I've found is that the series has become less and less tactical, and more and more action-focused, and that's not for me. If that makes me cynical, I think a great many other gamers would have to be accused of the same.

Edit; for anecdotal note on the subject, refer to my post in this very thread being by far the most liked one.

You should play the Bravely series (Bravely Default 1, 2 and Second).

Its basically old school Final Fantasy with everything but the name. Even the item names, magic spells, etc are the same.

Hmm, I might give it a whack! I also loved the Grandia games, they had some original ideas and the combat was quite dynamic, despite being turn-based. I've been playing a lot of CRPGs in the past few years as well, love the strategical element of it. FFXII had great combat as well, they changed it up, but did so in a good way. And you were still fully in control of all the party members. The gambit system was brilliant, essentially enabling a tailor-made and unique set of layers of control, all manageable as the player at any time. What I'm seeing now is simply what every other 3rd person action game seems to be doing, and it's tiresome. Dragon Age is still the biggest disappointment though; Bioware have lost their shit with that one.

Would also recommend Final Fantasy The Four Heroes of Light on DS - its basically Bravely Default 0 and its how the BD series came around.

All 4 games play like old school FF games, specifically I, III and V due to their class/job system.

You control all the characters, can set up abilities and the equipment system is the same as well - the customization is really great, improving over FF I, III and V's systems. The abilities you get reminds me of FFIX's ability system as well.

The only addition is the Bravely/Default addition to the gameplay but that provides more ways to add to your strategy and I see it as a new addition like the Junction system in VIII - it really doesnt change up the formula like that though, its a good addition in comparison.

There's also other QoL features such as speeding up the battle gameplay (to make grinding easy) and you can turn off stuff like random encounters if you want to go through a dungeon without getting triggered by the RNG random encounters.

FF The Four Heroes is on DS

Bravely Default and Bravely Second are on 3DS

Bravely Default II is on Switch and Steam/PC.

I've played the first 3 and enjoyed it - but will play Bravely Default II in the future on PC.

Octopath Traveler games are fantastic as well. DA is not going for the same combat as FF16. The west as a general rule is incabable of making high action combat like Japan can and FF16 has the combat director from DMC. So it's obvious DMC combat is in this games DNA. DA just looks bad as Bioware has sucked for a decade. Grandia was great, love those games and it was neat seeing Child of Light & Tokyo Mirage Sessions use the Grandia action  bar.

Already have the Octopath Traveler games on Switch. Loved the retro visuals!

Yeah, Bioware is a lost cause. I knew it would happen as soon as EA got their claws in them. What really sunk them, in my opinion, was the whole Anthem debacle; it showed a company now fully detached from the market and their core fanbase.

Only watched a little bit of the combat. I'm sure the story and acting will be good so stay away from that because if I do play it, spoilers and all that but the gameplay looks like lots of flash over anything. The enemies were being spammed with hits and abilities and their HP bars barely went down. Are we going to be button mashing for 20 minutes on generic enemies? It is going to have another god awful 'stagger' system that SquEnix keep putting in their games because they don't know how to balance damage?

No matter how pretty it might look, how good a story I believe the team can do, in the end, if it's just a generic hack and slash like everything else, what's the point?

Gonna have to disagree there. Squaresoft made amazing FF games. I've yet to see an amazing one made by Square Enix though.