Treating Final Fantasy as a whole, and giving it a personal state of "aliveness" or "deadness" amuses me. I treat 'em like Bond films: Some are good, some are bad, some are completely off the rails, some people like the new and some people like the old. I know which ones I love and which I hate and which infuriate the hell out of me for having good story with bad gameplay and vice-versa.
FF: Amusing, but I've yet to play the remakes. So very dated, hard to play personally.
III: Played the DS version. Fun, but decidedly oldschool gameplay irks it.
IV: Played original and remastered. Damnably good twist on the four crystals story, still drops the occasional overpowered boss without warning nor savepoint.
V: I never quite got to grips with it? Interesting characters.
VI: Ah, beautiful. A wonderful gem of a game, amazing cast, amazing gameplay, only a few quirks here and there.
VII: My very first RPG. I played all the previous titles after this one; I can't honestly judge it, there's too much rose-tinted interference. Amazing.
VIII: I honestly never completed it directly, due to the sheer difficulty of the infernal gameplay mechanics and my complete loss of interest after Esthar. The first disc or so was fun, and then it completely loses coherency. At least until recently when I stumbled onto a neat theory that explains it all; I think they over-reached, and shot themselves in the foot with a 12 gauge. It could've been brilliant.
IX: I played this before my retro binging, so a lot of the references were lost on me, but still a charming game. Odd ending.
X: Too linear. Dull characters I couldn't get interested in. Annoying villain. Sold it on quickly.
XII: I'm stuck halfway through, it's not well-paced but combat is new and interesting. I'll finish it soon enough. I quite like the character interaction and the way the party feels a little unfocused, since they're all working to slightly different ends.
Tactics Advance: Placing territories confused me and made the game into an awkward grind, plot took waaay too long to unravel.
Tactics A2: Plot what Plot? Damn good combat, characters are interesting enough but barely anything is done with them.
The series isn't dead to me, any more than Bond "died" for Sontum of Qualace. A new game is a new game - it's not like they have Resident Evil's problem of tying together an overly-convoluted story over more than a decade. The old mistakes can be forgotten, as they stand alone. The development team is always hiring new writers, programmers, even directors - although sadly XIII's director is the same one behind X-2 and Revenant Wings, two titles I've deliberately omitted from the above list because I haven't played X-2, and RW hurt me in my strategy place.
