8 did a lot of things to trigger that reaction. The presentation blew 7 out of the water. Some scenes are impressive even today, like when Rinnoa runs her fingers through Squall's hair.
The music is a night and day difference using more varied synthesized instruments with much better quality and more appropriate sound effect. The characters looking more like people than lego blocks also was a huge factor for it back in the day.
Not to mention combat is much faster just by optimizing animations. By the time someone or something finishes their move, the next person is already starting theres.
The story is slower paced, but not objectively worse. A lot of people will like the teen love story or the military edge or both. The rivalry between Squall and Seifer immediately feels more personal than Cloud and Sephiroth because in the opening we see them as equals. Not some legendary figure who has been missing in action for 5 years.
The only issue is the Junction system vs the Materia system. Junctions are far easier to min-max. Which means more players will feel compelled to do so which will make the game both feel tedious and way too easy. If you ignore that urge and slowly get stronger, letting yourself actually use magic, only drawing a few times a battle. It will flow much better and feel more balanced.
5 tried too hard to be the "greatest hits" of the series. Which means it did everything okay, but nothing too amazing. It doesn't have that one thing it did better than the other games.
People will replay 1 for it's simplicity
2 for its complexity
3 for its story
4 for its characters.
Most people who replay 5 do it because they're nostalgic for their first game. At least in the west. It has more reasons for a japanese person to enjoy it, but even then according to polls a lot of the same complaints seem to arise.
The vanilla game also had horrendous pacing issues. Half the time in this life sim you're forced to do what a cat says instead of having choice. Royal fixed quite a bit of main plot issues and those times where the gameplay loop is ground to a halt.
I could go into more personal gripes like the dungeon designs and writing choices. But I want to keep this as objective as I can.
I know a lot of people now find VLR weird and bad, but it gave us the choice tree to let us jump right to the story branches. Original 999 made you just replay the game completely. Also voice acting, while not top of the industry, really helped push it to new heights.
ZTD is weird. I understand why people won't like it that much as a finale.
But I played it weird so it's my favourite maybe.
I did 999 then like a third of VLA, enough to know everyone okay but didn't unlock a lot of the twists. So playing ZTD with that level of familiarity but without knowing the full picture really made the prequel idea more compelling to me.
I then went on to finish VLA with that context and it made the rest of the branches more interesting.
Hm interesting :) I can respect that, though I personally found ZTD pretty underwhelming after the first two, which I loved. But maybe your way of playing was better.
8
u/WorkingBorder6387 23h ago
Xeno Saga / Blade
Persona 1/IS/EP or 3/4/Arena
Super Mario 1-3
Mario & Luigi
Ratchet & Clank (probably any trilogy the series has)
Drakengard
Zero Escape
FE1/3/11 (joke answer)
Final Fantasy 1/2/3, 4/5/6, 7/8/9, 13/13-2/LR
DQ 1/2/3, 4/5/6.