Here's the thing. When you think about the traditional FF, the dialogue scenes, the battle scenes, the Uematsu music glueing it all together, the boss confrontations, fixed cameras, the victory fanfare at the end of each battle...

Those days are gone and they're never coming back.

The first nine games are always going to be definitive of what Final Fantasy used to be, developers like Tanaka and Ishii say something along the lines that we are now in the new versions of Final Fantasy, following FFX. X wrapped up all that and showed where the series could go. FFXI is completely different, FFXII is completely different, and from what I hear with what they're trying to do with the battle systems, I think XIII and Versus XIII will be very different also.

That's how I've realized that XII didn't break away from tradition, the tradition is gone, and each new title in the series will most likely try to do something that hasn't been done before. And in the end, that's cool, because that's what FF is about. XII is one of my favorite games.