I love it when people hold Final Fantasy up on this high-and-mighty platform like Square has done no wrong in the past and has somehow now fallen from glory.

I think it's a good game, but that's really irrelevant to my point: it's a Final Fantasy because they say it is, and they stuck a number on it. So's Crystal Chronices, so's XI. Just because a game doesn't happen to have a Cid or moogles or chocobos or a very specific type of plot, it's still an entry in the series, and that's all there is to it. If they decided to make FFXIV like Contra, it would still be a Final Fantasy game. The only exceptions, in my opinion, are due to weird localization or something like that, which doesn't really happen anymore: for example, Final Fantasy Adventure is a Seiken Densetsu game, not a FF game.