I hope they don't end the series, as to me that would mean they would finish off with a lot of things which I adore about the series - not to mention that EoFF would lose out entirely.

As for a lacking in personalities since FFIX, I disagree - I think FFXIII has the most fleshed out group of characters to date. Sure, there have been individuals prior to XIII which were fleshed out very well, but as a group of six characters? FFXIII is awesome. I loved it for that so much - it made the game ten times better than it already was for me.

I do wonder what people really want, though, sometimes. I'm sure S-E wonder this a lot, too. I'm fairly confident that they want to make epics, and that's what the're known for doing over the years. For a game to be an epic, it tends to need to be released on the latest console. They can't release an old-school game on the latest console, so they have to work on good graphics. This in turn means longer development times and notably more development time being spent on the graphics than other things. This means less time on the content etc. It is a downhill thing for all games as far as I'm concerned. Sure, FPS games are as good as ever - but that's because they don't need to have masses of content. Hours of storyline is thrown out in favour of online battles. As for Western developers leaving them behind - I disagree again. Oblivion may have had a lot of things to do, but it was no better than FFXII in that area and FFXII had better characters, ones you actually could gain an opinion of. Oblivion for me was just... boring after a while. Same thing, constantly. Even Morrowind was better. So that means other developers are also going downhill. I look forward to the day that the graphics simply can't get any better, and they can start spending more time on the things that matter.

But yeah, overall, I don't think they've gone that far downhill. I enjoyed FFV, VII, VIII and XIII the most out of the series. But that doesn't mean the others are crap. The old school FF's had a good storyline but if they were never released until today they wouldn't do well.