A smart combat system straining under the weight of a characterful but ponderous pseudo-medieval soap opera, with some of the grandest bosses and dullest sidequests in FF history.
The Final Fantasy games are so-called because the very first instalment was to be Square's swansong, its last release before going bankrupt. Another way of explaining that triumphantly ironic title is that each Final Fantasy is about journeying in the shadow of the final fantasy - the apocalypse. In being stories about saving the world, each game also asks you to spend untold hours living with the prospect of its demise. They all explore how people buckle or find themselves when they're obliged to exist in a climate of pervasive anxiety.
I think this atmosphere of encroaching crisis, with its abundant real world parallels, has played an unacknowledged role in Final Fantasy's appeal over the years. And it's this atmosphere, I think, that really binds together a series celebrated for constantly reinventing itself, from turn-based combat through rhythm-game spectacle to, in the case of Final Fantasy 16, a conflicted but enjoyable hack-and-slash with some engaging writing, beautiful if slightly soulless locations, and a heck of a lot of toing-and-froing.