Story is mandatory.

A focus on sword and magic with no gun, no vehicle, no airship, no alien, no outer space (including the moon), no time travel, no different world/reality/realm. (This might mean no Gilgamesh, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make. ;p)

I like something like the world of Conan the Barbarian, but with FF magic spells and monsters and whatnot, and I guess rated T for ESRB (though a rated M might be interesting too).

Plan out your race and gearing system. No need to add races down the line if it's going to have limitations. Just have all the races that you want right at the beginning. In fact, when it comes down to it, I'd rather just have one race and make the customization really good along with how gears look on that race.

And does every FF game has to have chocobo and moogle? If not, maybe try not having them. (I don't hate or dislike them at all, and actually like them, just want it to be a little different.)

And wasn't there a similar topic recently? I think in that other thread, I also mentioned something along the line of no PVP, no profession/tradecraft, no player market or player trading of any kind.

On the other hand, no arbitrary gil sink like teleport and repair and glamour fee.

Controller support, of course.

Tab targeting/GCD as opposed to action combat, although I hear DQX has a turn-based combat, and that might be interesting.

No M+ (or at least remove the timer and just have the affixes).

Only two group sizes: one for dungeon and one for raid (no normal vs alliance raid size shenanigans). Ideally, the raid size is just twice the dungeon size (whatever it may be, maybe try a bigger dungeon group size, like 8 or 10) so you can just have two dungeon groups join without anyone needing to switch class/job.

I have to be honest: I've never enjoyed any open world content beyond just doing the story quests, but I only have experience with it in WoW and FFXIV. So give me more instanced contents outside of quests.

There may be other things I've forgotten, but this will do for now.